LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Disclaimer: I am no expert or even amateur on this topic.

The Little Prover and The Little Typer might also be of interest. I played some with https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/ , and I liked it. It is an interactive textbook. I recommend using it with Emacs (Spacemacs has a coq layer).

I'd recommend checking out mild nootropics used by other cultures on a daily basis. Slow-burning 'highs', like the kind you get from South American maté, seem easier for my body to handle than the steep and sharp coffee buzz. There's also the obligatory meditation plug, but it's probably pretty reasonable to assume that anyone interested in changes in subjective experience has given it a try already.

I wouldn't say it's bad advice; it depends heavily on the context of the work.In an environment where you have some combination of:

1) a tight feedback loop with the relevant stakeholder (ideally the individual(s) who are going to be using the end product),

2) the product itself is amenable to quick iteration (i.e. composed of many smaller features, ideally with a focus on the presentation),

3) the requirements aren't clear (for example, the client has a mostly intuitive sense of how certain features should work; perhaps there are many implicit business rules that aren't formally written down anywhere but will come up as obviously "oh, it's missing the ability to do [x]" as the product gains capabilities)

...then avoiding significant investment in upfront design and adopting an iterative approach will very often save you spending a bunch of time designing something that doesn't fit your stakeholder's needs.

On the other hand, if you're operating in an environment where those conditions don't exist, such as one where you're mostly working on features or products that aren't easily broken down into smaller components that can be individually released or demoed to a stakeholder, and you have fairly clear requirements upfront that don't often change (or you have access to a product manager who you work with to iterate on the requirements until they're sufficiently well-detailed), then doing upfront design can often save you a lot of headache in wandering down dark alleys of "oops, we totally didn't account for how we'd incorporate this niche but relatively predictable use-case, so we optimized our design in ways which makes it very difficult to add without redoing a lot of work".

Having some experience with both, I'll say that the second seems better, in the sense that there are fewer meetings and interruptions, and the work is both faster and more pleasant, since there's less context-switching, conditional on the planning and product design being competent enough to come up with requirements that won't change too often.The downsides when it goes wrong do seem larger (throwing away three months of work feels a lot worse than throwing away two weeks), but ultimately that degenerates into a question of mitigating tail risk vs optimizing for upside, and I have yet to lose three months of work (though I did manage to lose almost two consecutive months working at an agile shop prior to this, which was part of a broader pattern that motivated my departure).I would recommend side-stepping that by attempting to find a place that does the "planning" thing well; at that point whether the team you're on is shipping small features every week or two or working on larger projects that span months is more a question of domain rather than effective strategy.

I like the general idea, but I'd be wary of venturing so far in terms of privacy that the usability becomes terrible and no-one wants to use it.

Hi! I've been reading LessWrong and Slate Star Codex for years, but until the today's events commented pretty much exclusively on SSC. Hope everything will resolve to the better, although personally I'm rather pessimistic.

In any case, I've been wondering for a while is there any online places for casual discussions a-la SSC Open Threads, but more closely related to Less Wrong and the Bay Area rationalist community? Threads like this are one such place obviously, but they seem rare and unpopulated. I've tried to fins facebook groups, but with very limited success. Any recommendations?

If it happens before the publication, it wouldn't be retaliation, but more like a commitment to retaliate. If there's people making a fuss about the reporter's current intention to publish, it's a pretty clear signal what would happen if they follow through.

If it gets them to change their minds in time before the publication, that seems like the best outcome.

I agree with that prediction, but that seems a given, with how Scott has called his supporters to action with emailing the NYT. Such a coordination is gonna draw the attention regardless.

I think something like "market inefficiency" might be the word. Disclaimer - I'm not an economist and don't know the precise technical meaning of this term. But roughly speaking, the situations you describe seem to be those where the law of supply and demand is somehow prevented from acting directly on the monetary price, so the non-monetary "price" is increased/decreased instead. In the case of the apartments, they'd probably be happy to increase the price until they've got exactly the right number of applicants but are kept from doing it by rent control or reputation or something, so they incur moral costs on the applicants. In case of hiring, they're probably kept from lowering their wages through some combination of: inability to lower wages of the existing employees on the similar positions, wages not being exactly public anyway, and maybe some psychological expectations where nobody with required credentials will agree to work for less than X, no matter how good the conditions are (or alternatively they're genuinely trying to pick the best and failing, than it's Goodheart's law). And in the case of the dating market there simply is no universal currency to begin with.

https://mindsarentmagic.org/2020/06/23/nyt-plan-to-dox-scott-alexander-for-no-real-reason

"If we are crunching the numbers, though, it seems like the flip side is much much more common, i.e. people doing things to benefit themselves under ostensibly altruistic motivations. "

Well, this is typical behavior, we all know that.

That is why I was puzzled by the phenomenon when everything happens in reverse.

But a much more common situation is when people clearly indicate and voice their position: they enter into interaction with others for the mutual formal benefit of both parties (nothing personal, it's just business), or for altruistic reasons.

But what my observation reveals, and what is probably even more common, is that people interact very often simultaneously satisfying both needs - for the good of others (you can call it altruism) and for their own good

If we talk about rationality in the broad sense of the word, as it is used on lesswrong, and not about rationalization in the narrow sense (and in general, these are different words with different meanings, although one-rooted), then rationality means "how a person should think and act in order to maximize the benefit of all, and the concept of "all" includes all people equally, and therefore himself"