All of gudamor's Comments + Replies

I have no idea which of the below are true, or to what extent: 1) They're not off-putting to everyone; you are not the target audience 2) Being off-putting is valuable, as decreasing voter turnout benefits their strategy 3) Being off-putting does not matter, as they remain effective regardless 4a) No one is checking if these are effective 4b) The people who DO check if these are effective have a vested interest in showing they are

If no one is gathering data on the effectiveness, then the next best strategy is to copy your competitor.

Instead of real-time directional data, could you improve your sense of direction with training? Something like: estimate North, pull out phone and check, score your estimate, iterate. I imagine this could rapidly be mastered for your typical locations, such that you no longer need to pull out your phone at all.

"searching for groups to join that are at least adjacent to my interests." Why limit it even to these? To extend your analogy: if you're about to fall over dead from starvation, you'd accept most any food.

Common hardship is great for quickly cementing group relationships. You could volunteer time at a charity that will throw together a random group of people at sweaty, repetitive work for an afternoon. You could join a sports team and coalesce around hatred of your rivals.

Let's cut to the reforms, listed below with their headers.

  1. Require open file discovery.
  2. Adopt standardized, rigorous procedures for dealing with the government’s disclosure obligations
  3. Adopt standardized, rigorous procedures for eyewitness identification.
  4. Video record all suspect interrogations.
  5. Impose strict limits on the use of jailhouse informants.
  6. Adopt rigorous, uniform procedures for certifying expert witnesses and preserving the integrity of the testing process.
  7. Keep adding conviction integrity units.
  8. Establish independent Prosecutorial Integrity U
... (read more)

The other responses are absolutely correct. If they clarified things for you, great! However, you indicated that your intuition wasn't getting you to the correct answer, so let's try to formulate these into a new intuition.

You are starting along a path from left to right. The left side is where you started, and way over on the right side are different outcomes. The 'chances' you mention above are forks in the path, and you are taking each path with some probability.

At the first fork there are two paths, one in which A happened and one in which A did not. T... (read more)

Is it better to be a bigger fish in a small pond or to be a member of the most dignified pond? It probably depends on how exactly the above analogy breaks down.

Perhaps the better way to cut these different conclusions is whether competition is within-group or versus other groups.

The link in source 2 appears to be broken:

2National Sleep Foundation. (2011, March 7). Annual Sleep in America Poll Exploring Connections with Communications Technology Use and Sleep. Retrieved August 17, 2011, from http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/press-release/annual-sleep-america-poll- exploring-connections-communications-technology-use-.

1Capla8y
Hmm...Let me check that out.
  1. Thanks!
  2. 175 will definitely trigger some sort of reevaluation, but I am not planning to toss out my workout routine or attention to what I am eating. By also continuing frequent measurement I hope to avoid bouncing back.
  3. Strongly considering the Fitbit Charge HR due to recommendations from a few friends with them. Do you have any experience on these?
2Elo8y
A wearable: No one does it superiorly better than anyone else. Fitbit, basis, apple watch, pebble, android wears, moo (or something?). There's a long list. To see what it might be like; you can probably download an app that step-tracks via your phone's gyroscope. There is a limit to the usefulness and really it depends how much you pay attention to it. I found the notifications to be unmotivating to get me to move, but that might be different for you. Each system is trying its best to be the best. The biggest factors seem to be: * charging - do you want to charge every day, 7 days. or yearly. Quality comes with the price tag. Forgetfulness comes with data loss (if its flat it doesn't record). Generally having a routine to charge the wearable while you shower or sleep seems to work for the people I know, even with the daily-charge wearables. * push notifications - fitbit flex has no notifications, pebble is all about the notifications. You really can't know how you might use it till you have it. * Peripheral data. I got a Basis B1 because it had heart rate, body temperature and perspiration. Now that I have the data I have literally no idea what to do with it. trying all kinds of experiments on my data to see if I can find something interesting. But now that I have it; I probably couldn't have been convinced that the data would be relatively useless; but I wish someone would have told me. What kind of use will GPS tracking be. I don't know, if you can justify it then get it; otherwise consider the cheaper alternatives. * sleep tracking. This is something that frustrates me because a lot of wearables are designed to charge in a dock overnight. which means they can't track you while you sleep. I have no solution for this, other than find out where the charging port is before you buy it. some of the heart rate monitors have the charging port on the bottom, so they can't be charged while you wear them. A new rule for myself when quantifying: have a purpose in min

I don't know of Sam Altman, so maybe this criticism is wrong, but the quote: "If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person." Absent any guides on how to identify breakout trajectory companies, this advice seems unhelpful. It feels like: "Didn't work for you? You must not have been a smart young person or you would have picked the right company."

Paired with the paragraph below on not lett... (read more)

2[anonymous]8y
I have read something like this on a rationalist blog somewhere. Basically it was a type of advice like "you want to win the race? well, just run fast! just put one foot in front of the other quicker than others do, d'uh!" Maybe we need a name for this.
2John_Maxwell8y
Sam Altman is the president of Y Combinator. I think the way to look for a company on a breakout trajectory is to find a company that is growing fast and getting a lot of buzz but has not become established and is not thoroughly proven yet. Even better might be to find a company that's growing fast but not getting a lot of buzz, but that's probably trickier.

Chemistry so far. Control theory next.

I had weighed at most 200 and at least 150 pounds since 2007. I set my target at 175 pounds as a 5'10" male.

Absolutely, but I decided that I could not justify it. I travel for work and would prefer not to have the extra weight and space of it.

3Elo8y
1. excellent work on the notes, 2. I would suggest a number lower than 175 pounds, but that depends on your muscle vs fat composition. 3. sounds like a good call. What about other fitness/activity trackers? wearables etc. To further manage the health-balance

I have habitually recorded my weight since February of this year.

This is great because historically "paying attention to my weight" has lead to the desired weight-loss.

Recently I moved beyond reading about Spaced Repetition to actually downloading Anki and creating some notes.

3Elo8y
What are your notes about? What is your weight and target? (and height + gender) Have you considered an automated system for weight tracking like fitbit scales (which syncs with your phone)

Is there any way you could give yourself a precommitment? You said you want to pass the Chinese proficiency exam by 2017; can you take the time/money to register for it now, ahead of time? If you know that you are already on the hook to take the test "January 16th at 3pm" you would be motivated to not waste that investment.

I have been using Duolingo to learn Spanish. However, I also struggled with practicing as much/as frequently as I wanted. I started minding it using Beeminder's data integration, which has so far kept me consistent.

I think what... (read more)