Adam Zerner
My understanding is that toothpicks are for scraping the area in between teeth, not the surface of the tooth itself.
There are some contexts where you get to sidestep this, which is nice.
Business-facing software comes to mind. I’m building a B2B app right now and am not optimizing much for mobile since my users will be using it on desktops at work. And in my day job we’re building internal tools that also are only used on desktop while people are at work.
Data-intensive apps too, I think you can often just decide that it’s not intended for mobile users because the screen is too small for a good user experience. I sorta did that with Premium Poker Tools, an app that allows poker players to run various simulations.
I kinda feel like a lot of random commercial things are better than residential things:
Napkin dispensers at restaurants vs at home. I like how at restaurants you pull and only one comes out. At home it takes a bit of fine motor skill to pluck just one napkin from a bunch of stacked napkins.
Toilet paper holders in public have a serrated edge that makes it easy to tear.
Soap dispensers in public bathrooms and showers are attached to the wall. I like how that saves counter space.
I wonder why there’s this difference. I suspect people would find the commercial approaches at home to feel “too utilitarian” and “not homey”.
That’s a good call out about acidic food. I remember hearing that too and so don’t brush after eating something pretty acidic. Also because my teeth are sensitive to acid and it hurts when I brush after eating something pretty acidic.
For the general case, this excerpt from the article sounded like it was indicating that you should brush after eating.
We’ve all heard that it’s best to brush our teeth after meals. But in some cases, did you know it is best to hold off brushing, at least temporarily?
So one in every 10,000 people gets hit by a car while walking every year.
Hm. 1 in 10k. I’m trying to think about how that squares with my expectation that “actual” is much less “intuition”.
I’ll pretty roughly approximate the number of “close calls” my intuition expects a person to encounter as something like 5-10 a year. Let’s say 5. And I’ll also guesstimate that for a given “close call”, there’s a 9⁄10 chance either you jump out of the way or the driver swerves out of the way, so only a 1⁄10 chance you actually get killed.
That’d mean that in a given year there’s a
1 - (0.9)^5 ~ 0.41probability of a given person dying, so 4,100 in every 10,000 rather than 1 in every 10,000.I feel like I might be missing or misunderstanding something though.
I remember a hygienist at the dentist once telling me that toothpaste isn’t a huge deal and that it’s the mechanical friction of the toothbrush that provides most of the value. Since being told that, after a meal, I often wet my toothbrush with water and brush for 10 seconds or so.
I just researched it some more and from what I understand, after eating, food debris that remains on your teeth forms a sort of biofilm. Once the biofilm is formed you need those traditional 2 minute long tooth brushing sessions to break it down and remove it. But it takes 30+ minutes to form the biofilm. Before it is formed you don’t need long brushing sessions to significantly reduce the amount of debris that is left on your teeth. So then, these short informal brushing sessions after meals seem like a great “bang for your buck” in terms of reward vs effort.
I wonder how widely agreed upon the whole “avoid unnecessarily political examples” in the “politics is the mindkiller” sense is. I was just reading Varieties Of Argumentative Examples by Scott Alexander. The examples seem maximally political:
“I can’t believe it’s 2018 and we’re still letting transphobes on this forum.”
“Just another purple-haired SJW snowflake who thinks all disagreement is oppression.”
“Really, do conservatives have any consistent beliefs other than hating black people and wanting the poor to starve?”
“I see we’ve got a Silicon Valley techbro STEMlord autist here.”
My memory is fuzzy, but it’s telling me something like:
Scott Alexander uses tons of political examples.
People on LessWrong lean pretty strongly towards avoiding them.
Robin Hanson uses them sometimes but tries to avoid them.
Jacob Falkovich seems to not lean into it as much as Scott Alexander, but is somewhere in the vicinity.
Something kinda scary happened a few days ago. I was walking my dog and was trying to cross at an intersection. There’s a stoplight which was red, and a cross walk which was on “walk”. But this car was approaching the crosswalk really quickly. You could hear the motor rev and the driver was accelerating.
I didn’t enter the crosswalk. I put my hand up to catch his attention. He came to a quick stop. I gave a shrug like “what are you doing”. He gave a similar shrug back. Then after I crossed, he floored it right through the stop light that was still red, only to come to a stop light one block away that was also red.
It wasn’t actually a close call. I looked before entering the crosswalk and wasn’t at risk of getting hit. But I feel like it was a close call in a different sense.
I’m a very careful street crosser, but even I fail to look both ways sometimes when the crosswalk signal is on “walk”, especially when visibility is poor. If there’s a parked car or something that is blocking my view of oncoming traffic, sometimes I just go. What if this were one of those situations?
And furthermore, I’ve had a ton of similar encounters where a car seemingly would have hit and killed me if I weren’t paying attention. I think it was a few weeks ago when I was walking on the sidewalk and a car jolted out of a parking garage without looking for pedestrians. If I had continued into the car’s path—an easy mistake to make—I seemingly would have been ran over and killed.
But I don’t think this logic actually adds up normality. The logic implies that vastly more people will get run over and killed than we actually observe. Given the number of close calls I’ve had in my life, it implies that I should probably be dead. And given how much safer and more cautious I am than other people, it implies that many of them would also be dead.
So then, I don’t think these “close calls” are actually all that close. I’m just not sure why.
I came across this today. Pretty cool.
“If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and five minutes finding the solution.” ~Einstein, maybe
I just learned about the difference between fundamental and technical analysis in stock trading. It seems like a very useful metaphor to apply to other areas.
My thoughts here are very fuzzy though. It seems pretty similar to inside vs outside view.
Does anyone have thoughts here? What is the essence of the difference between fundamental and technical analysis? How similar is it to inside vs outside view? Whether or not you’re modeling the thing itself (fundamental) or things “outside” the thing itself (technical)? Maybe it makes sense to think about causal graphs and how many edges there are in your graph? How much overlap is there with inside vs outside view? Where is it helpful to use fundamental vs technical analysis as an analogy?
But on its face, I think minimalism is not what would make most people happy because they derive some pleasure from stuff, including stuff they only use rarely.
I don’t disagree with that people derive some pleasure from stuff, including stuff they use only rarely. Part of my position is that the magnitude of pleasure here is relatively low. I’m not sure whether or not you agree with that. It’s also hard to operationalize.
But the more central part of my position is that since housing is expensive, you have to pay a relatively high price to have enough room for this sort of stuff, and the amount of pleasure it generates is a good amount lower than this price. Do you disagree with that?
That all makes sense. Work productivity and trivial inconveniences are important. At first I was thinking that 20-30 minutes to set up a work area is comparable to a commute and not too big a deal, but then I remembered that a) commutes suck and b) the raw number of minutes is only part of the story.
Kitchen space is the most important thing for me in terms of wanting space. I get a little overwhelmed when I’m cooking and things are tight. But this can be mitigated by focusing on a) meals that don’t require as much space and b) when I do want to cook a meal that requires more space, just take my time and go slow.
A few years out of college I ended up living in a 200 square foot micro-apartment. And my girlfriend lived with me there part-time. There were definitely things about it that aren’t ideal, but ultimately it was pretty tolerable.
I think a big reason why I don’t mind smaller spaces too much is because I don’t mind utilizing space outside of my apartment: communal areas in the apartment complex, coffee shops, libraries, parks. Not everyone’s like that though. Some people kinda need the privacy and comfort of home to relax.
That’s all cool to hear!
But I got used to that once it really sank in that unless I’m really in the middle of nowhere, I can get almost anything I actually need almost immediately, and almost anything else within a few days.
Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. A similar thought has occurred to me. I used to drive from Vegas to Mexico with my girlfriend for dental work. I remember passing through areas that felt incredibly remote, but even the most remote areas were never really more than an hour or so away from a Walmart or something. I think it’d take some actual effort to find a place that is truly remote.
The mental overhead was a big deal for me. For example, I’d wanted to get a new job for quite a few years, but felt weighed down like I had no time or energy to look; once we hit the road I was able to actually spend time and thought on this, and got a new job within a few months.
I’m glad to hear it! I’m in the same ballpark. I wonder how common this sort of thing is.
I feel like it’s something that many people should at least experiment with though. I suspect that a lot of people would predict the mental overhead to be a big deal but after trying they’d find that it was actually a big deal. I also suspect that this mental overhead affects people in ways that are hard to notice. Like maybe it leads to procrastination or something.
I will say that there is a lot of value in having dedicated spaces for specific activities that you actually do often, rather than having to constantly convert a multi-use space into different modes. That adds up in the same way having a commute adds up, vs working from home.
I’m not sure what I think about the value of spaciousness. I’d love to hear about any specific examples you have in mind.
Having less stuff also means being able to spend more per item where it matters to you, in order to get higher quality.
Ah yeah, that’s a good point!
My main concern with heavy LLM usage is what Paul Graham discusses in Writes and Write-Nots. His argument is basically that writing is thinking and that if you use LLM’s to do your writing for you, well, your ability to think will erode.
I’m similar, for both smart phones and LLM usage.
For smart phones there was one argument that moved me a moderate amount. I’m a web developer and startup founder. I was talking to my cousin’s boyfriend who is also in tech. He made the argument to me that if I don’t actively use smart phones I won’t be able to empathize as much with smart phone users, which is important because to a meaningful extent, that’s who I’m building for.
I didn’t think the empathy point was as strong as my cousin’s boyfriend thought it was. Like, he seemed to think it was pretty essential and that if I don’t use smart phones I just wouldn’t be able to develop enough empathy to build a good product. I, on the other hand, saw it as something “useful” but not “essential”. Looking back, I think I’d downgrade it to something like “a little useful” instead of “useful”.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, exactly. Just kinda reflecting and thinking out loud.
Suppose that you are having a disagreement with someone and you are frustrated and angry with them. It seems likely that this frustration would meaningfully harm your ability to reason well.
If so, similar to what we do in response to cognitive biases, it seems appropriate to make some adjustments. For example, given susceptibility to the planning fallacy, supposing we originally assume it’ll take 20 minutes to get to the airport, we might adjust this towards a more pessimistic estimate of 45 minutes. I would think that it’d make sense to do something similar in response to noticing a feeling of frustration in yourself during a disagreement with someone.
I’ve seen surprisingly little discussion of this idea.
This is such a good post. From The Scout Mindset (emphasis mine):
My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.
Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn’t automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that’s since been corroborated by researchers, as we’ll see in this book: our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.
If judgement is mostly limited by mindset rather than knowledge, then it is important to find ways to improve your mindset. There are slower but more persistent ways of improving your mindset, and there are quicker but temporary “boosts” that you can utilize. I think The Ritual speaks to one of these “boosts”.
But reciting meta-mnemonics and staring and blank walls is only one way that you might give yourself such a boost. I think it is worthwhile and important to think about others.
Yesterday I took a 50 mile bike ride and noticed myself feeling like I’m in a much better state to change my mind about something important. I felt like it gave me a boost. Perhaps long distance cardio really does provide such a boost, especially when done in nature.
That’s an excellent thought experiment!
Piggybacking off of it, suppose the man is struggling in life and otherwise doesn’t get any exercise. Suppose that Sunday morning digging really improves his health and quality of life a lot. Is the activity justified?
How about if he’s depressed? What if he isn’t digging by himself but is instead digging with a tight nit community of other gold believers? The digging provides him with feelings of warmth and connection that make life worth living. Is it justified then?
Where I’m coming from is that, supposing we view truth as an end in-and-of-itself, I want to question how much weight we give to truth relative to other ends we are interested in. I think that regardless of whether you are a consequentialist or virtue ethicist or deontologist or whatever, non-naive versions of these philosophies will weigh different considerations against one another.[1]
And so I don’t think OP’s position here indicates that he assigns a low value to truth. I moreso suspect that he is weighing truth against other important considerations and feels that the calculus comes out in favor of sacrificing some truth in favor of other important things.
- ^
Thanks to Gordon for helping me understand this in this dialogue!
- ^
My thesis is that most people, including the overwhelmingly atheist and non-religious rationalist crowd, would be better off if they actively participated in an organized religion.
My argument is roughly that religions uniquely provide a source of meaning, community, and life guidance not available elsewhere, and to the extent anything that doesn’t consider itself a religion provides these, it’s because it’s imitating the package of things that makes something a religion.
I would have liked to see the post focus more on the second paragraph. I feel like the post very minimally focused on it and instead, the majority of the post was on related topics like which religion one should choose.
Excellent facilitation Gretta. There are so many times when I was confused and then you asked Eliezer to clarify the thing I was confused about. I’m writing this after encountering the following, but there were others: