I’m also unsure why there isn’t more about personal finance / money management here. It seems like an excellent use-case for rationality: it’s so trivially quantifiable that it comes pre-quantified, and it’s something that a lot of people are bad at, so there ought to be room for improvement.
Even though LW’s in-practice target audience is a demographic unusually susceptible to the meme that it’s completely impossible to beat the market, investment is only one part of managing money. (And I wonder how many people with enough income to do so even invest in index funds.) Optimizing expenditures is another part; have there been any posts on how to, say, optimize diet for low cost with an at-least-superior-to-the-average-American level of nutrition? Or higher-level skills: how to cultivate the virtue of frugality and so on.
I like the way you think. Less Wrong has a culture, and a jargon (i.e., technical or artificial language specific to its culture). I don’t mean that as an insult; I use it, so I’ll work with it in producing content regarding to this frugality side of personal finance. That is, I can term it as ‘optimizing expenditures’, or ‘cultivating a (set of) habits’. That may quicken in the minds of Less Wrong users the relevance of this information to rationality.
Of course, what we may find in the course of exploring money management is that Less Wrong itself can improve upon the advice of these websites for ourselves. That would be interesting.
optimize diet for low cost with an at-least-superior-to-the-average-American level of nutrition
Well there’s the Soylent idea, thought I don’t think it was from LW. Soylent being 100% of all required daily nutrients stored in powder format then used to make shakes. In theory after a number of iterations it should be the healthiest food possible for humans to consume as well as being fairly cheap.
I’m also unsure why there isn’t more about personal finance / money management here. It seems like an excellent use-case for rationality: it’s so trivially quantifiable that it comes pre-quantified, and it’s something that a lot of people are bad at, so there ought to be room for improvement.
Even though LW’s in-practice target audience is a demographic unusually susceptible to the meme that it’s completely impossible to beat the market, investment is only one part of managing money. (And I wonder how many people with enough income to do so even invest in index funds.) Optimizing expenditures is another part; have there been any posts on how to, say, optimize diet for low cost with an at-least-superior-to-the-average-American level of nutrition? Or higher-level skills: how to cultivate the virtue of frugality and so on.
I like the way you think. Less Wrong has a culture, and a jargon (i.e., technical or artificial language specific to its culture). I don’t mean that as an insult; I use it, so I’ll work with it in producing content regarding to this frugality side of personal finance. That is, I can term it as ‘optimizing expenditures’, or ‘cultivating a (set of) habits’. That may quicken in the minds of Less Wrong users the relevance of this information to rationality.
Of course, what we may find in the course of exploring money management is that Less Wrong itself can improve upon the advice of these websites for ourselves. That would be interesting.
Well there’s the Soylent idea, thought I don’t think it was from LW. Soylent being 100% of all required daily nutrients stored in powder format then used to make shakes. In theory after a number of iterations it should be the healthiest food possible for humans to consume as well as being fairly cheap.