Perhaps I should have been more specific—every time you use your real name outside of a public-image building context, it becomes harder to build a public image associated with your name. I wasn’t trying to say that you should put nothing up—more that it should be something like what you’d expect a medical doctor’s official web page to look like. Not a stream of possibly controversial or misinterpreted posts on a web forum.
ThrustVectoring
Karma: 1,372
True, some cities are much better built for that sort of thing than others. I had San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, and Valencia in mind specifically—less so Los Angeles and Dallas-Fort Worth.
Agreed with the lifestyle part, though—it’s really a question of how often you need to do things that require a car, and how expensive the next-best option is (taxi, car rental, ride-share, borrowing your neighbor’s). If you want to drive three hours to see your Mom every weekend, you probably don’t want to sell your car.
I’ve found it to be very comfortable, though I have not been keeping data on sleep quality so I don’t have a quantitative answer.
If you’re already tracking sleep quality, trying a hammock out is much cheaper than trying a new mattress out.
You can always have a hammock in addition to, rather than instead of, a traditional bed. Or you can use the next-best piece of furniture for that purpose.
As much as possible, you want to optimize what a trivial investigation of you brings up—like, for instance, an internet search with your name as the query. Putting anything anywhere under your real name cedes a lot of that control.
If you’re worried about nontrivial investigations, whether or not you choose a pseudonym makes very little difference.
It is hard to predict how long that’ll take and even harder to predict what that agent’s intent will be
This weakens the case for holding back significantly, since it’s also applicable to the consequences of not posting.
Let me be more concrete. If all of Facebook is public data, are you going to be more suspicious of someone without a Facebook account, or someone whose Facebook activity is limited to pictures of drinking and partying that starts at around age 19 and dies a slow death by age 28?
Any data you leave has both condemning and exculpatory interpretations. If you don’t leave data behind that shows you like to drink socially, you’re also not leaving data behind that shows you don’t like to do cocaine in the bar bathroom. If you don’t know how that information is going to get interpreted in the future, both sides will tend to cancel out.
If your data is going to get targeted anyways in an unfair manner, being careful about what you slip out isn’t going to help that much. They’ll just latch on to the next most damaging piece of information—or if it isn’t much out there, make a meal of the lack of information.
there are excellent substitutes for personally having a child (e.g. convincing a less altruistic couple to have another child).
Not all children are of equivalent social benefit. If a pure altruist could make a copy of themselves at age 20, twenty years from now, for the low price of 20% of their time-discounted total social benefit—well, depending on the time-discount of investing in the future, it seems like a no-brainer.
Well, unless the descendants also use similar reasoning to spend their time-discounted total social benefit in the same way. You have to cash out at some point, or else the entire thing is pointless.
Let’s be more narrow and talk about middle-class professional Americans. And lets take a pass on the “pure altruist” angle, and just talk about how much altruistic good you do by having a child (compared to the next best option).
For having a child, it’s roughly 70 QALYs that they get to directly experience. Plus, you get whatever fraction of their productive output that’s directed towards altruistic good. There’s also the personal enjoyment you get out of raising children, which absorbs part of the cost out of a separate budget.
As far as costs go, a quick google search brings up the number $241,000. And that’s just the monetary costs—there are more opportunity costs for time spent with your children. Let’s simplify things by taking the time commitment entirely out of the time you spend recreationally on yourself, and the money cost entirely out of your altruism budget.
So, divide the 70 QALYs by the $241k, and you wind up with a rough cost of $3,400 per QALY. That completely ignores the roughly $1M in current-value of your child’s earnings (number is also pulled completely out of my ass based on 40 years at $60k inflation-adjusted dollars).
So, the bottom line is whether or not you enjoy raising children, and whether or not you can buy QALYs at below $3,400 each. There’s also risks involved—not enjoying raising children and having to reduce your charity time and money budget to get the same quality of life, children turning out with below-expectation quality of life and/or economic output, and probably others as well.
There’s also the question of whether you’re better off adopting or having your own, but that’s a separate analysis.
Mattresses aren’t the only thing you can sleep on. I’d consider picking up and installing a hammock—they’re not only cheap (~$100 for a top of the line one, $10 and 2 hours for making your own), but they also give you significantly more usable living space.
If you live in a city, you can (and probably should) get away with not owning a car. Not only is it unnecessary to get where you want to go, but due to property prices, parking is a gigantic hassle and expense. Walking works well for anything within a mile, biking for anything within about 5, public transit or a cab for the metro area, and car rentals (or borrowing a friend’s) can fill in for anything else that absolutely requires your own vehicle.
Not owning a car saves a significant amount of time and money and makes the math better for living in a more built-up area.
I completely agree with dance lessons as a worthwhile hobby to consider. The point I was trying to get at is that if you have disposable disposable income and free time and your hobbies are “books and computer games”, you’ve probably not done worthwhile exploration as to what hobbies you enjoy.
That’s pricing the risk that it messes up your eye at zero. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it.
I don’t recall the exact numbers, but the risks were sufficiently tiny that I was not concerned about them. Anything that laser eye surgery can do to the outer layers of the eye I fully expect to be fixable in the ~30 year future before age-related eye issues become a problem for me. A great deal of the remaining “messes up your eye” scenarios are fixable by the surgeon. The truly horrific stuff means a malpractice lawsuit (or settlement under threat thereof).
I did some more reading on the risks from the website and handouts from the place I got my eyes done. 7% have their eyes over or under corrected and get re-correction in the first year. Serious complications are much more rare.
It goes without saying that you should do your homework and go to the best place you can find.
There’s a certain conflation between being viewed as intelligent and being viewed as high-status. People who don’t have the smarts to play the intellectual status game have a couple of obvious choices to increase their perceived status. They can either reject the whole “thinking well is a valuable skill” set of ideas, or they can reject evidence that says that they aren’t smart and pretend to be better at the whole thinking thing than they really are.
Both of these are very big stumbling blocks for becoming a more rational and better person. In order to want to join the rationalist community, you need to have the beliefs that you aren’t as capable as you could be, that thinking better is good for you, and that you can admit to mistakes without undermining your position. These beliefs are much more present among high-IQ people for what I think are obvious enough reasons that I don’t need to enumerate them.
Other people in this thread have gone down the obvious “spend money to pay people to do things you don’t like doing but want done” route. My suggestion is to get hobbies. Awesome, awesome hobbies. Sure, there’s a time commitment to continue with a hobby, but they can be put down with little ill effect.Here’s what I’d start with:
Archery. Buy a bow and some lessons and perhaps a range membership.
Sailing. Sunscreen, clothing, and a Sunfish or other small dinghy. Maybe get lessons as well. I’d start at a lake.
Blacksmithing or welding. Take some fun classes along those lines at a community college or trade school or the like. Alternatively, you can get pliers and some metal wire and make chain mail (this, however, is much more time intensive, but cheap in terms of money alone).
Racing. You’d probably want to start with go-karts and the like.
Sports. Generally cheap and enjoyable.
As far as programming, writing, and people skills go, a big part of improving is spending time on it. Getting paid feedback can probably help as well.
For life-optimization in general, moving to a place closer to work and cutting down on your commute is worthwhile in general. You’d have to do the math to see how much you’d wind up paying for your time.
Getting rid of stuff to maintain is a freebie. Things are option-priced: owning something gives you the right to use it later. It also forces you to either maintain it or lose it. Keep track of the time and money costs as well as how often you use your car, and compare to the costs of renting a car instead.
I’d also recommend laser eye surgery, particularly if you have any amount of astigmatism or are clumsy. Financed over two years, my cost is something like $5/day. And as for clumsiness, well, a significant amount of that sort of thing goes away when things are the same shape across your field of vision. It’s anecdotes, sure, but all four people (myself included) that I know that got lasik have better hand-eye coordination and significantly reduced clumsiness. It’s hard for me to overstate how valuable laser eye surgery has been. My sister rates it as the third best decision she’s ever made, behind marrying her husband and buying a house she loves the daylights out of.
I’m not sure that dismissing government reform is necessarily the right thing to do, even if AI-risk is the larger problem. The timelines for the good the solutions do may be different—even if you have to save the world fifty years from now from UFAI, there’s still a world of good you can do by helping people with a better government system in the meantime.
Also, getting a government that better serves its constituents’ values could be relevant progress towards getting a computer program that serves well the programmers’ values.
You’ve probably thought through these exact points, but glossed over them in the summary. It’s still worth mentioning, even though you’ve already bought the educational options needed to tackle the AI problem.
I suspect at least one of the failure modes related to not learning things in the right order is slower, more arduous learning that isn’t fun.
And if you want everything to make sense anyway, you’re going to learn the prerequisites anyways. So not only are you having more difficulties now, but you’re spending time getting a tenuous grasp on a subject that you’ll want to revisit later anyways once you can put things into a coherent framework.
My impression is that most traditional statistics courses are very bad (not even because of anything to do with frequentism, they’re just very bad). Don’t take one.
That’s my impression as well. I’ve had to take a statistics course, and I wound up memorizing procedures enough to vomit it up on tests on homework. There wasn’t really a coherent framework, so the least work method of passing the course was memorizing the teacher’s passwords.
If you have to take a traditional statistics course, don’t expect to get a solid understanding of statistics out of it. Perhaps you’ll know how to use certain orthodox analysis methods.
I’ve had the same kind of insight. If you compute the consequences of following certain habits, the best plan looks an awful lot like virtue ethics. You’re not just someone who eats ice cream, you’re someone who has an ice cream eating habit.
Similarly, if you compute the consequences of setting and following rules, you get back a lot of Deontology. A doctor can’t just cut up one person for their organs to save a dozen without the risk of destroying valuable societal trust in others following certain expectations (like not being killed for your organs when you go to the doctor).
Imagine what the police would imagine if they followed the popular conception of what consequentialism is. That’s an expected consequence of police action, so if it’s worse than what they’re doing now, they won’t choose to do it (under a sufficiently savvy model of consequentialism.)
This might just be high levels of baseline cynicism, but I don’t really see changing the particular debate tactics used to change much of anything.
By the time it gets to televised debates, the choices have already been narrowed down to Blue policy vs Red policy (with a small change in the relevant party’s policy, based on the individual candidates). It’s still a debate between two people who are disproportionately wealthy, educated (particularly in law), and well-connected. The vast majority of the vetting goes on in local politics, finding those who are able to curry favor, run campaigns, do PR, and be politically savvy in general.
And given that it’s essentially a choice between Red and Blue policy, the way to do better at that game is deciding whose policy is better, supporting that side, and leaning on both to make better choices. Changing the debate rules is just going to change how the same politicians prepare for debates, and maybe flip an election outcome or three. Everyone with political influence is going to have roughly the same amount of influence.