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How to brainstorm effectively 2012-05-19T21:29:46.832Z

Comments

Comment by PECOS-9 on Feedback on LW 2.0 · 2017-10-10T22:46:05.379Z · LW · GW

I think your point about less information per screen identifies what has been bothering me. It makes it much harder to skim or to refer back to previous paragraphs.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Feedback on LW 2.0 · 2017-10-10T19:12:29.805Z · LW · GW

The "Daily" page seems to be the one that is most useful to regular users (it's the one I bookmarked), but it's relatively hidden. I think it should be linked directly on the top navbar or somewhere else on the front page instead of hidden inside the hamburger menu in the navbar.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, August 14 - August 20, 2017 · 2017-08-14T19:14:37.996Z · LW · GW

Does anybody have recommendations for video lecture series? Any topic.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread, Feb. 27 - March 5, 2017 · 2017-03-06T02:45:40.553Z · LW · GW

But why is it a piece of evidence pointing to greater than 80% instead of 80%?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread, Feb. 27 - March 5, 2017 · 2017-03-06T02:30:37.530Z · LW · GW

I still don't see the difference.

Are you saying that if many forecasters predict that something has an 80% probability of happening and they all use different methodologies, I should expect it to happen with greater than 80% probability? Why?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread, Feb. 27 - March 5, 2017 · 2017-03-05T06:06:06.399Z · LW · GW

That would not be reasonable if we were talking about something like a prediction of whether a 5-sided die would come up with the number 1. Why are polls any different?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Yudkowsky's 'Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation' · 2017-01-08T23:49:36.927Z · LW · GW

Is the example about an academic article on hyper computation real?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, Sep. 26 - Oct. 02, 2016 · 2016-09-27T04:50:58.684Z · LW · GW

Anybody have recommendations of a site with good summaries of the best/most actionable parts from self-help books? I've found Derek Sivers' book summaries useful recently and am looking for similar resources. I find that most self-help books are 10 times as long as they really need to be, so these summaries are really nice, and let me know whether it may be worth it to read the whole book.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, Jul. 18 - Jul. 24, 2016 · 2016-07-18T23:46:02.449Z · LW · GW

Robin Hanson's "The Age of Em" is a book about this sort of thing.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, Jun. 13 - Jun. 19, 2016 · 2016-06-16T02:51:24.867Z · LW · GW

What should you be doing right now if you believe that advances in AI are about to cause large-scale unemployment within the next 20 years (ignoring the issue of FAI for the sake of discussion)?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread May 16 - May 22, 2016 · 2016-05-31T02:15:23.224Z · LW · GW

Aside from allergies, also consider whether the digestive trouble could be due to anxiety or other psychological issues.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread Feb 16 - Feb 23, 2016 · 2016-02-21T06:25:37.365Z · LW · GW

Anyone have recommendations of fiction along the lines of Worm and HPMOR that are also very long (>400k words)?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, Oct. 26 - Nov. 01, 2015 · 2015-10-29T04:15:11.118Z · LW · GW

Anti-intellectual?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Group Rationality Diary, Oct. 6-18, 2015 · 2015-10-21T23:08:20.194Z · LW · GW

Are there any specific kinds of dancing lessons you'd recommend over others?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, Aug. 17 - Aug. 23, 2015 · 2015-08-21T23:38:48.934Z · LW · GW

What should you be doing right now if you believe that advances in AI are about to cause large-scale unemployment within the next 20 years (ignoring the issue of FAI for the sake of discussion)?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Crazy Ideas Thread · 2015-07-16T08:12:32.512Z · LW · GW

You could save up money for a few months then move to a country with a very cheap cost of living and live off your savings.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread, Jul. 13 - Jul. 19, 2015 · 2015-07-13T08:01:50.142Z · LW · GW

In a reddit AMA a couple of days ago, someone asked Sam Altman (president of Y Combinator) "How do you think we can best prepare ourselves for the advance of AI in the future? Have you and Elon Musk discussed this topic, by chance?" He replied:

Elon and I have discussed this many, many times. It's one of the things I think about most. Have some news coming here in a few months...

Any guesses on the news?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Interesting (or semi-interesting) part time jobs? · 2014-12-30T00:56:56.971Z · LW · GW

Tutoring? Put up flyers and sign up for wyzant (they take 40% at first, going down to 20% after you log many hours with them, which really sucks, but they're the only popular online marketplace for tutors).

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014 · 2014-04-22T00:14:43.479Z · LW · GW

The Feeling Good Handbook. It focuses specifically on Depression and Anxiety, but could probably be useful for anyone.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, 18-24 March 2014 · 2014-03-21T21:34:23.160Z · LW · GW

Thanks, I was going to take your advice, but I got lucky and found a nice place yesterday.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, 18-24 March 2014 · 2014-03-19T18:48:01.902Z · LW · GW

Long shot again:

Any LW NYCers have a room available for <$1,000 per month that I (a friendly self-employed 23-year-old male) might be able to move into within a week or two? Or leads on a 1br/studio for <$1400? I could also go a bit above those prices if necessary.

PM me if so and I'll send more details about myself. I'm also staying with some friends in NYC right now so we could meet up anytime.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 · 2014-03-14T11:57:11.118Z · LW · GW

Long shot:

I'm moving to NYC. Any LW NYCers have a room available for <$1,000 per month that I (a friendly self-employed 23-year-old male) might be able to move into within a week or two? Or leads on a 1br/studio for <$1200? I could also go a bit above those prices if necessary.

PM me if so and I'll send more details about myself.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 · 2014-03-13T00:29:12.410Z · LW · GW

I recommend you read The Motivation Hacker for techniques to get yourself to do what you know you should be doing, but can't bring yourself to do. I especially recommend Beeminder, especially this approach to using it.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 · 2014-03-12T03:24:45.908Z · LW · GW

If you want to make games, start doing it now. It's entirely possible for a single person to make great indie games. Working on that would also build skills that are useful for all 4 of the preferred careers you named.

It's okay if you find CS classes boring; the real test is whether you find working on real projects (such as your own indie games) boring.

Having lots of portfolio pieces will also help with finding a job.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 · 2014-03-08T03:58:43.844Z · LW · GW

there have also been a few huge disaster-threads recently that really damaged my personal affect regarding this community. When everybody in The Rationality Club (tm) starts acting like children, defect-defecting on each other and statusmongering and basically looking indistinguishable from my Facebook feed

I'm curious, which threads are you referring to?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 · 2014-02-24T01:26:50.775Z · LW · GW

I think complement can mean both too. E.g. red and green are complementary colors, whereas the sets "red" and "not-red" are complements).

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 · 2014-02-19T18:54:04.894Z · LW · GW

If you put a backslash before any closing parentheses in a url, it will work.00005-0)

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-12T03:36:41.839Z · LW · GW

More info: marginal utility

Comment by PECOS-9 on LessWrong Hamburg First Meetup Notes: Starting small · 2014-02-08T20:33:03.993Z · LW · GW

I had brought some books from the LW reading list I had in my collection

Do you have a link to the reading list?

Comment by PECOS-9 on How can I spend money to improve my life? · 2014-02-02T15:56:43.043Z · LW · GW

Improve the ergonomics of your computer situation:

  • Better chair
  • Better desk
  • Keyboard without a numpad so that the mouse doesn't need to be so far out
  • Bigger monitors/multiple monitors
  • If your computer is at all slow or annoying-to-use, consider whether better hardware could help that (and thus reduce the stress of using it). E.g. getting an SSD could decrease load times if you find those problematic

Buy nice clothes

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread, January 25- February 1 · 2014-01-27T00:22:39.785Z · LW · GW

PSA: You can download from scribd without paying, you just need to upload a file first (apparently any file -- it can be a garbage pdf or even a pdf that's already on scribd). They say this at the very bottom of their pricing page, but I didn't notice until just now.

Comment by PECOS-9 on How to become a PC? · 2014-01-26T19:17:43.191Z · LW · GW

Lukeprog's How to Beat Procrastination is a good instructional for building any kind of habit. Personally none of it really stuck for me until I read Nick Winter's The Motivation Hacker though (it has basically the same information as Luke's post, it just stuck with me more).

Beeminder is also a good way to pre-commit (mentioned in both Luke's post and The Motivation Hacker) to things in order to combat impulsiveness. I recommend this approach to using beeminder in order to also increase expectancy. Impulsiveness and expectancy are two of the components in the "procrastination equation," which, as Luke says, "accounts for every major finding on procrastination, and draws upon our best current theories of motivation."

Comment by PECOS-9 on What rationality material should I teach in my game theory course · 2014-01-14T04:25:49.399Z · LW · GW

Precommitment is an interesting aspect of game theory that ties in well with lukeprog's how to beat procrastination.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Habitual Productivity · 2014-01-11T02:53:21.758Z · LW · GW

Second, you make the things you want to do aversive by telling yourself to do them and then not doing them.

I think this is really important. It also fits into the procrastination equation by decreasing expectancy.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Habitual Productivity · 2014-01-11T02:43:46.742Z · LW · GW

Since you said in another comment your area of interest is medicine, you could study statistics (and work on statistics problem sets during boring lectures -- problem sets are just a type of puzzle that also build more useful skills besides keeping your brain busy).

Comment by PECOS-9 on The mechanics of my recent productivity · 2014-01-11T02:26:30.219Z · LW · GW

If you send an email to "1year@followupthen.com" with a reminder for yourself, you'll get an email reminder in 1 year.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 · 2013-12-10T18:31:42.050Z · LW · GW

Can you explain this? I always thought of game theory as being like calculus, and not about human values (like this comment says).

Comment by PECOS-9 on Failing to update · 2013-12-02T19:47:40.630Z · LW · GW

It sounds like some of these emotional issues could be helped by working through the exercises in a book like The Feeling Good Handbook, which has been shown to be about as effective as therapy for treating depression. Make sure you actually write out the exercises, don't just read them or think about them, you have to actually write for them to be effective.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013 · 2013-11-07T02:29:46.855Z · LW · GW

"It takes two to tango)" (not tangle)

Bonus related dinosaur comic

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread, October 13 - 19, 2013 · 2013-10-15T20:14:12.859Z · LW · GW

The Feeling Good Handbook has good evidence as a treatment for depression and could help you to identify and address your automatic thoughts caused by negative feedback.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Boring Advice Repository · 2013-10-06T19:57:22.200Z · LW · GW

The purpose of that suggestion is to protect against dictionary attacks. Agreed that the advice "should not contain any word in any language" is overly strict (better advice would be "should not simply be one or two words in some language").

Regardless, password recipes are a solution for the problem of coming up with a different password for different services. Even using the technique in the comic to remember phrases like "correct horse battery staple", it would be difficult to remember a different password for dozens of services compared to just remembering a single password recipe.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Boring Advice Repository · 2013-10-06T17:25:27.555Z · LW · GW

I like the approach of password recipes to have a unique password for each service without needing to memorize very much.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013 · 2013-09-24T14:52:51.131Z · LW · GW

Let me know if you find anything useful. I'm working on a project (though I haven't done anything on it since making that post).

fubarobfusco's reply to that post might be useful to you too.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Mistakes repository · 2013-09-09T23:08:58.268Z · LW · GW

Failing to do all sorts of things that I would have enjoyed merely because they involved some trivial inconvenience.

Can you be more specific (if you don't mind sharing)?

Comment by PECOS-9 on Which subreddits should we create on Less Wrong? · 2013-09-04T18:35:04.158Z · LW · GW

I was about to ask whether it would be difficult to include something like /r/all (i.e. the ability to view posts from all subreddits without having to visit each individually), when I tried just editing the url to http://lesswrong.com/r/all, and sure enough, it works (it shows posts from both Main and Discussion)!

Is this functionality documented anywhere? Also, is it possible to view just the post titles on /r/all, without the full text?

Edit: Yes, it is possible to view just post titles: http://lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts/

Comment by PECOS-9 on Simple investing for a complete beginner? (Just… developing world index funds?) · 2013-08-23T00:07:20.830Z · LW · GW

What do you mean by "have access to"?

Also, I'd be interested in that reading list, if it wouldn't be too much effort for you to put together.

Comment by PECOS-9 on "Mind reading" - how is this done? · 2013-08-15T19:10:03.112Z · LW · GW

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthypnotic_amnesia

"memory wiping" might not be the best term for it, since the memory is still in there, just really hard to access, but it's definitely a real effect.

I've also personally used hypnosis to achieve the effects on friends of mine (who I'm certain weren't just pretending), as well as to many strangers on omegle (who could have been pretending, but based on what I know about hypnosis I doubt they were).

Comment by PECOS-9 on "Mind reading" - how is this done? · 2013-08-15T15:56:09.883Z · LW · GW

I think that a lot of Derren Brown's stuff, while not exactly fake, is done by hypnotizing them off-camera.

So he either hypnotizes them and finds out some information then wipes the memory of them telling him the information, or he hypnotizes them and gives a post-hypnotic suggestion that they will make a specific choice (but not remember being hypnotized to make the choice).

Edit: This post received 4 downvotes, can someone explain? Is it because of a general skepticism about hypnosis? I gave a source on post-hypnotic amnesia below but I'm still receiving downvotes. Even if you think the supposed effects achieved by stage magicians are illegitimate in some way (e.g. people are just playing along), hypnosis as an explanation for how Derren Brown does these tricks is still valid.

Comment by PECOS-9 on Motivation and Merciless Commitment Contracts · 2013-08-08T14:14:04.016Z · LW · GW

Unless peirce is interested in going back to the clubs, that sounds like it could make the activity even better (from a getting-over-social-anxiety perspective).

Comment by PECOS-9 on Motivation and Merciless Commitment Contracts · 2013-08-08T02:17:22.497Z · LW · GW

So I could set up a commitment contract stating I must do each of these activities until my anxiety has decreased to half of its initial level by the end of a certain date.

I think a completely objective goal would be better, e.g. "I must do each activity at least 5 times".