adamzerner's Shortform

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

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)

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.

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.

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)

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)

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)

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)

A line of thought that I want to explore: a lot of times when people appear to be close-minded, they aren't actually being (too) close-minded. This line of thought is very preliminary and unrefined.

It's related to Aumann's Ageement Theorem. If you happen to have two perfectly Bayesian agents who are able to share information, then yes, they will end up agreeing. In practice people aren't 1) perfectly Bayesian or 2) able to share all of their information. I think (2) is a huge problem. A huge reason why it's hard to convince people of things.

Well, I guess w... (read more)

I think it's generally agreed that pizza and steak (and a bunch of other foods) taste significantly better when they're hot. But even if you serve it hot, usually about halfway through eating, the food cools enough such that it's notably worse because it's not hot enough.

One way to mitigate this is to serve food on a warmed plate. But that doesn't really do too much.

What makes the most sense to me would be to serve smaller portions in multiple courses. Like instead of a 10" pie, serve two 5" pies. Or instead of a 16oz ribeye, divide it into four 4oz ribeye... (read more)

Long text messages

I run into something that I find somewhat frustrating. When I write text messages to people, they're often pretty long. At least relative to the length of other people's text messages. I'll write something like 3-5 paragraphs at times. Or more.

I've had people point this out as being intimidating and a lot to read. That seems odd to me though. If it were an email, it'd be a very normal-ish length, and wouldn't feel intimidating, I suspect. If it were a blog post, it'd be quite short. If it were a Twitter thread, it'd be very normal and not... (read more)

Words as Bayesian Evidence

Alice: Hi, how are you?

Bob: Good. How are you?

Alice: Actually, I'm not doing so well.

Let me ask you a question. How confident are you that Bob is doing good? Not very confident, right? But why not? After all, Bob did say that he is doing good. And he's not particularly well known for being a liar.

I think the thing here is to view Bob's words as Bayesian evidence. They are evidence of Bob doing good. But how strong is this evidence? And how do we think about such a question?

Let's start with how we think about such a question. I... (read more)

Squinting

“You should have deduced it yourself, Mr Potter,” Professor Quirrell
said mildly. “You must learn to blur your vision until you can see the forest
obscured by the trees. Anyone who heard the stories about you, and who
did not know that you were the mysterious Boy-Who-Lived, could eas-
ily deduce your ownership of an invisibility cloak. Step back from these
events, blur away their details, and what do we observe? There was a great
rivalry between students, and their competition ended in a perfect tie.
That sort of thing only happens in stories, Mr Potter,

As a programmer, compared to other programmers, I am extremely uninterested in improving the speed of web apps I work on. I find that (according to my judgement) it rarely has more than a trivial impact on user experience. On the other hand, I am usually way more interested than others are in things like improving code quality.

I wonder if this has to do with me being very philosophically aligned with Bayesianism. Bayesianism preaches to update your beliefs incrementally, whereas Alternative is a lot more binary. For example, the way scientific experiments ... (read more)

I've gotta vent a little about communication norms.

My psychiatrist recommended a new drug. I went to take it last night. The pills are absolutely huge and make me gag. But I noticed that the pills look like they can be "unscrewed" and the powder comes out.

So I asked the following question (via chat in this app we use):

For the NAC, the pill is a little big and makes me gag. Is it possible to twist it open and pour the powder on my tongue? Or put it in water and drink it?

The psychiatrist responded:

Yes it seems it may be opened and mixed into food or somethin

Subtextual politeness

In places like Hacker News and Stack Exchange, there are norms that you should be polite. If you said something impolite and Reddit-like such as "Psh, what a douchebag", you'd get flagged and disciplined.

But that's only one form of impoliteness. What about subtextual impoliteness? I think subtextual impoliteness is important too. Similarly important. And I don't think my views here are unique.

I get why subtextual impoliteness isn't policed though. Perhaps by definition, it's often not totally clear what the subtext behind a statement i... (read more)

Inverted interruptions

Imagine that Alice is talking to Bob. She says the following, without pausing.

That house is ugly. You should read Harry Potter. We should get Chinese food.

We can think of it like this. Approach #1:

• At t=1 Alice says "That house is ugly."
• At t=2 Alice says "You should read Harry Potter."
• At t=3 Alice says "We should get Chinese food."

Suppose Bob wants to respond to the comment of "That house is ugly." Due to the lack of pauses, Bob would have to interrupt Alice in order to get that response in. On the other hand, if Alice paused in betwee... (read more)

Something that I run into, at least in normie culture, is that writing (really) long replies to comments has a connotation of being contentious, or even hostile (example). But what if you have a lot to say? How can you say it without appearing contentious?

I'm not sure. You could try to signal friendliness by using lots of smiley faces and stuff. Or you could be explicit about it and say stuff like "no hard feelings".

Something about that feels distasteful to me though. It shouldn't need to be done.

Also, it sets a tricky precedent. If you start using smiley ... (read more)

Capabilities vs alignment outside of AI

In the field of AI we talk about capabilities vs alignment. I think it is relevant outside of the field of AI though.

I'm thinking back to something I read in Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism. He talked about how the Amish aren't actually anti-technology. They are happy to adopt technology. They just want to make sure that the technology actually does more good than harm before they adopt it.

And thy have a neat process for this. From what I remember, they first start by researching it. Then have small groups of pe... (read more)

There's been talk recently about there being a influx of new users to LessWrong and a desire to prevent this influx from harming the signal-to-noise ratio on LessWrong too much. I wonder: what if it costed something like $1 to make an account? Or $1/month? Some trivial amount of money that serves as a filter for unserious people.

Nonfiction books should be at the end of the funnel

Books take a long time to read. Maybe 10-20 hours. I think that there are two things that you should almost always do first.

1. Read a summary. This usually gives you the 80/20 and only takes 5-10 minutes. You can usually find a summary by googling around. Derek Sivers and James Clear come to mind as particularly good resources.

2. Listen to a podcast or talk. Nowadays, from what I could tell, authors typically go on a sort of podcast tour before releasing a book in order to promote it. I find that this typi

I've been in pursuit of a good startup idea lately. I went through a long list I had and deleted everything. None were good enough. Finding a good idea is really hard.

One way that I think about it is that a good idea has to be the intersection of a few things.

• For me at least, I want to be able to fail fast. I want to be able to build and test it in a matter of weeks. I don't want to raise venture funding and spend 18 months testing an idea. This is pretty huge actually. If one idea takes 10 days to build and the other takes 10 weeks, well, the burden of

Collaboration and the early stages of ideas

Imagine the lifecycle of an idea being some sort of spectrum. At the beginning of the spectrum is the birth of the idea. Further to the right, the idea gets refined some. Perhaps 1/4 the way through the person who has the idea texts some friends about it. Perhaps midway through it is refined enough where a rough draft is shared with some other friends. Perhaps 3/4 the way through a blog post is shared. Then further along, the idea receives more refinement, and maybe a follow up post is made. Perhaps towards the ve... (read more)

I wish more people used threads on platforms like Slack and Discord. And I think the reason to use threads is very similar to the reason why one should aim for modularity when writing software.

Here's an example. I posted this question in the #haskell-beginners Discord channel asking whether it's advisable for someone learning Haskell to use a linter. I got one reply, but it wasn't as a thread. It was a normal message in #haskell-beginners. Between the time I asked the question and got a response, there were probably a couple dozen other messages. So then, ... (read more)

It's weird that people tend so strongly to be friends with people so close to their age. If you're 30, why are you so much more likely to be friends with another 30 year old than, say, a 45 year old?