I recently found out that a lifetime of dairy consumption is likely to only kill about 1 cow on expectation. This was about 6-8x off what I naively guessed. This made me curious and I did some napkin math with Gemini:

https://imgur.com/a/dyAWdUs

and fish are horrendous: https://imgur.com/a/EpwcWAm

I recently found out that one of the reasons it took Darwinism so long to emerge given animal husbandry was that many people had a similar idea, but the universe was considered to be too young for it to lead to anything but minor variation. It was shortly after cosmological times were pushed way way back that the idea took on more steam.

I think it's pretty reasonable that people discount the 3-5 years exercise adds at the end of life. But the quality of life boost is not reasonable to discount.

Aumann's agreement is pragmatically wrong. For bounded levels of compute you can't necessarily converge on the meta level of evidence convergence procedures.

I've thought a lot of the past dating roundups had good advice, but one based primarily on twitter discourse, as this one is, is very bad. Many of these takes reek of mental illness and should not be updated on IMO.

faster is often the wrong dimension for me to focus on. Though good optimization does lead to speed, it often feels like a result rather than a direct optimization target. I think something closer to how could I have learned that more easily, more completely. What was extraneous in retrospect? Were there any signs that I could have noticed earlier? What could I have included earlier that was obviously helpful?

One dynamic these questions reveal is often subtle bike-shedding: focusing on those areas that gave quick hits of sense of progress rather than what moves the needle on the original goal the most. A shorthand I have for this is 'decision leverage', as in how will what I am doing currently connect to something I do differently in the future?

More generally, the four pedagogical interventions with the largest effect size AFAIK are

deliberate practice

elaboration of context (connection to other areas of knowledge)

frequent low stakes quizzing

teaching the material to others

we identify seven epistemic fault lines, divergences in grounding, parsing, experience, motivation, causal reasoning, metacognition, and value. We call the resulting condition Epistemia: a structural situation in which linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without the labor of judgment.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19466

This may crisp up some intuitions about specific ways slop feels bad.

probabilistic sanctioning as the simplest way of distributing the duty (enforcement costs).

prior art for Eliezer's cooperation-punishment theorem from Planecrash?

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/16/8/083016/meta

The pattern you're naming seems common amongst grandiose narcissism. We tend to see the many coins flipped heads in a row cases.