If you weren't such an idiot...

Just last week I wrote a post reviewing the evidence on caffeine cycling and caffeine habituation. My conclusion was that the evidence was thin and it's hard to say anything with confidence.[1]

My weakly held beliefs are:

1. Taking caffeine daily is better than not taking it at all, but worse than cycling.
2. Taking caffeine once every 3 days is a reasonable default. A large % of people can take it more often than that, and a large % will need to take it less.

I take caffeine 3 days a week and I am currently running a self-experiment (described in my linked post). I'm currently in the experimental phase, I already did a 9-day withdrawal period and my test results over that period (weakly) suggest that I wasn't habituated previously because my performance didn't improve during the withdrawal period (it actually got worse, p=0.4 on a regression test).

[1] Gavin Leech's post that you linked cited a paper on brain receptors in mice which I was unaware of, I will edit my post to include it. Based on reading the abstract, it looks like that study suggests a weaker habituation effect than the studies I looked at (receptor density in mice increased by 20–25% which naively suggests a 20–25% reduction in the benefit of caffeine whereas other studies suggest a 30–100% reduction, but I'm guessing you can't just directly extrapolate from receptor counts to efficacy like that). Gavin also cited Rogers et al. (2013) which I previously skipped over because I thought it wasn't relevant, but on second thought, it does look relevant and I will give it a closer look.

Laptop chargers are also an object for which it's trivial to own multiple, at a low cost and high (potential) advantage.

I don't see why there is a high potential advantage here. I'd expect:

• Most people to be able to find a friend or a nice person at a coffee shop with a charger they can borrow.
• Most people to be able to get a new charger within a day or so (in person store or online + pay for faster shipping).
• Going a day or so without a laptop not to sacrifice much in terms of fun. I actually expect it to be a net positive there since it'd force you to do something like go for a walk or read a book. It also has the benefit of exercising your "boredom muscles".
• Going a day or so without a laptop not to sacrifice much in terms of your career. Maybe your boss is frustrated with you in the short term, but I don't expect that to lead to any actual consequences like being meaningfully more likely to get fired or not get a promotion.

I strongly advise against taking nicotine.

Could you link a source for the once a week coffee? I am intrigued.

I did not yet read your recommendations so I don't know if the answer is there.

I'm curious about you not doing these, since I'd unquestioningly accepted them, and would love for you to elaborate:

- save lots of money in a retirement account and buy index funds
- shower daily
- use shampoo
- wear shoes
- walk

Regarding 'diet stuff', I mostly agree and like how Jay Daigle put it:

I’ve decided lately that people regularly get confused, on a number of subjects, by the difference between science and engineering. ... Tl;dr: Science is sensitive and finds facts; engineering is robust and gives praxes. Many problems happen when we confuse science for engineering and completely modify our praxis based on the result of a couple of studies in an unsettled area. ...

This means two things. First is that we need to understand things much better for engineering than for science. In science it’s fine to say “The true effect is between +3 and -7 with 95% probability”. If that’s what we know, then that’s what we know. And an experiment that shrinks the bell curve by half a unit is useful. For engineering, we generally need to have a much better idea of what the true effect is. (Imagine trying to build a device based on the information that acceleration due to gravity is probably between 9 and 13 m/s^2).

Second is that science in general cares about much smaller effects than engineering does. It was a very long time before engineering needed relativistic corrections due to gravity, say. A fact can be true but not (yet) useful or relevant, and then it’s in the domain of science but not engineering. 

Why does this matter?

The distinction is, I think fairly clear when we talk about physics. ... But people get much more confused when we move over to, say, psychology, or sociology, or nutrition. Researchers are doing a lot of science on these subjects, and doing good work. So there’s a ton of papers out there saying that eggs are good, or eggs are bad, or eggs are good for you but only until next Monday or whatever.

And people have, often, one of two reactions to this situation. The first is to read one study and say “See, here’s the scientific study. It says eggs are bad for you. Why are you still eating eggs? Are you denying the science?” And the second reaction is to say that obviously the scientists can’t agree, and so we don’t know anything and maybe the whole scientific approach is flawed.

But the real situation is that we’re struggling to develop a science of nutrition. And that shit is hard. We’ve worked hard, and we know some things. But we don’t really have enough information to do engineering, to say “Okay, to optimize cardiovascular health you need to cut your simple carbs by 7%, eat an extra 10g of monounsaturated fats every day, and eat 200g of protein every Wednesday” or whatever. We just don’t know enough.

And this is where folk traditions come in. Folk traditions are attempts to answer questions that we need decent answers to, that have been developed over time, and that are presumably non-horrible because they haven’t failed obviously and spectacularly yet. A person who ate “Like my grandma” is probably on average at least as healthy as a person who tried to follow every trendy bit of scientistic nutrition advice from the past thirty years.

'Bike' is sometimes used as shorthand for 'motorcycle', in which case the 'absurdly dangerous' claim stands. I agree that riding a pedal-powered cycle without a helmet is somewhat dangerous, and unnecessarily so, but not 'absurdly dangerous'.

On the note of wearing helmets, wearing a helmet while walking is plausibly as beneficial as wearing one while cycling[1]. So if you weren't so concerned about not looking silly[2], you'd wear a helmet while walking.

[1] I've heard people claim that this is true. I haven't looked into it myself but I find the claim plausible because there's a clear mechanism—wearing a helmet should reduce head injuries if you get hit by a car, and deaths while walking are approximately as frequent as deaths while cycling.

[2] I'm using the proverbial "you" in the same way as Mark Xu.

I don't have strong takes on the "idiot" stylistic choice; introspectively it feels fun and it takes the bite out of my self-flagellations when I notice leaving value on the floor. I won't claim to have any empirical support that this actually works better or worse for me.

I mostly like this post for the advice. Concretely, after reading it:

• I've bought copies of exercise equipment I like for my parents' house so that when I am exercising relatively regularly, I don't break a streak by visiting them.
• I own two laptops, two kindles, have multiple chargers (some of which live in travel bags so I always have them)
• I often invoke this when deciding whether to try an experimental purchase that might make my life better, but is a little pricey.
• Rebought multi-colour pens, which tend to be useful for me for a stretch, and I don't consider rebuying them when they might be useful again.
• Bought an external battery.

That collection feels like it was probably net-positive.

Some of the things that Mark suggests have been really good for me but I already did them (have a password manager, bright rooms).  There are some I disagree with, so haven't (re)tried after reading it (drink lots of water, summarize things you've read, reliably sleep 6-9 hours a night (on the margin, for me)). And then there are some that seem likely good that I haven't tried.

I think that "any object" was just poorly chosen and it should be "many objects" or "If you would be be sad to not have an object, you would have multiple if you can afford it (and you can more often afford it than you might naively think)".

As I understand it, that point feels wrong to me. There are many things that I would be sad not to have in my life but only on the vaguely long term and that are easy to replace quickly. I have only one fridge and I would probably be somewhat miserable without one (or maybe I could adapt), but it would be absurd for me to buy a second one.

I would say most of the things that I would be sad to miss and that are easy to duplicate are also easy to replace quickly. The main exception is probably data, which should indeed be backed up regularly and safely.

I don't think it's polite to full-text copy when link posting, particularly when Mark sometimes posts on LessWrong. I guess I'll ask him if he minds

My interpretation of that was whenever you're having an opinion or discussion in which facts are relevant, make sure you actually know the statistics. An example is an argument (discussion?) my whole family had mid covid. The claim of some people was that generally, covid was only as bad as the flu. Relevant statistics were readily available for things like mortality rate and total deaths that some people making said claim were ignorant of (off by OOMs). With covid it seems obvious but for other things maybe not. Things people frequently have strong opinions about and don't frequently look up may include: the return on investment of college, the number of deaths due to firearms, the cost of alternative energy sources, how much taxes are actually going to change for a given bill.

I recommend Keepass, but you might have different requirements.

This video serves as a good comparison of your options and on this website you can find a list of recommendation for password managers and other privacy/security tools.

I've been well served by Bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com/

It has a dark theme, apps for everything (including Linux commandline), the Firefox extension autofills with a keyboard shortcut, plus I don't remember any large data breaches.

I really like 1Password, but my understanding is that Bitwarden has less frequent reported vulnerabilities

Whatever you use, remember to backup your vault regularly. A cautionary tale:

I lost access to my bitwarden vault containing a private key to a few thousand $ worth of crypto, after changing my master password to something that I was then not able to recall perfectly.  And bitwarden's website / extension start to rate limit you client-side after failed attempts. So instead, after a lot of research I was able to find the bitwarden hashfile on my computer where chrome stores data for its extensions. I then downloaded hashcat and tried to do a dictionary attack and some other clever attacks that made use of what I thought my password was supposed to be, but to no success.

Don't be me. Bitwarden lets you download your encrypted vault from the website or CLI. do that.

I don't think a fluff test is appropriate for a list titled "if you weren't such an idiot...". The whole point is that the advice is obvious^[1] but people are nonetheless failing to implement it.

1. ^{^}

   And I'm annoyed that some of the advice fails that test. Feels like smuggling in assumptions.

Are you really saying you think everything on this list is "obviously" beneficial? I probably only agree with half the stuff on the list. For example, I certainly disagree that I should "summarize things that I read" (?) or that I should have a "good mentor" by emailing people to request that they mentor me.