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Jeff Kaufman points to a kind of conflict: as he optimizes his life better for improving the world, his life looks less like other people’s lives, so makes a less good example showing that other people could also optimize their lives to make the world better. This seems similar to problems that come up often, regarding whether one should really do the (otherwise) best thing, if it will discourage onlookers from wanting to do the best thing.

These conflicts seem to be a combination of at least two different kinds of problems. Likely more, but I’ll talk about two.

One of them seems like it must be a general problem for people wanting others to follow them in doing a new thing. Since people are not doing the thing, it is weird. If you do the thing a little, you show onlookers that people like them can do it. When you do it a lot, they start to suspect you are just a freak. This might even put them off trying, since they probably aren’t the kind of person who could really succeed.

For instance, if you can kind of juggle, it suggests to an observer that they too could learn to kind of juggle. However if you can juggle fifty burning chairs, they begin to think that you are inherently weird. They also think that they are not cut out for the juggling world, since as far as they know they are not a freak.

This is a problem that both you and the observer would like to resolve – if it is really not very hard to become a good juggler, both of you would like the observer to know that.

The other kind of problem is less cooperative. Instead of observers thinking they can’t reach the extremes you have attained, they may just not want to. It looks weird, after all. You suspect that if they became half as weird as you, they would then want to be as weird as you, so want them to ‘take the gateway drug’. They may also suspect they would behave in this way, and don’t want to, and so would like to avoid becoming weird at all. At this point, you may be tempted to pretend that they would only ever get half as weird as you, because you know they would be happy to be half as weird, as long as it didn’t lead to extreme weirdness. So you may hide your weirdness. In which case you have another fairly general problem: that of wanting to deceive observers.

While there are many partial solutions to the second problem, it is a socially destructive zero sum game that I’m not sure should be encouraged. The first problem seems more tractable and useful to solve.

One way to lessen the first problem is to direct attention to a stream of people between amateur and very successful. If the person who can juggle very impressively tends to hang out with some friends at various intermediate juggling levels, it seems more plausible that these are just a spectrum of skills that people can move through in their adult lives, rather than a discrete cluster of freaks way above the rest. Another way to lessen this effect is to just explicitly claim or demonstrate that the extremal person was in fact relatively recently much like other people, or has endured few costs in their journey – this is the idea behind before/after images, and is also achieved by Jeff’s post. Another kind of solution is drawing attention to yourself before you become very extremal, so that observers can observe your progress, not just the result.

Robin wonders (in conversation) why apparently fairly abstract topics don’t get more attention, given the general trend he notices toward more abstract things being higher status. In particular, many topics we and our friends are interested in seem fairly abstract, and yet we feel like they are neglected: the questions of effective altruism, futurism in the general style of FHI, the rationality and practical philosophy of LessWrong, and the fundamental patterns of human behavior which interest Robin. These are not as abstract as mathematics, but they are quite abstract for analyses of the topics they discuss. Robin wants to know why they aren’t thus more popular.

I’m not convinced that more abstract things are more statusful in general, or that it would be surprising if such a trend were fairly imprecise. However supposing they are and it was, here is an explanation for why some especially abstract things seem silly. It might be interesting anyway.

Lemma 1: Rethinking common concepts, and being more abstract tend to go together. For instance, if you want to question the concept ‘cheesecake’ you will tend to do this by developing some more formal analysis of cake characteristics, and showing that ‘cheesecake’ doesn’t line up with the more cutting-nature-at-the-joints distinctions. Then you will introduce another concept which is close to cheesecake, but more useful. This will be one of the more abstract analyses of cheesecakes that has occurred.

Lemma 2: Rethinking common concepts and questioning basic assumptions look pretty similar. If you say ‘I don’t think cheesecake is a useful concept – but this is a prime example of a squishcake’, it sounds a lot like ‘I don’t believe that cheesecakes exist, and I insist on believing in some kind of imaginary squishcake’.

Lemma 3: Questioning basic assumptions is also often done fairly abstractly. This is probably because the more conceptual machinery you use, the more arguments you can make. e.g. many arguments you can make against the repugnant conclusion’s repugnance work better once you have established that aversion to such a scenario is one of a small number of mutually contradictory claims, and have some theory of moral intuitions as evidence. There are a few that just involve pointing out that the people are happy and so on, but where there are a lot of easy non-technical arguments to make against a thing, it’s not generally a basic assumption.

Explanation: Abstract rethinking of common concepts is easily mistaken for questioning basic assumptions. Abstract questioning of basic assumptions really is questioning basic assumptions. And questioning basic assumptions has a strong surface resemblance to not knowing about basic truths, or at least not having a strong gut feeling that they are true.

Not knowing about basic truths is not only a defining characteristic of silly people, but also one of the more hilarious of their many hilarious characteristics. Thus I suspect that when you say ‘I have been thinking about whether we should use three truth values: true, false, and both true and false’, it sounds a lot like ‘My research investigates whether false things are true’, which sounds like ‘I’m yet to discover that truth and falsity are mutually exclusive opposites’, which sounds a bit like ‘I’m just going to go online and check whether China is a real place’.

Some evidence to support this: when we discussed paraconsistent logic at school, it was pretty funny. If I recall, mostly of the humor took the form ‘Priest argues that bla bla bla is true of his system’ …’Yeah, but he doesn’t say whether it’s false, so I’m not sure if we should rely on it’. I feel like the premise was that Priest had some absurdly destructive misunderstanding of concepts, such that none of his statements could be trusted.

Further evidence: I feel like some part of my brain interprets ‘my research focuses on determining whether probability theory is a good normative account of rational belief’ as something like ‘I’m unsure about the answers to questions like ‘what is 50%/(50% + 25%)?”. And that part of my brain is quick to jump in and point out that this is a stupid thing to wonder about, and it totally knows the answers to questions like that.

Other things that I think may sound similar:

• ‘my research focusses on whether not being born is as bad as dying’ <—> ‘I’m some kind of socially isolated sociopath, and don’t realize that death is really bad’
• ‘We are trying to develop a model of rational behavior that accounts for the Allais paradox’ <—> ‘we can’t calculate expected utility’
• ‘Probability and value are not useful concepts, and we should talk about decisions only’ <—> ‘My alien experience of the world does not prominently feature probabilities and values’
• ‘I am concerned about akrasia’ <—> ‘I’m unaware that agents are supposed to do stuff they want to do’
• ‘I think the human mind might be made of something like sub-agents’ <—> ‘I’m not familiar with the usual distinction of people from one another’.
• ‘I think we should give to the most cost-effective charities instead of the ones we feel most strongly for’ <—> ‘Feelings…what are they?’

I’m not especially confident in this. It just seems a bit interesting.

Is it worth learning to type faster? If – like me – basically what you do is type, this seems likely to be a pretty clear win, if you have any interventions that would improve it at all. Ryan Carey suggested a painful sounding intervention which improves maximum typing speed a lot, but said that since he usually types substantially below his maximum typing speed, this would not help. His model seems to be that typing speed is basically either bottlenecked by physical typing ability or something else (like thinking speed), and it is not much worth trying to speed up the one that is not bottlenecking the process. This sounds pretty reasonable, but did not match my intuitions, and seemed extremely cheap to test, so I decided to test it.

I tried a number of ways of reducing my typing speed, and chose three that were reasonably spaced across the spectrum (~90wpm, ~60wpm, ~30wpm) on a typing speed test. These were (respectively) Dvorak keyboard layout, Dvorak with my left pinky finger tied up with a rubber band or tape, and Qwerty keyboard layout. I measured each one three times on that test, and three times on longer (3-5m) journaling activities, mostly writing about issues in my life that I wanted to think about anyway. These journaling bouts tended to be faster than I would usually casually write I think, so this does not really test how much peak typing speed improves combination writing/staring into space speed. But they were slow enough to be real journaling, with some real insights, and were substantially slower than peak typing speed.

My results are below. They are a bit dubious, but I think are good enough for the purpose. Moving from the middle method to the top method improved my real speed in proportion to my peak speed. Between the bottom two, it made little difference. Further details are more confusing – that there is no difference between peak and real speed for Qwerty suggests that physical typing is a big bottleneck there, however improving the typing method to handicapped Dvorak – which has a higher peak speed – doesn’t improve real speed much either, suggesting inconsistently that thinking is a huge bottleneck, which also seems implausible if thinking is not such a big bottleneck for higher speeds (implied by the fact that real speeds get a lot higher with better typing methods). But if I wanted to think more about these things, I should probably just do some more tests. I’m not convinced this is worth it, but if anyone else does any, I’m curious to see.

Incidentally I suspect Qwerty gets a boost in journaling relative to typing tests. This is because I have to look at my hands a fair bit to do it, which is harder when you also have to look at the screen sometimes too.

I’m more inclined to trust the patterns in faster speeds, which I say is due to them being much closer to my real typing speed (from which I might improve), but could obviously be because it supports my prior intuitions.

Incidentally, a few plausible-to-me models that would fit either thinking or typing faster increasing real typing speed:

• Thinking speed increases linearly with exogenously increased typing speed, and is usually the bottleneck – then increasing physical typing ability always increases thinking speed, as does increasing thinking speed itself.
• You do bursts of thinking and typing, basically one at a time – then your speed is something like a weighted mean of the speeds.
• You either type or think all the time (this is the bottlenecking activity), and do the other activity part of the time, however when you do the faster one it slows down the bottlenecking activity, so speeding up either activity speeds the entire process.

Mean speeds

All data

Some graphs

Ryan Carey and I discussed intelligence amplification as an altruistic endeavor with Gwern Branwen. Here (docx) (pdf) is a summary of Gwern’s views. Also more permanently locatable on my website.

Time has a monetary value to you. That is, money and time can be traded for one another in lots of circumstances, and there are prices that you are willing to take and prices you are not. Hopefully, other things equal, the prices you are willing to take are higher than the ones you aren’t.

Sometimes people object to the claim that time has a value in terms of money, but I think this tends to be a misunderstanding, or a statement about the sacredness of time and mundanity of money. I also suspect that the feeling that time is sacred and money is in some sense not prompts people who believe that money and time can be compared in value in principle to object to actually doing it much. There are further reasons you might object to this too. For instance, perhaps having an explicit value on your time makes you feel stressed, or cold calculations make you feel impersonal, or accurate appraisals of your worth per hour make you feel arrogant or worthless.

Still I think it is good to try to be aware of the value of your time. If you have an item, and you trade it all day long, and you don’t put a consistent value on it, you will be making bad trades all over the place. Imagine if you accepted wages on a day to day basis while refusing to pay any attention to what they were. Firstly, you could do a lot better by paying attention and accepting only the higher ones. But secondly, you would quickly be a target for exploitation, and only be offered the lowest wages.

I don’t think people usually do this badly in their everyday trading off of time and money, because they do have some idea of the trades they are making, just not a clear one. But many other things go into the sense of how much you should pay to buy time in different circumstances, so I think the prices people take vary a lot when they should not. For instance, a person who would not accept a wage below $30/h will waste an hour in an airport because they don’t have internet, instead of buying wifi for $5, because they feel this is overpriced. Or they will search for ten minutes to find a place that sells drinks for $3 instead of $4, because $4 is a lot for a drink. Or they will stand in line for twenty minutes to get the surprisingly cheap and delicious lunch, and won’t think of it as being an expensive lunch now.

I agree that time is very valuable. I just disagree that you should avoid putting values on valuable things. What you don’t explicitly value, you squander.

It can be hard to think of ways that you are trading off money and time in practice. In response to a request for these, below is a list. They are intended to indicate trade-offs which might be helpful if you want to spend more money at the expense of time or vice versa in a given circumstance. Some are  written as if to suggest that you should move in one direction or the other especially – remember that you can generally move in the opposite direction also.

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