Learning Report 5th Oct To 14th Nov

Date: 2020-11-14

Max’s Learning Report - 5th Oct to 14th Nov

I’ve mostly been posting to my microblogging thread and a little to my FI site. I’ve written a decent amount.

I finished The Choice (finally) and started Philosophy: Who Needs It. I’m really enjoying P:WNI. One of my favourite sections so far is Rand’s open letter to Boris Spassky.

I haven’t discussed The Choice much. The latter sections (e.g. comfort zones) I haven’t discussed at all. I’m not overly worried, though why shouldn’t I be worried? I wrote a post about how it’s important to have good self-judgement and to fully complete the learning cycle. Have I done so wrt The Choice? I can’t remember much off the top of my head re: comfort zones. I think I might have to revisit the last few chapters again.

I wrote 11887 words in my microblogging thread between these dates. This report covers ~40 days, so I wrote an average of ~297 words per day. I notice I felt pretty good reflecting on writing ~12k words total, but less good thinking about ~300 words / day. It doesn’t make sense to feel less good like that, though. For one there’s sampling bias – I’ve written more recently on the whole – but more importantly: I’ve started writing more in general, and I am looking forward to writing if I haven’t for a while. I want to write down thoughts and ideas now, regularly. Before tutoring I only wanted to write things down when I was struck with particular and fleeting motivation. I’m excited to think that I might be moving past that.

I’ve also started curi’s CF course. I’m finding it both good revision of yes/no and tutorial matieral, and also a good source of inspiration for connecting ideas I previously hadn’t – like breakpoints and excess capacity. (I’m not sure if curi and I covered this at all in the tutorials, but it hadn’t sunk in if we had.)

sizeable or significant posts

Conversation with curi: (Tutoring Max #49) There are no conflicts of interest between rational men
Initial answers to some conflicts of interest questions (TM#49)
Some thoughts on good/bad error msgs. I think they’re important. I found a surprise overlap with helping the best ppl or helping the masses – I think there were issues with this; the quality was too low b/c it was almost like personal notes. I haven’t done a PM or tried to re-write it.
harmony of interests - don’t forget about unknowns
in-progress idea on (in)dependent status of variables as yes/no property of explanations [Max] – I never finished this idea, but I did change my mind on whether it was worth thinking about. I got stuck at the point where I think I needed a way to test if an explanation was yes/no, but at that point you have to do significant creative thought anyway, so you can just directly criticise it. like there’s no an obvious way this could be useful. the idea wasn’t solving a major bottleneck or anything, so I stopped thinking about it.
feedback request: “Why I Live” draft 1 [Max] – this is mirrored on my site and there are some follow up comments. It’s about the importance of choosing to pursue great ideas. Anne and I have some conversation about it.
reflections on ‘Why I Live’ draft & idea in general – I had some reflections on the above post, particularly I thought I was dishonest in the way I put forward the idea. I presented it like it was reality, but really it’s an aspiration. It’s partly true, but I’m not close to consistent.
I’m thinking of unendorsing ~everything I’ve written – I’m still considering this and planning on posting to FI about it.
Reach + parameterisation of reach – Some ideas I had about reach and how it related to reality. particularly that there are infinite ways reach can be parameterised.
low-error-rate post on good self-judgement and learning - minor error 1
Some policies I am thinking of writing – social engagements; gift giving; birthdays and celebrations
a danger of unconventional ideas on academia
running communities based on ideas - note to self
Choices Matter (reflection)

short/tiny/insignificant posts

Things I could have practiced but haven’t

mapping a conversation tree
(probably more)

Posts I’m thinking of writing:

A postmortem (posted to FI) on some somewhat recent stuff I didn’t understand and now think I do
Thoughts on secondhandedness and the interaction with great people – relates to some thoughts I had regarding this thank-you msg to curi: http://curi.us/2385-discussion-points-of-view-and-mutual-benefit#18262
Reflections on tutoring (now that we’ve stopped the tutorials)

Desires / Goals

I want to keep up my writing and exceed my words-per-day average next time I do a learning report. In service to this I can keep track of what I write as I go, that way it’ll be easier to put together the next LR (this one is taking some time).
I want to keep thinking (and writing) about learning and related topics. I feel like it’s going to be very important to get that right.
I want to work on removing overheads from my life. Buffer can deal with some overheads, but there’s a limit to that. If you have too many overheads then no amount of buffer will let you fully avoid big impacts on your life. I’m going to start small by getting my house in order and selling some excess things.
I want to develop my plan for a mass-unendorsing. (Maybe I should note it’s not a way to escape doing post-mortems about things in the past & discussing past mistakes; it’s just a way to be unshackled from legacy)

Misc

I counted words by copying all my comments from microblogging to a text file. Then I used ctrl+f w/ ‘reply quote’ to quickly find+remove comments by other ppl. I then used the regex ^([\w\d #:\.\-\/'?>,”“|’\[\]\*])*\| quote$ to remove all the lines with ... | reply | quote in them. I then went and removed all quotes with the regex ^>([\w\d #:\.\-\/'?>,”“|’\[\]\*…";])* – checking that my regex covered each full quotation (that wasn’t like a comment; I sometimes mark comments with quotes to visually separate them).

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