Mr. Money Mustache has a lot of really good advice that I find a lot of value from. However, I think Mr. Money Mustache underestimates the ease and impact of opportunities to grow income relative to cutting spending - especially if you're in (or can be in) a high-earning field like tech. Doubling your income will put you on a much faster path than cutting your spending a further 5%.

PredictionBook is really great for lightweight, private predictions and does everything you're looking for. Metaculus is great for more fully-featured predicting and I believe also supports private questions, but may be a bit of overkill for your use case. A spreadsheet also seems more than sufficient, as others have mentioned.

Thanks. I'll definitely aim to produce them more quickly... this one got away from me.

My understanding is that we also have and might in the future also spend a decent amount of time in a "level 2.5", where some but not all non-essential businesses are open (i.e., no groups larger than ten, restaurants are closed to dine-in, hair salons are open).

A binary search strategy still could be more efficient, depending on the ratio of positives to negatives.

What about binary search?

This is a good answer.

Not really an answer, but a statement and a question - I imagine this is literally the least neglected issue in the world right now. How much does that affect the calculus? How much should we defer to people with more domain expertise?

Introduction to Statistical Learning

This paper also seems helpful: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.11118.pdf

Answered here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YAwLfgwhg7opp3rTp/please-take-the-2019-ea-survey#G8Hn64AEyh3uMY2SG

The EA Survey is closing today! Please take! https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/EAS2019LW

Thanks!

It could also be on the list of pros, depending on how one uses LW.

Are you offering to take donations in exchange for pressing the button or not pressing the button?

What happens if you don't check off everything for the day?

This sounds fairly similar to being on a board of a non-profit.

Nice post. I'd be curious to hear what all the monthly themes were.

Does anyone know if there are links to purchase some of this online?

Yes. I ultimately chose to go into programming. You can see how the story unfolds here:

http://everydayutilitarian.com/essays/i-now-have-approximately-five-career-categories/ http://everydayutilitarian.com/essays/comparing-across-my-five-career-categories/ http://everydayutilitarian.com/essays/my-careers-conversation-with-holden-karnofsky/ http://everydayutilitarian.com/essays/my-conversation-with-satvik-beri/ http://everydayutilitarian.com/essays/my-case-study-i-mostly-finished-choosing-between-careers/ https://80000hours.org/2014/10/update-on-peters-career-story/

Have you thought about Vimium instead of Karabiner?

Thanks for the feedback.

I added a paragraph to above saying: "We're also using this as a way to build up the online EA community, such as featuring people on a global map of EAs and with a list of EA Profiles. This way more people can learn about the EA community. We will ask you in the survey if you would like to join us, but you do not have to opt-in and you will be opted-out by default."

Why do you think this? The outside view suggests this won't happen -- disclosing success and failure is uncommon in the non-profit space.

It seems to have had consequences for at least one poster (namely, the OP).

I think we should change this, because a lack of fixed rules makes LW pretty hard to use and helps keep it dead.

This is pretty cool -- I like the write-up. I don't mean to pry into your life, but I would find it interesting to see an example of how you answer these questions. It would help me internalize the process more.

What category does writing posts go under? I'm impressed you can do a day job, write posts, and still have a lot of messing around time! :)

10:20-1 work meeting (1hr40mins)

Still nitpicking, 10:20-1 is 2hr40min.

Ok, that's pretty cool. Thanks!

I'd be curious to hear more about what you did with this information once you had it.

Nitpick:

10:20-1 work meeting (40mins)

1-1:30 lunch (30mins)

You have a hole in your schedule with 2hrs unaccounted for.

To me, the tone came across as "Ho ho ho, look at those stupid GiveWell people who have never heard of the streetlight effect! They're blinded by their own metrics and can't even see how awesome MIRI is!" when there's no interaction or acknowledgement with (a) materials from GiveWell that address the streetlight effect argument, (b) OpenPhil, or (c) how to actually start to resolve the problem (or even that the problem is particularly hard).

I don't want to have a high demand for rigor, especially for Discussion-type posts -- for me, it's more about the lack of humility.

I downvoted because this feels overly smug to me. I think it's a legitimate issue, but GiveWell has made many arguments for why they do what they do, and OpenPhil has made some progress on figuring out how to evaluate AI organizations. Sure, many fields might very well be vastly more fruitful, but they also might not. How do we know which ones?

Done.

Would you consider extending the offer to MIRI, Living Goods or Development Media International (for those unfamiliar: the first being the AI organisation that sponsors this website, the last two being 2 of GiveWell's standout charities?

At the moment we would prefer to not extend the offer to MIRI. This is because we think it’s valuable to keep an organization fairly focused on doing a few things well and fundraising for MIRI currently falls out of Charity Science’s scope. It’s also legally dubious whether or not Charity Science can use its resources to influence money to groups not involved in alleviating poverty.

We are more than happy to extend the offer to Living Goods or Development Media International. We do recommend bequests to GiveWell’s top charities though because GiveWell’s fluidity and flexibility will allow their recommendations to change over time, which means that they’re an excellent choice to leave a bequest to. This is in contrast to another charity that may be effective now but may not be 30 years from now.

I think it's good advice generally speaking, but it won't work for beginners. Studying great code is a great way to go from intermediate to expert, but if you haven't already gone from beginner to intermediate than you probably won't be able to recognize what is good code or understand why it is good.

When I was 16, I spent a lot of time "analyzing signals", and it never went well.

It's also possible that people might reasonably disagree with one or more of MIRI's theses.

Also see this reply by econblogger Noah Smith.

Solution: get an eBook edition or get a used hardcover and take off the dust jacket.

I enjoyed it a lot as an Audiobook.

Hey, thanks for the insight! You hit right on the head what benefit I derive from this, and I think you're right that I neglected to notice that the benefit is pretty different from that of the original Pomodoro. And, I actually still do use the original Pomodoro when I need to bust through tasks I really don't want to do, because the "It's only 25 minutes" is pretty compelling. Good point.

but [Pomodoro's] rigidity doesn't lend itself well to a lot of tasks that I deal with - reading papers and writing code, mainly. In both cases, it takes a lot of work to wrap my head around things, and I lose that if I take a break at the wrong time.

I definitely have this problem too, now that I write a lot more code than I used to back in Aug 2013. You may be interested in my proposed solution, the Pomodoro for programmers.

You can turn them on through [gear symbol] > Settings > General > Keyboard shortcuts. I'd also recommend turning on Auto-advance (also in Settings > General, I like it at "Go to the Previous (older) conversation").

Thanks! Knew about the shortcuts, but auto-advance is a huge boost to my email workflow!

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I'm about a week into trying out this system (with some modifications), and it feels really, really good.

What modifications?

Reduce further -- "what part of the character traits that you and others see yourself as possessing do you value?"

The question "what part of your identity is of value to you?" sounds like it can rescue the original philosophical meaning of the question, I think.

That's a good point. I often eat while working or during my fifteen minute break, and I agree that feels very important for keeping my energy up. I don't know if I ought to dedicate time to eating and only eating, or if I should not eat for the two hour work block, though.