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Tips for a Better Life

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Re: Tips for a Better Life

#351

Post by bluecalm »

paulpauper wrote: post #33
NortySpock wrote: post #24

I think the compassion section has the most wisdom in it, especially the reasoning behind the recommendation: 82. Call your parents when you think of them, tell your friends when you love them. 83. Compliment people more. Many people have trouble thinking of themselves as smart, or pretty, or kind, unless told by someone else. You can help them out. 84. If somebody is undergoing group criticism, the tribal part in yo…

91. don't buy XRP but in seriousness, I think it is easier to apply these rules to people you know than strangers. Look how often people lose patience with each other online. >85. Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can’t handle forms, scammers, or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not. Interestingly, being smart does not protect…

I am not sure if that many smart people got duped by Madoff, surely not for significant %, of their net worth. It's just who the public considers smart often isn't that at all.

We had similar scandal in our country with tens of thousands of people being duped into buying some kind of gold secured deposits. We have heard how smart people like doctors, actors, lawyers invested significant % of their net worth on it. I see it differently. They are not smart. If you invest big % of your net worth into one thing, especially if that thing is not a huge publicly traded and regularly audited company/fund then you are not smart. If you're tempted to put a lot of money into some magic fund that trades gold you are just dumb.

Not putting all your eggs in one basket, especially if it sounds like some exclusive great opportunity isn't rocket science. It's just that vast majority of the population is clueless when it comes to thinking about money, probability and motivations of others.

I think the point about the compassion is great. Very small % of people can understand things like financial instruments, expected value or utility of money. We need a framework to protect less fortunate from scams because that's most people and no one wants the world where scammers reside at the top of the food chain.

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#352

Post by wwwwewwww »

squibbles wrote: post #235

I do not mean to either encourage or discourage the taking of any kind of nutritional supplements, but I strongly caution anyone from looking to lists like the one on LessWrong for specific advice on health issues. > 23. (~This is not medical advice~). Don’t waste money on multivitamins, they don’t work. Vitamin D supplementation does seem to work, which is important because deficiency is common. From The Physicians’…

Agree about not taking medical advice from people on the internet.

It's also best not to form life decisions on any one study. This includes studies that show multivitamin benefits as well as those that show slight increase in mortality rate.

For multivitamin studies, it seems to be so hard to show any effect that people think we should stop looking for it:

"The probability of a meaningful effect is so small that it's not worth doing study after study and spending research dollars on these questions"

https://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20131216...

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#353

Post by DanBC »

jodrellblank wrote: post #305
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this was good advice in 2015. This is terrible advice in 2020. Reddit is astro-turfed up to it's eyeballs and the parts that aren't are people with little to no experience in niche X giving generally bad and nuance-free advice on niche X. The more niches you develop proficiency in the more you will see this.

Maybe this is true, but without any sort of evidence or detail it reads far more like you status signalling how above-it-all you are than a meaningful comment.

I don't use reddit much, so maybe I've got this completely wrong. (But the post doesn't say "use reddit", it says "search reddit".)

Look at frying pans.

Reddit will tell you that cast iron is the only option. Carbon steel is wrong ("home burners don't get hot enough", stainless steel is wrong ("too hard for you to use"), aluminium non stick is wrong ("only good for beginners who don't know what they're doing"), aluminium with ceramic non-stick is wrong (ok, they're right about this one).

Ask about boots, or hammers, or any of dozens of products.

Reddit fetishizes some products and disdains others and there's not much reason to it, it's mostly memetic.

Most redditors don't have the money to buy 8 different pans or 7 different pairs of boots. They tend not to work in these industries, so they can't give that experienced view point. And most redditors are young so they just haven't lived long enough to give a credible review of how long something lasts.

A 40 year old person who works with a tool 8 hours a day, and who's used a wide range of those over the years, will tend to give a better review than a 20 year old who works with a tool for a few hours a week.

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#354

Post by arvinsim »

I went the opposite of number 5. Instead of having multiple monitors, I just have 1 big 4k 32" monitor. I found that I am more distracted when having more than one monitor.

Lots of people are guilty with no. 49, especially when it comes to romance. Social media and dating sites has made cultivating a personal brand a top priority.

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#355

Post by coldtea »

fao_ wrote: post #222
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more than one counter-case to rationalism. Atheists, liberals, Democrats, progressives can all be irrational or pseudo-rational. What would pseudo-rationalism even be? Purported rationalism, yes, but the rationalism would be just a smokescreen for positions that are not rationally derived and therefore not addressable by means of rational argument. I don't understand why you think asocialism or self-interest…

> What would pseudo-rationalism even be? Purported rationalism, yes, but the rationalism would be just a smokescreen for positions that are not rationally derived and therefore not addressable by means of rational argument. Such as Yudkowsky believing that torturing a man for 50 years is ok if it means that a very large number of people don't get a single speck of dust in their eye? Or the creator of Roko's Baselisk…

Or the irrational idea of a "dog-whistle" making this a thought-crime to discuss.

Because, "of course", "rationally" nobody other than a fascist or such would care for tradition and traditional values or use such terms positively.

Only whether you're traditionalist or progressivist or whatever is a value judgement and a world-view, not something to put as rational or irrational. Those that say the opposite irattionally impose their value/preferences as "rational reason".

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#356

Post by nickflood »

c22 wrote: post #233
qntty wrote: post #25

Sorry, but a lot of this advice makes no sense or is pretty bad. 26. Are you on the fence about breaking up or leaving your job? You should probably go ahead and do it. People, on average, end up happier when they take the plunge. Seems illogical. Presumably the reason that people are happier after leaving their job is because, on average, they wait until they are ready. That doesn't mean anyone with the inclination…

I worked at my first job for over ten years, hated the last five... I guess you could say I waited until I was "ready" to quit, but in retrospect I think I was just scared. One day I quit on a whim and it felt great! That was the beginning of my journey of self-actualization.

Me too, and I've watched many of my friends go through this as well.

Basically, some people have jobs that are analogous to abusive relationships. Easy enough to get into one when you depend on your job to get money. And it is rarely a good idea to wait until you're "ready" to get out of an abusive relationship.

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#357

Post by coldtea »

stass wrote: post #304
ggm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess because I see secular humanism as being rooted in a rationalist outlook, and the a-social claimed rationality of the Ayn Rand rugged individualists just leaves me cold, as does most libertarian rejections of society and social equity, collectivism to me is the highest form of rationalism.

Collectivism killed hundreds of million of people in the past century alone. This was also rationalized. Rugged individualism is much less a-social from that perspective.

>Collectivism killed hundreds of million of people in the past century alone.

So? The western states killed and enslaved just as many under various names (from christianity and manifest destiny, to democracy and free trade and "the free world").

What happened in the name of an idea doesn't mean the idea is bad or that what happened is an inevitable part of the idea.

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#358

Post by coldtea »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #253
ggm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess because I see secular humanism as being rooted in a rationalist outlook, and the a-social claimed rationality of the Ayn Rand rugged individualists just leaves me cold, as does most libertarian rejections of society and social equity, collectivism to me is the highest form of rationalism.

I note that your rejection of Ayn Rand's philosophy is that it "leaves you cold", rather than a rational refutation of it. Ayn Rand begins with axioms, and logically derives her position from there. (Well, maybe. I suspect that at least to some degree, she already had her position, and derived her axioms from there, then argued for her position from her axioms.) So I attack her position by saying that in her third ax…

>Ayn Rand begins with axioms, and logically derives her position from there.

There's no way to arrive "logically" at value judgements.

You can just use logic as a klutch to support your pre-determined positions (and, of course, which is totally rational as a practice, to spread, support and enforce them).

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#359

Post by GoblinSlayer »

>5. If your work is done on a computer, get a second monitor. Less time navigating between windows means more time for thinking.

It's an overly american meme, it's a bad idea to work all day long. Anyway, if you think all day long, you don't really think.

Re: Tips for a Better Life

#360

Post by simtel20 »

bluecalm wrote: post #351
paulpauper wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

91. don't buy XRP but in seriousness, I think it is easier to apply these rules to people you know than strangers. Look how often people lose patience with each other online. >85. Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can’t handle forms, scammers, or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not. Interestingly, being smart does not protect…

I am not sure if that many smart people got duped by Madoff, surely not for significant %, of their net worth. It's just who the public considers smart often isn't that at all. We had similar scandal in our country with tens of thousands of people being duped into buying some kind of gold secured deposits. We have heard how smart people like doctors, actors, lawyers invested significant % of their net worth on it. I…

Just wrt Madoff, a lot of people who were smart enough to make real money in their lives were taken by him. Some may not be too bright, but that would be a long tail and there were surely some at the other end of the curved too. I asked a bigwig at a legit hedge fund once how they never spotted that he was a fraud, and his answer was that they couldn't reproduce his returns, so they figured he was smarter than them.
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