10. Everyday Razor—If you go from doing a task weekly to daily, you achieve 7 years of output in 1 year. If you apply a 1% compound interest each time, you achieve 54 years of output in 1 year.
What’s the intuition behind this—specifically, why does it make sense to apply compound interest to the daily task-doing but not the weekly?
I think the second part is bullshit anyway, I can’t come up with a single example where compounding is possible to a whole year in a row, for something related to personal work/output/results.
I think that came from James Clear’s Atomic Habits, talking about how if you get 1% better at something every day, then you get >30 times better at it after a year (1.01^365 = 37.7). But it has to be something where improvement by a factor of 30 is possible e.g. running a mile.
I think it makes sense that you can repeatedly get 30x better at, say, reducing p(doom), especially if you’re starting from zero, but the 1% per day dynamic depends on how different types of things compound (e.g. applying the techniques from the CFAR handbook compounding with getting better at integrating bayesian thinking into your thoughts, and how those compound with getting an intuitive understanding of the Yudkowsky-christiano debate or AI timelines).
What’s the intuition behind this—specifically, why does it make sense to apply compound interest to the daily task-doing but not the weekly?
I think the second part is bullshit anyway, I can’t come up with a single example where compounding is possible to a whole year in a row, for something related to personal work/output/results.
I think that came from James Clear’s Atomic Habits, talking about how if you get 1% better at something every day, then you get >30 times better at it after a year (1.01^365 = 37.7). But it has to be something where improvement by a factor of 30 is possible e.g. running a mile.
I think it makes sense that you can repeatedly get 30x better at, say, reducing p(doom), especially if you’re starting from zero, but the 1% per day dynamic depends on how different types of things compound (e.g. applying the techniques from the CFAR handbook compounding with getting better at integrating bayesian thinking into your thoughts, and how those compound with getting an intuitive understanding of the Yudkowsky-christiano debate or AI timelines).