You talk about the length of your sleep but have you considered variability of your sleep? For me sleeping always 7h30 seems to greatly increase my productivity in the long run. I sometimes add a few sleep cycle every few week ends but try to stick to a regular sleep schedule instead of thinking in terms of duration.

You might want to try by first waking up always at the same time, regardless of when you fell asleep.

A one word answer here is not very useful I think but I somewhat agree.

Adderall and other ADHD medication can, in a context of abuse, lead to somewhat "more productive time" or something like that. This if well known.

But too few people know that having a reduced "attention store" throughout the day can be a symptom of ADHD.

I can recall a patient that was not overly hyperactive but was daydreaming a lot and starting the medication actually helped him go "slower" in his mind but for way longer, hence increasing output.

There's been a mistake on the discord link. Here's a working on : https://discord.gg/VMQq8r83GS

THANK YOU

ahem

Hi!

I'm a bit late to the party. I postponed writing this because it felt so important that I wanted to reply correctly. I sincerely hope that my enthusiasm will not be mistaken for egotism. Forgive my Chutzpah!

Let me introduce myself. After a background in hard sciences I am currently a medical student in a european country (hint, president's name sounds like a pastry and loves nuclear energy). I am confident that I will become a psychiatrist (i.e. I am still a few years before the final exam where you choose the specialty but it's pretty easy to reach) but my love for computer science is burning as strong as ever. Hence, I have a strong motivation toward the field of computational psychiatry. I am particulary captivated by AI and think I am a pretty competent coder.

When people ask me what I want to do, I have several possible answers : understanding psychiatric pathologies and help patients (this also has the benefit of helping me get along with my medical peers), understanding counscioussness (this is my existencial goal), playing a role in creating artificial consciousness (that's my personnal motivation). But I am of course interested in all things AI related, including alignment research.

Hence, it is with strong enthusiasm that I read the term "AI psychologist", knowing that I introduced myself several times as "wanna be AI psychiatrist". Those passions of mine are intertwined as I'm convinced that (as Feynmann put it) "If you want to understand the mind, you have to build it".

You said :

(And it wouldn’t shock me if “AI psychologist” turns out to be an economically important occupation in the future, and if you got a notable advantage from having a big head start on it.) I think this is especially likely to be a good fit for analytically strong people who love thinking about language and are interested in AI but don’t love math or computer science.

I recognize myself in this paragraph, although I do love math and computer science.

Having to juggle between medical school and programming, I don't have the brains to be as competent and experienced as I'd like in ML but I think that interpretability research is a sweet spot where my transdisciplinary skills would be useful. Btw if anyone has specific courses, books or material on interpretability, I would be delighted!

I am writing this to signal that this kind of people exist. Unfortunately I am still about 5 to 10 years to completely finish my (currently planned) full curriculum (this includes medical and computer science degrees as well as PhDs), but I hope there will still be hanging fruits by this time :)

Btw I am also a LW meetup organizer in my country. If you ever come in europe in the coming years we could definitely have a chat. Otherwise don't hesitate to reach me, even/especially in years from now, as I'm still in the learning phase.

Note that I subscibed to your comments as well as to comments on this page, this way I can see the advance you publish in this field. I will also take a look every month at Redwood Research website news section.

Sincerely

The implementation is probably very inefficient and I suffered from my own scrope creepiness but the idea is still there.

Posting this comment motivated me to fix some bugs in the next few days so if you run into issues give it another go next week btw

In case you're still somewhat interested by LiTOY, I mentionned it here in a comment : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lwqb3zsPzTpMNNAvX/starting-too-many-projects-finishing-none

To keep motivated on my goals I coded my own tool called LiTOY (list that outlives you). It's FOSS in python : https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/LiTOY-aka-List-that-Outlives-You

I'm the only one to use it so there are probably bugs etc but maybe reading the README.md can inspire you :)

There is no functionnal GUI so it's in CLI but I plan to restart it from scratch in typescript as an addon for logseq

ping @JayMon who was interested by it 2 years ago (time flies)

Currently being a medical student that's very into AI, a dream of mine is to be in independant researcher in computational psychiatry.

Your post is very inspiring.

Thanks.

I am not aware of any way to quantify (even naively like my system) this kind of thing and I am very eager to hear about other ways people have found.

A metric for comparing Social Circles

Epistemic status : Just an idea I had on a walk, doesn't seem that stupid to me

I have been thinking a bit about this topic lately, had an idea of a solution and figured LW would be interested in pointing out the unavoidable flaws in the reasoning.

Here's the gist Find a formula to quantify, as objectively as possible, your filter bubble (also called social bubble or even social circle). One could also see this as measuring by how much your social circle differ from random. The metric I chose to focus on is the income in local currency unit, but I think the idea is easily generalizable. For example we could use the total number of years of education.

But why ? One could use it to compare his own bubble to other people's. I can see it being used as a wakeup call (i.e. it's one way to find out how much you're privileged), or to judge a politician or something.

Here's a simple algorithm I came up with :

1. ask the person to write down the names of the 10 most influential person they see more than once every 2 month. It has to be people they physically interact with, exchange ideas and so one. Any superficial friend doesn't count, one way relationships (watching someone one youtube for example) don't count either. Family members don't count. Neither do neighbours (that would skew results too much).
2. write down their income, or if they live at their parent's expense : the average of their parent's income.
3. sum the total income of your circle, add your own income, divide by 11. The difference between that value and the median income of your area of residence is your SocialCircleScore. You can compare this number to the one of others to better grasp the privileges that some may have without realizing it.

What do you think? Any idea of a better formula? What is missing? How would you see this being used? Ever heard of something like that? If so, I'd love to read on it.