https://meet.jit.si/viennarationality
The password is “schmachtenberger”
Sorry for the very late info, the organizer only just posted it (Viliam had asked a couple times without a reply)
moses
Karma: 277
I’m not clear on one thing: managers participate in mazes, I presume, because the higher positions pay much better.
But why do corporations pay higher positions much better in the first place? Why do they incentivize the maze like that? Surely they would rather have their managers focus on doing their job than on clawing their way up.
Sure, if the higher positions were paid exactly as much as the lower ones, nobody would want to take them (more responsibility for the same money), but in a maze on the other hand, they’re paid so much better that managers will sacrifice their firstborns to get to them.
Wouldn’t the corporation want to set some kind of a middle road between these two extremes? Where managers are mostly focusing on their job and are indifferent between staying where they are and taking up more responsibility?
I don’t think it has to be value on Earth; economic reasons to go to space can also mean creating value in space.
True, but what I’m arguing against here is the point of the post:
there may not be good economic reasons to go to space; therefore space colonisation would be driven by non-economic reasons
I’m arguing that there are good economic reasons to go to space. (There are also good economic reasons to build things that we’re not building here on Earth, but that’s tangential to the discussion.)
Bridges might not be the most valuable thing you can build with your resources right now, but that’s different than just letting the resources go unused
Why would we ever want to stop growing our economy and accomodating ever more people? We have always expanded and organized matter into valuable forms, why would we forever settle for the matter and energy available to us on Earth? We can create so much value with even just the matter inside the Moon or Mercury, let alone Jupiter or the Sun. Why would we pass up on it?
lots of the remote learning stuff does suffer from predicting 2019 instead of 2020
I wouldn’t call it a successful prediction anyway—he predicts this to be the normal state of affairs, whereas the current situation is a temporary reaction to extraordinary circumstances
Wow, I haven’t read the book so this was the first time encountering the predictions. They were… surprisingly bad, given it’s just 20 years. Even adjusting for the fact that predictions tend to be ridiculous in general, this really exceeded all expectations
Iirc this article on climate change made me update notably in the direction of climate change being serious and something worth paying attention to.
Definitely not the first piece of content on climate change I consumed, but maybe first that had a significantly over-the-top alarmist tone to shake me up?
I’m halfway through, so far it’s good, I’m glad I picked it up.
First half is about his general vision of transforming politics/governance from current industrial-era party politics to post-industrial, the main point being about the relationship between government and citizen. Currently there is pervasive individualism: you get a welfare check, but nobody has the job of giving a shit about your mental health, development, emotional wellbeing, needs, etc. He proposes overturning the individualist ethos and having society get involved with the wellbeing of its members.
In the second part, he introduces four lines of developmental stages: cognitive (kinda like Piaget but more stages extending into adulthood), cultural (traditional, modern, post-modern, meta-modern etc. cultural codes), and two more, but I haven’t gotten that far.
He foreshadows that the fact that adults exist on different developmental stages will be important for his vision of how exactly governance should work, which is in the next book, Nordic Ideology.
The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht
The number could easily be infinity; I have no problem imagining that most people have zero positive impact for more than half the years of their careers (even the ones that end up having some positive impact overall)
Sounds very close to what Peterson says
The last thing you should do if you come across a hard-for-you unimportant action is stop looking for other things to do.
I think you can go even more general and say, “don’t do unimportant things”.
Those are all people who don’t really consider cleaning their room important (Alice, if she considered it important, could easily hire a cleaning service with her programmer salary).
I’m not talking about people who don’t clean up because they’re “pouring energy into something else” or because “putting away dishes is boring” or because they have a physical disability. I’m talking about the people from Katja’s post:
‘how can make a big difference to the world, when I can’t make a big difference to that pile of dishes in my sock drawer?’
This sounds to me like someone who wants to load the dishwasher, but finds themselves unable to. Like someone who’s frustrated with themselves; not someone who’s happy with the state of the affairs because they have better things to do.
In this case, I would expect this to be a pretty good predictor of not being able to do things that are more difficult (for an able-bodied person) than loading the dishwasher. And while there will not be much of a correlation between difficulty and importance, I would still say that virtually all non-trivial accomplishments in the world will be over the “loading the dishwasher” threshold of difficulty.
Does that make sense?
Sounds good! I think many people would forego the luxury (parking spaces are expensive in cities & for a lot of people the transportation itself is enough), but I can imagine some part of the market being like this
Yes, if you can’t do an unimportant thing X, I can’t judge whether you’ll be able to do important thing Y, because I don’t know what the relationship in difficulty is between X and Y.
But if you can’t do an easy thing, surely I can judge that you’ll have even more of a problem doing a difficult thing.
And there aren’t going to be many things in the world easier than cleaning your room or loading the dishwasher, right?
Nor is the group, unfortunately
I agree, the “big, vague things” are the bedrock of epistemology, the lens which helps you be more discerning and critical when you read anything else (e.g. those more “hands on” materials) and get more value out of it.
I think that the sequences could be rewritten to half the length and still retain the vast majority of the value, but oh well, this is where we are at the moment with core rationality literature.
HPMOR is especially fun if you’ve read the original HP.
I recognize myself very much in the dandelion child description; makes me feel slightly better about not being gifted or a high achiever :)