Failure Mode 1: You don't have an implementable vision of what the solution is. In particular, some of the resources you need (e.g. data, algorithms, compute power) do not actually exist yet and you don't have a good plan for obtaining them.

For any complex number www, the constant function f(z)=wf(z)=wf(z) = w is elementary. The function f(z)=zf(z)=zf(z) = z is elementary. The functions f(z)=ezf(z)=ezf(z) = e^z and f(z)=ln(z)f(z)=ln⁡(z)f(z) = \ln(z) are elementary (although you may need to interpret ln(z)ln⁡(z)\ln(z) as a multi-valued function). Finally, any other function f(z)f(z)f(z) is elementary if and only if one of the following is true:f(z)=g(z)+h(z)f(z)=g(z)+h(z)f(z) = g(z) + h(z) for some elementary functions g(z)g(z)g(z) and h(z)h(z)h(z).f(z)=g(z)h(z)f(z)=g(z)h(z)f(z) = g(z)h(z) for some elementary functions g(z)g(z)g(z) and h(z)h(z)h(z).f(z)=g(h(z))f(z)=g(h(z))f(z) = g(h(z)) for some elementary functions g(z)g(z)g(z) and h(z)h(z)h(z).

With whatever portion of my resources I’m devoting to helping others, I want my help to be truly other-focused. In other words, I want to benefit others by their own lights, as much as possible (with whatever portion of resources I’ve devoted to helping others).

Writing is hard work, and any new piece of writing will generally add to the pile of existing ones, rather than multiplying it all; it’s an enormous amount of work to go through all one’s existing writings and improve them somehow, so it usually doesn’t happen. Design improvements, on the other hand, benefit one’s entire website & all future readers, and so at a certain scale, can be quite useful. I feel I’ve reached the point where it’s worth sweating the small stuff, typographically.

One must expect the unexpected, and a failure to ‘sweat the small stuff’ means you are allowing brush to pile up in the forest: one match could set it ablaze. People who do not sweat the small stuff have a remarkable tendency to have ‘bad luck’ and somehow keep getting into trouble

Early on, you don’t know enough to write anything useful; in the middle, you remember the mistakes & opinions & ignorance of yourself early on while understanding the topic, and are excited about explaining what you painfully learned; and then after enough time passes and the novelty wears off, you begin to forget what it was like to be a beginner, the correct understanding just becomes ‘obvious’, the inferential distance between you and a reader becomes vast and you’re no longer able to write at a low enough level⁠, and you lose your excitement and are no longer able to plow through writing a good post, because you know that even after you’ve written 90% of it, you still have 90% of the work left.

Interpretive Labor There’s a tradeoff between the energy put into explaining an idea, and the energy needed to understand it. On one extreme, the explainer can painstakingly craft a beautiful explanation, leading their audience to understanding without even realizing it could have been difficult. On the other extreme, the explainer can do the absolute minimum and abandon their audience to struggle. This energy is called interpretive labor .

Once you recognize this world of artificial complexity, you can turn any problem back into its simple solution through decomplication. Weight loss, strength gain, productivity, skill enhancement, sleep, they’re all incredibly simple once you decomplicate them

2010 meta analysis of 198 independent tests found the effect significant with a moderate effect size (d = .6). Even after accounting for possible unpublished failed studies, the analysis concluded that it is extremely unlikely that the effect doesn't exist.[37] In 2015, a meta analysis of over 100 studies by Carter and McCullough argued that the 2010 meta-analysis failed to take publication bias into account. They showed statistical evidence for publication bias. When they statistically controlled for publication bias, the effect size estimate was small (d = .2) and not significantly different from zero.[

Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up (with the word "ego" used in the psychoanalytic sense rather than the colloquial sense).

sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded.

For practical induction we use a set of approximations of increasing powerto approach ALP. This set is called Resource Bounded Probability (RBP), andit constitutes a general solution to the problem of practical induction. Some ofits properties are quite different from those of ALP.

We will begin with a definition of Algorithmic Probability (ALP), and discusssome of its properties. From these remarks it will become clear that it is ex-tremely effective for computing probabilities of future events — the best tech-nique we have

Space is infinite, unbounded.  This doesn’t imply that the infinity is all represented, just that the concept allows for indefinite extension.  Finite space can be derived by adding a bound to infinite space; this is similar to Spinoza’s approach to finitude in the Ethics. Space isn’t a property of things in themselves, it’s a property of phenomena, things as they relate to our intuition.  When formalizing mathematical space, points are assigned coordinates relative to the (0, 0) origin.  We always intuit objects relative to some origin, which may be near the eyes or head.  At the same time, space is necessary for objectivity; without space, there is no idea of external objects.

Rule #7: Predict the future. The same way you would predict what's going to happen in the next season of your favorite show. Is Beechum going to kill the President? Figure out what you think is going to happen in the future based on the details of what's happened in the past.This can however very quickly lead into the mistake of Historicism. The predictive power of History has a limit. While it is true that you can identify historical trends and you can make educated guesses as to them happening again if the conditions are met, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to rely on it. The reason for this being that we then begin to look for similarities and lose sight of other factors which may change the situation, and we run the risk of attempting to formulate historical laws. In this sense I agree with Karl Popper, in that these 'laws' aren't falsifiable, they aren't testable, unlike the sciences; history does not have this luxury

Rule #4: Think about how you play an RPG. If you like to explore each world in depth before moving onto the next, then maybe your going about it the right way. But if you like to explore an overall story which forms the main plot, and then add in side stories and other details not central to the plot later, or if only to strengthen the current plot your trying to develop.

And this logic applies also to the brain. Evolution has made wings that flap, but do not understand flappiness. It has made legs that walk, but do not understand walkyness. Evolution has carved bones of calcium ions, but the bones themselves have no explicit concept of strength, let alone inclusive genetic fitness. And evolution designed brains themselves capable of designing; yet these brains had no more concept of evolution than a bird has of aerodynamics. Until the 20th century, not a single human brain explicitly represented the complex abstract concept of inclusive genetic fitness

Unlike everyone else on the island, the only way for Moana to grow is to leap out into Chaos.

Quine thought that philosophy was continuous with science - and where it wasn't, it was bad philosophy

The most compelling evidence against the Dodo bird verdict is illustrated by the research done on anxiety disorders. Many studies have found specific treatment modalities to be beneficial when treating anxiety disorders, specifically cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)

Small differences make a huge impact on your phenotype (how you actually look and function), though.  We share 97-99% of our genes with other primates like chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons, 92% of our genes with mice, 44% of our genes with a fruit fly, and 26% of our genes with yeast.

Scrutinize claims of scientific fact in support of opinion journalism. Even with honest intent, it's difficult to apply science correctly, and it's rare that dishonest uses are punished. Citing a scientific result gives an easy patina of authority, which is rarely scratched by a casual reader. Without actually lying, the arguer may select from dozens of studies only the few with the strongest effect in their favor, when the overall body of evidence may point at no effect or even in the opposite direction. The reader only sees "statistically significant evidence for X". In some fields, the majority of published studies claim unjustified significance in order to gain publication, inciting these abuses.

With mental contrasting, you envision a desired future (in which you’ve successfully achieved your goal), then you contrast it with the present reality. Doing so encourages you to wrestle with the contrast between the idealized future and the present reality, which can spur action and boost enthusiasm about goal completion

This isn’t to say nobody can ever win a Nobel Prize. But winners will probably be people with access to new ground that hasn’t already been covered by other $20-seekers. Either they’ll be amazing geniuses, understand a vast scope of cutting-edge material, have access to the latest lab equipment, or most likely all three.

This is not a contradiction. Zvi and Yudkowsky are both correct. "No evidence" is a vague term. Consider the phrase "There is no evidence of Bigfoot". It could mean one of two things. Explorers looked for Bigfoot and didn't find him. This is evidence Bigfoot doesn't exist. Nobody looked for Bigfoot and nobody found him. This is not evidence Bigfoot doesn't exist.

Day 1: Bug Hunt A bug is anything in life that needs improvement. Even if something is going well, if you can imagine it going better, there’s a bug. On the first day of Hammertime, we will scour our lives with a fine-toothed comb to find as many bugs as possible. A comprehensive bug list will provide the raw material on which we practice every other rationality technique. For the first cycle of Bug Hunt, look for small, concrete bugs. The whole exercise should take a bit over an hour. WARNINGS: Focus on finding bugs, not solving them. If you can solve the bug immediately, go for it. Otherwise, hold off on proposing solutions. Writing down a bug does not mean you commit to doing anything about it. 1. Setup Find a notebook, phone app, spreadsheet, or Google Doc to record your bugs – preferably something you can bring with you throughout the day. We will refer back to it repeatedly in the coming days for bugs to solve. During Bug Hunt, spend the next 30 minutes writing down as many bugs as you can. Following each of the six sets of prompts in the next section, set a timer for 5 minutes and list as many bugs as you notice. 2. Prompts A. Mindful Walkthrough Walk through your daily routine in your head and look for places that need improvement. Do you get up on time? Do you have a morning routine? Do you waste mental effort deciding whether to or what to eat for breakfast? Do you take the most efficient commute, and make the most of time in transit? Fast forward to work or school. Are there physical discomforts? Are you missing any tools? Are there particular people who bother you, or to whom you don’t speak enough? Do you ask for help when you need it? Do you know how to shut up? Is there unproductive dead time during meetings, classes, or builds? Do you take care of yourself during the day? Think about the evening at home. Do you waste time deciding where or what to eat? Are there hobbies you want to try? Are there things you know will be more fun that you’re not doing? Do you progress consistently on your side projects? Do you sleep on time? How is your sleep quality? B. Hobbies, Habits, and Skills Walk through the things you do on a regular basis. Are there habits you mean to drop? Are there habits you mean to pick up but never seem to get around to? For each hobby or habit, answer the following questions. Do you do it enough? Do you do it too much? Are there ways you could improve your experience? Do it in a different place and time? Do it with other people or alone? Perhaps you have skills to practice. Are you as good as you want to be? Do you practice regularly? Have you plateaued by overtraining? Are there minor recurring discomforts keeping you from trying? Are there directions you haven’t tried which might indirectly improve your abilities? C. Space Look around your living space, your workspace, or the interior of your vehicle. What would you change? Space should be functional. Is there clutter you circumnavigate on a daily basis? Are your chairs and tables at the right height? Is your bed comfortable? Are there towels, pans, notebooks, or papers sitting out taunting you? Are there important things that deserve a more central position? Have you set up Schelling places for glasses, wallets, and phones? Space should be aesthetically pleasing. Do pieces of furniture or equipment stick out comically? Do your walls feel drab and depressing? Are there carpet stains or dust mites that keep catching your eye and sucking out your happiness? Are you tired of the art on the walls? Space on the monitor can be as important as physical space. Do you have enough screens? Do you find yourself repeating mechanical boot-up and shutdown sequences that can be automated? Do you use all the browser extensions and keyboard shortcuts? Is there a voice in the back of your head whispering at you to learn vim? D. Time and Attention People and things clamor for your attention. What’s missing from your life that would let you live as intentionally as possible? Many activities are bottomless time sinks. Do you watch shows or play games you no longer enjoy? Do you get dragged into conversations that hold no value? Do you find yourself rolling the mouse wheel down endless Facebook or Reddit feeds? Are there classes, meetings, commutes, or projects that zombify you for the rest of the day? Do you set up ejector seats in advance to protect yourself from time sinks? Focus on the things you don’t pay enough attention to. Do you often make mistakes on autopilot? Are there friends or family you’ve neglected or grown distant from? Are there conversations you zone out in that you could get more out of? Is there a childhood dream you’ve forgotten? Sometimes trivial distractions lead to spectacular failures. Are there slight, recurring physical discomforts that drain your agency? Does the temperature outside prevent you from exercising? Is there something shiny that always draws your eye away from work? E. Blind spots Our biggest bugs can hide in cognitive blind spots. Outside view your life. Are you sufficiently awesome? What is your biggest weakness? If there is one thing holding you back from achieving your goals, what would it be? Do you have mysterious attachments to pieces of your identity? Do you routinely over- or under-estimate your own ability? Simulate your best friend in your head. What do they say about you that surprises you? What behaviors annoy them? What behaviors would they appreciate? Is there a piece of advice they keep giving you? Summon your Dumbledore. What would he say to you? What deep wisdom are you blind to? If you were the protagonist, what genre would this life be? Look to admiration and jealousy for insight. Are you the person you most admire? What skills and traits do others have that you want? F. Fear and Trembling The shadows we flinch away from can hide the most bountiful treasures. What are your greatest fears and anxieties? Do you have the strength to be vulnerable? Are there necessary and proper actions you need to take? Are there truths you’re scared to say out loud? What do you lie to yourself about? Look to your social circle. Are there good people you hide from? Are there conversation topics that cause you scramble away? What do people say that cause you to lose your composure? Look to the past and future as far as your eyes allow. What deadlines cause you to avert your eyes? Is there a kind of person you are terrified of becoming? Or are you most afraid of stagnation? Do you trust your past and future selves? 3. Sort Hopefully, you came up with at least 100 bugs; I came up with 142. Time for some housekeeping. Input your bugs into a spreadsheet to organize and coalesce similar ones. Using System 1, assign difficulty ratings from 1 to 10, where 1 is “I could solve it right now” and 10 is “Just thinking about it causes existential panic.” Sort them in increasing order of difficulty. In the coming days, we will go down the list systematically, hitting as many nails as possible with each hammer.

Do you have the strength to be vulnerable?

2. The Artist and the CriticismIn art circles, there’s a common piece of advice that goes along the lines of:When people say that they don’t like something about your work, you should treat that as valid information.When people say why they don’t like it or what you could do to fix it, you should treat that with some skepticism.

Discussion about the limits of debate is important. It has implications for questions of both free speech and political tactics: if dialogue is impossible, what’s the point of attempting it? If right-wing speakers are not attempting discussion, but propaganda, why shouldn’t you try to shut them down? And if political power is not built through debate, should we even be trying to convince people?

The sentence “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.—Alfred Tarski

What Kahan and his colleagues found, to their surprise, was that while politically motivated reasoning trumps scientific knowledge, “politically motivated reasoning . . . appears to be negated by science curiosity”. Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not. Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not. The researchers muse that curious people have an extra reason to seek out the facts: “To experience the pleasure of contemplating surprising insights into how the world works.”

Even in a debate polluted by motivated reasoning, one might expect that facts will help. Not necessarily: when we hear facts that challenge us, we selectively amplify what suits us, ignore what does not, and reinterpret whatever we can. More facts mean more grist to the motivated reasoning mill. The French dramatist Molière once wrote: “A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.” Modern social science agrees.

When we reach the conclusion that we want to reach, we’re engaging in “motivated reasoning”. Motivated reasoning was a powerful ally of the tobacco industry. If you’re addicted to a product, and many scientists tell you it’s deadly, but the tobacco lobby tells you that more research is needed, what would you like to believe? Christensen’s study of the tobacco public relations campaign revealed that the industry often got a sympathetic hearing in the press because many journalists were smokers. These journalists desperately wanted to believe their habit was benign, making them ideal messengers for the industry.

Prusiner is a neurologist. In 1972, he was a young researcher who’d just encountered a patient suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It was a dreadful degenerative condition then thought to be caused by a slow-acting virus. After many years of study, Prusiner concluded that the disease was caused instead, unprecedentedly, by a kind of rogue protein. The idea seemed absurd to most experts at the time, and Prusiner’s career began to founder. Promotions and research grants dried up. But Prusiner received a source of private-sector funding that enabled him to continue his work. He was eventually vindicated in the most spectacular way possible: with a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1997. In his autobiographical essay on the Nobel Prize website, Prusiner thanked his private-sector benefactors for their “crucial” support: RJ Reynolds, maker of Camel cigarettes. The tobacco industry was a generous source of research funds, and Prusiner wasn’t the only scientist to receive both tobacco funding and a Nobel Prize. Proctor reckons at least 10 Nobel laureates are in that position. To be clear, this wasn’t an attempt at bribery. In Proctor’s view, it was far more subtle. “The tobacco industry was the leading funder of research into genetics, viruses, immunology, air pollution,” says Proctor. Almost anything, in short, except tobacco. “It was a massive ‘distraction research’ project.” The funding helped position Big Tobacco as a public-spirited industry but Proctor considers its main purpose was to produce interesting new speculative science. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease may be rare, but it was exciting news. Smoking-related diseases such as lung cancer and heart disease aren’t news at all.

In the war of ideas, boredom and distraction are powerful weapons. A recent study of Chinese propaganda examined the tactics of the paid pro-government hacks (known as the “50 cent army”, after the amount contributors were alleged to be paid per post) who put comments on social media. The researchers, Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts, conclude: “Almost none of the Chinese government’s 50c party posts engage in debate or argument of any kind . . . they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely . . . the strategic objective of the regime is to distract and redirect public attention.”

I have served as a fact checker myself on the BBC radio programme More or Less, and I often rely on fact-checking websites. They judge what’s true rather than faithfully reporting both sides as a traditional journalist would. Public, transparent fact checking has become such a feature of today’s political reporting that it’s easy to forget it’s barely a decade old.

The Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” the word of 2016. Facts just didn’t seem to matter any more.