I just made some dinner and was thinking about how salt and spices^[1] now are dirt cheap, but throughout history they were precious and expensive. I did some digging and apparently low and middle class people didn't even really have access to spices. It was more for the wealthy.

Salt was important mainly to preserve food. They didn't have fridges back then! So even poor people usually had some amount of salt to preserve small quantities of food, but they had to be smart about how they allocated it.

In researching this I came to realize that throughout history, food was usually pretty gross. Meats were partially spoiled, fats went rancid, grains were moldy. This would often cause digestive problems. Food poisoning was a part of life.

Could you imagine! That must have been terrible!

Meanwhile, today, not only is it cheap to access food that is safe to eat, it's cheap to use basically as much salt and spices as you want. Fry up some potatoes in vegetable oil with salt and spices. Throw together some beans and rice. Incorporate a cheap acid if you're feeling fancy -- maybe some malt vinegar with the potatoes or white vinegar with the beans and rice. It's delicious!

I suppose there are ... (read more)

I remember a hygienist at the dentist once telling me that toothpaste isn't a huge deal and that it's the mechanical friction of the toothbrush that provides most of the value. Since being told that, after a meal, I often wet my toothbrush with water and brush for 10 seconds or so.

I just researched it some more and from what I understand, after eating, food debris that remains on your teeth forms a sort of biofilm. Once the biofilm is formed you need those traditional 2 minute long tooth brushing sessions to break it down and remove it. But it takes 30+ minutes to form the biofilm. Before it is formed you don't need long brushing sessions to significantly reduce the amount of debris that is left on your teeth. So then, these short informal brushing sessions after meals seem like a great "bang for your buck" in terms of reward vs effort.

I just learned some important things about indoor air quality after watching Why Air Quality Matters, a presentation by David Heinemeier Hanson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It seems like something that is both important and under the radar, so I'll brain dump + summarize my takeaways here, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing.

• He said he spent three weeks researching and experimenting with it full time. I place a pretty good amount of trust in his credibility here, based on a) my prior experiences with his work and b) him seeming like he did pretty thorough research.
• It's easy for CO2 levels to build up. We breathe it out and if you're not getting circulation from fresh air, it'll accumulate.
• This has pretty big impacts on your cognitive function. It seems similar to not getting enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep also has a pretty big impact on your cognitive function. And perhaps more importantly, it's something that we are prone to underestimating. It feels like we're only a little bit off, when in reality we're a lot off.
• There are things called volatile organic compounds, aka VOCs. Those are really bad for your health. They come from a variety of sources. Cleaning pro

Project idea: virtual water coolers for LessWrong

Previous: Virtual water coolers

Here's an idea: what if there was a virtual water cooler for LessWrong?

• There'd be Zoom chats with three people per chat. Each chat is a virtual water cooler.
• The user journey would begin by the user expressing that they'd like to join a virtual water cooler.
• Once they do, they'd be invited to join one.
• I think it'd make sense to restrict access to users based on karma. Maybe only 100+ karma users are allowed.
• To start, that could be it. In the future you could do some investigation into things like how many people there should be per chat.

Seems like an experiment that is both cheap and worthwhile.

If there is interest I'd be happy to create a MVP.

(Related: it could be interesting to abstract this and build a sort of "virtual water cooler platform builder" such that eg. LessWrong could use the builder to build a virtual water cooler platform for LessWrong and OtherCommunity could use the builder to build a virtual water cooler platform for their community.)

In How to Get Startup Ideas, Paul Graham provides the following advice:

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

Something that feels to me like it's present in the future and missing in today's world: OkCupid for friendship.

Think about it. The internet is a thing. Billions and billions of people have cheap and instant access to it. So then, logistics are rarely an obstacle for chatting with people.

The actual obstacle in today's world is matchmaking. How do you find the people to chat with? And similarly, how do you communicate that there is a strong match so that each party is thinking "oh wow this person seems cool, I'd love to chat with them" instead of "this is a random person and I am not optimistic that I'd have a good time talking to them".

This doesn't really feel like such a huge problem though. I mean, assume for a second that you were able to force everyone in the world to spend an hour filling out some sort of OkCupid-like profile, but for friendship and conversation rather than romantic relationships. From there, it seems doable enough to figure out whatever matchmaking algorithm.

I think the issue is moreso getting people to fill out the survey in the first place. T... (read more)

I would like to see people write high-effort summaries, analyses and distillations of the posts in The Sequences.

When Eliezer wrote the original posts, he was writing one blog post a day for two years. Surely you could do a better job presenting the content that he produced in one day if you, say, took four months applying principles of pedagogy and iterating on it as a side project. I get the sense that more is possible.

This seems like a particularly good project for people who want to write but don't know what to write about. I've talked with a variety of people who are in that boat.

One issue with such distillation posts is discoverability. Maybe you write the post, it receives some upvotes, some people see it, and then it disappears into the ether. Ideally when someone in the future goes to read the corresponding sequence post they would be aware that your distillation post is available as a sort of sister content to the original content. LessWrong does have the "Mentioned in" section at the bottom of posts, but that doesn't feel like it is sufficient.

In public policy, experimenting is valuable. In particular, it provides a positive externality.

Let's say that a city tests out a somewhat quirky idea like paying NIMBYs to shut up about new housing. If that policy works well, other cities benefit because now they can use and benefit from that approach.

So then, shouldn't there be some sort of subsidy for cities that test out new policy ideas? Isn't it generally a good thing to subsidize things that provide positive externalities?

I'm sure there is a lot to consider. I'm not enough of a public policy person to know what the considerations are though or how to weigh them.

Every day I check Hacker News. Sometimes a few times, sometimes a few dozen times.

I've always felt guilty about it, like it is a waste of time and I should be doing more productive things. But recently I've been feeling a little better about it. There are things about coding, design, product, management, QA, devops, etc. etc. that feel like they're "in the water" to me, where everyone mostly knows about them. However, I've been running into situations where people turn out to not know about them.

I'm realizing that they're not actually "in the water", and that the reason I know about them is probably because I've been reading random blog posts from the front page of Hacker News every day for 10 years. I probably shouldn't have spent as much time doing this as I have, but I feel good about the fact that I've gotten at least something out of it.

Something kinda scary happened a few days ago. I was walking my dog and was trying to cross at an intersection. There's a stoplight which was red, and a cross walk which was on "walk". But this car was approaching the crosswalk really quickly. You could hear the motor rev and the driver was accelerating.

I didn't enter the crosswalk. I put my hand up to catch his attention. He came to a quick stop. I gave a shrug like "what are you doing". He gave a similar shrug back. Then after I crossed, he floored it right through the stop light that was still red, only to come to a stop light one block away that was also red.

It wasn't actually a close call. I looked before entering the crosswalk and wasn't at risk of getting hit. But I feel like it was a close call in a different sense.

I'm a very careful street crosser, but even I fail to look both ways sometimes when the crosswalk signal is on "walk", especially when visibility is poor. If there's a parked car or something that is blocking my view of oncoming traffic, sometimes I just go. What if this were one of those situations?

And furthermore, I've had a ton of similar encounters where a car seemingly would have hit and killed me if I weren... (read more)

Against "yes and" culture

I sense that in "normie cultures"^[1] directly, explicitly, and unapologetically disagreeing with someone is taboo. It reminds me of the "yes and" from improv comedy.^[2] From Wikipedia:

"Yes, and...", also referred to as "Yes, and..." thinking, is a rule-of-thumb in improvisational comedy that suggests that an improviser should accept what another improviser has stated ("yes") and then expand on that line of thinking ("and").

If you want to disagree with someone, you're supposed to take a "yes and" approach where you say something somewhat agreeable about the other person's statement, and then gently take it in a different direction.

I don't like this norm. From a God's Eye perspective, if we could change it, I think we probably should. Doing so is probably impractical in large groups, but might be worth considering in smaller ones.

(I think this really needs some accompanying examples. However, I'm struggling to come up with ones. At least ones I'm comfortable sharing publicly.)

1. ^{^}

   The US, at least. It's where I live. But I suspect it's like this in most western cultures as well.

2. ^{^}

   See also this Curb Your Enthusiasm clip.

For the past week my girlfriend's sister has been visiting us along with her 1.5 year old baby. The baby is very cute and I've really enjoyed some of my time with her, but I've also found it pretty overwhelming and chaotic at times. Overall it's made me more confident that I don't want kids.

It's also made me think that it'd make a ton of sense for someone who does want kids to spend a week or so babysitting in order to test help test that assumption.

• It seems hard to be confident that you do in fact want kids.
• Anecdotally I feel like there are a fair amount of examples of people who have kids and end up regretting it, at least to a meaningful degree.
• Babysitting for a week is a relatively cheap test.
• The decision to have kids isn't really a reversible one (once they're born; most of the time).

Perhaps this makes more sense when you think about it more in the abstract. Like if you want to make a decision that is very, very important, hard to be confident about, not really reversible, and relatively cheap to test, it makes sense to test it.

I suppose finding someone to babysit for a week might be hard. The parents would need to trust you. So I guess ideally you'd be able to babysit for a f... (read more)

Wow, I just watched this video where Feynman makes an incredible analogy between the rules of chess and the rules of our physical world.

You watch the pieces move and try to figure out the underlying rules. Maybe you come up with a rule about bishops needing to stay on the same color, and that rule lasts a while. But then you realize that there is a deeper rule that explains the rule you've held to be true: bishops can only move diagonally.

I'm butchering the analogy though and am going to stop talking now. Just go watch the video. It's poetic.

I've noticed that there's a pretty big difference in the discussion that follows from me showing someone a draft of a post and asking for comments and the discussion in the comments section after I publish a post. The former is richer and more enjoyable whereas the latter doesn't usually result in much back and forth. And I get the sense that this is true for other authors as well.

I guess one important thing might be that with drafts, you're talking to people who you know. But I actually don't suspect that this plays much of a role, at least on LessWrong. As an anecdote, I've had some incredible conversations with the guy who reviews drafts of posts on LessWrong for free and I had never talked to him previously.

I wonder what it is about drafts. I wonder if it can or should be incorporated into regular posts.

I spent the day browsing the website of Josh W. Comeau yesterday. He writes educational content about web development. I am in awe.

For so many reasons. The quality of the writing. The clarity of the thinking. The mastery of the subject matter. The metaphors. The analogies. The quality and attention to detail of the website itself. Try zooming in to 300%. It still look gorgeous.

One thing that he's got me thinking about is the place that sound effects and animation have on a website. Previously my opinion was that you should usually just leave 'em out. Focus on more important things. It's hard to implement them well; they usually just make the site feel tacky. They also add a decent amount of complexity.

But Josh does such a good job of utilizing sound effects and animation! Try clicking one of the icons on the top right. Or moving your cursor around those dots at the top of the home page. Or clicking the "heart" button at the end of the "Table of contents" section for one of his posts. It's so satisfying.

I'm realizing that my previous opinion was largely a cached thought. When I think about it now, I arrive at a different perspective. Right now I'm suspecting that both sound effects ... (read more)

Something I've always wondered about is what I'll call sub-threshold successes. Some examples:

• A stand up comedian is performing. Their jokes are funny enough to make you smile, but not funny enough to pass the threshold of getting you to laugh. The result is that the comedian bombs.
• Posts or comments on an internet forum are appreciated but not appreciated enough to get people to upvote.
• A restaurant or product is good, but not good enough to motivate people to leave ratings or write reviews.

It feels to me like there is an inefficiency occurring in these sor... (read more)

6th vs 16th grade logic

I want to write something about 6th grade logic vs 16th grade logic.

I was talking to someone, call them Alice, who works at a big well known company, call it Widget Corp. Widget Corp needs to advertise to hire people. They only advertise on Indeed and Google though.

Alice was telling me that she wants to explore some other channels (LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, etc.). But in order to do that, Widget Corp needs evidence that advertising on those channels would be cheap enough. They're on a budget and really want to avoid spending money they... (read more)

Over the past however many months, I've noticed myself posting a lot more quick takes and a lot less posts. I wonder whether the quick takes feature is a net positive for me.

I posted this quick take a few minutes ago. If quick takes weren't available, maybe I would have taken more time to develop the idea further and turn it into a higher quality post. Then again, I also very well may have just not written anything at all.

Now, every program believes they give students a chance to practice because they have them work with real clients, during what is even called "practicums". But seeing clients does not count as practice, at least not according to the huge body of research in the area of skill development.

According to the science, seeing clients would be categorized, not as practice, but as "performance". In order for something to be considered practice, it needs to be focused on one skill at a time. And when you're actually seeing a client, you're having to use a dozen or m

I was just watching this Andrew Huberman video titled "Train to Gain Energy & Avoid Brain Fog". The interviewee was talking about track athletes and stuff their coaches would have them do.

It made me think back to Anders Ericsson's book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. The book is popular for discussing the importance of deliberate practice, but another big takeaway from the book is the importance of receiving coaching. I think that takeaway gets overlooked. Top performers in fields like chess, music and athletics almost universally rece... (read more)

I am a web developer. I remember reading some time in these past few weeks that it's good to design a site such that if the user zooms in/out (eg. by pressing cmd+/-), things still look reasonably good. It's like a form of responsive design, except instead of responding to the width of the viewport your design responds to the zoom level.

Anyway, since reading this, I started zooming in a lot more. For example, I just spent some time reading a post here on LessWrong at a 170% zoom level. And it was a lot more comfortable. I've found this to be a helpful little life hack.

Noticing confusion about the nucleus

In school, you learn about forces. You learn about gravity, and you learn about the electromagnetic force. For the electromagnetic force, you learn about how likes repel and opposites attract. So two positively charged particles close together will repel, whereas a positively and a negatively charged particle will attract.

Then you learn about the atom. It consists of a bunch of protons and a bunch of neutrons bunched up in the middle, and then a bunch of electrons orbiting around the outside. You learn that protons are p... (read more)

"It's not obvious" is a useful critique

I recall hearing "it's not obvious that X" a lot in the rationality community, particularly in Robin Hanson's writing.

Sometimes people make a claim without really explaining it. Actually, this happens a lot of times. Often times the claim is made implicitly. This is fine if that claim is obvious.

But if the claim isn't obvious, then that link in the chain is broken and the whole argument falls apart. Not that it's been proven wrong or anything, just that it needs work. You need to spend the time establishing that claim... (read more)

I'm pretty into biking. I live in Portland, OR, bike as my primary mode of transport (I don't have a car), am sorta involved in the biking and urbanism communities here, read Bike Portland almost every day, think about bike infrastructure and urbanism whenever I visit new cities, have submitted pro-biking testimony, watched more YouTube videos about biking and urbanism than I'd like to admit, spent more time researching e-bikes and bike locks than I'd care to admit, etc etc.

I've been wanting to write up some thoughts on biking for a while but haven't pulle... (read more)

More dakka with festivals

In the rationality community people are currently excited about the LessOnline festival. Furthermore, my impression is that similar festivals are generally quite successful: people enjoy them, have stimulating discussions, form new relationships, are exposed to new and interesting ideas, express that they got a lot out of it, etc.

So then, this feels to me like a situation where More Dakka applies. Organize more festivals!

How? Who? I dunno, but these seem like questions worth discussing.

Some initial thoughts:

1. Assurance contracts seem

Why not more specialization and trade?

I can probably make something like $100/hr doing freelance work as a programmer. Yet I'll spend an hour cooking dinner for myself.

Does this make any sense? Imagine if I spent that hour programming instead. I'd have $100. I can spend, say, $20 on dinner, end up with something that is probably much better than what I would cook, and have $80 left over. Isn't that a better use of my time than cooking?

Similarly, sometimes I'll spend an hour cleaning my apartment. I could instead spend that hour making $100, and paying some... (read more)

The other day Improve your Vocabulary: Stop saying VERY! popped up in my YouTube video feed. I was annoyed.

This idea that you shouldn't use the word "very" has always seemed pretentious to me. What value does it add if you say "extremely" or "incredibly" instead? I guess those words have more emphasis and a different connotation, and can be better fits. I think they're probably a good idea sometimes. But other times people just want to use different words in order to sound smart.

I remember there was a time in elementary school when I was working on a paper... (read more)

Externality god

I was just walking my dog and there was this parked car that pulled out. As it did it's motor was crazy loud and I along with my dog got a big whiff of exhaust.

The first thought that came to my mind was something like, "Ugh, what a negative externality. It's so annoying that we can't easily measure these sorts of things and fine people accordingly."

But then I thought, "What if we could?". What if, hypothetically, there was some sort of externality god that was able to look down on us, detect these sorts of events, and report them to the gove... (read more)

I just saw (but didn't read) the post Anthropic is Quietly Backpedalling on its Safety Commitments. I've seen similar posts before.

I wonder: maybe it'd make sense to have some sort of watchdog organization officially tracking this sort of stuff. And maintaining a wall of shame-ish website. Maybe such a thing would make backpedalling on safety more costly for organizations, thus changing their calculus and causing them to spend incrementally more effort on safety.

There is a nasty catch-22 when it comes to happiness: you want to be happy, but explicitly trying to be happy often makes you less happy, not more happy.

Consider the example described in this article:

I saw it happen to Tom, a savant who speaks half a dozen languages, from Chinese to Welsh. In college, Tom declared a major in computer science but found it dissatisfying. He became obsessed with happiness, longing for a career and a culture that would provide the perfect match for his interests and values. Within two years of graduating from college, he had b

I kinda feel like a lot of random commercial things are better than residential things:

• Napkin dispensers at restaurants vs at home. I like how at restaurants you pull and only one comes out. At home it takes a bit of fine motor skill to pluck just one napkin from a bunch of stacked napkins.
• Toilet paper holders in public have a serrated edge that makes it easy to tear.
• Soap dispensers in public bathrooms and showers are attached to the wall. I like how that saves counter space.

I wonder why there's this difference. I suspect people would find the commercial approaches at home to feel "too utilitarian" and "not homey".

Virtual watercoolers

As I mentioned in some recent Shortform posts, I recently listened to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast's episode on the LessOnline festival and it got me thinking.

One thing I think is cool is that Ben Pace was saying how the valuable thing about these festivals isn't the presentations, it's the time spent mingling in between the presentations, and so they decided with LessOnline to just ditch the presentations and make it all about mingling. Which got me thinking about mingling.

It seems plausible to me that such mingling can and should h... (read more)

Sometimes I think to myself something along these lines:

I could read this post/comment in detail and respond to it, but I expect that others won't put much effort into the discussion and it will fizzle out, and so it isn't worth it for me to put the effort in in the first place.

This presents a sort of coordination problem, and one that would be reasonably easy to solve with some sort of assurance contract-like functionality.

There's a lot to say about whether or not such a thing is worth pursuing, but in short, it seems like trying it out as an experiment w... (read more)

Using examples of people being stupid

I've noticed that a lot of cool concepts stem from examples of people being stupid. For example, I recently re-read Detached Lever Fallacy and Beautiful Probability.

Detached Lever Fallacy:

Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it. The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever. "Ah," says the captain, "this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!" So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his s

Closer to the truth vs further along

Consider a proposition P. It is either true or false. The green line represents us believing with 100% confidence that P is true. On the other hand, the red line represents us believing with 100% confidence that P is false.

We start off not knowing anything about P, so we start off at point 0, right at that black line in the middle. Then, we observe data point A. A points towards P being true, so we move upwards towards the green line a moderate amount, and end up at point 1. After that we observe data point B. B is weak ... (read more)

Suppose that you are having a disagreement with someone and you are frustrated and angry with them. It seems likely that this frustration would meaningfully harm your ability to reason well.

If so, similar to what we do in response to cognitive biases, it seems appropriate to make some adjustments. For example, given susceptibility to the planning fallacy, supposing we originally assume it'll take 20 minutes to get to the airport, we might adjust this towards a more pessimistic estimate of 45 minutes. I would think that it'd make sense to do something similar in response to noticing a feeling of frustration in yourself during a disagreement with someone.

I've seen surprisingly little discussion of this idea.

A pet peeve of mine is when people recommend books (or media, or other things) without considering how large of an investment they are to read. Books usually take 10 hours or so to read. If you're going to go slow and really dig into it, it's probably more like 20+ hours. To make the claim "I think you should read this book", the expected benefit should outweigh the relatively large investment of time.

Actually, no, the bar is higher than that. There are middle-ground options other than reading the book. You can find a summary, a review, listen to an interv... (read more)