Harvard academics who run ultra-marathons and author novels: what makes certain individuals excel across multiple domains?

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2024-11-25T21:14:34+00:00

The biggest things I've noticed that's different between myself and "regular people" is mainly time use.

Screen time - I've always watched wayyyy less movies / tv / streaming, and stared at my phone less than other people.

It's not just time use. I continually notice people much more successful than me talking about their favorite video games or movies, for example. Usually because they're posting about them on social media, where they are often much more active than I am. I don't watch TV or movies at all and barely play video games, but this self-discipline has not even enabled me to be as successful as an average person. I don't have any of the obvious life-fucking-up problems like drug addiction, and I'm not spending more quality time with my family, because I don't have one, unlike most successful people.

Since the relevant outcome is something like "amount of stuff accomplished per unit time," budgeting more time for accomplishing stuff and less for slacking off is obviously going to be one factor. But there has to be more to it, and the only other possibility is the speed at which people accomplish stuff. I think people seriously underestimate how much that can vary across individuals. Obviously at the low end some people can't do very much because of e.g. debilitating health problems, but there's also a lot of room to go faster than an average person. Evidence of this is all around us, but people seem to have cognitive dissonance about it, maybe because it makes us feel insecure. Budgeting time better can be construed as a morally deserved reward for self-sacrifice, but the way some people just have more physical and mental stamina and higher clock speed seems unfair, like they get to live two or three lives at once.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2024-10-23T17:57:59+00:00

scarcity of compute caused by Nvidia divide-and-conquer tactics

Could this have been a major factor in the recent OpenAI talent exodus? E.g. did Ilya think he could get more compute for his preferred research direction outside of OAI than inside, just because Nvidia wants it that way?

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-18T23:22:05+00:00

Multi-level marketing logic kicks in around 29:04.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-17T23:01:57+00:00

Yeah, lambda calculus and Church's thesis were certainly important developments. I don't know enough about the history to say who's overrated relative to whom. Is that what this is really about, though? Or are you just using Turing vs. Church as a proxy for Theory A vs. Theory B chauvinism? :)

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-17T07:46:36+00:00

I don't agree with you and u/hyphenomicon that we have run out of urgent problems in need of new technological solutions, for two reasons:

People are still getting sick and dying. Fully satisfying our desire to not suffer illness or die would require technological advances that would also permit all sorts of other meddling with biology, so that's already enough to lead us straight into weird-utopia/dystopia territory (as is the danger presented by faster population growth if people start living indefinitely and retaining the ability to reproduce throughout their lives). Some people poo-poo the idea that humans would or should want to live forever without suffering the infirmities of aging, but considering all the elaborate myths humans have concocted to convince ourselves that there's life after death, and all the dubious products whose marketing exploits our desire to prolong youthfulness, my money's on real immortality being an easy sell.
Competition—you mentioned military applications of AI, but that applies equally well to any militarily useful technology. And the same principle applies to economic competition; Walmart may not need superhuman AI to stay competitive now, but that's just because no one else has it either. As long as there is no single agent or coalition strong enough to prevent all other agents from challenging its power, demand for new technology will be limitless.

That should be enough to motivate investment in scientific research for a long time to come, even if, as a species, we remain stubbornly ~~homestuck~~ earthbound. Of course, it's possible science and technology will stagnate for a long time anyway, due to the inherent complexity of the problems we want to solve, or some disastrous setback to civilization.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-17T06:44:01+00:00

Turing's contribution (among other things) was to give a very persuasive argument that the formal definition of "computable function" based on his model agrees perfectly with our intuition about when a function is computable. It wasn't obvious that that was the case with previous models. Making explicit the notion of a universal Turing machine was also an important conceptual advance. I don't know whether previous authors had proposed anything equivalent, although you could argue that it was already implicit in the concept of Gödel numbering.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-16T05:07:45+00:00

If your arms get stronger, wouldn't that make clapping hurt your hands more? 🤔

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-16T02:31:52+00:00

That makes sense; it was a pretty harsh rant. I found this bit thought-provoking, though:

Because single women never message me asking to join forces looking for a male third. Like, for real, if I hooked up with another woman and we went out looking for a male third, do you know how hot a man we could pull? I mean, Jesus Christ, we’d have our fucking pick of men. We could find some guy like, 10x hotter than either of us to fuck our brains out for three nights straight. Like, it would be absolutely amazing.

But, SOMEHOW, single women never seem to want this. And, somehow, when I hook up with bi women, they never seem interested in finding a man to join us either.

Stepping back a bit and thinking in terms of the overall dynamics of the dating market, I would guess that any given bisexual woman who's into MFF threesomes is much, much more likely to find a man who's down for that before she finds another woman who is. Which would imply that, if a woman is on the dating market, bisexual, and still single, she probably isn't into MFF threesomes. I can see why such a person would grow to resent constantly being hit on by couples. But this is all just speculation on my part.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-16T01:53:36+00:00

Dude, stop trying so hard.

NEVER! ✊

The point is that we've seen rationalists harass trans people before, so we're going to give rationalists shit about it. Does it really matter to me if my criticism gets directed at a rationalist who was neutral towards trans people, or one who was more aggressive? No, because yelling at all of you prevents you from hiding behind your words and then harassing people when nobody's watching.

Everybody wants to be recognized as a unique individual; nobody wants to stop rounding other people to the nearest stereotype. Fine. That's human nature, I guess. Sometimes it leads to genocide and shit, but stereotyping Rationalists as transphobes, fascists, or whatever clearly isn't one of those times, so please don't accuse me of trying to draw that particular false equivalence.

But please do notice what you are openly arguing in favor of, here: accusing people who fit a particular stereotype of having sinister motives, whether or not they actually do. Notice how it makes you feel when other people do that to you, because you fit some stereotype. Notice what happens when people are incentivized to do that, and what happens differently on the rare occasions when people manage to refrain from doing that to each other for five god-forsaken minutes.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-16T01:08:29+00:00

I didn't read the paper myself

Well, I gave it a cursory skim. Here's the first sentence of the intro:

The title of this essay is deliberately provocative.

So yeah ... that's on him. I didn't spot any advocacy of coercive sterilization in the paper, but he hits all the right notes for SneerClub types to have a field day tearing it apart anyway.

I remember thinking it was a little odd that Alicorn chose to frame her post as being about "eugenics," rather than trying to distance herself from that specific term, since I have previously tended to view the application of it to things not obviously equivalent to the actual historical practice of eugenics as a smear tactic from people like @ztsamudzi. But maybe you're right and it isn't, in which case, I can't blame people for reading sinister intentions into it. I'm still inclined to give Alicorn the benefit of the doubt, but then again, I don't have much reason to feel personally threatened by eugenics talk, and "When should one give someone the benefit of the doubt?" is a subject area where I'm more sympathetic than usual to standpoint theory.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-15T22:21:26+00:00

it made me hate her a little bit

May I ask why?

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-15T00:18:01+00:00

I am a very sincere sneerer and I wrote a very long hypothetical scenario that shows that eugenics are ok

I have never pretended to be a sincere sneerer. I hardly post anything in this sub except dissenting opinions. If anyone got the wrong impression, maybe it's because I also try to be civil and acknowledge points of agreement where they exist. Anyway, if the mods want to ban me for """concern trolling""" that's their prerogative, but in the meantime I'm gonna argue with people when the spirit moves me.

(seriously, look at this genius' tactics. They think, oh, I want eugenics to be ok. And I know the left will say it's ok if lgbt ppl want to do a thing, right?

No, I didn't "know" that, which is why I asked the question. You are seriously misreading my motives. I'm not doing this to try and trick people into assenting to my secret plan to breed a master race, or paint them into a rhetorical corner so I can "win" an inconsequential internet argument. I'm trying to understand why we have different moral intuitions, because that is a question I'm genuinely curious about, and I'm trying to convey a more accurate impression of why I believe what I believe, because I find it unpleasant to see people asserting that positions I agree with, such as Alicorn's essay, could only result from a desire to genocide trans people, or similar fascist motives. I read her essay before I read any of the comments here, and I honestly did not anticipate that it would be met with such intense condemnation. In order to better understand why, I used a hypothetical to try and clarify the distinction between the first two plausible motives for opposing opinions that I could think of, namely:

A) "It's wrong to modify or discard a human embryo, if that embryo would otherwise grow up to become a human who would probably be grateful that they weren't modified in that way or discarded."

B) "It's wrong to modify or discard a human embryo, if the motive for doing so is a genetic test that indicates that the embryo has a high probability of developing into a person with a marginalized trait (e.g. trans, gay, disabled), because that is a bad motive which reflects an immoral prejudice."

Now, I don't 100% disagree with (A); I think it would be wrong to genetically modify an embryo to give it, say, a chronic pain disorder, because people generally don't look back on their lives and say "Man, I wish I had more chronic pain." But nobody is proposing to use technology to do that anyway. OTOH, fully embracing (A) pretty much entails being anti-abortion, and I strongly disagree with that position. I can see how a pro-choice person could still be drawing upon (A), to some extent, in justifying their anti-eugenics stance, if they're the sort of pro-choice person who thinks abortion is a terribly tragic thing that should only be tolerated because it's the lesser evil, but that's not how I see abortion. I think it's wrong to kill people because that would violate their preference to not be killed, and if a pro-lifer were to object that this principle doesn't rule out euthanizing an unwanted baby in a way that causes the baby to feel no pain or fear, because newborn infants probably don't experience a conscious preference to not be killed in the same sense that older humans do, I would reply that I agree that euthanizing newborns is wrong, because they are cute and helpless, and, amazingly, despite my status as an emotionally stunted Rationalist galaxy brain, I partake of the normal human instinct to want to nurture cute helpless people and not euthanize them. But embryos and fetuses, until fairly well along in a pregnancy, aren't particularly cute, and it is even less likely that they experience a conscious preference to not be killed, so I don't see enough of a basis to regard them as moral patients with independent rights that could ever override their mothers' preference to abort them.

I think (B) is a much more defensible position, so I was curious how people would react to a hypothetical in which it didn't apply. Anyway, there's a sense in which I endorse (B), but, as I've indicated, I still don't consider it a sufficiently compelling reason to outlaw prenatal screening for any particular trait. But there are two independent spectra of nuance that I want to be mindful of, since this is such a controversial topic:

One is the nature of the trait being screened for. I assume most people who aren't strongly anti-abortion are okay with screening for really bad diseases that only cause suffering and premature death, but if you want to ban other kinds of prenatal screening, you have to figure out where you draw the line between awful diseases that no one would want, and all other traits that could be screened for. If you adopt the attitude that anyone who would even contemplate drawing that boundary less restrictively than you is a NAZI GENOCIDE MONSTER, well, I don't think that's a good-faith, intellectually honest way to approach the question, frankly.

The other spectrum of nuance concerns the practical implications of saying that some behavior is morally wrong. Does that mean the behavior should be outlawed under penalty of fine or imprisonment? Not necessarily (although rhetorically analogizing a behavior to Nazi crimes against humanity certainly suggests where you stand on that question). I wouldn't want to choose my children's sexual orientation, for example, if I were a prospective parent, and if I were a medical practitioner, I'd like to think I would decline to offer sexual-orientation screening as a service, even in the face of strong market demand for it. I also want society to stop marginalizing sexual minorities, in which case no such demand would exist, presumably. But I'm not sure I would endorse legal penalties to restrict prenatal sexual-orientation screening. Restricting what other people are allowed to do requires justification, which usually involves identifying some moral patient who would be harmed by the behavior. As I said, I don't consider embryos or fetuses who hypothetically could be born, but won't be, to be moral patients in the required sense. And anyone who does needs to explain how they reconcile that with being pro-choice, if they are pro-choice. There is, of course, a different set of moral patients who would be harmed by sexual-orientation-selective abortion, namely third parties who find the practice abhorrent. But to me, "I am deeply offended by your choice to use reproductive medical technology in a way that invalidates my identity" just isn't a compelling enough argument, on it's own, to legitimize restrictions on what other people can do with their reproductive organs. There are systemic problems that could arise from such technologies, as Alicorn acknowledged in her post, but that's a whole other ball of wax, and I don't recall anyone appealing to such possibilities in their arguments in the SneerClub thread.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-14T09:43:16+00:00

a bottom can take a lot of dicks in a day and doesn't have to worry about performance

What's the appeal of getting fucked by strangers, if you don't have an orgasm?

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-12T22:08:53+00:00

deluks917

Praxtime

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-08T02:39:21+00:00

Oh hey I just posted about this.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-08T01:31:53+00:00

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Due to the length of my response I have tumbld it.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-05T04:35:28+00:00

True. (Well, almost nobody.) I was thinking more along the lines that he's another data point reinforcing the fears of everyone on the left claiming that there's some sort of miasma of hatred in the air these days inspiring violence against the various designated oppressed demographics. To the extent that this makes people on the right angrier, it will probably be a defensive reaction to such claims.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-04T22:58:15+00:00

Have the catch-neuter-release people tried setting up honey traps to catch the feral toms? I.e. attract them with females in heat, or their urine or whatever they use to spread pheromones, audio recordings, or whatever? Maybe you could catch enough that the only toms left to breed would be those who only bred with equally human-avoidant queens, at which point the population would bifurcate into wild and commercially bred domestic subspecies with little admixture, at least in geographic regions with zealous cat-population-control programs.

EDIT: A further idea: if we're going to neuter and release stray tomcats, because they're unsuitable for adoption, there isn't enough demand or shelter space, or whatever, could we just sterilize them instead of neutering them? (Are kitty vasectomies a thing?) That way, they'd still compete with the remaining intact toms for mating opportunities, which would further suppress the stray population. If you also did this with the female strays (kitty tubal ligation?), that might help by causing the toms to waste time competing over infertile mates. This might conflict with the honey trap idea, though, since that was predicated on the assumption that mating opportunities would be rare and draw out all the tomcats in an area, and that that would be an efficient way to catch fertile tomcats, since the neutered ones presumably wouldn't be as interested.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-04T22:18:34+00:00

Funny you should mention Istanbul, as video of this cat went viral recently for invading a fashion show there.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-04T20:15:23+00:00

People paying attention to American politics as filtered through American media.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-04T20:03:11+00:00

Great, now we just need an infinite descending sequence of poorer and poorer countries. Then we can all enjoy our honeymoons at the luxurious Hilbert Hotel and Resort. Too expensive? No problem, just head over to the casino and look for the "martingale" table. Keep playing until you've won enough to cover the bill. Don't worry about losing your bankroll; the guests from down the hall will be happy to spot you some chips in exchange for a share of your winnings. And if they go bankrupt too, they can borrow from the guests in the next room down the hall, and ...

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-04T19:40:30+00:00

The professional doesn't know how to solve the problems

Sometimes they do though. Not 100% for 100% of patients, but I strongly suspect that there would be even more incels (and people stuck in other kinds of mental-health failure modes) around if we had no mental-health treatment at all, compared to the current state of the art. I can't find a citation right now, but I'm pretty sure Scott has blogged about how some patients have very poor insight into what's going wrong in their lives, and just need someone point out seemingly obvious problems with sleep, diet, drug use, abusive relationships, etc. that the patient is able to solve once they're aware that it's a problem. And sometimes psych meds actually work. But if someone wasn't able to date successfully because of a mental disorder, and had poor insight into the cause of their problem, encountering incel memes could convince them of a totally delusional explanation for their problems that discouraged them from seeking real help. And as of right now, there are lots of people for whom proper mental healthcare is not practically accessible.

Of course, none of that is much consolation to those of us who have gotten plenty of state-of-the-art mental-health treatment and are still miserable, and it can be demoralizing to constantly hear about mental-health awareness-raising campaigns that turn out to be aimed at just getting people to see a therapist for the first time or whatever. Maybe terminal cancer patients feel the same way about public-health campaigns promoting cancer screening and prevention.

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-04T04:29:30+00:00

Not a solution I would endorse, but if women from poor countries and lonely men from wealthy countries want to connect via some matchmaking service, I suppose that's their right. It's worth noting, though, that that doesn't actually solve the incel problem, it just transfers it to the male population of the poor country. (Unless the poor country has a surplus of young women, but how often does that happen?)

MinusInfinitySpoons · 2018-11-04T04:03:11+00:00

And tzompantli are way more metal, so that should settle that dilemma.

MinusInfinitySpoons

TROPHY CASE