chillacy

The author of “Die With Zero” makes an interesting observation: Experiences do compound in a way: the longer you have an experience, the more you can surface the memory over your life, leading to memories of memories which are themselves pleasant.

Adam smith wrote a short philosophy book about this back in the day about this very topic. (something like: what is worse: stubbing your toe, or a natural disaster somewhere remote which kills thousands but doesn’t affect you personally).

I wouldn’t say it’s “the answer” but it is “a candidate answer”

The parent said the metric was “people” not a rate of people normalized by total population, so by virtue of there being more people alive today than ever, many stats like this will be technically true but imo uninteresting.

The question of whether race or location is the causal factor seems to just be different dimensions of the same thing, no? Given that they pretty much correlate though most of history.

I found two books so far that had pretty actionable plans to address this.

They first is Difficult Conversations, largely about nonviolent communication, which provides a structured template for “learning conversations”. The relevant advice was: when you feel a strong feeling of disagreement, you tell the other person instead of bottling it up, which lets you ll then transition to a listening state. Like: “When I heard that my first instinct was to disagree because of X. At the same time I know you (insert reason like “have different life perspectives” or “are my friend and care about me”) so I would like to learn more.

The second is The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leaders, which offers a metaphor for the mental state between judgement and curiosity they call “the line”. Being “above the line” is a state of curiosity, “below the line” is judgement and defensiveness. The book goes into physiological reasons, the advice they give is to develop strong awareness of your emotions to detect when you go below the line, then use breathing exercises to quickly resurface. They also have other exercises for developing empathy for other points of view you can do on your own, like isolating narratives from facts and working through all possible narratives for a given situation (like “Tom thinks I am incompetent, I think Tom is incompetent, Tom thinks I am competent, I think Tom is competent”)

I’ve used both to some pretty good success so far, after receiving some feedback that I was not listening well.

I’ve been contemplating this topic as well, though more for social issues which I think that I’ve thought deeper on than the other person. The end state is that I believe that I know more than them and therefore my conclusions are “more correct”. It results in a physiological response and I end up in an argumentative state trying to get them to see my position but in the process, failing to query their point of view.

I’m torn because I think there are genuine cases where I do have more information, but I don’t want to become an argumentative person, and logically if offered a 1% choice to possibly learn something new, it would be more beneficial to learn than to not.

I was thinking next time I could try to guess their assumptions and reasoning and they can fill me in on the difference. Then point out and see if they accounted for any extra information I had.

I once heard this observation: judgement and curiosity are two distinct states of mind. If you’re curious about something, you cannot simultaneously be judgmental.

I don’t know if this is satirical or not but 275k for 3yoe is near the top of that band (assuming the startup equity is liquid). I think the parent has very generous stock appreciation going on, as $GOOG roughly tripled in the past 3 years

Just speculation, but there is a possibility that the old employer sought retribution against an employee who left by lying to the new company to sink the employee’s career? With laws like this it’s often a case of “it happened (at least) once so we wrote a new law”.

You can test at home with rapid antigen tests, for something like $15 per test where I live in the US. You can also swab at home for PCR tests but by the time you mail it in, a few days will pass and it sort of defeats the purpose of doing a PCR test in the first place (early detection).

Thanks, this actually matches my initial intuition about the matter. It's been awhile since I've looked up info in this area, partly due to the fact that a lot of IQ test proponents I spoke to seemed to have a great deal of personal identity staked in its significance.

Hang enough long enough on the internet and you’ll see a lot of hindsight bias. Or “first it’s is impossible, then it becomes obvious”

That’s a good take. I get the impression that some people just take his word because he has a Nobel prize.

Relatedly, do you have on Taleb? Given that Taleb and Krugman seem to have beef.

Do you have a source for “practice makes you better”? Last I checked only N-back benefits from practice, the rest doesn’t.

Couldn’t one also say that getting into Harvard just proves they were privileged enough to jump the criteria for selection? Eg parents sent them to volunteer abroad and varsity crew? How can any admissions criteria not get gamed over time?

Afaik they do this because they wanted to avoid admitting so many Jewish students in the 1900s.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...

Also related to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap

Shouldn't ITAR make this a non-issue?

> If "changing the American system", then I think that's what he wants. He seems to want industrial policy, possibly state control of industry -- whatever it takes to employ everyone and give them good wages. A Republican pivot to the working class.

Yea I also read it that way. Reading between the lines a bit, I see some of a desire for the America in the 50s and 60s, not super uncommon of a sentiment for a variety of reasons.

In retrospect I should have just co-opted the author's language:

> In the struggle between tradition and economic reality, tradition simply ends up being destroyed

If there are two dependent variables: economic reality and tradition, the author wants to fix tradition and find the economic reality which allows for that.

I would posit that historically, the long term trend is for tradition to change to match economic realities, so the way out of this might be to find new traditions which are self sustaining (positive birth rates or birth+immigration as the author says).

This is a very well reasoned article. The central thesis is that if culture follows economic realities (a notion I first encountered in Sapiens but have come to strongly believe), then readers (seems the audience consists of US cultural conservatives) should focus their efforts on changing the underlying economics, not waging the culture war.

> No amount of snappy YouTube videos decrying the “degeneracy” of current elite trends, no amount of influencers selling the “trad lifestyle” to Instagram followers, no amount of pithy arguments aimed at defeating some imagined foe with “facts and logic” will affect these issues in any meaningful way

> In the struggle between tradition and economic reality, tradition simply ends up being destroyed, excepting the few parts that can be adapted to serve completely new ends.

I would posit that a 3rd option exists that the author dismissed, but it would be to move to a new system (which is self-sustaining, unlike birth + immigration that the author dismisses) to match the new realities. I get that conservative thought is that it's safest to cling to that which we know, but with all the changes so far (and to come with automation), it might be as fruitless as running a knowledge economy like a feudal monarchy.

Afaik solana full nodes require basically datacenter level networking (unless you have like gigabit fiber at home) while more people could run an Eth full node at home on cable internet. That's one aspect of a sacrifice in decentralization in the Eth vs Solana debate.

The author could be practicing a superforecasting exercise of coming up with probability estimates and grading them at the end of the year to calibrate, but this author doesn't show his work as to where these estimates come from.

For example:

> In hindsight the 70% prediction was somewhat overconfident, and a prediction of about 45% would have been better

That's a huge post-hoc adjustment, what factors were important? Just because a p70 event does not occur does not mean that it did not warrant a p70 at the time.

Afaik markets use multisig now, so the facilitator never has access to the funds unilaterally.

Certainly morality is a shared part of us all, it was evolved to create ingroup cohesion and resist outgroups in humans, so there are a lot of commonalities like reciprocity, justice, etc.

It’s the divvying up of ingroup and out group that tend to create disagreements in morality. I.e. we understand forgiveness, but we disagree who is worthy. We understand justice but we disagree who deserves punishment or why.

That tends to make a pretty big difference in results and conclusions.

I'm partial myself to two books from the Harvard Negotiation Project (Douglas Stone, Shiela Heen, et al): Thanks for the Feedback (on how to receive feedback), and Difficult Conversations (on how to give feedback). I imagine books about the topic tend to all provide similar frameworks, I happen to like these two because they're very structured and I do well with that.

> Nobody knew who won, and there was a lot of misinformation spreading.

It was also very confusing to watch the live chat on YouTube. There was no authoritative communication on the official twitter or website about who would be bidding on their behalf. Nobody knew who the person representing ConstitutionDAO was, or if Constitution DAO was even participating at all. A good number of commenters were convinced it was a "rugpull" / scam.

Then as the article says, in the twitter audio room afterwards there was the "Dewey Defeats Truman" thing. Having gone through a few election cycles in the US, I must say it did remind me of election day results, but that's not a compliment.

Lee Kwan Yew gave an excellent speech on this topic, applied to how journalism works in the US (where it acts as a distributed force for accountability) vs Singapore, where he talks about how Singapore has found other ways to achieve accountability and how outsourcing accountability to the press comes with its own trade offs (the press has its own interests; they are usually for-profit players). He made a very compelling point that countries will arrive at different systems very naturally as a result of different initial starting conditions, that all systems have trade offs, etc. Then in the end the journalists proceed to ask him the most thoughtless questions imaginable which I recall reduced to “but how will you be free without a free press”.

It’s on YouTube somewhere.

These are good insights, I get the sense maybe that you may be tracking your predictions or at least are revisiting them more than most people. The common behavior is to forget just how uncertain the past was.

Or summarized: first things seem impossible, then they seem obvious.

Oh totally, but GP never said the words "normal", only "much"

> they don't get paid much

which is how I suppose we're on the topic of arguing the semantics of "much". I think GP should have said "as much" to clarify, since this is a comparison between two specific jobs.

FAANG senior engineers get in around 350-400k and with recent stock appreciation some are hitting 400-600 depending on tenure and company performance.

Source: levels.fyi