I purchased zinc lozenges, high dose Vitamin C, and HCQ many months ago. I am trying to decide for action now, or as a pre-commit for later, on what is most appropriate to take.
knite
Karma: 201
For shopping, the internet exists!
I’ve loved Wirecutter’s reviews for many years, but have occasionally been disappointed by their recommendations. It’s hard to say whether their quality has actually gone down or if the success/miss ratio is constant.
Examples:
External hard drive (pre-2016): no mention whatsoever of RPM, which is widely regarded as critical information when choosing a non-SSD hard drive. They didn’t even include a blurb saying that RPM doesn’t matter.
Bath towels (2019): Pasting my own comment: “I ordered a set of Frontgate towels based on this recommendation. After fewer than five washes (cold normal cycle with standard detergent, line dry), the towels aren’t plush at all. The towels arrived feeling luxurious and spa-like, but after only a few uses they feel drab and normal.” They updated their towel recommendations a week ago and Frontgate remains their top choice. I feel like I wasted several hundred dollars on an extensive set of pretty average towels. If I’m washing them wrong, it would have been nice for them to reply and update their care instructions.
Broom (2020): It’s...fine. Maybe my expectations were set too high, but I thought it would be the Best Broom, not just a broom.
I think pointing at anything you want better conveys the nature of L4. You could describe L0 as “I don’t point”.
Thank you, Zvi, I’ve really enjoyed your simulacra posts and found them to be very insightful. As I read this post, I came up with my own formulation of the levels that feels useful:
L1: I point at something.
L2: I point at you.
L3: I point at myself.
L4: I point wherever I want.
“Overall, Chesterton’s Fence needs context.”
This is literally the point of Chesterton’s Fence.
My real answer to what went wrong is that our civilization is profoundly inadequate. We have lost our ability to do things.
Civilization is made of people, and people aren’t wired for scale. We haven’t lost our ability to do things, we never had it. We have only ever done things at scale by accident, or for short periods of time (mostly wars and the Space Race).
When you live in a village of ~100 people, either you figure out norms for drought/famine/disease/etc quickly, or >90% of your community dies and the rest scatter.
In major cities, it’s fundamentally an issue of everyone-for-themselves. You walk down the street and see a bunch of strangers. You may wish they were wearing masks, but there’s no social norm. The norms are enforced at shops, waiting in line, entering with reduced capacity, wearing a mask (or not) in both cases.
If not enough people care on average, your friendly neighborhood megalopolis is doomed.
If the market regularly reacts to public statements of inefficiency (“stocks systematically rise on the third Thursday of each month but only under a waxing moon”) by eliminating it, then this is *refutation* of the efficient market hypothesis.
Inefficiencies are priced in when they are: obvious, easy, and safe,. A non-obvious inefficiency is a true hidden edge. A non-easy inefficiency has a high barrier (capital, technical, physical, etc) to entry. A non-safe inefficiency has a high social barrier to entry.
Because names have power, I dub this the Passive Market Hypothesis.
Great review! Have you taken a look at Gwent? It’s currently scratching the Hearthstone itch for me.
For syncing dotfiles and config generally: https://github.com/lra/mackup
For managing programming languages: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf
You may be undervaluing, or at least under-emphasizing, the idea of strategically ejecting from a maze. If your LinkedIn profile is accurate, you currently make a living as a trader. Your ability to execute on that is likely heavily influenced by your time in (firm’s) maze, both in terms of knowledge capital and financial capital you extracted from the maze.
It is plausible that spending a few years in a maze is +EV for a relevant fraction of people, and that “know what you’re signing up for and plan your exit strategy from day 0” is better advice than “avoid at all costs”.
Significant Digits, the unofficial sequel to HPMOR. A certain section (alas, I don’t recall which) singlehandedly leveled me up as human being.
The text immediately and irrevocably rewired my brain, to the degree that I stopped reading and thought to myself, “I don’t know the full consequences yet, but whatever just happened in my head is staggeringly important to my personal development.” I was right.
I’ve been trying to succinctly describe my insight for about three years. The best I have so far is this: people are the person who arrived at a moment, not the person in the moment. For the more mathematically inclined, individuals are the integral of their experiences, not the sum.
In practice, it was like suddenly developing empathy and a theory of mind in the span of 60 seconds. While reading fan fiction of fan faction.
What are your thoughts on *re-labeling* the voting UI so that it’s more clear to voters what the site norms are for the meaning of up- and downvotes?
Have you seen https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/best-in-show-whats-the-top-data-dog/ ?