Aug 27, 9:31am: What's the lowest effort concept to learn that I do not already know? → What's the lowest effort and most useful concept that I do not already know?
Give me cool ideas that don't require more than a paragraph or five to get the basic idea. Cognitive biases, razors, effects, feedback loops, useful words, or just a cool fact.
I will do some basic Googling, but if you want to explain the idea in the comments, that may help the key interesting points come through.
If I know the thing already, I will place a small bet on the thing and comment to let you know that it doesn't qualify. (I believe this will allow you to sell without loss, and will also function as an ANTE that grows based on number of responses).
I will select winning responses based my personal opinion, and I expect to be selecting multiple.
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@IsaacKing I am not convinced that this is really acausal trade; this is a lot more like Rawl's Veil of Ignorance. It works just as well even if it is missing the aspect of acausal reciprocity.
@Duncan This has been a bit useful in being aware that this is a thing that others might be finding useful.
@Duncan I use it on my phone (AnkiDroid app, there's also one for iphone) as a first app to pull out to kill time, instead of say Instagram or Facebook. Anki had nice defaults on how often to show you cards according to if you missed them or it was easy or hard to remember when quizzed. It also synchronizes across devices so I have it also installed in my eink reader to make cards while reading a book or articles
@Ivan I've only just started playing with them today, and they have not been very useful yet, but I'm just starting. Are there any types of tasks for which they have been particularly useful for you?
@jorge more useful than the software in particular is the IDEA of spaced repetition with active recall. Review with questions that make you actively come up with the information from memory, rather than getting a passive reminder. Space out reviews in increasing intervals as you successfully recall the information.
making cards and using the app on a regular basis is not often worth it except as a drop-in replacement where you'd already be using flashcards. use the general idea to shore up / optimize your existing practices for remembering important information.
We often instinctively divide the world into "rich" and "poor", or "developed" and "developing". This is unhelpful, because most people are in-between.
A better model is to group people into four income levels:
Level 1 (extreme poverty, less than $2 per day)
Level 2 (less than $8 per day)
Level 3 (less than $32 per day)
Level 4 (more than $32 per day)
The world's 7 billion people are distributed roughly as follows:
The distribution was much more bi-modal in the 1960s, but people have moved to higher levels ever since (except Covid was a setback).
For more information about this (and many more useful concepts to understand the world) I'd recommend Hans Rosling's book "Factfulness". Or these online resources:
[Gapminder: Income levels](https://www.gapminder.org/fw/income-levels/)
[Hans Rosling's TED talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen)
@Duncan Hmm, now I'm curious whether you're Duncan Sabien or a different Duncan. Duncan Sabien mentions a real-world use case for acausal trade in this talk around the 3:50 mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFULyVo4uts
It's a simpler form of acausal trade, since you're not trading with a differently-valued agent by explicitly simulating their decision process, but rather trading with copies of yourself by adopting a policy that would benefit you if all the copies adopted it. But it's the same underlying concept either way. I've found it to be a useful framing when I'm explaining to people why they shouldn't break a rule on the justification of "it's only me doing it this once".
@jorge I was not familiar with this idea, but I'm also not a meditation type person, and not especially prone to envy, so I'm not sure how useful this is (to me). I'll trying being more aware and use this framing for the next few days, and see what I think.
Empathetic joy (mudita) is one of the four "immeasurables" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmavihara) in Buddhism and can be cultivated with a particular kind of meditation. You are basically training your mind so that the success or happiness of others brings you joy automatically, as opposed to negative emotions such as envy
@JesperCockx I was broadly aware of this, and my understanding of it was basically correct, but I now see there is a lot more theory, and developed theory, and research behind it, that I was not aware of. This is eligible for selection, but I also thing that so far the sources I've found are long and not always very information rich, so a particularly useful link or description here could increase the value of this concept in this market.
@JamesGrugett Delaying death is positive utility. There's no such thing as saving a life forever, they're still going to die eventually. Having a longer life is a good thing, which is why we try to avoid death in the first place.
And note that it'd be more than just a few extra months of life. Delaying our Covid cases until after we had vaccines and better therapeutics would have massively reduced the death rate once Covid became endemic and everyone got it.
The tone of your response makes me think you interpreted my comment as being in favor of the Democrat strategy and you wanted to defend the other side. If that's the case, my apologies for conveying that impression; I was trying to be even-handed in my description of their priorities. That's why I said "Covid deaths" rather than just "deaths"; economic damage can also lead to more deaths from other causes, not to mention all the non-death downsides.
I agree that the majority of mainstream thought on the proper response to Covid was highly flawed, and a lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum were letting their emotional reactions prevent them from realizing facts that should have been obvious. (Like, perhaps, the fact that delaying death is a good thing. 😉)
@IsaacKing I know it was an oversimplified example, but going "all-in" on minimizing Covid deaths would be unlikely to achieve higher utility. You'd only delay deaths into the future when it eventually spreads. The original justification for lockdowns was as a temporary measure to not overwhelm hospitals, which does make sense.
Everyone should think a bit deeper about what happened with Covid and update their model of the world accordingly. A public health scare + an election year is not a great environment for clear decision making, but the kind of justifications and outlook educated people took up simply don't make sense (nor do they make sense today!). It's entirely possible for mainstream culture to be wrong. Cost-benefit analyses of Covid restrictions were rarely done, and mostly self-re-enforcing analyses were published that ignored most of the downsides of Covid restrictions. Unfortunately, this is par for the course for academic analysis, media reporting, and government regulation. Wake up sheeple!
@NN I have come across this on LessWrong, and found it interesting but not useful. Is there a specific aspect or context that you find useful?
@Duncan I was, I think, vaguely aware of tab groups, but hadn't processed that they were a useful thing I should use. So this is an eligible answer. However, if you meant something else, I'd also be interested in that.
@Ivan I am familiar with this concept, although not in depth, so I'm sure there are aspects that I'm unaware of.
@IsaacKing "which way is concave" comes down to what side of the curve you view as positive space. If we're analogizing to a cave (how I always remember the difference), is the cave the space of air within the rock? or the rock surrounding it?
@Duncan Having read the article, I think the term actually has less value than I was expecting; I assumed that there was going to be a taxonomy of procrastination, with the dark playground being one type. It sounds like the author just wants to explain that their personal type of procrastination is bad, and this is the term that describes how they feel. I am slightly annoyed that there was no mention of productive procrastination.
It is useful to have someone frame procrastination as a process with causes and outcomes, rather than just "procrastination is bad", but that is not a new concept for me.
@M I'm thinking about this one; I'm familiar with the phenomenon, but the label is new to me. I'm not sure if this is a case where a clear label is valuable enough to count as a useful concept on its own. I'll think on it a bit, then read the full article, then come back with more comment.
@M From https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html
The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It’s a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn’t actually fun because it’s completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread. Sometimes the Rational Decision-Maker puts his foot down and refuses to let you waste time doing normal leisure things, and since the Instant Gratification Monkey sure as hell isn’t gonna let you work, you find yourself in a bizarre purgatory of weird activities where everyone loses.
A lot of you are probably reading this article while in the Dark Playground.