jp's Shortform

Do Anki while Weightlifting

Many rationalists appear to be interested in weightlifting. I certainly have enjoyed having a gym habit. I have a recommendation for those who do:

Try studying Anki cards while resting between weightlifting sets.

The upside is high. Building the habit of studying Anki cards is hard, and if doing it at the gym causes it to stick, you can now remember things by choice not chance.

And the cost is pretty low. I rest for 90 seconds between sets, and do about 20 sets when I go to the gym. Assuming I get a minute in once the overheads are accounted for, that gives me 20 minutes of studying. I go through about 4 cards per minute, so I could do 80 cards per visit to the gym. In practice I spend only ~5 minutes studying per visit, because I don't have that many cards.

I'm not too tired to concentrate. In fact, the adrenaline high makes me happy to have something mentally active to do. Probably because of this, it doesn't at all decrease my desire to go to the gym.

I find I can add simple cards to my Anki deck at the gym, although the mobile app does make it slow.

Give it a try! It's cheap to experiment and the value of a positive result is high.

What to do if you suddenly need to rest your hands

On Monday I went from "computer work seems kind of uncomfortable, I wonder if I should be worried" to "oh crap oh crap, that's actually painful". Everything I've ever heard says not to work through RSI pain, so what now? I decided to spend a week learning hands free input. I wanted to a) get some serious rest and b) still be productive. And guess what? Learning hands free input is like the one activity that does not suffer a productivity penalty from not being able to use your hands.

When I started it was really slow going. Lots of yelling "no don't type 'delete word' delete the f**king word!!!"[1] But then I found this talk, which was just .. woah. Since then, I have been using Talon, and I am in love.

The key to understanding Talon, and the reason I think it's heads and shoulders above everything else I've tried, is the basic insight that most of the time the input you want to do is not writing. Talon has the concept of modes, and most of the time you're in the command mode.[2] And because there's a limited set of commands, there's much less ambiguity between inputs.

After one week, I'm able to dictate an existing code file painlessly albeit still slowly. The thing that feels important to me, is that I'm no longer living in fear of my career being taken away from me by my wrists. 

So my recommendation to you, if you find yourself in the situation I was is to rest your hands, and try learning this thing. If you do, reach out to me! I'm (at least currently) sufficiently excited about this that I would very much enjoy help you out.

Epistemic postscript: I'm writing this while still excited about it, which is providing the motivation to do the writeup, but also makes me believe that in the future I will be less optimistic, and you should take that into account when evaluating its implicit predictions.

***

[1] A word to the wise, if you have dictation software listening, yelling at your computer is the opposite of productive (this is good, a frustrating experience with quick negative reinforcement for outbursts induces a zen-like experience).

[2] This is similar to vim, if you're familiar.

"Cruxy" is a useful term to have in my vocabulary. I use it relatively loosely to refer to the type of thing I look for in a double crux. A consideration is more "cruxy" if it's closer to a but-for support for a proposition. Interestingly (mildly) this is very similar to the definition of "crucial," and in fact the etymologies are the same.

I'd really like to write more. I've noticed that some ideas become much better after I write them up, and some turn out to be worse than I initially thought. I'd also like to expand my ability to have conversations to include online spaces, which, as a confirmed lurker, I didn't really have much of until after I found myself writing code for the EA Forum. I'm going to try writing a shortform post a day for a week. Acceptable places to post include here on LW, the EA Forum, Facebook, and my org's slack. I'd like to go for at least one each.

If that goes well, my next step might be to try this thing called editing and post every other day. After that I'd like to try writing some top level posts.

Friday: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8WWeGuEQRBYRuQcYJ/jp-s-shortform#MBNfFKQwa8LQdBceQ [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Saturday: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8WWeGuEQRBYRuQcYJ/jp-s-shortform#pZ39ANtDxRK7X9KXv [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Sunday: ✓ (FB)

Monday: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8WWeGuEQRBYRuQcYJ/jp-s-shortform#SopSodvjwvkdAHe2G [LW(p) · GW(p)]

Tuesday: ✓ (Slack)

Wednesday: ✓ (Slack)

Thursday: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rWoT7mABXTfkCdHvr/jp-s-shortform#rCYFRZ2YoSfyYiXrh [EA(p) · GW(p)]

YA Novels and Human Talent Distributions

I take a dim view of how I spent my free time as a teenager. Reverse to how many people see it, I think my school time was great for me and my intellectual development, while my spare time often made me a worse thinker.* In particular, I'll call out my habit of videogames and YA fantasy novels. Here's a thing I wish I hadn't learned.

In YA novels, if you've ever spent 10 minutes living in the woods, you're now an A+ expert on all  things forestry. It doesn't matter if you're up against an adversary who logically would have spent years training for this, don't worry, if a single person on your team has some plausibly related piece of backstory, you're going to have an advantage.

Additionally, your primary talent is probably something where you have a god-given advantage over the rest of the world.

So fantasy novels are unrealistic. I noticed this while reading them. I still think I'd rather read books that will leave my system 1 with a more accurate understanding of talents. But what I noticed recently was that I didn't quite appreciate that these novels (and books) had discontinuities of talent. Many talents are power law distributed, to be sure, but more commonly they are normally distributed.

I've noticed myself appreciating that I/my friend/coworker/acquaintance are good at something, and then it taking a while to realize how not-special their talent is, to the detriment of my predictions about the world.

———

Another anti-useful learning: I spent years training my intuitive appreciation for how often a 90% accurate attack will miss on game THAT LIED ABOUT IT'S ACCURACY.

* I think I still am my best self doing productive things and often my spare time is spent unproductively [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Some thoughts on free time

I've had discussions recently about how to spend free time. I'm blessed with a job with relatively well-specified boundaries (I don't typically work on weekends or outside the hours I'm at the office), but I often still feel like I'm sucked into "unproductive" things in my free time. Here are some things I could want to do during my free time:

 1 Maximize global utility directly

 2 Maximize moment-to-moment hedonic happiness

 3 Maximize long term hedonic happiness

 4 Maximize mental recovery for later productivity

 5 Use a virtue heuristic for doing things that seems "worthwhile"

 6 Do whatever one feels like in the moment

 7 Try to accomplish things that sound cool

(1) Seems penny-wise, pound foolish, and paradoxically hurt my altruistic efforts. All of the ones with maximize I endorse caring about to some extent, but not maximizing. I'm especially interested in 4. I feel like 5 has led to some great victories for me. 6 obviously guides a lot of what I do. I'm happy that I do it, but I don't want to elevate it the way some people do. I like doing 7 sometimes, but often it trades of against 1, 2, 4, and 6, in which case I mostly end up not doing it. Thus I think most of my accomplishments have come during work hours. I'm basically ok with this.

Sometimes 6 ends up tanking efforts to do 1-5,7. Here's a list of some things that I don't endorse doing:

 1 Binge watching netflix, youtube etc.

 2 Scrolling through facebook, twitter, etc.

 3 Playing a videogame that grows to consume my time

 4 Writing code < 1.5 hours before I'd like to go to bed

 5 ~Half of the times I stay up late at parties

I claim that these are usually bad for essentially all of the other goals.

Here are some things that I endorse doing:

 1 Visiting individual blogs are reading through what I've missed

 2 Churning my personal Evernote todos

 3 Trying to answer something I'm curious about

 4 Hanging out with friends/boyfriend

There's a gap here where the unendorsed list has a bunch of things I can do even when I'm exhausted, and the endorsed list usually requires at least a little bit of awake-ness. This often makes me very reluctant to take stimulant holidays. The problem I think is that zero effort things are very low points in the energy landscape. This is what makes individual blogs so useful. They're pretty low energy, but they run out of content quickly.

I'd be interested in other recommendations for low energy but finite activities and additions to the goals list.

I have a classic rationality comment on the EA Forum [EA(p) · GW(p)] that's reasonably popular. I thought I'd crosspost here. The context is "What are work practices that you’ve adopted that you now think are underrated?"

***

CEA (my employer) has long had the concept of "who owns this ball."^[1] I'm gonna have a hard time in this answer conveying exactly how much this has become a whole encompassing working philosophy for me.

Level 1: The alarm bells about dropped balls

If you are having a conversation and someone's like "we should do X"... Someone should really be the person owning the ball for doing (or not doing!) X.

If there's a "ball" (a task of some sort) that's sitting around and not moving forward, and anyone has any uncertainty about who's responsible for it, they should flag that.

Example: "Ok, who owns the ball of reaching out to GWWC?"

Level 2: Passing balls

Be extremely clear in your communication when you're handing off a ball to someone else, or taking on a ball. This prevents balls from getting dropped in the first place. We use dedicated emoji-jargon for this at CEA:

• 🏈 for handing off a ball
• 🤾 for catching a ball

Example: "I'm not sure what happened there, looks like a bug. 🏈 to you to fix?"

Level 3: Systems that prevent dropped balls

We have a round robin system in our code reviews, to make sure that each code review is assigned to a single reviewer, who knows that it's their job to review that code. The reviewer then assigns the task back to the original developer to address comments and/or merge the code. The code review can literally never be in an ambiguous state. (Ideally anyway. Human be humans, and it happens.)

Both our developers and our moderators has the concept of an "on-call" rotation, both developed by me. Quoting from the moderator on-call doc:

You should be aiming to ensure an efficiently running ship. It’s your job this week to make sure that everything’s running smoothly. That does not mean doing everything yourself. But this week, the buck of dropped balls does stop with you.

***

I think I've done a fair job of communicating the type of thing I mean, but it really goes quite deep and broad for me. As I predicted, moreso than this suggests.

1. ^{^}

   I wrote this answer, and then realized I needed to give a shout out to @amywilley [LW · GW] and the (CEA) events team, who really embody the spirit of this philosophy. Amy at one point bought like 40 styrofoam balls and had CEA write tasks they were worried might be getting dropped on them, and then we went around finding an owner for the balls, or deciding to drop them by choice.

Bruce Schneier's original security mindset blogpost basically just says "look for holes in things." I thought I remembered the concept as being more interesting when I read it on LW and sure enough, Eliezer's post [LW · GW] was much more cogent. "The reason security is hard is because there's someone optimizing the system down paths that lead to bad outcomes."

Economic efficiency and a 5 year old bet

5 years ago, my then-boss and I realized we disagreed about something. He thought the oil and gas sector was clearly on the decline, and would be a bad place to put your money. I was a big fan of the efficient market hypothesis, and though, well, shouldn't that already be priced in?

He was confident and willing to give me good odds, but wanted to be clear he was talking over the very long term. So we agreed: 5 years term, 70% odds. If the O&G sector trailed the S&P 500 by more than 25%, I'd pay him ¢30, if it did better than that, he'd pay me ¢70. (The money being trivial, but the staking of our clear and unambiguous predictions being the important part.)

Now the bet has come to fruition. Take a moment to guess the result if you don't know.

.

.

.

.

.

.

It wasn't even close. The S&P returned 111% over the last 5 years, or 14.25% per year. The Dow Jones US Oil & Gas Index^[1] returned -26%, or -5.5% per year.

Would I take the bet today? One thing I appreciate now that I don't think I understood when I was 24 is that I was betting over a relatively small inefficiency. 5% per year is not an insight that you can get rich on. So the market is not gonna be that efficient. With that insight in mind I probably would have been more humble in my discussion with my boss, and we probably would not have ended up betting. I probably also would have bothered looking at the past 5 years of performance, which I don't remember doing.

However, I miiight still take the bet again? It was pretty good odds, and it's famously very hard to predict the stock market, even over the long term like this.

So there you go, not obvious how much I learned from it, but I liked the experience of looking back on the confident feeling of my past self and seeing how I'd changed.

This video seems highly relevant to the luminator fans here.

Here's a conceptual clarification that deconfused me somewhat. – The zeroth instantiation of the internet was the telephone network. The alpha version was when someone first made a modem to let computers send 1s and 0s over the telephone system. And that was it. You had the ability for computers to talk to other ones in different cities.

--

A different 0th version was computers hooked up directly to other computers.

--

The beta version involved Usenet, emails, etc.

--

Finally we get to what people talk about when they say the "invention of the internet" and a web of pages that pointed you to other pages when you clicked on links. I think the reason this gets so much attention is because the previous versions were just immensely less powerful.

--

There's so much more about this I wish I knew.

I'm really curious how places that are planning to be more supportive of remote work are going to handle *partially* remote teams.

Like, a meeting with 3/4 participants being in person is hard for the remote worker to participate in.

I've generally heard [LW · GW] that remote work works best when it's full-remote. If so then everyone's getting a very attractive view of remote work but when the pandemic's over, under this model, remote work will not be as viable as it currently is.

PDFs are the preferred communication style for papers. HTML documents are the preferred communication style for most other public facing documents.[1]

PDFs are inferior to HTML in many ways: HTML can adapt to fit the viewport and fontsize requested by the user, while PDFs are basically fancy images in this regard. This makes PDFs basically useless on mobile, and generally terrible for casual browsing.

However HTML is not as good for deep study. You can't annotate it easily, and it's harder to bookmark your place on a webpage.

I'd really like to see something that allows you to combine the permanence and mark-ability of PDFs with the flexibility of HTML. I'm not sure how good the profit opportunity is, but boy does it seems great. And not that technically difficult to make the product.

[1] Google docs, slack posts, and a long tail of web-based tools are used internally to organizations.

I found myself saying recently, "While this strategy does not in this case seem to have much causal connection to good outcomes, I feel like following the strategy in the past few months has been good for my soul."*

Humans don't have souls. I could imagine substituting, "This strategy has made me an easier agent to coordinate with and has moved me closer to the morality I was taught growing up, which has reduced my cognitive dissonance with my formerly more consequentialist actions. And it's an important part of the strategy that I don't alter it just because I can't see any negative consequences here."

I dunno, maybe that's the right way to say the thing? I think if I'd thought of that phrasing at the time maybe I should have just said that. It seems tempting to go with the shorter "good for my soul" phrasing, but I think it's likely to be pretty ambiguous in interpretation. I think after writing this rather stream-of-consciousness shortform that I'd rather stick to awkward but clear language instead of turning poetic.

* (A note in defense of my past self — While recently I've moved further in non-consequentialist directions, I've never been willing to defect when in coordination games with cooperating members of my communities.)

Spot the problem with this statement:

The Galleri test did not detect DNA methylation patterns that are associated with cancer in your blood sample. In a clinical validation study, fewer than1% of individuals with this result were projected to have cancer.