This is a special post for quick takes by Cipolla. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I noticed the most successful people, in the sense of advancing their career and publishing papers, I meet at work have a certain belief in themselves. What is striking, no matter their age/career stage, it is like they are already taking certain their success and where to go in the future.
I also noticed this is something that people from non-working class backgrounds manage to do.
Second point. They are good at finishing projects and delivering results in time.
I noticed that this was somehow independent from how smart is someone.
While I am very good at single tasks, I have always struggled with long term academic performance. I know it is true for some other people too.
What kind of knowledge/mentality am I missing? Because I feel stuck.
Okay, so I would say that I atleast have some experience of going from being not that agentic to being more agentic and the stuff that I think worked the best for me was to generally think of my life as a system. This has been the focus of my life over the last 3 years.
More specifically the process that has helped so far for me has been to:
Think of yourself as a system and optimise the shit out of it. Weirdly enough, this has made me focus a lot more on self-care than I did before.
Of course, it's a work in progress but I want to say that it is possible and that you can do it.
Also, randomly, here's a CIV VI analogy for you on why self-care is op.
If you want to be great at CIV, one of the main things to do is to increase your production and economics as fast as possible. This leads to an exponential curve where the more production and economy you have the more you can produce. This is why CIV pros in general rush Commercial Hubs and markets as internal trade routes yield more production.
Your production is based on your psychological well being and the general energy levels that you have. If you do a bunch of tests on this and figure out what works for you, then you have even more production stats. This leads to more and more of that over time until you plateau at the end of that logistic growth.
Best of luck!
Long term performance is a result of many skills / memes working together. I suspect you may have noticed that the children of white collar workers are more prepared for white collar work. It would make sense that they have inherited a set of memes that help with white collar work.
Academic performance isn't the only thing, consider your fail conditions. There's lots of things out there to be good at.
If you'd still like to keep going, I would say just keep practicing, I reckon it's taken me about four years to get good at my job. Look at what works and what doesn't for you.
I found that tracking my time helped with focusing on one thing at a time, having a prioritized to do list helped me focus on the right thing, having a study group helped make learning fun, easy and consistent. Trying to fit all the knowledge I needed for a class on a single a4 sheet helped me memorize what I needed (something about the refining process).
Otherwise get good sleep, lay off the substances, get some exercise in the sun and time with friends and family and you will be right as rain.
Oh and do at least three past exams for each class. Best to practice in the conditions you will be performing in.
Is this selection bias? I have had people who are overconfident and get nowhere.
I don't think it's independent from smartness, a smart+conscientious person is likely to do better.
I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this:
Not a proper quick take and perhaps off-topic on this forum. But given that I know some people here are into health I give it a shot.
I would be very grateful if someone could point me to some excellent doctors around Europe, website, or some sort of diet that can be good to improve my health.
I have been having some health issues:
All the doctors that I have met do not have a single clue, and do not seem interested into solving the problem or investigate.[2] I am not even looking for a cure now. Just a diagnosis.
I am not rich so my budget is limited. But life has become so difficult.
With my breathing problems I can do a 10km at around 4:40 km/min, but suddenly not on my top of my game (4:10 km/min).
If it is not an easy ibuprofen or similar, they quickly give up. I have a big suspicion that doctors are not trained well, so they might be all effectively incompetent at dealing with situations that are not solved by the usual medicines they prescribe. I plan one day to write a post, as methods of rationality and AI might help in diagnosing situations.
Have you tried asking some LLMs (give lots of details about your life, even if they don't seem relevant to you. Use multiple LLMs for multiple opinions.), googling possibilities of disorders (use Google scholar to get academic papers), go back to the LLMs and add papers from one possible cause to the prompt. Repeat for each possible cause.
LLMs have gotten better than an average doctor at medical diagnosis.
Yes, I have tried :) But I still value expert human intuition.
I think at least 50% of the doctors will go away in the future, as they are just trained to give the usual stuff, and if they disappear tomorrow an LLM would still give similar results (actually, even a monkey with just two basic medicines would be a good enough doctor).
There should be more talk about concentration of power, decoupling from the masses, and social fragmentation around here.
Disruptive technologies amplify the economic inequality gap within countries, and between countries.
Which are the consequences of this? I do not see many people discussing it on the forum.
While it is true that the AI itself might doom humanity, I consider human dynamics to be a greater threat (just for the fact that investing in AI can increase the likelihood of these fewer people to own the world, and this might increase the likelihood of humanity AI doom).
This is a better defined problem to the usual AI safety talk. I think it should be something that needs to be addressed asap with public discourse. We need to focus on the right things in my opinion.
It might also have some implicit benefits on usual AI safety (and to be sincere, I do not see current AI research level at the level of research in math or fundamental physics, where first principles approaches and taking your own time to deeply think about problems are preferred, but this is another topic for another day).
I had a look at "AI as Normal Technology", and some of the other writing of its authors. I thought it was two amateurs, until I checked their backgrounds. Astonishing how AI space is so random.
If you want a serious read check out for example Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil.
I see no difference between the principles underlying a financial system that builds products to please a few, and a social system that allows anybody to be anything to please a few.
Both serve a relatively small number of people. Both are based on a kind of freedom of expression that puts the individual in the center. One has been proven to be a very unreliable system that has been leading to crises and human suffering. The other one, will just be a matter of time.
There is a proliferation of too much freedom, meaning no freedom.
I think most of the people on LW can not see it. I believe the reason is due to social class. The average poster on LW comes from a relatively privileged economic and social environment that has led them in positions to rule over the others.
The consequence is that few people, mainly due to luck (for a random event that happened in the past), end up setting policies and ways of thinking upon the rest of the people.
As an example, there has been a lot of talk about creating programs that push for more professors/executives from a certain group of people. I can see today that they just ended up pooling from the same middle-upper classes that has been filling universities for years. On the other hand, the people with no voice are still in the same situation. You have no idea of how harsh life is for lots of people.
There seem some sort of air going around that we are a better society compared to the past. People grab random numbers, like the number of people above some poverty line, to say that we know better.
Even if we might have more technology compared to humans that lived one thousands years ago, I doubt that we are wiser.
The are books that have been written and rules that have served humans well, as a society as a whole. There are mistakes that humans have repeatedly done in the past. Why did we forget?
One of the consequences of this kind of thinking in this law-less society is that not everybody is born equal. I am disgusted by the disregard of the ruling class that they know better.
A lot of this is implicit, but I can see this around having interacted with people from privileged and not privileged backgrounds (and everything else in the middle).
We need to come back to fundamental principles. And the first one, is the importance of traditional family values, that see people in the unit of the boat.
If you do not see the catastrophe that is upon us as humans, then I hope you wake up.