Three-Monkey Mind

Wiki Contributions

Comments

Oh, that's something significantly different from what I had in mind. Thanks for pointing me to the page that explains the concept.

Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means?

I'm not jp, but:

  • too awake to sleep
  • too brain-fogged to do thinking work
  • possibly too brain-fogged to listen to a podcast and retain anything from it
  • too physically tired to go for a walk or do other similar low-intensity exercise, like easy yoga
  • probably too brain-fogged to read — and really digest — the web articles that I've been postponing for months because they seem great, but I can never get around to

Meanwhile, here's what I can do in a low-energy state, some of the time (but I frequently don't want to):

  • balance a checkbook, but it seems like I get roughly hours/week of low-energy time, but maybe hours/week of time that I need to spend balancing checkbooks
  • delete e-mails, but not be able to think of a couple good new categories that I'd need to get my inbox to zero
  • get photos off my phone and file them appropriately, but possibly spend a little too long thinking of good, descriptive filenames that I'll be able to use to search for them later, or just fail to have a name with the words that I'll want to use to retrieve it later

We might iterate on the exact implementation here (for example, we might only give this option to users with 100+ karma or equivalent)

I could be misunderstanding all sorts of things about this feature that you've just implemented, but…

Why would you want to limit newer users from being able to declare that rate-limited users should be able to post as much as they like on newer users' posts? Shouldn't I, as a post author, be able to let Said, Duncan, and Zack post as much as they like on my posts?

writing things down

A good idea but too general to be good advice.

More specifically (not an exhaustive list):

  • If you have a multistep 1- or 2-hour task, strongly consider scribbling down a quick checklist of what needs doing before your working memory gets swamped with the details of a subtask or three.
  • If you're in the middle of a programming project and need to pause your work, strongly consider typing out a message in a sticky-note-equivalent app like Tot that says "Welcome back. You were frobnicating the gleeberks because the gleeberks don't snozzle as well as they should."

More generally, consider dumping your mental state to a written medium more often. You should probably have a way to do this on both your phone and computer that doesn't take too much thinking to summon up a text field that you can edit and then have the text get stored in an inbox or similar catch-all folder somewhere.

If you feel silly writing down trivial stuff, it's helpful to think "I want to remember all of it, not just most of it."

Two responses:

  1. It's unclear to me what would make diet advice "rationalist".
  2. The only novel, actionable consensus I've seen seems to be "avoid eating or drinking things with sugar added to them, especially if there's a lot of added sugar".

If “refining the art of human rationality” is our goal, we should be doing a lot more outreach and a lot more production of very accessible rationality materials.

I agree, and I'm in favor of this sort of thing. I try to do this sort of thing among my friends. Sometimes it works, at least a little bit.

On the other hand, if we're trying to save Earth from being turned into paperclips, we ought to focus our efforts on people who're smart enough to be able to meaningfully contribute to AI risk reduction.

On the other other hand, there are people here who could help with sanity-line-raising materials who can't help with rationality training as a way to avert AI x-risk.

On the other other other hand, some people who might be able to help with AI risk might get into the possibly-less-important sanity-waterline-raising projects, and this would be a bad thing.

A second laptop charger.

It's nice to be able to charge your laptop at your desk, with a cord that snakes behind the desk, and not have to go in and undo all that just to get power to your laptop when you're out and about.

And if you're not getting out with your laptop, having a second charger is still useful. I have a makeshift standing desk with my laptop on top of my dresser. With a second charger set up like this, I can shift from standing to sitting on my schedule, not my laptop's battery's.

Also, I find myself vexed with thoughts […] How do professional or amatuer traders deal with this?

Habituation, meditation, and/or alcohol.

Subjective experience:

  • Polyester (elastane, etc.) clothes are much more common these days. Back in the 80s, people wore way more cotton shirts to the gym. Nowadays, most people wear some sort of sweat-wicking heat-venting material. They're also cheaper; Under Armour used to run about $50. Nowadays, UA shirts tend to run about 3/5 that.

  • Remember back when wool was only for itchy sweaters? Nowadays, merino wool, which is less itchy for most people, is used for shirts and undershirts and even socks and underpants. The great thing about wool shirts is that you can wear them for almost a week and they won't stink; this isn't something you can do with cotton and especially not polyester.

  • There are a lot more stretchy materials out there, as well as stretchy materials (polyester) woven into less-stretchy materials (cotton) to give the stiffer materials a bit more give. This makes slim-fitting clothing less restrictive, if nothing else.

  • There are nylon pants that don't look out of place at the office. Outlier's Futureworks pants made out of F.Cloth (click on "Fabric" on the tabs) are better than cotton chinos in at least some respects; you can spill coffee on them and likely all of it will bead up and just run off, not staining anything or even getting wet. (They'll eventually wet out if you're walking around in the rain, though.)

  • You can car camp in the rain, forget your rain gear, and everything'll turn out mostly OK.

While the price of insulation is a superlatively objective metric, it entirely misses advancements in anything other than insulation effectiveness. The big changes have all been in finding new points that balance the different tradeoffs between stretchiness/durability/stink trapping/cost/water resistance/stain resistance/warmth/air permeability.

Load More