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Max Learning FI

Learning Report: 2020, week 38

Date: 2020-09-20

Goals

  • philosophy
    • keep improving, learning, and understanding stuff about YesNo, TCS, Goldratt, etc
      • finish the choice
      • finish fabric
    • discussion has been helpful, I think more of that would be good
      • discussion seems to be easier to write about than when I have free choice of topics
    • objectivism – start learning a bit more about it slowly; I have a list of Rand to read
  • work
    • continue/start writing on some things
    • i’ve done a bit of writing on some work stuff, but held back a bit b/c I’ve been improving a lot
      • I feel my writing (and speed at writing) has improved a lot, so time to go back to that, I think
    • put together a sort of ‘intro philosophy’ pack for future team stuff
  • Flux
    • have some backlog to do, getting more urgent
    • start writing some of the Flux articles I’ve been meaning to

specific goals

  • make a video like ‘Tom Scott is Wrong About Online Voting and he Should Stop Spreading Misinformation
    • made some notes on this
  • write and publish draft: discussion / debate policy
    • from curi.us debate topics: “Intellectuals who are too busy to talk with everyone should have written policies for who they talk to”
  • write response to WA Electoral Funding submission request (by Oct 2)
  • write response to Fed Electoral Funding submission request (by Nov 6)

notes

  • finding overhead of managing postmortems, this site, etc sometimes-significant but not unbearable

tutorials

  • 40
    • Speedrun discussion
    • Otherwise general discussion + post ideas discussion
  • 41
    • LW banned curi
      • some discussion
    • discussion of ‘hello and welcome to fi’ post – lots of places to improve, not persuasive
    • some discussion on ‘potential’ and why it’s not a good thing to base stuff on

posts

Personal

  • wrote a few thousand words in a few letters, one went through numerous drafts which was good
  • over the phone – helped find a soln to a minor ~family problem, using stuff I’ve learnt

LW posts/comments

postmortems

carry over

  • started reading the choice again, up to ch12 (friday)
    • no other reading

misc

  • SSOL speedrun improved to 2:20
    • this uses the same route but I have some new ideas.
      • I got 2:23 on a new route on like the ~5th attempt, so there’s some good potential there
      • I also realised I thought there was a wall at the end of the main route but it’s just bushes, so maybe there’s a faster route that goes through that. it’s a bit of a pain though b/c it’s hard to manoeuver through that space without like hitting rocks or things
      • the current end is not a bad place to end b/c there are a lot of orbs in roughly a line. it’s tricky to get them all in one go, though, and costs like 5s+ if you miss one (or more), so ending elsewhere could be good.
        • maybe I can try routing backwards instead?
    • Weekend Update: Bit of a timer battle thing going on with AggressiveCombo (AC)
      • He got a 2:16, I pushed my time down to a 2:12
      • Then he got a 2:09, 2:08, 2:02, 2:01, and 1:57
      • No fundamental changes to the route, he cut a corner off I included but didn’t need, and has better movement in the last section which is important for consistency and b/c it can take 10s on its own (saves like 4s)
        • If I were going to keep competing, I’d practice picking up orbs on corners, particularly zigzagging
        • Also, I’m not sure if holding s to stop and go backwards is slower than holding w and flipping 180 with the mouse
    • not sure if I’m going to keep running it – I gather AC put in more time practicing that weekend that I have in total

curi debate topics

  • Genes (or other biology) don’t have any direct influence over our intelligence or personality.
    • I’m unsure about this, I should do some more reading.
      • I think genes could have some effect without compromising ppl being universal understanders/explainers
  • Human minds aren’t a collection of modules or compartments
    • parts of the brain dedicated to some function
      • not sure this is incompatible, sort of like optimisations in code
        • you could do something generally and slowly, or have some optimisations that are specific but don’t change the generality of the program
  • There are no conflicts of interest between rational men.
    • at a high level this seems sensible, but I’m not sure at a lower level
      • does ‘lower level’ (like day-to-day stuff) mean anything outside of higher level goals (e.g. life-long / wholistic)
  • Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are worthless investment frauds.
    • this I think we could debate

I think the only thing we might disagree about in a substantial way is the cryptocurrency one. I think there are two main things to figure out via the topics:

  • Bitcoin is a worthless investment (fraud)
    • fraud is easier to see in projects ppl start which they profit from, Bitcoin is different b/c AFAWK Satoshi hasn’t made significant profit from it, despite his estimated holdings being like ~9b USD (the coins remain untouched)
  • Blockchain in general has this property

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