bachbach

Habits are hard to break but I've also found it surprisingly easy to manipulate yourself by putting an annoying obstacle in the way. For getting work on time I can't snooze-beat the combination of a wake up light and a distantly located mobile alarm.

On internet use restriction the best solution so far has been to use a simple electronic plug timer connected to a laptop without a battery. Zap - no internet for you.

There ought to be a solution that installs itself into the computer's firmware though. Most of us on HN install new operating systems at a much higher rate than the typical user so having a persistent solution would be huge.

I have had this experience.

Still don't understand the fascination - maybe I had inferior quality bubble tea.

The US has its issues but nothing to complain about in comparison to Mexico or Brazil.

50,000 murders a year - that's a low intensity war.

Even elite University education in STEM is a terrible investment. All the people boostering it are recipients of multiple selection filters or from different age cohorts and really have no idea what the fuck they are talking about.

When you do the math - it's terrible compared to almost any other alternative - even minimum wage jobs.

This doesn't apply if you have a wealthy family and can be assured of a job with dad's company or other connections - but for a blue collar kid university is not a good route to fortune in the UK.

The level of effort required and the wages are simply not commensurate and everybody who thinks so is delusional because they're not comparing and contrasting the effort with other options. The stats are all skewed by confounding factors like half your class will be going to work for Goldman Sachs.

Modern universities are a way of manufacturing poor people with stunted ambitions, not upward social mobility.

But the word 'Capitalism' did not exist in Smith's day!

Quibble - this comes from Smith. It's not specifically a Marxist complaint - just one popular with them.

Like leveling up in an RPG!

Horseshoe Theory is not true.

Your supporting link says it has no substance - it's a simple meme that is wrong.

This subject annoys me because I am convinced that not only does the Horseshoe Theory have no predictive power - but also that it denies something which really is true - that political violence can come out of the Center aka from Liberalism.

This is a huge blindspot in modern political culture. Conflict coming out of the Center would be a true Black Swan event.

It is true and no argument is required - just observation of history.

If you examine the history of political philosophy of Liberalism you shall see immediately that Republicans and Democrats are both part of the Liberal Party.

I know some people come to this conclusion by viewing it as a conspiracy but it's really not.

That modern day Democrats are called Liberals causes confusion because from the historical context they are just a subset of Liberals. The older definition includes most Conservatives and Libertarians.

Political philosophy is a family tree. If you go back into the history you find that apparent enemies are more accurately described as competitors.

This is demonstrated in the present each time there is an external threat too.

Communism and Monarchy are both Western political philosophies that reject Liberalism. If you say far right or far left and this group still supports the goals of political Liberalism then you've made a category error.

I use the keep warm feature on my instant pot as an alternative to a microwave. I'm not paranoid about microwaves - I just don't like constantly cleaning them.

People are definitely reluctant to retract that bit of gospel and it's not a good look. IIRC Flynn himself was circumspect and the memory is uncertain but I thought he pointed to the recent reversal too.

This sort of collective amnesia happens often if you look out for it and this makes me suspicious of other conventional wisdom I see peddled here and on Reddit. Is it probably true because a lot of people think so or is it true because it chimed with a story. The mind warping powers of politics are well known but maybe the conceit every person shares is that we feel there ought to be a nice coherent story like a box to put things into - meanwhile Reality/Nature/God gives zero fucks about all that.

Atsushi Horiba seems to think this is rubbish.

Does he have a point?

Those don't seem to fit the application I'm thinking of but thanks for trying.

I sometimes carry a notepad and pen, but I thought something might exist - electronic - but with the speed and flexibility of an analog pad and pen - then I could incorporate ideas with orgmode or other organization software.

Literally I wanted to be making notes a moment after thinking a thought - no lag of any sort.

Think this is one of the universals. It's not that we're good at it - it's that there exist other cultures worse still.

I hope you're not an American.

Look up Myron Ferguson's 'Drywall' book - it's the bible on it.

But you're borrowers!

The basic policy of every political faction used to be an extremist position. Free markets were a radical idea (the Kings and Queens of Europe favoured mercantilism), readopting an interpretation of Greek democracy from 2500 years ago was a revolutionary idea and everything to do with political liberalism was definitely considered by the monarchy and aristocracy to be extreme.

I can't believe this is still a middle class meme, some ideas die hard.

Universities have been sliding downhill for a long time and they know why because they operate the nightclub protocol for entry.

Geography and formal education not what links the people I mentioned. Correlation, causation, you know the mantra.

I suspect this appears to be true but it is an illusion. This is because although you're right there's an incredible complexity to manage - we've been actually doing that using abstraction for a long time by inventing black boxes - sometimes literally white coloured boxes like fridges and washing machines that take away the necessity of thinking about the nuance in domain X but also the development of ideas that abstract out.

We can also make something look very complicated if we try, by switching context, multitasking, improper coordination.

The natural world (think of coal mining, making bicyles, stream engines) always looks very challenging if you're starting out.

> It's also important to distinguish between projects that are deep vs. broad (i.e. those solved by new thinking vs. those solved by scaling up).

Agree.

> As technology has advanced, deep projects just get deeper. Although each level of technology builds on the last, there is still complexity added at every level.

But we see conceptually simple projects everywhere that aren't being done!

We literally use the same tech to construct roads as the Romans. That is trillions of dollars in maintenance.

We know that natural sunlight and biomes would improve people's health in buildings where we spend 99% of our time. We just don't do anything about it apart from a window and a potted rubber plant or two.

We clean our butts with paper! The Koreans and Japanese had this one solved years ago!

There is no great wealth of complexity in any of these - it's just that we've decided not to think about them for legacy reasons.

We could talk all day but sadly I must go to work to obtain those calories! ;-)

It's always fun talking with you though and I appreciate it.

I'll make one point though.

> Removing selective pressure, possibly another.

I think this one is underrated - there is a strong incentive for us to want to believe the removal of pressure is a good thing - then call that problem solved - it's a black box we no longer think about and close shop on that.

You may know of Mike Rowe - the blue collar jobs advocate.

I think he and David Krakauer are often saying something similar - which is that a loss of contact with the tools in our brains which solve certain problems can (sometimes) produce stagnation as individuals and society - it gets us flying away from Musk's 'first principals' beliefs.

The whole video is worth watching but this short segment illustrates the point:

https://youtu.be/pi7h6nmkvAM?t=1900

I've similar impressions.

I think - and this risks sounding self absorbed - that we've become more sophisticated because of the Internet - at least in some ways.

Closer feedback loop because flow of information is higher. You might have thought "this is bullshit" before but this feeling was more widely spaced before when journalism was in print form.

Some subgroups in society like the extremes were easier to dismiss as irrelevant because we couldn't really point to anything concrete representing their existence. This will probably be a downvote attractor but I wouldn't have believed SJWs were real people before the web existed. I'd heard of them before but presumed them the ravings of hyperbolic conservatives.

The number of people in these subgroups isn't large but large changes in society usually happen when the subgroup mainstreams an idea - so appreciating that extremist minority groups are important - is important - that idea development is an ecology and even that policy cannot come from the center. I think this is why when politics stalls support flows into fat tails - normally thought of as a bad thing but it's a survival instinct - this idea is slippery because from the evolutionary view conflict isn't a pure bad - lack of reproduction is.

> A not-uncommon example is "fact" pieces that assume the mental state or thought processes of various public officials with no quotes or really anything to back them up.

I really hate this, I'd call it an allergy! The worse version of this is that most dishonest form of journalism where the piece attempts - inception-like - to insert the thought process into yours. It's not compare and think or think within this framework - it's think like me. For this reason I dislike Fox but I really, really hate NPR.

In the construction industry there are no bullshit jobs. Zero.

However only 50% of the house price comes from the construction industry, I have another comment suggesting part of why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18040633

There needs to be a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently. There are only so many Gwerns and Scott Alexanders and Dredmorbiuses out there. There really are not that many people out there thinking about and discussing the Big Ideas and you keep running into the same ones over time. I fear many club members are lost in the blogosphere and near impossible to find with Google.

Some possible answers:

> Spending on healthcare > cost of college > construction costs > childcare costs

There are many complex reasons why costs can rise in any area, but the common theme between them is something you already know - the propaganda machine told everybody that university degrees meant belonging to the middle class club with accompanying benefits aka house ownership, a high status mate, healthy income, respect.

Turns out this is a bad model. There are diminishing returns for not only college degrees but even that knowledge itself in relation to what other parts of society do. The fuzzier and understudied/underappreciated areas of construction skill, caring (including healthcare - recall Robin Hanson's contention that 50% of healthcare costs are just people wanting to feel supported) have been deprived of talent and that is what is driving up costs across the board - supply and demand.

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

My opinion is the same as Thiels I think - it's that our ability to do complex coordination is dropping. The reasons why? Information is an ecology - Cal Newport will tell us distraction or context switching is a sin if you want complex coordination and that is right - but also I believe in The Ladybird Book Theory which is that our education - taken broadly - has given us a false impression of complexity instead of thinking from first principals (notice how the old ladybird books are written - the kind of thing kids used to read) - which is something Musk puts a lot of weight on. The Elon/Cal thesis might be that "leave out some stuff - focus on key principals intensely". It sounds trite but I think it is right.

From a ROI point of view - not very many people in society need to be very very good at driving projects - so if you focused on making super-coordinators aka a new form education for those selected for Big Tasks should pay off immediately.

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

My guess is energy.

> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?

Sunset clauses are one but I don't really know because the main way seems to be just forgetting. I think when our institutions screw up it can get bad enough that the fix was a thousand years later we forgot that was even a problem.

> How do we help more experimental cities get started?

An idea.

You need to build a machine that compacts garbage into a substrate that can be used to form new land offshore. Nearly all prosperous cities are near water and produce garbage. It should be possible to gradually build experimental islands while solving the garbage problem so it's all in the technical detail of designing a machine that makes blocks/substrate out of the garbage. It pays for itself and building pyramids starts with understanding how to make a single brick.

> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

Maybe human to human communication is weirder than we think. In education you're conventionally thinking about transmitting information, understanding from A to B but maybe because our common ancestors have spent millions of years in forests and other environments instead of classrooms they transmit information to each other in ways which sound a bit odd to us. Think of pheromones, our sense of smell, hearing somebody's voice unmediated by electronics, seeing somebody's posture body language - these could all form metainformation about the information in language that is very helpful in the student/tutor relationship.

Think also of the 'sleeping dictionary' - a person in a couple who learns his or her spouse's native language learns it really fast. It can sound a bit woo-ish but I think it'll be objectively measurable.

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?

I don't know but I really like Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (subtitle: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer").

Wikiquote: "At the age of four, Nell receives a stolen copy of an interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion, in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, &c., originally intended for the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw's granddaughter. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth and Fiona, girls who receive similar books. The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life, as defined by "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an "interesting life" is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop."

> Could there be more good blogs?

I've been moping about this recently too. I hope this was not a passing trend. The main social networks seem sterile.

I'll take a stab.

Two ways in which that could be so is -

Your society succumbs to accumulative negative side affects that lead to a civilization scale heart attack. Pollution, barbarians, (lack of) land reform, diversity zoo taxing coordination ability.

Your society is too rigorous at its maintenance - initially hypersuccessful but becomes overtaken by competitors that managed to bottle enough chaos to produce improvement without falling apart. Analogy being a very clean human would have an unhealthy immune system or homogenous microbiome - making them susceptible. China might be the archetype.

Were either of these what you had in mind? Both include predation but are almost at odds. The main idea might be that a society needs to exercise in many different ways to have a high adaptability score but not too much. This is in the zip code of what David Krakauer (complex systems theory) seems to worry about too. He seems to suggest that we should be teaching children and ourselves lots of useless skills (reading the classics?) because they could exercise our brains in productive ways - that the use of technology to replace human cognition can be a trap.

Wanted there to be some images of it.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/y3jX2tKIau0/maxresdefault.jpg

Don't give up :)

I think that is wrong - it's more like The Frame Problem.

It's not really that right wingers think the news is lying to them in a direct sense. It's more like they believe the entire frame of discussion is wrong. I'm not an American but I'd concur with that sentiment in general when I listen to NPR. You could listen to NPR for years without realizing the experience of many Americans directly contradicts the story themes on offer, yet many other Americans do have an experience which is sympathetic to the same themes.

This is because of social class. Different people have different experiences - but because of social stratification what has happening is that some people consistently have a difference experience of the world.

In Hidden Brain - an NPR podcast - a social science researcher and mother relates how she had the impression most mothers breastfed their kids, bought organic food, went to yoga. It's only through her analytic research that she came to the understanding this is a minority, a sort of elite.

A zip code away - you'll have some people who have had their car broken into 17 times, burglarized 5 times - every time by people with the same skin colour.

I leave the results to your imagination.

NPR and Russia Today will make one of those scenarios sound normal, the other abnormal but they're the result of the same sorting affect.

Scott Alexander makes the point that this clustering affect can happen even when you go out of your way to prevent it. He says he doesn't have any Christian Republican friends on his Facebook account - but they're half the country. He didn't try to do this - it just happened that way.

The probability of this happening by accident is astronomical - yet each one of us is in a similar peculiar bubble. Worth reflecting that this makes it harder to understand each other.

This is some bullshit.

I hope everybody with the question "Why aren't there that many Elon Musk type individuals in the world?" is satisfied with the answer.

I understand he fucked up but that is not the point.

There are people who play fast and loose with the rules who never get punished because they're practically the government. Recall the financial crisis. China would have executed dozens of people - a symbolic gesture but an important one.

Then there are people outside the magic circle who get autofucked the minute they steer wrong.

We KNOW Eric Schmidt for a FACT suppressed wages for thousands of employees, him and other Silicon Valley corporations - and even honest CEOs were being bullied and blackmailed into such a scheme. For this? Crickets.

I'm very much in favour of capitalism but this is some bullshit.

People talking shit on the internet isn't a problem - it's that real name policy large numbers of people opted into and still think is acceptable.

In the future organizations will be run by mysterious persons - everybody with a real name sooner or later put "I am an idiot" on the web's permanent record by depleting their credibility in some way. The only person who seems immune is The Orange Man. Recall Paul Graham - the founder of this website, mild mannered - it didn't save him from attack. I don't know the full story but it seems he got fed up of Silicon Valley's character assassination subroutine.

If I am wrong you have to believe the outrage culture takes a bow and exits - people relax and move on. Hmmmmm

This is meta, but I know you enjoy meta dredmorbius/Cat with the Glasses.

All the debates we have are internal debates.

We are Westerners. They have three schools of thought in politics. The Left, the Right and the Liberals. These may be compared to a three set Venn Diagram - related but different.

Everything we think is inside the three school paradigm - that is our Western Orthodoxy.

We have got something from the fundamentals right or we wouldn't be, and it's amazing this isn't stated for the bare fact it is more often - the largest and most successful human civilization in human history by every metric there is.

The problem is of course we are likely wrong about something that will prove our undoing. The question is: what are those things?

The natural tendency is to promote our preferred school over the others but this is a weakness. You can imagine the Romans or Chinese looking at their civilization's decline in retrospect - giving their just-so-story of why it happened. In most cases it is going to be blaming the usual suspects aka the failure modes of competing schools and that isn't enough to explain something systematic. I expect that Joesph Tainter's way of thinking is closer to the mark in getting to real answers - which should be possible.

This may not be a specific answer to the question "what will undo us?" but what jumps out at me is how all Westerners presume their school of thought to be a universal as the monotheistic religions have of their beliefs but there is nothing easier than to show Leftist/Rightist/Liberal dogma does not hold relevance in other times and places. Why didn't the Greeks invent the Industrial Revolution? Maybe they weren't looking for the kinds of answers that would have taken them to new forms of energy and transport because they placed importance on other things.