Humans have a sleep/wake cycle, but we also seem to need (or at least, express a need for) a different kind of rest: a work/play cycle (work during the day and relax in the evening, work during weekdays and relax during weekends, take vacations every so often, that sort of thing). The notion of spontaneity here seems like a reasonably good model of the point of evenings, weekends, and vacations: doing things because they feel good, because they're alive for you in the moment, rather than making and completing to-do lists. (Of course, some people won't fit this model.)
Just like different people need different amounts of sleep, maybe the work/play balance also works differently for different people. I wonder whether "needs much more play than average people" is a good model for ADHD.
Thank you! I have some Christian friends, and your description generally matches what I observed.
Prayer is a powerful social/psychological technology that many atheists could benefit from.
if you don't have high standards for employees it might because you're misanthropic
That sounds to me like a needlessly complicated theory. Maybe the reason why they hire mediocre people is that exceptional people are rare and expensive?
Like, what's the alternative to "They hire middling engineers instead of holding out for 10x'ers"? If you interview people, and you find out that most of them suck, and then there are a few average guys, but no 10x'er... should you keep waiting? You would be missing opportunities, losing the momentum, and running out of money.
The 10x'ers are few, and they have other opportunities that pay better and provide better work-life balance. The author seems to take for granted that all 10x'ers must be trying to get a job at a startup, and it must the startup's fault to somehow push them away. I would assume that most of them already have a job.
If you need a good marketing slogan:
Yudtella -- if anyone mass-produces it, every bear dies
1I am fascinated by how often I read something about LLMs and it seems to illustrate something about human psychology. I wonder how many psychologists think about these things. (I suspect not many, because psychologists typically don't read technical articles about LLMs.)
For example, in "GDM: Consistency Training Helps Limit Sycophancy and Jailbreaks in Gemini 2.5 Flash" the part "Bias-augmented Consistency Training", specifically "Train the model via SFT to give the clean response ... when shown the wrapped prompt"... that reminds me strongly of "Asch’s Conformity Experiment", "On Expressing Your Concerns". Specifically that it becomes much easier to resist pressure when you have seen an example of resisting the pressure.
This is fascinating for me, and so are the other articles on your blog!
The sad truth is that you probably need to get that damned piece of paper from the educational system, because during your entire life there will be a chance that people in HR will use it as their first filter. Even if not now, maybe ten or twenty years later. So the options seem to be:
- avoid the school system as long as possible... but join at the last moment, to get the final paper. The specific details depend on your school system; if being admitted to the institution that gives you the final paper requires you to get the previous paper first, etc., maybe starting with the kindergarten, then you are screwed.
- accept the risk that you will never get a job, and will have to start your own company, or get homeless.
- become so famous or so good at networking that you will never have to use the standard channels, because when you apply somewhere, the CEO will call the HR department and tell them to shut up.
The last two options are very high variance, I would probably recommend against them.
In my experience (probably not relevant: different country, different decades) there are a few tricks one could use without the diploma:
- networking: a friend inside a company recommends you directly to their boss
- get a shitty job in the same industry, they will accept you because no one applies to them, when you apply to the next job you already have experience in the industry (this assumes that a diploma is more relevant fresh after school, but your previous jobs are more relevant later)
- apply to the same company to a different position (e.g. software tester instead of developer), when you are hired, demonstrate extra skills and try to get promoted to a new position
- a combination of the previous two steps, where you get a different but similar position in a different company, and as you change companies you try to slightly adjust your role
But none of this will probably work if there are many candidates and the HR is free to apply simple filters.
What advice/concrete instructions would a future superintelligence send down to me that would completely transform my life
This is tricky, because there is a tradeoff between how good the advice is, and your ability to use it properly.
When I thought about an advice I could give (using some kind of time machine) to my younger self, I thought "but there is little chance that my younger self would interpret these instructions correctly". It would be cheating to post the entire Sequences. I am not sure if I could make a useful extract, especially one that cannot be easily misinterpreted by a teenager.
So similarly, if suddenly a portal opened and my older (post-Signularity?) self gave me some good advice, I would probably start screaming: "I need more details!"
Why is the number of different vegetables not exploding?
Map vs territory: are we really missing new vegetables, or only new names for vegetables? I mean, are there some things that we just call "adjective1 X" and "adjective2 X" because they appeared relatively recently, but we would have separate names "X" and "Y" for them if they appeared millennia ago?
I mean, who decides that red / yellow / green bell pepper are considered the same kind of vegetable, or white / yellow / red / purple raddish, but e.g. broccoli and cauliflower are considered different vegetables?
How exactly did we bootstrap ourselves to smaller and smaller computer hardware?
Not sure I understand the question. We started with big. But if you try making things faster, you are limited by the speed of light (or electricity) in you circuits. These days, with gigahertz speeds, it's literally centimeters. Though I am not sure whether this was the actually the first reason for computers getting smaller.
In my opinion it's pretty good, especially for a first post on a philosophical topic.
people in those cultures seem to just come to value beauty less
Is it "less" in the sense that their standards simply got higher and shifted the beauty curve, or in the sense of diminishing returns? Not sure I could operationalize this, but intuitively it feels like there is a difference between:
- this person (beautiful by other country's standard) seems repulsively ugly to me
- this person seems pretty, but so are most people, so I am looking also for some other traits
Not my experience. Probably depends on country, but maybe my objections also apply to other countries.
In schools, "inclusion" is the buzzword, and having separate schools for gifted children is... legal, so far, but frowned upon. I wish we had more schools that separate children by intelligence and conscientiousness. Instead, they mostly separate them by how much money and connections their parents have.
Similarly "standardized tests and extracurriculars" is a strangely mixed bag. The former refers to students' actual skills, the latter refers to luck and/or ability to navigate arbitrary constraints.
Finally, elite universities admit great students... or those who will represent them at sport events.
In other words, we kinda get sorted all the time, but the criteria are inconsistent. Not sure if this is what the article tried to imply. I got an impression that it talks about a more consistent way of sorting.
This seems like a self-inflicted misery that you can easily opt out from. I have no idea how other people spend their vacations.