Category Archives: meta

Unusual Holidays

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You can create your own holidays! On this page I share some of mine.

Backup Day January 5th

  • Check your backup document which lists where all important data is stored
  • All important data should have at least one clearly-documented backup location (ideally two)
  • Consider automating your backups if they are not already
  • Consider if you have to back up anything physical (IDs, passports, tax documents, mail)
  • Make sure your backups actually work

Security Audit Day February 5th

  • Upgrade all your computers, servers, firewalls, and packages
  • Do basic penetration testing, remove deprecated software
  • Delete accounts/info you don’t need, attempt to doxx yourself if you want more opsec
  • Briefly go over physical security with a reasonable threat model too (keys, cameras, etc are cheap)

Digital Organization Day March 5th

  • Organize and categorize all your files and directories on all your devices
  • Clean your desktop, home screen, task bar, delete unused apps

Physical Organization Day April 5th

  • Organize and categorize all the objects in your living space
  • Buy anything that helps you become more organized such as cable ties, organizers, plastic bags, extension cables, label maker, etc
  • Don’t be averse to replacing old or sub-optimal items if you can afford newer ones – it’s usually worth it

Cancel Subscriptions Day May 5th

  • Cancel or reduce as many reoccurring payments as possible
  • Check all credit cards, bank accounts, mortgage accounts, brokerage accounts, business accounts, etc and repeat this process
  • Consider the rest of your personal finances too, but you should do this more than once a year!

Habit Breaking Day June 5th

  • Break as many habits as you can: stop yourself before you perform any habitual action and first attempt an alternative
  • You are not allowed to engage in a habit before at first consciously stopping to analyze at least one alternative (including simply not doing it) and performing a basic EV analysis
  • Try to apply this at a low level, e.g. including phone apps you open – It’s very hard!
  • You will probably want to modify your environment both physically (keep your phone further away) and digitally (block common websites) for a reasonably serious attempt

Cold Outreach Day July 5th

  • Do cold outbound!
  • If you don’t know anyone you want to talk to or meet, look for new people

Digital Exploration Day August 5th

  • The Internet is a large place and is not actually only composed of four apps
  • Explore it! Find places you’d never normally go to – links were made to be clicked!
  • You may naturally find yourself falling into Internet rabbit holes, but the intent of today is to dig new holes rather than fall into pre-existing patterns
  • Optionally pair with learning new skills, hobbies, or interacting with new types of people

Belief Audit Day September 5th

  • Spend at least several hours auditing beliefs that you hold dear
  • Make a document and recursively lists beliefs you hold about the world and yourself with reasons for why
  • Then red-team the ideas and attempt to falsify them.
  • It’s likely that this is most difficult for beliefs which are harming you the most.
  • Suggested to be done entirely in written format, although walks are also acceptable for single topics

Health Analysis Day October 5th

  • Analyze your personal health data and think of new data you may want to collect
  • With generative AI you can code and parse data much more quickly than before. It took me 10 minutes to import apple health data into a custom sql database starting with nothing but Claude
  • Consider blood tests – you can order them yourself with services like privatemdlabs and it’s one of the best ways to find ways to improve yourself (your goal should not be to fall “within the range” but rather to be at optimal levels of useful biomarkers like hormones, A1C, CRP, Lp(a), homocysteine, triglycerides. If you’re taking a test that’s important to you, you don’t shoot for a 60 or 70, but instead a perfect score.
  • If you can find ways to spend money to improve your health, it’s probably worth it. It’s easy to have fun with data from an (apple watch, eight sleep, whoop, oura, cgm, dexascan), but make sure the product is actually what you need to improve yourself beforehand. Data is fun, but actionable data is even more fun!

$X Celebration Day November 5th

  • Today is the day to celebrate $X (this is a fill in-the-blank variable, not Twitter!), something which you love but for some reason the rest of humanity has not made a national holiday for
  • If you really love $X, you could make this a monthly celebration, or perhaps even…
  • Spread this holiday to as many people as possible if you’d like a shot at it becoming a real national holiday

Bespoke Holiday Day December 5th

  • Are your bespoke holidays helping?
  • Can you improve them or add new ones?
  • My original list had twice as many holidays, so I’m confident you can come up with more!

Celebrate these holidays with just a few clicks!

You can add all of the above holidays to your calendar with this link!
Google calendar instructions: Open your calendar and find the bottom left hand panel where it says Other calendars. Click + and then from URL and paste in the above link.

If you enjoyed this post you may like the rest of my website.

Links

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This page lists many of my favorite blog posts, organized by author. Much of my most-cherished knowledge is from blog posts or internet comments, so I hope to share some of that with others here. Last updated: Nov 30 2024

Scott Alexander (Twitter): As the author behind SlateStarCodex (now AstralCodexTen) and many great LessWrong posts, Scott is among one of the best written content creators of the last decade. He writes about psychiatry, rationality, and meta-science. Here’s some writing of his that I love, with my favorites bolded:

Gwern Branwen (Twitter – currently private): Well-known for having quality deep dives in diverse areas such as statistics, technology, machine learning, genetics, psychology, and many others. Also often recognized as an amazingly aesthetic, verbose, and highly-usable website. Favorite posts:

  • About Gwern: About Gwern; who he is, what he has done, and links to other mediums
  • It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World: An eloquently-written and humorous short story about AI alignment and paperclipping, featuring our good friend Clippy alongside a multitude of entertaining references, both to Internet history and many arxiv machine learning papers
  • Generating Anime Faces: An overview of GANs in machine learning, with focus on Stylegan2 and anime art generation including ThisWaifuDoesNotExist and its follow-up ThisAnimeDoesNotExist, both trained from a large Danbooru dataset
  • Death Note Anonymity: Using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in Death Note (absolutely worth watching, even if you’re not into anime), offering insightful analysis and constructive criticism
  • The Scaling Hypothesis: Discussion of the scaling hypothesis in machine learning (essentially how much better models get with significantly more data+compute), with obligatory emphasis on GPT-2 and GPT-3
  • Melatonin: Detailed information on melatonin, a simple endogenous hormone that notably improves sleep in many individuals when supplemented just before bedtime
  • Nicotine: An analysis on the benefits of nicotine as a nootropic, with attention given to the fact that it is often incorrectly assumed to be a dangerous and addictive drug due to its inclusion in cigarettes and consequently significantly-confounded research claims
  • Modafinil: Discussion of modafinil, a prescription stimulant drug that appears to have a relatively favorable cost/benefit profile for productivity and alertness
  • Embryo Selection for Intelligence: A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits
  • Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation: A meta-scientific discourse and analysis on the age-old adage that correlation does not imply causation
  • The Melancholy of Subculture Society: A brief analysis on the cultural effects of the Internet allowing niche subcultures to easily form
  • Newsletters: Links to Gwern’s past ~monthly newsletters
  • My Anime List: Gwern’s top-rated anime

Andrej Karpathy: (Twitter) A bright AI researcher who has spent time both at OpenAI and as the chief AI officer at Tesla. He has a popular Youtube channel with machine learning content as works on Eureka Labs.

  • The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks: Back in 2015 Andrej trained a 10M-parameter RNN on some interesting text datasets like the source code for the Linux kernel and Shakespeare. Performance was surprisingly good!
  • Biohacking Lite: It’s always fun to read content from people from fields like computer science when they later deep dive into biology, often for their own personal health. This post has some high-SNR content on the basics of metabolism and energy in humans as well as some quantified-self demonstrations and simple dietary advice.

Scott Aaronson: A theoretical computer scientist with a focus on quantum computing and complexity theory. Although his posts on quantum computational complexity theory research go over my head, I’ve enjoyed some great content from him in other categories. Favorites:

Matt Levine (Twitter): An ex-Goldman Bloomberg opinion columnist with some wonderfully insightful and hilarious posts (offered as a free newsletter, generally ~4x a week) on the happenings in our modern yet often-insane financial world. Posts are generally centered around current events and are best read as they come out. Some examples:

Nintil (Twitter): A wonderful blog by Jose Luis Ricón with a focus on longevity, economics, and meta-science. Favorite posts:

Patrick Collison (Twitter): The CEO and co-founder of Stripe, often with focuses involving meta-science, individual and societal productivity, and economics

  • Fast: Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together
  • Questions: A short list of interesting questions
  • Advice: Advice, particularly for young and ambitious individuals
  • Book Recommendations: A well-sized list of suggested reading

Nabeel Qureshi (Twitter): a startup founder who was previously at Palantir, having been a Emergent Ventures awardee prior to that. He has a high-signal website with posts on thinking, reflecting, and optimizing well. My favorite articles from him include:

Richard Ngo (Twitter): Richard previously worked on the governance team at OpenAI after having been a research engineer on the AGI safety team at DeepMind. Much of his writing exists on Twitter, LessWrong, or his blog. My favorites aren’t currently listed as I’d like a way to archive tweets on this website prior to adding them.

Sam Altman (Twitter): The CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator, his posts often focus on startups, artificial intelligence, productivity, and science. Favorites:

  • How to be Successful: Thirteen thoughts on how to achieve long-term successful outcomes: learn a lot, compound yourself, work hard, and be ambitious
  • Productivity: Various productivity tips, such as ‘Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored. So think about it more!’
  • Advice for Ambitious 19 Year Olds: Advice for young and ambitious individuals, such as ‘The best people always seem to be building stuff and hanging around smart people’
  • How to Invest In Startups: Advice about being a good startup investor
  • Super successful companies: Notes some salient commonalities between many very successful companies
  • The Strength of Being Misunderstood: You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status

Paul Graham (Twitter): The founder of Y Combinator, with many posts focusing on startups, ideas and frameworks for everyday life, as well as advice and reflections for people that fit the founder/builder/nerd stereotype. Some favorites:

  • Do Things That Don’t Scale: An amazing tip on gaining initial traction and leverage by doing high-impact activities that won’t scale, but that will work effectively for the time being
  • What You Can’t Say: Reflections on that which exists outside of the Overton window
  • How to Make Wealth: An essay on effectively building wealth over time
  • Keep Your Identity Small: On why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions due to excessive involvement with personal identity
  • Having Kids: Personal experiences and thoughts on having kids
  • It’s Charisma, Stupid: A 2004 essay arguing that charisma is the most important trait for elected politicians, using the US presidency as an example
  • What I worked on: A personal and emotional memoir on pg’s professional and personal history

Alexey Guzey (Twitter): Currently working on New Science, Alexey has some great blog posts with a focus on properly using the Internet for social leverage (reach out to people more, cold email people more, initiate conversations more, and create content more!), meta-science, productivity, biology, and more. Some favorites:

Melting Asphalt (Twitter): Written by Kevin Simler (along with Robin Hanson (Twitter), co-author of The Elephant in the Brain), Melting Asphalt has a wonderful collection of posts on evolutionary psychology, game theory, and novel and introspective takes on what makes us human. Favorites:

  • Neurons Gone Wild: A beautifully speculative post that suggests a recursively selfish model of biological neurons which enables selfish sub-agents and networks to co-exist in an evolutionary semi-competitive environment within our own minds. Probably my favorite post on this blog for several reasons. Also see Hallucinated Gods
  • Music in Human Evolution: A great book review of Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution by Joseph Jordania, involving predatory defense mechanisms, disposition of the dead, battle trances, and the audio-visual intimidation display
  • Crony Beliefs: On beliefs that stick around when they shouldn’t
  • Personality: The Body in Society:
    What is personality? ‘Nature and nurture work together to create a prototype, which then negotiates with the external world. The result is a strategy for getting along and getting ahead — a strategy we call “personality”, in other words, ‘Personality is a strategy for making the most of one’s particular lot in life.’ See also: part two and part three
  • Ads Don’t Work That Way: On ‘cultural imprinting’ and signaling in advertising
  • Doesn’t Matter, Warm Fuzzies: Discusses many interesting aspects of human ecology and society, with a focus on rituals, culture, confabulation, mimicry, and more
  • Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole: On social status in humans, including an analysis of two proposed separate status systems: dominance/submission and prestige/admiration. See also: Social Status II: Cults and Loyalty
  • Border Stories: Borders are a necessary precondition for agency within a hostile ecosystem

Telescopic Turnip: Reads like type of cross-over between scott alexander and gwern, which means it’s good

Qualia Computing: With a subtitle of ‘revealing the computational properties of consciousness’, Qualia Computing is a great blog for anyone interested in the neurology, phenomenology, and interesting attempts at quantifications and explanations behind our own conscious experiences (qualia)

Patrick Mckenzie (Twitter): An entrepreneur and writer that lives in Japan and currently works at Stripe with a focus on startups and outreach, Patrick has many invaluable posts about finance, startups, marketing and professional communication, and highly-regarded SaaS and entrepreneurial advice. Favorite posts:

Nat Friedman (Twitter): Great personal website!

Fantastic Anachronism (Twitter): todo, see Recommended Reading

Applied Divinity Studies: todo

Peter Attia (Twitter): todo

Vitalik Buterin (Twitter): todo, see The bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis

Lesswrong: todo

Overcoming Bias: “This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don’t all die”. See also: Overcoming Bias Anthology

Tim Ferris: 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous

Dynomight (Twitter): todo, see Better air is the easiest way not to die by The impact of air pollution on health is often significantly underrepresented, and working on improving the quality of air in your dwelling can result in a very high ROI for your health

Marginal Revolution: todo