Emotionally, redefining the concept of “luck” to “probability distribution” (and further to “Everett branches”) helped me deal with randomness in real life. Also the idea that you should judge your decision by the information you had available at given moment, not in the light of random events that happen later.
For example, every week someone wins a lottery. Yet I do not regret not having bought the ticket, because there was no way for me to buy a ticket that wins predictably. That allows me to remain calm even if a lottery winner (e.g. Nassim Taleb) is laughing at me.
Another thing is politics. I still care about some political issues, but I no longer care about people debating politics, as I see the debate as an expression of our tribal instincts and signalling loyalty, rather than an attempt to find truth. The fact that someone has a wrong political opinion is now just a fact about human nature.
Many concepts I found in the Sequences were actually things that I have already intuitively half-discovered for myself. That brought me the relief that I am not imagining things; that at least someone on the opposite side of the planet sees things similarly, and OMG it is actually more than just one person, it is actually a large group of people (sadly not so large in my country).
I probably also made an actual rational decision once or twice, but it is hard to say, because I don’t know what decisions would I have made without reading LW; maybe different, maybe quite similar.
Emotionally, redefining the concept of “luck” to “probability distribution” (and further to “Everett branches”) helped me deal with randomness in real life. Also the idea that you should judge your decision by the information you had available at given moment, not in the light of random events that happen later.
For example, every week someone wins a lottery. Yet I do not regret not having bought the ticket, because there was no way for me to buy a ticket that wins predictably. That allows me to remain calm even if a lottery winner (e.g. Nassim Taleb) is laughing at me.
Another thing is politics. I still care about some political issues, but I no longer care about people debating politics, as I see the debate as an expression of our tribal instincts and signalling loyalty, rather than an attempt to find truth. The fact that someone has a wrong political opinion is now just a fact about human nature.
Many concepts I found in the Sequences were actually things that I have already intuitively half-discovered for myself. That brought me the relief that I am not imagining things; that at least someone on the opposite side of the planet sees things similarly, and OMG it is actually more than just one person, it is actually a large group of people (sadly not so large in my country).
I probably also made an actual rational decision once or twice, but it is hard to say, because I don’t know what decisions would I have made without reading LW; maybe different, maybe quite similar.