This is a linkpost for https://markxu.com/if-you-weren't
If you weren't such an idiot...
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Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)
Laptop chargers are also an object for which it's trivial to own multiple, at a low cost and high (potential) advantage.
Other examples: Take caffeine once a week (and nicotine (not cigarettes!) once a month) instead of never or daily. Leave social situations when they're not fun or useful anymore. Do small cost-benefit analyses when they make sense[1].
See also: Solved Problems Repository, Boring Advice Repository.
I've done two already this year: One to decide whether to leave a bootcamp, and another to decide which gym to select. (The second one misfired: I made a mistake in my calculation, taking only the way there as a cost and not the way back to public transport, which led me to choose the wrong one (by <100€ of cost over the time I go there)). I should've done the math (done ✓), then burned the math and gone with my gut (not done ✗).) ↩︎
Just last week I wrote a post reviewing the evidence on caffeine cycling and caffeine habituation. My conclusion was that the evidence was thin and it's hard to say anything with confidence.[1]
My weakly held beliefs are:
- Taking caffeine daily is better than not taking it at all, but worse than cycling.
- Taking caffeine once every 3 days is a reasonable default. A large % of people can take it more often than that, and a large % will need to take it less.
I take caffeine 3 days a week and I am currently running a self-experiment (described in my linked post). I'm currently in the experimental phase, I already did a 9-day withdrawal period and my test results over that period (weakly) suggest that I wasn't habituated previously because my performance didn't improve during the withdrawal period (it actually got worse, p=0.4 on a regression test).
[1] Gavin Leech's post that you linked cited a paper on brain receptors in mice which I was unaware of, I will edit my post to include it. Based on reading the abstract, it looks like that study suggests a weaker habituation effect than the studies I looked at (receptor density in mice increased by 20–25% which naively suggests a 20–25% reduc...
1Update: I finished my self-experiment, results are here: https://mdickens.me/2024/04/11/caffeine_self_experiment/
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Thank you, that's really cool! I'll look at your post when I have time.
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I don't see why there is a high potential advantage here. I'd expect:
* Most people to be able to find a friend or a nice person at a coffee shop with a charger they can borrow.
* Most people to be able to get a new charger within a day or so (in person store or online + pay for faster shipping).
* Going a day or so without a laptop not to sacrifice much in terms of fun. I actually expect it to be a net positive there since it'd force you to do something like go for a walk or read a book. It also has the benefit of exercising your "boredom muscles".
* Going a day or so without a laptop not to sacrifice much in terms of your career. Maybe your boss is frustrated with you in the short term, but I don't expect that to lead to any actual consequences like being meaningfully more likely to get fired or not get a promotion.
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If you're a student, you sometimes have to hand in papers on a deadline (or are on a tight schedule), in which case another charger might be useful. (This is less relevant today, when many laptops have identical charger plugs).
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Good point. Makes sense that it'd be important for such people.
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Unplugging the charger and putting it in my bag (and the reverse) is a trivial inconvenience that annoyed me many times
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Could you link a source for the once a week coffee? I am intrigued.
I did not yet read your recommendations so I don't know if the answer is there.
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I got the caffeine recommendation from here, Nicotine here. I don't have great sources for this, and the ranges were mostly gut estimates.
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Thank you
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I strongly advise against taking nicotine.
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Maybe I can be clearer: I use 2mg nicotine rarely (15 times since December 2022), so on average about once a month, which I've edited in the comment above. It's been really useful when used surgically. Why do you advise against it? The strongest counterarguments I've seen were in here.
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Pretty much all of those reasons - what it's missing is that nicotine itself may also be a carcinogen- at least, it has the ability to be one: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-023-01668-1
Although there aren't enough isolated studies done on nicotine in a long period to be conclusive: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5020336/
Some reviews disagree: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26380225/
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I think there is some context missing. When I see "taking nicotine" I think "smoking a cigarette, but expressed using more science-y language to make it sound like a less awful idea". Whereas you seem to be taking nicotine gum or something, which is a different proposition. (I think smoking is a very bad idea, with very high confidence. I think nicotine by other sources is also a very bad idea, but my confidence is lower).
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Ah, agree on the cigarettes thing (edited it in).
- You would wash your hands properly at all the appropriate times.
- You would study with spaced repetition.
- You would stop looking at (mainstream, megacorporate) social media.
A list of things that "everyone knows you should do" that I have gained value from NOT doing:
- health things recommended by "experts" that few people do and are therefore not lindy
- drink lots of water - diminishing marginal returns. if you have to get to pee at night you may be drinking too much
- sunglasses - outdoor light improves your eyesight and makes you more alert.
- diet stuff. eating a lot of vegetables, eating no vegetables, cutting salt, cutting fat, cutting carbs - nutrition is not solved, your body is a complex system, and your body is not like other bodies for reasons no one really knows.
- avoid fast food
- drink red wine
- don't waste food
- avoid nicotine
- buy a car
- get a mortgage for a house
- save lots of money in a retirement account and buy index funds
- shower daily
- use shampoo
- wear shoes
- walk
- sleep under a blanket
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I'm curious about you not doing these, since I'd unquestioningly accepted them, and would love for you to elaborate:
Regarding 'diet stuff', I mostly agree and like how Jay Daigle put it:
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Skipping showering is easy actually.
Caveat: people differ in body odor based on genetics, hormones, and armpit microbiome. I personally am privileged to not smell bad, therefore I don't shower until my skin or hair starts to feel icky (a few days).
I used to get dandruff a lot even back when I was showering daily. I saw r/HaircareScience saying sulfates and other chemicals in typical shampoos dry out the scalp and make it overcorrect by producing more oil. this matches my experience. Shampoo is like coffee; it creates dependency. Later, when I stopped showering daily, I did some experimentation and found that if I used shampoo, my scalp would actually feel worse the day after. So I just went cold turkey.
Now, my hair routine is: brush it every morning, use normal conditioner every time I shower, and use clarifying conditioner if my hair feels icky.
I saw people on r/parkour talk about running barefoot, so I gave it a try. The impact hurt at first, but I focused on landing on my forefoot, I immediately learned the technique and honed it over a few runs. Then I was able to use this technique even while having my shoes on.
At the time, I reasoned that this skill would allow me to be prepared in scenarios where I was wearing high heels or something, because I had the option to take them off and run. Which is true but moot: now I prefer to wear shoes with a "zero drop" because they pack light, are cheap, and comfortable to me.
Walking strictly slower than running. Most things if done faster will give you more stress, but pure movement done fast both saves time and is healthy.
I tried to give up walking for Lent - except when inside or walking with a group of people, and I can walk when out of breath. Honestly I've forgotten to do this sometimes. But it's fun and I'm getting better.
I also don't have a sports bra, or any bras really because I've grown out of my old ones. This is definitely me being an idiot, but to cope I've discovered how to run with long gentle
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Experimenting with this requires a source of trustworthy feedback. Only try this if you have a friend who's opinion you trust that you can ask whether or not you smell bad.
Practically it's also worth noting that specific emotional states such as going to an event with a lot of social anxiety can make your body sweet in a way that's smelly even if you normally don't.
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Ok. Well I don't think there's a robust nutrition engineering either. Except maybe whatever the gym bros are cooking up (iirc mostly macronutrients, some supplements, and don't take certain research chemicals that will kill you). There is a lot of incredible engineering in making food tasty and cheap though.
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(Splitting into multiple comments)
* Yes, the employee matching is "free money." But transferring my money out of this to do a Roth IRA rollover was really annoying and I may have accidentally done it wrong and now I need to talk to a CPA. All this work for just for a matched $6000. Bureaucracy, friction, and poor UI are bad because it makes my adhd brain procrastinating on actually investing. (Incidentally this is also a reason to be wary of crypto as an investment - annoying to get on/off chain)
* Retirement accounts are also often not able to invest in non-traditional assets like crypto or startup equity. They are less liquid.
* I've reduced my "necessary" possessions to only what fits in a single tiny backpack. I've also cut my expenses substantially. I've saved so much money, I could retire very soon and travel the world in low cost-of-living countries, just living off the 4% of the principal. So by keeping my money in "retirement" accounts I am delaying the age at which I can retire because of the tax penalty!
(I love working at manifold tho, and even if I left I'd probably just start my own startup, or something else ambitious, while being a nomad.)
* maybe you don't earn very much, but the future is coming fast so who knows when financial escape velocity will come for you
* diversification has diminishing marginal returns.
* if instead you just hand-pick a dozen of stocks of companies you think are underrated, spread out across industries, you've got most of the benefit of diversification already, but at higher EV
* if you're young, you should be taking on more risk for higher EV
* the lesswrong zeitgeist in particular was ahead on crypto, covid, and AI. I have made money listening to it. what else will this community be ahead on?
* if everyone buys the top 500 companies in the S&P, because "they're supposed to," then the top 500 are overvalued and you should buy the 501st company. (some mutual funds do this trade, and my rationalist friend
Minor nitpick:
You wouldn’t do anything absurdly dangerous, like take unknown drugs or ride a bike without a helmet.
Riding a bike without a helmet is not "absurdly dangerous". Mostly because riding a bike is not very dangerous, to begin with (unless you are doing absurdly dangerous stunts with it, but then it's a different question and anything that reduces injuries helps). Helmets do reduce injuries by a factor of about three.
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'Bike' is sometimes used as shorthand for 'motorcycle', in which case the 'absurdly dangerous' claim stands. I agree that riding a pedal-powered cycle without a helmet is somewhat dangerous, and unnecessarily so, but not 'absurdly dangerous'.
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I was under the impression that riding a motorcycle even with proper protection is still very dangerous?
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Ah, yes. I agree that motorcycles are more dangerous than bicycles. Generally, avoiding dangerous activities (like those toward the lower end of this chart) seems like a good idea.
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That doesn't seem like a good idea. You're ignoring long-term harms and benefits of the activity - otherwise cycling would be net positive - and you're ignoring activity duration. People don't commute to work by climbing Mount Everest or going skydiving.
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I'm not ignoring them. I'm just comparing danger base rates. That's why "generally". The benefits of each activity depend on the user.
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On the note of wearing helmets, wearing a helmet while walking is plausibly as beneficial as wearing one while cycling[1]. So if you weren't so concerned about not looking silly[2], you'd wear a helmet while walking.
[1] I've heard people claim that this is true. I haven't looked into it myself but I find the claim plausible because there's a clear mechanism—wearing a helmet should reduce head injuries if you get hit by a car, and deaths while walking are approximately as frequent as deaths while cycling.
[2] I'm using the proverbial "you" in the same way as Mark Xu.
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It's not just cars- helmets protect you if you tip over or crash into something. That happens at much higher speeds on bikes and scooters than while walking.
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Disregarding the looking silly, there are many other (small) downsides of wearing a helmet all the time:
1. the weight may have an adverse effect on your neck
2. you may get stuck on obstacles such as door frames
3. you may hit other people with it (who presumably don't wear it and if they do see 2
4. it interferes with close personal interactions, such as hugging
5. ...
I will push against.
I feel unhappy with this post, and not just because it called me an idiot. I think epithets and thoughtless dismissals are cheap and oversupplied. Patience and understanding are costly and undersupplied.
A lot of the seemingly easy wins in Mark's list were not so easy for me. Becoming more patient helped me a lot, whereas internal vitriol made things worse.I benefitted hugely from Mr. Money Mustache, but I think I was slower to implement his recommendations because he kept calling me an idiot and literally telling me to punch myself in the face.
If a bunch of people get enduring benefits from adopting the "such an idiot" frame, then maybe I'll change my mind. (They do have to be enduring though.)
Here is a meme I would be much happier to see spread:
You, yes you might be able to permanently lower the cost of exercise to yourself if you spend a few days' worth of discretionary resources on sampling the sports in Mark Xu's list. But if you do that and it doesn't work, then ok, maybe you really are one of the metabolically underprivileged, and I hope you figure out some alternative.
Side notes:
- It seems like this post is in tension with Beware Other Optimizin
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I don't have strong takes on the "idiot" stylistic choice; introspectively it feels fun and it takes the bite out of my self-flagellations when I notice leaving value on the floor. I won't claim to have any empirical support that this actually works better or worse for me.
I mostly like this post for the advice. Concretely, after reading it:
* I've bought copies of exercise equipment I like for my parents' house so that when I am exercising relatively regularly, I don't break a streak by visiting them.
* I own two laptops, two kindles, have multiple chargers (some of which live in travel bags so I always have them)
* I often invoke this when deciding whether to try an experimental purchase that might make my life better, but is a little pricey.
* Rebought multi-colour pens, which tend to be useful for me for a stretch, and I don't consider rebuying them when they might be useful again.
* Bought an external battery.
That collection feels like it was probably net-positive.
Some of the things that Mark suggests have been really good for me but I already did them (have a password manager, bright rooms). There are some I disagree with, so haven't (re)tried after reading it (drink lots of water, summarize things you've read, reliably sleep 6-9 hours a night (on the margin, for me)). And then there are some that seem likely good that I haven't tried.
You would have multiple copies of any object that would make you sad if you didn’t have it
This seems more directly to be an issue with finances than idiotic thinking. off the top of my head: I'd be pretty devastated if I didn't have my 30 year old prime lens, but I also can't afford to buy one, especially because it's quite rare and prices have gone up since I bought it. A second car is a luxury few can afford. Or am I misunderstanding the point of this list?
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I think that "any object" was just poorly chosen and it should be "many objects" or "If you would be be sad to not have an object, you would have multiple if you can afford it (and you can more often afford it than you might naively think)".
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I suspected that is the case but wanted to make sure because other items on the list also seemed to be things that, at least in my position, seem like unobtainable luxuries (which abstractly might be related to idiotic judgement - for example "invest in yourself" well there's infinite ways to try that, I've made the mistake of reading many self-help books, but few which pay actual dividends; playing an instrument is an investment - a decent electric bass and amplifier can cost well over a grand).
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As I understand it, that point feels wrong to me. There are many things that I would be sad not to have in my life but only on the vaguely long term and that are easy to replace quickly. I have only one fridge and I would probably be somewhat miserable without one (or maybe I could adapt), but it would be absurd for me to buy a second one.
I would say most of the things that I would be sad to miss and that are easy to duplicate are also easy to replace quickly. The main exception is probably data, which should indeed be backed up regularly and safely.
Probably >90% of people I know are aware that exercise, sleep and food are important. The reason they don't do them or do them poorly is not a lack of knowledge, it's a lack of dopamine or motivation or whatever you wanna call it.
You would have tried making your room as bright as the outdoors.
i have. i find i operate better in the darkness, where everything is dark except for my screen. it provides sensory deprivation of unimportant information, allowing my neural network to focus on ideation.
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This seems so wrong, but very interesting! I've previously noted that thinking to myself in the dark seems to help. I've had periods (<4 months in 2023 / early 2024) where I would spend 2-5 mornings per week just staying in bed (while dark) for 1-5 hours while thinking inside my own head.
After >3 hours of thinking interestedly about a rotation of ideas, they become smaller in working memory, and I'm able to extrapolate further / synthesize what I wasn't able to before.
I no longer do this, because I'm trying to do more practical things, but I don't think it's a bad strategy.
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I'm simply a vampire, you see.
Same about this working, wrote something similar in here. (Maybe this needs its own post instead of two comments by me that few saw given it works for both of us)
If I imagine a counterfactual version of me who regularly does for long times (e.g for most of their waking life), they are much more likely to succeed. I think I might need to set a system to keep me in such a state (like locking any computers in a timed box, so I can do nothing but think alone).
What does practical things mean?
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Oho! Yes, there's something uniqueish about thinking-in-bed compared to alternatives. I've also had nonstop 5-9h (?) sessions of thinking aided by scribbling in my (off-PC) notebooks, and it's different. The scribbling takes a lot of time if I want to write down an idea on a note to remember, and that can distract me. But it's also better in obvious ways.
In general, brains are biased against tool-use (see hastening of subgoal completion), so I aspire to learn to use tools correctly. Ideally, I'd use the PC to its full potential without getting distracted. But atm, just sitting at the PC tends to supplant my motivation to think hard and long about a thing (e.g. after 5m of just thinking, my body starts to crave pushing buttons or interacting with the monitor or smth), and I use the tools (including RemNote) very suboptimally.
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Same[1]. Would you want to write a short post about this? I think you could better than I could, judging by these two paragraphs you just wrote.
(I edited into my reply: "(Maybe this needs its own post instead of two comments by me that few saw given it works for both of us)")
Here's the summary I was writing for a not-yet-existent post
1. ^
apart from wanting to learn to use computers without becoming distracted, I think that would be really hard for my mind and I should just usually avoid them
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I really appreciate your willingness to think "extreme" about saving the world. Like, if you're trying to do an extremely hard thing, obviously you'd want to try to minimize the effort you spend not-doing that thing. All sources of joy are competitive reward-events in your brain. Either try to localize joy-sources to what you want yourself to be doing, or tame them to be in service of that (like, I eat biscuits and chocolate with a Strategy! :p).
...But also note that forcing yourself to do thing X can and often will backfire[1], unless you're lucky or you've somehow figured out how to do forcing correctly (I haven't).
Also, regarding making a post: Sorry, probably not wish do! And the thinking-in-bed thing is mostly a thing I believe due to extensive experience trying, so it's not something I have good theoretical arguments for. That is, the arguments wouldn't have sufficiently convinced a version of myself that hadn't already experienced trying.
1. ^
There's probably something better to link here, but I can't think of it atm.
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I must have mis-worded the first sentence. I guess it's hard for me to write advice without it being read as 'naively maximize this in a way that leads to burnout instead of actually maximizing it', cause I modified the original phrasing away from 'minimize' to 'trying not to' to try to avoid that interpretation.
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I just try to add that disclaimer whenever I talk about these things because I'm extra-worried that ppl will be inspired by my example to jump straight into a severe program of self-deprivation without forethought. My lifestyle is objectively "self-deprivational" relative to most altruists, in a sense, so I'm afraid of being misunderstood as an inspiration for doing things which makes my reader unhappy. 🍵
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Ah, forgot to reply to "What does practical things mean?"
Recently it's involved optimizing my note-taking process, and atm it involves trying to find a decent generalizable workflow for benefiting from AI assistance. Concretely, this has involved looking through a bunch of GitHub repos and software, trying to understand
➀ what's currently technologically possible (← AutoCodeRover example),
➁ what might become possible within reasonable time before civilizational deadline,
➂ what is even desirable to introduce into my workflow in the first place.
I want to set myself up such that I can maximally benefit from increasing AI capabilities. I'm excited about low-code platforms for LLM-stacks[1], and LLM-based programming languages. The latter thing, taken to its limit, could be called something like a "pseudocode interpreter" or "fuzzy programming language". The idea is to be able to write a very high-level specification for what you wish to do, and have the lower-level details ironed out by LLM agents. I want my code to be degenerate, in the sense that every subcomponent automatically adjusts itself to fulfil niches that are required for my system to work (this is a bad explanation, and I know it).
The immediate next thing on my todo-list is just... finding a decent vscode extension for integrating AI into whatever I do. I want to be able to say "hey, AI, could you boot up this repository (link) on my PC, and test whether it does thing X?" and have it just do that with minimal confirmation-checks required on my part.
1. ^
I started trying to begin to make the first babysteps of a draft of something like this for myself via a plugin for Obsidian Canvas in early 2023[2], but then realized other people were gonna build something like this anyway, and I could benefit from their work whenever they made it available.
2. ^
Thinking high level about what this could look like, but left the project bc I don't actually know how to code (shh), and L
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i just remembered that it might be relevant that i have a non-24-hour sleep/wake cylce[1]. maybe i tend to expect it to be dark. also, if a human in an ancestral environment needed to be awake at night for some reason, it wouldn't really make sense for their cognition to be worse just because it's dark - maybe instead better/worse on different dimensions.
1. ^
another source: section 3 on 'circadian rhythm disorders' in this scott alexander post
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I don't think it's polite to full-text copy when link posting, particularly when Mark sometimes posts on LessWrong. I guess I'll ask him if he minds
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Agree. Please ask.
You would carry batteries to recharge your phone.
Anker makes dual wall chargers/batteries that I found extremely convenient while traveling.
You would have multiple copies of any object that would make you sad if you didn’t have it
especially a second pair of sheets, so you can wash them at your leisure.
1As an idiot, I found this useful. However, what did you mean by “… routinely look up key numbers and do numerical consistency checks during thinking”?
To build on your point about sleep : if you’re taking melatonin and getting enough sleep but still feel groggy, it’s worth considering the dosage. The average adult naturally produces about 0.3mg of melatonin, yet over-the-counter supplements are commonly available in dosages of 1 - 10mg.
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My interpretation of that was whenever you're having an opinion or discussion in which facts are relevant, make sure you actually know the statistics. An example is an argument (discussion?) my whole family had mid covid. The claim of some people was that generally, covid was only as bad as the flu. Relevant statistics were readily available for things like mortality rate and total deaths that some people making said claim were ignorant of (off by OOMs). With covid it seems obvious but for other things maybe not. Things people frequently have strong opinions about and don't frequently look up may include: the return on investment of college, the number of deaths due to firearms, the cost of alternative energy sources, how much taxes are actually going to change for a given bill.
One way to do this is to email people that you want to be your mentor with the subject “Request for Mentorship”.
I'm curious if anyone sending emails like these have gotten mentors. The success rate might be higher if you form a connection and then ask for recurring meetings.
I am really cautious of saying that there are only 2 things I am not doing and I got a weird feeling that I ticked most the boxes. Has anybody had this feeling? (OK I don't use pens and I don't have a consistent mentor).
I do the majority of these, and converged on them independently over the course of decades. I ended up doing most of these because they made my life better.
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I recommend Keepass, but you might have different requirements.
This video serves as a good comparison of your options and on this website you can find a list of recommendation for password managers and other privacy/security tools.
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I've been well served by Bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com/
It has a dark theme, apps for everything (including Linux commandline), the Firefox extension autofills with a keyboard shortcut, plus I don't remember any large data breaches.
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I really like 1Password, but my understanding is that Bitwarden has less frequent reported vulnerabilities
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Whatever you use, remember to backup your vault regularly. A cautionary tale:
I lost access to my bitwarden vault containing a private key to a few thousand $ worth of crypto, after changing my master password to something that I was then not able to recall perfectly. And bitwarden's website / extension start to rate limit you client-side after failed attempts. So instead, after a lot of research I was able to find the bitwarden hashfile on my computer where chrome stores data for its extensions. I then downloaded hashcat and tried to do a dictionary attack and some other clever attacks that made use of what I thought my password was supposed to be, but to no success.
Don't be me. Bitwarden lets you download your encrypted vault from the website or CLI. do that.
You wouldn’t take irreversible actions if you didn’t know what the fuck you were doing.
I would add for clarity "...if you knew you didn't know...." [edit:] did not realize this reaction would take the form of a separate comment, ah well serves the same function I guess.
Some stupidly obvious hacks that worked for me. Most were designed to help me push through ADHD issues, but would be just as useful for neurotypicals:
- 5 minute super intense cardio, as a replacement for long, low intensity cardio. It is easier to motivate oneself to do 5 minutes of Your-Heart-Might-Explode cardio than two hours of jogging or something. In fact it takes very little motivation, if you trick yourself into doing it right after waking up, when your brain is on autopilot anyway, and unable to resist routine.
- pile stuff by the door, or put it
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Interesting, I had the complete opposite experience. I previously had the idea that exercise should be short and really hard, and I couldn't stick with it. Then I learned that it's better if the majority of your exercise is very easy. Now I go for hour-long walks and I get exercise every day. (Jogging is too hard to qualify as easy exercise.)
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?
Soft downvoted for encouraging self-talk that I think will be harmful for most of the people here. Some people might be able to jest at themselves well, but I suspect most will have their self image slightly negatively affected by thinking of themselves as an idiot.
Most of the individual things you recommend considering are indeed worth considering.
A post I like by @Mark Xu (who agreed to my crossposting in full).
Some more from me: