Talk: Technique Suggestions

people skills improvement: give feedback on where someone could improve their conversation by annotating a chatlog

:3

mental health: to not cheat yourself out of useful information when you can no longer handle a conversation, note it down somewhere you will remember it and come back at a time when you are in a better headspace

entry requirements: create a questionnaire to check if people have read the sequences before allowing them into a space which treats them as an underlying assumption

Version control everything.

Sometimes a local optimum is just fine. Before you strike out to find a global optimum, ask yourself if you're willing to put in 10x as much time as you think you'll need. If not, don't bother, because in practice, that's about as how long as it actually takes to go from a local optimum to another, better, local optimum.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/921316465663533056 do this for any major thing in your life

Follow up to the previous: if, in the process of reading something, you find that it isn't worth taking notes on, it probably wasn't worth reading in the first place.

Take notes while reading. You never remember as much as you think you will.

Develop epistemic dragonfly eyes, allowing you to model multiple worldviews and update on them simultaneously.

• http://www.richardhughesjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Superforecasting-Abilities-768x561.png

Have two people at the top instead of one, so that it's harder to pin the entire outrage on either of them.

• http://blakemasters.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes

Finding an expert and asking them.

Being willing to be wrong for five minutes, so you can be more correct for a lifetime.

The Pomodoro Method.

Noticing when a response you gave is a cached thought.

Noticing the cognitive frame your thoughts come from, and the emotions attached to them.

One way to delay the impact of Goodhart's Law is to keep anti-cheater metrics a secret.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/18/a-ceos-most-important-metric-should-be-a-secret/

If the king of science is empiricism, the queen is measurement. What the Wright Brothers invested was not an airplane, but a process that let them quickly measure the performance of different aircraft designs.

https://wright.nasa.gov/discoveries.htm

" During the winter of 1901, the brothers began to question the aerodynamic data on which they were basing their designs. They decided to start over and develop their own data base with which they would design their aircraft. They built a wind tunnel and began to test their own models. They developed an ingenious balance system to compare the performance of different models. They tested over two hundred different wings and airfoil sections in different combinations to improve the performance of their gliders The data they obtained more correctly described the flight characteristics which they observed with their gliders. By early 1902 the Wrights had developed the most accurate and complete set of aerodynamic data in the world. "

Before you embark on a project to create something new, look at what work has already been done. Put real effort into literature review and reviewing prior work.

"To do better, ask yourself straight out: If I saw that there was a superior alternative to my current policy, would I be glad in the depths of my heart, or would I feel a tiny flash of reluctance before I let go? If the answers are “no” and “yes,” beware that you may not have searched for a Third Alternative. " - https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Third-Alternative

"The moral is that the decision to terminate a search procedure (temporarily or permanently) is, like the search procedure itself, subject to bias and hidden motives. You should suspect motivated stopping when you close off search, after coming to a comfortable conclusion, and yet there’s a lot of fast cheap evidence you haven’t gathered yet—there are websites you could visit, there are counter-counter arguments you could consider, or you haven’t closed your eyes for five minutes by the clock trying to think of a better option. You should suspect motivated continuation when some evidence is leaning in a way you don’t like, but you decide that more evidence is needed—expensive evidence that you know you can’t gather anytime soon, as opposed to something you’re going to look up on Google in thirty minutes—before you’ll have to do anything uncomfortable." - http://www.readthesequences.com/MotivatedStoppingAndMotivatedContinuation

If you want to get good at the thing, and can't find good mentors, notice the things people who are good at the thing do that others don't, and things that others do that people good at the thing don't do. this is usually better than listening to the advice of people good at the thing

If you want to get good at the thing, and can't find good mentors, notice the things people who are good at the thing do that others don't, and things that others do that people good at the thing don't do. this is usually better than listening to the advice of people good at the thing

if you want something to be delivered on time and under budget: add a third to the estimated time, add a third downtime/slack, add a third to tractable costs and triple your median estimated blue sky costs

Noticing when you are confused, and taking the time to figure out why.

Learn how to change the parts of your personality that you don't like.

Inversion: Think of what you want to achieve and identify things that would cause it to fail. Then mitigate against these.

Make a decent fermi estimate.

Learn to have a great conversation consistently: http://www.orangecoast.com/features/center-of-the-universe/

project management general advice: learn hacker culture norms and emulate them as close as possible unless you have good reason for deviating from them (e.g. your group's communication's need to interface heavily with the outside world)

The thing EY talks about where you reverse Deep Ancient Wisdom to see if it still sounds wise.