Raj Thimmiah
Is there still a map of LW community members?
stumbled upon this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/neXgtqxS2KDRwDszG/a-map-of-lwers-find-members-of-the-community-living-near-you and the link it has to map of users is defunct
awesome, dm’d you for more details
Is anyone interested in being accountability partner for unscrewing sleep?
In the past, I’ve used a system: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WqwnDj0eOdDjBnocN_1gPaeKlO—DtCzNlWhg5IyRwc/edit#gid=381019029 which worked pretty well for unscrewing my sleep a few months ago.
It’s pretty simple: when I screw up my sleep and commit to fixing it the next day with willpower, that fails.
When I fix what screwed my sleep that night, something new comes to screw my sleep. So you basically have to go down a list of things that break your sleep and fix ALL of them. Which I managed to do a few months ago but regressed on after moving.
I want to try it again but I find it hard to take seriously enough to stick to.
I’m looking for someone willing to do daily check-ins/discuss bugs that also wants to work on fixing their sleep. I dunno if we’d do synchronous or asynchronous communication but in the beginning I’d probably want to try synchronous
that’s interesting, what were the steps you took to engage with that? I’ve vaguely wanted to do that but haven’t been sure about how to approach it
I’ve generally found quality good for things I’ve requested and when it isn’t it isn’t hard to just say ‘no this is not what I expected try more’
For those that don’t know it exists, r/slavelabour (not literal slave labour) is a great place to outsource things (https://www.reddit.com/r/slavelabour).
I’ve gotten a virtual assistant through it that has saved me massive amounts of time and sanity (at around 5$ per hour at start and 7$ per hour now with base rate of 5$ per week)
I’ve also gotten scripts made and a translation to Japanese done for my friends thesis
Bountied rationality (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1781724435404945/) also exists but is much more expensive since less efficient market with fewer people clustered in countries with higher wages.
if anyone has a thing they’re thinking of posting there lemme know and I can probably give advice. If you’re interested in getting a virtual assistant, I can point you to the post I made and how you could try to get one too (I offered 5$/hr 4 hours a week and got 20 literally applicants)
What ended up happening to this? seems like an interesting project though site doesn’t load now unfortunately
Just tried the consequences thing and it’s helpful and different from standard pros/cons as you said. I think I internalized from somewhere that lists and process of elimination don’t work which now looks clearly wrong and I want to get into the habit of using more.
make a list of possible consequence-types and your outcome preferences for each type. Maybe rank those preferences.
missed this part on first read, will try that
okay, that was useful and made choice more certain. Thanks for the suggestion.
Do you have a blog? Maybe consider turning this into a blog post, in line with the idea of generalizing instances of problems to benefit more people
[Question] How do you deal with decision paralysis?
Have any of you made an effort to apply expected utility theory to all the things you do? If so, how did you find it?
I’m guessing there are constraints that make routine application difficult but it seems like you could take those into account too
Okay nice, I think this answers half my question: can I do things that make a difference? Where answers seems to be: just think about it, there isn’t a black magic answer
though I still want to get a better idea of what makes GDP/income/wealth of a nation increase
Something that’s bothered me for a while is: how is wealth created and value added to society? If I start a software company which marginally makes some people’s lives better, does this actually contribute to society? How zero sum are our efforts?
I know the answer to this is somewhere in economics but I’m not really sure where and the 1 course I took on macro wasn’t really enough to answer this for me.Any recommendations/people willing to talk me through this?
definition on tag already helping a ton:
Mistake theorists think problems in society are caused by people being bad at achieving common goals.
Conflict theorists think problems in society are caused by adversaries with incompatible goals.
Thanks for pointing me to those, will give them a read!
https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/?ep=028 listened to this episode of the clearer thinking podcast with michael vassar. Mistake theory and conflict theory get thrown around a lot but I don’t really get what they are nor how to figure out what the are. I’m not interested in in depth learning on them, does anyone have suggestions on concise summaries/sources to get a good enough idea of what they are?
I’ve put off making a post on it for a while but something I’ve wanted to offer to anyone interested is free teaching to learn SuperMemo and incremental reading.
A big part of why I put it off is that it’s a pain to explain. Instead of explaining it, I’ll give a top level overview and a link to a video that explains it in more detail.
tl;dr: with SuperMemo/incremental reading, you can manage reading hundreds of articles in parallel (incrementally) without going insane, with long-term retention using spaced repetition. It’s a lot of fun, seriously. Unlike say Anki where you slog through reps, incremental reading intersperses learning making it highly novel and not monotonous.
If you want to try it, check out supermemo.wiki/start, download SuperMemo 18 here (no, you don’t want supermemo.com) and schedule a call with me (I’ve taught 30+ people over the last year, in ~1 hour can get you far enough to be able to start using it enjoyably). Possibly also join the supermemo discord server to ask questions.
FAQ:
Q: I’m on mac/linux/not windows what do I do?
A: Scroll down to mac and linux section here.
Q: SuperMemo UI is terrible!
A: yes. true. at some point though you stop caring and the lack of decent alternatives + fun will pull you through. Unless it doesn’t, in which case you could just not use it. Though I think giving it a try for at least a week is worth it.
Q: if it’s so great why does no one use it?
A: it’s a big pain to start using. it took me 5 months to start incremental reading after buying SM because I couldn’t figure out the documentation. That’s why I’m offering to teach anyone interested: I can get you to being able to use it fine after an hour.
While it’s still smallish, it’s much bigger than it was a year ago with around ~1,200 people on the SM discord server (and some amount of rat adjacent people).
If you have other questions feel free to ask. If you have insane expectations of very quick returns, probably don’t try it. I’ve taught a lot of people and the people who do consistently worst are people with high expectations and no patience for both getting better at learning/getting used to SuperMemo itself. If you don’t have insane expectations, try it and potentially get easy 10%+ long-term boost to life (or at least that’s conservatively what I’ve found. though there are massive benefits for me since ADHD renders me practically incapable of normal modes of declarative learning)
thanks for reading. seriously.
You able to link to it now?
I’ll keep an eye out for any US evening events then, completely understandable to focus on americas/europe since most people there
Unfortunately this is a bit too early for me at 4 am japan time but I’d be interested in similar future events. What’s a good way to be alerted on future discussion events?
You might find some of the writings on supermemo.guru regarding sleep interesting.
SuperMemo is a spaced repetition app (it was the very first in fact) that has a thing called sleepchart built in. It lets you both track sleep for finding interesting patterns alongside getting altertness/cogniti8ve data from correlation of say hour of day vs. average grades:
There are a bunch of confounders (they could be eliminated were I more rigorous) but I think it’s interesting and even without SRS data I get some useful data:
Basically red line is how long sleep episodes are, blue line is how frequent they are around that time. You can see there’s a peak around 6 hours from waking and around 16⁄17 hours from waking. The green line shows breakeven (if I sleep at that time, for the amount of hours on the left, it’ll add up to 24).
It’s probably really complicated looking but if you want to try it let me know and i’m happy to show you how. Doesn’t take long to learn and takes very little time to add track in a new sleep episode.
(this is from my own data)
Are you still using it now or did you find a better solution?