Raj Thimmiah
Bay Area Rationalist Field Day
In case anyone is interested, Piotr Wozniak, the man that invented spaced repetition, is on voice chat on the SuperMemo server!
supermemo.wiki/discord
I have some music I really like but I don’t want to over listen to them for fear of enjoying them less. Does anyone know research on how to min/max listening vs. long-term novelty?
For anyone that’s gone through super forecasting material, have you been able to make it pragmatically useful day to day?
How do you compare the utility of ongoing skill acquisition vs. working on projects?
I’m trying to prioritize what I work on in the day by utility and this is easy for projects but I’m struggling to figure out where skill acquisition things should go, especially open ended ones without a finite end like using SuperMemo
Does anyone have a means they use for tracking how long things take vs. predictions to use for future outside view calculations?
What’s the least expensive way to acquire a copy of HPMOR as a gift for a friend? Same for Unsong too though lower priority
I have a hunch that task switching is lowering my productivity some amount but I’m not sure because there are multiple possible sources:
-might be coworking around friends who might be talking
-might be reading and task switching to phone
-might be doing some work, need to ask friend a question on discord and then getting distracted (even if I really am asking/discussing thing with them)How could I test just how bad it is for productivity and optimize it over time?
I’m working on a project to implement some fraction of Ray Dalio’s Principles in app form.
Part 1: be able to access principles on my apple watch. I have this working. I have principles I can edit on computer and run on apple watch. I’m mainly using them for morning/night routines.
I’m trying to, each night, write down the mistakes I made during the day and spend a yoda timer fixing as many of them as I can by writing new programs and updating existing programs. The issue I’ve run into is that I’ve been kind of bad at actually remembering to run them. I need to start using TAPs more reliably to go from situation → opening principle
I think after I figure this out I’ll try to figure out a triaging system for mistakes I record each day, to sort them into categories to see what repeat/urgent issues I have and such
Open Thread: What are you working on? (October)
Does anyone have experience doing rationality adjacent hackathons? I’m thinking of hosting one in the Berkeley area aimed at trying to make cool rationality tools. I’m interested on input for what kinds of an event people would want or if people have relevant experience and suggestions!
I think it’d be cool if there was a way to browse projects/side-projects rat adjacent people are working on. It’d be nice to see what kinds of things people are interested but it’d likely lower the barrier to finding interesting things to work on with other people.
I’m curious if such a thing already exists or if anyone would actually possibly use it if it did exist
Yes, this. I don’t remember what the application required but I got in and I don’t have an especially cool use case
Asking for a friend of mine, would you be willing to hire/manage visa stuff for people that are interested in working at lightcone but live abroad?
Do you have a link to more info on how they do goal factoring/what software they were using?
yeah I’m gonna try more of this. hard part is just getting myself to go outside but that’s getting easier as I do it more
I’m working on some rationality-adjacent apple watch apps aimed at:
-making it easier to capture mistakes you make throughout the day
-when you notice a trigger, to have an easier way to access reference material/actions that would be more updateable over time than normal TAPs
-capturing data of what you’re doing throughout the day with experience sampling methods
I’m interested in:
-mentors that know swift: I’ve been hacking together code so far and while this kind of works, this isn’t the best approach. Having someone I can ask questions would speed up a lot of my efforts
-collaborators that know swift or are interested in learning it: if you’re not sure how interested you are, feel free to schedule a call and we can discuss the project more
Hopefully soon-ish I’ll make a post with more detail on the project.
you might want to try dendro.cloud which is made by long-term SuperMemo users to be an easier alternative to SM. Unfortunately I think they’re in the midst of a redesign though so they may not be accepting more registrations
If you want to try it again, I’d be happy to teach you (and anyone else interested!). It took me like 5+ months on my own to even start incremental reading because I couldn’t figure out the documentation. I’ve found with 1-1 teaching though that in ~1-2 hours I can get people to being able to do ok IR.
Also: For people interested in either Anki or SM (or just learning/SRS in general), I recommend joining the SuperMemo.wiki discord serverThere’s an anki discord server but the SuperMemo one tends to be more active/more interesting discussion
Does anyone know a good explanation of dopamine/psychological arousal? Recently made the connection that me craving novelty/wanting high psychological arousal levels reduces focus/leads to overthinking and difficulty actually doing normal work that I’d normally enjoy doing. I’d like a better model of my brain with this in mind that I can work around.