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Owning Multiple Copies of Objects Can Reduce Attention Costs
| 339 wordsI own multiple copies of many objects so I have to spend less attention doing things like remembering to bring them places, actually bringing them places, charging them, plugging them into other objects, etc. Examples: Having two pairs of noise canceling headphones means that I don’t have to remember to...
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Coase's Theorem Means The Customer Doesn't Have To Always Be Right
| 374 wordsSometimes, when I’m buying a good or service, the person selling me this good or service is rude to me. In the past I’ve thought this was pretty unreasonable because I was trying to pay them money for the thing they were trying to sell me, so shouldn’t they be...
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Overly Specific Reviews: Tongue Scrapers, Floss Picks, and Whiteboard Markers
| 600 wordsMost sites review things along dimensions like quality and cost. However, sometimes there are properties that various objects have that are pretty important that don’t get mentioned in reviews. In the spirit of optimizing literally everything, I will present my favorite objects in pretty narrow categories and explain why they...
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Your Time Might Be More Valuable Than You Think
| 1909 wordsSummary People often seem to implicitly value their time at the amount they can convert hours to dollars given their current skills. However, the value of saving the marginal hour today is to increase the total number of one’s working hours by one, resulting in a new hour at the...
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Review: A Really Short History of Nearly Everything
| 859 wordsI recently finished Bill Bryson’s A Really Short History of Nearly Everything. This book wasn’t very good, and I wouldn’t recommend it. However, I learned some useful things both at the meta and object levels, which I will relay in bullet point form. The book contains a number of factual...
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Quirks with the Solomonoff Prior
| 593 wordsA standard formalization of Occam’s razor is to fix some universal turing machine, weight all programs for that machine exponentially inversely related to their complexity, and then say the prior of a given bit string is the sum of all the weights of all programs that output that bit string....
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Insights from Complications
| 930 wordsAtul Gawande’s Complications is a tour of the medical system through the lens of a series of case studies. The cases are interspersed with semi-philosophical commentary. The prose is easy to read. Here are some insights that the book gave me (note that the book is from 1999, so some...
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The Simulation Hypothesis Undercuts the SIA/Great Filter Doomsday Argument
| 2238 wordsThis post was written by Mark Xu based on interviews with Carl Shulman. It was paid for by Open Philanthropy but is not representative of their views. Summary The absence of evidence for extraterrestrial life suggests the existence of a Great Filter, a set of factors that in combination drive...
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How well can people distinguish tastes?
| 601 wordsRecently, my friend claimed that he could tell the difference between two brands of sparkling water. I expressed skepticism. After testing, I’m now moderately confident that he can. The reason I was skeptical seems to be downstream of a tendency I have to assign less weight than other people on...
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TAP Inventory
| 753 wordsThe acronym TAP stands for trigger-action planning/pattern and describes roughly what people think of as “habits.” A particularly interesting application of this concept is to mental habits, patterns of thinking that might robustly cause individuals to have better reasoning and decision-making abilities. Here are some of the mental habits that...