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This is one of the most profound essays I’ve read this year. A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse. ...

Reality is complicated. It’s hard to know what is true. See also: Reality has a surprising amount of detail At some point in their education, most smart people usually learn not to credit arguments from authority. If someone says “Believe me about the minimum wage because I seem like a trustworthy guy,” most of them will have at least one neuron in their head that says “I should ask for some evidence”. If they’re really smart, they’ll use the magic words “peer-reviewed experimental studies.” ...

If you routinely stay 30 minutes after your shift doing free work, you’ve given away 72 hours per year. Now you’ve just traded away a long weekend that you could have spent fishing, skiing, traveling, or doing literally anything else that you want. Sixty minutes after each shift? That’s the same time commitment as working 16 additional shifts every year. You’re working one month each year for free. No bonus. No thank-yous. No recognition. Just more work. Ninety minutes after each shift? That’s nine full days of your life every year. Not theoretical days. Real full days. Go take a trip to Europe instead. Or stay home and do nothing. I bet you can find something better to do with that time than volunteering at the hospital. — The Economics of Going Home on Time

The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. — Jacob Coxon (ex-Anthropic employee)

I just dug to the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They’ve been in the bottom for 10+ years. So, “when are you ever gonna use these?” was today. Don’t ever let anyone take your Big Box of Cables away. — Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables

I was in Ops for several years at a fairly large SaaS. This article reminded me several times of lessons I learned while in that role. 1. Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems. All of the interesting systems (e.g. transportation, healthcare, power generation) are inherently and unavoidably hazardous by the own nature. The frequency of hazard exposure can sometimes be changed but the processes involved in the system are themselves intrinsically and irreducibly hazardous. It is the presence of these hazards that drives the creation of defenses against hazard that characterize these systems. ...

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important. ...

At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things. ...

Just have notebooks lying around, or on your person. Write grocery lists, doodles, notes on meetings, to-do lists, or stray ideas. Journal. Copy out good lines from books. Anything that has your mental focus will have a more enduring presence in your brain if you write it down. — Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here’s how to do it

So, I use this as an excuse to buy beautiful Moleskine, Leuchtturm, and MUJI notebooks and coloured pens, and I stash them in my gym bag. Each day before class, I open the app and copy the workout into my notebook. I do any necessary calculations, which is the basis of weightlifting training. I lift based on percentages of a “1 rep max” (1RM), which has been established prior, and often these percentages increase over the course of a training session. ...