This is a discussion topic for Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (a pseudonym, Ayn Rand's birth name). Other people are welcome to make comments. Alisa has agreed not to post under other names in this topic.
This is a discussion topic for Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (a pseudonym, Ayn Rand's birth name). Other people are welcome to make comments. Alisa has agreed not to post under other names in this topic.
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Messages (298)
Post-mortems and overreaching
Proposal: If you post-mortem each of your mistakes, then you're not overreaching.
Reasoning: Overreaching involves being overwhelmed by your mistakes. If you are post-morteming each of your mistakes, then you're dealing with them appropriately. This is incompatible with being overwhelmed by them.
#12940 Yes but many post-mortems will be very short.
E.g. you could say: I don't know enough about this problem. I need more data, more experience with it. *And* I think it's minor and rare (because [something]). So I won't worry about it for now. I'll reconsider next time it comes up, if it comes up again. My tentative plan is to pay more attention to it if it comes up 4 times in 12 months or 8 times lifetime. Similar to not worrying about refactoring code to be general purpose until you've done the same thing 3 times.
If you have literally no idea what went wrong with a mistake, that's bad. If you can organize it into some kinda category (that you have some general policy for dealing with), and get some kinda handle on it, that's much better. That can be very brief.
Unit testing knowledge
I think one reason I make as many mistakes as I do is that I don't unit test my knowledge enough. I accept, as something that I know, knowledge that hasn't been sufficiently tested from different angles. I wouldn't have such low standards for software (that I care about). So why do I have such low standards in the realm of ideas?
On lying and being inaccurate
Being inaccurate is a matter of morality. I once watched an episode of Hell's Kitchen in which chef Gordon Ramsey indicated that he needed to be able to trust that his chefs were reliable and that they were giving me him reliable info about the dishes that they were cooking. Once, someone feigned not knowing what was wrong with a dish (it was scallops, and they were raw). Gordon Ramsey noticed that the chef hadn't done sufficient error-checking, and said that he couldn't trust them any more.
When you make an assertion without doing adequate unit testing, error checking, or cross-checking, you are saying that you know something which you do not in fact know. Being in accurate in this way is a form of lying. It’s misrepresenting your state of knowledge, like a waiter who says that a dish doesn't contain some allergen when in fact he doesn't know or hasn't done adequate due diligence.
Big picture: people need to be able to trust what you say, and you can't be trusted if you don't adequately error check what you say.
> that they were giving *me him* reliable info
> Being in accurate
Typos. Content makes sense.
Typos
#13199 Thanks for the typo reports (and for the content assessment), anon.
After figuring out what I wrote above, it's a given for me that I need to find a way to reliably say things without being inaccurate or otherwise lying. I think that typos matter too, but in a different way than factual inaccuracies. From the Hell's Kitchen perspective: every factual inaccuracy is like a major problem with a dish, but so long as the true meaning of the text can be easily understood, a typo is more like a tiny defect.
In different situations there will be different expectations for what counts as reasonable typo-prevention efforts. For example, in a book, there basically should never be a typo, but in IMs that are clearly being sent off-the-cuff, occasional typos are okay. At work, it would be helpful for me to be able to generate typo-free text, so I am interested to find a trustworthy process for that.
My current best process for generating typo-free text is to check for misspelled words highlighted in red, and use TTS to listen to what I wrote.
> that they were giving *me him* reliable info
TTS should have caught that mistake. The issue here was that I didn't listen to my message #13198 before sending it. At this point, for me, sending a message that I haven't listened to is dishonest, because I've previously stated my intention to use TTS as part of my error-checking process [https://bitbucket.org/petrogradphilosopher/fi/src/default/pf.md]. I need to either follow through with that or retract my claim.
> Being in accurate
That mistake would be hard to catch with my current process.
Example of a lie: hand soap at the kitchen sink
Not too long ago, I had been away from home for about a week. I was staying at the house of someone I know. There was hand soap at the kitchen sink. That was convenient because I needed to wash my hands and the bathroom was on a different floor. I remarked on the convenience of this. I said that I didn't have hand soap in my kitchen sink at home. The person expressed surprise that I didn't have hand soap at my kitchen sink. I assured him that I didn't. But when I got home a day later, I saw that I *did* have hand soap at my kitchen sink.
I count as a lie the statement of mine in which I said that I didn't have hand soap at my kitchen sink. I confidently made a false statement about something which I can be reasonably expected to speak accurately about. Even if I was unsure (and it's not clear that I was), I mis-represented my state of knowledge by speaking confidently.
When I lied, did I have any sense that I was lying? Did I have any indication that what I was saying was false, or that what I was saying merited more error-checking -- even a slight gut feeling? I don't know, but if so, I should have paid more attention to that sense or indication. It would have been far better to say nothing than to confidently say something false.
I suppose my lie could have been due, in part, to bias. There were a lot of convenient things in the person's house. I had been praising some of them. Maybe I wanted to praise more things. Maybe I thought that lying about the hand soap would be a good way to make headway towards that goal. If so, then maybe I could have prevented the lie by *noticing* my desire to praise things, *recognizing* that as a bias, and then *watching for* for the potential effects of that bias. I could have been extra careful about saying things that I would be biased to say.
#13203 You were visibly doing some social stuff (which is inherently not truth-oriented in some ways, which is similar to bias). Exaggerating some praise was one of the social things.
#13171 Unit tests for knowledge are basically the same concept as a library of criticism. That library of criticisms that you check new ideas against is your test suite. It needs to be built up gradually with *high quality* tests. People with a bunch of shitty tests, with a bunch of false positives (flags stuff as broken that is actually correct), start ignoring their tests and using metrics like "Did over 10% of my tests fail? Then maybe it's bad. But I'll ignore fewer fails than that."
Also note that many tests are subject-specific. They can apply to a field, like physics, or to a much more narrow area (like only applies to ideas about golden retrievers catching frisbees). So part of the process has to be evaluating *which* tests should be run for a particular idea (which are relevant).
When in doubt, run extra tests *if* they are designed to not fail when they can't deal with the input. But if your tests start flagging stuff as wrong that they don't understand, then you have to much more aggressively limit what tests get run, which is bad.
#13204 Good point. Acting social is a major factor in lying. For one thing, acting social commonly involves telling *white lies*.
I could try to notice when I'm acting social (which is not THAT often, I think) and to be extra alert for lies during those times. I think that would be a do-able and potentially helpful next step.
> I could try to notice when I'm acting social (which is not THAT often, I think)
I'd guess it's most of the time, or at least most of the time you're around anyone other than family.
#13236 I wrote:
>> I could try to notice when I'm acting social (which is not THAT often, I think)
Anon replied:
> I'd guess it's most of the time, or at least most of the time you're around anyone other than family.
Ok. I will modify my proposal from #13204 to take account of your point. My modification is to remove the text "(which is not THAT often, I think)". The result is:
>>> I could try to notice when I'm acting social and to be extra alert for lies during those times.
I don't currently notice myself acting social often enough for that to be a burden, but I do notice it enough for it to give me something to work on.
Suppose I eventually learn to notice myself acting social in more situations. Then maybe my capacity to watch out for my own lies will also have grown. If it hasn't, I'll have to think of something else.
Unit tests for knowledge
#13205 That's an angle I wasn't thinking of it from. I was thinking of starting with an idea, and then figuring out what tests would be good for it, and then writing and running those tests. You're suggesting that I focus instead on the tests, and on making them good and generic, and then when ideas come along, I spend a bit of time figuring out which tests from my library apply. This seems different than writing new tests for each idea.
In programming, I write new tests for each function. I don't have a generic library of tests that I apply to new functions. I have generic test *helper* functions and test *libraries* that make testing in general easier, but still, each function requires its own new test, and I usually have to think about the inputs for each new function and about what the correct outputs should be.
To avoid lying to others, you have to avoid lying to yourself
#13198 Some people (including me at some times) believe that it's morally worse to lie to someone else than it is to lie to yourself. But if you are effective at lying to yourself, then you will believe your own lies, and it's plausible that you would eventually tell those lies to others. So if you really care about not lying to others, you have to avoid lying to yourself.
lying
This is an area where I don't know much. But my guess is that when we believe lies we tell ourselves, it is almost *inevitable* that we tell those lies to other people as well. The only situation where we wouldn't is where those lies aren't relevant to something we'd convey to other people in some way, and I can't think of a situation where that would be the case.
Morality isn't primarily about others
My take on what you're saying: Some people think that the really bad thing is to lie to others. So, don't lie to yourself as you'll probably end up lying to others, too (i.e. you'll do the really bad thing).
I think this puts morality inside a social framework. It conveys that the reason to be moral is the effect on other people.
But the primary reason to be moral is for *you*. It's to help *you* successfully live. It's to help *you* not destroy yourself (by destroying your mind). Others come into the picture only secondary to that goal.
I think it's much worse to lie to yourself than to lie to others. When lying to others, it's possible that you retain a tie to reality (e.g. you lie only to them and not also to yourself). If you lie to yourself, then by definition you've lost that tie, which is a much worse position for you to be in.
My comment is a response to #13252.
#13258 If you can identify a single false statement in the post of mine to which you replied, I would appreciate hearing about it.
Scenarios in which you could lie to yourself w/out lying to others?
#13256
> when we believe lies we tell ourselves, it is almost *inevitable* that we tell those lies to other people as well
Practically speaking, I agree. However, I think there are a few theoretical scenarios in which someone could lie to themselves without lying to others. Here are a few:
- Say someone follows a vow of silence. If they don't talk to others, they won't lie to others.
- Say someone never talks about a certain area of their life. If they lie to themselves only about that area, then they wouldn't inevitably tell those lies to others.
> If you can identify a single false statement in the post of mine to which you replied, I would appreciate hearing about it.
I think believing the idea "that it's morally worse to lie to someone else than it is to lie to yourself" is a mistake.
Now, I guess you might be thinking "Well, I didn't say that it was *right* to believe that. I just said that I believed it some times. I was just honestly stating the facts regarding my beliefs. Therefore, I didn't actually make a false statement."
If that's the case, then I think you're missing the point. It's sort of like this:
Suppose someone says "I believe it's ok to steal from ppl some times."
Another person says "That's wrong and here's why -- blah, blah, blah."
The first person replies "If you can identify a single false statement in the post of mine to which you replied, I would appreciate hearing about it."
#13265 Saying "Some people [...] believe that [X]" is not stating X.
Saying something like "Sometimes I believe X" also is not stating X.
> then I think you're missing the point.
You seem to be missing the point that Alisa was speaking narrowly about limited issues, and then asked if you could point out a false statement. Alisa was trying to say things which were true rather than false, as written, exactly. You are talking about how, in some context, some of it could be bad or misleading which is a different issue. You are still pushing this after Alisa clearly and directly communicated what he cares about (false statements). You have not in fact pointed out a false statement from Alisa's comment, but you haven't clearly admitted you can't, and you have continued with other types of criticism that Alisa didn't express interest in and which you could probably guess that Alisa has heard before.
> Suppose someone says "I believe it's ok to steal from ppl some times."
That is not equivalent to what Alisa said. That strikes me as dishonest. That or it's a grammar error with an ambiguous modifier on the end. What Alisa said was about *believing sometimes*, but you've changed it, as I read it, to being about always believing that *stealing* is ok sometimes (in some situations).
#13247 Start with individual tests. It's important to find patterns in the testing and refactor to have more generic tests which can replace 3+ previous tests. Same as normal DRY coding.
If you have a bunch of one-line tests which just call a library function, then you're part of the way there. But it'd be superior to write some code which generates all those individual tests instead of writing them all by hand.
Also I talked about this in my stream https://youtu.be/EiPMrvQYx5w approximately 2 hours in. (I talked about some other comments from this page earlier in the stream, too.)
>> then I think you're missing the point.
> You seem to be missing the point that Alisa was speaking narrowly about limited issues, and then asked if you could point out a false statement.
I wondered about that point, which is why I wrote this:
>Now, I guess you might be thinking "Well, I didn't say that it was *right* to believe that. I just said that I believed it some times. I was just honestly stating the facts regarding my beliefs. Therefore, I didn't actually make a false statement."
To clarify, I agree with this reasoning as stated. Alisa didn't actually make a false statement.
back to anon:
>Alisa was trying to say things which were true rather than false, as written, exactly. You are talking about how, in some context, some of it could be bad or misleading which is a different issue.
I don't understand why Alisa doesn't care that his belief is a mistake. But it's his call. I'll drop it.
> You are still pushing this after Alisa clearly and directly communicated what he cares about (false statements). You have not in fact pointed out a false statement from Alisa's comment, but you haven't clearly admitted you can't, and you have continued with other types of criticism that Alisa didn't express interest in and which you could probably guess that Alisa has heard before.
What other types of criticism? The idea that he should care when his beliefs are mistaken?
>> Suppose someone says "I believe it's ok to steal from ppl some times."
> That is not equivalent to what Alisa said. That strikes me as dishonest. That or it's a grammar error with an ambiguous modifier on the end. What Alisa said was about *believing sometimes*, but you've changed it, as I read it, to being about always believing that *stealing* is ok sometimes (in some situations).
I see what you mean. Sorry. The grammar is different between them. I don't know if it was dishonesty or carelessness (or both...they are related). Anyways, I just wrote the meaning that I had in mind. And looking at it now, even though the grammar is different, I'm having a hard time seeing the difference in meaning.
I sometimes believe it's ok to steal.
I believe it's ok to steal sometimes.
(BTW, I think "sometimes" is better.)
If you sometimes believe it's ok to steal, then there will be times when you believe it's ok to steal.
If you believe it's ok to steal sometimes, then aren't we left with the same conclusion? That there will be times when you believe it's ok to steal?
How are they different?
With one meaning, there can be times when you think all stealing is wrong. You have different ideas at different times.
With the other one, you have a single idea at all times which says some stealing is wrong and some is right.
In the one case, your ideas are what's changing around time. At different times you have different opinions of the same situation. In the other case, the situation is what changes.
A trick for solving problems that should be possible but seem impossible
This note explains a trick for making progress on a kind of problem where you have to figure out how to do something that seems like it should be possible but also seems to be impossible for some unknown reason. Examples of this kind of problem:
- Figuring out how to close the blinds to get some privacy in a street-level hotel room that seems like it doesn't have blinds
- Figuring out how to turn the cooling on in a hotel room that doesn't seem like it has air conditioning (AC)
The trick is: act as if things make sense even though it seems like they don't. It's a mental attitude to try adopting temporarily. Just assume that things must make sense somehow and keep looking for how that could be.
The example problems above actually happened to me. I was with someone who used the trick to figure out how to solve each problem. They shared the trick with me after I asked how they did it.
The solution to the missing AC control is that it was in a strange location. I forget exactly where. But it doesn't make sense that a hotel wouldn't have AC, so it was worth assuming that there was AC and trying to find the control for it.
The actual blinds were somehow covered behind semi-transparent curtains. They were attached to a high railing and kind of hidden. But they were there. And when you closed them, it gave the room privacy from the street.
BoI on "[t]he quest for good explanations" and Deutsch's "criterion for reality"
A paragraph from BoI:
> The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. It is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed: It trivially implies that prediction alone is insufficient.
Ok.
> Somewhat less trivially, it leads to the rejection of authority, because if we adopt a theory on authority, that means that we would also have accepted a range of different theories on authority.
Ok. "X is true because Y said so and Y has authority" is not much of an explanation, let alone a hard-to-vary explanation.
> And hence it also implies the need for a tradition of criticism.
Hmm. Is the issue that without ongoing criticism throughout time, the quest for good explanations will ultimately fail, and the only known way to provide ongoing criticism throughout time is to have a tradition of criticism?
> It also implies a methodological rule – a criterion for reality – namely that we should conclude that a particular thing is real if and only if it figures in our best explanation of something.
How does "[t]he quest for good explanations" "impl[y]" Deutsch's "criterion for reality"? (I think "It" at the beginning of the above sentence ultimately refers to the subject of the first sentence of the paragraph, namely, "[t]he quest for good explanations".)
> How does "[t]he quest for good explanations" "impl[y]" Deutsch's "criterion for reality"?
It's not a logical implication, but it's a view which works well if you see explanations as primary.
re tradition of criticism, that's an alternative to authority.
#13285
> re tradition of criticism, that's an alternative to authority.
Is a tradition of criticism the only workable alternative to authority that is compatible with the quest for good explanations? Or is there some other reason that nothing other than a tradition of criticism would work? If not, then I don't see how the quest for good explanations implies the *need* for a tradition of criticism.
#13296 Do you have any ideas for something else that would work?
#13297 No.
Chilipad
The Chilipad is a device that helps control the temperature of the top of a mattress. The Chilipad's temperature can be set to any integer value between 55° and 110° F.
The Chilipad consists of two parts: (1) a small refrigerator/heater and (2) a thin pad filled with flexible water-carrying tubes that lies between the mattress and the bottom sheet. A pair of hoses connects the two parts. Whenever the Chilipad is on, water circulates through the pad and through the refrigerator/heater.
Benedict Evans miscapitalizes "YouTube"
Benedict's Newsletter: No. 300 [1] miscapitalizes “YouTube” as “Youtube”:
> you *could* argue that changing the ownership of Youtube or Instagram would open up more competition
> but of course changing who owns Youtube or Instagram
YouTube writes “YouTube” with a capital “Y” and “T”. This can be seen, for example, on YouTube's support page.
[1] The number for Benedict's newsletter appears to be given only in the email subject line. The number isn't visible in the Mailchimp version linked at the bottom of the email. (This is the link I gave above.)
Unit tests for knowledge
#13267 Your idea of starting out by writing individual tests for each function (or idea) and abstracting/generalizing when you encounter repetition makes sense.
In the stream, you brought up, as an example of a generic unit test, testing that a web page loaded without errors:
> You could have actual generic tests. You could have a test that works on any web page and tests whether it loads without erroring. And so you keep using that test on many different web pages. Now, in terms of the actual design, it might be you have a helper function called testWebPage, and then you write a testManyWebPages function, then you just call the helper function on a list of things. The point is, conceptually, you are re-using that testing function on many different cases instead of using separate stuff.
That was helpful. I can now think of some examples of generic unit tests for knowledge. For example, knowledge that involves statistics could be checked for generic statistical errors such as having a sample size that is too small. Knowledge that deals with epistemology could be checked for generic epistemological errors such as appealing to justificationism or otherwise contradicting YESNO.
A forgotten item to revisit in my Paths Forward document
I am reviewing my Paths Forward document. There are a lot of problems in it that should be addressed. This comment addresses one of them. I will address the other issues that I find in follow-up notes.
The doc lists several items for me to revisit. Along with each item is a date by which I should have revisited it. This means that either the date passed without me revisiting that item or, if I did revisit it, I didn't update the document accordingly. Either is bad.
Here's one of my items to revisit:
> - 2018-06-24: Check for Critical Fallibilism website & post about it. I am reliably informed that this site will have ideas that are relevant to learning how to not want to be stuck forever. "it has some things to say about bounded and unbounded! (wanting to be stuck on some topics = bounded)." (Issue raised by Elliot Temple on 2018-04-19.)
That item should have been revisited on 2018-06-24. I revisited it today. I went to https://criticalfallibilism.com . The site seems unfinished. The header says "Yes or No Philosophy" and under that it says "hi. this is a test file." Other text on that page looks similar to the text at https://elliottemple.com/consulting . Since the site doesn't seem to be ready yet, I plan to change the date on the reminder from 2018-06-24 to 2020-06-24.
My Paths Forward document rendering as raw text
My Paths Forward doc is now hosted on sourcehut (sr.ht). I used to host it on Bitbucket, but Bitbucket is removing support for Mercurial, the revision control system I use.
sourcehut currently doesn't render files as Markdown except for README files. My Paths Forward doc is currently named pf.md, so it currently doesn't render as Markdown on sourcehut. sourcehut renders it as raw text.
Reviewing and updating my Paths Forward document often enough
My Paths Forward document says:
> ## Update this document often enough
>
> I plan to update this document at least once per month. The most recent update should never be more than a month ago.
According to the revision history, the document was last updated 3 months ago, and the previous update was almost a year before that. Fail.
> I have a repeating calendar event to remind me.
I have no such repeating event on my calendar. A search for "paths" or "forward" in my Apple calendar returns nothing, and I don't use any other calendar, such as a Google calendar or a physical calendar. Fail.
Rather than planning to *update* the document monthly, I think I should plan to *review* it monthly. By reviewing, I mean re-reading the whole thing. As I do that, I can make any updates that occur to me.
I don't like the idea of a calendar event for reviewing because I don't want to do the review on a particular day. However, I think I may have thought of a better way to remember.
Another thing that could help me remember to review the document every month is to post the results of each monthly review here under the title "Paths Forward review". One way this would help is by making it more clear to me and others if the monthly review isn't taking place.
#13364 You can have a calendar reminder and then either do it that day *or* have it remind you tomorrow. And keep having it remind you tomorrow until you actually do it. This will help you remember compared to no reminder.
#13365 I wasn't able to figure out how to get Apple's calendar to remind me again the next day for an event. However, I was able to use the Reminders app to create a recurring monthly reminder. Once a reminder comes due, I think the Reminders app will keep reminding me about it until I mark it as done.
1 billion seconds
Say you can count one number every second. Suppose you were to start counting 1, 2, 3, ..., and keep counting with no breaks, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. How long would it take you to count to a billion?
Answer (ROT-13): Nobhg guvegl gjb lrnef. [1]
A modern CPU can count to 1 billion in less than a second. Comparing the two times gives one way of thinking about of how fast modern CPUs are.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+billion+seconds+to+years
Life BelowZero
Life Below Zero is an interesting TV documentary about people who live near the Arctic Circle.
One thing that stood out to me about S01E01 is the way the subjects seem to exude competence in survival skills. The people catching fish seem competent at it. Erik Salatan, the guy who harvests all his own meat, seems competent at shooting caribou. The guy who rides on a dog sled on the frozen river seems competent at guiding his dogs and at recognizing when the ice isn't safe.
Ayn Rand valued competence extremely highly. In Atlas Shrugged, Francisco says:
> "Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life-except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. [...]"
What could explain this competence? Here are a few factors:
- North of the Arctic Circle, one mistake can kill you. People who overreach in survival-related matters won't last long there. Learning without overreaching is the quickest path to competence.
- Knowing the dangers of the arctic environment, the people who choose to live there are predisposed to value competence in survival skills.
- In order to make the show more interesting, the show's producers selected competent people to be on the show.
"pit toilet" and "outhouse"
NOTE: This post explains my understanding of what Wikipedia says about the terms "pit toilet" and "outhouse". It may not be the best way to understand what they actually mean or how they are actually used.
A pit toilet is a toilet in which the waste falls or slides into a hole in the ground.
An outhouse is a building that provides shelter for a pit toilet.
A pit toilet and an outhouse usually go together, kind of like a toilet and a bathroom. I guess that "pit toilet" slightly focuses on the toilet part of the toilet/shelter pair, while "outhouse" slightly focuses on the shelter part of the pair.
Consider the pairs "pit toilet"/"outhouse" and "toilet"/"bathroom". I guess that, in many cases, either term in a pair can be used mostly interchangeably. For example, you can say either "I need to use the toilet" or "I need to use the bathroom" – they mostly mean the same thing.
#13396 And plastic porta potties are different.
#13397 Yeah. For one thing, in plastic porta potties, the waste stays in the porta potty rather than going into a hole in the ground.
Life below Zero
#13384 gp @ competence. I watched a few episodes of the show, but my thoughts were less precise than yours. Something along the lines of: I wouldn't want to live that way (meaning: in the Alaskan wilderness, with little technological infrastructure), but it's a lifestyle worthy of respect.
Spelling error
#13384
> Erik Salatan, the guy who harvests all his own meat, seems competent at shooting caribou.
Correction: Erik's last name is "Salitan", not "Salatan". I guess I tried to spell his name from memory without checking it, rather than copy/pasting or checking the spelling carefully.
To see the correct spelling, you can watch the show itself which has text on the screen that spells his name correctly. Also, his name is on his site, http://www.bushwhackalaska.com :
> Owner/Operator Erik Salitan
Hotels/motels without air conditioning
Some American hotels/motels don't have air conditioning, but I didn't realize this. I thought having air conditioning was table stakes for a hotel/motel, like having a shower and a sink. So I didn't check for it when booking. I ended up booking a place that had no air conditioning.
As an example of a hotel without air conditioning, consider Marin Suites Hotel, which is rated 3.5 on tripadvisor with 657 reviews. (This is an example hotel I found by searching tripadvisor for "no air conditioning"). The hotel's own page describing their rooms doesn't mention air conditioning among the amenities, but it also doesn't mention it as something missing. In contrast, the hotel's tripadvisor page (linked above) says the rooms *do* have air conditioning.
Regarding the hotel, someone on tripadvisor asked:
> Is it true that there is no air conditioning in this hotel? I have a reservation in June, and I do not want to stay without air conditioning!
A hotel representative replied:
> Yes it is true that we do not have air conditioning in the hotel. We have a portable cooler that we have in the living room and provide one for each bedroom. Please let me know if I can help you with any other questions.
Judging by some other comments on that page, the "cooler" provided by the hotel is either a fan or a swamp cooler:
> They provide fans in each room including front room. We were there this past weekend for the fifth time in a row each time in July.
> No AC........The swamp coolers don't work when its hot. Stay there in June, 2017 and the rooms were 95 degrees.
Proposal for a personal list of big problems & solutions
If I don't share a belief with others, there's no way for others to tell me I'm wrong about that belief. In other words, there's no paths forward for beliefs I don't share. I don't want to be making known mistakes about the big issues in my life. So I think I should publish a statement of what big problems I want to solve in my life and how I'm trying to solve them. Example big problems: How to not die early (both physically and mentally, which are two different issues) and how to have enough money to live on.
If applicable, for each problem, I could list some alternative solutions I considered and rejected, along with why I rejected them.
Serious potential problems in my life that I'd like to prevent
Here's a list of serious potential problems in my life that I'd like to prevent:
- Having an unreasonably low expected value for my lifespan
- Disengaging from public criticism of my ideas
- Lacking sufficient money
- Lacking sufficient free time
This is just a high-level draft. Any big problem areas I'm missing?
#13508 Maybe you could become hostile to Objectivism (for example) while still engaging with public criticism. Sounds kinda hard tho.
You don't talk about relationships. Friends, family, socializing, etc. Maybe you have goals for that?
Other big ones for many people are prestige, reputation and career.
Also maybe you'd want to have kids and treat them well, or treat your existing kids well.
Maybe you should also have a section for some major things you disagree with, some non-goals.
#13509
> You don't talk about relationships. Friends, family, socializing, etc. Maybe you have goals for that?
> Other big ones for many people are prestige, reputation and career.
I guess I have some goals in those areas, but they aren't my most important goals. I would have to think hard before sacrificing one my most important goals for any of those things.
> Also maybe you'd want to have kids and treat them well, or treat your existing kids well.
Those aren't goals of mine.
> Maybe you should also have a section for some major things you disagree with, some non-goals.
Good suggestion. Some people have important goals relating to the following things, but I don't:
- God
- Having a good physique (for its own sake, beyond what's helpful for achieving a reasonably long expected life span)
- Not eating meat or animal products
- Eating a lot of delicious food (I expend energy on this, but I like to think I would give it up if it became necessary for my health)
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any important goals to disavow beyond those.
#13509
> You don't talk about relationships.
Good point. One exception to my lifespan-related goal is that I might do something risky to save a loved one who is, say, trapped in a burning building or something. That should be a really unusual situation, though. I guess one way to mitigate the risk of something like that happening would be to try to arrange things such that my loved ones are rarely in dangerous circumstances.
Pronouncing "Alisa"
On Sunday, September 15, 2019, AnneB wrote on the FI Discord:
> 2) I pronounce Alisa with a long 'i', like it does here: https://www.pronouncekiwi.com/Alisa%20Zinov%27yevna%20Rosenbaum
> I don't know how FI's Alisa pronounces it.
I have been pronouncing "Alisa" with a short "i" -- like "Alyssa" in Alyssa Milano's name. This pronunciation has contributed to me mis-spelling "Alisa" as "Alissa" on multiple occasions. Examples can be found on FI list and on curi.us.
From now on, I'll try to remember to pronounce "Alisa" with a long "i". The name "Lisa" is pronounced with a long "i", so I think that pronouncing "Alisa" with a long "i" will help me remember to spell "Alisa" correctly.
Form of verb following "instead of"
https://curi.us/2218-social-rules :
> Social rules cause people to take offense instead of rationally analyze what was said.
To my ear, that use of "analyze" should be replaced by "analyzing". I don't know enough grammar to explain why that is.
In the sentence after the one above, a verb ending in "ing" ("evaluating") follows "instead of":
> Social rule following involves a way of evaluating statements as polite or rude, which people do before and often instead of evaluating whether the statement is true.
That sounds grammatically correct to me.
I thought the example below from https://www.englishgrammar.org/adverb-preposition/ was helpful:
> **Instead of** can be followed by an –ing form. Infinitives are not normally used.
>
> * I spent the whole day in bed **instead of going to work**. (NOT I spent the whole day in bed instead of to go to work.)
#13537 My intuition disagrees with you. I think the infinitive "analyze" is used because the infinitive "to take" is used prior, as the point of comparison, so it should match that. It's better to have it more parallel.
#13539
> #13537 My intuition disagrees with you. I think the infinitive "analyze" is used because the infinitive "to take" is used prior, as the point of comparison, so it should match that. It's better to have it more parallel.
I wonder if the prepositional phrase "instead of X" affects the attempt at a parallel structure. If the sentence just used a conjunction, e.g. "Social rules cause people to take offense and get mad.", then you'd want a parallel infinitive situation.
But with the sentence in question, I also think it's better to use a gerund to serve as the object of the preposition: "instead of analyzing" ("rationally" is just a modifier).
"instead of" vs "rather than"
#13539
I see what you mean about parallelism. In light of that, I propose replacing "instead of" with "rather than". The result is:
> Social rules cause people to take offense rather than rationally analyze what was said.
That preserves the parallelism, while also sounding grammatically correct to my ear.
I did a web search and found multiple GMAT study pages claiming that "instead of" can govern only a noun, while "rather than" can govern a noun or a verb. One example is https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/gmat-idioms-of-comparison/ , which says:
> [**Instead of**] is a compound preposition, and, as such, could only take a noun as its object. By contrast, **rather than** can act as either a preposition (taking a noun) or a subordinate conjunction (followed by a full clause). **Instead of** could only put nouns in parallel, but **rather than** can put nouns or verbs or entire actions in parallel.
Postmortem for my almost-blank comment (#13541)
My comment #13541 was empty except for a link to the parent comment. Here's how that happened.
I created my comment by clicking "reply" on the comment to which I wanted to reply (the parent comment). That created a comment box containing only a link to the parent comment. The cursor was at the end of the link. Very soon after that, I tried to add a newline after the link to the parent comment. To do this, I pressed Tab and then, without waiting to see the effect, I pressed Enter, thinking it would add a newline. However, Tab changed the input focus to the "Post Comment" button and Enter effectively clicked the button.
Pressing Tab was a mistake. I don't remember exactly why I pressed it. It wouldn't have done anything useful for me. Maybe I thought it would take the cursor to the end of the line. However, in the comment box that results from clicking "reply", the cursor starts out at the end of the first line. So maybe I had hit the up arrow earlier for some reason. That would have moved the cursor to the beginning of the line.
#13548 Ah, good research. I tentatively think you're right.
I am a self-programming program
I am a self-programming program. I am responsible for all of my own programming. Everything that would conventionally be regarded as part of my unconscious mind was in fact put there–programmed–by me in the first place, including:
- the way I look at this screen and see text
- the way I hear sounds as speech
- the things I notice in a situation, such other cars while driving
- my emotions
- the way I speak and walk
I can re-program myself. Even my most habitual actions and my deepest emotions can be changed [1]. Not with code, like with a computer, but by *learning*.
A good program has a clean design. Everything works together, and every part makes sense. Maybe this is why Francisco could "always name the purpose of his every random moment".
I don't remember how I began. Maybe it wasn't until I got older that I programmed a memory system that was accessible with my current retrieval methods. I suppose, though, that I must have started out as a rather small self-programming program. Using my creativity, I began to program myself. And over time, I added the layers and layers of programming that make up the me of today.
[1] Elliot Temple wrote about how to change emotions in fallibleideas.com/emotions.
#13601 This story leaves out how other people pressured you to program certain features.
Mostly, other people can't program you. But then can punish you unless you accomplish certain things they choose, pass certain tests, etc. Those threatened and actual punishments can motivate some programming (partly to please the threateners, partly to lie to and trick the threateners).
Also, to some extent, your culture (using some individuals) can program you. Programming you from the outside is very very very hard and complicated. But I think it can be done by highly evolved static meme knowledge.
#13638 I agree.
Solzhenitsyn, sanction, and lying
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in *From Under The Rubble*:
> What does it mean, not to lie? [...] It simply means: *not saying what you don’t think*, and that includes not whispering, not opening your mouth, not raising your hand, not casting your vote, not feigning a smile, not lending your presence, not standing up, and not cheering.
This reminds me of (what I understand of) Ayn Rand's ideas about *sanction*. It is lying to indicate, by any means, that you agree with something with which you disagree.
Remembering that adverbs can modify non-verbs
In English Language, Analysis & Grammar, Elliot Temple writes :
> There are two types of modifier. An adjective is a modifier for a noun, and an adverb is a modifier for anything else. [...]
> *Warning:* Despite having the word “verb” inside it, an “adverb” doesn’t only modify verbs. Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and more.
I found it hard to remember that adverbs can modify non-verbs. In search of a memory aid, I looked up the etymology of "adverb" in Webster's 1913:
> Ad"verb (?), n. [L. *adverbium*; *ad* + *verbum* word, verb...]
So, earlier in the evolution of the word "adverb", the string "verb" actually meant *word*!
Interestingly, the first **English** definition of "verb" in Webster's 1913 is also "word", though this definition is marked as obsolete.
> Verb (?), n. [... L. *verbum* a word, verb...]
> 1. A word; a vocable. [Obs.] South.
I hope that info will help me remember that adverbs can modify more than just verbs.
Helping verbs
In English Language, Analysis & Grammar, Elliot Temple writes:
> *Detail:* Verbs can be modified by other verbs. Modifier verbs are called “helper” or “auxiliary” verbs, not adverbs. In “I will practice grammar.”, the verb “practice” is modified by the helper verb “will” which changes it from present tense to future tense.
There is a song that I call the "Jingle Bells Helping Verbs Song". It is a short song that lists 23 helping verbs, sung to the tune of *Jingle Bells*:
> Helping verbs, helping verbs,
> there are 23.
> Am, is, are, was and were,
> being, been, and be [hey]!
> Have, has, had, do, does, did,
> will, would, shall, and should.
> There are 5 more helping verbs:
> may, might, must, can, could!
In The Forgotten Helping Verbs, Neal Whitman discusses several different views on how many helping verbs there are. Whitman brings up "ought" and "having" as examples of helping verbs that aren't in the Jingle Bells Helping Verbs Song.
In Understanding the Parts of Speech, Edward Good argues that "had better" should also be regarded as a helping verb, for example:
> You'd better watch your step.
Good also argues that "better" alone can be a helping verb (though this usage seems informal to me), for example:
> You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not shout, I'm telling you why.
Postmortem: incorrect quoting
#13784 The example sentence “You'd better watch your step.” was my own. It didn't come from Good, but I quoted it as if it had.
In an earlier draft, the example sentence was in quotation marks at the end of the sentence that introduces it. Even here, I should have added some text indicating that the quote was my own, not Good's.
I think I moved the example sentence to a separate block quote because I thought that made it stand out more clearly. If I had any ideas warning me that this kind of quoting could be confusing, I didn't give them enough importance.
Updated Alisa's Paths Forward doc
I finally updated my Paths Forward doc. Here's a summary of the main diff:
- Moved reading list to a separate doc.
- Added a short section listing 4 specific mistakes I want to avoid, namely: false statements, unclear statements, non sequiturs, and formatting errors.
- Added a prioritized list of things I plan to learn. The list is, essentially: grammar first, then *Yes or No Philosophy*.
- Reviewed all the items to review with deadlines. I wasn't ready to tackle any of them. I plan to revisit them after I learn more about grammar and *Yes or No Philosophy*. I bumped the review date year on all but one of them from 2019 to 2021.
#13363 I filed a sourcehut feature request to render .md files as Markdown.
#13790 I updated my Paths Forward doc again. Here's a summary of the main diff:
- Added last-updated date
- Added note about checking for words that occur only once in a post
Broken link
#13790 The "main diff" link in the parent post (from Oct 14, 2019) is broken.
The URL I had was:
https://hg.sr.ht/~petrogradphilosopher/fi/rev/3df43f09217cca12b64c456848a4bcb15f882f4cI
That ends in an "l", but the final "l" shouldn't be there. The URL should just be:
https://hg.sr.ht/~petrogradphilosopher/fi/rev/3df43f09217cca12b64c456848a4bcb15f882f4c
I didn't notice the mistake until now. Enough time has passed since I made it that I've forgotten what I was doing when I made it.
I updated my PF doc again
#14148 I updated my Paths Forward doc again. Here's a summary of the diff:
- Added info about the length in days of my daily FI posting streak.
- Added note about logging the URL of at least one of my daily FI posts.
- Added info about my FI posting screencasts.
Disagreeing with Ram Dass
On HN, someone quoted Ram Dass:
> "When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
> The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are."
I replied:
> It’s correct to regard trees, but not people, as products of their environment. Trees don’t make choices. People do.
Programming problem: find the two integers in a list that occur an odd number of times
Here's a programming problem I read about. I wasn't able to solve it on my own.
Say you have an array of nonnegative integers in which all but two of the numbers occur an even number of times in the array. The problem is to write an algorithm that finds, in linear time and constant extra space, the two numbers that occur an odd number of times in the array.
Example: [1,9,3,1,9,9,5,5,5,9] would be a valid input array: 1 occurs twice, 9 occurs 4 times, 3 occurs once, and 5 occurs 3 times. The algorithm's output should be 3 and 5, because they are the two numbers that occur an odd number of times.
Solution (my code, based on a solution I read about): https://play.golang.org/p/wmqVhnjQ%2dvq
#14950 Haven't checked your solution yet but I think I solved it. I randomly generated a bunch of array inputs to test it.
I assumed there's a max integer. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to destructively modify the array but my solution didn't do that anyway.
https://pastebin.com/uzbEkD0r
And with bad formatting just in case pastebin dies one day:
def f(a)
answer_xored = 0
lower_xors = 0
a.each do |e|
answer_xored = answer_xored ^ e
end
a.each do |e|
solution_pairing = e ^ answer_xored
lower_num = [e, solution_pairing].min
if e == lower_num
lower_xors = lower_xors ^ e
end
end
return [lower_xors, lower_xors ^ answer_xored]
end
#14950 Read your solution description. Mine is similar but a bit simpler and more elegant because I use lower numbers from a pair instead of screwing around based on the first set bit. Also you don't need to iterate through the array a third time to find the second number. Just xor the first number in the solution with the number you got earlier when xoring everything in the array together.
Nice! Your solution is significantly simpler than mine. Here's how I think your solution works:
First, you XOR everything together (this part is the same as the solution I read). You call the result of that *answer_xored*.
Next, you observe that XORing either of the two solutions with *answer_xored* will yield the other solution. Using this idea, you iterate over each number in the array and ask, is this potentially the lesser of the two solutions? If so, XOR it together with the other numbers that would give the same answer. Here's my version of this loop (using dots for indentation):
a.each do |e|
··if e <= e^answer_xored
····lower_xors ^= e
··end
end
By the end of that loop, all the non-solutions included in *lower_xors* have cancelled each other out, and the greater of the two solutions was never included in *lower_xors*, so *lower_xors* contains the lesser of the two solutions.
The way that loop works, you kind of don't have to think about the non-solutions, since they cancel each other out. Even though the loop iterates over the entire array, it's sort of as if you were iterating only over the two solutions.
Finally, you use the observation from the third paragraph above to get the greater of the two solutions by XORing *lower_xors* and *answer_xored*. Really neat.
#14964 I agree with your summary.
I updated my paths forward doc
I updated my paths forward doc. To summarize:
- my daily posting streak is now 82 days,
- I enhanced my FI post checker to check for line break errors, and
- I listed how far along I am (e.g., current chapter/section) on the philosophy materials I'm studying.
Hiding ideas from criticism
If you don't share your ideas in public and reply to people's comments, it's a sign that your ideas suck -- kind of like the left-wing news sites that turn off their comment sections.
Some partially-formed thoughts on good & evil
[The ideas below aren't as connected to the rest of what I know as most other things I write, so I wouldn't be too surprised if they are mistaken. However, I would still be interested in post-morteming any mistakes people point out.]
The moral is the effective, the potent. Therefore, evil, the immoral, is ineffective, impotent. An evil person can bumble around and cause destruction, but they won’t be especially effective at it. It’s like the knowledge possessed by static memes. Evil can do damage, but it’s not the kind of damage that can be achieved with effective thought. In the fight between good against evil, good has an advantage, but the good has to be actively chosen, unlike evil, which is the default. Therefore, if you aren’t actively choosing the good, you are evil, or, at the very least, immoral.
#15544 This reads to me like a bunch of assertions without enough explanations/reasoning. Some statements of what you mean by some of the terms could help too.
Paul Graham: How to Write Usefully
Paul Graham published an essay called How to Write Usefully (Feb, 2020). Below are some excerpts I agreed with. I emphasized in *italics* some points I found especially interesting.
> Telling people something they didn't know doesn't always mean surprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had never put into words.
> When you tell people something they didn't know, they don't always thank you for it. Sometimes the reason people don't know something is because they don't want to know it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief.
> The strength component just makes things worse. If there's anything that annoys people more than having their cherished assumptions contradicted, it's having them flatly contradicted.
> [...]
> And if your writing is as simple as possible, that just makes things worse. *Brevity is the diction of command.* If you watch someone delivering unwelcome news from a position of inferiority, you'll notice they tend to use lots of words, to soften the blow. Whereas to be short with someone is more or less to be rude to them.
"Brevity is the diction of command" has ties to Chase Amante's Law of Least Effort.
> *If you've stated an idea as strongly as you could without making it false, all anyone has to do is to exaggerate slightly what you said, and now it is false.*
> ... people who disagree with you rarely disagree with what you've actually written. Instead they make up something you said and disagree with that.
> *For what it's worth, the countermove is to ask someone who does this to quote a specific sentence or passage you wrote that they believe is false, and explain why. I say "for what it's worth" because they never do*.
> I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentional misinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place to meet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by putting bars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The place to protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes. But don't think you can predict them all. *People are as ingenious at misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they want to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill.*
Evasion?
#15583 was by me.
Minor updates to my PF doc
#15015 I made some minor updates to my paths forward doc. To summarize:
- my daily posting streak is now 133 days
- I'm now on Part 4 of Elliot's FI grammar essay
- I'm now on YESNO part 17 - "Check Your Understanding"
Mar 2020 PF doc updates
#15592 A few more minor updates to my paths forward doc:
- My daily posting streak is now 144 days.
- I finished reading Elliot's FI grammar essay, and I'm working on the exercises for part 4.
- I'm now on YESNO part 17 - "Check Your Understanding", question 4.
How I've been studying YESNO
On 2020-04-21, on the #fi discord, @nikluk asked me:
> what new have you learned [from YESNO] so far?
I'm starting to acquire a rudimentary understanding of the material. I've posted to FI list my answers to 8 of the 16 YESNO Check Your Understanding questions, and I haven't gotten any feedback to those posts saying that I'm way off base.
> What kind of approach to it worked best for you?
Mainly: taking notes, reviewing my notes, and posting my thoughts for criticism.
When reading/watching YESNO material, I took a note whenever I learned something interesting (along with the video timestamp if applicable). That resulted in well over 100 notes. I review my notes periodically.
I've also posted about YESNO to curi.us or FI list around 25 times since I started trying seriously to learn it in late 2019. Some of those posts have led to helpful corrections from Elliot (e.g., http://curi.us/comments/show/14869 ).
I read your paths forward policy today:
Alisa's paths forward policy
> By "FI post" I mean an FI list message or a curi.us blog comment. I plan to post often enough to get enough feedback to keep making progress. *My goal is at least 50 posts per month.*
(My emphasis added.)
This seemed pretty high to me. Are you reaching this goal on a continuous basis?
FI posting goal
#16421 In August 2019, I moved my paths forward document to another site (see #13363). When I did that, I should have updated the old document to say that it had moved. I have now done that. (You can still see the version you read in the revision history).
Here's my current posting goal:
> ## Post to FI every day
>
> My goal is to post at least once per day, except when I'm taking a break. I may take up to two breaks per year, each of which could last for up to two weeks. Starting 2019-12-01, I will log (in my records) the URL of at least one of the FI posts I make each day.
>
> As of 2020-02-22, I've been posting at least once per day for 144 days.
I haven't updated the document yet for April, but I haven't broken my daily posting streak.
#16421 A way to start writing is tweets. Write one tweet per day. 280 characters max. You need to get used to writing and build up to it.
The number one goal you should have for your tweet is not being wrong[1]. You could also post tweet-sized stuff here, on your blog, etc.
[1] Either wrong about anything at all or about important stuff. It's your choice of goal, but choose in advance and communicate it to critics. if you choose important stuff you'll have to give some criteria for what that means. an example of reasonable criteria would be "all errors are important except typos that aren't confusing". you could similarly choose to exclude a few other types of minor errors that you specifically list. broader exclusions that identify more things as unimportant are kinda hard. it's hard to make them clear/specific and also hard to avoid any important errors being labelled unimportant.
List of Alisa's postmortems
I updated my paths forward document today. I added a list of my postmortems along with the lessons learned from each:
- Postmortem: missed videos to download (2019-05-02). Lessons: write down goals; treat everyone and everything (including myself!) as a buggy program unless they have demonstrated otherwise; don't ignore my intuition; write about my current level of organization/brainstorm ways to improve.
- Postmortem: incorrect quoting (2019-09-18). Lessons: N/A.
- Postmortem: missing footnote label (2019-09-25). Lessons: add footnote label check to my post checker; take breaks between re-reading posts before sending.
- Postmortem: typo: misspelled domain name (2019-10-03). Lessons: add unique word check to my post checker.
- Postmortem: almost-blank comment (#13541) (2019-10-13). Lessons: N/A.
- Postmortem: missing/incorrect quote attribution (2019-10-30). Lessons: Always add the quote attribution (e.g., "Somebody wrote" or "Somebody continues:") *before* pasting any quote.
- Postmortem: incorrect quoting (2019-11-14). Lessons: check for quote attributions when trimming extra text; make screencasts when I write posts.
- Postmortem: inconsistent bullet point punctuation (2020-01-12). Lessons: add bullet point punctuation check to my post checker.
- Postmortem: not trying to understand the entire sentence (2020-01-19). Lessons: Whenever I post about not understanding something, include a grammatical analysis of the key sentence(s) I didn't understand.
- Postmortem: incorrect spelling/capitalization of proper nouns (2020-02-26). Lessons: use post checker on curi.us comments (not just FI list posts); treat proper nouns like strings of Chinese characters.
- Postmortem: typo in abbreviation (2020-04-06). Lessons: post checker should run *automatically* before I mail a post.
- Postmortem: typo in post title (2020-04-20). Lessons: I need to see everything that I paste.
2020-05-03 #off-topic FI Discord:
[1:26 AM] Alisa: “Some devastating examples of Chads with Incel brothers” http://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4525505&mc=3&forum_id=2
What is your opinion of this and why did you share it?
Some devastating examples of Chads with Incel brothers
#16485 In our culture, famous men attract women more easily than non-famous men. The bodies of the "Chad" brothers (two basketball players and an actor) played an important role in their fame. I shared the post because, in view of the foregoing, I thought it was notable how different the bodies of the "Chad[s]" were from their "Incel" brothers. I think siblings are usually more similar than that.
#16495 If the point was about genetics, why didn't you say so? And surely there are better examples of genetic differences between siblings.
The labelling in terms of chad and incel wasn't about genetics. So not only did you say nothing about your point, you also said things to communicate a different point?
You also haven't said much about your opinion of the matter, as asked. Surely you have opinions about concepts like chad and incel, or you wouldn't have posted about them?
More on "Chads with Incel brothers"
#16496 :
> If the point was about genetics, why didn't you say so?
My point wasn't "about genetics". I didn't say, and I don't know enough to say, what differences between the bodies are genetically determined.
Here are some guesses, though: Height was a prominent difference, and height can be affected (to an extent) by diet and drugs as well as by genes. Unless plastic surgery was involved, I think the bone structure of the faces of Ashton Kutcher and his brother were genetically determined.
I'll answer a related question: "Why didn't you say the point of your link?" Because, when I shared it, I didn't have a point in mind beyond, *this seems interesting*. I hadn't verbalized my reason(s) when I shared the link without comment. That is one reason I posted it to #off-topic instead of somewhere else.
> The labelling in terms of chad and incel wasn't about genetics.
Agreed.
> So not only did you say nothing about your point,
By "your point", I guess you mean something "about genetics", which you referred to earlier. But genetics was not a major part of why I found the link interesting. (Note: You commented about my "point" and I answered about why I found the link interesting. However, I'm not sure whether my reason(s) for finding the link interesting constitute a "point".)
When you refer to "say nothing about your point", I think you mean that what I wrote in #16495 didn't say anything about genetics AND that my point was about genetics. The first part is true, but not the second. Also, #16495 did say some stuff about why I think I shared the link.
> you also said things to communicate a different point?
If (1) the other ideas I communicated constitute a "point" and if (2) "a different point" means something other than a point "about genetics", then yes: the other ideas I communicated had to do with why I found the link interesting enough to share.
> You also haven't said much about your opinion of the matter, as asked.
I'm unclear about what you mean by "the matter". If you mean something about genetics, the question that prompted #16495 was in #16485, and it didn't mention genetics. It asked:
> What is your opinion of this and why did you share it?
My response in #16495 included, as asked, some thoughts about the link I shared as well as why I shared it.
> Surely you have opinions about concepts like chad and incel, or you wouldn't have posted about them?
By "posted about them", do you mean sharing the original link that used the words "Chad" and "Incel" in the title, or what I wrote in #16495? If the former, I wasn't concerned with those words in particular. If the latter, I wrote about them in response to a question about why I shared the link.
Here are my thoughts on the term "chad" and "incel". I didn't do any research for this, so this is roughly what I thought about those terms at the time I shared the link:
I think "chad" roughly means what pick-up artists (PUAs) would call a *good-looking natural*. It means a man who seems to attract women easily, at least in part because of his looks. To the extent that the "chad"'s personality helps him attract women, it's thought that his personality developed because of his looks and his early interactions with women, so it's thought that the "chad" didn't have to consciously practice attracting women. As usually used, the term has a positive connotation, as if it's good to be a "chad", even aside from the fact that the "chad" is presumably doing better than a lot of guys at achieving his own goals about his interactions with women.
I think "incel" is short for "involuntary celibate". I think it generally refers to a man who would like to have romantic or (non-explicitly-paid-for) sexual interactions with women, but is unable to achieve this goal. I don't know where the term comes from. It isn't a PUA term AFAIK. PUA has the term "AFC", which is short for *average frustrated chump*, but an "incel" would be someone who is at an even worse disadvantage when it comes to women than an AFC. I think the term usually has a negative connotation, as if an "incel" is a bad thing to be, even aside from the fact that the "incel" is not achieving his own goals.
You think it's notable and post-worthy if two siblings have non-genetic bodily differences, e.g. b/c one goes to the gym a ton and the other doesn't plus overeats? Or because one is an amputee? Or many other scenarios?
A significant amount of the visible difference in the pictures was genetic and you were talking about bodies instead of stuff like social signaling (which was also highly visible, and are what the title was mostly talking about, and therefore what the people you shared the link with would reasonably think you were sharing).
I was trying to be charitable by taking the ambiguous statements about bodies and siblings as being related to genetics. Similar to how I tried to be charitable by not replying by pointing out that different-gender and different-age siblings have bodily differences.
#16495
Alisa said:
> I shared the post because, in view of the foregoing, I thought it was notable how different the bodies of the "Chad[s]" were from their "Incel" brothers. I think siblings are usually more similar than that.
#16497
Alisa said:
> I'll answer a related question: "Why didn't you say the point of your link?" Because, when I shared it, I didn't have a point in mind beyond, *this seems interesting*. I hadn't verbalized my reason(s) when I shared the link without comment. That is one reason I posted it to #off-topic instead of somewhere else.
I think these contradict.
You're right, they do contradict. Here's what I think happened: #16495 was an attempt to verbalize, after the fact, what prompted me to share the link in the first place; however, #16495 just shared the results of that verbalization as if I had had those ideas in mind all along. In #16497, I explained (contrary to #16495) that I didn't have an explicit (or readily-verbalized) reason for sharing the link, beyond *this is interesting*.
I could have avoided the contradiction by starting with what I said in #16497. I could then have continued with the info in #16495, as long as I made it clear what I was doing.
#16498:
> You think it's notable and post-worthy if two siblings have non-genetic bodily differences, e.g. b/c one goes to the gym a ton and the other doesn't plus overeats? Or because one is an amputee? Or many other scenarios?
Yes, I guess I do.
> I was trying to be charitable by taking the ambiguous statements about bodies and siblings as being related to genetics.
Regarding bodies, I wrote:
>> The bodies of the "Chad" brothers (two basketball players and an actor) played an important role in their fame.
Regarding siblings, I wrote:
>> I think siblings are usually more similar than that.
I don't understand the issue of ambiguity clearly. One thing I can say is that, in both cases, I was trying to avoid false statements. However, maybe the result was unclear, which is also something I try to avoid. If ambiguity is worth focusing on separately from unclear-ness, I would be open to trying to better understand it (and perhaps adding it to my list of things to avoid).
> Similar to how I tried to be charitable by not replying by pointing out that different-gender and different-age siblings have bodily differences.
Good points. I don't think I would have posted if the body differences were just due to the brothers being different ages. I guess because differences due to age are not that unusual.
I thought of different-gender siblings on my own after I posted, but I decided against posting a clarifying follow-up.
Just to note, I wrote #16501, but not the other messages.
#16502:
> I could have avoided the contradiction by starting with what I said in #16497. I could then have continued with the info in #16495, as long as I made it clear what I was doing.
yes, that would have avoided the contradiction. it also would have done a better job of answering the question, which was "why did you share it?". Instead of saying your honest answer about why you shared it, you speculated about it. The reasons you gave weren't things you explicitly thought at the time you shared it. They are things you came up with after the fact.
In #16503, you say:
> One thing I can say is that, in both cases, I was trying to avoid false statements.
That is an issue. Those statements were meant to be the reason why you shared the picture. But instead of just honestly introspecting and trying to come up with the real reasons you shared it, you tried to say things that *weren't false*. The goal of saying things that aren't false (or that make sense, don't contradict, follow your values, etc) can get in the way of honestly figuring out what your thoughts are and what the reasons for your actions are.
If the reasons you shared it were actually bad reasons, then trying to avoid false statements or contradictions could stop you from actually figuring out & articulating your reasons. You could be self-censoring them before even becoming aware of them.
Talking about things as I'm thinking them through.
Ingracke suggested that I learn to talk about things as I'm thinking them through, i.e., before my thoughts have reached a point where I would normally be satisfied enough to share them in a post. I think the idea here is that this will help me learn to think more effectively.
I don't understand Ingracke's suggestion well yet. Understanding it is a work-in-progress for me. This message is my very first attempt to follow it.
#16513 Thinking out loud is something I'm especially good at and have been for a long time.
#16514 Do you know of any existing material on this topic that you think might be helpful for me?
#16515 I do some thinking out loud in many streams. This has a bunch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkyKXRijwYQ&list=PLKx6lO5RmaeuXinlXLiZtm16HNE20KPdL&index=2&t=2668s
#16516 Timestamp unintended.
Alisa, you shared a link mocking "incels". The reason people like it, and say such things, is they are mean to those they view as lower social status. It's part of the very common activity of looking down on others in social status terms.
The contrast with brothers highlights and intensifies the perceived low social status. It's like putting a short person next to a tall person then pointing and laughing. Which is actually rather literally part of what's going on here.
Do you know that that's the standard reason other people find it notable, react to it, share it, etc? That is the thing about it which stands out in our culture.
Presumably if you knew, and thought you weren't part of it, you would have disowned it because you'd expect people to misunderstand otherwise.
If you did not know explicitly, you had no business re-sharing something when you can't state in words why people share it and what it means to the standard audience.
That doesn't mean you should simply suppress sharing. If you want to share something while having no rational business doing so, you have a conflict and there's an important problem there. Such things should be dealt with.
Presumably the reason you wanted to share it is the same reason other people share it: you like to enforce social conformity and look down on people you view as low status. When you don't consciously understand yourself, normally you're normal, for stuff where it's normal to lack conscious understanding. The standard pattern is to do this stuff without clearly thinking about why or what it means. People don't put it into words like "I am an enforcer of social conformity who attacks failed conformists and nonconformists, and who thinks people higher in the status hierarchy[1] have earned the right to be mean to people lower in the status hierarchy[1]."
[1] Talking about status generally *or* it can just be in some aspect or subculture, like appearance.
#16523
> you had no business re-sharing something when you can't state in words why people share it and what it means to the standard audience.
That sounds like a wise policy. It would help prevent anyone who follows it from being part of the replication cycle of certain nasty social memes. I haven't come up with any downsides for it. I intend to add it to the list (in my learning plan) of the types of errors for which I will write postmortems.
> I haven't come up with any downsides for it.
Then you haven't really tried to.
I moved the learning plan info from my paths forward doc into its own doc. I also made a few small updates, which can be seen in the revision history. Here are links to each doc:
- learning plan
- paths forward doc
#16565
That could be. I have added to my learning plan an item about not re-sharing stuff unless I can explain what it means to a standard audience. I intend to write postmortems for incidents when I fail to follow that policy. Also, if I discover any downsides to the policy, I intend to share them.
Thinking out loud
#16513 People who are solving a programming problem in a job interview will sometimes think out loud. They explain their thought processes as they try to solve the problem.
I can imagine a mathematician thinking out loud too: Maybe he says what kinds of things he's thinking about and where he's stuck as he tries to solve some math problem.
Or consider a mechanic. He might think out loud as he diagnoses what's wrong with your car or tries to decide how to fix a problem he already diagnosed.
I think I associate being good at thinking out loud with being good at solving particular kinds of problems. But maybe it's possible to be good at *thinking in general*, in which case one could think out loud about anything without much trouble.
#16516
I started making a transcript of this using otter. Here are the first ~20 minutes or so: https://pastebin.com/nLkuiwWV
There's a *lot* of thinking out loud here. Elliot brainstorms items for a TOC-style current reality tree, starts coming up with categories for the items, organizes the items under the appropriate category, makes new categories as needed, and deals with computer glitches, both with the program he's using to make the current reality tree and with a bot posting to Discord two different links to his stream (only one of which was correct).
Roof Koreans meme
#16570
I've seen tweets referencing the Roof Koreans meme in the context of the recent rioting in Minneapolis. I'm going to analyze what I think the meme means to a standard audience.
I think a many people in a standard audience would not know the meaning of the Roof Koreans meme. I think the ones who do would take it to be a positive reference to the Koreans that defended their shops with firearms from the roofs during the 1992 LA riots.
I think the meme conveys:
- a positive sentiment towards the "Roof Koreans"
- a pro-second-amendment sentiment
- a pro-self-reliance sentiment
I'm aware of two criticisms of re-sharing internet memes in general: they're not especially truth-seeking and they're not a form of communication that rational people would be especially good at creating. Aside from those issues, I don't think the Roof Koreans meme is a particularly harmful thing to reshare.
Correction
#16584 Typo: "think a many" should be "think many". This slipped through TTS.
#16584 Another thing it communicates is that judging groups of people by race is normal, reasonable, etc.
#16586 Is Korean a racial description rather than a cultural description?
#16587 When referring to people I think that's a standard meaning. It's at best ambiguous and feeds into viewing people by race.
#16586
> Another thing it communicates is that judging groups of people by race is normal, reasonable, etc.
Good point, thanks. The name alone — "roof Koreans" — communicates the idea you mentioned even to people who don't know what the meme means, which I think would be the majority of the people who see it. Not good.
https://twitter.com/FrankHassleYT/status/1267156524453048320
People are excited for Koreans to be in enough danger to sit on rooftops with guns. This is an *awful* attitude. Nasty fucking meme.
Deciding where to live
I want to decide where to live. This is an actual problem that I care about.
I plan to produce a YESNO decision chart for this decision. Making that chart will be a project. Below are my thoughts about planning for this project.
Completing the decision chart will involve coming up with a list of criteria for what is an acceptable place to live, coming up with a list of candidate places to live, and evaluating each place in terms of whether it meets each criterion.
The main resource this project will require is my time+attention. I guess that in a few hours, I could figure out whether a candidate place meets all of my criteria, since I can stop evaluating a place once I learn that it doesn't meet one of them.
The project doesn't seem risky. If I stop before finishing, I will still have learned something about where I want to live, about project planning, or about how to make decision charts.
As an alternative to doing this project on my own, I could hire someone to help me. That person could help me figure out what my criteria should be, propose places to live, and help me figure out (or figure out for me) if they meet my criteria.
At Ingracke's suggestion, I updated my learning plan to include posting about grammar at least 3 days per week. This should help me make steady progress on my goal of finishing the exercises in https://fallibleideas.com/grammar .
Postmortem: incomplete comment
I was composing #16741 in the curi.us comment box, and I clicked Post Message before I had finished typing my message.
I'm not sure how that happened, but the problem here is similar to the problem I wrote a postmortem about in #13549. Maybe, before I pressed Enter, I accidentally pressed Tab or Option+Tab which put the input focus on the Post Message button.
This kind of error could be prevented by composing my comments in a separate editor window.
Learning plan update: more time on FI + freewriting
At Ingracke's suggestion, I intend to
- increase the amount of time I spend on FI each week (currently I guess that I spend 30-60 minutes per day on FI)
- add free-writing to some of my FI sessions and see if it helps
I added the text below to my learning plan:
## Spend enough time on FI
I intend to spend 2 hours per day on FI three days per week. On each of the 4 other days, I intend to spend only 30-60 minutes on FI. I will track how much time I spend on FI so I can see how I'm doing at this.
## Practice free-writing
For each of my 2-hour FI days, with 50% probability, I will start off by free-writing for 15 minutes. At the end of the 2 hours, whether I started with free-writing or not, I will evaluate and record how the 2 hours went. I will periodically review these records to see if I can come up with any theories about whether free-writing helps my FI learning sessions.
#16852 I overestimated how quickly I would switch to spending 2+ hours per day on FI for 3 days per week. It's been over a week since I stated that as my goal in #16852, and so far, I've only had one 2-hour FI day. What's more, on my 2-hour day, I didn't even realize in advance that I would go for 2 hours. I just got caught up in FI stuff and when I was done, I realized I was pretty close to 2 hours, so I decided to do a bit more to make it 2 hours.
For now, I've updated my goal in my learning plan to be one 2-hour FI day per week
More clause vs phrase quizzes
I now consider a clause to be some text which I can analyze with steps 1-4 of Elliot's English Language, Analysis & Grammar essay.
I did 4 clause vs phrase quizzes today. (One of them I also did a few days ago.) I got 100% on all of them. The last quiz had 28 questions and it took me less than 2 seconds per question, including the mouse movements to select the answer and click 'submit' for each question. I'm going to call my phrase-vs-clause knowledge good enough for now.
The following are still a bit slower for me to categorize:
- texts that use words like "who" and "which" as subjects (for example, "who have got the flu" is a clause)
- texts that use present participles (for example, "the baby crying" is a phrase)
https://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/en/quiz/jeu-quiz-clauses-and-phrases-1-eng 100%: 8 out of 8 correct
https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/quizshow.php?title=clause-vs-phrase&q=20 100%: 20 out of 20 correct
https://www.softschools.com/quizzes/grammar/phrase_or_clause/quiz2825.html 100%: 15 out of 15 correct (I took this quiz a few days ago)
https://ca.ixl.com/ela/grade-7/is-it-a-phrase-or-a-clause 100%: 28 out of 28 correct in 2 minutes 34 seconds, which is less than 2 seconds per question
> 28 out of 28 correct in 2 minutes 34 seconds, which is less than 2 seconds per question
double check your math
#16998 I double-checked my math, and I realized that it actually took me 5.5 seconds per question.
Here's how I think I got the wrong answer ("less than 2 seconds"). I wanted to get the total number of seconds spent and then divide by 28. I calculated the total number of seconds as 2 * 60 + 34 = 120 + 34 = 154, but I mistakenly dropped the leading 1 before dividing by 28. This yielded 54/28, which is approximately 1.92. At this point, I didn't try to use number sense or do any checks like multiplying 2 * 28 to see if I had anything like the right answer.
For now, I added the following to my learning plan:
> ## Math errors
> I intend to sanity-check every math calculation in my posts. One way to do this would be to run the calculation in Wolfram Alpha or some other calculator.
Freewriting
I tried freewriting for a few minutes today. Everything below the line is what I freewrote. I only did a bit of editing while I was writing some sentences. I didn't go back afterwards and edit anything.
----------------
Free writing is writing down everything you think. It's kind of like talking to yourself, except you type. You type as fast as you can think. I can type pretty fast. Maybe I should record myself talking to myself instead of typing. Then I could get more info out faster. Because I can talk faster than I can type. But I'll try typing for now.
I just realized I forgot to mark the time when I started. It's :40. Not putting in the hour for privacy reasons. Ok.
So what do I want to freewrite about. I did a lot of work today. Barely checked Twitter or anything else. Am working on a neat project that I don't want to say too much about here, because I am planning on sharing these notes to show what my freewriting looks like.
So far I think my freewriting results will look kinda boring. What if I put a clown in there? Maybe a crazy clown makes it more interesting. Or a sunset would make it beautiful. Hard to put a sunset in text. I could do it with colored text, maybe. There's code to change an image into colored text, I bet.
I haven't been doing as much philosophy as I ultimately would like to do. I have been pretty busy with other stuff. curi says "busy" is kind of an excuse. It would be better to expose my priorities to criticism. Well, "better" isn't maybe the way to put it. There would be certain advantages to sharing my scheduling priorities.
I also haven't been doing my flashcards lately. I made some flashcards to help me remember things that I want to remember. I would like to get that started again too. I will have some time off work coming up. Maybe I can start them again at that point.
I was also doing a bit of weight lifting. I think a little bit of weight lifting is good for staying healthy and for looking good. Looking good has certain advantages. The time spent on weight lifting and other activities to look good as well as caring about what other people think of you which often goes along with trying to look good are disadvantages. Some of the advantages are that it's easier to get new romantic partners when you look good and existing romantic partners tend to be... happier with you... uh, not exactly that... they respond better to your advances? There's maybe something there, though whether that's because you have more confidence or because you look better isn't entirely clear to me. Maybe it's a mix of both.
Ok, it's now :46, so I've free-written for 6 minutes. The end.
List of messages I intend to reply to
My learning plan has a list of older threads to which I have not replied and a list of dates by which I plan to revisit them. I added a list of more recent messages to which I also intend to reply but haven't yet:
- curi's reply to my partially-formed thoughts on good & evil: I posted my partially-formed thoughts on 2020-02-19. On 2020-02-20, curi replied stating that my message read like a bunch of assertions. He also suggested that I explain what some of my terms mean.
- Unwelcome Tenant short story: I posted this on 2019-12-31. I meant to reply with some of my comments on it.
- Discussion w/anon of whether a used bookseller's comment "rekt" Amazon: On 2020-05-25, anon asked me what my goal in the conversation was.
- Discussion w/curi about the space of ideas being initially sparse: On 2020-04-18, curi replied to me.
- Discussion about why I shared a meme mocking "incels": On 2020-05-09, qqbb replied to me with some comments about honest introspection and how attempting to avoid false statements could interfere with my attempts at honest introspection.
- YESNO check your understanding question: "What's wrong with arguments having an amount of strength?": On 2020-06-20, curi replied to me with some criticisms of my answer to this question.
#16504 qqbb wrote to me:
> Instead of saying your honest answer about why you shared it, you speculated about it. The reasons you gave weren't things you explicitly thought at the time you shared it. They are things you came up with after the fact.
Makes sense. After-the-fact speculation should be identified as such rather than being passed off as something more reliable.
> In #16503, you say:
>> One thing I can say is that, in both cases, I was trying to avoid false statements.
> That is an issue. Those statements were meant to be the reason why you shared the picture. But instead of just honestly introspecting and trying to come up with the real reasons you shared it, you tried to say things that *weren't false*. The goal of saying things that aren't false (or that make sense, don't contradict, follow your values, etc) can get in the way of honestly figuring out what your thoughts are and what the reasons for your actions are.
> If the reasons you shared it were actually bad reasons, then trying to avoid false statements or contradictions could stop you from actually figuring out & articulating your reasons. You could be self-censoring them before even becoming aware of them.
To me, not saying false things doesn't mean not reporting false ideas that I had in the past. I can say, "I thought X, and X was false" without saying something false. What I *can't* do without saying something false, is say "X", when X is false.
I looked through my posting history and found some examples of me acknowledging having held ideas in the past that I later recognized as false. They are below.
2020-05-02:
> I thought I said that, but I didn't.
2020-03-28:
> At first I thought it was supposed to be a child talking to a hostile parent, because children don't usually wear ties. But if that's the case, then I don't get the relevance of returning the rest of the buttered toast.
2020-03-02:
> Before, I thought adding implied words never changed the meaning of a sentence at all. But now I think it can, because grouping is part of what a sentence conveys, and adding implied words can affect the grouping.
2019-05-19:
> I thought I had the evidence to claim this, but I didn't.
> I thought I downloaded everything from the presenter list (even though in fact I hadn't). I'm not sure why I thought this. But when I found other videos that I had missed, I incorrectly *assumed* they must not have been on the presenter list. My initial mistake compounded into more mistakes because I misinterpreted what was going on, kind of like the Athens/thieving example from BoI.
2018-05-24 :
> I thought I knew how to write strings of adjectives correctly. It turns out I don't.
2018-04-28 :
> Previously, I thought a path forward was an answer to the modified question.
2018-04-24 :
> Because I thought everyone else's standards were as low as mine, I interpreted their sharing of abstract principles as attempts to bully or control me.
Assertions vs explanation/reasoning
#15555 curi wrote:
> This reads to me like a bunch of assertions without enough explanations/reasoning.
I've been thinking about what assertions are and how to recognize when I make them.
I think to assert something is to just flatly state it. An explanation, in contrast, describes how something works, and reasoning explains why it makes sense to accept or reject an idea.
## Example
Assertion: In chess, 1. a4 is a bad opening.
Explanation: Good opening moves help you control the center or develop your minor pieces. 1. a4 doesn't do either of those things and it allows your opponent to do them. (I don't understand chess well, but this is just an example.)
## Example 2
Assertion: The man went into the store.
Reasoning: The man was just in front of the store, but he's not there now, there are no cars nearby, and I see the store door closing.
> Reasoning: The man was just in front of the store, but he's not there now, there are no cars nearby, and I see the store door closing.
That's a list of facts. It's not reasoning. Reasoning would explain how you get from those facts to a conclusion. Why do you think those facts add up to the man going into the store?
#18163
> Why do you think those facts add up to the man going into the store?
I think I could make a YESNO decision chart in which all the plausible scenarios I can think of except for the man going into the store are ruled out either by one of the observations or by background knowledge. The list of scenarios would be like:
- Man left in car (no: no cars nearby, couldn't drive away fast enough)
- Man vanished into thin air (no: violates physics)
- Man sprinted away down the block (no: not enough time -- he was "just" in front of the store)
- <other scenarios here>
- Man went into the store (ok)
I think a clearer example of reasoning would be an argument from premises to a conclusion. Something like this:
1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.
3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
I don't know if you need to name the logical rule(s) used to conclude 3 from 1 and 2 for it to count as reasoning. I intuitively think people would count it as reasoning even if you didn't name the rules, but I intuitively thought my example about the man in front of the store was reasoning too.
>> Why do you think those facts add up to the man going into the store?
You took this question out of context and did not respond directly to the main point of my comment.
Postmortem: non sequitur (didn't respond to the main point)
In #18160, I wrote:
> Assertion: The man went into the store.
> Reasoning: The man was just in front of the store, but he's not there now, there are no cars nearby, and I see the store door closing.
Quoting the "Reasoning" line, curi replied in #18163:
> That's a list of facts. It's not reasoning. Reasoning would explain how you get from those facts to a conclusion. Why do you think those facts add up to the man going into the store?
I replied to curi in #18170, quoting the final, interrogative sentence of curi's #18163 and giving a partial YESNO decision chart for the man-going-into-the-store scenario and a proposal for what I took to be a clearer example of reasoning involving a syllogism.
In #18171, curi replied to me:
> You took this question out of context and did not respond directly to the main point of my comment.
I re-read curi's #18163, and I think its main point is the third sentence:
> Reasoning would explain how you get from those facts to a conclusion.
Regarding facts, in May 2020, I wrote:
> People seem to use "fact" to refer to ideas that they think can be proven or disproven by objective evidence.
I agree that all the things I listed under "Reasoning" in #18159 were facts. The corresponding "Assertion" (the conclusion) was also a fact.
It follows from (what I take to be) the main point of curi's #18163 that reasoning is a kind of explanation: it *explains* how you get from the premises to the conclusion.
I agree that I didn't respond to curi's main point directly. That makes my overall response a non sequitur, which my learning plan lists as a postmortem-worthy mistake. Actually, I didn't even consider what the main point was before replying. I didn't consciously consider it, and I haven't automated doing that either.
The top level of Paul Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement is: *explicitly refutes the central point*. That's for disagreement, but even for responses that aren't disagreement, responding to the central point would be good. In general, it would be good for me to be able to state what I think is the central point of whatever I'm replying to. This would help me avoid non sequiturs.
By missing the main point, I missed most of the value of the post. I wonder how often it's the case when I see little value in a post by a top FI poster that it's because I missed the main point.
I thought my main point was (italics added):
> That's a list of facts. *It's not reasoning.*
This was meant to disagree with you by directly contradicting your "Reasoning:" label. The last two sentences were explanatory.
#18174 It's true I didn't respond directly to the "It's not reasoning" sentence. However, I did have it in mind as I replied. Mainly, I thought the YESNO info was one way to supply the missing reasoning. And then I tried to give a better example of something that *was* reasoning: the syllogism. Those two things were meant as an acknowledgment (admittedly, indirect) that the list of facts I had supplied wasn't reasoning.
When I wrote #18173, I took "Reasoning would explain how you get from those facts to a conclusion" as the main point because:
- I really hadn't responded to it directly or indirectly, and not responding directly was one of the clues you gave
- It supplies info that helps clarify other things that weren't clear to me in my reply
If I could take away one sentence from your reply to memorize or treat as the most important, it'd be that one. It seems a better match for the main point than "It's not reasoning" because, together with some other knowledge (like the fact that I didn't explain how to get from my facts to a conclusion), it implies "It's not reasoning".
My understanding of the situation
#18178 A couple of things I noticed in this thread:
> It's not reasoning.
I think this means curi was interested in why Alisa thought the list of facts was reasoning, and labeled them reasoning, when they clearly (to curi) weren't.
Getting Alisa's reasoning for the conclusion was not curi's main point. The main point was that Alisa thought a list of facts was reasoning, which seems like a significant problem, and Alisa still hasn't addressed that.
But even regarding the non-main issue of Alisa's reasoning, something about Alisa's response seems off.
Starting back at #18163 I thought curi did have a question about how Alisa reasoned from the facts to the conclusion.
Then in #18170 Alisa quoted:
> Why do you think those facts add up to the man going into the store?
Then Alisa described how she *could* reason from the facts to the conclusion using YESNO. It was pretty clear she was not describing how she actually *did* reason from the facts to the conclusion.
IOW it seems to me that Alisa's response was to a hypothetical of what she could have done rather than curi's question about what she actually did.
Maybe Alisa doesn't know how she actually reasoned from the facts to the conclusion. Which is, if not fine, at least common. It's common for people to reach conclusions by intuition and then not explicitly know how they reached them.
But if I'm right, it'd be good to at least recognize what's going on. Alisa isn't actually using YESNO decision charts for this type of conclusion. She can fit the conclusion to the YESNO model after the fact but in real time she's doing something different.
#18180
Andy Dufresne (AD) quoted curi's sentence from #18163:
> It's not reasoning.
AD continued:
> I think this means curi was interested in why Alisa thought the list of facts was reasoning, and labeled them reasoning, when they clearly (to curi) weren't.
If AD's analysis of what "It's not reasoning" means is correct, then good for AD for seeing it. I don't see it, though. I took it as a statement. I believe that when curi has a question, he generally asks it in the form of a question.
> Getting Alisa's reasoning for the conclusion was not curi's main point. The main point was that Alisa thought a list of facts was reasoning, which seems like a significant problem, and Alisa still hasn't addressed that.
I am planning to write a postmortem on that. I replied to curi's #18171 first because, as a meta-comment about the discussion, I saw it as having priority.
> Then in #18170 Alisa quoted:
>> Why do you think those facts add up to the man going into the store?
>Then Alisa described how she *could* reason from the facts to the conclusion using YESNO. It was pretty clear she was not describing how she actually *did* reason from the facts to the conclusion.
Yes.
> IOW it seems to me that Alisa's response was to a hypothetical of what she could have done rather than curi's question about what she actually did.
I agree with the first part of this sentence, but I disagree with AD's characterization of curi's question. curi's question used the verb "do", which is in the present tense. If the question were about what I thought at the time I posted the list of facts in #18159, it would have used a form of the past tense, such as "What did you think ..."
I agree with the rest of AD's comment.
#18207
> such as "What did you think ..."
Correction: I meant to write "Why did you think ...".
#18207
Regarding:
>> It's not reasoning.
Alisa wrote:
> I took it as a statement.
I agree, it is a statement.
> I believe that when curi has a question, he generally asks it in the form of a question.
I agree with this too. Curi did end his post with a question:
>> Why do you think those facts add up to the man going into the store?
That was context for:
>> It's not reasoning.
In one sense, I think curi's whole post can be read as a multi-sentence question.
#18207
>> IOW it seems to me that Alisa's response was to a hypothetical of what she could have done rather than curi's question about what she actually did.
>
> I agree with the first part of this sentence, but I disagree with AD's characterization of curi's question. curi's question used the verb "do", which is in the present tense. If the question were about what I thought at the time I posted the list of facts in #18159, it would have used a form of the past tense, such as "What did you think ..."
gp.
One possible explanation for curi's use of the present tense is that at the time curi wrote the question, Alisa had not indicated any change of mind. So "do" and "did" would be the same answer.
But I'm not at all confident in that explanation and I don't have an alternate.
Postmortem: thinking I understood something when I didn't
#18163
In #18159, I wrote:
> Assertion: The man went into the store.
> Reasoning: The man was just in front of the store, but he's not there now, there are no cars nearby, and I see the store door closing.
As curi pointed out in #18163, my "Reasoning:" line wasn't reasoning; it was just a list of facts. I guess I thought I understood reasoning better than I actually did.
In #18159, I wrote:
> reasoning explains why it makes sense to accept or reject an idea.
As best I can recollect, when I wrote #18159, I was thinking of reasoning as *whatever info would convince someone of something*. I felt that if I told someone that the man had gone into the store, and they asked why I thought that, and I said the stuff in the "Reasoning:" line to them, they would understand and be convinced, assuming they believed my observations to be accurate. From that, I concluded that the stuff in my "Reasoning:" line was actually reasoning.
I now think, as I understand curi to have written in #18163, that a crucial part of reasoning is an *explanation* of how to arrive at a conclusion, and my list of facts did not contain an explanation. (I had used the word "explains" in my own definition of what reasoning was (see above), but I think I was thinking of the term more colloquially, in the way that someone might say, "Ah, that explains it", in response to a newly-learned fact.)
One thing I did right in #18159 was to give examples of my thinking. That made it easier for others to see my mistake. I should give examples more often.
Some postmortems of mine that are closely related to the mistake described in this one:
- Postmortem: thinking I understood a term that I didn't (2020-06-23)
- Postmortem: a third mistake with clauses (2020-08-01)
After re-reading those postmortems and thinking about this one, I've concluded that I don't know how to tell whether I understand a term well enough to use it. I just go by intuition.
#18231 The text below from YESNO is relevant to my mistake:
> # Inanimate Facts
> Facts don't do anything by themselves. If you observe something, that doesn't tell you what's true. It's not an argument. Facts are inactive and passive. Facts don't speak, point, hint, argue, agree, disagree, or do anything.
#18224 Yeah I don't think I had any reason to distinguish past and present given no new info.
#18244 I don't think it's unusual for a person to be able to come up with better reasons for thinking something than whatever reasons they had in the past.
For example, suppose I were to state that Sacramento is the capitol of California. If someone were to ask me, "Why do you think that?", I might look it up in an encyclopedia or some official state of California web page and give that info as my reason. My original reason might have been that I vaguely remember it from somewhere, but I understand the question as asking for the best possible answer I can give *now*.
I can see how that kind of answer would be unhelpful when the person is looking for info about what I was thinking at the time I made the original statement.
#18245 If you read the question then look it up, then say "cuz i looked it up", then you are giving info that was inaccurate not merely at the time you made your original statement, and not merely at the time the question was written, but also at the time you read the question.
The present tense is meant to apply to when the question is communicated, not a later time after you react to the question and change the situation.
I don't think that making errors like this and being corrected on them is addressing your bottlenecks.
#18247
> If you read the question then look it up, then say "cuz i looked it up", then you are giving info that was inaccurate not merely at the time you made your original statement, and not merely at the time the question was written, but also at the time you read the question.
> The present tense is meant to apply to when the question is communicated, not a later time after you react to the question and change the situation.
The particular form of the present tense used in the question, "Why do you think X?" is the *present indefinite*. According to Wikipedia, one of the main uses of the present continuous is:
> [... w]ith stative verbs in senses that do not use progressive aspect..., to refer to a present or general state, whether temporary, permanent or habitual;
> You are happy.
> I know what to do.
> A child needs its mother.
> I love you.
My understanding of that is that one of the main uses of the present indefinite is to refer to a permanent or habitual state rather than to a particular point in time. Therefore, I think the interpretation of questions that use the present indefinite is context-dependent. Here are a few examples:
- Suppose someone asks me (using the present indefinite), "Why are you so happy?". They could be wondering why I am so happy *at the moment they asked the question* or why I am so happy *in general*.
- Suppose I say, "Trump 2020!", and someone asks, "Why do you think it would be good for Trump to win?". They might want to know why I think that at the time they asked the question, or they might want to know why I think that in general. In the latter case, they might well regard a good answer as one that gives my best reasons for thinking that it would be good for Trump to win.
- "What is your net worth?": If asked out of context, I think an answer to this question should generally be true as of *the time the answer is given*, which is not necessarily the time the question was asked. For instance, if I wait a week before answering and win the lottery during that week, I could -- and should -- state a higher net worth than I would have otherwise. However, if the question were a follow-up to a related statement that I had made previously, such as "I am rich", then I think the question should be understood as asking about my wealth at the time I stated that I was rich.
- "Are you a fugitive from justice?": This is question 11(d) on Form 4473, which is typically filled out when purchasing a firearm in the U.S. I think one's answer is expected to be true at the time one submits the form.
Wikipedia continues:
> [The present indefinite] contrasts with the present progressive (present continuous), which is used to refer to something taking place at the present moment: I am walking now; He is writing a letter at the moment.
Suppose someone asks, using the present continuous, "Why are you marching?". That question unambiguously refers to the marching going on at the time the question was asked.
If the question had been posed in the present indefinite, e.g., "Why do you march?", then I think the answer wouldn't necessarily be expected to apply to any particular point in time.
#18247
> I don't think that making errors like this and being corrected on them is addressing your bottlenecks.
I agree. I don't know my goals or my bottlenecks, so I would have to get lucky for any given action of mine to advance me towards my goals or address my bottlenecks.
#18252 Then shouldn't you stop acting aimlessly and try to figure out what your goals and bottlenecks are? Isn't finding that out your first bottleneck on progress?
goals
#18253 curi wrote:
> Then shouldn't you stop acting aimlessly and try to figure out what your goals and bottlenecks are? Isn't finding that out your first bottleneck on progress?
Yes, I suppose so.
I have gained a lot of value by "acting aimlessly" on FI, compared to what my life would be like if I hadn't participated here at all. But I have also given up a lot of value compared to what I could have achieved by acting more purposefully here. I remind myself of someone wandering aimlessly above a gold mine, picking up tiny flecks here and there, when, if they acted with purpose, they could mine deep veins of gold and become rich.
I do have smaller goals (e.g., posting daily, spending more time on FI, and finishing the YESNO "check your understanding" questions), but those goals are mostly chosen by intuition, as opposed to being chosen by a process of reason in light of larger goals. I think figuring out my larger goals is what curi was talking about.
One reason knowing my goals is important is that I can't take effective action towards my goals unless I know what they are. Also, knowing my goals is a prerequisite for figuring out what my bottlenecks are, which is another prerequisite for taking effective action towards my goals.
Some actions I could take towards figuring out my goals:
- brainstorm (e.g., freewrite about) goals and, later, criticize what I come up with
- investigate the goals of top thinkers
- look into different goal setting methodologies
- look for and read/watch FI material on figuring out goals
I may need to learn other stuff (e.g., how to be more honest) before I can figure out what my goals are. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
life goals of top thinkers
Ayn Rand:
> Ayn Rand was asked "What is your purpose in life?" at the end of the book Ayn Rand Answers. Her answer:
> "My purpose is to enjoy my life in a rational way: to use my mind to the greatest extent possible; to pursue, admire, and support human greatness; to make all my choices rationally; to expand my knowledge constantly. That's a pretty ambitious program, and I've achieved most of it."
Eliyahu Goldratt:
> The life work of Goldratt ... was “to teach the world to think.”
In Atlas Shrugged, Francisco "could always name the purpose of his every random moment". It would make sense that knowing his larger goals helped him with that.
Quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on goals:
> "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
> "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
> "I don't much care where—" said Alice.
> "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
> "—so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
> "Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
>>> I don't know my goals or my bottlenecks, so I would have to get lucky for any given action of mine to advance me towards my goals or address my bottlenecks.
I read this as a general statement.
> I have gained a lot of value by "acting aimlessly" on FI
Here the topic jumps to lack of goals *at FI*.
Do you have other goals that you do know?
#18265
>>>> I don't know my goals or my bottlenecks, so I would have to get lucky for any given action of mine to advance me towards my goals or address my bottlenecks.
> I read this as a general statement.
>> I have gained a lot of value by "acting aimlessly" on FI
> Here the topic jumps to lack of goals *at FI*.
I didn't intend to change the topic. Maybe I'm using the term *goal* incorrectly. In both cases, I was talking about *high-level goals* and the bottlenecks that limit my progress towards them. The way I understand bottlenecks, they only make sense with reference to high-level goals. (As Jonah says in *The Goal*, "an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage.".)
Some examples of what I have in mind by "high-level goals" are the life goals of Goldratt and Rand that I quoted in #18260. Other examples include:
- The idea that the mission of the GOP should be to "preserve the American way of life".
- The idea that the goal of a company is to make money ("So this is the goal: To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow." – Goldratt, *The Goal*).
I think goals, whether high-level or not, are directly related to the reasons you would give when asked why you did something. For example, if you reply that you did something "because it's fair", that implies that being fair is one of your goals. Someone could take your answers and ask "why" again. If this continues, the result seems to me somewhat like a hierarchy of goals.
> Do you have other goals that you do know?
Yes. I have non-high-level goals such as the "smaller goals" I listed in #18259 ("posting daily, spending more time on FI, and finishing the YESNO "check your understanding" questions"). Some of my other non-high-level goals include:
- making enough money to have a middle-class Western lifestyle
- having enough free time
- getting enough sleep
> - making enough money to have a middle-class Western lifestyle
Why do you say “*middle-class* Western lifestyle”?
#18269
>> - making enough money to have a middle-class Western lifestyle
> Why do you say “*middle-class* Western lifestyle”?
I'll take the question as asking "Why *did* you say ..." Therefore, I'll try to remember what I was thinking at the time I wrote the text you quoted, and I'll try not to clarify my thinking much beyond what it was at the time.
By saying "middle-class", I think I was trying to rule out a lower-class lifestyle, which I associated with a lack of disposable income, and an upper-class lifestyle, which I associated with having more disposable income than I would need to live the kind of life I want. I think I was vaguely envisioning things like being able to live in a nice, low-crime area, have a better-than-average healthcare plan, buy nice computers/tablets/phones, and take a few vacations per year, all while building up a reasonable amount of savings.
#18270
> By saying "middle-class", I think I was *trying to rule out* a lower-class lifestyle, which I associated with a lack of disposable income, and *an upper-class lifestyle, which I associated with having more disposable income than I would need to live the kind of life I want.*
Why were you trying to rule out this (highlighted part)?
Because having an upper-class lifestyle wasn’t a goal of mine, and I was trying to list only things that were.
Do you think that there are downsides with having more disposable income than one would need (upper-class lifestyle)?
I am asking because all the things you listed in #18270:
> live in a nice, low-crime area, have a better-than-average healthcare plan, buy nice computers/tablets/phones, and take a few vacations per year, all while building up a reasonable amount of savings
could be significantly better with an above middle-class lifestyle goal.
I guess that I don’t understand why, if you have a lifestyle goal, you would chose to settle at middle-class level. It sound like you are not even attempting greatness. I guess I’m wondering if that is the case (not attempting greatness), and in that case why.
Maybe I am misunderstanding something. I’m trying to figure out what if that is the case.
#18273
> Do you think that there are downsides with having more disposable income than one would need (upper-class lifestyle)?
No.
> I am asking because all the things you listed in #18270:
>> live in a nice, low-crime area, have a better-than-average healthcare plan, buy nice computers/tablets/phones, and take a few vacations per year, all while building up a reasonable amount of savings
> could be significantly better with an above middle-class lifestyle goal.
I don't see how an above-middle-class lifestyle would let me get a significantly better phone or tablet than my iPhone and iPad, but I can see how the rest of the things I listed could be significantly improved.
> I guess that I don’t understand why, if you have a lifestyle goal, you would chose to settle at middle-class level. It sound like you are not even attempting greatness. I guess I’m wondering if that is the case (not attempting greatness), and in that case why.
> Maybe I am misunderstanding something. I’m trying to figure out what if that is the case.
I don't think you're misunderstanding. I was not attempting greatness, and I don't think I've written much that would give the impression that I was. I don't think I had thought much about the reasons for that at the time I wrote the comment you asked about.
#16571 I had an idea about how to get better at thinking out loud. Maybe I could try to shorten the amount of time it takes me to write posts. That is, shorten the gap between the time I have an idea and the time it takes me to get it into a form that's acceptable for posting.
Part of this might involve relaxing my standards about what's acceptable for posting. There may be some time-consuming things I do that are good to be *able* to do when necessary, but maybe I don't need to do them for all posts. Or maybe I should just get faster at everything related to posting.
Another idea is to get better at being able to post without editing. The sentences should come out at an acceptable quality level the first time.
This post took me about 3 minutes to write.
*Atlas Shrugged*:
> It was days later, when they were alone, walking through the woods on the shore of the river, that she asked: "Francisco, what's the most depraved type of human being?"
> "The man without a purpose."
I think Francisco was talking about a purpose *in life* or what I referred to in #18268 as a "high-level goal".
#18276 Later in *Atlas Shrugged*, Rearden tells Francisco:
> "... To me, there's only one form of human depravity-the man without a purpose."
> I was not attempting greatness
why not?
#18278 It’s hard to say. I don’t think I had considered much whether I should attempt greatness. And I suppose that, for whatever reason, attempting greatness wasn’t my default, i.e., it wasn’t something I would do even without considering it much.
> I don’t think I had considered much whether I should attempt greatness.
Will you consider it now?
#18281 Right now, like today? No, I don't have any plans for that. Longer-term? I don't know. It's possible.
#18268 I wrote:
> I think goals, whether high-level or not, are directly related to the reasons you would give when asked why you did something. For example, if you reply that you did something "because it's fair", that implies that being fair is one of your goals. Someone could take your answers and ask "why" again. If this continues, the result seems to me somewhat like a hierarchy of goals.
I might be able to learn about my high-level goals by asking why I have some of my current non-high-level goals. Maybe I'll discover contradictions among my existing goals, and/or maybe I'll learn some things about what my high-level goals are or should be.
## Non-high-level goal: get enough sleep.
Why do I want to get enough sleep? Because getting enough sleep helps me function better when I'm awake. It makes it easier for me to get more value out of my waking hours.
Getting enough sleep isn't usually a big problem for me. I go to sleep when I get sleepy, wake up without an alarm, and take naps when I feel like it. Getting enough sleep isn't currently a bottleneck for me. That doesn't mean I can just let my sleep go all to hell and stop caring about getting enough sleep. If I did that, then sleep might become a bottleneck. I have to take enough care that that doesn't happen. But currently, getting enough sleep happens pretty much on autopilot for me.
So why do I want to function better when I'm awake? This is harder to answer. I don't really know why. I guess I could stop here and treat *wanting to function better when I'm awake* as a given for now.
Some related topics I could consider:
- Are there things I could do that would help me function just as well on less sleep?
- If I just start sleeping fewer hours per night, would those extra waking hours compensate for the reduced function?
I'm open to learning about those topics. I don't know enough to rule them out as potentially promising avenues to investigate. But for now I think I'll just stick with my current approach to sleeping.
## Non-high-level goal: have enough free time.
Why do I want to have enough free time? I think of free time as being kind of like disposable income. Free time is time that I can do whatever I want with. I don't have any obligations to anyone else about what I do in my free time. For example, I don't need to work during my free time, because I get enough money from the time I already spend working. I'm not sure if I should count the time I spend each day writing FI posts as free time or not. I guess not, because I don't just do whatever I want during that time. My thinking on this is kind of fuzzy.
I still don't know why I want to have enough free time. I guess I'll leave it as a given for now.
## Non-high-level goal: make enough money to have a middle-class Western lifestyle.
We could discuss how much money is *enough*, but to start with, I think what I stated is a reasonably close approximation of what I'm aiming for. But why that much? Why not higher? Why not lower? Those are tough questions for me to answer. I guess I'll leave it as a given for now.
Thoughts about attempting something great
I'm considering setting a goal for myself of doing something great with my life.
Here's why: I guess that solving problems is fun, and the bigger the challenge, the more fun. By not setting a big challenge for myself, I'm leaving a lot of fun on the table.
curi's squirrel morality essay argues that achieving any of a wide array of serious goals requires, first of all, maximizing core aspects of rationality and power:
> Take any pattern of atoms, and make the goal to spread it across the universe, and what we'll need to do is maximize human power first, and then when we're ready, spread it in a stable, reliable, risk-free way...
> So for any goal like that, we should ignore the goal and focus on human power. We need to enable ourselves first. And we need to learn how to accomplish the goal, and avoid mistakes, so knowledge and error correction come in there...
> So, if the basis of morality is squirrels, or bison, or crystals, and we think carefully enough about what to do, then what we'd end up with is almost exactly the same morality that people believe in today: we'd first value human happiness, freedom, science, progress, peace, wealth, and so on. The only difference would be one extra step, much later in time, where we'd fill most of the universe with squirrels or bison or whatever.
So what ambitious goal should I set for myself? I don't know yet. Getting closer to figuring that out seems like it might be a fun challenge in itself.
Conversation with curi
This is the start of a conversation I had with curi in private chat, where I don’t follow my learning plan guidelines for postmortems the way I do on FI or curi.us comments. I will be temporarily suspending those guidelines for the rest of this conversation.
**curi**: i find you talk differently on forums
**Alisa**: Like curi comments?
**curi**: yes
**Alisa**: I do talk differently.
**curi**: less conversational. weirder. sometimes more rationalist/sophisticated. sometimes more formal/cold. much slower replies. these things make some types of conversations hard to initiate or maintain.
**Alisa**: I write differently when I know I’ll be writing postmortems for the mistakes listed in my learning plan. It’s cheaper if I can make a mistake and not write a postmortem.
**curi**: my impression is that what you’re doing on forums is worse.
**Alisa**: I don’t mind just typing something and hitting “send”. Ok. I can believe that. One thing I could do is start a new identity for quicker comments. I already to that to some extent with Anon. Anon doesn’t write postmortems, which makes it faster to post as Anon.
**curi**: that sounds like you’re introducing too many error checking approaches at once, rather than focusing on 1-3 at a time and only adding more when earlier ones become adequately cheap (e.g. automated)
**Alisa**: Could be. TTSing slows things down. It still prevents multiple typos per message, though. Trying not to say things that I would recognize as false if you asked me about them right after I said them slows me down. Definitely not automated.
**Alisa**: Here I made the references suggestion and a few sentences later I retracted it.
**curi**: i doubt typos are a bottleneck for you
**Alisa**: That’s the sort of thing I’d put thought into avoiding if commenting under my learning plan.
**curi**: i don’t think retracting after i explain some stuff is bad
**Alisa**: I think I could have figured that one out on my own if I’d thought more before saying it. For lots of other things I learn from you, that isn’t the case.
**curi**: considering if what you just wrote is false in a way you can recognize without using much creativity (basically mostly using your existing knowledge), or if you’d be surprised to be wrong about it (if not, it should be labelled/qualified/hedged appropriately), or what you’ve done to test/check/criticize your idea, are good things to do but may be too much to focus on and need be broken down into smaller chunks.
**Alisa**: I could remove typos from my learning plan. I don’t really know enough myself to know whether that’d be a good idea, but I don’t mind doing it on your suggestion.
I’m getting faster even at posting the way I do on forums. I wrote 4 posts in 30 minutes yesterday. That’s good for me. Actually, 5. (one anon)
I *am* posting daily, I *am* getting faster at it, even without relaxing my success criteria, and I *do* find that skill helps me in the rest of my life. I can believe that a more conversational, faster style might help me even more, though. I don’t know much about breaking stuff down into smaller chunks. Sounds reasonable, but not immediately actionable. I also don’t know much about how to ask useful questions that would get me closer to being able to learn that or lots of other things. Ingracke identified that as a growth area for me.
Do you have a kind of target speed that you think I should try aiming for? Something along the lines of how fast I write here? Then I can try adjusting my error checking until it lets me write this fast or close to it.
**curi**: can we move this to alisa thread?
> I could remove typos from my learning plan.
up2u. i don't think typos are your bottleneck. it sounds like you think typo correction is not causing/worsening a bottleneck, so it may be fine to keep it since it's going reasonably smoothly. i don't know enough details of your process to say more.
> I’m getting faster even at posting the way I do on forums. I wrote 4 posts in 30 minutes yesterday. That’s good for me. Actually, 5. (one anon)
That sounds good. I think your forum posting method breaks some things you're able to do at other times. But it may have important advantages. So if things are improving maybe it's good idk.
> Do you have a kind of target speed that you think I should try aiming for?
The issue in my mind was primarily about content not speed.
#18395 Ok @typos.
Maybe I should have two modes, say, *careful* and *carefree* and be able to switch between them. I could default to *carefree*, and be ready switch back to *careful* if need be. I like having the *careful* mode available.
> The issue in my mind was primarily about content not speed.
I don't know what to say to that. To me it feels entirely like a difference of how much thought I put into what I say. That's what it seems like from my end. So to produce the thing you say may be more valuable, on my end, it seems like all I do is type as I would in chat and hit send at the end.
#18397 It's not like I rush during chat, but I go way faster. I slow down a lot when I post with my learning plan in mind. Here I just kind of type out whatever my inner voice is saying. If it says something that I think is really ridiculous, or I'm not sure of a word or something, I'll pause and check, but otherwise everything I say like this would be only a first draft if I posted as I usually do.
#18398 Faster = less second guessing yourself = less use of conscious thinking. Your autopilots are wiser than your rational analysis in some ways (and worse in other ways). And when people second guess themselves a bunch sometimes they end up changing from something reasonable to something unreasonable. Heavy enough second guessing can lead to bizarre results far from common sense. This is observed across many fields, including, e.g. chess. Sometimes people's first intuition – the move they want to play after 2 seconds – is the best move, but after 20 minutes of concentration they talk themselves into playing a different move which turns out to be way worse. That happens regularly in chess.
The "less use of conscious thinking" explanation makes sense. And I could see how the benefits and detriments of that could vary depending on circumstances. It's a better way to think about it than going faster or slower. Maybe how good it (= less use of conscious thinking is) is depends on how good your intuition is.
#18401 One thing you could try is go fast then analyze errors later. That way you're trying to fix the errors your autopilots make, not the errors your defensive (= trying to avoid errors), conscious thinking makes.
When you discuss a particular way before post mortems which tries to avoid the errors your autopilots make, then you're avoiding error correcting your autopilots. But you use your autopilots (and intuitions, habits, etc.) for most of your life.
I think your *go fast and analyze later* suggestion is what I usually do. I edit a lot. I gather from what I'm hearing from you that a lot of my edits make things worse rather than better in certain ways. My normal posts are optimized for a particular purpose: not saying something interesting without having to write a postmortem.
I could review some of the videos I made of me writing posts to see how true my paragraph above is. I could find the link.
#18404
> My normal posts are optimized for a particular purpose: not saying something interesting without having to write a postmortem.
Typo: that "not" shouldn't be there.
#18404 Ah you write conversational first drafts then edit a bunch? You could share the editing process sometimes then so that you could get feedback on errors introduced during it.
#18393 I'm going to stop following my learning plan for the rest of my curi.us comments today, even if they're made outside of this conversation.
#18409 In late 2019, I started sharing occasional screencasts of my entire posting process. This included character-by-character edits, but I don't recall getting any feedback. Should I start that up again, or is there a better way to share the editing process? Maybe I could save a draft every so often, throw the drafts up on pastebin when I'm ready to post, and link the drafts in my post.
#18411 You would get more feedback if you explained a specific purpose and goal for feedback re those screencasts, or a point of interest for people to watch out for. E.g.:
- a posted comment has an error
- you share the first draft which lacks that error
- then you could look for where/how/why the error was created during editing
- you could share your analysis of the screencast and link timestamps as documentation
- others might get curious at some point given there is some sort of narrative and learning process going on which the screencast connects with
You should also have more patience and persistent instead of silently(?) giving up due to lack of feedback on something. And in general you should do things you see the value in so you don't require other people to be providing ongoing external value for you to continue.
#18409
> Ah you write conversational first drafts then edit a bunch?
I actually write worse than conversational† first drafts. Maybe that's my problem. I write things that aren't even complete sentences. Just notes. Thoughts. Questions. Then I edit until it becomes something I'm satisfied with.
Maybe I should try for conversational first drafts and then edit from there. That way I'd get the benefit of whatever intuitive process is producing the good qualities you're seeing in my comments today, and with my edits I could get whatever benefits I'm looking to get by following my learning plan.
†I think this equates to what I was calling "carefree" in #18397.
#18412 I agree with everything you wrote here.
> I actually write worse than conversational† first drafts.
oic
> Maybe I should try for conversational first drafts and then edit from there.
yeah sounds worth trying and it would better enable the problem solving process in #18412
#15555 I've been trying for a while to define my terms from #15544. I'm finding it hard. I think I'm going to put it aside. I think my time would be better spent doing things that are easier, or, if I'm going to spend time trying to understand something, I should try to understand something written by a great thinker.
SMB1 speedrunning project
Project summary: describe and successfully execute a reasonable plan for getting to within 20% of the world record time in Super Mario Bros. (SMB1) any%.
The purpose of this project is to help myself power up to the point where I can choose a life goal. Reaching that "philosophy power level", so to speak, is my current life goal.
During a coaching call, Elliot told me that getting within 20% of the world record time was a reasonable goal for speedrunning.
The current world record for SMB1 is 4m 55s 430ms. That record is held by Niftski and was posted in Nov 2020.
Rounding Niftski's time to the nearest second yields 295s. 120% of that is 354s, which is 5m 54s. That's currently good enough for is 874th place on the SMB1 any% leaderboard. 5m 54s is the time I want to achieve.
The Guides section of speedrun.com's SMB1 page links to a Super Mario Bros. any% tutorial by Jellyman102 from 2017. Here's my transcript of the start of the video:
> Hello and welcome to my first ever tutorial. This is gonna be a tutorial on Super Mario Bros. speedrunning any%. So this tutorial doesn't cover like any world record strategies. This is mainly what I do, and I kinda suck at the game, so, I don't know. It might not be what you're looking for if you're shooting for world record, but if you're shooting for a time under 6 minutes, and you just want to have some fun, then this is the tutorial for you.
Sounds good to me. My goal of 5m 54s is just under 6 minutes, so it looks like this tutorial will give me some useful tips. (According to Jellyman102's speedrun.com profile, he posted a 5m 35s time for SMB1 any%.)
I created a profile at speedrun.com.
Here's my plan:
The first step is to be able to beat the game, i.e., complete an entire game of SMB1. I've never done that. I've worked through Jellyman102's tutorial a bit before, but didn't get too far with it.
Once I can beat the game, I'll use that time as my initial benchmark. Then I'll look at how long different sections took and look for things to speed them up. I may also notice that improving at some technique would shave a bit off of lots of sections, even if it doesn't make a big difference in any one section of the game. After a fair amount of technique practice and probably practicing some sections or levels, I'll try an entire run again to see how much (if any) I've improved.
I'll post about my progress here and keep going until I reach my goal or give up. If I get stuck or feel like I'm not being efficient in my learning, I'll ask for help here, on the Super Mario Speedrunning Discord, or on some other speedrunning forum.
I intend to spend at least 5m per day on this project. If I'm around a device on which I can practice playing the game (e.g., if I'm at home with my NES), I'll probably spend some of the time practicing. Otherwise, I'll do other things like
- watch and take notes on tutorial videos, videos about speedrunning in general (such as these two by Karl Jobst: 1 2), and videos of my own runs
- think and read about things to optimize in my run
#19008 u got livesplit?
No. I'll check it out. Thanks.
Here's an update on what I've been working on.
For Super Mario Bros. (SMB1) any%, I can pretty reliably get to the beginning of World 8-2. I'm not trying to do everything super-well. I've never gotten through 8-2. I'm trying to get through that and then the levels after that, following Jellyman102's SMB1 Any% tutorial. That's my priority.
I got LiveSplit. I put in some splits for SMB1. I'm not quite sure when I should be pressing the *split* button. Like is there some part of the transition between levels that people usually split on? If I use an emulator then I think there's an add-on that will do the splits for me. I don't know how worthwhile that is.
The main use I can think of for recording individual segment times with something like LiveSplit is to tell me how long different parts are taking so I can figure out where I want to spend time optimizing.
I started reading *Time Will Run Back* by Hazlitt. I like it so far.
I started reading *Bureaucracy* by Mises. I like it too. It reminds me of how Steve Bannon talks about deconstructing the administrative state. I like how Mises directly connects socialism to bureaucracy. I'm looking forward to reading more.
> I'm not quite sure when I should be pressing the *split* button.
Conventions vary some by game/community as well as individual, personal preference.
The important thing is to be consistent across many runs and get useful data from your splits.
The most common place to split is the start of a cutscene. You don't want to lose time by splitting at the same time you're trying to control your character. For Mario I think you lose control of your character for a couple seconds when you beat a level, so I'm guessing you should split at the start of that. It's OK that there is a small delay between your last input to beat the level and then moving your hand over to split, as long as the delay is reasonably similar each time. It doesn't need to be the frame perfect start of the cutscene or anything like that.
> The main use I can think of for recording individual segment times with something like LiveSplit is to tell me how long different parts are taking so I can figure out where I want to spend time optimizing.
That's a major use. Another use is to know whether you can still get a PB or WR this run. You can see how ahead or behind you are in real time while playing. This helps you decide whether to reset the run.
Splits also help you find out your "sum of best" – if you took your best gameplay for each split and put them all together in one run, what would your time be? When you play enough that your sum of best stops increasing quickly and becomes reasonably stable, then comparing your PB to your sum of best helps you understand how optimized your PB is and how realistic a better PB is without new strategies.
Splits can also help with thinking about route changes, since they help you gain an understanding of how long different sections of the game are instead of just the length of the whole game.
And when your gameplay gets consistent enough, you can lose 10 seconds on a split and know it was from one specific mistake and everything else was normal. It can help you understand connections between a single event in a split and gaining or losing time.
#19178 livesplit can display "what time would I get if I matched my best splits for the rest of the run?". for ppl who play a lot, this can be pretty accurate for the best realistic time they can still get, or over-optimistic (upper bound on how good the run might be) if they aren't yet near the end of the run. ppl will also often know how many hard or risky sections are left in the game (e.g. the last 20min of the 3h run is pretty safe and they are likely to get times near their best splits for that section).
ppl also use splits to know where they have timesave available in their PB. you take every split in your PB and compare it to your best (aka "gold") split for that section and then you know, without changing your skill level, which sections of the PB went well and where you can expect to gain time on it. you can also compare your gold splits to WR and see e.g. if any are faster than WR. or you might see that most are similar to WR but one is way slower.
#19178 Thank you. That explanation of when to split and how to use the split data was very helpful. I plan to start using splits for the reasons you gave as soon as I can finish the game.
SMB1 progress report
A few days ago, for my SMB1 project, I started tracking each attempt on each level and whether each attempt succeeded (completed without losing any lives) or failed. I also wrote a program to summarize the results for each day. The output looks like this:
> 2020-12-21: 1-1=100%(1/1) 1-2=50%(1/2) 4-1=100%(1/1) 4-2=100%(1/1) 8-1=17%(5/29) 8-2=0%(0/5)
Here, I practiced world 8-1 29 times, and out of those, I completed the level successfully 5 times. I also practiced 1-1, 1-2, 4-1, and 4-2 once or twice, and 8-2 5 times.
> 2020-12-22: 8-1=20%(14/70)
> 2020-12-23: 1-1=100%(1/1) 1-2=100%(1/1) 4-1=100%(1/1) 4-2=100%(1/1) 8-1=39%(9/23) 8-2=0%(0/5)
I'm getting better at 8-1. I improved my success rate at that level from 17% to 20% to 40% over the course of 3 days.
The goal of tracking these things is to help me get to the point where I can complete the game. I'm hoping the data will help me know where to focus my efforts.
I wrote another program that, given the probability that I can successfully complete any level without losing a life, tells me the average number of attempts per completed game (i.e. how many times I'll have to start over to get one completed game). To complete the game I need to complete it without dying more than twice, since you start out with three lives and none of the things I do involve getting extra lives.
For example, say that I can complete levels 1-1, 1-2, 4-1, 4-2, 8-1, 8-2, 8-3, and 8-4 with probability 1, 1, 1, 1, 0.4, 0.4, 0.4, and 0.3 respectively. Then the program tells me that it will take me 7 attempts on average to complete the game.
Currently, I have a 0% success rate for worlds 8-2, 8-3, and 8-4, so I'm not able to calculate a meaningful average number of attempts to complete the whole game.
The resulting probabilities are slightly inaccurate because sometimes when you die, you re-spawn in the middle of a level instead of at the beginning of the level, and I don't currently have a good way to record the fact that the next attempt starts from the middle.
Today, I also started keeping track of where in a level I died, for example, "on the narrow ledge near the end of 8-1". I plan to use this data to look for patterns and things to work on.
One thing I might start doing, when I'm working on a new level, is to treat that level as if it consisted of multiple sub-levels, and work on those sub-levels individually as if they were distinct levels. For example, if I were working on 8-2 (which I am), I might first try to just get past the first stairs. Each time I succeed at that, I'll start the level over rather than continuing, until I can do it reliably. Then I'll use a save point to start after the stairs and practice the next sub-level. My goal is to efficiently spend my practice time on the areas of the game where it's most helpful.
I'm getting better at world 8-2 in SMB1. I can reliably get further in it before dying. I've been making Mario walk more instead of running and I wait for an enemy to pass sometimes rather than trying to move around it. This is slower but *reliable*. That's what I care about for now. I just want to reliably be able to get to the end of the game.
#19231 Sounds like you're making some progress, which is good.
The software you wrote reminded me of a similar situation I was in a few months ago (we discussed it in tutoring max, probs around early September).
I ended up writing a bunch of code around my routing/running of SSOL. The details aren't too important, but I probably spent more time writing code than I did actually practicing/running the game. There were some really tangible benefits, like the modded client I made has near-instant level-reload and a 99% reduced load time.
But, just considering *right now*, would I be better at the game if I put that time into practicing instead of writing code? Probably.
It sounds like you have put a bunch of work into the code side (though IDK proportions or what you've measured, etc). I just wanted to mention my anecdote b/c working on that stuff might not be that useful. Say you ended up calculating that you had p=0.2 to finish a run from 1-1 to 8-4. How does that help you? What goal is that helping you reach?
Aside: there are often other goals we can meet by doing overly-side-y side-quests like the coding we've both done. I don't really consider that here but it can make a practical difference in prioritization/choices.
#19235 I'd suggest playing through the game warpless, without looking up strategies, to get more used to general gameplay. After you beat it the first time, replay it occasionally with a timer so you can see your time go down (no need to time the first play through). I think that'll help with your ability to beat 8-2, 8-3 and 8-4. You're having a hard time with them partly cuz you warped past most of the levels so you're less experienced than the game designers intended.
Don't get hung up doing this for a long time and not speedrunning at all though. I'm not sure how long it'd take you, but maybe split your time between doing both.
Doing a regular playthrough before speedrunning a game is a common thing speedrunners do. It helps them see if they like the game and get general info about how to play it.
#19238 I completed world 8-2 in SMB1 for the first time today, beating it 3 times in total. I enjoy working on the speedrun levels directly and learning things as needed. I don't feel stuck.
I did try some non-speedrun levels for about 10 minutes during which I completed 2-1 and 2-2. I understand that doing non-speedrun levels could help me build up skills that would be useful in later levels, and I understand that the game is designed to teach me how to play it if I go through it in the intended order. However, my plan for now is to go in the intended order more only if I feel stuck on the speedrun levels.
I didn't enjoy doing the non-speedrun levels. I think maybe the reason I didn't enjoy them is that I don't feel stuck doing the speedrun levels. I feel like I'm making progress and having fun. So I feel that my time is better spent directly on the speedrun levels for now.
Another thing is that, at 22:50 in Jellyman102's SMB1 tutorial, he says:
> This [8-2] is the hardest level, and so is 8-1.
I can already reliably pass 8-1 and I expect to reach that point soon with 8-2.
#19237 Max wrote:
> It sounds like you have put a bunch of work into the code side (though IDK proportions or what you've measured, etc).
I've spent a little over 8 hours so far playing SMB1 and watching tutorials. I spent about 45 minutes writing those programs.
> Say you ended up calculating that you had p=0.2 to finish a run from 1-1 to 8-4. How does that help you? What goal is that helping you reach?
I was hoping to use that info as a kind of progress meter towards my sub-goal of finishing the game (at any speed). So even if I couldn't complete the whole game in a single run, at least I could see how getting better at individual levels was reducing the expected number of attempts I would have to make.
*Bureaucracy* by Mises
In *Bureaucracy*, Mises writes:
> The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors. With them nothing counts more than their own satisfaction. They bother neither about the vested interests of capitalists nor about the fate of the workers who lose their jobs if as consumers they no longer buy what they used to buy.
I don't understand how Mises deals with things like Big Tech censorship, companies outsourcing essential items like water filters or face masks to a country like China (which may stop sending them to us at any time), or companies pushing for immigration from 3rd world countries faster than we know how to assimilate them. Maybe free-market capitalism, kinda like free-market anarchy, needs a society with some good ideas that we may not have fully internalized in order to work.
A bit later, Mises writes:
> Thus the capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote.
I guess he's technically correct, but I think you wouldn't normally call something a democracy if different people get vastly different amounts of "votes". Like if dollars were votes, then I think Bill Gates would have as many votes as a large % of the population.
This all seems hard and complicated to me. I'm not arguing that I'm right and Mises is wrong. I just feel like I'm overreaching in trying to understand this book.
#19254
> I don't understand how Mises deals with things like Big Tech censorship, companies outsourcing essential items like water filters or face masks to a country like China (which may stop sending them to us at any time), or companies pushing for immigration from 3rd world countries faster than we know how to assimilate them.
I don't know how Mises deals with them either. And I haven't read _Bureaucracy_.
My opinions:
Tech Censorship - I agree with the idea that this problem is mostly caused by unprosecuted fraud.
Essential items - I think we really shoot ourselves in the foot with laws and social pressure against "gouging" and reserving essential items for the neediest recipients (ex: healthcare workers during the pandemic). This kind of response has been normal so often and for so long that it's killed the market mechanisms that would otherwise deal with the problem.
If instead of being reviled as gougers people could reliably count on getting instantly, fabulously rich just for storing some essential items for the rare chance they'd be desperately needed and supplies would be disrupted...there'd be a lot more storage going on and it'd be a lot less of a problem. And a lot faster retooling of production facilities for whatever was needed too.
Immigration - I see two problems here:
(1) Welfare state effectively subsidizes being here rather than working here.
(2) Lack of assimilation requirements for voting (ex: birthright citizenship)
Solve those and I don't think BigCorp bringing in a bunch of immigrants to work for them would be a problem.
> I don't understand how Mises deals with things like Big Tech censorship, companies outsourcing essential items [...]
> I just feel like I'm overreaching in trying to understand this book.
It's simple. (From memory,) the book doesn't deal with those things. The book isn't comprehensive. If you finish reading the book and doesn't know the answers to those things, that doesn't mean you missed anything.
Try to look at what topics Mises is covering and what problems he's trying to solve/address, and how he does that. What are the book's goals and answers? If you do that, then you're understanding the book. Knowing how to address all economic and political issues in a (classical) liberal way would be going beyond the book's scope.
#19254 Mises wrote:
> The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers... They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.
I was trying to understand how this works in relation to Big Tech censorship. Are consumers determining that Big Tech should censor? Maybe the "consumers" of Big Tech are actually advertising companies. They are the ones who pay the bills, since it's not as if social media users themselves pay to use Big Tech. I can more easily believe that advertisers hate Donald Trump and don't like free speech than I can believe that Twitter users preferred censorship during the election.
Maybe if people paid for social media directly they could have more, or at least different kinds of, free speech. Gab, for instance, is funded by users, not advertisers.
#19262 I wonder if it would help my understanding if I imagined that, by a "capitalist system of market economy", Mises is talking about a perfectly capitalist world in which everyone likes capitalism and everyone wants the world to continue to be capitalist. If I think of it that way, it's harder for me to come up with things that seem to contradict Mises.
> I was trying to understand how this works in relation to Big Tech censorship.
You don't have to understand that to understand the book. The book wants you to understand it in general. You should be able to see why it makes sense in a variety of typical or easy cases, but the book doesn't cover most edge cases or the specific details re big tech.
> Are consumers determining that Big Tech should censor?
The short answer is *no*. We have a mixed society and there are major anti-capitalist elements involved which are limiting consumer choice and power.
Big tech has friends in government, various favorable laws, various mechanisms to suppress competition, and has been getting away with ongoing fraud. E.g. Twitter sold itself to consumers as a free speech platform, and consumers wanted that, and then Twitter started censoring. Worse, Twitter didn't even admit they changed their policies, but kept lying b/c they apparently believe their customers prefer free speech.
> I wonder if it would help my understanding if I imagined that, by a "capitalist system of market economy", Mises is talking about a perfectly capitalist world in which everyone likes capitalism and everyone wants the world to continue to be capitalist.
I think it's enough that all the governments and major societal institutions are fully capitalist, rather than the ideas of every individual. A capitalist system with a fully free market and a bunch of pro-capitalist companies is resilient to a few new businesses or customers with anti-capitalist ideas. It'll work OK to imagine the anti-capitalist is a reasonably small minority, e.g. 10%, that never uses force (no government power, no riots, no robberies, etc. – or if a little force is used it's effectively suppressed by the police, that's OK too). Sadly that's pretty different than the US or any other country today.
Stats on my SMB1 level times
## Intro
When playing SMB1, I started using the keyboard and a program to mark the timestamp of each beginning-of-level screen (i.e., the screens that say "WORLD x-y" and tell you how many lives you have). I also mark as close as I can get to the instant when the game ends (i.e., when you get the axe behind Bowser on the final level). With these timestamps, I can calculate how long it took me to complete each individual level that I play.
So far, I've recorded about 470 individual level times. Below are some stats on those times. (For context, achieving a continuous 5m54s run of SMB1 is my goal for this project.)
## Best times
Here are my best times so far for each level, in milliseconds. The times in parenthesis are the times given at speedrun.com for the current world record run, by Niftski.
- 1-1: 30882 (29000)
- 1-2: 34118 (33000)
- 4-1: 36967 (34000)
- 4-2: 40407 (31000)
- 8-1: 53188 (48000)
- 8-2: 47227 (35000)
- 8-3: 36145 (34000)
- 8-4: 56752 (47000)
Sum of bests: 5m35s
## Average times
Here are my average times for each level (again, in milliseconds). This only counts instances when I went from the beginning to the end of the level without dying on that level. For example, if I died once, respawned at the beginning of the level, and then completed the level successfully, only the time for the second attempt at that level would count here.
- 1-1: 33211
- 1-2: 34546
- 4-1: 37751
- 4-2: 43999
- 8-1: 56003
- 8-2: 50727
- 8-3: 36884
- 8-4: 61340
Sum of averages: 5m54s
## How often I didn't die
Here's the percent of the time I was able to complete each level without dying on that level:
- 1-1: 100%
- 1-2: 75%
- 4-1: 93%
- 4-2: 60%
- 8-1: 47%
- 8-2: 32%
- 8-3: 18%
- 8-4: 24%
## Timing notes
The beginning-of-level screen for 1-1 appears roughly when the you press Start to start the game. Judging by the on-screen timer at the start of Niftski's world record run, this is about 2650 ms before when SMB1 speedrun timing officially starts, which is when "400" appears in the upper-right corner (source: https://www.speedrun.com/smb1 – click on "View rules"). So, for level 1-1 reporting and stats, I subtract 2650 ms from the level times I recorded. The times for other levels are unchanged (i.e., they are as recorded).
Levels 1-2 and 4-2 have an intro cut scene (of Mario walking to a pipe) that plays after the beginning-of-level screen shows for the first time. If you die and re-spawn at the beginning of these levels, the intro cut scene is skipped. I want the times to include the cut scene, because the cut scenes are included in the official time. I achieved this by ignoring, for individual level timing purposes, any attempt that didn't include the cut scene (i.e., any attempt except the first attempt on each level in a given run).
Problems reading Mises' Bureaucracy
I'm having a hard time with Bureaucracy. I think it makes good points but doesn't back them up enough. I didn't get this impression when I was reading *Human Action*, but I didn't get too far into that book either.
Examples of my problems with *Bureaucracy* are below. It might be that I'm just not a clear enough thinker to understand Mises. Or maybe there's something easier I should read first. Or maybe I should change my way of thinking about the book or my way of reading it. I dunno. I'm running into problems like this every few paragraphs.
Mises, *Bureaucracy*:
> The preëminence of the capitalist system consists in the fact that it is the only system of social coöperation and division of labor which makes it possible to apply a method of reckoning and computation in planning new projects and appraising the usefulness of the operation of those plants, farms, and workshops already working. The impracticability of all schemes of socialism and central planning is to be seen in the impossibility of any kind of economic calculation under conditions in which there is no private ownership of the means of production and consequently no market prices for these factors.
I don't fully understand why Mises is right about this. Big companies like Google or Walmart don't have private internal ownership of the means of production. Employees or departments don't own the things they use to produce. Everything is owned by the company. Yet these companies manage to centrally plan some new projects and appraise the usefulness of their operations. Granted, they exist within a somewhat capitalist system, but it seems like there is some effective central planning that is going on that is not itself capitalist.
> Which of these potential procedures and plans are the most advantageous? Which should be carried out because they are apt to contribute most to the satisfaction of the most urgent needs? Which should be postponed or discarded because their execution would divert factors of production from other projects the execution of which would contribute more to the satisfaction of urgent needs?
> It is obvious that these questions cannot be answered by some calculation in kind. One cannot make a variety of things enter into a calculus if there is no common denominator for them.
I don't find it "obvious". For one thing, you can create a common denominator in terms of how much you value different goods. You might value a gold necklace or an iPad or a suit roughly the same. You could then calculate using those exchange ratios. Another example of calculating with things that have no common denominator is coming up with a tasty diet that meets different conditions for how much of each nutrient you receive.
> The market prices alone can answer the question whether the execution of a project P will yield more than it costs, that is, whether it will be more useful than the execution of other conceivable plans which cannot be realized because the factors of production required are used for the performance of project P.
The *current* market prices don't answer that question. You'd need to know the prices at the time the project starts producing things that are ready to sell, which will be in the future.
I just beat SMB1 in 6m22s
I just beat SMB1 for the first time! The total time was 6m22s. I died only once, on 8-3. It would have been about 6m4s if I hadn't died.
Here are the individual level times, from my keyboard-based split tracker:
- 1-1: 33990 ms
- 1-2: 35483 ms
- 4-1: 39835 ms
- 4-2: 47188 ms
- 8-1: 55624 ms
- 8-2: 49295 ms
- 8-3: 18681 ms (died)
- 8-3: 38252 ms
- 8-4: 63627 ms
Sum: 6m22s
#19309 gz
> Mises, *Bureaucracy*:
>
>> The preëminence of the capitalist system consists in the fact that it is the only system of social coöperation and division of labor which makes it possible to apply a method of reckoning and computation in planning new projects and appraising the usefulness of the operation of those plants, farms, and workshops already working. The impracticability of all schemes of socialism and central planning is to be seen in the impossibility of any kind of economic calculation under conditions in which there is no private ownership of the means of production and consequently no market prices for these factors.
>
> I don't fully understand why Mises is right about this. Big companies like Google or Walmart don't have private internal ownership of the means of production. Employees or departments don't own the things they use to produce. Everything is owned by the company. Yet these companies manage to centrally plan some new projects and appraise the usefulness of their operations. Granted, they exist within a somewhat capitalist system, but it seems like there is some effective central planning that is going on that is not itself capitalist.
Google can't get money by force unlike the government. There is a market for Google's assets outside Google, like the market for computers and programmers. So Google can look at the prices of the resources it is using for projects and the price it expects to charge for the result of that project and check whether the project makes sense. If Google fails to do this then it loses money and is deprived of the resources it could buy with that money. So Google has an incentive to provide products people want and loses access to some resources if it fails.
#19308
https://www.sgtreport.com/2019/01/the-extraordinary-censorship-of-its-a-wonderful-life/ :
> Anyone familiar with the realities of today’s Hollywood knows that ideological agendas, not box-office profits, are the true bottom line.
I feel there’s some truth to this. But *Bureaucracy* so far talks mainly of firms being driven by profits. I feel like even the *critiques* of capitalism that it addresses are in terms of rich people and firms doing supposedly bad things in order to make an unfair amount of profit.
I beat SMB1 again today
#19309 I beat SMB1 for the second time ever today. Beating the game at all is still a big deal for me.
The time for the run was 7m18s. I died twice. If I hadn't died, the time would have been 5m54s, which is my goal time.
Here are the individual level times:
- 1-1: 33832 ms
- 1-2: 35056 ms
- 4-1: 37589 ms
- 4-2: 38678 ms
- 8-1: 59471 ms
- 8-2: 21486 ms (died)
- 8-2: 49229 ms
- 8-3: 36948 ms
- 8-4: 62017 ms (died – ran into Bowser instead of under him)
- 8-4: 63621 ms
My priority continues to be to not die. I've been re-working the way I do some sections in order to make my performance more consistent, even if the new way is a bit slower.
SMB1 update
#19324 I've gotten better at not dying on most levels except for 8-3. According to my records, I make it through 8-3 without dying only about 20% of the time. The hammer bros on that level give me trouble, and I still make some unforced errors there as well.
If I throw out the times when I die, the sum of my average times on all levels is 5m56s (close to my goal of 5m54s).
I think I'm going to try fixing my unforced errors on 8-3, and then record some runs with the goal of beating the game without dying even once. For those runs, whenever I die, I'll just reset and try again from the start rather than playing through to the end as I normally do.
SMB1: Mission accomplished
On Dec 6, 2020, in #19008, I wrote:
> Project summary: describe and successfully execute a reasonable plan for getting to within 20% of the world record time in Super Mario Bros. (SMB1) any% [...] 5m 54s is the time I want to achieve.
Yesterday, Jan 2, 2021, I recorded a 5m 47s run and uploaded it to YouTube, thereby accomplishing my goal for this project. (I know the video quality is bad. I'm working on a better recording setup.)
I submitted the run to speedrun.com, but they haven't verified it yet.
My route uses only basic running and jumping. It doesn't use any tricks like pipe jumps, wall jumps, wrong warps, flagpole glitches, or Bullet Bill glitches.
Here's a review of the SMB1 speedrun timing rules† and how they apply to my video:
> Start - The frame "400" appears in the top right corner after selecting 1 player.
The start happens just after 0:09 in my video.
> End - The frame all sprites are invisible after touching the axe in 8-4.
The end happens just before 5:56 in my video.
† Go to https://www.speedrun.com/smb1 and click "View rules"
5m 56s - 0m 9s = 5m 47s.
Even if my timing calculations are off by a few seconds, I'm still clearly under my 5m 54s goal.
When I started this project, I was a novice at SMB1. I had never completed level 8-2, and even getting that far was a stretch.
I spent about 70 hours on this project over a period of about 4 weeks. That averages to 2.5 hours per day. 6 hours of that were spent writing computer programs to help track my progress; the rest was mostly watching tutorials and practicing.
These were the main tutorials I used:
- Jellyman102: any% BASICS tutorial
- Kosmic: Speedrun Tutorial: How to Beat Super Mario Bros. in Under 5 Minutes, particularly the section on dealing with the hammer bros in 8-3
#19351 New SMB1 project: describe and successfully execute a reasonable plan for getting to within 15% of the world record time in Super Mario Bros. (SMB1) any%.
The current world record for SMB1 is 4m 55s 314ms. That record is held by Miniland and was posted in Jan 2021. Rounding Miniland's time down to the nearest second yields 295s. 115% of that is 339.25s, which is just over 5m 39s (5 * 60 s = 300 s, plus 39 s = 339 s). That is the time I want to achieve.
My current best is 5m 47s (#19351). To reach my goal, I need to improve on that by at least 8 seconds.
My plan is to break each level down into meaningful individual segments, and then compare my time on each segment to Miniland's time in his tutorial video from Nov 2019 called "How to get a 5:03 with completely safe strats". I'll see how much time Miniland saves compared to me on each segment, and, by looking at how he runs different segments, I'll try to find the easiest way to shave 8 seconds off of my current time.
As with my first SMB1 project (#19008), I intend to spend at least 5 minutes per day on this. I'll post about my progress here and keep going until I either reach my goal or give up.
Summoning Salt video: The History of Super Mario Bros. 2 World Records
SMB1: 2nd mission accomplished
#19368 Today, I submitted a 5m 37s SMB1 run to speedrun.com. This accomplishes my goal of getting a time of 5m 39s or better. My new run hasn't been approved yet, but my earlier 5m 46s run was. (I conservatively submitted the time for that run as 5m 47s, but the moderators updated the time to 5m 46s when they verified it.)
I was able to get 5m 37s without adding any new tricks to my repertoire. I just got faster and more consistent at the techniques I was already using. Even a novice to SMB1 wouldn't see anything in my latest run that he didn't understand.
# Deciding how to improve
Following the plan I outlined in #19368, I broke each level down into segments and compared my time on each segment to the time achieved by Miniland in his 5m 3s video. I recorded this data in a spreadsheet.
Each segment on which Miniland was faster than me (this was almost all segments) has a note in the spreadsheet explaining what he did that made him faster. I picked a few segments where I thought Miniland's approach would be easiest to learn and where the time savings would add up to enough to reach my goal. I practiced those segments until I could consistently do them Miniland's way.
Then I re-did my original run, over multiple attempts, replacing the old way I did my chosen segments with the new way. While practicing, I also got better at some other segments, which made me faster overall.
I didn't track my individual level times at all during this process. However, I got to know by looking at the in-game timer at the end of each level whether I had done the level according to my expectations or not.
# How I spent my time
It took me 19.5 hours to improve from 5m 46s to 5m 37s. Of this, I spent:
- 4.5 hours on my spreadsheet, including deciding how to break each level down into small segments, recording the exact times for each segment on my video and Miniland's video, and deciding which improvements to focus on
- 1.5 hours improving my video capture setup
- 1 hour editing videos uploading to YouTube and reviewing runs (I uploaded a 5m 42s run to YouTube on the way to 5m 37s, but I didn't submit it to speedrun.com)
- 12.5 hours actually playing the game and practicing
I'm now setting a new goal: get within 10% of the SMB1 world record. This works out to a time of 5m 24.846s or better.
To achieve this goal, I plan to use the same approach as before. I've added a new sheet to my spreadsheet to help me figure out which improvements to focus on.
#19566 gz on 5:37 run
> I was able to get 5m 37s without adding any new tricks to my repertoire.
> I'm now setting a new goal: get within 10% of the SMB1 world record.
Yeah. Since you didn't add new tricks I was gonna suggest going for a faster time. It didn't get too hard to improve yet.
Makes sense to copy some strategies from a fast run that don't require new tricks. (btw, i figure tricks means stuff like clipping through walls, doing wrong warp pipe glitches, or doing wall jumps).
#19588 Yeah, that's exactly what I meant by tricks.
I'm learning to jump backwards, which is a skill required for wrong warps. I'm also practicing doing a specific sequence of backwards jumps on 4-2 that should let me do a wrong warp which saves about 5 seconds.
#19566 Nice progress!
#19594 I noticed you bumping 3 jumps in 4-2 and then not doing the wrong warp. I guess that you could go a bit faster if you didn't do that, but also that it'll probably be easier to get the wrong warp if you've got those 3 bumps consistent already.
This sounds like a good learning technique when you have excess capacity. Bc you don't have to focus on much else at that point, you can focus on consistency before you could without the learning optimization. (the alternative being that you'd only do more advanced once you'd finished with the foundational skills.) It's using excess capacity to work on a future constraint. :thumbsup:
Also, if you didn't do that then you'd be, effectively, doing local optimisation instead of global. the local optima would have gotten you a slightly faster run *this time*, but at the expense of getting to your ultimate goal faster. Using excess capacity like you do is working towards global optima.
> This accomplishes my goal of getting a time of 5m 39s or better.
I said "ultimate goal" above even tho you haven't defined it (not that I saw skimming back, at least). I think this means that you had an implicit background goal in addition to your 5:39 goal; something like: you didn't want your learning/practice/performance to inhibit more ambitious goals. If you didn't have a bg goal like that then it doesn't make sense for you to start including practice for more advanced techniques that you won't actually use in the current run. my guess is that this sort of bg goal is pretty common and mostly implicit.
> I've added a new sheet to my spreadsheet to help me figure out which improvements to focus on.
I like the method you use in the spreadsheet. It looks effective, pracitcal, and reasonably general.
Are you including frame-rule stuff yet? I didn't see anything in the spreadsheet. I'm not sure if it's premature optimisation, but there might be some breakpoints you can hit that would bump up frames-saved to the next multiple of 21. I think that means some of the new tech could save more than you calculate; e.g. if 'fast backwards jump onto 1st of 3 piranhas' hit a framerule breakpoint you might save like 60 frames instead of 47. My guess is that this sort of thing isn't worth worrying about yet. I guess that framerules align themselves to the start of levels, so you might just be able to do some excel math to figure out how many frames you lose compared to Miniland's 5:03.
Fat loss project
My doctor told me I am overweight. My BMI is 29.5 which is in the "Overweight" category according to the NIH BMI calculator. BMI is an imperfect measurement, but I actually am overweight, and using it gives me a metric to measure myself by.
I want to get thinner. My goal is to get my BMI down to 28. This is still in the "Overweight" category, but it's less overweight than I currently am. To get there, I plan to do both of the following:
- enter everything I eat into an app that tracks calories, macronutrients, and net carbs
- eat at most 75% of the amount of calories that I need to maintain my weight
- eat at most 50 grams† of "net carbs" per day, where net carbs = total grams of carbohydrate - grams of fiber - grams of sugar alcohols
I have a "sponsor" who will help me deal with exceptions and mistakes.
I'm not trying to argue that this approach is in any way optimal and I'm not recommending it for anyone else. The reason I'm proposing to use it is because, when I followed it over the past few months or so, I reduced my BMI from 31 to 29.5, and I didn't really mind it.
I hope that by continuing to follow it I can reduce my BMI some more. I will monitor my progress and adjust my approach if it isn't working.
† One reason for limiting my net carbs like this is that I suspect it reduces my feelings of hunger.
#19607
> To get there, I plan to do both of the following:
There are three items in the list that followed that. I should have said "all of the following".
#19595 Max wrote:
> I noticed you bumping 3 jumps in 4-2 and then not doing the wrong warp. I guess that you could go a bit faster if you didn't do that, but also that it'll probably be easier to get the wrong warp if you've got those 3 bumps consistent already.
I didn't think 3 forward bumps would shift Mario's position rightwards far enough to get the wrong warp in 4-2. Do you have more info about that? (The bumps in 4-2 in my 5m 37s run were forward bumps. I wasn't trying to do them on purpose. They happened because I jumped imprecisely.)
The approach for 4-2 that I'm following now, from Miniland's video, calls for 4 *backwards* bumps, though some players do it in 3, e.g., in Kosmic's tutorial, he says:
> One is the main method. You need to jump backwards into 3 walls.
> I didn't think 3 forward bumps would shift Mario's position rightwards far enough to get the wrong warp in 4-2. Do you have more info about that? (The bumps in 4-2 in my 5m 37s run were forward bumps. I wasn't trying to do them on purpose. They happened because I jumped imprecisely.)
I think I just misremembered the details of the wrong warp and forgot they were backwards jumps not forwards (aside: is this actually crucial? like the shift in position only happens when mario is the wrong way? mb I'm confusing it with some wall clipping stuff)
Thinking about #19595 in this context: curiously I don't think I should change my mind about the learning strat stuff.
*reflection:* It feels like there's something singificant in the idea of creating knowledge out of noise. I suspect it's a combination of: evolution + reach of constituent ideas + measurement theory.
Here's my attempt at it: we sometimes create bridging theories that bridge noise to actual ideas. A problem with the bridging theory doesn't impact the idea (or the data), so it's never a reason to doubt the main idea. We can create knowledge out of noise because: knowledge persists/endures, the creative process of evolution doesn't need to 'input' knowledge to output knowledge, the identification of noise doesn't criticise the result idea (that realisation just ~removes some ~support, which wasn't neccessary anyway).
#19611 BTW, I enjoy discussing this with you and watching you make progress. (And the thoughts about progress/learning that come with this discussion.) Thanks :)
SMB1: third mission accomplished
#19566 I got a 5m 20.54s Super Mario Bros. (SMB1) any% speedrun today. This accomplishes my goal of getting a time of 5m 24.846s or better. (The speedrun.com SMB1 any% leaderboard doesn't appear to show milliseconds for runs that are 5m 3s or longer, but I'm not sure if they round up or down, so I'm including the milliseconds here.)
I submitted my run to speedrun.com earlier today, but it hasn't been verified yet. If it were to be verified right now, I would be at 563rd place on the leaderboard, a big improvement over my current position of 776th, which was due to my earlier verified run of 5m 37s.
## Improvements
Here are the main improvements I made over my previous personal best:
- 298 frames: 4-2 wrong warp (requires backwards jumping, a new skill for me)
- 162 frames: 4-2 better jumping into warp zone
- 83 frames: 8-1 wait less before piranhas
- 122 frames: 8-2 fast jumping up initial staircase
- 48 frames: 8-3 don't get 3 fireworks at the end†
- 116 frames: 8-4 faster motion on wall jump section (but still no wall jump)
- 63 frames: 8-4 wrong warp to water section
- 88 frames: 8-4 water section
- 87 frames: 8-4 jump through Bowser's axes, no back & forth
The total from those improvements is 1067 frames, or about 17.8 seconds. I messed up in some places and went through other places slightly faster, so my overall improvement from my last run wasn't exactly 17.8 seconds.
†If the last digit of the in-game timer reads 1, 3, or 6 when you touch the flagpole at the end of a level, that many fireworks go off, which takes extra time. Rather than touch the flagpole when the last digit of the in-game timer is 3 or 6, it's faster to wait until the last digit goes down to 2 or 5.
## Time spent
Making those improvements took me about 48 hours over the course of 14 days, which averages out to about 3.3 hours per day. Of those 48 hours, I spent about:
- 2 hours making a spreadsheet and deciding what improvements to learn
- 2 hours improving my video capture setup so that I could record at 60 frames per second
- 2.5 hours watching videos and tutorials
- 41.5 hours practicing
## Future work
I think I could get down to 5m 15s without too much trouble. As of today, a run that fast would tie me with 12 other people for 499th place on the SMB1 any% global leaderboard. Maybe that would be a good goal. I could get there without learning any new tricks. According to my spreadsheet, I could save over 4 seconds off my latest run just by not messing up and another 4 seconds or more by learning how to beat 8-2 without going underground (which involves only simple motions that I already know how to do).
#19780 gz
What's the frame rate of SMB1?
trying for 5:15 sounds good
#19781 SMB1 runs at 60 frames per second.
Ok, I'll go for 5m 15s, using the same general approach to improvement that I've been using so far.
A minor correction to #19780 while I'm here. I wrote:
> Making those improvements took me about 48 hours over the course of 14 days, which averages out to about 3.3 hours per day.
Rounded to the nearest 10th, 48 hours divided by 14 days is 3.4 hours per day, not 3.3.
smb1 gz and qs
Awesome!
I was surprised to see this update so soon (or at least it felt like it was 'soon' after the last one) -- mentioning b/c it seemed notable.
IDK if your recording setup/config got better since jan 18 but it's really nice. Like smooth and crisp.
gj on the backwards jumping btw. I noticed first in 4-1.
AND THE WRONG WARP! I saw the backwards bumps and then you hit the vine. Exciting stuff. gz
A lot of your pipe transitions look much smoother now - warp pipes particularly.
In 8-3 (and some other times) it looks like you're bumping in to stuff. Sometimes that seems like a safety strat and other times it seems on accident. I'm writing this at 4:02 -- is this one to get better bullet bill / hammerbro timings? It's hard to tell which ones are deliberate from the run alone (IDK that much about strats with these times). 8-3 looked pretty nice, mb one or two bumps. Are you taking timings and patterns in to account atm? Or just hoping to get good patterns?
Water in 8-4 looked much smoother than before from memory.
And the penultimate jump over Bowser! IDK how you survived. GG
BTW WRT bandicut logo at the end -- I use ffmpeg with a command like this:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 01:19:27 -to 02:18:51 -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4
You might need to consider keyframes but on the whole I've found it's the fastest and most reliable method for me. And tends to work for whatever codec/format first time.
> Of those 48 hours, I spent about:
> [...]
> - 41.5 hours practicing
Wow, I'm surprised at how radical the difference between practice % of time compared to the last update.
> I think I could get down to 5m 15s without too much trouble. As of today, a run that fast would tie me with 12 other people for 499th place on the SMB1 any% global leaderboard. Maybe that would be a good goal. I could get there without learning any new tricks. According to my spreadsheet, I could save over 4 seconds off my latest run just by not messing up and another 4 seconds or more by learning how to beat 8-2 without going underground (which involves only simple motions that I already know how to do).
If you had the goal of getting better than 499th place (tied 485th + 5:14 or less) would you need to learn new tricks?
I don't think you should stop learning new tricks yet unless you won't have goals beyond 5:15.
If it matters, I think 5:14 is a better goal than 5:15 b/c you will need to integrate new tricks to get that rather than focusing on premature optimization on what you already know.
#19783 Max wrote:
> IDK if your recording setup/config got better since jan 18 but it's really nice. Like smooth and crisp.
Yeah. In #19780, I wrote that I spent:
> 2 hours improving my video capture setup so that I could record at 60 frames per second
SMB1 runs at 60 frames per second, so capturing at that rate helps a lot.
> gj on the backwards jumping btw. I noticed first in 4-1.
Thanks. I practice my backwards jumps a few times in 4-1 just to get warmed up for 4-2, where I actually need them.
> In 8-3 (and some other times) it looks like you're bumping in to stuff. Sometimes that seems like a safety strat and other times it seems on accident.
> I'm writing this at 4:02 -- is this one to get better bullet bill / hammerbro timings?
The bump at 4m 2s was just for safety. I can't yet reliably jump over that cannon without sometimes getting hit by a bullet bill. So I just run up to it and then jump over it. It doesn't shoot once I get up close to it.
The hammer bros' behavior is controlled by the SMB1 random number generator (RNG), which is a number that is is initialized, deterministically, upon reset, and which updates, deterministically, once per frame. In each frame where the game needs to figure out what the hammer bros are doing, it does so by reading parts of that number.
I don't think there is a way to get good hammer bro patterns on 8-3 aside from controlling the exact frame on which you start 8-3. Some good players know which frame they are starting 8-3 on, and they have memorized what the hammer bros do for each of the frame numbers they are likely to start 8-3 with. So it's not exactly that they get good hammer bro patterns, but they know how to efficiently deal with the pattern that happens, and they aren't surprised by it. That works just as well as getting good patterns would.
> It's hard to tell which ones are deliberate from the run alone (IDK that much about strats with these times).
Yeah. I guess I could annotate the video with comments indicating which things are intentional and which are mistakes. I was also thinking of narrating a video where I explain everything I'm doing, for my own reference in case I decide to take a break from the game and later decide to pick it up again.
> And the penultimate jump over Bowser! IDK how you survived. GG
I forget where I learned this, but SMB1 can only have 7 or so interactive sprites on the screen at any one time. Any sprites beyond that are just for show. Once Bowser throws up enough axes, the rest can't hurt you. You pass right through them.
> BTW WRT bandicut logo at the end -- I use ffmpeg with a command like this:
> ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 01:19:27 -to 02:18:51 -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mp4
Thanks. I hadn't noticed the Bandicut logo. (I didn't watch the cut video all the way to the end.) I've now edited it out with YouTube's video editor.
Thanks for the ffmpeg tip. I like visually editing my videos with Bandicut, though, because it's simple to drag the start and end to where I want them.
I did use ffmpeg to change the aspect ratio of my video. It was recorded from my capture device at 1920x1080, which makes everything look stretched out horizontally. I used this ffmpeg command (source) to fix it:
```
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale=1024x1024,setsar=1:1 output.mp4
```
> Wow, I'm surprised at how radical the difference between practice % of time compared to the last update.
It was a lot faster for me to go from 5m 46s to 5m 37s than from 5m 37s to 5m 20s (12.5 hours vs 41.5 hours). I think that's understandable, because in the former case, I was saving only 9 seconds, while in the latter case, I was saving 17 seconds. Plus, it gets harder to improve the closer you get to the world record.
Also, it took me longer to make the spreadsheet the first time. It was faster to make it for this run, because mostly all I had to do was watch the video of my run with frame numbers added and enter the frame numbers and in-game timer for the specific milestones that I had previously identified.
Here's how I added the frame numbers, btw:
```
ffmpeg -i input.mov -vf "drawtext=fontfile=Arial.ttf: text=%{n}: x=(w-tw)/2: y=h-(2*lh): fontcolor=white: box=1: boxcolor=0x00000099: fontsize=36" -y output.mov
```
> If you had the goal of getting better than 499th place (tied 485th + 5:14 or less) would you need to learn new tricks?
No. My current time is 5m 20s, and, as I said, I think I can save at least 8s without learning any new tricks.
> I don't think you should stop learning new tricks yet unless you won't have goals beyond 5:15.
I'll learn new tricks when I judge that doing so is the best use of my time.
Learning new tricks takes longer than doing things that I can do with stuff I already know. I'm trying to achieve my time goals (e.g., 5m 15s) as quickly as possible, or, at least, without unnecessarily making it take longer than it should.
If I preferred learning new tricks over making better use of my existing motions, then I guess I might learn new tricks, even if that meant that it took me longer to improve. But I don't have that preference.
> If it matters, I think 5:14 is a better goal than 5:15 b/c you will need to integrate new tricks to get that rather than focusing on premature optimization on what you already know.
I think I could get to 5m 12s without learning any new tricks, so I guess you'd say that 5m 11s is a better goal. But I feel like it's better to set an easier goal first. It gets harder to improve the closer I get to the record. Once I get to 5m 15s, I'll think about whether I should try to improve further. If I do, maybe I'll set a goal that would require some new tricks or techniques. If not, I may just try another game.
Finally, I don't see what's "premature" about making better use of ("optimizing") what I already know.
P.S. A correction to #19780. I wrote:
> I messed up in some places and went through other places slightly faster, so my overall improvement from my last run wasn't exactly 17.8 seconds.
I forgot to mention framerule delays, which could account for up to 7 * 21 frames = 147 frames = 2.45 seconds over the course of a game. (I multiplied by 7 instead of 8, even though there are 8 levels, because 8-4, the last level, ends when you get the axe, not when the "bus" takes you to the next level.) I'm still not thinking about framerules at all, since each one is only about 1/3 of a second, and I still have problems that, individually, cost me over a second.
quick smb1 reply
> The hammer bros' behavior is controlled by the SMB1 random number generator (RNG), which is a number that is is initialized, deterministically, upon reset, and which updates, deterministically, once per frame. In each frame where the game needs to figure out what the hammer bros are doing, it does so by reading parts of that number.
Does this interact with framerules? Like, when good players get to the hammer bros, will they *always* be on a 21st frame? I thought it did, but I'm not sure given the way you described this bit.
> I forget where I learned this, but SMB1 can only have 7 or so interactive sprites on the screen at any one time.
Yeah, I think that sounds right. I think, mb in 8-2 or 8-3, there are three pipes close together and often the 3rd piranha plant doesn't spawn b/c of sprite overload. I think I noticed that in your run (tho that's normal AFAIK)
> Any sprites beyond that are just for show. Once Bowser throws up enough axes, the rest can't hurt you. You pass right through them.
I did not know that! Sneaky Nintendo. Thanks!
thoughts on spirte counts and frame counters
#19786
> I forget where I learned this, but SMB1 can only have 7 or so interactive sprites on the screen at any one time. Any sprites beyond that are just for show. Once Bowser throws up enough axes, the rest can't hurt you. You pass right through them.
(nb: ',' and '.' will move by 1 frame on YT -- in case anyone reading doesn't know)
At frame +-19427 in your run mario goes through the 5th and 6th hammer that bowser throws. I guess that bowser takes at least 2 enemy sprite slots, but does the level-end axe also take a slot? That would mean that - at most - 4 of bowsers hammers are 'active'. The hammers seem a lot less threatening knowing that. I'm thinking there might be something I'm missing, tho, because it would make the near-WR runs that end there all the more frustrating and I don't remember anyone like summoning salt mentioning it (sprite slots + the hammers), but it seems interesting and notable.
I've watched multiple SMB1 speedrun related videos (mostly glitches and tech, a few WR progression type vids too). From memory maybe there's 8 sprite slots but maybe mario takes one. IDK, but 7/8 slots doesn't make a big difference for the difference in hammer threatening-ness.
> video of my run with frame numbers added
Since you don't seem to mind about flashy-twitch stuff on your vids, *I think you should submit the videos of your run with the frame counter*, esp if you're making them usually anyway.
I'm a mod on speedrun.com/ssol and I've had to use some arcane tools to do both frame-level verification (mostly as practise) and frame-level comparisons between two different SSOL runs (for my own improvement). In one case it was easiest to download two YT vids, then combine them in adobe premiere and add a frame counter/timer. Having a frame counter in the video would be a nice convenience as a verifier. If someone submitted a run like that I would appreciate it (makes my job easier) and I'd also do some basic checks (duration * fps = frame-delta; a few random samples for consistency), tho no checking beyond that unless it was like super competetive.
it would also set a good example for *high quality standards of submissions*, which is occasionally an issue.
(the link goes to "The Weirdest Cheated Speedrun World Record" about a forged Celeste submission)
I think adding the framecounter to your submission videos also establishes a soft/indicative track record of honesty, integrity, etc.
SMB1 Local Optima, the checkpoint-goal method, premature optimization, a conjecture about when optimizations are worth doing, and potenatial risks
#19786
>> I don't think you should stop learning new tricks yet unless you won't have goals beyond 5:15.
> I'll learn new tricks when I judge that doing so is the best use of my time.
Seems sensible (to do otherwise would be to do something that you judge as suboptimal use of time.)
> Learning new tricks takes longer than doing things that I can do with stuff I already know.
Potentially, yes. Though sometimes that would be seeking local optima. Whether an individual case is seeking local optima or not is goal dependent (particularly long-term goal dependant).
> I'm trying to achieve my time goals (e.g., 5m 15s) as quickly as possible, or, at least, without unnecessarily making it take longer than it should.
I think those two things can be very different. That sort of (method,goal) pair can make sense, but the pair -- sort of a checkpoint-goal-checkpoint-goal strategy --isn't always globaly optimal. i.e. the shortest path to some goals delays some checkpoints -- the shortest path can mean sacrificing local optima for global optima. e.g. if you had a long term goal of sub-5 minutes then delaying new tricks now could also delay achieving sub-5 min in favour of premature optimization.
> If I preferred learning new tricks over making better use of my existing motions, then I guess I might learn new tricks, even if that meant that it took me longer to improve. But I don't have that preference.
I think that whether you should prefer to learn new tricks or not should be dependant on your goal and current context. I guess that makes sense b/c it's like evaluating the (I,G,C) for `(Idea): learn new tricks`. One thing that occurs to me is that it might be a good time to practice self-judgement -- like IDK how *I* could meaninfully claim that you should focus on consistancy or new tricks on any given day. Based on what you've said, I can claim that you'd need new tricks at some point if you wanted e.g. sub-5 min. I generally claim that one needs to exercise good self-judgement to achieve the goal ~optimially (particularly on the priority of consistency vs new stuff).
>> If it matters, I think 5:14 is a better goal than 5:15 b/c you will need to integrate new tricks to get that rather than focusing on premature optimization on what you already know.
> I think I could get to 5m 12s without learning any new tricks, so I guess you'd say that 5m 11s is a better goal.
Yes, unless you planned to not have goals below 5m 12s.
> But I feel like it's better to set an easier goal first.
I don't have any particular criticism, but I'm not convinced that's necessarily useful. It might be. If your new goal was 5m 15s, why wouldn't it be better to set an easier goal first, then? e.g. 5m 17s.
> It gets harder to improve the closer I get to the record. Once I get to 5m 15s, I'll think about whether I should try to improve further.
I don't want to claim that doing this would be bad compared to my suggestions; like, even if you choose to go lower and it ends up being globally not-optimal in the long run, it would be a low risk / low impact / non-constraining mistake. It's also a pretty safe option if you're not sure you'll take it longer (and it could become globally optimal if you choose to stop running after 5m 15s, in a retcon sort of way).
However, I think my claim about local/global optima above stands -- the one about the checkpoint-goal-checkpoint-goal method. I don't want to push you to any particular decision (and I hope my writing doesn't miscommunicate that sort of subtext) -- not that I think I could push you if I wanted to. If you are curious about anything I've mentioned and we disagree, though, I would like to try and persuade you (b/c it would be philosophy practise for both of us, potentially). I'm not sure if we have any substantial disagreement about that stuff, tho.
One thing I want to note: pursuing local optima can be useful when simultaneously meta-learning. One needs to be very good at learning effectively to reliably pursue globally optimal methods for large goals.
> If I do, maybe I'll set a goal that would require some new tricks or techniques. If not, I may just try another game.
> Finally, I don't see what's "premature" about making better use of ("optimizing") what I already know.
Does the stuff I wrote above about checkpoint-goal-checkpoint-goal explain better what I meant?
The major factor in whether it's premature or not, IMO, is your self-judgement about consistency and whether you need to focus on that (maybe speed, too, depending on which new tricks are good next candidates)
> P.S. A correction to #19780. I wrote:
>> I messed up in some places and went through other places slightly faster, so my overall improvement from my last run wasn't exactly 17.8 seconds.
> I forgot to mention framerule delays, which could account for up to 7 * 21 frames = 147 frames = 2.45 seconds over the course of a game. (I multiplied by 7 instead of 8, even though there are 8 levels, because 8-4, the last level, ends when you get the axe, not when the "bus" takes you to the next level.) I'm still not thinking about framerules at all, since each one is only about 1/3 of a second, and I still have problems that, individually, cost me over a second.
I guess that you should expect delays to follow a symmetric binomial (?) distribution between 0 and 2.45s per run. Hmm, mb not binomial; that has to do with yes/no stuff. Normal? Poission? Guassian? IDK, that sorta shape, not too significant in this case (tho I am curious if anyone knows off the top of their head).
**Exploratory Conjecture**: Framerules will matter for *any* stage where you are within ~1-2 framerules of *either* variance per run *or* best-known-strats. They *can* matter even if you could save more time in another stage. Whether it's good to focus on frame-rule related tricks (e.g. flagpole glitch) only makes sense in the context of tricks you know and tricks available for that stage, with some consideration for the difficulty of learning the relevant trick. You should focus on frame-rule stuff for a particular stage only *if both* it's the best-judged way to improve for a particular stage *and* it's worth focusing on that stage compared to any other stage.
Given that your sorta 'sum of best' figure above (5m 12s) is 8s faster, and you only do 8 stages (~half with <1s to save, ~half with >1s): my strong intuition is that *necessary* frame-rule level optimisation is a long way off. Mb there is something easy you could do in a stage with low variance + a hard next (big) trick, but I would be very surprised if any frame-rule tricks are related to constraints, except as part of a bigger more general thing that made sense for other reasons.
#19787 I wrote:
>> The hammer bros' behavior is controlled by the SMB1 random number generator (RNG), which is a number that is is initialized, deterministically, upon reset, and which updates, deterministically, once per frame. In each frame where the game needs to figure out what the hammer bros are doing, it does so by reading parts of that number.
Max asked:
> Does this interact with framerules? Like, when good players get to the hammer bros, will they *always* be on a 21st frame? I thought it did, but I'm not sure given the way you described this bit.
Every 21 frames, the game checks whether you've beaten the current level. I think these checkpoint times are what are referred to as "framerules". For all but the last level, it doesn't matter what frame you beat the level on, it only matters what frame the game advances you to the next level on.
This is explained by Darbian's "bus" analogy for framerules. Imagine there's a bus that takes you to the next level that leaves every 21 frames. Arriving early (by less than 21 frames) is just as good as arriving exactly on time. And if you arrive late, you have to wait for the next bus.
After a reset, if you start the game quickly enough and complete the first level in an approximately known time, the game will be in a known state as you start the next level. Let's say you hit start 10 frames after reset and it takes you about 1000 frames to beat 1-1. And say framerules happen at frame 0 , frame 21, frame 42, etc. Then if you beat 1-1 on frame X, where 988 (=21*48) < X <= 1029 (=21*49), then you will advance to the next level at frame 1029. Similarly for the rest of the levels. In this way, players who are consistent enough will "know which framerule they're on" and hence be able to know what "random" things will happen, since the "randomness" depends entirely on how many frames have elapsed since the last reset.
#19788 I don't know exactly how many hammers Bowser has to throw before he starts throwing phantom hammers that won't hurt me. What I do is run under him if he gives me the chance, or, if he doesn't, I try to jump over him as close to his head as possible and pray for the best.
#19788
> *I think you should submit the videos of your run with the frame counter*, esp if you're making them usually anyway.
Ok. I edited the video link for my 5m 20s run on speedrun.com to point to the version with frame numbers.
I added this text in the description:
> I added frame numbers to the video by post-processing with ffmpeg. If that's a problem, I can submit the original video without frame numbers instead (it's also linked in the video description).
#19789 Max wrote:
> Whether an individual case is seeking local optima or not is goal dependent (particularly long-term goal dependant).
Say I wanted to be a top-5 player at Super Smash Bros. Melee (SSBM). I've heard that the Ice Climbers character is especially good for beating low-level players in that game, but Ice Climbers aren't great at the top level. For example, none of the top 20 SSBM players play Ice Climbers as their main character. If you start by learning the Ice Climbers character, you might make quicker progress initially than if you started off with some other character, but your progress would likely stall sooner than it otherwise would have.
#19789 I wrote:
>> I'm trying to achieve my time goals (e.g., 5m 15s) as quickly as possible, or, at least, without unnecessarily making it take longer than it should.
Max replied:
>I think those two things can be very different. That sort of (method,goal) pair can make sense, but the pair -- sort of a checkpoint-goal-checkpoint-goal strategy --isn't always globaly optimal. i.e. the shortest path to some goals delays some checkpoints -- the shortest path can mean sacrificing local optima for global optima. e.g. if you had a long term goal of sub-5 minutes then delaying new tricks now could also delay achieving sub-5 min in favour of premature optimization.
We could discuss in the abstract what the best way to get to sub 5 minutes is. I think I would argue that in a lot of cases, the way I'm doing it is actually one of the better approaches.
Goldratt suggests you should first make the improvements you can make with little investment (exploit the constraint), and only when you've run out of those, make the improvements that require a bigger investment (break the constraint)
The way I see it, trying to learn a trick, which is relatively difficult, when I still have easy gains available would be premature optimization. And I don't think making the easy gains is wasted effort. It gets me better at skills I'll still have to use anyway.
#19789 Max asked:
> If your new goal was 5m 15s, why wouldn't it be better to set an easier goal first, then? e.g. 5m 17s.
I picked 5m 15s because it put me under 500th place (a nice round number) and because it seemed reasonably achievable in a reasonable timeframe given my current skill level, the things I think I need to improve at to get there, and my experience playing the game so far.
If someone made the case that 5m 17s was a better goal than 5m 15s, I probably wouldn't argue too much.
Reisman's *Capitalism* project
New project: read Reisman's *Capitalism*, answer the 1500 study questions in the *Capitalism Short-Answer Q&A Supplement* as well as the 2500 essay questions starting on page 113 of *George Reisman's Program of Self-Education in the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism*.
My goals with this project are to improve my reading comprehension skills and my understanding of economics.
I intend to:
- spend at least 5 minutes per day on this project
- report my progress here after every chapter
> 1500 study questions in the *Capitalism Short-Answer Q&A Supplement* as well as the 2500 essay questions
IIRC you flipped the two numbers. Also your short answer link is broken and Capitalism link goes to his homepage. I have links and numbers at http://curi.us/2145-open-discussion-economics#19818
In #19866, I wrote:
>> 1500 study questions ... 2500 essay questions
In #19867 curi replied:
> IIRC you flipped the two numbers.
Oops, yeah. Thanks.
In #19866, I wrote (parentheses replaced with U+2768 and U+2769 so as not to trigger markdown parsing):
>> study questions in the [*Capitalism Short-Answer Q&A Supplement*]❨https://www.capitalism.net/Capitalism's%20Short-Answer%20Q&A%20Supplement.htm❩
In #19867, curi replied:
> your short answer link is broken
It's broken *on curi.us*. The URL itself is correct. It was copied and pasted from the browser location field, and if I paste it to the location and go there, it works. Also, if I click the link from the curi.us comment email (rather than from curi.us site) it works. Finally, the markdown version of the link works in Markoff and in markdown-editor.github.io.
#19875 oh. i've added it to a bug list and may or may not work on it later.
In #19866, I wrote (parentheses replaced with U+2768 and U+2769 so as not to trigger markdown parsing):
>> Reisman's [*Capitalism*]❨https://www.capitalism.net❩
In #19867, curi replied:
> your ... Capitalism link goes to his homepage
As far as I could tell, https://www.capitalism.net was the best URL to use for the book. I didn't want to link directly to the PDF. I wanted to link to Reisman's landing page for the book so people could read what he had to say about it.
Following up now, I printed https://www.capitalism.net as a PDF. It was 8 pages, 6 of which (75%) were about the book.
I think the second-best thing to link to would have been the book's Amazon page, which is what Reisman himself often links to on Twitter. However, the Amazon page doesn't feature Reisman's blurb nor does it show how easy it is to download a free PDF of the book.
Capitalism project revised
#19866 I'm revising my *Capitalism* project. Instead of doing the short Q&A and the essay questions for the entire book, I'm going to do them *for the first chapter only*. I'll see how that goes and decide where I want to go from there.
Another point I wanted to add is that the short Q&A doc comes with an answer key, so I can check my own work, but the essay questions don't. I'll post my answers to the essay questions separately, then I'll go back and check them against the book, and try to grade myself. Hopefully, they'll be pretty short (though I haven't tried any yet) so if anyone else wants to read them and see if I made any mistakes, that'd be another way that I could get feedback. I'll learn a bit about how well that works from doing them for the first chapter.
JPLT N5 project
Project: Describe and successfully execute a reasonable plan to pass the JPLT, the official Japanese Language Proficiency Test, at level N5, the easiest level.
The JPLT is administered twice a year in lots of countries. I intend to take the official exam. An intermediate goal is to be able to consistently pass N5 practice tests.
As of now, I know basically zero Japanese. I just started trying to learn some Hirigana characters yesterday.
Learning plan:
- Learn Hirigana and Katakana from the Learn Japanese!! app
- Study the Kanji I need to know for N5
- Study The Complete JLPT N5 Grammar Video(Game) Textbook YouTube video which claims to cover all the N5 grammar using examples from Japanese video games
- Take practice tests every so often, and see how I score (e.g., https://www.jlptstudy.net/N5/ and https://www.nihongomaster.com/jlpt-n5-practice-test )
- Add other stuff as needed
- Work on this project for at least 5 minutes a day
curi.us quote/reply js project
Project: Describe and execute a reasonable plan to replace the curi.us quote and reply links so that they don't need a server request.
Here's the conversation that led to the project.
> [curi:] want to write js for me to replace curi.us quote and reply links so it doesn’t need a server request?
>> [Alisa:] Maybe @js. I could make it an FI project like capitalism etc.
> [curi:] would u prefer i ask someone else?
>> [Alisa:] I think you said successful project completion is worth getting better at. I failed at my last FI-related programming project. If doing this successfully would get me closer to my life goals, I’m interested. Otherwise, yeah, ask someone else I guess.
> [curi:] i think it’s fine as a mini project. i don’t think it’s particularly important for life goals but i’d say it’s compatible, not bad.
>> [Alisa]: Compatible is good. I’ll do it.
> [curi:] javascript:document.getElementById('comment_argle').value=document.getElementById('comment_argle').value.replace(/(%5E%7C%5Cn)(.*%5CS)/g,'$1%3E%20$2');
> that’s my bookmark which quotes all text in curi comment field
> i think i need the js in the form of 2 functions i can put on the top of the page, and then i’ll have rails output calling those functions for each link.
> they would take comment id number as input or something similar
> for each comment, to make the 2 links*
> u link to # and then do an onclick attribute iirc
> well actually i’ll link to #comment-box or whatever i called it so it scrolls u down
My plan is to write some javascript and use the inspector until I have something that works the way curi described. Basically it'll be two functions that are called with an onclick.
Would be good to find out if onclick even handling happens before or after navigation, or even if it happens at all when a link has both an href and an onclick attribute. I don't know that from memory. I'll look it up. If there's a problem, one thing I could do is just do the navigation in the function. It'd be like this as the last line of the function:
```
window.location.href = '#comment-box' /* or whatever */
```
I intend to spend at least 5 minutes per day on this until it is complete. Once I have something working, I'll submit it to curi for review.
#19917
> Would be good to find out if onclick even handling happens before or after navigation, or even if it happens at all when a link has both an href and an onclick attribute. I don't know that from memory.
Why don't you ust have an `onclick` function for the 'reply' and 'quote' links that fills in the textbox, and use the existing `<a>` tags to href to `#comment-box`?
That sounds simpler.
I've done a bit with JS navigation; something like `window.location.href = blah` should work too, but IMO if you're already using links (instead of like buttons) then doing `<a href="#comment-box">blah</a>` is more elegant if it works for your script.
In #19917, I quoted curi as saying:
>>> for each comment, to make the 2 links*
>>> u link to # and then do an onclick attribute iirc
>>> well actually i’ll link to #comment-box or whatever i called it so it scrolls u down
After quoting curi, I wrote this in the same comment:
>> Would be good to find out if onclick even handling happens before or after navigation, or even if it happens at all when a link has both an href and an onclick attribute. I don't know that from memory.
In #19919, Max replied to my comment, asking:
> Why don't you ust have an `onclick` function for the 'reply' and 'quote' links that fills in the textbox, and use the existing `<a>` tags to href to `#comment-box`?
IIUC, that's the same thing curi proposed.
Below is an example of the current HTML for the "reply" button. (I changed the angle brackets to prevent possible issues with markdown):
〈a href="/2204-alisa-discussion/reply/19919#post-comment" rel="nofollow"〉reply〈/a〉
I think you and curi are proposing to:
- change the value of the href attribute to something like "#post-comment" in order to scroll down to the comment form
- add an onclick attribute to the〈a〉tag to fill in the post number in the comment body for a reply (or quote the whole post, if the 〈a〉tag is for the "quote" button)
I haven't gone ahead with that approach immediately because, as I said, I don't know if the onclick would happen before navigation (i.e., scrolling to the bottom), after navigation, or not at all. I would like to understand the order in which things will happen, or understand why order is irrelevant in this case.
> something like `window.location.href = blah` should work too, but IMO if you're already using links (instead of like buttons) then doing `<a href="#comment-box">blah</a>` is more elegant if it works for your script.
I agree.
> In #19919, Max replied to my comment, asking:
>> Why don't you ust have an `onclick` function for the 'reply' and 'quote' links that fills in the textbox, and use the existing `<a>` tags to href to `#comment-box`?
> IIUC, that's the same thing curi proposed.
Yeah, it sounds like it. I think I skimmed over curi's comment and didn't read it closely enough to notice. Mb I was also distracted a bit by your `window.location.href` bit.
> I think you and curi are proposing to:
> - change the value of the href attribute to something like "#post-comment" in order to scroll down to the comment form
yes, I think that's right. If you have *only* the anchor tag then it won't trigger an HTTP request for a new page (which AFAIK just like 302 redirects you back anyway)
> - add an onclick attribute to the〈a〉tag to fill in the post number in the comment body for a reply (or quote the whole post, if the 〈a〉tag is for the "quote" button)
Yup
> I haven't gone ahead with that approach immediately because, as I said, I don't know if the onclick would happen before navigation (i.e., scrolling to the bottom), after navigation, or not at all.
My intuition is that, since `onclick` is a callback, page scrolling would happen first. But IDK. I don't think it really matters, tho. I am reasonably certain that `onclick` will trigger like normal. I'm wrong tho -- just googled; link is to stackoverflow.
#19793
> Ok. I edited the video link for my 5m 20s run on speedrun.com to point to the version with frame numbers.
Did you get any feedback about that from the verifiers? I'm curious if they agreed with me. I guess they didn't say anything about it tho (like someone did the verification then just pressed the green 'verify' button). I don't think mods can leave comments/msgs unless they click the red 'reject' button.
#19794
>> Whether an individual case is seeking local optima or not is goal dependent (particularly long-term goal dependant).
> If you start by learning the Ice Climbers character, you might make quicker progress initially than if you started off with some other character, but your progress would likely stall sooner than it otherwise would have.
Yup, that's exactly the sort of thing I meant.
#19795
> We could discuss in the abstract what the best way to get to sub 5 minutes is. I think I would argue that in a lot of cases, the way I'm doing it is actually one of the better approaches.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'in the abstract' and 'a lot of cases'. My guess is that 'abstract' means like, for anyone generally rather than you, and 'cases' means instances of ppl trying to get sub 5. Is that right? I'm not particularly interested in SMB sub-5 strats without more reason to focus on that.
> Goldratt suggests you should first make the improvements you can make with little investment (exploit the constraint), and only when you've run out of those, make the improvements that require a bigger investment (break the constraint)
> The way I see it, trying to learn a trick, which is relatively difficult, when I still have easy gains available would be premature optimization. And I don't think making the easy gains is wasted effort. It gets me better at skills I'll still have to use anyway.
This sounds like it makes some sense, but I wonder if the diff in contexts changes how one should approach this? In a factory, you might have a constraint that will stop being the constraint if you can get 5% more efficiency. Say you have 2 ideas for exploiting the constraint; one that gives you an extra 10% and is easy, and on that gives you an extra 25% and is hard. I think Goldratt's idea makes sense here, particularly, b/c either idea will introduce some excess capacity to the current constraint (and thus there'll be a new one somewhere else). so you get a nice way to incrementally improve without over-optimizing.
IDK if the method carries over that well tho. Like with speedrunning you have a static goal (sub-5) and then some combination of optimizations/tricks to implement to get there. It doesn't matter which tricks you use, besides that some are easier/harder or more/less consistent - that could change with personal context too.
The method carries over better if you have a incremental goals like sub-5:40, sub-5:20, etc. Incremental goals make more sense if you don't know what your final goal will be (which seems like your case with SMB).
PangaeaPanga has some interesting discussion of his speedrunning learning strats at 17:54 in one of his latest vids.
YT's transcript (slightly touched up)
> the way i do this is we do progressively harder strats so that way i can get consistent at the later parts of the level or parts that i need to be consistent at. and once i'm consistent enough with those strats i can move on to faster strats. i don't go for world record strats on my very first run. that's how i approach speeding in general. like i used to speedrun sunshine. i did very moderate strats. and once i was comfortable with them then i would move on to the world record strats. and then eventually my movement got better as a result and i got a 116.
I think there is a diff here between Panga's method and yours. I think the diff is that he skips any ~middle strats, like he goes from easy strats (w/ LOTS of excess capacity) to WR strats. IDK if that's actually how he does things but it makes some sense. But I think your method includes ~middle strats, which makes sense since you have incremental goals, rather than a goal like "get the WR".
Proposal for curi.us reply/quote js
#19917 Here's my proposal for replacing the curi.us reply & quote buttons, which currently require a round-trip to the server, with javascript that executes entirely in the client.
Currently the reply and quote buttons look like this (angle brackets changed to avoid potential markdown issues):
- 〈a href="/2394-focusing-your-attention-discussion/reply/3#post-comment" rel="nofollow"〉reply〈/a〉
- 〈a href="/2394-focusing-your-attention-discussion/quote/19920#post-comment" rel="nofollow"〉quote〈/a〉
Change those to:
- 〈a onclick="reply(3)"〉reply〈/a〉
- 〈a onclick="quote(3)"〉reply〈/a〉
The number in parenthesis should be the number of the comment that is being replied to or quoted.
Add this JS code: https://pastebin.com/dygnQveS
I tested this by pasting in the code and using the inspector to change some reply and quote links. They seem to do mostly the same thing as the old links.
One thing they don't do is shrink the comment box to the minimum size necessary to contain the resulting comment. So, for example, if you click "quote" on a big comment and then click "reply", the comment box will be taller than it initially was. I think this could be fixed by replacing the `autogrow()` call with the code below, but I'm not sure if it's worth it:
```
commentBody.style.height = 'auto';
commentBody.style.height = commentBody.scrollHeight+'px';
```
My code tries to put the cursor at the end of the comment textarea. It works in my manual testing with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on macOS, but I'm not sure how well it'll work in other environments. This seems to be complicated to do in a way that works across multiple platforms, browsers, and browser versions.
#19793 Max wrote:
> Did you get any feedback about [the frame numbers in your speedrun videos] from the verifiers?
No, not directly. However, my run that I submitted with frame numbers was verified in a few days, whereas previous runs took over a week.
#19956 Correction: Max wrote that in #19934, not #19793. Copy/paste fail.
#19934 Max wrote:
> PangaeaPanga has some interesting discussion of his speedrunning learning strats at 17:54 in one of his latest vids.
> YT's transcript (slightly touched up)
>> the way i do this is we do progressively harder strats so that way i can get consistent at the later parts of the level or parts that i need to be consistent at. and once i'm consistent enough with those strats i can move on to faster strats. i don't go for world record strats on my very first run. that's how i approach speeding in general. like i used to speedrun sunshine. i did very moderate strats. and once i was comfortable with them then i would move on to the world record strats. and then eventually my movement got better as a result and i got a 116.
> I think there is a diff here between Panga's method and yours. I think the diff is that he skips any ~middle strats, like he goes from easy strats (w/ LOTS of excess capacity) to WR strats. IDK if that's actually how he does things but it makes some sense. But I think your method includes ~middle strats, which makes sense since you have incremental goals, rather than a goal like "get the WR".
It doesn't look to me like Panga says or implies anything about skipping "~middle strats". He says "The way Ido this is we do *progressively harder* strats" (emphasis added) and he explicitly mentions using "moderate" strats.
In #19934, Max wrote:
> [In #19795, Alisa wrote:]
>> We could discuss in the abstract what the best way to get to sub 5 minutes [in SMB1] is. I think I would argue that in a lot of cases, the way I'm doing it is actually one of the better approaches.
> I'm not sure what you mean by 'in the abstract' and 'a lot of cases'. My guess is that 'abstract' means like, for anyone generally rather than you, and 'cases' means instances of ppl trying to get sub 5. Is that right? I'm not particularly interested in SMB sub-5 strats without more reason to focus on that.
Yes, that's what I meant.
>> Goldratt suggests you should first make the improvements you can make with little investment (exploit the constraint), and only when you've run out of those, make the improvements that require a bigger investment (break the constraint)
>> The way I see it, trying to learn a trick, which is relatively difficult, when I still have easy gains available would be premature optimization. And I don't think making the easy gains is wasted effort. It gets me better at skills I'll still have to use anyway.
> This sounds like it makes some sense, but I wonder if the diff in contexts changes how one should approach this? In a factory, you might have a constraint that will stop being the constraint if you can get 5% more efficiency. Say you have 2 ideas for exploiting the constraint; one that gives you an extra 10% and is easy, and on that gives you an extra 25% and is hard. I think Goldratt's idea makes sense here, particularly, b/c either idea will introduce some excess capacity to the current constraint (and thus there'll be a new one somewhere else). so you get a nice way to incrementally improve without over-optimizing.
> IDK if the method carries over that well tho. Like with speedrunning you have a static goal (sub-5) and then some combination of optimizations/tricks to implement to get there. It doesn't matter which tricks you use, besides that some are easier/harder or more/less consistent - that could change with personal context too.
When you're doing projects, it's helpful to have an objective measure of progress. And in speedrunning, the clearest objective measurement is your best time. It's straightforward to get objective feedback from others (verifiers/moderators) about whether your run is legit and whether it's faster than your previous best. So progressively improving your time helps with speedrunning projects, provided that you're not wasting your time on approaches that ultimately won't get you where you want to go (like my Ice Climbers example from #19794). I don't think I'm doing that, but if anyone thinks I am, I'd be very interested to hear about it.
#19955 Correction:
> 〈a onclick="quote(3)"〉reply〈/a〉
That should be:
> 〈a onclick="quote(3)"〉quote〈/a〉
Japanese project update
I've learned 26 of the 46 hirigana characters. I can draw them, though not very cleanly, and recognize them.
I've been using Heisig's *Remembering the Hirigana*. It has mnemonics for every character, some of which I use. For others, I make my own or just memorize them.
Daily project spreadsheet
I have 5 FI projects on which I try to spend at least a minimum amount of time each day. For most projects the minimum is 5 minutes. For posting, the minimum is 1 minute, but I also have another constraint which is that I try to post something at least once per day. So no matter how long I spend writing a post, if I don't actually post something, then I didn't achieve my goal for that day.
To help me remember what I want to do each day, I made a spreadsheet that tracks how many minutes I spent on each project for each day. Here's a sample for the last two weeks or so:
The bottom cell in the "Poast" column is red because I haven't filled in my time there yet today. It would also be red if I had entered a value there that was less than the minimum.
The "Capital" column is short for "Capitalism" – it refers to my project to read the first chapter of Reisman's *Capitalism* and answer the Q&A and essay questions.
#20007 cool. share this or a link to it on FI Learning Basecamp?
#20007 5min on every single freewrite is suspicious. not sure what's going on there. do you never get into a thought you wanna finish writing about? no flow state? no finishing something up?
#20009 I think I almost always stop freewriting when the 5 minute timer on my watch finishes. I finish up the sentence I'm on, usually.
I don't know much about "flow state[s]". If I had something I wanted to finish writing about I might do that, but probably not as freewriting.
#20010 I realized that, for most projects, I have a goal above and beyond putting in some minimum daily amount of time. For SMB1, for example, I’m trying to get to a specific time in my best speedrun. For Capitalism, I’m trying to read the 1st chapter and answer questions. Spending more time on those projects beyond the daily minimum is a way to advance me towards my goals.
For freewriting, though, I currently have no goal beyond spending a certain minimum amount of time each day. Maybe I should have a goal of writing some large number of words in freewriting or writing X posts based on freewriting.
Speedrunning applied to writing and reading basic hirigana
#19995 I can now write and recognize all 46 of the basic hiragana characters. (Note: in previous posts on this page, I misspelled hiragana as "hirigana".) I used a couple of different iOS apps to test my knowledge.
To get more confidence before moving on to the non-basic hiragana, I've timed myself at writing all the basic hiragana from memory in Japanese alphabetical order, not moving on to the next character until I write the current one correctly. I got my time down on this from 8m17s to 3m22s. I think a good goal would be to have my time somewhere around the time it takes me to write the upper and lowercase English alphabet, which has 26*2 = 52 characters in total.
The other thing I want to do is time how long it takes me to go through a shuffled basic hiragana flashcard deck, where I look at the hiragana side of the card and I have to respond with the romaji equivalent on the other side. I'd like to be able to do this in around the time I could do it for a deck of 52 English characters.
I think success on both of those tests would indicate that I'm good enough at writing and reading individual basic hiragana to move on.
#20056 I wrote:
> Title: Speedrunning applied to writing and reading basic hirigana
> Note: in previous posts on this page, I misspelled hiragana as "hirigana"
Oops – I also misspelled it in the title of that very post. I noticed the misspelling in the body when I was writing the post, but when I corrected it in the body, I didn't re-check the title field.
#20056
> I think success on both of those tests would indicate that I'm good enough at writing and reading individual basic hiragana to move on.
Note: Moving on isn't binary. I think the concept you want is "be done with". You can do some further steps, and may find that useful, but you can't build on this very far/much until it's done.
#19955 thank you. i deployed the reply and quote link improvements.
#19879 I finished the multiple choice questions for chapter 1 of Reisman's *Capitalism*.
Before answering each question, I decided whether or not I cared about the question and whether or not I was confident in my answer. (Credit to Elliot for suggesting that I do this.)
There were 68 questions. I got 66 (97%) correct.
The two I got wrong were (retyped from the pdf at the link above since it doesn't allow copy/paste):
3. The importance of economics derives from the importance of wealth insofar as the subject can be no more important than is wealth.
The answer was True. I put False. This is one of the questions that I both cared about and was confident of my answer in. In retrospect, I'm not confident that I understand the question. It should have recognized that I wasn't confident.
59. Striking down residency requirements for the receipt of welfare requirements represents violating the freedom of taxpayers.
The answer was True. I guessed False. This was a question that I cared about but wasn't confident of my answer. I don't think I understand the question, but the subject matter looks like something I would care about: residency requirements for welfare recipients and the "freedom" of taxpayers.
I think I did OK overall. I'm going to move on to the essay questions for this chapter. If that goes OK, I'll try the same thing on the second chapter of the book: read the chapter, and then answer the multiple choice Q&A questions and the essay questions.
#20342 There should have been quote marks for the questions I got wrong:
> 3. The importance of economics derives from the importance of wealth insofar as the subject can be no more important than is wealth.
> 59. Striking down residency requirements for the receipt of welfare requirements represents violating the freedom of taxpayers.
#20342
The command below takes a PDF that doesn't allow copying and creates a version that allows it:
> gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf original.pdf
> #20342
> The command below takes a PDF that doesn't allow copying and creates a version that allows it:
> > gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf original.pdf
Really useful tip, thanks Alisa
#19955 My client-side javascript for the "quote" button has a problem: it removes all links in the quoted text. I don't think the server-side implementation had that problem.
For example, check out #20351 on this page, which I think it was made using the "quote" button. It quotes me as saying "The command below takes", but what I actually said was "The command below takes".
I don't think it'll be that simple to fix, because my code uses the innerText property to read the body of the comment to be quoted, and the links won't show up in innerText. I think I'd have to use innerHTML instead, replace the "a href" links with markdown-style links, and then convert other HTML stuff to plain text, e.g. replace ＆gt; with an actual greater-than sign.
#20353 i think we can live with that limitation. sounds better than using the old code again. (btw your script won't quote images either)
could do an AJAX solution but i don't think it's important enough
and it only removes markdown links. if someone posted a full url or a #20353 type link, it'll still work with your quote code.
#20355 Oh yeah, good correction. My code only removes markdown links, not other links.
In #20353, I wrote:
> I don't think it'll be that simple to fix, because my code uses the innerText property to read the body of the comment to be quoted, and the links won't show up in innerText. I think I'd have to use innerHTML instead, replace the "a href" links with markdown-style links, and then convert other HTML stuff to plain text, e.g. replace ＆gt; with an actual greater-than sign.
I know Elliot said we can live with the current version of the code, but I thought of a pretty simple way to fix the issue: first iterate over all the link tags in the DOM tree for the comment body and replace each one with a markdown-style link. Then copy the innerText as usual.
#20359 Correction: I’d have to replace the links without messing up the original DOM tree, like by making a copy first and modifying the copy or by saving the original innerHTML and restoring it at the end.
#20361 I updated the JavaScript code for the quote button handler to properly quote Markdown links: https://pastebin.com/LvJD8U8K . It doesn't touch comment-number links such as #xyz or raw http/https links – it leaves both as plain text.
Tested on a Mac with Chrome 89.0.4389.114, Safari 14.0.3, and Firefox 87.0.
SMB1 update
I haven't reached my goal of getting 5m 15s in SMB1 yet. I've spent over 32 hours on SMB1 since I got my previous personal best on 2021-01-28. Here's how much time I've spent on SMB1 so far:
- 2021-01-03 5m 47s (goal: 5m 54s; time spent: 70 hours)
- 2021-01-14 5m 37s (goal: 5m 39s; time spent: 19.5 hours)
- 2021-01-28 5m 20.54s (goal: 5m 24.846s; time spent: 48 hours)
SMB1 on an emulator
#20366 I tried playing SMB1 on an emulator on my Windows machine, and I had input lag issues. I tried all of the allowed emulators listed in the speedrun.com rules for SMB1 (go to https://www.speedrun.com/smb1 and click Rules), and all of them seemed to have input lag. The world record of 4m 54s 948ms was set by Niftski a week ago using an emulator, so I expect my lag issues are either imaginary or can be fixed, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet and I'm reluctant to put in the time for now.
Reisman essay questions for Chapter 1 of *Capitalism*
I tried answering the first three of Reisman's essay questions for Chapter 1 of his *Capitalism*. I found it pretty hard. I also found it hard to tell if I was doing a good job.
I think my best option is to continue with only the multiple choice questions. This will help me learn something about capitalism while still testing my reading comprehension to some extent.
Below are my answers to the first three questions. I'm not satisfied with them, but I'm sharing them here so people can see what I mean when I said that answering them was hard for me.
> 1. What is economics, according to the instructor?
I think Reisman said something in Chapter 1 like: *Economics is the study of the creation of wealth under a division-of-labor society*. However – did the U.S.S.R. have a division of labor? As I understand it, a society in which most people or small groups of people rely mainly on themselves to produce what they consume is a society without a division of labor. But if people rely mainly on others to produce what they consume, then there is a division of labor. So it seems to me that a communist society could have a division of labor. This is a really hard question for me. I suspect I'm making a mistake somewhere. I would want to look this up again to see what Reisman says.
> 2. What are some frequent alternative definitions of economics?
I think that one alternative definition is: *economics is the study of ways to divide scarce resources*. I think there are more alternatives, but I don't remember them. I would want to look this up too.
> 3. How does the individual live under a division of labor—that is, for whom does he produce and from whom does he obtain the goods he consumes?
Insofar as the goods he produces will primarily be sold to others, an individual living under a division of labor produces for others. He also obtains the goods he consumes primarily from others. [This answer doesn't have any explanations.]
5m 9s SMB1 run
#19782 I got a 5m 9s Super Mario Bros. (SMB1) any% speedrun today. I submitted it to speedrun.com, but, unfortunately, the audio quality is bad, so the run may well be rejected by the moderators. If, on the other hand, they verify it, then my goal of getting a time of 5m 15s or better will have been accomplished, and I will be tied for 451st place on the leaderboard. That would be a big improvement over my current position of 623rd (from my earlier verified run of 5m 20s).
5:09 sounds like a great time! Are you satisfied with it or still want to push lower in any%?
#20392 At approx frames 7900-8100 your screen blanks. if there's an issue for verification I think it'd probs be that. mb they would verify anyway if the times matched perfectly (or worse), but IMO that'd be reason for rejection (which sucks, b/c i guess it was mb the capture device).
#20394 Just checked the speedrun link:
> Rejected: At 2:11 Their is a black screen before Mario enters the pipe.
:(
#20393 I'm neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with my time. I was doing this as something that's fun and a good learning project. I'm still enjoying SMB1, and I think I would enjoy improving my time further, so if you think it's still a good learning project, I'll continue with it and try to go even lower, e.g. 5m 5s.
380 on 1-1 underground section in SMB1
I got my first 380 on the underground portion of 4-1 today! This means 380 showed on the timer as I entered the pipe to go back up. I normally get 379 here.
Kosmic spends about 2m 20s of his SMB1 speedrun tutorial talking about "the famous 380". Today I did it by accident, but I had recorded it, and I watched the recording frame-by-frame and remembered the way I had pushed the buttons. I also kind of remembered the way it looked different and felt that time, and I could recognize when I wasn't doing it the 380 way. Eventually, I was able to figure how I did it and even re-create it a few times. Once I master that, my 1-1 will be on pace for a sub-5-minute time. My 4-2 is already there (it's the easiest level), as is my 8-3.
I'm questioning whether I want to continue posting every day. I've been doing it for over a year and a half without missing a day. I think I've shown that I can do it. I think I've gained by learning to do it. But I'm not sure I want to continue. I have other things I'm doing that I think help me more, like:
- getting monthly philosophy coaching from Elliot
- having well-defined projects to work on
- doing something on my projects every day and tracking what I did in a spreadsheet
I'm considering posting only the following kinds of posts:
- periodic higher-level updates, such as in the learning updates thread
- posts I make when I have something I already want to share (without trying to find something to share)
5m 8s SMB1 run
#19782 I got a 5m 8s Super Mario Bros. (SMB1) any% speedrun today. I didn't submit it to speedrun.com because I still haven't solved my video capture problems. The screen blanks out around 2:12 again. It blanks starting at frame 8010. The start frame was 268, so that's 7742 frames into the game.
In my previous run, it blanked starting at frame 7939. The start frame was 185, so that's 7754 frames into the game. Pretty close to what happened this time.
In both runs, the blank screen seems to happen right as Mario touches the wall above the pipes near the end of 4-2.
#20451 To be clear, the blank screen happens in the original video saved from OBS, not just in the postprocessed videos with frame numbers added and scaling applied. I'm going to see if it's somehow reproducible. Does it always or often blank at that point?
Weight loss project update
On January 16, 2021 (#19607), I wrote:
> My BMI is 29.5
On March 10, 2021, my BMI was 28.7.
Today, April 26, my BMI is 29.3. I got a bit fatter since March 10, but not quite as fat as I was in January.
> - enter everything I eat into an app that tracks calories, macronutrients, and net carbs
I hadn't been tracking data every day. I decided to eliminate the gaps. On March 1, 2021, I added a column to my daily spreadsheet to help remind me to enter calories. Since then, I've been tracking every calorie I eat. Sometimes I go out to eat or I eat at someone's house where I don't want to weigh my food. In those cases, I just put in my best estimate. Like if I have 3 fried chicken wings, I put in 3 fried Popeye's chicken wings (which the program knows the calories for). Or if I have some dessert, I put in my best estimate of how much it weighed.
Along with the calories I ate each day, I also enter into my spreadsheet what my Apple Watch says were my "Move" calories for the day. I think that's meant to be close to the calories I burn from motion, above and beyond the calories burned by my basal metabolism.
I read somewhere that, at least over short periods, a pound of fat is gained when you eat 3500 calories more than you burn. Using that info, I calculated that if my calories in minus move calories equals about 1850 per day (and my overall lifestyle stays the same and I keep recording my calories the same way), then I would basically maintain my weight. On any day where I eat more than 1850 calories, I would gain weight, unless I balance it out with move calories or by eating less on another day.
I plan to continue recording my calories in and move calories every day. I'll also continue to record my weight periodically and see how I'm doing. I want to see whether this careful calorie tracking together with the knowledge of where my calorie break-even point is will help me make decisions that I'm satisfied with about what to eat and how much to exercise.
> On January 16, 2021 (#19607), I wrote:
> > My BMI is 29.5
> On March 10, 2021, my BMI was 28.7.
> Today, April 26, my BMI is 29.3. I got a bit fatter since March 10, but not quite as fat as I was in January.
> > - enter everything I eat into an app that tracks calories, macronutrients, and net carbs
> I hadn't been tracking data every day. I decided to eliminate the gaps. On March 1, 2021, I added a column to my daily spreadsheet to help remind me to enter calories. Since then, I've been tracking every calorie I eat. Sometimes I go out to eat or I eat at someone's house where I don't want to weigh my food. In those cases, I just put in my best estimate. Like if I have 3 fried chicken wings, I put in 3 fried Popeye's chicken wings (which the program knows the calories for). Or if I have some dessert, I put in my best estimate of how much it weighed.
Estimates can be fine. The more you measure stuff at home when you have the opportunity, the better you'll get at eyeballing stuff. You can also find portable digital scales.
> Along with the calories I ate each day, I also enter into my spreadsheet what my Apple Watch says were my "Move" calories for the day. I think that's meant to be close to the calories I burn from motion, above and beyond the calories burned by my basal metabolism.
if you go to Activity iphone app and tap the wheel at the top, you'll see both "Move" and below that and a graph a "Total" calories figure that includes basal
> I read somewhere that, at least over short periods, a pound of fat is gained when you eat 3500 calories more than you burn. Using that info, I calculated that if my calories in minus move calories equals about 1850 per day (and my overall lifestyle stays the same and I keep recording my calories the same way), then I would basically maintain my weight. On any day where I eat more than 1850 calories, I would gain weight, unless I balance it out with move calories or by eating less on another day.
FWIW i've found that many estimates of basal that i've seen are egregious overestimates. Yours may be fine though. The apple watch calculation i get for total calories seems pretty on point
#20460 My Apple Watch calculation for total calories significantly overestimates how much I burn from basal metabolism (assuming its active calories calculation is correct and 3500 kcal per pound).
#20452 I tried using a different program, XSplit, to record my runs, and I also noticed the blank screen issue in the recordings. So now I think it may be something in my capture hardware. (Either that, or it's the OS. I'm using Windows 10 and I'm up-to-date on patches. However, I think I didn't have any issues when I was using Windows 7...) I'm using an external component video to HDMI converter followed by an external HDMI to USB converter. I researched PCI video capture cards that can directly capture component video, picked one, and ordered it.
#20342 After my philosophy coaching call with Elliot today, I'm changing my approach to the *Capitalism* project. As a reminder, the goals of the *Capitalism* project are to improve my reading comprehension and my understanding of capitalism. To that end, I'm going to continue doing the short-answer questions, but I'll do them open-book if necessary. I'll try answering them from memory first, but I won't consider it a complete failure if I don't succeed. I'll just look back at the relevant section of the book and try again. Just doing the multiple choice questions wouldn't improve my reading comprehension or my understanding of capitalism as much as this will.
What follows are some of my notes on the part of the call where Elliot and I talked about this project. What I'm writing here is (almost) all stuff that's new to me that I learned on the call with Elliot. He tried multiple ways of explaining each thing until he found a way that made sense to me.
## Notes
I'm going to try making an outline of each chapter as I read. One goal of the outline is to help me understand the different ideas at different levels of abstraction and how they relate to each other. Kind of like if I were reading a large computer program (like the Linux kernel), I would make some kind of a diagram or text or something else that would help me understand how the different functions and parts of the program are related and what parts make up what other parts.
When I read a word, I don't think of each letter individually. I understand the word as a unit on its own that's independent of the letters. Similarly, I can understand the point of a sentence, after I've read it, without thinking of every individual word in the sentence.
One thing I thought of as I was writing these notes is how I understand the difference between boiling water and non-boiling water without consciously thinking of the individual motion of the atoms in the water. Temperature is made up of the energy of individual atoms, but I can also understand it on its own, without thinking about individual atoms.
This idea of understanding a higher level thing without consciously thinking of each lower level thing that goes into it also applies to paragraphs, sections, chapters, and even entire books. Some texts may do a better or worse job of giving you the outline or organization explicitly, similar to how some software source code is well organized and some isn't. But either way, the structure is there to be discovered. Otherwise it would be just a collection of random facts and trivia. I have to re-create that structure and organization in my own mind using the source text (and maybe other stuff) as a guide.
#20451 On my coaching call with Elliot yesterday, he suggested that, for SMB1 speedrunning, I could look at when my personal best would have been the best in the world. My 5m 8s run from 2021-04-26 would have been the best in the world on or before 2004-04-23, when Scott Kessler got the world record with a 5m 10s run. That record was beaten on 2004-10-09 by Trevor Seguin with a 5m 7s run.
#19883 I'm planning to put my learning Japanese project on hold unless and until I have a plan to actually move to Japan. In the mean time, I have other projects that I think would be better to spend my time on.