Raj Thimmiah's Shortform

Are there any modern competitors to metamed? Have a health issue, very willing to spend money to fix it. 

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)

Do any of you have systems you've used to test out which diet you find best for yourself?

I'm also curious: how did you manage confounders such as life changes/sleep and other things

For people that have read Ray Dalio's Principles: how did you apply the book to reality?

Specifically, how did you write out principles and actually check and iterate on them over time?

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?

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'm 65% moving back to us in a month or two but haven't lived there in like 5 years so am not sure what to expect nor where I'd like to go.

I'm mainly optimizing for friend-making/having/meeting (IRL) though I'm not sure how much I care about that since I haven't had much chance to do that for the last few years. though also trees and stuff are nice too

I'm not really sure how to choose between cities in terms of satisfying this. vaguely seems like SF would be cool and have many cool people that would be nice to meet but is also expensive

Any recommendations on figuring out where to stay?

How important are real social networks? I'm debating on moving back to the US from Japan pro's and cons being:

Japan:

Pro: 
-university is easy
-is cheap
-have nice apartment and setup
-corona situation is way better than in the US
-health care is cheap and good

Cons:
-very few friends (can probably change this next semester. can maybe change it this semester if I make a real effort to go to meetups. But will be hard, since is hard in general here to make friends and I'm not currently studying towards native level Japanese)

US:

Pro:
-can probably make many friends
-can talk to many more people

Cons:
-would need to re-apply to university
-university is expensive
-moving will be expensive
-apartment expensive depending on where I go
-healthcare not cheap nor good
-corona stuff not good

It all really comes down to: is it worth it to have more friends IRL? When I had more friends in the past and did coworking or just hanging out it was a lot of fun and I kind of miss that. It feels like the answer is thus yes even when a bunch of other things look like they'd suck.

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. 

Does anyone have an actual example of applying Bayes theorem in real life? Never bothered learning it because its actual application has never been clear to me

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

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

I'm looking for people to pair program with with me and my friend on a SuperMemo clone (software that Anki is based on). It has a feature called incremental reading that we'd like to create a modern implementation of. 

Neither of us have a ton of programming experience; we're making ok progress but would do much better with pairing with someone more experienced than us. 

I can pay around 30$/hr but can't do much better than that unfortunately. 

How long should I wait from cold inception to travel (back home)? I have 2 things I'm optimizing for:

a. apparently traveling with sinus issues on a plane is exceptionally painful

b. I don't want to infect other people

I don't have a good model of how quick I should expect to recover/when I'm reasonably non-infectious.

What are good fictions for an inaction bias? When I have an idea or thing I want to work on, I tend to think too much about outcomes and even if it does seem like there's a decent chance of success, I don't even try because I then know how daunting the thing will be.

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.

In case anyone is interested, Piotr Wozniak, the man that invented spaced repetition, is on voice chat on the SuperMemo server!

supermemo.wiki/discord

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 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. 

For health reasons, my sleep is consistently bad. I can still get around 2-3 hours of work done in the morning and another 2-3 in the evening but I have a lot of time where I'm just tired and don't want to do anything too intellectually stimulating. 

Any recommendations on good filler activities?

I just moved to Berkeley so fairly often I can go to a meetup of some sort in the evening. But the mornings are harder to fill.  When I get myself to, walking around  works fairly well (I'm finding it a lot harder now than when I was in Japan since in Japan I just didn't buy food in advance so I'd have to go outside around 11 am).  This isn't really enough alone to cover the 3-4 hours between doing work and taking my nap though. 

Activities that I've considered:

-reading: if I get hooked on the right book, this definitely works. I'm struggling to start reading books though.

-video games: these would likely work but I'm nervous about getting addicted and not getting anything done

Does anyone else struggle with rejection sensitivity dysphoria (common in people that have ADHD)? It's gotten better for me over time as I understand myself better but it's still a big problem and I'm not sure how to go about dealing with it

Where are SF/Berkeley area events usually coordinated? (going to hopefully be living in the area)

I tried to look for a facebook group but didn't have too much luck

Has anyone considered a way of using a variation of an electrolarynx + voice to text to enable some method of using voice to text without needing to actually speak out loud?

(I know electrolarynxes produce noise but I get the impression some variation could be much quieter than normal speech and still work)

Any suggestions on decent online universities? I've decided to move back to the US from abroad without finishing my degree but my parents still want me to get some sort of degree for long-term employability (ruling out bootcamps unless I can make a really convincing argument). 

I'm trying to optimize for:
-not too time consuming: I want to spend most of my time on side-projects of my own interest
-not too expensive: don't want to burn money
-marginally useful/interesting: will be less hard to complete if it feels actually useful

https://www.snhu.edu/online-degrees/associate/as-in-computer-science was suggested to me and is likely what I'd do as a baseline option. 

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 [LW · GW] and the link it has to map of users is defunct

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

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?

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?

Anyone have recommendations on good non-swiveling chairs? Unfortunately I end up fidgeting and moving around way too much with them (maybe some of my ADHD?). I'm using a normal chair now but I wonder if there's something better for my back

How do you effectively represent knowledge in learning?

how do you effectively apply recognition primed decision making rather than lesswrong biases? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5OO9L67jL4

Is breadth of knowledge, depth of knowledge or applicability of knowledge more important? Whatever the answer is, how do you more dakka the hell out of it?