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The Best Essay
101–110 of 274 posts
Re: The Best Essay
#102I often think about this as a sort of counterargument for rationalism. Or maybe it's more of a paradox than a counterargument: Suppose you were trying to answer the question: "what is the best way to make as much as money as possible in the next year?" You imagine optimizing yourself or your company or your algorithm or whatever to answer this question. Maybe it does a bunch of calculations and decides the answer is…
This response represents some confusion on your part and not a paradox or counterargument to rationality.
very very roughly the ideas you need are:
1. survivorship bias
2. self-interested optimisation is not guaranteed to lead to a global maxima, e.g. self-interested agents may be systematically less risk-taking than would be societally optimal.
3. it's fine for rational agents to account for private information, e.g. "I did really well at Stanford probably I have a better shot at a company than a random person." is a fine thing to include in reasoning.
Re: The Best Essay
#103[flagged]
I wonder if this is some sort of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' situation or an elaborate piece of trolling. To me, this reads like a hallucinating LLM. Adding thanks to Sam Altman at the end sells it beautifully.
Something VC essays have in common with ChatGPT responses is that they make confident assertions in a million different subject areas without any citations at all. I was hopeful that the hyperlinks in this essay were citations to sources, but the ones that aren't links to footnotes with more opinions are links to other pages on the author's own blog.
Re: The Best Essay
#104> There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be. I'm reminded of a philosophy joke: An angel came dow…
...I don't think I get it. Like, if the angel is going to be a jerk, he could be a jerk with any question. The philosophers could have asked "What is the meaning of life?" and the angel would answer "Of course, it is the meaning of life," without any of this ordered pair nonsense.
I feel like there's something deeper to it, since there's some recursion to the answer.
But it's not a joke about programmers, so I don't get it either, ha!
Re: The Best Essay
#105> There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be. I'm reminded of a philosophy joke: An angel came dow…
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Re: The Best Essay
#106I often think about this as a sort of counterargument for rationalism. Or maybe it's more of a paradox than a counterargument: Suppose you were trying to answer the question: "what is the best way to make as much as money as possible in the next year?" You imagine optimizing yourself or your company or your algorithm or whatever to answer this question. Maybe it does a bunch of calculations and decides the answer is…
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Re: The Best Essay
#107I often think about this as a sort of counterargument for rationalism. Or maybe it's more of a paradox than a counterargument: Suppose you were trying to answer the question: "what is the best way to make as much as money as possible in the next year?" You imagine optimizing yourself or your company or your algorithm or whatever to answer this question. Maybe it does a bunch of calculations and decides the answer is…
I feel like the missing ingredients are risk, variance, cost, time horizon etc.
"Moonshot" type endeavours are not paradoxes. They do involve considerable uncertainty and usually some kind of large investment (time, money or something else). Most can't afford them and don't have any particular reason to believe they will be more successful than everyone else who has tried. Relative to most people's resources, time preference and risk tolerance they are bad bets.
If you are starving then your strategy for getting food should usually be the one with the highest overall chance of success, you care much less about factors like effort/reward ratio or getting the highest possible payoff.
The most common strategy for people who want a tiny chance at an enormous payoff is to buy a lottery ticket. Millions of people do that every week.
Such bets absolutely do feel paradoxical at times because multiplying a very small chance of success times a huge (usually easier to reason about) payoff seems to break people's brains a bit. This is often described as a "bug" in human cognition, though I have always felt it's an instinct for "exploration" in the sense of occasionally making small bets with huge potential payoff "just in case" your world model is wrong. Also that the way humans process probabilities and payoffs seems more logarithmic than linear (making small probabilities "feel" bigger than they really are).
Re: The Best Essay
#108> There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the best essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays well? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be. I'm reminded of a philosophy joke: An angel came dow…
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Re: The Best Essay
#109I wrote hundreds of essays based on content from my hobby of performing offensive standup comedy. I put this all in a filterable website www.urrong.com and self-published it in an illustrated book, Correct Me If You're Wrong ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FRR76YK ), the full PDF is here, free: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ujpr5klpwtmxve/book%20-%20DRAFT.p... . I'm a YC alum. Over.
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Re: The Best Essay
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you claim your knowledge of the field is actually deep, if you’ve never even done anything with it? Knowledge without application is nothing, imo. True “depth” comes from the know-how acquired in digging through all the minutia nobody else though to document, on your way to producing a new creation nobody else thought to build.
While I think there's some truth to yours and some of the sibling comments here, I think a lot of the discourse around documentation is actually just motivated reasoning. The trope that software projects are poorly documented is so pervasive as to be saying nothing at this point. Despite extremely useful and celebrated documentation projects (MDN and Python off the top of my head) that dramatically accelerate other p…
In the case of Python, I do think the approachability of the documentation slipped after they migrated to the 3.x site, and I think this is somewhat reflected in the search engine rankings.