Really. (This sounds acerbic, but your comment is incredibly hard to take at face value.)
Do you also only watch a TV show (or a movie, or a fantasy novel) just enough so that you maximize your future contributions to effective charity (or MIRI etc.)?
What about going out with a girl, or keeping up with old friends outside the field? All that diverted effort consciously calculated to maximize your effective charity contributions, or do you treat time invested differently from other resources such as money?
(In the last few years, I’ve deliberately excluded some goals/activities that would sink resources/time but won’t serve a long-term global purpose (i.e. goals that are not about myself) and whose avoidance doesn’t seem to damage my motivation/productivity (reading fiction, playing games, studying music and (natural) languages, buying things beyond necessities, creating a family, aggressively advancing career). It might be that this mode is (psychologically) enabled by the fact that so far I’m investing in my own time/training, not donations.)
When tired or low on motivation, I watch TV shows (US, UK series), recently for about 1.5 hours a day on average, in 10-20 minute sections throughout the day.
(This sounds acerbic, but your comment is incredibly hard to take at face value.)
Yeah, I noticed that after writing it. Look, I have limited time and a complicated utility function. I can try to optimize where I think it would be particularly valuable to optimize (the decision to buy an iPhone is not small in terms of the accumulated costs or in terms of time investment so it seemed particularly worth paying attention to), but if I tried to consciously optimize everything I’d quickly run out of time to actually do any of the things I’m trying to optimize.
I recognize I’m opening myself up to further accusations of hypocrisy here, but I’d rather be hypocritical in the sense that I optimize some part of my life and not the other parts (and ask others to do the same) than be consistent in the sense that I don’t optimize any of it. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.
Really. (This sounds acerbic, but your comment is incredibly hard to take at face value.)
Do you also only watch a TV show (or a movie, or a fantasy novel) just enough so that you maximize your future contributions to effective charity (or MIRI etc.)?
What about going out with a girl, or keeping up with old friends outside the field? All that diverted effort consciously calculated to maximize your effective charity contributions, or do you treat time invested differently from other resources such as money?
(In the last few years, I’ve deliberately excluded some goals/activities that would sink resources/time but won’t serve a long-term global purpose (i.e. goals that are not about myself) and whose avoidance doesn’t seem to damage my motivation/productivity (reading fiction, playing games, studying music and (natural) languages, buying things beyond necessities, creating a family, aggressively advancing career). It might be that this mode is (psychologically) enabled by the fact that so far I’m investing in my own time/training, not donations.)
Just curious: What things, if any, do you do that sink resources but don’t serve a long-term global purpose?
When tired or low on motivation, I watch TV shows (US, UK series), recently for about 1.5 hours a day on average, in 10-20 minute sections throughout the day.
Yeah, I noticed that after writing it. Look, I have limited time and a complicated utility function. I can try to optimize where I think it would be particularly valuable to optimize (the decision to buy an iPhone is not small in terms of the accumulated costs or in terms of time investment so it seemed particularly worth paying attention to), but if I tried to consciously optimize everything I’d quickly run out of time to actually do any of the things I’m trying to optimize.
I recognize I’m opening myself up to further accusations of hypocrisy here, but I’d rather be hypocritical in the sense that I optimize some part of my life and not the other parts (and ask others to do the same) than be consistent in the sense that I don’t optimize any of it. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.
Qiaochu participated in the last MIRI math workshop. Calculation done.