Try to break that down into the positive versions - estimation, requirements, design, etc - and then list projects that went better because you're on them. Ideally get a quote or reference from someone else saying "the projects Jawns was on went better for X, Y, Z reasons - he really helps things go faster/smoother/etc."
Hey, think might like this one — it was such a joy to build.
Our CTO and myself linked up 1-on-1 in Japan to end the year, and we just wanted to give some fun design and coding in. We were looking for a fun lightweight project to do, and we wound up taking a bunch of best practices around setting and following through with goals and looking for a way to make it interesting and novel.
We wound up borrowing some inspiration from "dangerous Japanese game shows" and built a "make progress on your New Year's Resolution daily to stay in the competition" — I think might really enjoy it. Was a joy to build.
Respectfully, I think you're being a little uncharitable here.
I'm on the periphery of the EA / Longtermist scene — I have friends and customers in that space and have studied and hung out some. I recently went to one of the online events — EAGx Virtual — so I got to see what people actually care about, are working on, the methodologies being used, etc.
One way that might be helpful to think about "Effective Altruism" and "Longtermism" is that they're rather loose labels, more similar to "Democracy" than "Member of XYZ Political Party or NGO" — while there's some loose unifying threads across people who hold those views, there are very many different nuanced views about what good implementation can look like and how individual people and groups relate being effective and benevolent.
Then, the people doing the best work in that space are doing some incredible things that have already had short-term high-impact results in the world like doing hyper-rigorous work on how to cure and treat and prevent diseases in the developing world, and then actually getting those things funded and checking the results. It's also very much _not_ uniformly "just use a spreadsheet" - a lot of people there take dialogue, conversation, and engagement qualitatively to ensure good is happening very seriously.
For instance, a talk I attended at EAGx Virtual covered this - https://whatworkswellbeing.org/about-wellbeing/how-to-measur... - I haven't been able to dive deeply into the methodology, but it looks incredibly thoughtful and with many practical applications. I'm, personally, really happy people are doing work like that.
Then, simultaneously there are people in the EA/Longtermist space that are working on more speculative potential problems — pandemic preparedness, reducing the risk of nuclear war, and yes AI Safety. To the latter point, empirically a lot of people in AI Safety seem more worried about very practical can-definitely-be-anticipated risks of things like, e.g., USA-China rivalry and what types of regulations, markets, and general consensus might prevent that from going badly. Obviously highly speculative futuristic ideas are sexier and get more attention than "boring routine stuff" but international conventions against, for instance, Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs) seems like a really prudent thing to at least explore and see if an international consensus could be built around similar to the Geneva or Hague conventions.
As for "EA-think" I don't agree with Aaronson's assessment. I'm n=1, but there's not a single monolithic viewpoint.
Some really exceptional work is being done by some very thoughtful people there. Undoubtedly some bad or sloppy work is being done, as is true in just about any domain. But on balance I've found the people there to be quite thoughtful and doing some really valuable things for the world with a lot of sincerity and rigor.
Respectfully, I spent a few years fascinated with Taoism and quite a bit of time studying it and reckon you probably get some wrong impressions from this article.
The challenge in learning from the Taoist writers is that almost no one can read their original works directly any more — the writing was so long ago that most modern-day Chinese people can't read it directly from Ancient Chinese without translating into modern first. The language has evolved.
That's before even getting into the challenge of learning in English or another language, since the works tend to have lots of metaphors and idioms and poetic language in them.
In my case, I had a really cool opportunity to go through over a dozen translations of the Taoteching with copies of the translation from ancient Chinese into modern Chinese and a translator's attempt at an English translation with a Chinese friend who is a scholar of linguistics. It was really fun and insightful.
That all said, I think Rosenthal's "The Tao Te Ching: An Introduction" is a wonderful starting place.
Rosenthal takes the very terse, poetic, and metaphorical lines of Laozi and turns them into extended prose while keeping a lot of the aesthetics. Like so:
> THE TAO AND ITS NAME
> 1. Naming things enables us to differentiate between them, but names are words, and words easily give rise to confusion. They do not replace the thing or direct experience of the thing which they name, but only represent or describe it.
(And then it goes deeper into explaining on that point.)
At least in Rosenthal's case, his take is quite different than the professors who wrote this article:
> KNOWLEDGE OF 'THE TAO', AND EXPERIENCE OF THE TAO.
> There is a way in which we may conduct our lives without regrets, and in such a manner as assists in developing and realizing our individual potential, without harming others, or inhibiting the realization of their potential, and which is beneficial to a healthy society.
> Such a way of life may of course be conducted without a name, and without description, but in order that others may know of it, and so as to distinguish it from other ways in which life may be conducted, we give it a name, and use words to describe it.
And then, critically —
> 2. LETTING GO OF OPPOSITES.
> It is the nature of the ordinary person, the person who is not yet at one with the Tao, to compare the manifestations of the natural qualities possessed by things. Such a person tries to learn of such qualities by distinguishing between their manifestations, and so learns only of their comparative manifestations.
> So it is that the ordinary person might consider one thing beautiful when compared with another which he considers to be ugly; one thing skillfully made compared with another which he considers badly made. He knows of what he has as a result of knowing what he does not have, and of that which he considers easy through that which he considers difficult. He considers one thing long by comparing it with another thing which he considers short; one thing high and another low. He knows of noise through silence and of silence through noise, and learns of that which leads through that which follows.
> When such comparisons are made by a sage, that is a person who is in harmony with the Tao, that person is aware of making a judgement, and that judgements are relative to the person who makes them, and to the situation in which they are made, as much as they are relative to that which is judged.
The interaction and fusion of Taoist and various other Chinese thought with Buddhism, attributed typically to Boddhidharma traveling from India to China, became the foundation of Chan Buddhism in China and later Zen Buddhism in Japan.
I reckon most scholars and practitioners from the tradition wouldn't accept the useful/useless distinction as correct or as "Follow[ing] the Daoist way" - like, some nice ideas in the article, but both a false dichotomy and unfortunate dualism there.
As far as i understand, the dao de ching is in fact more of a confucian text. Its original focus was 'how to rule'. Albeit a great intro to thought of that time and place. It may be my perverse nature, but religions that actively try and hide their knowledge make me think they have something worth researching (as opposed to ones that knock on the door and try to convert me!). Its hard to find good stuff online. Here is a rare "interview with a daoist":
The other component that seems uniquely daoist is the fundamental goal of long life/immortality (as opposed to a buddhist nirvana) hence the emphasis on starting with the body and the overlap with chinese internal arts taichi, hsing i and bagua.
Around the 15th c there was a fundamental shift in physical training theory to the principles of the yi jin jing ("changing the muscles into the quality of tendons theory")
This is a sophisticated and fundamentally different approach to the body than most western training systems.
The basic idea is that in any difficult conversation, there's actually three sub-conversations happening —
(1) What happened?
(2) How do we feel about it?
(3) What are we going to do about it?
A lot of times people get into cross-talk or can't get on the same page because they mix up what sub-conversation they're happening. This can happen when one person gets right into proposing solutions (#3) while another person is still trying to work out why things went the way they did (#1). Likewise, sometimes a conversation around "we really screwed this up" is meant to be a neutral "what happened" conversation (#1) but is taken as a negative or put-down (#2).
Oh man, I'm happy to see this here — I've been slowly working my way through various science and engineering done in the Soviet Union since there was some incredible work done that's very poorly known in the West.
Vavilov is definitely a first-class scientist who seemed to have an incredible personality. In some alternative better timeline, Vavilov would probably be as well-known and had inspired as many people as, say, Feynman. Alas.
Anyway, while we're on the topic of Soviet scientists, the whole silver fox domestication research program is infinitely fascinating —
Edit: Soviet pharmacology also very interesting — and even more surprising it hasn't been studied and imported since, like, humans are humans and it works. Probably an unfortunate secondary effect of how trials/licensing/patenting work. Not a bad starting point: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-de...
While we're on the topic, Xenophon's "Anabasis" is probably both the greatest military memoir of all-time and the greatest adventure story of all-time.
Heck, maybe also a candidate for greatest learning-on-the-job and leadership story too.
It's really an incredible work. The "Why am I lying here?" monologue still gives me chills.
Ok, I wanted to read "Anabasis" for quite some time, but never actually gotten myself to it. However, you provided the final nudge, I'm already past page 10.
I'm voting you up, but a respectful disagreement...
I think that sometimes seeing a person meander through related concepts and take a fresh look at them can be quite valuable; likewise, non-technical language can make things accessible.
Even if there's no grand takeaway.
I know, for me, sometimes I quite like this sort of thing and sometimes I find it tiresome. But in the right mood, I find it very valuable.
Likewise, I could send this piece to someone who has no technical background at all and has not the Bitcoin whitepaper or any further analyses, and then have an interesting conversation afterwards.
I wonder if the causality might run the other way — like, if you imagine a set of "all possible commitment levels of sports fans" you'd have hardcore committed... moderately committed... middle of the road... somewhat fairweather... complete bandwagonner.
Something like that, eh?
Losing might strip away the fairweather/bandwagoner fans, leaving only the people with a natural predilection to commitment. Winning might attract more bandwagon/fairweather fans.
You could probably test this by finding multiple teams that had around a 50% win percentage and finding fans that adopt them in early adulthood, like someone who goes to college in Indiana starting to root for the Indiana Pacers (basketball), etc.
If you build a sample of around 1000 people that adopted different middle-of-the-road teams, then followed them longitudinally, you could see whether they increase in commitment, drop out, or stay about the same with rising and falling fortunes of the team.
A lot of work, though. No doubt certain experiences shape perception of fandom, but I imagine it's different populations — not just the same type of starting population being effected by different events.
