Geoffrey Wood

• Geoffrey Wood 21 Oct 2024 18:16 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Geoffrey Wood’s comment on: Cipolla’s Shortform

  Oh and do at least three past exams for each class. Best to practice in the conditions you will be performing in.

• Geoffrey Wood 21 Oct 2024 17:47 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Cipolla’s comment on: Cipolla’s Shortform

  Long term performance is a result of many skills /​ memes working together. I suspect you may have noticed that the children of white collar workers are more prepared for white collar work. It would make sense that they have inherited a set of memes that help with white collar work.

  Academic performance isn’t the only thing, consider your fail conditions. There’s lots of things out there to be good at.

  If you’d still like to keep going, I would say just keep practicing, I reckon it’s taken me about four years to get good at my job. Look at what works and what doesn’t for you.

  I found that tracking my time helped with focusing on one thing at a time, having a prioritized to do list helped me focus on the right thing, having a study group helped make learning fun, easy and consistent. Trying to fit all the knowledge I needed for a class on a single a4 sheet helped me memorize what I needed (something about the refining process).

  Otherwise get good sleep, lay off the substances, get some exercise in the sun and time with friends and family and you will be right as rain.

• Geoffrey Wood 15 Sep 2024 22:45 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: I’m con­sis­tently over­whelmed by ba­sic obli­ga­tions. Are there any paradigm shifts or other ra­tio­nal­ity-based tips that would be helpful?

  Maintenance—the process of preserving a condition or situation or the state of being preserved.

  I call these things you refer to “Maintenance jobs”

  I think that the answer you are looking for is in the definition of maintenance

  • They are a trade-off for the things you enjoy

  ∴ you must do them to enjoy the things they generate

  OR

  ∴ you don’t have to accept the trade-off if you don’t enjoy the result as much as you hate the maintenance.

  In other words:

  Life has a cost, and you must pay it.

  Nobody said you had to enjoy paying it.

  There’s joy to be had in projects to reduce maintenance jobs

  I quite love finding ways to reduce my maintenance burden, for example:

  • Washing machine (look up the unholy task on manually washing your clothing, then worship your washing machine)

  • Dishwashers (I calculated a ~4000% ROI per year)

  • Clothes Dryers (much lower ROI, still positive depends on your time value)

  • Robot vacuum cleaner plus no carpet (very little time spent vacuuming)

  • Learning to cook efficiently (Could write a book, but consider time spent vs happiness vs $ cost)

    • Egg, spinach and cheese pie (bought pastry sheets) (10 − 15 minutes prep = lunch for four days)

    • Rice cooker rice plus chicken tenders plus frozen veggies plus sauce (10 minute dinner)

    • Rice medley − 1 cup brown rice + 0.5 cups lentils simmer for 40 minutes add a can of beans, mix, portion, add grated cheese, sriracha and soy sauce. Heat in the microwave—yum snack.

    • Honestly baking cakes and cookies is easy as

  • Replace your lawn with whatever you can get away with (I’m re-wilding honest)

  • Design your garden for low maintenance wherever you can

  • Live closer to work

  • Biking is the most cost-efficient transport method (I hear cars may be needed in America)

  • Replace hard to maintain things with easy to maintain things

    • I will not buy a shirt i have to iron

    • I will not buy kitchen things I cannot dishwash (except cast iron pans, worth in that case)

  • I believe the FIRE movement had a bunch to say on jobs, minimalism has some good points, permaculture has some great ideas (kinda process optimisation for non-engineers)

  Have fun finding better ways to beat back the menace of entropy!

• Geoffrey Wood 24 Sep 2023 20:53 UTC

  1 point

  −1

  on: Would You Work Harder In The Least Con­ve­nient Pos­si­ble World?

  I couldn’t read this straight. Alice is being an absolute asshole to Bob. This is incredibly off-putting.

  I think you could have communicated better if you had tried to make Alice remotely human.

  I think I get what you are trying to do with this, but I only got it after reading comments.

• Geoffrey Wood 23 Jun 2023 4:22 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Neil ’s comment on: “Nat­u­ral is bet­ter” is a valuable heuristic

  Okay, I think I see your point. Could I summarise your heuristic as “Don’t tear down Chesterton’s fence until you are absolutely sure you know why it was there”?

  A defence of “tradition” rather than of “nature”?

• Geoffrey Wood 23 Jun 2023 4:15 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: “Nat­u­ral is bet­ter” is a valuable heuristic

  You are quite right. I was thinking of the behaviour of humans while food is scarce and the human permanently hungry, not in the modern context.

• Geoffrey Wood 21 Jun 2023 23:58 UTC

  2 points

  5

  on: “Nat­u­ral is bet­ter” is a valuable heuristic

  “natural is better”

  I disagree with your proposed heuristic for two reasons,

  1. I think it is to poorly defined to be a good decision-making guide (Heuristic)

  2. By my definition I think it would guide you to worse decisions not better

  To poorly defined:

  Natural—existing in or derived from nature; not made or caused by humankind

  Better—more desirable, satisfactory, or effective

  There are two issues in definition, the first, more minor, issue is in “Natural”.

  It’s far too broad, for example where does the line stop for an herbal remedy? At the wild herb, the cultivated variety, a dried leaf, an extract or tea from the leaves or a pill manufactured from the identified active ingredient?

  The second more serious issue is in “Better”. Better requires a direction, the question must be asked better for who or what? In your wooden stick verses plastic object example, its true a wooden stick is better at decomposing in a woodland. However, if we didn’t want it to decompose, for example if it were a fencepost we were talking about a plastic version would be preferable (all other factors being equal).

  Actually, a bad heuristic:

  My understanding of what you meant by your heuristic would be

  “The closer your choice matches what would be found or happen with the minimum of human intervention the better for your health /​ wealth”.

  There are no criteria given for when to apply this heuristic, making it a poor heuristic, however using your own examples and applying the above heuristic to all of them:

  Media consumption – avoid anything not mouth to mouth – Result: Happy and ignorant 😊

  Fuel choice – Use wood or animal power not nuclear – Result: significantly more poverty, health issues and animal cruelty

  No GMOs – Only eat the non-bred ancestral variety of plants /​ animals (Aegilops tauschii, Bos primigenius) – Result: Very very expensive food.

  No pesticides – Result: Very expensive food

  No artificial fertilizers – Result: Very expensive food

  Weapon choice – Clubs and slings only – Result: killed immediately by non-complying competitors, great tv.

  Technology use – No computers /​ cars /​ internet or anything dependant on that etc – Result: Ostracism and eventual starvation.

  Food consumption – eat as much as you can as often as you can – Result: Obesity

  Type of foods to eat – Pottage only (ideally with self-caught wild game, many wild herbs gathered and grain you grew organically) – Boredom, Poverty, good health 😊

• Geoffrey Wood 12 Jan 2023 22:12 UTC

  0 points

  1

  in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: In­fo­haz­ards vs Fork Hazards

  Thinking about it more, I suppose I don’t know, perhaps they were perfectly happy.

  However, in my experience, when you set out to find a thing and fail to find it that often leads to dissatisfaction. My expectation /​ rule of thumb for this is “People don’t often hunt for things they don’t want for some reason”.

• Geoffrey Wood 11 Jan 2023 2:35 UTC

  0 points

  −1

  in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: In­fo­haz­ards vs Fork Hazards

  It certainly was infohazardous to the people who funded the expeditions and got poor return for their investment.

  I would consider the hazard to be to the agent not to society, though I can certainly imagine information that hurts an individual, but benefits somebody else.

• Geoffrey Wood 6 Jun 2022 22:19 UTC

  2 points

  on: Mak­ing sta­ble, free na­tions as a hobby

  Fellow Rimworld enjoyer here, thoroughly enjoyed your well thought out idea :)

• Geoffrey Wood 26 Jul 2021 20:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: My Mar­riage Vows

  I agree that marriage is an unwritten contract, I mean you literally sign something as part of the ceremony that legally binds you in the eyes of the government after making serious promises in front of everyone you care about. In some ways this contract is already agreed to well before the wedding, during the period you are dating, living together and sorting out what each other thinks about things.

  Nevertheless due to my more pessimistic view of human agency, I wouldn’t write it up, instead relying on constant good communication about each others feelings on things. (Not implying that this is a perfect recipe or that people should be blamed for being bad communicators if a relationship fails, sometimes there truly are irreconcilable differences).

  I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days and I feel that the need to get it all nailed down in this manner could perhaps be coming from a place of insecurity? It might be an idea to address this separately? Id like to say that anyone who could write vows like the ones above with their partner is probably in an excellent place in their relationship.

  In your other responses i saw that you are the primary breadwinner and that your beloved is at least partially dependent on you. This situation is similar to one of my friends and i don’t think they have been handling it well, I think he doesn’t realise the extent of the power imbalance this causes. His weakly held opinions have more impact on his wife than he realises and I think that her relative lack of ability to argue with him has caused them to make some poor decisions in the past. I know this is slightly off topic un-solicited advice, but It might be helpful to you to realise (on the off chance that you hadn’t already thought about it in this way).

  I wish you and your fiancé the best in your life together :)

• Geoffrey Wood 21 Jul 2021 22:51 UTC

  5 points

  on: My Mar­riage Vows

  “We decided to take marriage vows very seriously”, I this this is good, however I think you are making a basic error in what this should mean you have in your vows. I think you are trying to write a specific contract, or a set of programming instructions.

  We, as in humans, are poorly defined, barely conscious, irrational, lumps of meat. We are not aware of our own utility functions let alone those of others, especially as they change over time and chaotically in the course of a day. We are unable to follow a precise recipe like the one you have outlined.

  I think the only thing you can communicate with your vows is the spirit of your words not their contractual meaning. That’s why you often hear in others vows poorly defined meaningless things like “I feel you and I were destined to be together” or “I love you with all of my heart”. The words are not the point, nobody remembers them anyway.

  I also took my vows seriously, i simply tried to be a bit more concrete that the average set of vows.

  I went with:

  I vow to mow the lawns, vacuum the floor, clean the bathroom and if the mood strikes, do the dishes
  I vow to always do my best to keep you happy, healthy in mind and body and well pampered
  I vow to cook for you all sorts of delectable, interesting and marginally sub-lethal dishes
  I vow to be there for you when you need me, and far away when you don’t
  I vow to always attempt to improve myself and help you grow in any direction you so desire
  I vow to always give you something to laugh about, a reason to smile
  I vow to think
  I vow to help
  I vow to listen
  I vow to love you for the rest of your life

• Geoffrey Wood 30 Nov 2020 1:19 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ur­gent & im­por­tant: How (not) to do your to-do list

  This article changed my life, made doing tasks much much easier, I made a spreadsheet for it.

  My algorithm is:

  • Write task description

  • Decide if I “Must”, “Should or “Could” do it

  • Decide if I should do it “Today” or “Later”

  • Assign how long it might take me (optional)

  • Use my spreadsheet to sort by rank

  • Do tasks from top to bottom

  • When a Task is complete, replace “Must”, “Should or “Could” with “Done”

  To do list

  I hope it serves you well.

• Geoffrey Wood 30 Nov 2020 1:13 UTC

  1 point

  on: Fi­nal Ver­sion Perfected: An Un­derused Ex­e­cu­tion Algorithm

  While I absolutely agree that an unsorted to-do list is a minefield, I intuitively feel that FVP is a more-wrong approach to To-Do lists. I also feel that it might work for very small, short term lists but would struggle to scale.

  Tasks are extremely varied things and so not always easily comparable, for example when comparing the task “Buy milk” and “Finish term Paper”, the term paper is probably more important in the longer term, but in the short term you wont have any milk for your breakfast. Unless extremely time crunched, breakfast comes first.

  *Edit—After some reflection I think the main disadvantage of FVP is when you have to put in the decision making effort. You have to make a decision just before you do the task. Better to rank an issue as you write them on the list, that way you can separate the effort of doing the task from the effort of writing it on your to do list, see below for my favoured solution.

  I use and love this, Urgent & important: How (not) to do your to-do list—LessWrong.

  My algorithm is:

  • Write task description

  • Decide if I “Must”, “Should or “Could” do it

  • Decide if I should do it “Today” or “Later”

  • Assign how long it might take me (optional)

  • Use my spreadsheet to sort by rank (right click A column and sort A-Z)

  • Do tasks from top to bottom

  • When a Task is complete, replace “Must”, “Should or “Could” with “Done”

  Here is my spreadsheet, I hope it serves you well.

  To do list

  I would love to receive feedback.