Adam Zerner
There are some other things that I wanted to say but struggled to fit in to the OP. I’ll mention them here (in a rather brain-dumpy manner):
I think an important question is, like, why is it important to understand these things when you can just google a recipe for any given food item you’re cooking? The recipe will tell you exactly what to do and following those instructions isn’t exactly rocket science.
Well, the words aren’t really coming to me here but nevertheless, I’ll give it an initial stab. 1) Often times you’ll need to improvise and do things different from what the recipe says. 2) Sometimes you might want to cook something without a recipe.When I said that this stuff is something you could learn in minutes-to-hours rather than days-to-weeks, I should probably clarify some things. I think a lot of learning does still happen at the days-to-weeks point in the timeline. What I mean is that I think the 80-20 principle applies and that in the minutes-to-hours phase, I expect that a very useful and worthwhile of learning will take place.
When I propose that the benefit is large, to be clear, it’s because I’m multiplying a relatively small amount of utility across a pretty large period of time. When you improve you enjoy your meal a bit more than you otherwise would I don’t think that’s yielding a massive amount of utilons. But when you eat three meals a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year… it adds up. Technology could end up changing this though.
Even if you currently are someone who currently doesn’t get much utility out of eating, I think that can change for reasons similar to how someone who doesn’t appreciate art can learn to appreciate art and subsequently get a lot of joy out of art. And since we eat every day, learning to appreciate food seems plausibly worthwhile. Hm, maybe I’ll write a post about that some time. For now I’ll note that this path also has downsides. Off the top of my head: being tempted to spend more time cooking than you should, to eat less healthily than you should, to spend more money than you should, not enjoying food you otherwise would.
I worry that I wasn’t clear enough about the fact that I don’t think the goals of a crispy exterior and tender interior are as common as… I made them sound? The important point is just that they are relatively common, common enough that if there’s a technique for accomplishing those goals, that technique would be worth learning.
I was hoping to spend more time explaining what exactly the adjacent techniques are, why I think they are adjacent to the reverse sear, and how you might apply them when improvising in the kitchen, but I kinda ran out of steam (no pun intended).
Yes, traditionally people would sear and then put in the oven so the “reverse” in “reverse sear” is alluding to the fact that you’re switching the order by going oven first and sear second.
Some other comments:
I’ve never heard anything about the origin of the reverse sear being related to food safety, or better food safety is part of the reason to use it now.
Not that Vanvier is saying anything in conflict with this, but since food safety was brought up I want to say that food safety thing with chicken (as an example) is kinda annoying. I think this video does a good job explaining it.
Basically, you want to kill salmonella and other bacteria. The heat needed to accomplish that is a function of both temperature and time, not just temperature. See page 37 of this USDA guide. At 165℉ salmonella is killed instantly. At 160℉ it takes 13.7 seconds. At 155℉ it takes 44.2 seconds.
Conventional wisdom says that you need to cook it to 165℉ to be safe, but that’s just the guidelines being dumbed down because nuance leads to mistakes. In reality you can (and probably should!) cook it to a lower temperature if you hold it there long enough.To me, the big reason to reverse sear rather than to the traditional sear-then-finish-in-the-oven is because of the better browning you get with the reverse sear. After taking it out of the oven with the reverse sear, the exterior is nice and dry, and since moisture is the enemy of browning, this dryness helps you get particularly good browning.
The other thing is that for physics reasons I don’t quite understand, the reverse sear is supposed to get you more even cooking with less of a temperature gradient.
The reverse sear as a worthwhile life skill
This is illustrated well in this Seinfeld clip.
Beware boolean disagreements
Ah I see. Thanks for clarifying. I see now that it was mentioned but yeah, I lost sight of it while reading.
I’d be interested to hear more about how governments currently deal with it. It seems kinda obvious to me that we wouldn’t want to trust that there is no state-level hacking going on, and that we’d want something like what you propose in the post where you can know it’s random without having to trust people. I always assumed they had some sort of fancy math-y solution, but from what you’re saying it sounds like maybe they don’t.
What if instead of one sources of randomness, we have each candidates provide their own?
Maybe instead of one person-with-a-hat randomizer, we could have each candidate be their own randomness source. We just need a way for candidates’ randomness to be merged in a way that determines the winner.
I got a little confused here. If you have a source of randomness available to you, why move forward to something like Rock-Paper-Scissors? Why not just say “we’ll generate a random number between 0 and 1. I win if it’s between 0 and 0.5, you win if it’s between 0.5 and 1, we re-run if it’s exactly 0.5”?
Is it because both parties can’t agree that the source of randomness is fair?
The paper’s in a hat discussion made me think back to this from Probability is in the Mind:
I believe there was a lawsuit where someone alleged that the draft lottery was unfair, because the slips with names on them were not being mixed thoroughly enough; and the judge replied, “To whom is it unfair?”
Not that I don’t think there can be legitimate problems with the degree of randomness. Just that in the absence of legitimate problems, people still might have problems with it that aren’t legitimate.
I want to push back on the idea of needing a large[1] place if you have a family.
In the US a four person family will typically live in a 2,000-2,500 square foot place, but in Europe the same family will typically live in something like 1,000-1,400 square feet. In Asia it’s often less, and earlier in the US’s history it also was much less than what it is today.
If smaller sizes work for others across time and space I believe it is often sufficient for people in the US today.
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Well, you just said “larger”.
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This resonates with me. I’ve always been a fan of Mr. Money Mustache’s perspective that it doesn’t take much money at all to live a really awesome life, which I think is similar to the perspective you’re sharing.
Some thoughts:
Housing is huge. And living with friends is a huge help. But I think for a lot of people that isn’t a pragmatic option (tied to an area; friends unwilling or incompatible; need privacy), and then they get stuck paying a lot for housing.
Going car free helps a lot. Unfortunately, I think most places in North America make this somewhat difficult, and the places that don’t tend to have high housing costs.
Traveling is expensive. Flights, hotels, Ubers, food. I find myself in lots of situations where I feel socially obligated to travel, like for weddings and stuff, and so end up traveling maybe 4-6x/year, but this isn’t the hardest thing in the world to avoid. You could explain to people that you have a hard budget for two trips a year.
Spending $200/month or whatever on food means being strategic about ingredients. Which I very much think is doable, but yeah, it requires a fair amount of agency.
Cool simulation!
I also have to add that I find the idea that a cyclist wouldn’t cycle on a road absurd. I don’t think I know a single person who wouldn’t do this, presumably a US vs EU thing.
You mean the “No Way No How” group? If so, yeah, it feels implausible to me as well. I have a feeling that for people who were surveyed and said this, it wouldn’t match their actual behavior if they were able to experience an area with genuinely calm roads.
This summer the Thinking Basketball podcast has been doing a series on the top 25 players[1] of the 21st century. I’ve been following the person behind the podcast for a while, Ben Taylor, and I think he has extremely good epistemics.
Taylor makes a lot of lists like these and he always is very nervous and hesitant. It’s really hard to say that Chris Paul is definitively better than James Harden. And people get mad at you when you do rank Paul higher. So Taylor really, really emphasizes ranges. For Paul and Harden specifically, he says that Paul has a range of 6-17 and Harden has a range of 13-25. So yeah, given these ranges it’s very possible that Harden is in fact the better player.
Here’s what his list looks like with ranges in brackets:
LeBron James [1-3]
Shaquille O’Neal [1-6]
Steph Curry [1-8]
Kevin Garnett [2-9]
Nikola Jokic [2-9]
Tim Duncan [2-10]
Dwyane Wade [4-11]
Kobe Bryant [6-15]
Giannis Antetokounmpo [6-15]
Kevin Durant [7-15]
Kawhi Leonard [7-16]
Chris Paul [6-17]
Steve Nash [8-19]
Dirk Nowitzki [7-19]
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander [7-20]
Tracy McGrady [10-24]
Anthony Davis [12-23]
Luka Doncic [12-24]
James Harden [13-25]
Joel Embiid [11-23]
Manu Ginobili [17-24]
Draymond Green [18-26]
Dwight Howard [17-28]
Jayson Tatum [20-28]
Russell Westbrook [20-32]
I think these ranges can be said to be confidence intervals. Taylor never explicitly used that phrase or said whether it’s an 80% confidence interval or 90% confidence interval or whatever, but yeah, I think that’s what these ranges are.
These confidence intervals made me think back to this idea ladder from What’s Our Problem?.
The author of the book, Tim Urban, distinguishes what you think from how you think, and lays out each of these dimensions in that diagram. For the horizontal axis, we can use politics as an example where liberal is to the left and conservative is to the right. For the vertical axis of how you think, high is good (like a scientist) and low is bad (like a zealot).
Of course, these two dimensions don’t tell the whole story. We’re compressing things down and losing information when we plot a point on this 2D graph. But as the saying goes, all models are wrong, some are useful.
Anyway, I think it’d be cool to add a third dimension: confidence. Maybe you think James Harden is the 19th best player of the 21st century, and you arrived at that belief by taking the high rung approach of thinking like a scientist, but how confident are you in that belief? Are you 90% sure that he’s like the 18th to 20th best player, or is your 90% confidence interval much wider?
Maybe we can describe this third dimension in terms of width. Someone who is “wide left” leans to the left but has a wide confidence interval. I don’t love conceptualizing this with width though because there aren’t enough adjectives. How do you describe medium width? Medium wide? I dunno.
When briefly describing your beliefs you need to reduce things down to few dimensions and be concise, so I think we need to be careful about “what we add”. But still, I’m a huge fan of talking about how confident you are in what you believe. I think it’s pretty underutilized and wish people included their confidence when describing their beliefs more frequently. And that said, my confidence in that belief is probably medium-low.
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Well, single season peaks.
Yeah I think those experiences are pretty common. I was the same until I started going to some local bike meetups. I would see these intense looking bikers on their road bikes riding amongst fast, aggressive traffic and thought that’s what you need to do if you’re a biker, and that I just lacked the skills. I would stick to sidewalks and off-road paths.
Well, I guess in places without good bike infrastructure there’s a lot of truth to my assumptions actually. But the important thing to realize is that, although hard to find, some places do exist that are actually decent for those of us in group three.
LLMs as a limiter of social intercourse
Hm. I’m shouldn’t have said that
symboldoesn’t fit well into the post. I actually don’t understand it well enough to say that.I would be ok calling “boo” and “yay” beliefs in the context of this post. In some sort of strict sense I’d want to say that beliefs can only have the type of number (between 0 and 100 exclusive), but in a looser sense I think it’s probably fine to call things like “boo”, “yay”, true, false, null, etc all beliefs as well.
Edit: Perhaps these “boo” and “yay” beliefs you reference are the type of thing described in Professing and Cheering.
You have a typo where the second instance of
let belief = null;should presumably belet belief = undefined;.I somehow lost sight of the fact that undeclared variables aren’t seen as
undefined. I’ll try to update the post.(Also, I think “It’d print an error saying that
foobaris not defined” is false? Confirmed by going to the browser console and running that two-liner; it just printsundefinedto the console.)Hm. I get
Uncaught ReferenceError: foobar is not defined.Interesting mapping, otherwise!
Thanks!
Yeah, I lost sight of that somehow. Whoops.
It’s a little tough because in terms of how beliefs map to JavaScript types I think the mapping to undeclared makes more sense, but describing the nuance of how an undeclared variable differs from an
undefinedone in JavaScript feels a little excessive for this post.But I also don’t like having something in the post that is so blatantly wrong. I’ll try to come up with something and edit the post.
Beliefs and JavaScript types
Related: this video shows an example of a bike lane that just randomly ends. It’s main point is that the city should put up signs to warn you that it will end so you don’t head down it if you don’t want to, but I think that it also kinda illustrates the idea that as an “unfinished bridge”, it doesn’t really provide much value (it probably provides negative value).
That’s great to hear!
One thing I’ve heard is that for crispy outsides, after parcooking you want to shake ’em up aggressively so that there’s a pasty substance on the outside like in this image. It provides more surface area for browning.
This post from Serious Eats has some other tips that you might be interested in.