benedict

it's like when you keep putting off the migration and they finally get fed up and pull the plug on the legacy thing

@triketora.bsky.social i feel like you'd be amused(?) by this

practically speaking yes. i can imagine the second thing being a useful way to think (ie "take responsibility for your own happiness") but if you're just directly comparing vs the counterfactual you really want to be happier w/ your partner than without

aw i love this!

contrary to the other replies it's the former for me, probably because my level of strength has fluctuated a lot. when i'm stronger and try to lift something heavy the feeling is "oh shit this is really heavy, but wait it's actually moving when i push"

would love to hear more! what kind of info would you focus on, and why might i be likely to already have it?

one internal voice says that it's bad to live so much in the future but otoh it is kinda hard to invest somewhere you're only going to be for another year

is it crazy to do a bunch of research and interviews to decide where to live next or is it just obviously correct. i'm sick of moving and i want the next spot to be our home forever ideally

ah, best of luck!

have you come up with any good ways to execute the AI bet? other than semiconductor stocks i've found it difficult to figure out how

i think of this as the "choir of angels problem" after the xkcd on it. it used to really stress me out but some time ago i decided that it was fake and then i was able to get married.

wrote a blog post about it if you're interested! https://www.benedict.one/2022/08/18/uncertainty-and-marriage/

i hadn't seen this before, thanks for the link! already enjoying this: "thank you for inviting me to discuss einstein. he was not a mathematician so i won't say anything further about him. anyways as i was saying about bacon and descartes,"

do you notice differences between the kinds of people who are good at different kinds of math? could be like: high school vs grad math, or geometry vs number theory, whatever you've noticed.

"thinking about"?

nothing. brain empty. needy baby

ok i'll go first.

in the morning i try to do some writing (i have a moderate sized pileup of posts to publish once i iron out a new editing process) and in the afternoon i'm helping a friend code up an online marketplace. in the evening there's a very needy baby

so, what are you all working on and/or thinking about recently?

between you and others

another example that comes to mind is keith johnstone's improv

the more general pattern is that when a field is new, it's small and uncompetitive enough that the same person can be researcher/eng/practitioner. but there aren't a lot of new fields currently except the ones that are personally created (but often those have no relevance to wider reality)

i was actually going off your "personal experience vs existing knowledge base" piece more, but it's linked because

- distortion field lets you leverage your personal insights
- personal insights are idiosyncratic to just you
- so there is no specialization into the 3 roles for others to fill

what do you think accounts for the difference?

i wonder how the oculus in nyc comports with this. it's a shopping mall built directly on top of a large subway junction in fidi, but i mainly hate it because i always accidentally exit the subway into it and it takes me 5 min to figure out how to leave and it makes me late

i guess the stuff that comes to mind is:
- guru / cult leader
- therapist w/ new modality
- startup founder

all things where your personal insights induce some kind of reality distortion field for the people around you

one of the big gaps btwn fiction and reality is that in reality practitioners tend to be different from engineers who are diff from researchers, whereas in fiction the same person embodies all three (the discoverer gets to wield the new powers).

do you need to be all 3 or id with 1 of them more?

on twitter i frequently find myself wanting to ask moots "hey why do you follow this other person" as in looking for whether they are specifically good on one area or just a hate/curiosity/IRL-friend or thirst-follow or whatever and i hate that i'd basically just come off as a follow cop for asking

i see, i might go the other way honestly, i find that there are weird catastrophic failures of insight for domain experts even barely outside their domain (eg paul graham sometimes seems quite wrong just past seed stage, or foreign policy guys just outside their geo) but i do see what you're saying

fwiw i think it was like a short pleasant jolt similar to if someone was unusually interested in something i had to say and i had forgotten it by the time we parted until right now! so hopefully not too distorting

but i'm glad that we also accidentally had a clarifying conversation about it later

probably the gpt4 tokens because the ocean water would be annoying to store

do you think this is justified (results in better opinions) or no

ok i forgot that this happened but now that you mention it i do think that this happened

also now i'm wondering how much this explains my suspiciously high number of vaguely entangled friendships with introverted / anxious girls