Inanity
Crazy Lilac5 Days
3-24 Algorithms
3-23 Algorithms
3-22 Algorithms
3-21 Algorithms
3-20 Algorithms
Links
A Simple Model of Grabby Aliens
Algorithms Plan
Realistically I think taking notes on a couple more books and then problem solving through the last 10 years of USACO Platinum, IOI, and ICPC is the plan.
Inanity 1 Theses and Reflection
High utility/energy. Going to the third order on first order physiology. Really easy low hanging fruit hedonic tone multipliers. Mental masturbation. Might throw some funny Wikipedia links at the bottom under Ideas.
The Biggest Red Pills, Viewquakes, Insights
Definitely by far the biggest one is music resolution/fidelity. It’s a truly awesome art form I did not even know existed. I do think Elephant In The Brain style analysis is useful like in my original agents incentivized to misrepresent preference strength emergent human qualiae example. Furthermore economic analysis on where people put their money and energy.
Modernity, Powerful Drugs, Irrationality
To write: evolutionary psychology, actually rejecting modernity, Elephant In The Brain, comments on preworkout powder douchey correlation direction of causation, long run cognition, and failing to remember how sobriety feels.
Screenshots and Images
Productivity, Zizek, Old Bedroom, State of Seduction
Parenting Brief Notes
Kids are in a very different human position from parents, asking them how things make them feel, what they are curious about, etc. and listen to them, nest, sleep, diet, exercise, stimulating activity and exploration, interactions, etc.
Lifting Brief Notes
If you want bigger X muscles lift weights with X muscles, lifting every Y time, hitting what feels good usually 7-10 reps per set not even at rep max weight, chill on joints, chronic, big idea one can obtain a very nice body and maintain it.
Background Malodor Minimization
Baking soda is extremely effective for many things. Consider hydrogen peroxide. I am not sure bleach or isopropyl alcohol are ever needed. White vinegar for wood can be effective. Perhaps ammonia for walls.
Uncommon Knowledge
Not sure where I really deviate from mainstream math rationality.
Mistakes
Sometimes you try things out of curiosity. A recent big one was some nose hairs plucking which can seriously lead to lung problems, stress, and perception issues.
Effective Altruism
I am not sure what I value but I predict with fairly high confidence if I continue to donate it will be to x-risk research and meta. My last donation was to the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative.
Small Fantasy House/Apartment Specifications
Extremal, simple, clean, minimal, peaceful, externally soundproofed, white concrete floor, bright white flat walls and ceiling, 0 trim, large single pane window, mattress on floor, nearly empty.
Experimental/Creative Writing First Draft
It was a day like any other... witty, clever. Interesting date, mysterious, 0 needy… attraction get to his place falling in love with this dude… clothes off passionate sex next morning lift weights hot body cooked eggs, bacon, crepes… meeting this guy was a life changing event.
It was a day like any other. Did the actions which led to a female human being in some positions and the qualiae which emerged were what one would predict. Inane.
The Red Pill Sphere of Blogs and Pickup/Seduction/Erotic Written Stories for Men
The key idea is about girls feeling attraction. Mixed writing styles, the only one I really remember much of is Illimitable Men and how it ends on hormone replacement therapy with notes on hCG. A good final note. Useful words for communicating. Does exposure to this corpus lead to girls feeling more attraction?
Being Useful
I never read How to Win Friends and Influence People. Always assumed the title was good enough to get the big ideas. Think about other people and what they want. Be a good employee, know the things they explicitly write for on their websites. See a way to add value and do it (Joe Gallian).
Modeling Other People
For me it can be easy to underestimate how much other people know that I don’t know they know. I think plenty of mathematicians, academics, humans know a lot about a lot and don’t project it all over the place. Sometimes they let it out in subtle ways, a minor comment here or there leaking information. Where their maps of reality are precise is unclear sometimes.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasies
100% work from home quant job, making a girl feel optimally good, small quiet odorless minimal white house, lying in bed naked in sunlight, being happy, being in nature, each family member having their own nest, primitive hunting i.e. spearing a large animal,
Reflections on Communications: Wikipedia and CS
Recently a number of mathematicians in the sense of published paper writing theorem provers have written to me. One compared “reading Wikipedia” to a “time sink”. I realized/updated I don’t model people that well and don’t realize how my worldview differs from theirs. For some kids it’s synonymous with the best source of information on the humanity corpus/canon. Another conversation I thought there was something esoteric and philosophical and realized there may be and it has a lot to do with computer science and for me I may understand it if I spend hundreds of hours on that topic. It is good to know these really can exist. It may sound a bit like a sneer “to really understand Lazar requires at the bare minimum: AOPS, undergraduate mathematics, rationality, etc.” or at least some ideas about what these corpi contain.
Sleep, an Optimization Primer
Optimization can mean thinking hard. In this case one can examine lighting, earplugs, eye coverings, windows, airflow, pillows, sheets, pillowcases, detergents, mattress position, waking up ideas, etc. etc. and inside important things like reading many reviews, going to many stores and feeling products, etc. etc. This is a very first order physiological object, and one of the theses of earlier Inanity drafts was that these are very worth thinking about very hard and going to third order on.
Ankle Merino Wool Socks, Laptop Holder, Home Gym, Sex Toy, Decision Processes
It is worth talking about this class of low cost low energy low transition overhead decisions/purchases which seem obviously and uncontroversially good to many people. I prefer ankle merino wool socks over other options, and I know of quite a few, to the degree that I may say it immediately confers a 1.05 qualiae multiplier. And so on, status quo bias and reversal test. Gathering information and thinking can lead to a preferred life. I feel I am becoming a senex, an old man, who fantasizes of gifting socks. A naive observation on sex toys may be that in fact they feel so directly good, provide pleasure as an end, that they contribute to the observed lower sex in young people.
Making Myself Feel Good
I bring it up in the context of food choices quite a lot like there will be an experience which will include taste but will be followed be feeling and there is a sense in which ice cream makes me feel very good, it produces a rush of endogenous opioids, but it does not make me feel good in the long run so when I query myself these considerations are normally factored in. Though, in times of extreme stress response my food actions can be rather extreme. For now I put steak or salmon on aluminum foil on a pan and insert it into a preheated oven at X temperature for Y time and what emerges makes me feel good with salt and white rice once per day. One of the sort of “postrationality” ideas or ways of experiencing things would be like: I observe myself doing these actions chronically and infer it is what I truly prefer and get used to.
Linguistic Precision
One of the key ideas in the rationality blogosphere is that one can “update” on information and concrete actions will follow. Information in communication is serious. One can translate writing into simpler, high level logical or mathematical statements. The applied rationality skill might include practicing this. And this isn’t just about framing. For example, biology/PubMed may contain “background noise causes death”, “cell phones cause testicular dysfunction”, “bathing is not related to hygiene”. Perhaps earplugs, no cell phone, no bathing could be experimented with and then feeling good is some information/evidence.
General Point on Aesthetics Curiosity
Currently I seem to do what feels good and follow my intuitions. Then, I have moments of realization like ah now finally I understand some sublime minimal productivity pleasure of only ever having one tab of math open, and doing 0 blogs, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc. People write all the time and one can be curious and try to see or feel something they do or observe and if it happens naturally so be it. Eros is on my radar.
I Want To Become Who I Want To Become
What happened was listening to music became an end. And now with 0 musique, math is becoming an end. I prefer this.
The Social Network Brief Notes
As with all the films in my list, I have viewed this one at least 10 times, probably more like 50. I also read the book The Accidental Billionaires and the screenplay. I could see myself listening to the soundtrack if it were released in Hi-Res. Firstly, note we are watching depositions. For example, Mark makes a false statement on IQ and then we cut to them talking about the girl’s deposition and Mark saying she made all that up. So, in some sense it is a series of portraits of Mark by humans incentivized against him or with biased faulty memory. It’s visually nice, Sorkin and Fincher are the best and the acting is solid. It’s very funny. Many memorable lines and moments.
Questions
How to extract information on expected future quality of life. Will 2040 be much better than 2020? I predict it will. I think we are still capturing nontrivial utility from basic science. Concrete corollaries?
Rationality Ideas and Words for Communication
Habits, preferences, meta, proximal/distal, credence, predictions, betting, irrationality, internal inconsistency, optimization, information, evidence, actions, positions, brainstorming, writing, time preference, learning, status quo bias, self modification.
Algorithms Meta
Habits I am internalizing. Some things which are easy to write down with some technical precision and matter a lot in a lot of contexts. Firstly, solving the problem fully before writing any code. Considering details, numbers, input, extremal cases, optimality. Executing in code, implementation, down to minutiae like the order one chooses in an if elifs else sequence. Philosophically it’s about getting from the input to the output and what precisely the output needs to be matters quite a lot. Key ideas like pruning which can be framed also as: will I ever need this information?
Math Contest Optimization
Puzzles: Heard on the Street, Mathematical Puzzles, Cut the Knot
Computation: websites, FTW
Notes: chronic exposure to a ~5 to 10 page LaTeX document
Athletics
Problem Solving
Reading Solutions
Books
Other People’s Notes
Hurdles in Rationality
A lot of people I know do not choose to wear earplugs. Perhaps it is due to size. Rolling and lifting ears and properly inserting are how they work. Once one is used to wearing them it can be a very nice option to have. A fixed cost, sometimes surprisingly low, can lead to serious benefits.
Obligated by Rationality
It’s a phrase I use sometimes. For example, I feel obligated by rationality to apply to graduate school in math/CS/data science since I can’t be sure I will get a job in trading or finance. I feel obligated to apply for trading roles in addition to quant roles, perhaps with a cover letter proposing 100% work from home. Perhaps even post graduation internships for information. Maybe something simple like “I am a highly sensitive person and have sensory processing issues including extremely severe hyperosmia.”
The Setting Matters
A lot of people I know do not choose to use caffeine after a few bad experiences. I think a lot of them would benefit from cultivating a nearly flawless sensory environment.
Doing Homework Weeks in Advance
I go to class 0. The logic is something like: I am going to do this homework at some time, may as well do it now rather than later. Why I prefer this has a lot to do with feeling chill. In particular, if a homework is released and I am feeling lousy I can just do it the next day. It can lead to later realizing I made an error and then being able to fix it. I tend to not feel lousy so I normally do them as they are released.
Idea For Art Installation
A chain of speakers and microphones playing “I am just a copy of a copy of a copy” by Trent from Hesitation Marks over and over so the first one is pretty legitimate reproduction and then it gets more and more distorted down the chain. Metaphor for biological reproduction “assemble”, “pieces”. Trent lyricism is endlessly interesting, profound, corny, interpretations are on the listener. Post Reich post Basinski post Trent for sure “hallucinate in high fidelity” he understands sound and audio equipment. Rather than a chain perhaps one mic and one speaker. Consider the gap between repeats. Other chaos/order sounds?
Folders Of Portfolios
It seems like it would be quite easy to produce a folder of image files corresponding to the portfolios of quite a few visual artists and put them up for download. The underlying datasets may have copyright on the photography but this is not a real problem.
Rolling A Die Until The First 1 Note
Submission under review.
Betting Mechanism Note
Simple idea is that one party can propose to the other a bet on an upcoming event with a binary outcome and then they can negotiate a magnitude for the bet prior to the following: each writes down a real in [0,1] and then the bet is that implied by some function for example the bet with magnitude total amount betted and odds the arithmetic mean of the two reals written down direction from which party wrote which number down.
Cosmic Invisibility Note
The key idea is that to perform an anthropics update on the position in the universe requires a number of things, many pieces of information, and when precisely incidences of viewing can occur. Hanson, Paulson, et al. have written an interesting paper on the future of humanity which is an interest of mine.
Aesthetics
There is a trivial tautological sense in which beauty is a perception in a human. Another sense in which it is a word sometimes used in conversation or writing which is a very different setting. I myself have written it down quite a lot which like many words may diminish its impact. This doesn’t mean I could not be perceiving it all the time. If one lives a certain lifestyle perhaps one can. I did not trust other people enough when I was younger to know when they see beauty they really see it so banal platitudes like it is in the eye of the beholder really are true. In terms of pleasure and being a source of unironic spiritual content I find lying in bed naked eyes closed listening to high resolution music is something. It’s different when one hunts for it and when it strikes you. It certainly seems that being a human in a position related to something can lead one to find beauty in it. The simple fact of the matter is a human could in principle be placed on an island with some options for actions and choose to study mathematics for example and one might say their preference has to do with their perception of beauty. Another thought experiment would have to do with deciding to choose some random activity and seeing if you see beauty in after awhile. Also one can decide to study what other people find beautiful and perhaps understand them better, seriously! Musique for me became a stratospheric catastrophically beautiful art form for eliciting raw emotion and pleasure with sounds. Getting totally lost. And now it’s part of me forever.
Pieces of Musique/Hi-Res Albums
An Awesome Wave, Science Fiction, Blackout, Femme Fatale, Circus, Princess Catgirl, Collage, Lys, Mare, Young Alaska, Ghost Stories, Viva La Vida, A Rush of Blood to the Head, X&Y, Parachutes, Tron: Legacy, Dark Sky Island, Reunion, Skin, The Beautiful & Damned, Dreamland, Home, Esja, Descent, Ascend, Evolve, Speak For Yourself, Watch The Throne, Kids See Ghosts, Cloud Nine, Born To Die, Eternal Atake Renji, A Thousand Suns, Living Things, Meteora, Pure Heroine, Not All Heroes Wear Capes, Post Traumatic, Hesitation Marks, Home Tapes, Ultralife, Another Eternity, Daytona, Void, Human, Beauty Behind the Madness, After Hours, Starboy, Jeffery, Slime Season 3, I’m Up
Lifestyle
Currently it’s ~22 hours per day in bed, most of my waking hours are spent lying on my back without a blankie in a warm room with my laptop over my torso. I start each day with instant coffee or preworkout powder, C4 Original, mixed in a little water and ingested via straw to throat. After lifting I like White Mountain Foods Bulgarian Yogurt followed by rinsing my mouth with water which I also do after meals. Every night I thoroughly floss and brush my teeth. I take hCG, levothyroxine, and over the counter “magnesium glycinate lysinate chelate”. I own a rack, barbell, and plates in my living room and shave with cordless electric clippers every few weeks and some areas with a normal razor. I eat once per day, white rice, and quality steak or salmon followed by orange juice. I wear ankle merino wool socks and earplugs 100% of the time and only leave my apartment to take out the trash. I own a sex toy, a $200 1080 15.6in Chromebook, a wireless mouse, and a Metaphys Locus .5mm black mechanical pencil.
Quotes
I want to get what I prefer.
I want to do what I say I will do.
Seductive. - Yan Zhang
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Leonardo Da Vinci
Death is the solution to all problems. No man, no problem. - not Joseph Stalin
Betting creates utility, both parties think it’s EV>0. - Andrew Critch
You’re a fucking sik cunt if you want to be brah, stop being a fucking sad cunt, alright. - Zyzz
Films
The Social Network, American Psycho, Cloud Atlas, Leviathan, A Clockwork Orange
Visual Art
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hieronymous Bosch, Wassily Kandinsky, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Graham Franciose, Frank Lloyd Wright, Claude Monet, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami
Young Adult Fiction
Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Twilight, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Roald Dahl, Artemis Fowl, Evil Genius, Eragon, Inkheart, Death Note, Carl Hiaasen, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Sports
Casual weightlifting, rooftopping, disc golf, tennis, F1, NBA, 3x3, soccer, golf, running (all distances), beach volleyball, long track speed skating, snowboard cross.
Writers
Robin Hanson, Geoffrey Miller
Tricks
Baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, white vinegar, isopropyl alcohol, 180 rotate dick pics, AdBlock to simply remove CSS elements, Stylish, electric clippers shaving, hand to focus camera, Google for phone calls from laptop, writing, storing, Google functions, keyboard functions, .txt files, page functions, Library Genesis, pee pee cleaning, straws, timers, calendars, 0 notifications, 0 Facebook, 0 LinkedIn, considering 0 of anything really
Ideas