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I sometimes hear of EAs or rationalists thinking about their career plans and trying to account for their bias and the incentives they face. They want to compare their plans with some hypothetical ideal plan without their bias, and that was immune to social pressure or financial incentives. But they...
It's easy to disagree with people. You just say, "That's wrong" and decline to elaborate. But that's not very interesting. If you want to be making progress — instead of ragebaiting — it usually helps to find a way for your disagreement to be productive. Productive disagreements start in the...
Having more tools greatly increases the space of potential plans you can consider. So by default you should be getting more tools. Having too few tools tightly constrains your options, and often impacts the kinds of plans you consider in the first place. Years ago I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail,...
(The better telling is here. Seriously you should go read it. I've heard this story told in rationalist circles, but there wasn't a post on LessWrong, so I made one) Today is April 15th, Carpathia Day. Take a moment to put forth an unreasonable effort to save a little piece...
I have been pondering Wentworth's Information vs Assurance post, and I think I have another angle on a similar concept. Wentworth identified the problem of information being mistaken for assurance. I want to explore what it looks like to deliberately construct assurance, and what that costs. Conveying this concept in...
One way intellectual progress stalls is when you are asking the Wrong Questions. Your question is nonsensical, or cuts against the way reality works. Sometimes you can avoid this by learning more about how the world works, which implicitly answers some question you had, but if you want to make...
I'm a struggling beginner to this whole writing business, and I've been wondering how to measure my skill as it improves. There is an app called the most dangerous writing app, that deletes the words you've typed in it if you don't keep writing up to a specific amount of...