Jack R

If you are interested in living in a group house of EAs in Berkeley starting as soon as you’d like, please fill out this 1-minute form - we have a few spots available that we’re hoping to fill. Rent durations are up to 8 months (longer if a new lease...

Linkpost for: https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-020-02986-y/d41586-020-02986-y.pdf I figured this was probably of interest to people here, e.g. for seeing how scientists feel about this type of ethical concern and for thinking about the potential consequences of lab-grown brains. The beginning of the article: > In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains,...

This is a pretty funny and quick TED talk about positive psychology that I liked, though I wish it addressed the possibility and harms of self-delusion more. Questions I now have about deliberately choosing positive thoughts: * How harmful is the self-delusion from choosing positive thoughts? * What does this...

To figure out how to make progress on problems that require cognitive effort, it seems useful to think of times in the past when you’ve made lots of cognitive progress. For me, high school math camp was the most cognitively productive time. It seems plausible that the main reason I...

Actions after which I expect some kind of response seem to be more costly than the direct time cost they incur (for me, at least). They also incur a decreased effectiveness of the time just afterward, due to causing me to be anticipatory – e.g. I am more likely to...

In other words, I'm interested in ways I can design my work-flow/environment/habits to avoid bike-shedding (aka the Law of Triviality), which is the behavior of "substituting a hard and important problem for an easy and inconsequential one" [1]. Examples include 1) looking into an interesting idea that you ran across...