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Do You Want the Complexity in the Tools or in Their Usage? 2020-12-31T10:58:38.393Z

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Comment by mxshn on Do You Want the Complexity in the Tools or in Their Usage? · 2021-01-04T16:38:17.089Z · LW · GW

I see what you mean, even though I haven't had this sensation yet. Good to note, and I tend to agree for indiscriminate tasks like "Hammer in a nail", "Somehow separate a board into two pieces". But do you think this still holds if you explicitly state the task more precisely as "Make a straight cut", "Puree something very finely", "Remove a precise shape from the top layer of the wood"? I.e. associate a quality with the task?

Comment by mxshn on Do You Want the Complexity in the Tools or in Their Usage? · 2021-01-04T16:31:20.124Z · LW · GW

I agree, the InstantPot is able to do more things than the rice cooker, but it doesn't seem more versatile to me than a pot. This is mostly an intuition that I find hard to make into a clean argument, but the InstantPot, to me, looks to be specific, in more ways. There is a discrete (larger) set of particular functions it can do, while a pot is so simple, it doesn't have particular functions attached to it. Its function resides in the user.

Comment by mxshn on 100 Tips for a Better Life · 2020-12-26T20:30:43.184Z · LW · GW

I'm missing "Don't lie"

Comment by mxshn on How I Write · 2020-12-03T17:44:35.805Z · LW · GW

Fantastic, especially the bit about needing to write before understanding it fully, or else it becoming stale and boring (and obvious, all of a sudden).

Comment by mxshn on How do you organise your reading? · 2020-08-06T17:15:44.695Z · LW · GW

Are all those things about the same concepts, or wildly different? If they are wildly different, I would advise consuming less, spending more time processing and sticking with one inquiry at a time.

At least in my experience, whenever I had too much to read, I actually was procrastinating. I wasn't really reading that stuff, I was only avoiding something else. So I would go ahead and close all those tabs and forget all those PDFs. Some you will remember, and then only do those, and process them a bit before going further (i.e. think about them in the shower).

Comment by mxshn on Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know (I.) · 2020-07-20T18:15:45.448Z · LW · GW

Neat, thanks for the insight! Just wondering, the 0.51% should be 51%, right?