One option would be to make a new account and not publicly acknowledge it’s a successor to this one, if you’re okay with everything that entails. I’ve done it before (to change my username) and the reset to zero karma and loss of my precious posting history really didn’t affect me at all.
jamesf
This is an awful lot of words for talking about something that I don’t get to play with yet.
I’m skeptical of the implicit dichotomy between a successful career and a meaningful life (especially for academics!). I may very well just think that because I’m also from the US. As for my n=1, I live in New York and get to enjoy the rationalist and tech communities here and generally don’t interact with any other demographic.
[the US] isn’t that far away from a survival-traditional oriented society
America contains multitudes; by living in the right place and exposing yourself to the right information, you don’t really have to be aware of all the people who determined its World Values Survey results. (I suspect this is also true in Brazil...)
the fact [New Zealand] is in the freaking middle of nowhere is very discouraging.
Why? You haven’t expressed that living somewhere with high population density or lots of popular nearby attractions is important to you.
Finally, note that you could remove “rationally” from the title and exactly the same meaning would be conveyed, since we’re on a blog about rationality.
The market provides a continuous and generally valid test of engineering principles. I think it’s more scientific than peer review, in the most meaningful sense of the word “science”.
I’m not sure. If you’re comfortable sharing your data, PM me a link to the contents of your /data folder.
It’s an H2 database saved inside /data in your Familiar directory. You can make SQL queries into it with other programs. Exporting to JSON or CSV or something will happen eventually.
Two, technically, I suppose, but I’d probably collect data for a couple of months before I started seriously interpreting correlations involving variables with a resolution of one day. This will be a topic in the more extended documentation.
There is, though it’s not implemented as a neat API function (yet), so if you’re using the official release from when this was first posted you can’t do it. It looks like this:
(update variable (where {:name "cats"}) (set-fields {:unit "encountered" :fn "non-negative?"}))
This will break preexisting data if the prior validator wasn’t a strict subset of the new validator. Converting variables into a new representation sanely and easily is something I plan to add in.
You want
(change-time (days -1))
if the active time is on the wrong day. The active time being wrong but on the correct day doesn’t matter yet since only day-resolution variables are supported. A time zone setting will be added along with variables of arbitrary time resolution.
For percentage variables, use
(num-interval 0 100)
as the validator for a variable. (I will add “percent” as a built-in validator.)
Besides the built-in documentation for all the API functions, the readme on GitHub is the most comprehensive existing documentation. Of course I intend to fix that eventually, probably along with the next release which is going to be the one where there is a GUI.
Thank you for all your feedback!
At the end of the day, go through the things you did. What did you do and why? How did you feel while you did it? Doing it in writing can be helpful (this is what journaling is). Or even get scientific and quantify things so you can analyze your data later!
cough this software I write for that last thing cough
She had cardiac arrest and they cooled her down to prevent organ damage. Now that I research it more, probably not enough to completely stop brain activity, though that was the premise of the question and they seemed to understand that part.
A few days ago I was talking with two people who had “experienced” total brain inactivity for some period of time before (one for a few days on ice!). I tried asking what they thought about the discontinuous experience/identity and associated philosophical issues that e.g. cryonics or other forms of not-being-alive for a while entails, but I couldn’t get them to interpret the question as anything besides “what do you think of the personality changes that might happen from such an event?”.
I found this miscommunication highly informative.
The description starts at “Section 4.2. Tube” on page 24.
That would be a good component of an answer to “what have you been doing for the last seven years?”, yes.
The competitive Magic scene may not be your best bet. If it looks like you’re not going to make a name for yourself in it, but that’s what it would take for you enjoy it, you might be much better off playing with local amateurs and trying to focus on that world instead. Also, it’s probably a better way to make friends. I’ve never stood a chance at playing competitive Team Fortress 2, but finding a public server and carrying the team every now and then is still very fun for me; I pretend pros don’t exist and temporarily relish in my superiority over 23 randoms.
I don’t have much concrete advice as far as finding a job goes, since there a lot of relevant details that you haven’t and possibly shouldn’t share, but I’ll at least suggest that doing whatever you can to overcome your ugh field around job searching would be extremely valuable in the long run. If you have a large gap in your resume (which sounds like it might be the case), find something you can do that puts an end to it, and can also plausibly retroactively fill in some of the gap. Freelancing of some sort comes to mind.
Rutgers is a better university than mine. Studying engineering in the honors program I still felt very alone. I’m glad it (sounds like?) you felt like you fit in there somewhat. Still, it’s very possible to underestimate the size of the minimum-sized pond you’ll be able to flourish in. “Lonely at the top” and all that.
Anecdote time!
I had the high school resume to get into highly selective universities. For financial reasons, I instead went to my flagship state university. I expected the big fish in small pond effect to play to my advantage, and I did develop a reputation as “(one of) the smartest student(s) in the room” (which I’ll at least admit was a boon to my romantic desirability), but the most salient result was extreme loneliness. I wasn’t able to find many people I could have stimulating conversation with, and while I did make a few friends, none of them shared my degree of passion for intellectual subjects. This summer I’ve been at Hacker School, which I think is a correctly-sized pond for me, but the damage to my mood and social expectations from three years of being stuck in too small a pond has definitely impeded my ability to make friends and feel socially engaged. As of right now I’m attempting to find a job as a software developer so I can drop out of college in relative security, because college is that intolerable and I think I have a much better chance of finding more correctly-sized ponds on this path. (Transferring to a more selective university is still not a financial burden I’m willing to accept.)
I guess the takeaway here might be: while a small pond of the right size can have its advantages, larger ponds are much more likely to help you grow more, and ponds that are too small can be absolutely crushing. If finding a smaller pond consists of moving away from your current large pond, be extremely careful that it’s not too small.
I plan on addressing false positives with a combination of sanity-checking/care-checking (“no, drinking tea probably doesn’t force me to sleep for exactly 6.5 hours the following night” or “so what if reading non-fiction makes me ravenous for spaghetti?”), and suggesting highest-information-content experimentation when neither of those applies (hopefully one would collect more data to test a hypothesis rather than immediately accept the program’s output in most cases). In this specific case, the raw conversation and bodily state data would probably not be nodes in the larger model—only the inferred “thing that really matters”, social life, would. Having constant feedback from the “expert”, who can choose which raw or derived variables to include in the model and which correlations don’t actually matter, seems to change the false positive problem.
Or, I mean, just use Facebook and other social media activity to identify the formation, strengthening, and slow or abrupt end of friendships and relationships. Many of us do basically already live in that world.
Hacker School is totally free (with living expenses paid if you’re a woman). I believe five rationalists including myself have done it. Unlike most bootcamps it has basically no official structure—you and all the other hackers/aspiring hackers think of cool stuff to do and then do it. They will help you become a better programmer and find a job. The community is great.