Husband suggested I post and advertise myself here. I am an artist who works mainly in watercolor painting, woodworking, and the Japanese art of Kanzashi.
Want to support my work? For only $3 a month get full access to every piece and early viewing. Check out my patreon https://www.patreon.com/SavageMadness
I write a substack talking about AI and the business change needed to take advantage of the opportunities. A tech-optimist view from Europe, specifically Scotland/ UK. https://kennyfraser.substack.com/
I work for Otherbranch, a tech hiring startup founded and staffed by former Triplebyte employees. Surprisingly enough, our list of clients offering open roles is currently outpacing the growth of our candidate pool. So if you're a SWE, we want to get you hired for them.
When you sign up and tell us what you're looking for, we keep an eye out for incoming roles that match your interests and skills. Then we'll schedule you for a 90-minute technical interview. Based on your performance, we can vouch for your skills directly to employers and expedite you through the first few steps of their application process. Some other perks:
- You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
- It's free. Our paycheck comes from the employer's side.
- Whether you pass, fail, or crush our interview, you'll get detailed feedback on every section so you know exactly how you did.
(If you want us to help you hire engineers for your company, we're of course happy to work with you as well! You can learn more about that side of the process at https://www.otherbranch.com/landing-j-employers.)
I'm getting laid off as an economics professor at the end of the school year, and while I'm going through the normal job channels, I figured I'd put my name out there. If anyone on the West Coast is looking for an economist, particularly one specializing in behavioral economics, or looking to hire anyone with the skillset of an economist, let me know.
Web developer with a few years of experience looking for most any kind of work. Most of my skills are in Ruby/Rails and JS/React but I've also dabbled a little bit in Python and Java, and I'm up to learn whatever. Located in the Boston area, open to remote or maaaybe relocating depending where and for what. I've got a pretty big resume gap at this point so I'm prepared to be pretty flexible on pay and possibly other stuff if needed.
Also open to volunteer work for a good cause.
Either way you can reply here or email paulsaywardgoodman, gmail.
My girlfriend is looking for a job as a PM or estimator in SF or the Bay Area. She has several years experience managing larger projects and home construction
Looking for a job related to AI safety / evals / alignment. Strong background in data science and ml engineering. Tired of working remote, want to work in-person at least part of the time. Looking for full-time role. Will discount salary expectations in accordance with my estimate of the value to humanity of the job. I'm sick of automated coding tests, if you want to pre-screen me then give me a work trial task.
I'm hiring for AI research at the Astera institute in Emeryville, California.
Team members may work remotely up to 2 days per week on a regular basis, and as needed for special circumstances. We are willing and able to sponsor visas if needed.
We are willing and able to sponsor visas if needed. Please apply through the URLs below. You can email me garymm <at> astera.org if you have questions that are not answered by the job listings.
I'm looking for software or operations roles at small/medium sized startups, preferably mission driven places, preferably at least partially in person in the bay area. I trained as a scientist but after my PhD decided to move to the private sector, and have been at a biggish startup for a little over a year since. I've loved my time here but we aren't doing too hot and I'm starting to ponder what's next, would love to chat with interesting places.
I mostly self-taught programming for science and then have been doing a mix of operations and informal software engineering at work. I really just enjoy solving impactful problems, and am pretty tool-agnostic, and I like slotting into different roles as need shift.
Would love to chat more (and happy to share my actual identity privately), reach me at cubecumbered@gmail.com.
I'm on track to finish a PhD in clinical psychology, and it's looking about 70% likely that I won't be continuing in academia so I'm on the lookout for anything that is more impactful than psychology research - a low bar. My intuition is that I'm most suited to grant evaluation or something similar that requires broad knowledge and skills. I'm based in the Netherlands but open to remote work or moving, to an extent. You can contact me at my gmail address which starts with laurensk90.
Another lawyer. 10+ years in criminal defense litigation, at every level from pre-trial to trial to appeals, in both state and federal courts. This includes all kinds of offenses from narcotics to homicide to white collar crime. I've done it all, including investigations, discovery, motions practice, first and second chairing trials (including winning my last homicide a month ago), and writing and arguing before appellate courts.
Looking for a midlife career transition to something that does not involve the mental stress of working with people's lives immediately in the balance. Special interest in tech, politics, history. Probably remote, but the right position might change that.
here's a physicist (M.Sc.) with both strong hands-on experience and solid statistical/ML experience, looking for new opportunities. I specialized in biophysics for my Master, due to my life-long interest in biology (additionally to physics, obviously) and have a solid base knowledge in biology, too.
The last few years I worked in IT-related positions (requirements, specification, coding, DB-work), but I am now looking to get back into a job more involved with physics, biology, and engineering. Before that I gained some experience in systems and requirements engineering in the semiconductor world.
Due to my private interests, I also bring a lot of practical skills, from knowing my way around any toolbox to 3D-printing and CAD and some basic soldering.
I like to get sh*t done, talk less, do more, but I can still present very well and concise in front of suits. I also love to properly work in a team and teach others, if the opportunity presents itself. I dislike completely isolated work, I have had enough of that in my life. I get along very well with all kinds of engineers, coders, and even managers and investors as long as I don't have to participate in office politics.
I am particularly interested in STEM R&D like aerospace, semiconductors, medical. Thanks for reaching out!
Hello, I'm a nuclear security lawyer looking for new job opportunities. Remote or DC. Besides the nuclear niche, I have experience in environmental law, administrative law, and policy writing and communication. Would love to do something towards environmental law reform.
Hello! I'm looking for some unspecified job, remote or in Yerevan, Armenia (other locations are unlikely), regular or one-time.
I'm a former academic researcher in applied math with few up-to-date skills (Python, machine learning, scripts etc., bits of C++) and rusty math background. I'm willing to learn something new but am probably best suited to work on something related to math/numbers, data, and/or programming. (I also tried tutoring but I'm not enough of a pedagogue, the only significant success I had was with a pupil who found their own motivation and I just helped.)
I guess my main selling point is that by US/EU standards I don't expect to be paid that much.
I am a CS grad a year of SWE experience at a manufacturing company looking to move to a more challenging and interesting job, ideally hybrid in the bay area or remote.
What I am most looking for (and missing now) is a role with collaboration, tight feedback loops, and room to grow. Just about any startup with good culture would intrigue me, along with companies in hard tech, finance, and biotech/pharma.
I am an enthusiastic generalist; I have a minor in physics, and wish I got the double major. My greatest strength in my current role is being able to sit in on a meeting of seasoned mechanical and electrical engineers and figure out exactly how my QC test software needs to behave based on their technical concerns.
The tools I use at my job are mostly C# .NET (MVVM, Entity Framework) and SQL. I am strong in Python, and proficient in C and C++. I've done a computer vision project involving simulated training data and transfer learning, and also contributed data analysis to a genomics project.
Above all, I am looking for a team of curious individuals who will push me to become a better programmer.
I would greatly appreciate any inquiries or career advice, I can be reached at jakestenger5@gmail.com.
I'm a hobbyist programmer based in India looking for remote work. I don't specialize in anything because I'm more of a generalist. I mainly code in Python and have dabbled in other languages when needed, such as JavaScript. I'm familiar with some front-end too, but I primarily like building APIs (Flask, FastAPI, etc.), bots, backend services, scripts, etc. I like building prototypes and MVPs.
I've been coding here and there on my personal projects since 2018 and never really considered it as a career, and I still don't, but I need to get a job right now, and I thought my skills could be useful somewhere. I believe I'm quite efficient when creating "just works" things for personal projects.
I'm offering affordable labor for anyone interested due to my current financial circumstances. I need some stability, and this is going to be my first traditional job.
My only deal-breaker requirement from the job is async communication and low/no group meetings. If interested, contact me at q0wbdmo7j@mozmail.com.
Woman, 44, Seattle, no kids and looking for a long-term monogamish relationship with a straight man. I'd be most comfortable with someone who's either child-free or has not-super-young kids,; my floor for being "good with kids" is probably about 8 years old. As a bit of an introvert, I'd really enjoy indefinitely maintaining separate households but frequently visiting and/or spending weekends together.
I am very much a grownup. I'm employed full-time, own a condo and a car, and am responsible and fair-minded. I'm difficult to offend, very slow to anger, quick to forgive, and I'm a huge fan of advice because it's more efficient to learn from other people's mistakes than one's own. I bond deeply with loved ones, but between being rational-minded and most of my closest friends being men, I have a straightforward, pragmatic manner that tends to be more common in men than in women and can be disconcerting for people expecting (and wanting) stereotypically feminine displays of intense emotional expression.
I have great taste in restaurants and media and love talking about both. I have a few weirdo quirks, like hating bananas and pho while loving plantains and ramen, and being irrationally annoyed with the characters in organized crime dramas for not finding less dangerous work, but otherwise I have a broad, educated palate in both food and media. I get equally excited about grimy taquerias and pristine white tablecloth gourmet seafood. I watch Shogun *and* Bluey.
I think I'd be an excellent partner for someone who finds most of the above roughly recognizable in themselves and appealing in others. Based on advice I once received in the comments on an ACX thread, I've concluded that the ability I'd admire most and require of an intimate partner is a history of changing his mind about *big* things and a conscious commitment to being open to doing so.
My main dating profile and some writing is on Fetlife under my username here minus the "Christina." Email is my username here at Gmail.
Edit to add:
Well, since including the Big Five has become a trend in this Classifieds, I might as well go along with the crowd and see if I can boost my Agreeableness a bit. I took this no-doubt unscientific test here (https://bigfive-test.com/):
* Contentiousness: 99, with Cautiousness at 20/20, Dutifulness 19/20, Self-Efficacy 18/20.
* Agreeableness: 87, with Morality 20/20, Cooperation 18/20, Altruism 17/20. That last one needs explanation in that I almost certainly didn't answer it the way most people did; my altruistic inclinations are only ever processed first through "Morality."
* Openness to Experience: 80, with Imagination 20/20, Artistic Interests 19/20, Intellect 18/20, and Emotionality at a hilariously low 11/20 with Liberalism even lower at 8/20. This *totally* tracks for me.
* Extraversion: 67, with Assertiveness at 18/20 and Cheerfulness at 16/20. Some context on the assertiveness is that I never especially *want* to scrap with someone for the adrenaline rush or whatever; rather, I get *dragged* into being assertive when it seems like there's a moral need to do so.
* Neuroticism: 56, with Anxiety at 14, Immoderation at 13, and Self-Consciousness at 12. The highest score being anxiety makes sense to me; you can't have a lot of imagination without imagining what could go wrong. Anger is a 5 and Depression a 4, which I think accurately reflects my naturally high hedonic set-point, I think.
34F, San Jose, working on the dating doc I swear. Monogamous; looking for a bright, interesting young man who is interested in marriage, children, and talking about books (and occasionally interesting articles, like the ones on this substack!). I feel as if enjoying talking with someone is a pretty strong requirement for long-term compatibility, and relatively easy to check.
I also play D&D, cook, play harp, and do a variety of kinds of dance (mostly historical, but sometimes other social dancing as well). I'm a libertarian. I would not call myself a rationalist, though I do read some rationalist authors. I think after SSC/ACX, the one I found most interesting was Unitofcaring.
I'm probably unusually risk averse for this community, and approve of being so (e.g.: I have never gotten drunk past "just enough to know what it feels like" and never intend to, have never tried drugs, etc. - and have no desire to change this!) I don't feel that trying things before judging them is necessarily a good idea, and I tend to like tried-and-true solutions above novel ones for important things (see monogamous). If this is a dealbreaker for you, now you know!
> "You want to *date* me? Have you *read* any of my comments?"
I suspect that this level of self-awareness automatically bumps you pretty close to the front of the queue for those that are self-aware themselves. :)
I hope to attend Hillsdale College in the coming academic year to study their Pre-Law program. In the meantime, I'm working at a fab (fabrication) shop.
When I'm not working, I like to practice Brazilian Jiujitsu and CrossFit. I also play Skyrim, read Substack, and volunteer at my church (I'm Orthodox.)
I'm a socially conservative libertarian. ( I ❤️ Mises to pieces!)
Stats: 5'4", hetero, ENTP, white(would be interested in someone Latino; I speak good Spanish), a 7 according to the 4chan ranking chart, low neuroticism/conscientiousness, high openness
Hello! Female / 25 / UK (open to re-locate) I’m insatiably curious and looking for a long term relationship/ marriage/ kids with a monogamous guy. I've no history and not likely to be flippant here as I'm as socially awkward as you'd imagine a girl on here would be.
I’m looking for that typical life stuff to be non-typical and have a big emphasis on curiosity/ be made better by good conversation and curiosity day to day. I know sometimes people see people very invested in abstract more ultimate level goals and progress as anti-close proximate connections but I think they are incredibly compatible and people are doing something a bit wrong if progress on one level isn't also informing and improving progress in other levels. I've a couple of big projects I'm edging toward once I'm out of student-ing. So I’m pretty motivated by understanding abstract ideas but also equally by nurturing connections with family and friends.
I’m looking for someone who is (dare i say it) intelligent? not in the ‘i’m better than you sense’ or the ‘i have lots of facts sense’ but in the ‘i care deeply about curiosity as a value/ principle sense and will consider things patiently sense'. (and kind!)
Feel welcome to DM here,
(even if just to be friends!! :)
odds are if you read this we have a lot in common,
Also want to note: In weighing up the risks of sounding overly keen against the knowledge that many men assume 'womanlyness' in the context of dating makes for lots of attention and therefore low likelihood of a response or consideration - this is not actually true! so if you are shy don't be.
I'm also open to constructive feedback on what's important to know in this sort of thing.
You can fully and honestly intend to carefully consider messages and then under the weight of (without exaggeration) thousands of them simply not; many such cases, as they say. This is why *you* should message *me*.
Yes this is the reasoning behind my awkward flagging / reassurance message - It is actually an exaggeration *in this context* (I'm going to be a little optimistic and attribute it to the context than me for now) but I have so far received exactly 1 message for friendship and 1 enquiring re: a date.
You're dead right on the likes of dating apps like okcupid etc where very varied populations of men characteristically swipe on almost everyone to ensure not missing a match that women get overwhelmed despite their generally better intentions to respond to everyone. Let me tell you this broke my heart a few months ago when I started online dating and spent hours in well meaning attempts to write apology messages paired with honest explanations to hundreds of guys which were obviously not my kind of person, in most cases a bit lower in openness and emotional stability.
But I don't think this dynamic carries forward in spaces like this (unless you are a woman investing a lot of time in public identity development) where it filters out flippant effort to a certain extent and I do believe people in this sphere are exactly the type to analyse a situation and be more tentative to action where even low probability negative potentials exist.
Hm. I'm not especially pretty and photograph vastly worse than that, so I don't use anything photo-based. I'm generalizing from things more like the date-me-doc model; one time I got a few rounds of increasingly stressed and agonized "I promise to respond to everyone, really!" mass emails until they finally, mercifully, stopped; rather souring me on the whole practice. I wouldn't have sent anything, had I predicted that! (The foregoing lightly falsified for anonymity.)
At any rate consider dating me! I *guess* I can send a message introducing myself but I don't actually build myself out of punchy taglines anyone can get a handle on. (Working on it, unfortunately.)
It's true this modern dating culture is incredibly emotionally harmful and I think it's actually *rational* to feel soured by the process. Sorry in proper ACX fangirl fashion I realise I'm going off my practical goal here and using it to segway to broader theory but I think people especially mathsy shape rotators that make up a large portion of ACXers often don't view emotions as a *rational* source of information thing but a kinda inefficient deficit to overcome. Basically I'm saying, to feel bad about something bad is good, it shows the emotions are working right.
I also think a kind of overlooked thing is that it isn't emotionally different for women who get a lot of attention on dating apps (I think ppl overestimate the ego boost entirely) because they are seeing first hand the sheer volume of people in the world that are incompatible and it's a kind of more abstract rejection. If anything it's kinda like a scary added responsibility because you can feel lonely and have people throwing themselves toward you for very shallow reasons and yet you've to analyse if it would actually work alright for everyone and then hold the responsibility to be *disagreeable* on top of that when women are very naturally more *agreeable*. It's hard for everyone I guess in different ways. Definitely a fun topic for a longer form post sometime possibly.
But yes I'm so happy to chat to absolutely anyone from these kind of ideasphere to see if we get along.
Sure, why not. :) Hi, I'm Harry, a mathematician (though not professionally) who can talk your ear off about writing numbers with ones! :D (And various other things, many of them not math-related.) (You may have seen some of my writing on the internet before, as Sniffnoy? I wrote an old article on LessWrong about Savage's Theorem, for instance...) I'm male, 37 years old, interested in women, and living in New York City; and I prefer polyamory but am not necessarily fixed on it. I like taking pictures of bugs and birds and other city wildlife. Once, I sniffed a dog's butt; it stunk. For a slightly longer profile with some pictures and a few links, you can see here: https://hjaltman.github.io/dmd/
I really appreciate the weirdness of your having a dating doc that is mostly pictures of bugs, but you might consider some more pictures of yourself. Unless you are a bug
Ha! Yeah, that's what happens when you try to put something together from existing material and aren't much of a web guy. The problems I had here were:
1. I don't have many pictures of myself (that's not what I take pictures of!*),
2. The ones I do are often very old and people want recent ones (I ended up using some old ones anyway due to a lack of material),
3. Even though everyone says "put pictures of yourself with others to demonstrate you have friends!" I am a little uncomfortable including people in this who weren't necessarily expecting it (I guess I could scribble over their faces or something? Blech),
4. Not all the pictures were the same aspect ratio and this caused the page to be ugly and I didn't want to deal with that. (OK, that was more of a problem for the bug pictures, the me pictures was mostly the first 3. I mean obviously cropping would have solved that problem.)
5. Oh and I didn't want to include a picture of me with a small child (even though it's adorable :) ) because then I'd have to explain "not my kid" and the format I was doing didn't give me an easy way to do that such that people would see it (again, not really a web guy).
This is one of the reasons I included the Facebook link at the bottom, because even someone completely outside my social circles will at least be able to look through profile pictures. And obviously the talk link shows me as well, in motion even! :) So people seeking appearance information should follow those.
...but yeah likely I should go do some more on this at some point. Will have to figure out what to do about (1)-(4).
*And even when other people take pictures of me, that's not necessarily something I can easily find, because it seems like these days people I know dump pictures on Facebook *without tagging them* so I can't even easily find the pictures of me later >_>
Hey, I'm Richard, male, 29, working in AI in San Francisco, looking for a female life partner who's highly intellectual, playful, and collaborative (three traits I also share).
Male, 25, USA, interested in finding a life partner of compatible stats, cis female, to do the regular upper-middle class thing: cohabitate, put off kids till 30+, make money with dual income, retire early, love eachother, have a nice life, occassionally travel... you know the drill!
Stats: 6'3, heterosexual, intj/infj, caucasian, conventionally attractive, 99th percentile creative & INT, minorly eccentric, majorly conscientious and self-controlled, income somewhere between 60-150k+ as my career develops, IT/Biz. I don't like or have a history in casual dating.
Contact me: dirgewriter (at) gmail if you're also sick of this dating market and ready to get on with your (otherwise great) life!
Hi! I'm looking for a longterm partner to have kids with, probably in the bay area and probably in Oakland. For more information, pictures, and contact info check out my dating doc on my website.
Hey, I like your tattoos. You look great. But I'm old enough to be your mother, so I'm just writing to say I think you should change the stand-in image you use here with your posts. It's of someone skinny, haunted and mistrustful, and after feeling startled when seeing your actual photo I realized that I thought of you as actually looking skinny, haunted and mistrustful.
Nothing works in Substack comments, we have to go back to the old days of putting in asterisks or underscores to indicate text formatting (but yet emojis work?)
Five years ago, me and other SSC readers launched Optimized Dating, a Discord chatroom for dating discussion and advice. We like helping people with their dating problems (mostly overly analytical nerdy type of people).
The idea is for inexperienced people to get advice from more experienced people who have similar backgrounds and dispositions, but also to just share knowledge about how to improve one's chances while dating. Sharing experiences, stories, setbacks and wins is encouraged.
Feel free to join and look around, each channel has pinned messages you may find helpful.
31 / M / Berkeley, looking for a monogamous LTR aimed at marriage + kid(s). Dating doc (including contact details): tinyurl.com/daterobert
A random legible thing demonstrating my good taste (in at least one domain) is what people have said about eating with me:
B: "Robert took me out to a great dining place last night... perhaps peak food experience, I get why people are foodies. I will now try to avoid ever going to great food places Robert advises again, I do not wish to lose myself to the temptation of spending lots of money on great food."
A: "I forgot that food could be this good." (approximate sentiment, not exact words)
I also have good taste in programming languages and friends (people generally agree they're excellent). My taste in music is controversial. I can successfully interface with government bureaucracy and own a car. Further details on request.
late to the party, but I have a Substack where I've written about AI, metascience, FDA regulatory policy, and progress studies topics. I call myself an aspiring "metascience blogger" as that is supposed to be the main theme now. So far my most read posts are on AI for medicine, Cerebrolysin, COVID-19, and the FDA: https://moreisdifferent.blog/archive?sort=top
Highlights include 'A very British 2050s', which got shared on Marginal Revolution. Posts range from geopolitics to creative ways to boost fertility rates.
Last month I commented here in an open thread asking for advice on quitting my job or sticking with it. I got a lot of good advice. But life forced my hand and I wrote about it recently on my blog. I cover a wide variety of topics, make some observations, complaints, and always have some tech nostalgia. Thanks in advance for reading.
I write about plenty of topics including depression, economics, and rationalism (along with the occasional villain rant) at https://affablyevil.substack.com/.
I'm a machine learning engineer working at a startup who has worked *a lot* with models like GPT and written a lot of prompts to do very complex reasoning tasks, so I think it's a worthwhile perspective.
Tonight I posted a deep, plain-English dive into whether Guardian Caps reduce brain injury among football players. This turned out to be a useful topic for illustrating several ways that statistics are misinterpreted. (I like "misinterpreted" - it encompasses the possibility of mistakes as well as intentional deception, and it's ambiguous as to whether we should blame the scientist or the reader.)
I have recently begun writing short stories. Most of my ideas are sci-fi but not exclusively. The one I have posted is called Glitches in the Outfield. It's about a world where physicists "break" the universe, and baseball players use it to change the game.
I really like the idea of having a "glitchy world" and want to write more stories based on it but I have a variety of things I want to write about. Here are some of the short stories I've been working on:
"Glitch world", where it's like a theme park
A hotel inside a black hole
A young arrogant universe simulator who creates a world but it falls apart when his subjects advance in technology too quickly
A war between AI against humans and mind uploads and the history of how that came to be.
A kid that gets really in to Rome and decides he wants to restore the Roman Empire(I actually posted this here a while back and did some minor edits, I just need to post it)
And I've also been working on one about a space knight who goes to a seedy bar and gets in trouble. This one is longer and has been taking up a lot of my time but I got a second draft done. If it goes well, I have a longer series conceived where he goes on various episodic adventures, but interstellar space is very different than what we think of.
Here's the first few paragraphs of Glitches in the Outfield:
“O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!”
We all cheered loudly for the game to begin. My family had never been to a Major League Baseball game before because it cost too much money. But it had been a crazy year for our family.
“Uncle Barry, can I get a hot dog, please!!!?”, Alex pleaded with me, as though his very life depended on it.
My son Derek obnoxiously chimed in. “You should have asked earlier when he was getting food. Now you’re going to starve!”
“Uncle, please! I don’t want to starve!”
I gently admonished Derek, “Be nice to your cousin. It’s a big day for him.” I turned to Alex. “Of course, I’ll get you one. Let me just watch the opening pitch.”
Following tradition, someone important was throwing the opening pitch. The governor would be doing us the honor today. Governors had been throwing the opening pitches for over a hundred years by this point but not like this. He stepped up to the plate. The governor wiped his right arm twice and then his left arm twice. He stepped forward and then back. Forward and back. Forward and back. He then tapped his head and launched the ball. As soon as he let go, it vanished.
Reappearing right in front of the catcher, the ball went right into his glove. The crowd went wild. The governor was sure to get a boost in popularity after that performance. The glitch was seemingly simple to pull off, but anyone who tried it knew it was anything but. You needed to pull off those moves in an extremely precise manner, or the game could crash.
Might just be a personal preference, but I think the dialogue exchange moves too quickly for how early in the story it is. We're still in the Worldbuilding Phase, so Alex should get a sentence or two about who he is before moving on to Derek's line, who gets a sentence or two before moving on to Mr. Narrator Man.
That's interesting because I figured I would get criticism for how little dialogue there is. World building actually takes up most of the rest of the story and the kids are more of a vehicle for introducing the world.
Well, I've only read the part you posted here. I'm kind of expecting one of the kids to catch a ball at some point, probably through a glitch of their own. And then maybe the pitcher uses a rewind glitch and they get upset.
...all right, after reading the whole thing; you've got three separate conflicting introductions here. You want EITHER the perspective from the audience, OR the perspective of the experts (you could move the story to a coach in the training room for that) OR the history of Connor (which I would say is the best option). Right now you've got all three, but the three styles don't flow into each other
...actually, it might work just to make Derek the History Of Science Exposition Boy. Mr. Narrator Man makes a comment about how they'd never seen a pitch like that when they were young, Alex asks a question, then Derek launches into the long diatribe about finding the glitches, and that makes Mr. Narrator Man reminisce about Connor's attempts. And then you still can keep the twist where the kids are watching their own relative play (and oh how relative he is, har har).
I am getting a phd in economics, and write almost every day about things I find interesting in economics. My last three articles have been about the effect of tax salience on tax rates, whether misallocation across firms in developing countries is simply a statistical artifact, and a substantial work summarizing the evidence for peer effects.
Upcoming over the next two weeks (these are just the half-completed drafts) will be a first sketch of a paper I’m writing on risk-aversion and increasing returns to skill, a piece explaining why vaccines are less profitable than drugs (drawing from Kremer), an article on why multi-industry conglomerates occur, a discussion of increasing returns and equilibrium unemployment, some thoughts on the durable good monopoly problem, an explanation of the theory, and an attack on the history, of industrial policy, an article on how we arrive at discount rates, an article on risk aversion focusing on a Chetty Szeidl paper, coverage of a paper alleging publication bias in the unemployment insurance literature (with the hopes of extending this to publication bias more generally), an assessment of whether R&D subsidies actually increase innovation, and if they do, by how much, and a love letter to Jean Sibelius.
Again, it can be found here at the link below. It is Tyler Cowen endorsed, and I hope that you decide I merit that praise. Thanks!
Also, to Scott Alexander: if you read my blog, and do not like it, I will donate $100 to Givewell. (Alright, even if you did like it, I’d donate it anyway). The point is, I think you *would* like it, and this is a credible signal that it is worthwhile. Comment on this to let me know if I should, thanks!
How important was the potato to urbanization and the development of technology? Drawing primarily on Nunn and Qian’s QJE paper, but with an extensive digression into the differences between China and Europe’s economic history.
Do institutional investors increase growth? As the size of firms increase, they internalize the gains of finding new ideas, but this trades off against allocative efficiency. Which is more important? Do investors, like Vanguard, allow for optimal innovation investment with allocative distortions?
The sharecropping problem — who should receive the residual from ex ante indescribable work? I show how optimal allocation changes depending on who is able to innovate, and suggest that it is impossible for a contractual structure to guarantee all socially optimal actions are taken.
I cover the history of endogenous growth models, and discuss how a small change in modeling assumptions leads to a really big difference in how we treat population’s relationship with innovation, and how this supports human capital first stories of development.
I'm a freelance editor. I offer proofreading, light editing, intensive editing, review, and conceptual writing support. Writing samples, prices and more information available on my website: https://amber-dawn-ace.com/
(2) (CHEAP) COACHING
I offer writing coaching: I'll give you advice on anything from the nuts and bolts of sentence structure, to writer's block, to the best way to convey your arguments.
I also offer generalist life coaching: we can talk through your problems and blocks. Some topics I'm particularly interested in include:
-internal conflicts and contradictions
-philosophical issues
-relationships, especially poly romantic relationships or other somewhat-unusual structures
-self-care
But I'm happy to talk about anything.
Since I'm new to this work, I'm currently charging a reduced rate of £15/hour for the first 3 hours; after that, I'll charge £45/hour.
I'm interested in trying out technical writing, that is: writing user-friendly instructions, manuals, documentation, and explanations for products. Do you want someone to write some instructions, FAQs, help pages etc for your website/app/device/machine/whatever? I might do this for *free* to test whether I enjoy it. Message or book a call to discuss: https://calendly.com/amber-ace/15min?month=2024-10
It's a “crowd-building” platform for solving collective action and coordination problems, by using assurance contract frameworks and transitional anonymity. It’s unlike any other crowdfunding, organizing, or mobilization tool out there.
*All beta testers receive white glove support from me directly in structuring and promoting a campaign, and a $50 gift card as a token of thanks upon campaign completion regardless of outcome.*
Criteria:
- You have a real-world application for Spartacus. (I.e. not a hypothetical scenario, but a campaign with real participants and a real goal).
- You are ready to start evaluating Spartacus right away, or at most within a few weeks.
- Your campaign has realistic success criteria: The deadline is not too far out, and the participant goal is reasonably attainable within that timeframe.
- You are willing to provide detailed feedback on the user experience.
- If successful, you are open to having your experience used as the basis for a case study that will be published and shared.
-You may use a pseudonym to maintain more privacy throughout this process.
Any businesses out there who need a reliable partner for their web presence, talk to Gotham City Drupal (https://www.gothamcitydrupal.com). We build using Open Source tools and host on award winning Pantheon.io, and our clients love us. Come join the fam! 🫶🏼
I write a (free!) monthly science and nature magazine for kids called "The Outside Scoop." It's focused on Western and Southern Michigan but suitable for much of the upper Midwest. You'll find kid-friendly phenology (seasonal nature observation) and a few in-depth articles each month to build a big picture of the ecosystems around us.
Subscriptions are, again, free, with an standards-aligned lesson suggestion doc also available for schools. This year I'm working on increasing my reach and hopefully finding a grant to support production and distribution in future years. Check it out at https://the-outside-scoop.mailchimpsites.com/ .
Help me beta-test my full-stack human development system ("Metamodern Yoga" placeholder name for now)
You have to develop all 4 of the following layers of your being at the same time, because developing only 1 at a time creates local progress at the cost of a shadow/anchor side effect. (This is why the people great at 1 of these don't ride that local greatness to general greatness and make humanity halfway competent at self-coordination)
(1) Mental: Progress toward enlightenment without the dark nights of the soul
(2) Emotional: Progress toward Jungian individuation, integration and fruitful creation between the ego/shadow and masc/fem
(3) Physical: Progress toward the Greek statue/athlete ideal of aesthetics/performance without the health issues of many world-class athletes/models
(4) Behavioral: Progress toward next-gen agency and connection without the behavioral scandals marring many leaders/gurus/etc.
Email me at hunterglenn92@yahoo.com about any mental/strategic, emotional/creative, health/beauty, agency/connection problem you'd like help with, or a pre-existing strength you'd like to bring to its greatest potential, and we'll figure it out from there! <3
I'm a freelance editor specializing in science fiction and fantasy, though I've worked with a number of other fiction genres (mysteries and historical novels are probably the next best fits), and occasionally interesting non-fiction. I have a slightly odd pricing pattern: I don't charge for hours, I charge for (500-word) pages ($2-$8/page, depending on how much editing is required - $2 is "a little polishing", $8 is "one page took me half an hour"), so it's easy for me to tell you the exact price as soon as I've received the document. I also have a 5-free-pages offer; if you have never hired me before, send me the first five pages (2,500 words) of whatever you want edited, and I will edit and return them for free. This also allows me to tell you what pricing category the work falls into. Second and later passes are half price. For more information please see my website (http://arpistaediting.com/).
Given inflation I'm planning to raise prices in the new year, so if you've been thinking you really should get your novel edited this is a good time to get your estimate locked in!
Try my Steam game! It's a chess roguelite where you play chess with a large number of exciting and powerful abilites—and the enemies have powerful abilities of their own. The game is chock-full of references to popular chess variants (Atomic Chess, Monster Chess, Duck Chess, etc) and effectively meshes a bunch of different unorthodox styles of chess play.
Our reviews are very positive, and some of our players have played the game for dozens or over a hundred hours. The game spans a very wide range of difficulty, so it's accessible for chess beginners while having super hard levels available for experts.
If you have an emotional, motivational, or social goal or issue that would be extremely valuable to you iff resolved, you may be able to resolve it quickly by talking to me.
I operate on a bounty system: pay only if you’re satisfied, whenever you’re ready.
★ (Bounty claimed) A man I met at Manifest had lifelong anxiety he wanted to resolve, even after “8 years of talk therapy” and “1 year of actively seeking exposure to scary situations”. After one conversation with me, he considers his social anxiety resolved (two months so far). He is also significantly more agentic now, as he wished.
☆ (Bounty ongoing) A founder in SF had a persistent inability to express attraction he wanted to resolve, even after “3 years of IFS therapy”, etc. After one conversation with me, he has since asked two people out comfortably.
☆ (Bounty ongoing) A woman working in tech in SF struggled with lifelong self-doubt she wanted to resolve, even after “9+ years of coaching and therapy”. After three conversations with me: “[…] The results are already telling: a disappointment that might’ve made me emotionally bleed and mope for a month was something I addressed in the matter of a couple of days with only a scoop of emotional self-doubt instead of *swimming* in self-torture. […];”
☆ (Bounty ongoing) A woman: ”I have a history of complex trauma and have spent most of my life terrified and depressed.” After three conversations with me: “I’m doing more self-improvement and productive things now. I definitely don't live in bliss every day, but I don't feel that my life or my relationship is in crisis anymore. Things feel light and hopeful.”
(Detailed reviews are linked.)
Who this is for:
I'm currently hunting 8 bounties, the median is worth $11,500 if resolved. So this is best if you have been stuck for multiple years, “have tried everything else”, and don’t expect to resolve your issue soon otherwise.
(If you have status that other people trust, I’m open to helping for free. This is still very early so getting more credibility helps me help more people.)
This is for people who really want to grow, but don’t know how. Emotional, motivational, and social issues are usually a fit, and I will tell you asap if I can’t help you so we save our energy. While sustained results may take multiple conversations, you will know in our first conversation whether this will eventually work for your goal.
If you’d like to do a 15 min call with me first, just email me chris@chrislakin.com.
My wife has her science/stem and nature jewellery shop ohpluto.com
She designs, manufactures, packages it all herself (laser cutter in the garage).
She likes to have niche designs for various specialisations, and we find that lots of customers get a kick out of wearing her distinctive designs at events.
She also designed her own acrylic reclamation process where she can remix and press offcuts (again in the garage) from the laser cutting, into new sheets which she uses for a line of recycled jewellery designs.
If you have a special event, corporate thing, wedding, conference etc. she also does bespoke design consulting for volume (>50).
Most monitoring tools are frustrating. They have complex setups, rigid pricing, and confusing dashboards. They charge more as you grow, penalizing success.
I wanted a tool that:
+ Scales with you: Pay only for what you use, without subscriptions or hidden fees.
+ Gives real-time alerts: When something breaks, you know right away.
+ Has simple, clear pricing: 50,000 checks for $1. Monitor as often as every minute.
How It Works
+ Pay-as-you-go: Every user gets 1600 free credits a day. That’s enough to run a check every minute, all day. If you need more, you can get 50,000 credits for $1, or check out the pricing structure over here (https://cassie.fm/checkout).
+ Easy setup: Sign up, add your monitor, and you're good to go. No complicated configurations.
+ Instant alerts: Get notified by email, SMS, or webhooks the moment something goes wrong.
Important Note: Beta Program
Cassie.fm is currently in pre-beta, and we’re limiting access to 50 users for now. We want to ensure the service runs smoothly as we gather feedback and continue improving. If you can't get in, and you really really want to, fill out the support form (https://cassie.fm/support), and mention that you're coming from here.
What’s Next?
I use Cassie.fm myself, so I’ll keep adding features that matter. Coming soon: more integrations, deeper analytics, customizable alerts, and response structure checks.
Frec is like investing in index funds, but better. Instead of buying 1 ETF that is a basket of 500 stocks, you buy all 500 stocks individually so we can tax loss harvest for you. This is how rich people have been investing for decades, but now with fractional shares anyone can do it. And we're almost as cheap as index funds (10 bps). E-mail me Daniel@frec.com if you want to learn more.
We write the world's first version-controlled SQL database, Dolt. It's like Git and MySQL had a baby. Free to download and run, paid hosting and support available.
I run weekly local rationality meetups in Waterloo, Ontario. If you read this blog you should definitely come check us out. Next week we're doing a byo laptop research party where we're going to try to evaluate and rank local charities, so the more bodies/heads/computers we have the better :]
Here's the YouTube channel for Fluidity Forum, a metarationality conference in September. I hope you'll plan to attend our meetup in 2025. I'm in the middle of editing and posting the videos of talks and workshops from our second annual event, so if you subscribe, you'll get several more videos in October.
(P.S. Eric Lanagan is in the process of putting all the episodes of my UNSONG Audiobook on Soundwise, for free, as a proper audiobook so you can listen to it all in one go.)
I'm looking for people to play Inflection Point with me. It's a real time turn based military strategy game, kinda like Civ, but simpler. It's completely free to play and runs in the browser.
I'm running an open table D&D 5E game that could use more players. It's a megadungeon campaign focused on low-commitment, pickup-style play: we go into the dungeon with whoever happens to be available on a given day, and get the characters back to the starting town by the end of the session. (Downside is not a lot of super deep plot development. I put some interesting stuff in the dungeon and if you have interesting ideas for your character I'll try to play around with them a bit, but no promises. On the other hand if you fit in well in this game I'll keep you in mind if I end up trying to run something more ambitious.)
New and experienced players all welcome, message placidplatypus on Discord (or if that doesn't seem to be getting through reply here and we'll figure it out).
I'm looking for people who seriously believe that one of the greatest problems of our times is the disconnection and alienation of humans beings to each other (loneliness crisis, etc), precipitated by the rise of technology. Open to any and all ideas, thoughts and solutions related to increasing isolation, and I currently live in SF if you want to meet in person.
I do seriously believe this. Relatedly, I have an idea to solve the fertility/depopulation crisis by starting a gene drive in humans to make all births be of twins. Everyone having a twin might also solve the loneliness problem. Existing evidence for this is that twins have higher life expectancy than non-twins, which might be caused by a general increase in life success due to always having a friend to aid you.
Hi, sounds like an interesting thought. I am a monozygotic twin and I actually think I have never experienced what other people describe as 'loneliness'. Of course I have wanted to experience more popularity and stuff like that, but to not have a person I could talk with is just something outside my experience. As a drawback, talking with mainly one person have probably stranded me with a much smaller network than normal people.
All that said, I don't think you will be able to convince the average woman to do anything which woukd increase their chances of having twins. It is just seen as too hard to be pregnant with two children at once.
The idea is to genetically modify everyone such that their births are guaranteed to be of twins. If the genetic trait is made to be dominant (guaranteed to pass to descendants) then only a few people need be modified, and the afterwards the twin gene will naturally spread to the rest of humanity over the next few hundred years.
There already exist some populations who have a much higher than usual occurence of dizygotig twins, and some fertility drugs also increase it. But I don't see how you would get enough people interested in this. It seems most mothers prefer to give birth to singletons (boring), and if you were to start messing around with modifying human genes there would probably be a lot of other things that people would want first, like lowering the risk of all sorts of diseases.
This is why the gene drive is so good, it doesn't matter what people want from genetic engineering. The children of any person with the twin gene will also have the twin gene, so it will inevitably spread throughout the entire population, no matter whether the idea of 'all births should be of twins' has political support. People won't deliberately choose to have twins, they will just meet and have kids with someone who has the twin gene, and then their children will also be twins.
Hi, I believe this, and I have some hope that shifting our aim away from unity and toward harmony instead might be part of a next-gen culture that helps humanity coordinate better, solve half its problems with halfway-competent coordinated action, and enjoy much more connection together along the way.
I'm trying to organize a free, in-person educational workshop on basic Python programming in the Philadelphia/Delco/Montco area. Target audience is people who are complete beginners with no programming background, who want to learn the basics either to pursue it as a career or just for fun/curiosity.
I've taught this workshop a couple times before, and am now trying to turn it into a recurring, semi-official free education project.
Anyone live around here (Philly / suburbs) and want to help? If so, send me an email at mikest[at]udel[dot]edu!
Do you know if there is anything similar in the SF Bay Area? (Yes, I know I am the only person in the Bay Area who doesn't know how to code and doesn't have a Substack)
Inspired by Scott Alexander's post on missing developmental milestones, I have been trying to come up with a questionnaire to determine whether a person is statistically literate or not. (By statistical literacy I mean a nebulous general perspective on the world rather than knowledge of specific techniques.)
If you are willing to take the questionnaire and give me feedback, email me at lw@xkqr.org. If you are a reader of this comment section, you are just the sort of person I want help from!
I have deliberately not done that because the feedback I would like at this stage is a little more involved. I aim for self-selection of people who care enough to devote a few extra minutes.
Not being able to see it makes it impossible to estimate the effort involved, which means people (like me) who might be on the border of being willing to give extended feedback are just not going to follow up.
You've heard of artist residencies, where people go all sorts of places to ponder the nature of Beauty and conversely. Well there's no reason why scientists can't have fun too.
We are a small nonprofit research lab hosting scientific residencies in Southern France, in the Pyrenees mountains:
We welcome any research topic (we're mainly from physics, biology and history but we've had philologists, computer scientists etc -- and some artists too). Hoping to see some of the ACX crowd!
I am creating a bizarre (novel-length) work of fiction*, the most WeDoTheodicyInThisHouse piece of fiction currently imaginable. (That's super-helpful, I know, for the like 5 people reading this who know my personal brand.)
Pitch1: "The combined voices of Tolstoy, Harper Lee, ermm... The Book of Genesis, Amy Tan, CS Lewis, Ender Wiggin, and George MacDonald speak wisdom and shed light upon Reality that help the MC save sanity from the ashes! In 2027 America." Do you think you want to help birth a project like this into existence? Well, have I got an idea (errm, note: a very *general* idea) of how you can waste all your spare time between now and December 17th!! (and beyond. assuredly, beyond as well.)
Pitch2: "Do you want to see a work of fiction where you reasonably and tangibly feel that stating ones own opinions is hazardous, but listening to others deeply is a way to gain... effectively... skills and XP?" (Well, actually, there's probably a dozen or more works like that: list ones you can think of in the comments!)
So... yeah, I will be looking for a variety of kinds of help! Here's the area I'd like help for that's currently most salient: Basically, sometimes a person is creating something and it's a stupid idea to invest a bunch in it. Or--maybe it's fine to invest a bunch of thought and energy into writing ones first novel† because they needed to break through the barrier of "I can't" so that by the time they write their 16th novel 40 years later, it'll be great. For example. But in that case, maybe investing a bunch of money in advertising it would be a STUPID idea even if investing a bunch of effort in creating it, in order to grow, is a worthy idea. So, "many counselors makes for great victory," or what-have-you.
Feel free to reply here, or at wedotheodicyinthishouse @ g, or any ole place you may be able to find me at.
* Disclaimer: I know that everyone who writes fiction thinks their new, cool idea for is a perfect, snowflakely little baby.
† Note: Yes, I know; I'm not claiming that in my case, an actual novel will be what comes out on the other end.
EDIT: formatting. thought i could italicize with underscores. i cannae.
The same way living in a house doesn't automatically teach you about the internal structure of a house, such that you can build a house without any extra knowledge, reading novels doesn't automatically teach you about the internal structure of a novel, such that you can write a novel without any extra knowledge.
It is a very good idea to invest a bunch of thought and energy into writing your first novel! Super worthwhile. Everybody should write novels! Expect that it'll be pretty bad. That's fine and normal. Don't spend money on advertising. Very, very, very few people's first novel will be commercially viable. Do spend some money on books on the craft of fiction. I particularly like and recommend A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders, although that deals with short stories. The principles are relevant.
Second piece of advice: show your work to people whose taste you respect and who are genuinely willing to tell you it's bad. Get them to read through it and mark down their reactions in the margins. Try to get them to avoid telling you what to do, since they'll be wrong. They're not helping you fix your manuscript; they're lab rats you're testing on. Does this joke land? Is this clue too easy, or too hard? Is this sad part actually sad?
Third piece of advice: learn what POV is and how it works; it's not obvious, and many, many new writers end up writing incomprehensible nonsense that they can't tell is incomprehensible nonsense because they don't understand it. Saying "third person omniscient" after the fact does not un-confuse your readers and so is not an excuse to break the rules.
I could go on and on about this, I'll stop now.
(Source: I have an MFA in fiction writing & have written 7 novels; I haven't published any of them, nothing I've written is up to my standards, writing is hard)
A lesson I learned from doing a few years of NaNoWriMo and personal novel writing projects: Every story I complete is better than the last, regardless of the strength of the idea that spawned it.
You learn a lot from finishing things and encountering the challenges of writing a story that aren't obvious from the outset. That's not to say you shouldn't advertise it, but if this is the first project of this size you're tackling I would definitely view it more as an investment in learning than a business venture. You can always ramp up advertising later if the finished project if it turns out really well.
Looking for really solid curriculum on any practical subject. Something where you can be assured that once you complete the course you will be proficient in the subject. See LearnCraft Spanish for reference.
Curriculum quality is underrated imo, which is why subject isn't as important to me here. Just like learnin.
Hello, I am also interested in this topic due to my working on literacy issues. I am curious whether you are interested in this for personal reasons or whether all forms of good curriculum count? I have lots of recommendations of curriculum but they are for elementary schoolers learning to read, so probably not applicable for you personally.
Thalassa Crusoe wrote 2 books about gardening in maybe the 1950's. One's called Making Things Grow and one's called Make Things Grow Outdoors. The first is more or a curriculum than the second, because the second is also the story or her bringing back a long-neglected garden. She only writes about plants grown for their beauty, not vegetable gardening. Anyhow, the first book is the only book I've ever read about growing indoor plants, and I don't think I'll ever need another. When I first read it I tried some of her info about how to propagate plants, & some of the ways were pretty exotic, but she describes how to do it precisely and all my propagations worked. Also, she writes well. She's entertaining, and very clear. She was an old-fashioned British horticulturalist, absolutely loved gardening, and really knew her stuff. I'm sure there are lots of secondhand copies of the hardback Making Things Grow around at nice low prices.
I would be keen to hear recommendations for a good electronics curriculum. Would be nice to have a better intuition for how to design/build/troubleshoot simple (then increasingly advanced) circuits
Thanks for the +1. 10 more to go and I'll organize notes. It's a significant amount of time to do, so I want to make sure there's at least 11 people I can send info to.
Basically, I used CBT heuristics to rate 225 dates, ranking each date with a 100 pt scale. The hardest part was sticking to heuristic and not pursuing bad outcomes in favor of "romance." My wife scored 96. We just had our first baby after several years of happy marriage.
225 dates!! With how many unique people? I’ve been at least 1 date with — I think — 7 total people in my 34 years of life thus far. If you do wind up prepping notes, don’t underestimate what the inferential distance might be between you and your readers!
by dates i mean people. 225 people. it was hard, emotionally. the fact that it was covid actually helped with the number. i was able to meet most people virtually. met about 2 dates per day at my peak dating time.
Husband suggested I post and advertise myself here. I am an artist who works mainly in watercolor painting, woodworking, and the Japanese art of Kanzashi.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/savagemadnessart/
See what I have for sale! https://www.etsy.com/shop/SavageMadness
Want to support my work? For only $3 a month get full access to every piece and early viewing. Check out my patreon https://www.patreon.com/SavageMadness
I write a substack talking about AI and the business change needed to take advantage of the opportunities. A tech-optimist view from Europe, specifically Scotland/ UK. https://kennyfraser.substack.com/
------------------------------ EMPLOYMENT ------------------------------
I work for Otherbranch, a tech hiring startup founded and staffed by former Triplebyte employees. Surprisingly enough, our list of clients offering open roles is currently outpacing the growth of our candidate pool. So if you're a SWE, we want to get you hired for them.
When you sign up and tell us what you're looking for, we keep an eye out for incoming roles that match your interests and skills. Then we'll schedule you for a 90-minute technical interview. Based on your performance, we can vouch for your skills directly to employers and expedite you through the first few steps of their application process. Some other perks:
- You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
- It's free. Our paycheck comes from the employer's side.
- Whether you pass, fail, or crush our interview, you'll get detailed feedback on every section so you know exactly how you did.
If this sounds appealing to you, check out https://www.otherbranch.com/landing-j-engineers to learn more and sign up. You can also send me an email at jonah@otherbranch.com if you have additional questions.
(If you want us to help you hire engineers for your company, we're of course happy to work with you as well! You can learn more about that side of the process at https://www.otherbranch.com/landing-j-employers.)
I'm getting laid off as an economics professor at the end of the school year, and while I'm going through the normal job channels, I figured I'd put my name out there. If anyone on the West Coast is looking for an economist, particularly one specializing in behavioral economics, or looking to hire anyone with the skillset of an economist, let me know.
Web developer with a few years of experience looking for most any kind of work. Most of my skills are in Ruby/Rails and JS/React but I've also dabbled a little bit in Python and Java, and I'm up to learn whatever. Located in the Boston area, open to remote or maaaybe relocating depending where and for what. I've got a pretty big resume gap at this point so I'm prepared to be pretty flexible on pay and possibly other stuff if needed.
Also open to volunteer work for a good cause.
Either way you can reply here or email paulsaywardgoodman, gmail.
My girlfriend is looking for a job as a PM or estimator in SF or the Bay Area. She has several years experience managing larger projects and home construction
Looking for a job related to AI safety / evals / alignment. Strong background in data science and ml engineering. Tired of working remote, want to work in-person at least part of the time. Looking for full-time role. Will discount salary expectations in accordance with my estimate of the value to humanity of the job. I'm sick of automated coding tests, if you want to pre-screen me then give me a work trial task.
Wanna sue animal abusers? 🐥⚖️❤️
ACX-funded nonprofit Legal Impact for Chickens seeks a litigator!
https://legalimpactforchickens.org/staff-attorney-or-managing-attorney
I'm hiring for AI research at the Astera institute in Emeryville, California.
Team members may work remotely up to 2 days per week on a regular basis, and as needed for special circumstances. We are willing and able to sponsor visas if needed.
We are willing and able to sponsor visas if needed. Please apply through the URLs below. You can email me garymm <at> astera.org if you have questions that are not answered by the job listings.
software engineer: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/astera/30d5ef40-eea7-4a2f-a7cf-28accbd9062c
research intern: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/astera/cb9a9572-8b24-436a-aa22-d543f6faa27b
I'm looking for software or operations roles at small/medium sized startups, preferably mission driven places, preferably at least partially in person in the bay area. I trained as a scientist but after my PhD decided to move to the private sector, and have been at a biggish startup for a little over a year since. I've loved my time here but we aren't doing too hot and I'm starting to ponder what's next, would love to chat with interesting places.
I mostly self-taught programming for science and then have been doing a mix of operations and informal software engineering at work. I really just enjoy solving impactful problems, and am pretty tool-agnostic, and I like slotting into different roles as need shift.
Would love to chat more (and happy to share my actual identity privately), reach me at cubecumbered@gmail.com.
I'm on track to finish a PhD in clinical psychology, and it's looking about 70% likely that I won't be continuing in academia so I'm on the lookout for anything that is more impactful than psychology research - a low bar. My intuition is that I'm most suited to grant evaluation or something similar that requires broad knowledge and skills. I'm based in the Netherlands but open to remote work or moving, to an extent. You can contact me at my gmail address which starts with laurensk90.
Another lawyer. 10+ years in criminal defense litigation, at every level from pre-trial to trial to appeals, in both state and federal courts. This includes all kinds of offenses from narcotics to homicide to white collar crime. I've done it all, including investigations, discovery, motions practice, first and second chairing trials (including winning my last homicide a month ago), and writing and arguing before appellate courts.
Looking for a midlife career transition to something that does not involve the mental stress of working with people's lives immediately in the balance. Special interest in tech, politics, history. Probably remote, but the right position might change that.
Dear ACXers,
here's a physicist (M.Sc.) with both strong hands-on experience and solid statistical/ML experience, looking for new opportunities. I specialized in biophysics for my Master, due to my life-long interest in biology (additionally to physics, obviously) and have a solid base knowledge in biology, too.
The last few years I worked in IT-related positions (requirements, specification, coding, DB-work), but I am now looking to get back into a job more involved with physics, biology, and engineering. Before that I gained some experience in systems and requirements engineering in the semiconductor world.
Due to my private interests, I also bring a lot of practical skills, from knowing my way around any toolbox to 3D-printing and CAD and some basic soldering.
I like to get sh*t done, talk less, do more, but I can still present very well and concise in front of suits. I also love to properly work in a team and teach others, if the opportunity presents itself. I dislike completely isolated work, I have had enough of that in my life. I get along very well with all kinds of engineers, coders, and even managers and investors as long as I don't have to participate in office politics.
I am particularly interested in STEM R&D like aerospace, semiconductors, medical. Thanks for reaching out!
Hello, I'm a nuclear security lawyer looking for new job opportunities. Remote or DC. Besides the nuclear niche, I have experience in environmental law, administrative law, and policy writing and communication. Would love to do something towards environmental law reform.
Hi everyone, I want to do (1) free coaching with my next-gen full-stack human dev system
and
(2) paid teaching of remote improv piano, and voice.
Here's my (1) DNA Piano Lesson in 16m, and (2) me singing *Hallelujah/haMephorash* (by Leonard Cohen and Scott Siskind)
DNA Piano Lesson
https://youtu.be/u8JwXve-h_8
Hallelujah/haMephorash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1wRHcihtRQ
Hi, can you provide more detail on 1?
You have a wonderful presence in those videos.
Thank you very much! Let me know if I can be of help <3
Hello! I'm looking for some unspecified job, remote or in Yerevan, Armenia (other locations are unlikely), regular or one-time.
I'm a former academic researcher in applied math with few up-to-date skills (Python, machine learning, scripts etc., bits of C++) and rusty math background. I'm willing to learn something new but am probably best suited to work on something related to math/numbers, data, and/or programming. (I also tried tutoring but I'm not enough of a pedagogue, the only significant success I had was with a pupil who found their own motivation and I just helped.)
I guess my main selling point is that by US/EU standards I don't expect to be paid that much.
ACX,
I am a CS grad a year of SWE experience at a manufacturing company looking to move to a more challenging and interesting job, ideally hybrid in the bay area or remote.
What I am most looking for (and missing now) is a role with collaboration, tight feedback loops, and room to grow. Just about any startup with good culture would intrigue me, along with companies in hard tech, finance, and biotech/pharma.
I am an enthusiastic generalist; I have a minor in physics, and wish I got the double major. My greatest strength in my current role is being able to sit in on a meeting of seasoned mechanical and electrical engineers and figure out exactly how my QC test software needs to behave based on their technical concerns.
The tools I use at my job are mostly C# .NET (MVVM, Entity Framework) and SQL. I am strong in Python, and proficient in C and C++. I've done a computer vision project involving simulated training data and transfer learning, and also contributed data analysis to a genomics project.
Above all, I am looking for a team of curious individuals who will push me to become a better programmer.
I would greatly appreciate any inquiries or career advice, I can be reached at jakestenger5@gmail.com.
I'm a hobbyist programmer based in India looking for remote work. I don't specialize in anything because I'm more of a generalist. I mainly code in Python and have dabbled in other languages when needed, such as JavaScript. I'm familiar with some front-end too, but I primarily like building APIs (Flask, FastAPI, etc.), bots, backend services, scripts, etc. I like building prototypes and MVPs.
I've been coding here and there on my personal projects since 2018 and never really considered it as a career, and I still don't, but I need to get a job right now, and I thought my skills could be useful somewhere. I believe I'm quite efficient when creating "just works" things for personal projects.
I'm offering affordable labor for anyone interested due to my current financial circumstances. I need some stability, and this is going to be my first traditional job.
My only deal-breaker requirement from the job is async communication and low/no group meetings. If interested, contact me at q0wbdmo7j@mozmail.com.
------------------------------ DATING ------------------------------
Woman, 44, Seattle, no kids and looking for a long-term monogamish relationship with a straight man. I'd be most comfortable with someone who's either child-free or has not-super-young kids,; my floor for being "good with kids" is probably about 8 years old. As a bit of an introvert, I'd really enjoy indefinitely maintaining separate households but frequently visiting and/or spending weekends together.
I am very much a grownup. I'm employed full-time, own a condo and a car, and am responsible and fair-minded. I'm difficult to offend, very slow to anger, quick to forgive, and I'm a huge fan of advice because it's more efficient to learn from other people's mistakes than one's own. I bond deeply with loved ones, but between being rational-minded and most of my closest friends being men, I have a straightforward, pragmatic manner that tends to be more common in men than in women and can be disconcerting for people expecting (and wanting) stereotypically feminine displays of intense emotional expression.
I have great taste in restaurants and media and love talking about both. I have a few weirdo quirks, like hating bananas and pho while loving plantains and ramen, and being irrationally annoyed with the characters in organized crime dramas for not finding less dangerous work, but otherwise I have a broad, educated palate in both food and media. I get equally excited about grimy taquerias and pristine white tablecloth gourmet seafood. I watch Shogun *and* Bluey.
I think I'd be an excellent partner for someone who finds most of the above roughly recognizable in themselves and appealing in others. Based on advice I once received in the comments on an ACX thread, I've concluded that the ability I'd admire most and require of an intimate partner is a history of changing his mind about *big* things and a conscious commitment to being open to doing so.
My main dating profile and some writing is on Fetlife under my username here minus the "Christina." Email is my username here at Gmail.
Edit to add:
Well, since including the Big Five has become a trend in this Classifieds, I might as well go along with the crowd and see if I can boost my Agreeableness a bit. I took this no-doubt unscientific test here (https://bigfive-test.com/):
* Contentiousness: 99, with Cautiousness at 20/20, Dutifulness 19/20, Self-Efficacy 18/20.
* Agreeableness: 87, with Morality 20/20, Cooperation 18/20, Altruism 17/20. That last one needs explanation in that I almost certainly didn't answer it the way most people did; my altruistic inclinations are only ever processed first through "Morality."
* Openness to Experience: 80, with Imagination 20/20, Artistic Interests 19/20, Intellect 18/20, and Emotionality at a hilariously low 11/20 with Liberalism even lower at 8/20. This *totally* tracks for me.
* Extraversion: 67, with Assertiveness at 18/20 and Cheerfulness at 16/20. Some context on the assertiveness is that I never especially *want* to scrap with someone for the adrenaline rush or whatever; rather, I get *dragged* into being assertive when it seems like there's a moral need to do so.
* Neuroticism: 56, with Anxiety at 14, Immoderation at 13, and Self-Consciousness at 12. The highest score being anxiety makes sense to me; you can't have a lot of imagination without imagining what could go wrong. Anger is a 5 and Depression a 4, which I think accurately reflects my naturally high hedonic set-point, I think.
34F, San Jose, working on the dating doc I swear. Monogamous; looking for a bright, interesting young man who is interested in marriage, children, and talking about books (and occasionally interesting articles, like the ones on this substack!). I feel as if enjoying talking with someone is a pretty strong requirement for long-term compatibility, and relatively easy to check.
I also play D&D, cook, play harp, and do a variety of kinds of dance (mostly historical, but sometimes other social dancing as well). I'm a libertarian. I would not call myself a rationalist, though I do read some rationalist authors. I think after SSC/ACX, the one I found most interesting was Unitofcaring.
I'm probably unusually risk averse for this community, and approve of being so (e.g.: I have never gotten drunk past "just enough to know what it feels like" and never intend to, have never tried drugs, etc. - and have no desire to change this!) I don't feel that trying things before judging them is necessarily a good idea, and I tend to like tried-and-true solutions above novel ones for important things (see monogamous). If this is a dealbreaker for you, now you know!
Oh, and I'm Christian.
45M, salary mid-$300s, debating retirement, location censored.
High neuroticism, low agreeableness and extroversion, intermediate openness and conscientiousness, hetero-and-change (moderately kinky), 5'9", ugly/balding/mildly obese (BMI 31), white/Latin/technically Jewish.
Politics: neither woke nor fascist, that's about all I can say for sure.
I'm pretty boring but I have about 1000 books in my crappy one-bedroom.
You want to *date* me? Have you *read* any of my comments?
(I'm assuming jokes are OK as long as you're not mocking anyone *else*?)
> "You want to *date* me? Have you *read* any of my comments?"
I suspect that this level of self-awareness automatically bumps you pretty close to the front of the queue for those that are self-aware themselves. :)
40 / F / Upstate New York / looking for monogamy with the potential for marriage
My date me doc (haven’t updated since June but other than losing weight since then, which I doubt is a downside, no real change): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-0Jxk4hj_Q36NZvP1NQsmsA3r5MPfJ5B2bar2w3XUJo/edit
Oh since people are listing their Big 5: Low neuroticism, low extraversion, high openness, high agreeableness, high conscientiousness.
Hello! I am an 18F in the Midwestern US.
I hope to attend Hillsdale College in the coming academic year to study their Pre-Law program. In the meantime, I'm working at a fab (fabrication) shop.
When I'm not working, I like to practice Brazilian Jiujitsu and CrossFit. I also play Skyrim, read Substack, and volunteer at my church (I'm Orthodox.)
I'm a socially conservative libertarian. ( I ❤️ Mises to pieces!)
Stats: 5'4", hetero, ENTP, white(would be interested in someone Latino; I speak good Spanish), a 7 according to the 4chan ranking chart, low neuroticism/conscientiousness, high openness
You may DM me.
Hi! 30M, currently in NYC but willing to relocate. Here's a very thorough dating doc someone wrote about me:
https://fortunate-dragon-241.notion.site/Robi-Rahman-18dc6efe060a43f08163d67832f13719
Okay, that's incredibly low on neuroticism. Really?
It's true! Very consistent finding of all my OCEAN results.
(M/24) I'm a nerdy farmer from the midwestern US. Looking for the quiet life and a good crop of kids? Send me a DM; who knows, we might hit it off.
Midwest = Michigan?
Very funny. :/
https://images.app.goo.gl/6QtiGr6duuQAk3aU6
Hello! Female / 25 / UK (open to re-locate) I’m insatiably curious and looking for a long term relationship/ marriage/ kids with a monogamous guy. I've no history and not likely to be flippant here as I'm as socially awkward as you'd imagine a girl on here would be.
I’m looking for that typical life stuff to be non-typical and have a big emphasis on curiosity/ be made better by good conversation and curiosity day to day. I know sometimes people see people very invested in abstract more ultimate level goals and progress as anti-close proximate connections but I think they are incredibly compatible and people are doing something a bit wrong if progress on one level isn't also informing and improving progress in other levels. I've a couple of big projects I'm edging toward once I'm out of student-ing. So I’m pretty motivated by understanding abstract ideas but also equally by nurturing connections with family and friends.
I’m looking for someone who is (dare i say it) intelligent? not in the ‘i’m better than you sense’ or the ‘i have lots of facts sense’ but in the ‘i care deeply about curiosity as a value/ principle sense and will consider things patiently sense'. (and kind!)
Feel welcome to DM here,
(even if just to be friends!! :)
odds are if you read this we have a lot in common,
or on my email on arabella.a.anca@gmail (dot) com
Best of luck!
Also want to note: In weighing up the risks of sounding overly keen against the knowledge that many men assume 'womanlyness' in the context of dating makes for lots of attention and therefore low likelihood of a response or consideration - this is not actually true! so if you are shy don't be.
I'm also open to constructive feedback on what's important to know in this sort of thing.
You can fully and honestly intend to carefully consider messages and then under the weight of (without exaggeration) thousands of them simply not; many such cases, as they say. This is why *you* should message *me*.
Yes this is the reasoning behind my awkward flagging / reassurance message - It is actually an exaggeration *in this context* (I'm going to be a little optimistic and attribute it to the context than me for now) but I have so far received exactly 1 message for friendship and 1 enquiring re: a date.
You're dead right on the likes of dating apps like okcupid etc where very varied populations of men characteristically swipe on almost everyone to ensure not missing a match that women get overwhelmed despite their generally better intentions to respond to everyone. Let me tell you this broke my heart a few months ago when I started online dating and spent hours in well meaning attempts to write apology messages paired with honest explanations to hundreds of guys which were obviously not my kind of person, in most cases a bit lower in openness and emotional stability.
But I don't think this dynamic carries forward in spaces like this (unless you are a woman investing a lot of time in public identity development) where it filters out flippant effort to a certain extent and I do believe people in this sphere are exactly the type to analyse a situation and be more tentative to action where even low probability negative potentials exist.
Hm. I'm not especially pretty and photograph vastly worse than that, so I don't use anything photo-based. I'm generalizing from things more like the date-me-doc model; one time I got a few rounds of increasingly stressed and agonized "I promise to respond to everyone, really!" mass emails until they finally, mercifully, stopped; rather souring me on the whole practice. I wouldn't have sent anything, had I predicted that! (The foregoing lightly falsified for anonymity.)
At any rate consider dating me! I *guess* I can send a message introducing myself but I don't actually build myself out of punchy taglines anyone can get a handle on. (Working on it, unfortunately.)
It's true this modern dating culture is incredibly emotionally harmful and I think it's actually *rational* to feel soured by the process. Sorry in proper ACX fangirl fashion I realise I'm going off my practical goal here and using it to segway to broader theory but I think people especially mathsy shape rotators that make up a large portion of ACXers often don't view emotions as a *rational* source of information thing but a kinda inefficient deficit to overcome. Basically I'm saying, to feel bad about something bad is good, it shows the emotions are working right.
I also think a kind of overlooked thing is that it isn't emotionally different for women who get a lot of attention on dating apps (I think ppl overestimate the ego boost entirely) because they are seeing first hand the sheer volume of people in the world that are incompatible and it's a kind of more abstract rejection. If anything it's kinda like a scary added responsibility because you can feel lonely and have people throwing themselves toward you for very shallow reasons and yet you've to analyse if it would actually work alright for everyone and then hold the responsibility to be *disagreeable* on top of that when women are very naturally more *agreeable*. It's hard for everyone I guess in different ways. Definitely a fun topic for a longer form post sometime possibly.
But yes I'm so happy to chat to absolutely anyone from these kind of ideasphere to see if we get along.
Sure, why not. :) Hi, I'm Harry, a mathematician (though not professionally) who can talk your ear off about writing numbers with ones! :D (And various other things, many of them not math-related.) (You may have seen some of my writing on the internet before, as Sniffnoy? I wrote an old article on LessWrong about Savage's Theorem, for instance...) I'm male, 37 years old, interested in women, and living in New York City; and I prefer polyamory but am not necessarily fixed on it. I like taking pictures of bugs and birds and other city wildlife. Once, I sniffed a dog's butt; it stunk. For a slightly longer profile with some pictures and a few links, you can see here: https://hjaltman.github.io/dmd/
I really appreciate the weirdness of your having a dating doc that is mostly pictures of bugs, but you might consider some more pictures of yourself. Unless you are a bug
Ha! Yeah, that's what happens when you try to put something together from existing material and aren't much of a web guy. The problems I had here were:
1. I don't have many pictures of myself (that's not what I take pictures of!*),
2. The ones I do are often very old and people want recent ones (I ended up using some old ones anyway due to a lack of material),
3. Even though everyone says "put pictures of yourself with others to demonstrate you have friends!" I am a little uncomfortable including people in this who weren't necessarily expecting it (I guess I could scribble over their faces or something? Blech),
4. Not all the pictures were the same aspect ratio and this caused the page to be ugly and I didn't want to deal with that. (OK, that was more of a problem for the bug pictures, the me pictures was mostly the first 3. I mean obviously cropping would have solved that problem.)
5. Oh and I didn't want to include a picture of me with a small child (even though it's adorable :) ) because then I'd have to explain "not my kid" and the format I was doing didn't give me an easy way to do that such that people would see it (again, not really a web guy).
This is one of the reasons I included the Facebook link at the bottom, because even someone completely outside my social circles will at least be able to look through profile pictures. And obviously the talk link shows me as well, in motion even! :) So people seeking appearance information should follow those.
...but yeah likely I should go do some more on this at some point. Will have to figure out what to do about (1)-(4).
*And even when other people take pictures of me, that's not necessarily something I can easily find, because it seems like these days people I know dump pictures on Facebook *without tagging them* so I can't even easily find the pictures of me later >_>
Well in that case let me offer this definitely real, definitely safe for work advice for dating app pictures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glRNFEIMQxQ
I endorse him as not a bug
I'm also not a squirrel! :)
Hey, I'm Richard, male, 29, working in AI in San Francisco, looking for a female life partner who's highly intellectual, playful, and collaborative (three traits I also share).
My dating doc is here (with a link for contacting me): https://docs.google.com/document/d/14iR0P1MQ8DdyoUXv_3_K1aWewwf1wRXIxwWHy-GuG3Y/edit
You might also get a good sense of how I think from my twitter here: twitter.com/richardmcngo
This was so well-written, I saved it despite not being in the market myself.
Male, 25, USA, interested in finding a life partner of compatible stats, cis female, to do the regular upper-middle class thing: cohabitate, put off kids till 30+, make money with dual income, retire early, love eachother, have a nice life, occassionally travel... you know the drill!
Stats: 6'3, heterosexual, intj/infj, caucasian, conventionally attractive, 99th percentile creative & INT, minorly eccentric, majorly conscientious and self-controlled, income somewhere between 60-150k+ as my career develops, IT/Biz. I don't like or have a history in casual dating.
Contact me: dirgewriter (at) gmail if you're also sick of this dating market and ready to get on with your (otherwise great) life!
Hi! I'm looking for a longterm partner to have kids with, probably in the bay area and probably in Oakland. For more information, pictures, and contact info check out my dating doc on my website.
https://drethelin.com/romance/
As someone with a far skinnier and and more haunted looking pfp, I think yours looks fine.
drethlin's dope! hosts excellent dance parties
(sorry for the asymmetrical anonymity, drethlin)
Hey, I like your tattoos. You look great. But I'm old enough to be your mother, so I'm just writing to say I think you should change the stand-in image you use here with your posts. It's of someone skinny, haunted and mistrustful, and after feeling startled when seeing your actual photo I realized that I thought of you as actually looking skinny, haunted and mistrustful.
39 / AMAB, primarily looking for a long term relationship that might lead to marriage and kids, but also open to other things. For details: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uk2uQohqeyhzqbZuwwVW_Zvt5ZrxUhK4Vll2G9Y_dyk/edit
41 / F / Israel, bisexual, polyamorous, looking for secondary. More details (and pics)
<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EWhcWT7EGIqVnXZ5c00oI5v5RON5b5v6t-a8ywKOZNQ/edit?usp=sharing">here</a>.
Also open to platonic friendship!
Also apparently HTML doesn't work in substack comments 😅
Nothing works in Substack comments, we have to go back to the old days of putting in asterisks or underscores to indicate text formatting (but yet emojis work?)
Well, we have UTF8 to thank for emojis, not substack specifically.
Five years ago, me and other SSC readers launched Optimized Dating, a Discord chatroom for dating discussion and advice. We like helping people with their dating problems (mostly overly analytical nerdy type of people).
The idea is for inexperienced people to get advice from more experienced people who have similar backgrounds and dispositions, but also to just share knowledge about how to improve one's chances while dating. Sharing experiences, stories, setbacks and wins is encouraged.
Feel free to join and look around, each channel has pinned messages you may find helpful.
Invite link:
https://discord.gg/uWeETX5
This is a great idea.
31 / M / Berkeley, looking for a monogamous LTR aimed at marriage + kid(s). Dating doc (including contact details): tinyurl.com/daterobert
A random legible thing demonstrating my good taste (in at least one domain) is what people have said about eating with me:
B: "Robert took me out to a great dining place last night... perhaps peak food experience, I get why people are foodies. I will now try to avoid ever going to great food places Robert advises again, I do not wish to lose myself to the temptation of spending lots of money on great food."
A: "I forgot that food could be this good." (approximate sentiment, not exact words)
I also have good taste in programming languages and friends (people generally agree they're excellent). My taste in music is controversial. I can successfully interface with government bureaucracy and own a car. Further details on request.
------------------------------ READ MY BLOG ------------------------------
New blog about rationality and faith from the perspective of a Mormon academic: https://thecircumscriber.substack.com
late to the party, but I have a Substack where I've written about AI, metascience, FDA regulatory policy, and progress studies topics. I call myself an aspiring "metascience blogger" as that is supposed to be the main theme now. So far my most read posts are on AI for medicine, Cerebrolysin, COVID-19, and the FDA: https://moreisdifferent.blog/archive?sort=top
I write a techno-optimist-y blog that touches on a wide range of topics - https://medium.com/@bobert93
Highlights include 'A very British 2050s', which got shared on Marginal Revolution. Posts range from geopolitics to creative ways to boost fertility rates.
I write essays and short stories some of you might find interesting.
Here's an essay critiquing EA (sorry Scott, haha!): https://mattymorrison.com/pages/writing/againstEA.html
And short story I just finished: https://mattymorrison.com/pages/writing/stephen.html
Cheers,
Matt
Last month I commented here in an open thread asking for advice on quitting my job or sticking with it. I got a lot of good advice. But life forced my hand and I wrote about it recently on my blog. I cover a wide variety of topics, make some observations, complaints, and always have some tech nostalgia. Thanks in advance for reading.
https://mudandmisc.substack.com/
https://wordriverdelta.substack.com/p/a-birthday-present-to-my-spouse
The best of my poems from the past 12 years.
I wrote about my experiences of scrupulosity, a trait which I think is common in EAs/rationalists (and therefore maybe under-noticed?)
https://joeblogs.substack.com/p/the-lived-experience-of-scrupulosity
I review books and write about exercise and fitness and paleoanthropology mostly.
If you want to read about exercise reducing all cause mortality 4x and be convinced that you should exercise too, my review of Dan Lieberman's Exercised is here: https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-149039475
If you want to read about human metabolism and the limits of sustained athletic performance, Herman Pontzer's Burn is here: https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-148396057
If you want to read about the paleoanthropology of how we became human, here: https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-149240369
If you want to read about how we learned how to stop bullies and inadvertently created a world-dominating superweapon, read here: https://substack.com/@performativebafflement/p-149332133
I write Humanlike, a blog about the relationship between AI and humanity.
A few of my posts include:
- An essay about the use of the word "humanist" in EA and E/acc communities
- A deep-dive into each of the three possible AI monetization methods (API fees, subscriptions, ads) and which will be successful
- Short stories about possible AI futures
Read at https://humanlike.blog/
I write about plenty of topics including depression, economics, and rationalism (along with the occasional villain rant) at https://affablyevil.substack.com/.
I have a substack about LLMs, in particular on the problem of getting LLMs to reason (better): https://llmpromptu.substack.com/
My most recent post is about OpenAI's new o1 model and some thoughts on how it achieves better reasoning: https://llmpromptu.substack.com/p/o1-llms-and-reasoning-faq
I'm a machine learning engineer working at a startup who has worked *a lot* with models like GPT and written a lot of prompts to do very complex reasoning tasks, so I think it's a worthwhile perspective.
Thanks for checking it out!
I'm a theoretical physicist writing on the phenomenon of beauty, and its connection to entropy. If that sounds like your thing, here you go
https://extramediumplease.substack.com
Tonight I posted a deep, plain-English dive into whether Guardian Caps reduce brain injury among football players. This turned out to be a useful topic for illustrating several ways that statistics are misinterpreted. (I like "misinterpreted" - it encompasses the possibility of mistakes as well as intentional deception, and it's ambiguous as to whether we should blame the scientist or the reader.)
https://statisfied.substack.com/p/guardian-caps
Come on into The Brass Bull; it's rather warm, and getting hotter, and no one comments, but it's good poetry, if I say so myself.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thebrassbull
I have recently begun writing short stories. Most of my ideas are sci-fi but not exclusively. The one I have posted is called Glitches in the Outfield. It's about a world where physicists "break" the universe, and baseball players use it to change the game.
https://substack.com/@thestuffyougetwrong/p-109422862
I really like the idea of having a "glitchy world" and want to write more stories based on it but I have a variety of things I want to write about. Here are some of the short stories I've been working on:
"Glitch world", where it's like a theme park
A hotel inside a black hole
A young arrogant universe simulator who creates a world but it falls apart when his subjects advance in technology too quickly
A war between AI against humans and mind uploads and the history of how that came to be.
A kid that gets really in to Rome and decides he wants to restore the Roman Empire(I actually posted this here a while back and did some minor edits, I just need to post it)
And I've also been working on one about a space knight who goes to a seedy bar and gets in trouble. This one is longer and has been taking up a lot of my time but I got a second draft done. If it goes well, I have a longer series conceived where he goes on various episodic adventures, but interstellar space is very different than what we think of.
Always appreciate feedback.
Here's the first few paragraphs of Glitches in the Outfield:
“O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!”
We all cheered loudly for the game to begin. My family had never been to a Major League Baseball game before because it cost too much money. But it had been a crazy year for our family.
“Uncle Barry, can I get a hot dog, please!!!?”, Alex pleaded with me, as though his very life depended on it.
My son Derek obnoxiously chimed in. “You should have asked earlier when he was getting food. Now you’re going to starve!”
“Uncle, please! I don’t want to starve!”
I gently admonished Derek, “Be nice to your cousin. It’s a big day for him.” I turned to Alex. “Of course, I’ll get you one. Let me just watch the opening pitch.”
Following tradition, someone important was throwing the opening pitch. The governor would be doing us the honor today. Governors had been throwing the opening pitches for over a hundred years by this point but not like this. He stepped up to the plate. The governor wiped his right arm twice and then his left arm twice. He stepped forward and then back. Forward and back. Forward and back. He then tapped his head and launched the ball. As soon as he let go, it vanished.
Reappearing right in front of the catcher, the ball went right into his glove. The crowd went wild. The governor was sure to get a boost in popularity after that performance. The glitch was seemingly simple to pull off, but anyone who tried it knew it was anything but. You needed to pull off those moves in an extremely precise manner, or the game could crash.
Might just be a personal preference, but I think the dialogue exchange moves too quickly for how early in the story it is. We're still in the Worldbuilding Phase, so Alex should get a sentence or two about who he is before moving on to Derek's line, who gets a sentence or two before moving on to Mr. Narrator Man.
That's interesting because I figured I would get criticism for how little dialogue there is. World building actually takes up most of the rest of the story and the kids are more of a vehicle for introducing the world.
Well, I've only read the part you posted here. I'm kind of expecting one of the kids to catch a ball at some point, probably through a glitch of their own. And then maybe the pitcher uses a rewind glitch and they get upset.
...all right, after reading the whole thing; you've got three separate conflicting introductions here. You want EITHER the perspective from the audience, OR the perspective of the experts (you could move the story to a coach in the training room for that) OR the history of Connor (which I would say is the best option). Right now you've got all three, but the three styles don't flow into each other
...actually, it might work just to make Derek the History Of Science Exposition Boy. Mr. Narrator Man makes a comment about how they'd never seen a pitch like that when they were young, Alex asks a question, then Derek launches into the long diatribe about finding the glitches, and that makes Mr. Narrator Man reminisce about Connor's attempts. And then you still can keep the twist where the kids are watching their own relative play (and oh how relative he is, har har).
Please highly consider reading my blog! https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/
I am getting a phd in economics, and write almost every day about things I find interesting in economics. My last three articles have been about the effect of tax salience on tax rates, whether misallocation across firms in developing countries is simply a statistical artifact, and a substantial work summarizing the evidence for peer effects.
Upcoming over the next two weeks (these are just the half-completed drafts) will be a first sketch of a paper I’m writing on risk-aversion and increasing returns to skill, a piece explaining why vaccines are less profitable than drugs (drawing from Kremer), an article on why multi-industry conglomerates occur, a discussion of increasing returns and equilibrium unemployment, some thoughts on the durable good monopoly problem, an explanation of the theory, and an attack on the history, of industrial policy, an article on how we arrive at discount rates, an article on risk aversion focusing on a Chetty Szeidl paper, coverage of a paper alleging publication bias in the unemployment insurance literature (with the hopes of extending this to publication bias more generally), an assessment of whether R&D subsidies actually increase innovation, and if they do, by how much, and a love letter to Jean Sibelius.
Again, it can be found here at the link below. It is Tyler Cowen endorsed, and I hope that you decide I merit that praise. Thanks!
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/
Also, to Scott Alexander: if you read my blog, and do not like it, I will donate $100 to Givewell. (Alright, even if you did like it, I’d donate it anyway). The point is, I think you *would* like it, and this is a credible signal that it is worthwhile. Comment on this to let me know if I should, thanks!
I highly recommend this blog for anyone interested in economics.
To give a sense of my writing, here are my best articles in the past month:
Why do firms choose to be inefficient? Why are some firms persistently producing less than they are able to? (This is my most popular article).
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/why-do-firms-choose-to-be-inefficient
How important was the potato to urbanization and the development of technology? Drawing primarily on Nunn and Qian’s QJE paper, but with an extensive digression into the differences between China and Europe’s economic history.
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/the-potato-and-the-modern-world
Do institutional investors increase growth? As the size of firms increase, they internalize the gains of finding new ideas, but this trades off against allocative efficiency. Which is more important? Do investors, like Vanguard, allow for optimal innovation investment with allocative distortions?
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/institutional-investors-spillovers
The sharecropping problem — who should receive the residual from ex ante indescribable work? I show how optimal allocation changes depending on who is able to innovate, and suggest that it is impossible for a contractual structure to guarantee all socially optimal actions are taken.
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/can-we-ever-optimally-innovate
I cover the history of endogenous growth models, and discuss how a small change in modeling assumptions leads to a really big difference in how we treat population’s relationship with innovation, and how this supports human capital first stories of development.
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/endogenous-growth-and-human-intelligence
------------------------------ CONSUME MY PRODUCT/SERVICE ------------------------------
I offer a few things. 1. Editing 2. (Cheap) coaching 3. (Free) technical writing/manual-writing
Book a 15-minute call or message me if you'd like to learn more or discuss projects! https://calendly.com/amber-ace/15min?month=2024-10
(1) EDITING
I'm a freelance editor. I offer proofreading, light editing, intensive editing, review, and conceptual writing support. Writing samples, prices and more information available on my website: https://amber-dawn-ace.com/
(2) (CHEAP) COACHING
I offer writing coaching: I'll give you advice on anything from the nuts and bolts of sentence structure, to writer's block, to the best way to convey your arguments.
I also offer generalist life coaching: we can talk through your problems and blocks. Some topics I'm particularly interested in include:
-internal conflicts and contradictions
-philosophical issues
-relationships, especially poly romantic relationships or other somewhat-unusual structures
-self-care
But I'm happy to talk about anything.
Since I'm new to this work, I'm currently charging a reduced rate of £15/hour for the first 3 hours; after that, I'll charge £45/hour.
More of my experience and thoughts about coaching here: https://www.facebook.com/unnamedelement/posts/pfbid02suGtHVErbjPFLNfG84StBBDBrWPR7xeE7ackj2k3G8YHGej1GZevm3bVQb42kpt2l
(3) (FREE) TECHNICAL WRITING/MANUAL WRITING
I'm interested in trying out technical writing, that is: writing user-friendly instructions, manuals, documentation, and explanations for products. Do you want someone to write some instructions, FAQs, help pages etc for your website/app/device/machine/whatever? I might do this for *free* to test whether I enjoy it. Message or book a call to discuss: https://calendly.com/amber-ace/15min?month=2024-10
I wrote a Logic Tournament for middle and high school kids, with competition rules for team based play and individual rounds.
More than a math-with-skin tournament, it's a real fun set. This year's team questions are all fantasy themed.
https://logic-tournament.tiiny.site/
Suggestions for improvement welcome!
Looking for people who own stock in meat or egg companies. 📈
You may have a unique opportunity to help animals, and help your company follow the law. 🐥⚖️
https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/investors
Sincerley,
Legal Impact for Chickens
(an ACX-funded nonprofit)
Spartacus.app (an AXC 2024 Grantee mentioned in the previous open thread [https://manifund.org/projects/an-online-platfo]) is looking for beta testers!
It's a “crowd-building” platform for solving collective action and coordination problems, by using assurance contract frameworks and transitional anonymity. It’s unlike any other crowdfunding, organizing, or mobilization tool out there.
*All beta testers receive white glove support from me directly in structuring and promoting a campaign, and a $50 gift card as a token of thanks upon campaign completion regardless of outcome.*
Criteria:
- You have a real-world application for Spartacus. (I.e. not a hypothetical scenario, but a campaign with real participants and a real goal).
- You are ready to start evaluating Spartacus right away, or at most within a few weeks.
- Your campaign has realistic success criteria: The deadline is not too far out, and the participant goal is reasonably attainable within that timeframe.
- You are willing to provide detailed feedback on the user experience.
- If successful, you are open to having your experience used as the basis for a case study that will be published and shared.
-You may use a pseudonym to maintain more privacy throughout this process.
Contact me at Jordan@spartacus.app if interested.
And in any case, please support us by following us at:
https://spartacusapp.substack.com/,
https://x.com/AppSpartacus
https://www.linkedin.com/company/spartacus-app/
Thanks!
Any businesses out there who need a reliable partner for their web presence, talk to Gotham City Drupal (https://www.gothamcitydrupal.com). We build using Open Source tools and host on award winning Pantheon.io, and our clients love us. Come join the fam! 🫶🏼
TRY MY THING
I write a (free!) monthly science and nature magazine for kids called "The Outside Scoop." It's focused on Western and Southern Michigan but suitable for much of the upper Midwest. You'll find kid-friendly phenology (seasonal nature observation) and a few in-depth articles each month to build a big picture of the ecosystems around us.
Subscriptions are, again, free, with an standards-aligned lesson suggestion doc also available for schools. This year I'm working on increasing my reach and hopefully finding a grant to support production and distribution in future years. Check it out at https://the-outside-scoop.mailchimpsites.com/ .
Help me beta-test my full-stack human development system ("Metamodern Yoga" placeholder name for now)
You have to develop all 4 of the following layers of your being at the same time, because developing only 1 at a time creates local progress at the cost of a shadow/anchor side effect. (This is why the people great at 1 of these don't ride that local greatness to general greatness and make humanity halfway competent at self-coordination)
(1) Mental: Progress toward enlightenment without the dark nights of the soul
(2) Emotional: Progress toward Jungian individuation, integration and fruitful creation between the ego/shadow and masc/fem
(3) Physical: Progress toward the Greek statue/athlete ideal of aesthetics/performance without the health issues of many world-class athletes/models
(4) Behavioral: Progress toward next-gen agency and connection without the behavioral scandals marring many leaders/gurus/etc.
Email me at hunterglenn92@yahoo.com about any mental/strategic, emotional/creative, health/beauty, agency/connection problem you'd like help with, or a pre-existing strength you'd like to bring to its greatest potential, and we'll figure it out from there! <3
Hi everyone, I want to do (1) free coaching with my next-gen full-stack human dev system
and
(2) paid teaching of remote improv piano, and voice.
Here's my (1) DNA Piano Lesson in 16m, and (2) me singing *Hallelujah/haMephorash* (by Leonard Cohen and Scott Siskind)
DNA Piano Lesson
https://youtu.be/u8JwXve-h_8
Hallelujah/haMephorash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1wRHcihtRQ
I'm a freelance editor specializing in science fiction and fantasy, though I've worked with a number of other fiction genres (mysteries and historical novels are probably the next best fits), and occasionally interesting non-fiction. I have a slightly odd pricing pattern: I don't charge for hours, I charge for (500-word) pages ($2-$8/page, depending on how much editing is required - $2 is "a little polishing", $8 is "one page took me half an hour"), so it's easy for me to tell you the exact price as soon as I've received the document. I also have a 5-free-pages offer; if you have never hired me before, send me the first five pages (2,500 words) of whatever you want edited, and I will edit and return them for free. This also allows me to tell you what pricing category the work falls into. Second and later passes are half price. For more information please see my website (http://arpistaediting.com/).
Given inflation I'm planning to raise prices in the new year, so if you've been thinking you really should get your novel edited this is a good time to get your estimate locked in!
Try my Steam game! It's a chess roguelite where you play chess with a large number of exciting and powerful abilites—and the enemies have powerful abilities of their own. The game is chock-full of references to popular chess variants (Atomic Chess, Monster Chess, Duck Chess, etc) and effectively meshes a bunch of different unorthodox styles of chess play.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3074200/The_Rookery/
Our reviews are very positive, and some of our players have played the game for dozens or over a hundred hours. The game spans a very wide range of difficulty, so it's accessible for chess beginners while having super hard levels available for experts.
If you have an emotional, motivational, or social goal or issue that would be extremely valuable to you iff resolved, you may be able to resolve it quickly by talking to me.
I operate on a bounty system: pay only if you’re satisfied, whenever you’re ready.
https://chrislakin.com/bounty
Examples:
★ (Bounty claimed) A man I met at Manifest had lifelong anxiety he wanted to resolve, even after “8 years of talk therapy” and “1 year of actively seeking exposure to scary situations”. After one conversation with me, he considers his social anxiety resolved (two months so far). He is also significantly more agentic now, as he wished.
☆ (Bounty ongoing) A founder in SF had a persistent inability to express attraction he wanted to resolve, even after “3 years of IFS therapy”, etc. After one conversation with me, he has since asked two people out comfortably.
☆ (Bounty ongoing) A woman working in tech in SF struggled with lifelong self-doubt she wanted to resolve, even after “9+ years of coaching and therapy”. After three conversations with me: “[…] The results are already telling: a disappointment that might’ve made me emotionally bleed and mope for a month was something I addressed in the matter of a couple of days with only a scoop of emotional self-doubt instead of *swimming* in self-torture. […];”
☆ (Bounty ongoing) A woman: ”I have a history of complex trauma and have spent most of my life terrified and depressed.” After three conversations with me: “I’m doing more self-improvement and productive things now. I definitely don't live in bliss every day, but I don't feel that my life or my relationship is in crisis anymore. Things feel light and hopeful.”
(Detailed reviews are linked.)
Who this is for:
I'm currently hunting 8 bounties, the median is worth $11,500 if resolved. So this is best if you have been stuck for multiple years, “have tried everything else”, and don’t expect to resolve your issue soon otherwise.
(If you have status that other people trust, I’m open to helping for free. This is still very early so getting more credibility helps me help more people.)
This is for people who really want to grow, but don’t know how. Emotional, motivational, and social issues are usually a fit, and I will tell you asap if I can’t help you so we save our energy. While sustained results may take multiple conversations, you will know in our first conversation whether this will eventually work for your goal.
If you’d like to do a 15 min call with me first, just email me chris@chrislakin.com.
Let me know if you have any questions.
https://chrislakin.com/bounty
My wife has her science/stem and nature jewellery shop ohpluto.com
She designs, manufactures, packages it all herself (laser cutter in the garage).
She likes to have niche designs for various specialisations, and we find that lots of customers get a kick out of wearing her distinctive designs at events.
She also designed her own acrylic reclamation process where she can remix and press offcuts (again in the garage) from the laser cutting, into new sheets which she uses for a line of recycled jewellery designs.
If you have a special event, corporate thing, wedding, conference etc. she also does bespoke design consulting for volume (>50).
Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day 😊
It's not a blog, so I guess I'll put it here. I wrote a sci-fi short story some of you might enjoy. It's called "The Whisper of an Invisible Light" and features a society of blind sophonts in a zero-g environment: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c5D2DLxWvFrRJXjkX9NaV2ogpZer4FV9/view?usp=sharing
Introducing Cassie.fm : Simple, Transparent Website Monitoring (Beta)
I built Cassie.fm because monitoring shouldn’t be complicated or overpriced. It should be simple, affordable, and clear.
Why Cassie.fm?
Most monitoring tools are frustrating. They have complex setups, rigid pricing, and confusing dashboards. They charge more as you grow, penalizing success.
I wanted a tool that:
+ Scales with you: Pay only for what you use, without subscriptions or hidden fees.
+ Gives real-time alerts: When something breaks, you know right away.
+ Has simple, clear pricing: 50,000 checks for $1. Monitor as often as every minute.
How It Works
+ Pay-as-you-go: Every user gets 1600 free credits a day. That’s enough to run a check every minute, all day. If you need more, you can get 50,000 credits for $1, or check out the pricing structure over here (https://cassie.fm/checkout).
+ Easy setup: Sign up, add your monitor, and you're good to go. No complicated configurations.
+ Instant alerts: Get notified by email, SMS, or webhooks the moment something goes wrong.
Important Note: Beta Program
Cassie.fm is currently in pre-beta, and we’re limiting access to 50 users for now. We want to ensure the service runs smoothly as we gather feedback and continue improving. If you can't get in, and you really really want to, fill out the support form (https://cassie.fm/support), and mention that you're coming from here.
What’s Next?
I use Cassie.fm myself, so I’ll keep adding features that matter. Coming soon: more integrations, deeper analytics, customizable alerts, and response structure checks.
Try It Free (Limited Beta)
Sign up (https://cassie.fm/account/register) and get 1600 daily credits for free, no strings attached.
Frec is like investing in index funds, but better. Instead of buying 1 ETF that is a basket of 500 stocks, you buy all 500 stocks individually so we can tax loss harvest for you. This is how rich people have been investing for decades, but now with fractional shares anyone can do it. And we're almost as cheap as index funds (10 bps). E-mail me Daniel@frec.com if you want to learn more.
We write the world's first version-controlled SQL database, Dolt. It's like Git and MySQL had a baby. Free to download and run, paid hosting and support available.
https://github.com/dolthub/dolt
We're working on a Postgres compatible version too, which will have its beta launch at the end of the year.
------------------------------ MEETUP ------------------------------
I run weekly local rationality meetups in Waterloo, Ontario. If you read this blog you should definitely come check us out. Next week we're doing a byo laptop research party where we're going to try to evaluate and rank local charities, so the more bodies/heads/computers we have the better :]
https://kwrationality.ca/
Here's the YouTube channel for Fluidity Forum, a metarationality conference in September. I hope you'll plan to attend our meetup in 2025. I'm in the middle of editing and posting the videos of talks and workshops from our second annual event, so if you subscribe, you'll get several more videos in October.
https://www.youtube.com/@FluidityAudiobooks-ec5qs
(P.S. Eric Lanagan is in the process of putting all the episodes of my UNSONG Audiobook on Soundwise, for free, as a proper audiobook so you can listen to it all in one go.)
That's awesome that UNSONG will be free as an audiobook for everyone, thank you!
IYI, here's me singing "Hallelujah/haMephorash". I'd love there to be a better version of haMephorash out there!
https://youtu.be/u1wRHcihtRQ
Cool, thank you!
------------------------------ OTHER ------------------------------
I'm looking for people to play Inflection Point with me. It's a real time turn based military strategy game, kinda like Civ, but simpler. It's completely free to play and runs in the browser.
https://inflectionpointgame.com/
Feel free to contact me on Discord, email, or Telegram, username benjaminikuta
To sweeten the deal, if there's some other free game you want to play, I'd be willing to take turns.
I'd also be interested in advice about how to find people to play with.
I'm running an open table D&D 5E game that could use more players. It's a megadungeon campaign focused on low-commitment, pickup-style play: we go into the dungeon with whoever happens to be available on a given day, and get the characters back to the starting town by the end of the session. (Downside is not a lot of super deep plot development. I put some interesting stuff in the dungeon and if you have interesting ideas for your character I'll try to play around with them a bit, but no promises. On the other hand if you fit in well in this game I'll keep you in mind if I end up trying to run something more ambitious.)
New and experienced players all welcome, message placidplatypus on Discord (or if that doesn't seem to be getting through reply here and we'll figure it out).
I'm looking for people who seriously believe that one of the greatest problems of our times is the disconnection and alienation of humans beings to each other (loneliness crisis, etc), precipitated by the rise of technology. Open to any and all ideas, thoughts and solutions related to increasing isolation, and I currently live in SF if you want to meet in person.
Consider coming to the Love Symposium at Lighthaven in November to meet those very people. :)
https://x.com/MathYouF/status/1838386811707527531
I do seriously believe this. Relatedly, I have an idea to solve the fertility/depopulation crisis by starting a gene drive in humans to make all births be of twins. Everyone having a twin might also solve the loneliness problem. Existing evidence for this is that twins have higher life expectancy than non-twins, which might be caused by a general increase in life success due to always having a friend to aid you.
Hi, sounds like an interesting thought. I am a monozygotic twin and I actually think I have never experienced what other people describe as 'loneliness'. Of course I have wanted to experience more popularity and stuff like that, but to not have a person I could talk with is just something outside my experience. As a drawback, talking with mainly one person have probably stranded me with a much smaller network than normal people.
All that said, I don't think you will be able to convince the average woman to do anything which woukd increase their chances of having twins. It is just seen as too hard to be pregnant with two children at once.
The idea is to genetically modify everyone such that their births are guaranteed to be of twins. If the genetic trait is made to be dominant (guaranteed to pass to descendants) then only a few people need be modified, and the afterwards the twin gene will naturally spread to the rest of humanity over the next few hundred years.
https://x.com/iiloyjerh/status/1815500639608385843?t=unfTB1A6QxaOpeQspVSnzA&s=19
There already exist some populations who have a much higher than usual occurence of dizygotig twins, and some fertility drugs also increase it. But I don't see how you would get enough people interested in this. It seems most mothers prefer to give birth to singletons (boring), and if you were to start messing around with modifying human genes there would probably be a lot of other things that people would want first, like lowering the risk of all sorts of diseases.
This is why the gene drive is so good, it doesn't matter what people want from genetic engineering. The children of any person with the twin gene will also have the twin gene, so it will inevitably spread throughout the entire population, no matter whether the idea of 'all births should be of twins' has political support. People won't deliberately choose to have twins, they will just meet and have kids with someone who has the twin gene, and then their children will also be twins.
Hi, I believe this, and I have some hope that shifting our aim away from unity and toward harmony instead might be part of a next-gen culture that helps humanity coordinate better, solve half its problems with halfway-competent coordinated action, and enjoy much more connection together along the way.
I'm trying to organize a free, in-person educational workshop on basic Python programming in the Philadelphia/Delco/Montco area. Target audience is people who are complete beginners with no programming background, who want to learn the basics either to pursue it as a career or just for fun/curiosity.
I've taught this workshop a couple times before, and am now trying to turn it into a recurring, semi-official free education project.
Anyone live around here (Philly / suburbs) and want to help? If so, send me an email at mikest[at]udel[dot]edu!
Do you know if there is anything similar in the SF Bay Area? (Yes, I know I am the only person in the Bay Area who doesn't know how to code and doesn't have a Substack)
Not sure, but if there isn't already then that would be a cool thing for someone to start.
I'm studying cognitive science. Tell me which of my two undergraduate thesis ideas you find more interesting and why: https://satchlj.com/thesis
Inspired by Scott Alexander's post on missing developmental milestones, I have been trying to come up with a questionnaire to determine whether a person is statistically literate or not. (By statistical literacy I mean a nebulous general perspective on the world rather than knowledge of specific techniques.)
If you are willing to take the questionnaire and give me feedback, email me at lw@xkqr.org. If you are a reader of this comment section, you are just the sort of person I want help from!
Probably you should also give a link to the questionnaire here. That would significantly lower the bar to entry.
I have deliberately not done that because the feedback I would like at this stage is a little more involved. I aim for self-selection of people who care enough to devote a few extra minutes.
Not being able to see it makes it impossible to estimate the effort involved, which means people (like me) who might be on the border of being willing to give extended feedback are just not going to follow up.
You've heard of artist residencies, where people go all sorts of places to ponder the nature of Beauty and conversely. Well there's no reason why scientists can't have fun too.
We are a small nonprofit research lab hosting scientific residencies in Southern France, in the Pyrenees mountains:
https://intp.science/content/residency
We welcome any research topic (we're mainly from physics, biology and history but we've had philologists, computer scientists etc -- and some artists too). Hoping to see some of the ACX crowd!
I am creating a bizarre (novel-length) work of fiction*, the most WeDoTheodicyInThisHouse piece of fiction currently imaginable. (That's super-helpful, I know, for the like 5 people reading this who know my personal brand.)
Pitch1: "The combined voices of Tolstoy, Harper Lee, ermm... The Book of Genesis, Amy Tan, CS Lewis, Ender Wiggin, and George MacDonald speak wisdom and shed light upon Reality that help the MC save sanity from the ashes! In 2027 America." Do you think you want to help birth a project like this into existence? Well, have I got an idea (errm, note: a very *general* idea) of how you can waste all your spare time between now and December 17th!! (and beyond. assuredly, beyond as well.)
Pitch2: "Do you want to see a work of fiction where you reasonably and tangibly feel that stating ones own opinions is hazardous, but listening to others deeply is a way to gain... effectively... skills and XP?" (Well, actually, there's probably a dozen or more works like that: list ones you can think of in the comments!)
So... yeah, I will be looking for a variety of kinds of help! Here's the area I'd like help for that's currently most salient: Basically, sometimes a person is creating something and it's a stupid idea to invest a bunch in it. Or--maybe it's fine to invest a bunch of thought and energy into writing ones first novel† because they needed to break through the barrier of "I can't" so that by the time they write their 16th novel 40 years later, it'll be great. For example. But in that case, maybe investing a bunch of money in advertising it would be a STUPID idea even if investing a bunch of effort in creating it, in order to grow, is a worthy idea. So, "many counselors makes for great victory," or what-have-you.
Feel free to reply here, or at wedotheodicyinthishouse @ g, or any ole place you may be able to find me at.
* Disclaimer: I know that everyone who writes fiction thinks their new, cool idea for is a perfect, snowflakely little baby.
† Note: Yes, I know; I'm not claiming that in my case, an actual novel will be what comes out on the other end.
EDIT: formatting. thought i could italicize with underscores. i cannae.
The same way living in a house doesn't automatically teach you about the internal structure of a house, such that you can build a house without any extra knowledge, reading novels doesn't automatically teach you about the internal structure of a novel, such that you can write a novel without any extra knowledge.
It is a very good idea to invest a bunch of thought and energy into writing your first novel! Super worthwhile. Everybody should write novels! Expect that it'll be pretty bad. That's fine and normal. Don't spend money on advertising. Very, very, very few people's first novel will be commercially viable. Do spend some money on books on the craft of fiction. I particularly like and recommend A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders, although that deals with short stories. The principles are relevant.
Second piece of advice: show your work to people whose taste you respect and who are genuinely willing to tell you it's bad. Get them to read through it and mark down their reactions in the margins. Try to get them to avoid telling you what to do, since they'll be wrong. They're not helping you fix your manuscript; they're lab rats you're testing on. Does this joke land? Is this clue too easy, or too hard? Is this sad part actually sad?
Third piece of advice: learn what POV is and how it works; it's not obvious, and many, many new writers end up writing incomprehensible nonsense that they can't tell is incomprehensible nonsense because they don't understand it. Saying "third person omniscient" after the fact does not un-confuse your readers and so is not an excuse to break the rules.
I could go on and on about this, I'll stop now.
(Source: I have an MFA in fiction writing & have written 7 novels; I haven't published any of them, nothing I've written is up to my standards, writing is hard)
A lesson I learned from doing a few years of NaNoWriMo and personal novel writing projects: Every story I complete is better than the last, regardless of the strength of the idea that spawned it.
You learn a lot from finishing things and encountering the challenges of writing a story that aren't obvious from the outset. That's not to say you shouldn't advertise it, but if this is the first project of this size you're tackling I would definitely view it more as an investment in learning than a business venture. You can always ramp up advertising later if the finished project if it turns out really well.
I agree with this.
Looking for really solid curriculum on any practical subject. Something where you can be assured that once you complete the course you will be proficient in the subject. See LearnCraft Spanish for reference.
Curriculum quality is underrated imo, which is why subject isn't as important to me here. Just like learnin.
Check out https://arena.education/ for AI Alignment Research Engineering!
Hello, I am also interested in this topic due to my working on literacy issues. I am curious whether you are interested in this for personal reasons or whether all forms of good curriculum count? I have lots of recommendations of curriculum but they are for elementary schoolers learning to read, so probably not applicable for you personally.
Yeah just looking personally
Nand2Tetris is an amazing course on low level computing from the basics
Thalassa Crusoe wrote 2 books about gardening in maybe the 1950's. One's called Making Things Grow and one's called Make Things Grow Outdoors. The first is more or a curriculum than the second, because the second is also the story or her bringing back a long-neglected garden. She only writes about plants grown for their beauty, not vegetable gardening. Anyhow, the first book is the only book I've ever read about growing indoor plants, and I don't think I'll ever need another. When I first read it I tried some of her info about how to propagate plants, & some of the ways were pretty exotic, but she describes how to do it precisely and all my propagations worked. Also, she writes well. She's entertaining, and very clear. She was an old-fashioned British horticulturalist, absolutely loved gardening, and really knew her stuff. I'm sure there are lots of secondhand copies of the hardback Making Things Grow around at nice low prices.
I would be keen to hear recommendations for a good electronics curriculum. Would be nice to have a better intuition for how to design/build/troubleshoot simple (then increasingly advanced) circuits
To learn German, I recommend this free one https://a1.vhs-lernportal.de/wws/9.php#/wws/home.php (Me a legit MA in GFLT, and VHS legit, too. The whole thing is paid by tax money.)
Doubt it'll apply to me living in a small-ass town, but sure, why not. And congrats!
Write it! Sounds neat.
Here's the start: https://open.substack.com/pub/1111founder/p/true-love-a-metric-approach-to-dating
Thanks for the +1. 10 more to go and I'll organize notes. It's a significant amount of time to do, so I want to make sure there's at least 11 people I can send info to.
Basically, I used CBT heuristics to rate 225 dates, ranking each date with a 100 pt scale. The hardest part was sticking to heuristic and not pursuing bad outcomes in favor of "romance." My wife scored 96. We just had our first baby after several years of happy marriage.
225 dates!! With how many unique people? I’ve been at least 1 date with — I think — 7 total people in my 34 years of life thus far. If you do wind up prepping notes, don’t underestimate what the inferential distance might be between you and your readers!
by dates i mean people. 225 people. it was hard, emotionally. the fact that it was covid actually helped with the number. i was able to meet most people virtually. met about 2 dates per day at my peak dating time.
And congrats!
So, so cool.