Smashter's Great Adventure

[Smashter]

Work, don't work. It's all good.

Thanks for this perspective. I need this to fully sink in.

I would be doing grocery delivery if I was single. DW truly enjoys going to the store and picking produce out in person. My brother is the same way. That's something that makes no sense to me.

[Smashter]

I fed Claude Opus an HTML file with all my answers on Quora over the last 12 years (46,000 words.)

I gave it the following prompt

what can you tell me about the author of these posts? can you take a guess at their myers briggs personality type? can you offer this person any words of wisdom for living a happy life? can you identify any patterns in their thinking that are not serving them well?

After a couple minutes, it responded:

Based on the series of answers provided by Smashter, here are some insights and observations about the author:

Personality Type:
From the posts, Smashter comes across as an ENTP (Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving) personality type on the Myers-Briggs scale. Some key traits that point to this:

• He tends to be analytical, questioning established ideas and ways of doing things.
  
  He seems extroverted and enjoys novel experiences and interactions with others.
  
  He focuses more on possibilities and theories rather than just concrete facts.
  
  He appears adaptable and open to changing his mind based on new information.
  
  However, personality typing has limitations, so this is just a tentative guess based on limited information.

Patterns of Thinking:
A few patterns emerge in Smashter's posts that may not always be serving him well:

• He tends to idealize certain paths in life (e.g. focusing solely on basketball in college) at the expense of being more well-rounded. This tunnel vision mentality caused him to feel lost at times.
  
  He displays black-and-white thinking in some cases, fully buying into one perspective before swinging to the opposite view after being exposed to a compelling counterargument. Integrating nuance and holding multiple perspectives could be beneficial.
  
  He seems prone to self-judgment and regret when reflecting on perceived mistakes or missed opportunities from his past. Practicing more self-compassion would likely increase his happiness.
  
  His analytical mind sometimes leads him to rationalize or explain away his gut ethical concerns (e.g. working as an agent's assistant despite moral qualms). Staying true to his values is important.

Words of Wisdom:
Here are a few pieces of advice for Smashter as he navigates life:

• Your worth as a person is not defined by external markers of success. You have inherent value regardless of accolades, job titles, salaries, etc.
  
  Root your self-esteem in your character and how you treat others.
  
  Keep investing in self-awareness and personal growth. Therapy, journaling, meditation, and heart-to-heart talks with loved ones can all help you understand yourself on a deeper level. This will empower you to make wiser choices.
  
  When in doubt, bet on yourself and what lights you up inside. Playing it safe and following a traditional path is tempting, but you seem to thrive when taking bold leaps in a direction that fascinates you. Let your curiosity guide you.
  
  Forgive yourself for your missteps and have faith in your ability to learn and do better going forward. You're human, and your past does not determine your future. Look ahead with hope.
  
  Prioritize relationships, experiences and making a positive impact over chasing status and material success. Focus on what will matter to you in the end - the people you lifted up and the moments of awe and connection.

In summary, Smashter comes across as a highly intelligent, analytical and driven person who is willing to question the status quo in pursuit of a life true to himself. If he leads with his curiosity, treats himself with compassion and defines success on his own terms, he will likely find his way to enduring happiness and fulfillment. The twists and turns of his journey will simply make him wiser and his story richer in the end.

Seems pretty accurate to me. Though I certainly wouldn't qualify as "highly intelligent" on these boards

The advice does feel a bit generic, but that's kind of how advice goes. It's interesting how it really leans into the "experiences over things" approach. I wonder if that's become such commonplace advice that it would be really hard to move it away from default suggesting that. Or maybe I don't give it enough credit, and if I'd written a bunch of posts about how I was broke, jaded and disillusioned after chasing experiences it would tell me to get grounded, acquire simple things, and save money.

I assume every LLM has already scraped all of Quora, hence my lack of concern with giving Claude all this personal info. Don't these models "read" literally everything on the internet daily, or something like that? Cat's out the bag now, I guess.

I think doing some chat therapy with one of these systems would be super interesting. I've had nothing but frustrating experiences with human therapists.

[jacob]

I think doing some chat therapy with one of these systems would be super interesting.

Certainly better than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA ... I suspect one problem with an internet based analysis is that it might miss someone's development (if any) over time. I for one would prefer not to have my present self analyzed based on my writings from 15 years ago ;-P (I lean more king than prince these days. Trying to protect my domain rather than conquering new ones. I'd likely tell my young whippersnapper self to slow down and be less annoying.) OTOH, I'd expect a human analyst to be projecting either their own presumptions or the cultural presumptions too much. The "words of wisdom" was pretty generic blah. Not particularly directed at ENTP. (I do think ENTP was a fairly good call though.)

But yeah, much like simple decision trees tend to be better at medical diagnosis that meat-based doctors, I could see how psychological diagnoses would be aided by this. In particular, an AI might easily understand people better (based on their writing) than they understand themselves. To what degree would that pass a Turing test?

[daylen]

Opus doesn't have access to any data beyond august 2023 (it will tell you if you ask it). Real-time updating is a feature the creators of these models are working towards. I have had about a hundred conversations now with various models and see them like an arc of opening and closing entropic pockets. Meaning that I often get more interesting results by (1) starting slow, priming, and leaving the objective open (2) climaxing with difficult and diverse questions that are often interdisciplinary (3) circle back around to what was primed in at the beginning and try countering the bias of the climax.

The basic idea is that a conversational arc can deviate away from what might otherwise be an averaged, boring response.

[Smashter]

To what degree would that pass a Turing test?

This system (Claude 3 Opus) easily passes a Turing Test in my opinion. When I tell it to be conversational and act like a friend it sounds perfectly human. It'll start sentences with phrases like, "For sure, I totally hear what you're saying, but here's the thing..." which is a level of human-soundingness I hadn't been able to get other systems to achieve.

And that's a good point about how it might overindex on very old writing when doing it's analysis. At some point I might feed it some of my fresher blog posts and see what it says.

I thought about asking you, a myers briggs expert who has also had extensive chats with me, if you agreed with the analysis. So thanks for chiming in on that.

@Daylen, thanks for those tips!

I will have to give that a try. But I'm still confused as to what you mean by:

...like an arc of opening and closing entropic pockets.

Your explanation afterward is clear, but why use that language? What is an entropic pocket? The mind of Daylen works in mysterious ways and I'm always curious to learn more

[daylen]

The space of all possible responses or essays is huge, the majority of which we would find gibberish. What these models train on is a small fraction of what is possible. This training attempts to capture the low-entropy sea of order and predictability. The water we swim in. [High] entropic pockets appear in this sea as disordered and unpredictable mixing. For instance, a chemistry textbook is fairly low-entropy and the ERE book is fairly low-entropy, but the combination of a chemistry textbook and the ERE book could form a relatively [higher-]entropic pocket ripe for the exploration of novel connections. What does a mad ERE chemist look like?

I tend to see culture inclusive of other languages as a fluid sea of potential. Some areas more ordered or solid-like than others, continuously dissolving, mixing, and re-crystallizing.

I am not sure where I initially heard the idea of "entopic pockets" or whether I just made it up but here is what Claude has to say:

what are entropic pockets?

Entropic pockets, also known as entropy-stabilized alloys, are a novel class of materials that consist of multiple elements mixed in high concentrations, close to equiatomic ratios. The term "entropic" refers to the high configurational entropy of these alloys, which stabilizes the solid solution phase and prevents the formation of intermetallic compounds.

Key characteristics of entropic pockets include:

1. High entropy: The alloys contain at least five principal elements, each with an atomic concentration between 5% and 35%, leading to a high configurational entropy of mixing.

2. Solid solution formation: The high entropy of mixing favors the formation of simple solid solution phases (e.g., face-centered cubic, body-centered cubic, or hexagonal close-packed) rather than complex ordered intermetallic compounds.

3. Unique properties: Entropic pockets exhibit a combination of desirable properties, such as high strength, high hardness, excellent thermal stability, good wear resistance, and corrosion resistance, making them attractive for various applications.

4. Sluggish diffusion: The presence of multiple principal elements with different atomic sizes leads to severe lattice distortion and reduced atomic diffusion, resulting in enhanced high-temperature stability and creep resistance.

5. Tailorable properties: The composition of entropic pockets can be adjusted to optimize specific properties for targeted applications.

Entropic pockets have garnered significant attention in recent years due to their potential for developing new materials with unprecedented combinations of properties. They find applications in various fields, including aerospace, energy, transportation, and manufacturing industries, where high-performance materials are required to operate under extreme conditions.

what might entropic pockets refer to in the realm of culture?

In the realm of culture, the concept of "entropic pockets" can be used as a metaphor to describe certain cultural phenomena or spaces characterized by a high degree of diversity, randomness, or unpredictability. These pockets can be seen as localized areas within a larger cultural context where various elements, ideas, or practices coexist and interact in unconventional or unexpected ways.

Some possible interpretations of entropic pockets in culture include:

1. Subcultures: Entropic pockets may refer to subcultures or alternative communities that diverge from mainstream cultural norms and values. These groups often embrace diverse and unconventional lifestyles, beliefs, or artistic expressions.

2. Creative spaces: Artists' studios, experimental theaters, or underground music venues can be seen as entropic pockets where different artistic styles, genres, and ideas mix and interact, leading to innovative and unexpected creations.

3. Multicultural neighborhoods: Urban areas where people from various ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds coexist and interact can be considered entropic pockets. These spaces foster cultural exchange, hybridization, and the emergence of new cultural forms.

4. Online communities: Some online spaces, such as forums, social media groups, or virtual worlds, can function as entropic pockets where people with diverse backgrounds and interests come together, leading to the cross-pollination of ideas and the formation of unexpected connections.

5. Festivals and events: Certain festivals, carnivals, or gatherings that bring together people from different walks of life and celebrate diversity, creativity, and unconventional expressions can be seen as temporary entropic pockets within a larger cultural landscape.

In these cultural entropic pockets, the interaction and mixing of diverse elements can lead to the emergence of novel and unpredictable cultural forms, practices, and ideas. These spaces often challenge established norms and hierarchies, fostering creativity, innovation, and cultural evolution.

Signs of convergent mixing.

[jacob]

I'll do a shorter one. An entropic pocket is the same as what permaculturists call edge-spaces. A space of high-interaction between differences.

It helps to understand what entropy actually is. Lets metaphorically consider rolling two dies. The result of adding can be anywhere between 2 and 12. Some combinations will be more probable than others, but if all you had access to what the sum, the most likely combination would be 7 although other combinations would also be possible. Why 7? Because the average value of a roll is 3.5 (=(1+2+3+4+5+6)/2) and you got two die. Now suppose you had a thousand dies or a gazillion. What's the average roll. It's still 3.5 but the chance of outliers just got relatively MUCH smaller. Rolling two 1s with two dies happen... Rolling a thousand 1s with a thousand dies is very very unlikely. If you roll a thousand dies and add them up, you'll be close to 3500 much of the time.

Now here's where the mind-blowing happens. Suppose you just knew the sum total and not how it came about via the individual addition, you'd ascribe this unseen combinatorial dynamics to some other quantity. Historically, that quantity was called "temperature". Statistical physics essential associates what is commonly associated with the measurement of temperature with the most likely sum of molecular dice rolls. Basically how fast molecules are most likely to move on average ... if there are enough molecules they stick close to the average ... so we can have a stable measurement with an instrument known as a thermometer.

Now enter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

Suppose you added a bunch of other dies with a different temperature to the first set. Eventually, they'd combine and reach the same temperature. But what happens initially is that there are two different temperatures. There are various theories for dealing with how these two sets eventually reach equilibrium. Heat transfer, conductivity, convection ... all simplifications of how molecules interact.

An entropic pocket is essentially a case of that for behavior that is more complicated than molecular dynamics. It's a fairly basic idea with a fancy new term. What happens when two different subdomains merge. Like how the the distribution of sums chance when adding 500 20-sided dies to your collection of 1000 six-sided dies.

Okay... that wasn't that short

[Smashter]

Thanks guys, I think I grok it now. I didn't expect to get so interested in the Maxwell's Demon wikipedia page. I liked reading about how many extremely smart and driven people have grappled with that thought experiment over the years.

From Daylen's Claude answer (my bolding):

Online communities: Some online spaces, such as forums, social media groups, or virtual worlds, can function as entropic pockets where people with diverse backgrounds and interests come together, leading to the cross-pollination of ideas and the formation of unexpected connections.

I can think of a place like that

[Smashter]

Update Time!

Finances

~525k combined NW in 85% stocks 10% cash 5% gold. Paid off house worth ~300k.

We are at a 60% savings rate on the year, though there’s an asterisk to that as we haven’t figured out how we want to amortize some of the fertility spending and the car purchase. Our monthly grocery bill is still high but has been cut down $300 from peak insanity.

The Long and Winding Road to Producing Offspring

I know they say it’s expensive to raise kids, but I'll be shocked if that is more expensive than this whole trying to have kids thing has been.

We have recently engaged a surrogacy agency. We’re already matched with an awesome surrogate who has done it before and knows the ropes. Total costs for this are going to be very high, probably close to 80k, but it's hard to say since we're at such an early stage.

One interesting tidbit is that all parties (me, DW, surrogate, surrogate's husband) have to do a psychological evaluation before the train can really get rolling. I understand why. But there is something that feels ironic about all these extremely responsible people being grilled by a professional about whether they really want to make a baby when any old non-surrogate using hooligan is free to pump out kids to their hearts content without any oversight.

In parallel, we are flying out to the east coast later in the summer to meet with specialists who can hopefully get the golf ball sized fibroid out of DW’s uterine lining.

Health

I was on such a good streak until I got covid a week ago. It’s my second time having it and while it’s not as bad as the first time, it really affects me. Overall though, I’m feeling good and strong. The people who guessed my age on my birthday recently thought I was younger than I am, which felt nice.

Sister Drama

Thank the high heavens, there have been no late night calls about my sister being in trouble lately. It’s actually been the opposite. She moved into my dad’s house and got a job at a decent company. Some in my family are acting like she turned a corner and everything is now sunshine and rainbows. But getting a job and keeping one are two different things. She actually has to show up to an office 5 days a week now after basically doing nothing for 1.5 years. I just pray she can resist going out to bars after work with her new friends. That’s where the trouble tends to start. But I’m really hoping she maintains normalcy for a while.

Quick Book Reviews from Recent Reading

Watership Down by Richard Adams — A 1970’s fantasy story that follows a group of rabbits as they leave their den and go on an adventure. It’s not something I would have picked up without seeing rave reviews. It’s really fun. It’s Tolkien like with the world building and invention of language. It’s also very grounded in research into how rabbits actually behave. It seems like the author read a very detailed book on rabbit behavior, became obsessed, and then next thing he knew he was writing a gigantic rabbit fantasy novel. 

Dominion by Matthew Scully — An esteemed republican speechwriter writes a 400 page book about how society should treat animals better. Not what you’d expect! He uses his conservative bona fides to gain access to interviews others would have a hard time getting, such as the president of a large pig farm. Then he’ll be like “those pigs look pretty miserable in those tiny crates and a lot of them look sick, what’s up with that?” I loved it. Scully is an awesome writer who makes compelling arguments as to why our factory farming system (not to mention sport hunting and whaling) is an embarrassment to a society that calls itself ethical and modern. The whole book is kind of like an extended version of David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster.”

Last month I submitted a review of Dominion to a book review contest put on by one of my favorite blogs. I quickly found myself utterly devoted to the project. I must have put in like 70 hours on it. It was fun to have such a single minded focus on a side project. If I put a fraction of that effort into my college studies I would have graduated cum laude. The process really made it clear how we can harness nearly unlimited energy when we actually care about something.

The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee — This one is about a North Korean defector. I only read the last 60 pages or so, because I’d read about life inside North Korea before. I was only interested in learning about her escape with her mom and brother. It was a riveting 60 pages. They have to make their way through the wilderness, bribe a bunch of people, and pretend they are mute and dumb to avoid suspicion at a Chinese checkpoint, amongst other drama. The mom and brother eventually end up in a prison in Laos with very limited prospects of making it to an embassy. Then a random Australian on vacation ends up giving the author large amounts of money despite being not that wealthy himself, just out of the kindness of his heart. This is used to complete the bribery process and gain their freedom. I currently feel very grateful to live in a democracy and to have never paid a bribe. All the bribes reminded me of Matt Lakeman’s amazing travel blog . That dude is always paying bribes.

Going Down with the Ship?

My job is as easy as it’s ever been. I’m glad I didn’t take the severance when offered at the start of the year, as I got a little raise and have made a lot more money in salary than I would have from the severance. I have time to do a good job at work, walk my dogs a bunch, write, and workout. 

The company only has about 6 months of runway left, so let’s see if our CEO can raise some cash. I always said this would be my last tech sales job, but if this company dies before we are done with the surrogacy process it would make sense to get one more tech sales job to offset the costs. I have one more job syndrome, ha.

A Stressful Trip 

I posted last year about my experience getting way too stressed at an adult weekend sporting event. It happened again this year. Argh! I’m not sure what to do about this. But I know I need to solve it or I need to take a year off from the event. Right now I am leaning towards not explicitly training for it, so I have less pressure on myself to do well. I still have very vivid and often stressful dreams about basketball about once per week. Clearly there is some deep rooted stuff to work through regarding my relationship to the game. I’m 37! This has got to stop. I had a good time socializing otherwise.

No More Fancy Gym Membership 

We pulled the plug on the fancy gym and social club after about 5 months. Surprisingly, it was DW who had enough. The straw that broke the camel’s back was them threatening to charge us hundreds of dollars for parking after telling us when we signed up that parking was free. This was on top of numerous other frustrations with the way the gym was managed and with the quality of the facilities. (We are not super picky people, but we are when we’re paying ~$350/month for a gym) 

I liked it for basketball, but that was far and away the high point. I genuinely like lifting at my old school gym near my house way more than at the fancy one. The fancy place had all plastic weight plates that looked cool from afar because they were shiny and embossed with the gym logo, but they were actually terrible to use if you actually wanted to get a workout in. 

DW was not a fan of the fitness classes. We did not attend any of the networking events. It was fun for a while to use the sauna and stuff, and we used to co-working facilities every once in a while, but overall the value was not there for us. I thought we were locked into a year contract, so it was nice to learn it was only month to month. 

I did develop a few nascent friendships through basketball, and I’m sure those would have continued to develop had I stayed. That’s the big loss from walking away. I’ll just have to find a new game or activity to meet people! 

New used car

We had been having a lot of car trouble with our 2007 Prius and our 2014 Subaru. After getting a repair quote on the Prius that was approaching what the car was worth, we decided to change things up. We sold both cars and got a 2020 Prius with 50k miles on it from a reputable nearby small dealer that specializes in Priuses. We got a big discount on it because it’s a rebuilt title, so there’s a risk in that. All in all, when accounting for the profits from the sales, this cost us $10k. We now have a much more reliable car + only one car to insure.

That recent thread about being able to save money if you know how to work on cars is resonating right now.

Wanderlust

I haven’t even been in the new house for a year and I’m already getting ants in my pants about moving again. I’m ready to get a little more peace and quiet. The non stop planes and trains are getting to me. I started a practice where I think of something I’m grateful for every time I hear a plane engine or a train horn to try to associate those sounds with positive things. It’s sort of working 


We want to stay in the same general area, this will not be another out of state move. 



My neighborhood is genuinely great in a lot of ways. I am by no means miserable. And DW loves it. But every time I think I’m ready to write up a post for the ERE city thread about how everyone should move here, I think that I’m likely to be gone by the time anyone else arrived. 

As of now we’re seeing how the kid stuff progresses before making any other big changes. DW is more of the mind to stay for like 5-10 years, where I’m like let’s get out of here as soon as we have been here two years and wouldn’t have to pay capital gains on a sale, haha. Although I’m also tempted to keep this property if/when we move and use it as a rental. 



Volunteering at a farm animal sanctuary

I have been going twice a month to help out at a local farm animal sanctuary. They have like 180 rescued animals living their best lives on a 30 acre farm. There are pigs, cows, goats, chickens, horses, donkeys, geese, more, and they all need tending to. I mostly muck stalls and refill water bowls. Given my relative strength compared to the rest of the staff, I often get pulled into anything that requires muscle and lifting ability, which is a lot on a farm. I enjoy the time away from screens doing something completely different from what I’m used to. During my last shift I got to feed cows bananas and it was delightful. They slurp them up, peel and all, right out of your hand. I also enjoyed learning that pigs love to get scratched and they will form a line to wait their turn once you start on one. There are long handled dishwashing scrubbers around the farm for just for pig scratching.

[delay]

Thanks for the journal update! Fertility treatment and surrogate parenting is becoming quite common. On the other side of the spectrum, last year a female friend had an unplanned daughter at age 48. So it goes.

Being thankful for things that get at you is a powerful technique! I've been using it with "opponent" colleagues lately. Like wishing for the best outcome for them. It seems to work! Perhaps getting older is also a help in this.

[Smashter]

Finances
Investments + cash ~$650k

New house has $250k mortgage. Someone please hold me accountable and don’t let me move for the next 18 years, ha.

DW got a raise and my salary has held steady, though my company has not been doing well. There could be more cuts incoming very soon. Between us we earn about 275k per year.

The tariff induced market volatility rattled our little household psychologically much more than the Covid dip ever did. I would read investing articles to calm myself down that were titled things like "everyone thinks this downturn is different, but it never is, just stay the course!“ and then I'd think "...but THIS time feels so different!" We ended up selling ~$80k of stocks during the turmoil (thankfully after they’d bounced back from their lows) and putting that money in cash. That brought us to an asset allocation we felt more comfortable with. What this experience taught me is I should check on my investments less during volatile times.
As of now we are at ~55% stocks, ~15% gold, ~30% cash.

Life
Moved yet again, to a bigger house a couple hours north of where we were. Hopefully this is our spot for a long time. Our best friends live around the corner and we have family nearby. We abut an awesome 270 acre county park that has woods and trails and playgrounds and all sorts of fun stuff. Which will be helpful because we have not one but two babies on the way! 

I’ve written in this journal about our infertility struggles. We finally, mercifully, hit on something that worked. We ended up using a surrogate and putting in one of our embryos. The surrogate got pregnant right away. At the same time, my wife was having surgery to remove a very large fibroid from her uterus. Once that was out, she also got pregnant, naturally. Now we have two baby boys coming within 3.5 months of each other. The miracles of modern medicine. It’s about to get wild. I look forward to joining the ERE parent club next month!

The surrogate will have cost us, all-in, something like $150k start to finish. We had a very simple setup where we met someone in the same state, worked with a very affordable agency, and have had no complications. I can’t imagine what some people pay.

It will be nice to have all that off the books soon. Just in time for whatever bills these kids have in store for us

@dear leader Jacob, I can’t wait for your heartfelt congrats next time I make an ERE march!

When someone just had a baby, you're supposed to say "congratulations" to affirm the (usually) happy new parents; you should definitely avoid talking about the Fi-pain you're feeling on the newborn's behalf as they're been sold down the river in an overpopulated world. This might be where the executive functioning comes in(!). If you can't bring yourself to fake it, it's better to say nothing.

Job turmoil (what else is new)
I was connected by a distant acquaintance to a job opportunity in the animal welfare space. I’ve been looking to do something that helps animals suffering on factory farms for a while now, so that was exciting. I’m currently interviewing with them. This should be good, but it’s also causing me existential anguish. I feel like I should want the role more than I actually do, and I’m wondering if now, with these babies coming in hot, is the time to be taking on a whole new thing. But I also don’t want to be caught totally off guard if I lose my other job. And I really would like to be having more of a positive impact on the world. Gah! So much to consider. Hopefully I can survive at my job at least long enough to get paid out for my paternity leave and then I’ll take it from there.

The nice thing about maintaining a high savings rate all these years is I don’t have to rush into anything. We are very comfortable financially. We are nowhere near some of y’all. We won’t be living off of a 3% SWR anytime soon. But we are doing just fine, especially given the ungodly amount of money we’ve thrown at having these babies. One day at a time, let’s see what the future holds. 


[thef0x]

Now we have two baby boys coming within 3.5 months of each other. The miracles of modern medicine. It’s about to get wild. I look forward to joining the ERE parent club next month!

!!!!! Congratulations dude!

Your situation sounds like the start of a great book to me. Plenty of type two fun to be had, no reason to kid yourself about it, but so much pure, hallucinating-from-sleep-deprivation baby bliss. And to have two of them grow up together, that's a real treat!

Welcome to BABY MAYHEM good sir!! It's going to be amazing!!!!!

[Cam]

Congratulations on the babies! Here's to many new adventures.

[delay]

Congratulations on becoming a father!

What this experience taught me is I should check on my investments less during volatile times.

Setting up a system that encourages few checks helps. I have different bank accounts for investing and normal life, and I don't see my investments at all. The login credentials are in a box I only open at "finance time". I check my investments only once a year, even in 2008 or 2020.

I guess reducing news consumption also helps. When I look at market watch, I remember Yahoo Finance from the early 2000s. Pretty much every article I read made me feel unsafe, and none of them came about. I don't know I gained anything from that anxiety.

[suomalainen]

Congrats and condolences! Parenting is nothing if not both the good and the bad, but I'm happy for you both that you were able to succeed in starting this venture that you both seemed so genuinely to want. And it's nice that you (seemingly) have support nearby.

[Scott 2]

Congrats on success with the fertility treatments. Coupled with the move, that's a strong transition into your next phase of life.


If there's an option to delay any decision on work until paternity leave, that's ideal. I can't imagine how you'd know until then.

[Western Red Cedar]

Congrats to you and your DW. It is funny how these things work out sometimes. I think new parenting role will provide plenty of near-term opportunities to provide a positive impact on the world. Good luck!

[Smashter]

Thanks everyone! And lol @Suo.

We are in the home stretch. We just moved a chunk of money from one account to the other, and procured a cashier's check, to get ready for our final surrogacy payment. We are going to pay her for a few months of breast milk, but that's pennies compared to what we've been shelling out.

I never even heard back from that job opportunity I got so excited about. Another lesson in how I should not pre-suffer based on how I think things are going to play out. The amount of bad experiences I've had going through the interview process for animal welfare orgs with an effective altruist bent is starting to pile up. They are just not professional operations. I expect Big Soulless Acme Corp to make you do multiple interviews and a big project only to then ghost you, but not organizations that present themselves as owning the moral high ground and being all about "doing the most good." Okay, end rant. That company will probably write me back tomorrow now, ha. (edit to add: you can't make this up, they emailed asking me to continue the interview process minutes after I hit send on this post.)

I've been enjoying the Shifty documentary series that Ego called out in the recommended viewing thread. I don't like it nearly as much as the other series that creator did on the fall of the soviet union (TraumaZone), but it's still interesting.

I've been reading
- Fear Factories, by Matthew Scully -- great collection of essays on how the awful things we do to animals by a former GW Bush speech writer
- Original Love, by Henry Shukman -- nicely written intro meditation book. It's aimed at a lower wheaton level meditator than me, but it's nice to page through this kind of dharma writing from time to time anyway. Very optimistic, very warm
- Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth -- I want these baby boys to be good sleepers and I heard this had good tips
- Several blog posts about whether the universe is "fine tuned" or not. Is it true that it's totally improbable that we live in a world with physics perfectly suited for our flourishing? I don't grok the math at all, but I like readying really smart people as they go back and forth on this. This summary post was entertaining: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/hi ... ments-on-a

[Scott 2]

I think your experience is typical of desirable non-profit careers. There's an abundance of youth and enthusiasm. It manifests as mis-management.

Recommendations I've seen are to delay involvement until late career, entering at a leadership or board level. Higher leverage, greater impact, better insulation from the dysfunction.

My wife looked into non-profit animal rights fresh out of undergrad. The application process was enough to put her off. Very clearly a taste of what's to come.

[jacob]

- Several blog posts about whether the universe is "fine tuned" or not. Is it true that it's totally improbable that we live in a world with physics perfectly suited for our flourishing? I don't grok the math at all, but I like readying really smart people as they go back and forth on this. This summary post was entertaining: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/hi ... ments-on-a

When it comes to philosophy, metaphysics, and physics, it's very useful to frame it in terms of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_differential

In terms of abstractions, most philosophy, for example, happens above the "descriptive level". Taken to the extreme, we get kooky notions like deconstructivism and its ilk that takes the position that "everything is made out of words"(*?) However, going with the "structural differential", I find that philosophical positions often depends on the nervous system of the person espousing their respective position: It makes sense to them.

(*?) To be fair, I'm not sure that this is what the original deconstructivists asserted even if that's what their students eventually went with. Originally, the posit was simply that "words are useless because they merely refer to other words, etc. and so on turtles all the way down." Yeah, well, if all one has in the department of philosophy are words, I can see how this would be limiting /snark/

But ... if we take it all the way down to the particle physics level, there are very good arguments that the universe simply can not be any other way. IOW, there's no "fine tuning" at this level. To give a brief overview...

(Caveat: I haven't really thought much about this for the past 25 years.)

If we assume that the universe has certain symmetries (a symmetry is an invariance under some transformation and obeys a principle of causality. (Examples of transformations include e.g. relocating the particles (their interaction doesn't change if they are moved in space), rotating the perspective (ditto whether we look from above or from the side, negative charges work opposite of positive charges, ...) ... then "particles" (<- not a word but a concept) can only have certain numbers of spin, e.g. 0, 1/2, 1, 3/2, 2, 5/2, ...

Spin relates to how much you have to rotate (transform under a symmetric principle) the particle (or your observation of it, see above) before you see the same thing. Think of a cube with 2 differently colored sides (red-green-red-green). This only has to be rotated 180 degrees before you see the same thing, so it has spin 2. Spin 1/2 is a bit weird since you have to rotate it 720 degrees to see the same thing.

It turns out that particles with half spins (1/2, 3/2, ...) obey something called the Pauli exclusion principle. This means that two particles with the same configuration can't occupy the same position in space. If you add more particles, they will spread out. We call such non-integer spin particles "matter". Basically, what we call "matter" has the property of space-filling particles.

Whereas integer spins (0, 1, 2, ...) can sit on top of each other without pushing each other away. We call these particles "forces". Recall that "particle" was not a word but a concept. So now it should be clear that "forces" and "matter" are just two aspects of the same general "thing" or aspect about the universe which ultimately comes down to spin... which again comes down to rotational symmetry constraints.... which is very simple.

There is no fine-tuning here. There are TWO and only TWO options and we observe them both.

Now the question is how do different categories of spin "particles" behave. This is determined by their quantum propagator which determines how their wave function evolves in time and space. IOW, how the particles move and interact. Turns out that spin also determines this. Each kind of spin has a different propagator.

Spin 1/2 particles are electrons, positron, neutrons, protons, ...

The key idea for the following is to look at ALL POSSIBLE INTERACTIONs and see which are physically allowed. If the theory is correct, we should observe ONLY physically allowed solutions and never see solutions that are not allowed under the theory. It turns out that if we look at all the allowed solutions (this was historically done by hand using Feynman diagrams, but now the diagrams are just made by computer, there's a mechanical process for making increasingly elaborate ones of all possible interactions) for spin 1/2, we can derive (from these principles) something that looks EXACTLY like the classical theory of electrodynamics.

IOW, electrodynamics can be explained as an inevitable consequence from simple assumptions about spin.

Spin 1 particles (remember they carry force) are the photon, the gluons, and the bosons. Remember, integer spins don't obey the exclusion principle. They can occupy the same space. Thus two photons can cross each other without being aware of each other. This is why the universe is TRANSPARENT to light. More generally, because of not obeying the exclusion principle, forces can not crowd each other out. You can not "block" a force with another force.

Still no fine tuning. This is the ONLY way.

The spin 1 particle propagators don't go far (compared to spin 1/2). If they did, the particles would be infinitely massive. This explains why the nuclear forces are strong AND short-ranged. This, in turn, is how we get atoms but only up to certain size. The spin 1 particles interact with the spin 1/2 particles and hold them together in nucleons, atoms, molecules, etc.

Spin 2 is really interesting because with this high a spin number, a spin 2 particle ought to be really short-ranged. It turns out, though, that ALL the higher order terms (very complicated Feynman diagrams) for all the possible solutions cancel out. In addition and more remarkable, the spin 2 particles couple EQUALLY to all other spin numbered particles. Is there anything or any force in the universe with those features? Yes, gravity! So the spin 2 particle is the graviton. IOW, the principle assumptions of General Relativity follows from the graviton being a spin 2 particle. This basically explains why gravitational mass and inertial mass are the same thing. This was something Einstein had to assume (with his accelerated elevator gedankenexperiment) but modern particle physics does not.

What about spin 0, 3/2, and more than 2? Well, the only spin 0 particle that has been observed is the Higgs Boson. Spin 3/2 has never been seen (in this universe, I don't know why) and neither has fundamental particle above spin 2 (likely because there are no solutions to their propagators that can be observed with our current energy level of particle accelerators---we can't access sub-subatomic physics).

General conclusion: The fundamental structure of particles and forces in the universe have only ONE solution. We see this solution because we can. There is no other way.

My conclusion: When people debate philosophically about these things, it's due to a limited range of their "structural differential". For example, trying to ascribe "cause and effect" or "prime mover" to events is trying to apply macroscopic thinking about inference and generalization to quantum level reality. It doesn't work.

But what about ...

One of the things I got paid to do was to calculate the ratios between various observed isotopes in the universe. Since [nuclear chemistry] is a bit closer to the "object level of human experience" it seems a bit more "real". Hence, of course, people have made more "fine tuning"-arguments here since it's closer to home. For example, why are we humans and all other life that we know of based on carbon? Or more fundamentally, why is there so much carbon in the universe? It turns out that the amount of carbon is HIGHLY sensitive to two nuclear resonances. If either is off by 0.1%, then either carbon would not be made (out of helium) in the first place or it would be quickly eliminated (turned into oxygen) in the second place.

Again, though, it's possible to calculate these resonances since the 1960s. Using the same calculation for the thousands of different isotopes that exist and their tens of thousands of resonances, you can calculate the isotopic distribution theoretically for a very close match to observed reality. There is NO OTHER WAY.

Basically, the only thing left to "fine tune" in terms of imagining or parametrizing different kinds of universes are the constant of nature. We do not have a theory that allows us to compute those. We do, however, as described above have a complete lock on the STRUCTURE of the natural laws and how they behave. It is rather amazing to me that one can mathematically derive all these conclusions from very very simple assumptions.

I'm rather meh about what this means for the "human condition" or place in the universe. If a giant meteorite hadn't wiped out the dinosaurs, humans would never have come into existence in the first place.