---
title: "Learning Report: 2020, week 38"
layout: post
date: 2020-09-20
parent: Learning Reports
category: Learning Reports
published: true
redirect_from:
- "/105"
---

## Goals

* philosophy
  * keep improving, learning, and understanding stuff about YesNo, TCS, Goldratt, etc
    * finish *the choice*
    * finish *fabric*
  * discussion has been helpful, I think more of that would be good
    * discussion seems to be easier to write about than when I have free choice of topics
  * objectivism -- start learning a bit more about it slowly; I have a list of Rand to read
* work
  * continue/start writing on some things
  * i've done a bit of writing on some work stuff, but held back a bit b/c I've been improving a lot
    * I feel my writing (and speed at writing) has improved a lot, so time to go back to that, I think
  * put together a sort of 'intro philosophy' pack for future team stuff
* Flux
  * have some backlog to do, getting more urgent
  * start writing some of the Flux articles I've been meaning to

### specific goals

* make a video like 'Tom Scott is Wrong About Online Voting and he Should Stop Spreading Misinformation
  * made some notes on this
* write and publish draft: discussion / debate policy
  * from curi.us debate topics: "Intellectuals who are too busy to talk with everyone should have written policies for who they talk to"
* write response to WA Electoral Funding submission request (by Oct 2)
* write response to Fed Electoral Funding submission request (by Nov 6)

## notes

* finding overhead of managing postmortems, this site, etc sometimes-significant but not unbearable

## tutorials

* 40
  * Speedrun discussion
  * Otherwise general discussion + post ideas discussion
* 41
  * LW banned curi
    * some discussion
  * discussion of 'hello and welcome to fi' post -- lots of places to improve, not persuasive
  * some discussion on 'potential' and why it's not a good thing to base stuff on

## posts

* Overreaching, greatness, and meta-knowledge
* Perimortem on intuitive response to comment #18037
* Postmortem on #18030 #18043 #18050
* Hello, and welcome to FI (opt1) -- note: not v good
* (Draft/Partial) Helping the Best People or the Masses; One Meaning for FI
* [(curi.us) Inefficient learning is like eating the seed corn](https://curi.us/2380-max-microblogging#18032) -- plus some discussion I thought was good
* [(curi.us) TCS and passions](https://curi.us/2380-max-microblogging#18066)
* [(curi.us) Quick thought on a secondary goal of life.](https://curi.us/2380-max-microblogging#18080)

## Personal

* wrote a few thousand words in a few letters, one went through numerous drafts which was good
* over the phone -- helped find a soln to a minor ~family problem, using stuff I've learnt

## LW posts/comments

* [reply to curi's ban](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PkpuvsFYr6yuYnppy/open-and-welcome-thread-september-2020?commentId=xT6FrJuYCf5QLYuzv) -- there's ~7 substantial replies in total, [mostly mirrored on curi.us](https://curi.us/2381-less-wrong-banned-me)
  * LW is pretty shit

## postmortems

* I said I'd do a retrospective (filling in for a monthly learning report) and I didn't. I should do a postmortem on that. (I haven't)
* [pm/1](../../pm/1)
* [Perimortem on intuitive response to comment #18037 -- pm/2](../../pm/2)
* [misreading IR](https://curi.us/2380-max-microblogging#18051) #18051 (also via [pm/3](../../pm/3))

## carry over

* started reading *the choice* again, up to ch12 (friday)
  * no other reading

## misc

* SSOL speedrun improved to 2:20
  * this uses the same route but I have some new ideas.
    * I got 2:23 on a new route on like the ~5th attempt, so there's some good potential there
    * I also realised I thought there was a wall at the end of the main route but it's just bushes, so maybe there's a faster route that goes through that. it's a bit of a pain though b/c it's hard to manoeuver through that space without like hitting rocks or things
    * the current end is not a bad place to end b/c there are a lot of orbs in roughly a line. it's tricky to get them all in one go, though, and costs like 5s+ if you miss one (or more), so ending elsewhere could be good.
      * maybe I can try routing backwards instead?
  * Weekend Update: Bit of a timer battle thing going on with [AggressiveCombo](https://www.speedrun.com/user/AggressiveCombo) (AC)
    * He got a 2:16, I pushed my time down to a 2:12
    * Then he got a 2:09, 2:08, 2:02, 2:01, and 1:57
    * No fundamental changes to the route, he cut a corner off I included but didn't need, and has better movement in the last section which is important for consistency and b/c it can take 10s on its own (saves like 4s)
      * If I were going to keep competing, I'd practice picking up orbs on corners, particularly zigzagging
      * Also, I'm not sure if holding `s` to stop and go backwards is slower than holding `w` and flipping 180 with the mouse
  * not sure if I'm going to keep running it -- I gather AC put in more time practicing that weekend that I have in total

## curi debate topics

* Genes (or other biology) don’t have any direct influence over our intelligence or personality.
  * I'm unsure about this, I should do some more reading.
    * I think genes could have some effect without compromising ppl being universal understanders/explainers
* Human minds aren’t a collection of modules or compartments
  * parts of the brain dedicated to some function
    * not sure this is incompatible, sort of like optimisations in code
      * you could do something generally and slowly, or have some optimisations that are specific but don't change the generality of the program
* There are no conflicts of interest between rational men.
  * at a high level this seems sensible, but I'm not sure at a lower level
    * does 'lower level' (like day-to-day stuff) mean anything outside of higher level goals (e.g. life-long / wholistic)
* Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are worthless investment frauds.
  * this I think we could debate

I think the *only* thing we might disagree about in a substantial way is the cryptocurrency one. I think there are two main things to figure out via the topics:

* **Bitcoin** is a worthless investment (fraud)
  * fraud is easier to see in projects ppl start which they profit from, Bitcoin is different b/c AFAWK Satoshi hasn't made significant profit from it, despite his estimated holdings being like ~9b USD (the coins remain untouched)
* **Blockchain in general** has this property