This is embarrassingly out of date, but since it’s literally about Time Bridges, that makes it all the more apropos, right? (If you’re wondering how we even dug up something this old, you might like our recent series on backlogs and freshenable collections.) The Future of Life Podcast is mostly about...| blog.beeminder.com
I’ve been doing life tracking for around 10 years, and this post is looking back at some things I learned from the data (since my previous retrospective in 2017). Highlights include what I ge…| Victoria Krakovna
Recently I spent some time at a liberal arts college, doing close reading out loud with a group of the profs. It was lovely; stimulating, collegial, civilised. A little pocket of air outside history. But I was aware of being an interloper, of feeling inimical to them. But why? After all, I’m an obsessive reader – and they do little else. I’m uninterested in most kinds of worldly success – and, e.g., none of the six professors present had ever heard of YCombinator. We both love learnin...| argmin gravitas
Welcome to the Dreevpeeve of the day. I’ve actually seen “deprecate” misused so often that I was worried that, as usual, the prescriptivists would soon have to concede defeat. But so far all the dictionaries are holding firm. This is merely in the category of Common Misconception and so I’m doing my...| blog.beeminder.com
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian, bestselling author, public intellectual, and secular prophet (or ‘futurist’ as they prefer to be called). Speaking out of his Darwinian natura…| Analogical Thoughts
You are a random sample of short experience-generating strings, and the crazy thing about it is that it's all less crazy than it sounds.| PUTANUMONIT
Welcome to the next post in our Freshening Series. Before we get to that, let’s review our related posts on clearing and preventing backlogs: Redqueening, Inbox Zero, Backlogs, and Fluid Dynamics describes Mark Forster’s Backlog Method — “isolate and redqueen” — using lots of analogies. Control Systems...| blog.beeminder.com
In January, I defended my PhD thesis. My thesis is called Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology, and it’s about predicting the future. In many ways, the last five years of my life have been unpredictable. I did not predict that a novel bat virus would ravage the world, causing me to leave New York for a year. … Continue reading Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology→| Unexpected Values
[Note: images may not load if you’re using the WordPress app. Try opening this post in a browser, or reading it on LessWrong.] Thanks to Drake Thomas for feedback. I. Here’s a fun scatter plot. It has two thousand points, which I generated as follows: first, I drew two thousand x-values from a normal distribution … Continue reading How much do you believe your results?→| Unexpected Values
In December 2020, I made 100 probabilistic predictions for 2021. As promised, I’ve come back to evaluate them on two criteria: calibration and personal optimism/pessimism. I also challenged readers to compete with me. More on this later, but first, here are my predictions, color-coded black if they happened and red if they didn’t. I. US … Continue reading Grading my 2021 predictions→| Unexpected Values
We’re thrilled and honored to welcome back to the blog the esteemed Mary Renaud, PhD. Though for now, only iPhone people can reap what Mary has sown… I’m excited to officially announce my first iOS app: Time Stream! What is Time Stream? Time Stream is a routine management app that adapts when your day...| blog.beeminder.com
We have a pair of blog posts from 2022 called “Backlog Freshening” and “Backlog Freshening For Humans” that we’re still very pleased with. To recap, say you have a backlog of something — tasks, emails, blog post drafts, bugs, you name it — that it’s not realistic to clear. (If you do need to clear it,...| blog.beeminder.com
A reminder not to fall into the trap of first-order thinking.| An Operator's Blog
The golden mean of Beeminder: If you never derail, dial up your bright red lines — if you’re derailing all the time, dial them down. Thanks to felixm and others in the forum for inspiring this post. The previous blog post in our series on how derailing is good-actually (see the sidebar for a review)...| blog.beeminder.com
This is a sequel to “The Power of Rearticulating Insights in Your Own Words.” If that post convinced you, this post is a way to turn all that up to eleven. Also conceivably related is our latest autodata integration, Postminder, for beeminding forum posts. The extremely curious can check out the forum...| Beeminder Blog
Tada! You can now beemind posting to the Beeminder forum, or any forum that uses the same forum software. Which is a lot of other fora. All the cool kids use it. It’s called Discourse. Not to be confused with Discord (more on this below), the instant messaging platform. Which, we suppose, is what the...| Beeminder Blog
This is a slightly more polished version of something I posted in the Beeminder forum. The forum is also the place for ongoing discussion about this. OpenAI’s Deep Research tool was made available to premium users the other day and I tried it out with the following prompt: “What does the science say...| Beeminder Blog
This is part 4 of our Melzaminder Series. Previously we introduced the Mindful Munching with Metrics program, talked about scale weight as a metric, and talked about proxy metrics more generally. Here we talk about how the Metrics part of Mindful Munching with Metrics work. Alright, any non-nerds who...| Beeminder Blog
That’s Fatebook with a T. Made by the impressive folks at Sage. What is Fatebook for? It’s for predicting things. Specifically, it’s for publicly or privately logging your estimates of the likelihood of certain future events. Which events? It’s totally up to you. You can predict the course of history,...| Beeminder Blog
This is part 3 of our Melzaminder Series. Previously we introduced the Mindful Munching with Metrics program followed by To Weigh Or Not To Weigh, in which we argue in favor of poor maligned scale weight as a useful getting-in-shape metric. Here, we generalize the idea of metrics that aren’t quite the...| Beeminder Blog
Welcome one and all to this announcement of our latest Beeminder integration: Curlminder. This one’s for the nerds. The idea is that you give us a URL and a regular expression, and we fetch the contents of the webpage, match it on the regex, and pull out a number. In theory you can use this to beemind...| Beeminder Blog
Users have been lobbying for this feature for years. Finally we threw in the towel and implemented it. Hitting the Uncle Button (crying uncle) means accepting a derailment before the clock runs out. This is actually kind of critical to let users do and it’s silly it took us so long. I mean, for starters,...| Beeminder Blog
Remember Fractional Beeminding? We’ve been putting it to great use for such goals as Our meta goal to keep churning out autodata integrations Project Euler, and Workerbee-Visible Improvements. A key clarification before reviewing how it works: fractional beeminding doesn’t mean beeminding something with...| Beeminder Blog
Question from the internet: What do we mean by calling Beeminder hyperrational goal tracking? Before I give my answer, here’s a recent example from the inventor of Ruby on Rails using “hyperrational” in the context of sociopathic companies: [Fines on tech companies] put a price on criminal behavior,...| Beeminder Blog
Beeminder as the nuclear option means beeminding something as an insurance policy. You have a nice graph of your progress but you maintain enough safety buffer that you’re not in danger of derailing and getting stung (being charged money for going off track on your goal, for those just tuning in). In...| Beeminder Blog
Being a smidge embarrassed by the term “user-squeaming”, we sat on this draft for years. But when we used it again this morning we decided the concept handle had officially stuck and figured it was time to give it the imprimatur of a blog post. User-squeaming means being excessively squeamish about what...| Beeminder Blog
This blog post started its life during the pandemic, as part of a series in the daily beemail called Madhack Mondays. Here’s a highly beemindable workout idea for the dead of winter if you have stairs in your house. Put 100 marbles or legos or whatever in a bowl at the bottom of your stairs. Then...| Beeminder Blog
Grayson Bray Morris has been a bright spot in the Beeminder community almost since the beginning. She’s currently taking a break from the internet, but before she peaced out she gave us permission to canonize this classic 2015 (!) post from her old blog, by publishing it here on Beeminder’s blog. The...| Beeminder Blog
We have two excuses to blog about this. First, we’re using our new group goals feature to experiment with something we’re calling Book Brigades. To quote myself from the forum post about it: A book brigade is a very small group of very like-minded| Beeminder Blog
Group goals are alive! Multiple people can all commit to a single goal! Find it in the Settings tab below your graph: Backing up, this has been in private beta for over a year. Then this past weekend I was at Manifest (which was pretty amazing, btw, highly recommended, and tons of Beeminder fans) where...| Beeminder Blog
We are living through historic times right now, and I mean that in the worst possible way. We’re witnessing, in real time, a slow-motion coup against the United States government, one that may already have reached a point of no return.| Franklin Veaux's Journal
The Supreme Court’s judgment in R (The Spitalfields Historic Building Trust) v London Borough of Tower Hamlets [2025] UKSC 11 traverses some important ground concerning the principle of legality and heightened-scrutiny rationality review — and serves as a reminder that a good deal of work remains to be done if doctrine and principle are to […]| Public Law for Everyone
Old bills are coming due. We have obscured truths that were obvious to previous iterations of Western Civilization, in fact of all civilization, and which will eventually become obvious again. A few of these truths: The longer these sorts of truths are ignored the harder the crash will be.| Truth and Tolerance
The judgment of Chamberlain J in KP v Foreign Secretary revisits and clarifies some fundamentals about the nature of substantive judicial review. In doing so, it reminds us that the ‘proporti…| Public Law for Everyone
This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, travel, etc) and analyze my life track…| Victoria Krakovna
Rational therapy equals the ‘avoidance of risk’, the ‘avoidance of uncertainty’. RT involves the creation of a positive reality, in other words. We never hear anyone actually say this, but that's because the positive (or 'stated') reality is all we know, all we are able to acknowledge. If we ever…| radicaluncertaintydotcom
A bold new theory of behavioural economics.| Deep Dish
Abstract| Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
Written by Daniel Villiger Do I want to have children? This is one of the big life decisions. If I choose to have a child and am successful, I will become a parent and will experience the ups and downs, the advantages and disadvantages of being a parent. On the other hand, if I choose| Practical Ethics
Bayesianism is one of the more popular frameworks in cognitive science. Alongside other similar probalistic models of cognition, it is highly encouraged in the cognitive sciences (Chater, Tenenbaum, & Yuille, 2006). To summarize Bayesianism far too succinctly: it views the human mind as full of beliefs that we view as true with some subjective probability. […]| Theory, Evolution, and Games Group
In Damon Culture (that is to say, a culture made up of people where my traits are the expected ones of the average person, if not quite a culture made of my literal clones), how confidently someone states their beliefs is ideally NEVER influenced by how confident people around them are. Only by how confident … Continue reading Confidence and Humility →| Daystar Eld
I had an amazing conversation with Drs Anila D’Mello and Liron Rozenkrantz from MIT about their research review and other work about autism, rationality and cognition! Listen to the episode by clicking the audio file below or on Spotify, Stitcher or iTunes here. Read the transcript below the audio file. . . Transcript by Julie-Ann … Continue reading “There are a lot of areas autism researchers have viewed as deficits that can actually confer advantages”: Talking with MIT researchers...| Noncompliant – the podcast
This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, travel, etc) and draw conclusions from…| Victoria Krakovna
This has been a long time coming, but I have been working on a new blog! It lives here. While I’ll leave this site up as an archive, all new posts will be put on the new mlu.red site in the f…| mindlevelup
[See also: On Giving Advice and Recognizing vs Generating] So this quarter, I’ve been tutoring for an undergraduate computer science course, and one interesting thing that I’ve revised is how I thi…| mindlevelup
[An overview of why I didn’t write as much in 2018. Aversions snowballed, and the blog format led to having expectations about content I found sometimes hard to satisfy. A look back at some of my f…| mindlevelup
[Because people are predisposed to give others good impressions, when our relationships deepen, it’s more likely that we’ll have to revise our initial “perfect” models of the other person. For the …| mindlevelup
[Communication is a lot like a game of telephone. Information needs to flow from your head to the the medium to the other person to the other person’s head. As a result, there are lots of pla…| mindlevelup
I’ve been working on a static site generator that gives me a lot more control over the formatting and stylings. My current plan is to keep putting polished essays here on MLU and use the shor…| mindlevelup
My understanding of AGI is, perhaps predictably, rooted in my understanding of human psychology.| Daystar Eld
When I go to write a post for this blog I spend a lot of time doing research to| www.thelastrationalist.com
Something is “robustly tolerable” if it performs adequately under a wide range of circumstances, including unexpectedly bad circumstances. In this post, I argue that when the costs of failure are high, it’s better for something to be robustly tolerable even if this means taking a hit on performance or agility.| Amanda Askell
Embracing the kind of aggressive curiosity of sharks seems to be a good way of getting better at arguing. But it can have a chilling effect on discourse and friendships. In this post, I explain what I mean by shark curiosity, and how we can strike the right balance between nurturing and testing new ideas.| Amanda Askell
We sometimes assume that seeing someone fail implies that they are doing something wrong, but I argue that the ideal rate at which our plans should fail is often quite high. I note that this has consequences in politics and ethics that are often underappreciated.| Amanda Askell
There is a longstanding debate about whether deliberation prevents us from making any predictions about actions. In this post I will argue for a weaker thesis, namely that deliberation limits our ability to predict actions.| Amanda Askell
Every now and then I write twitter threads about papers (both ones I read and ones I’ve written) and talks (ones I gave and ones I’ve seen). Someone suggested once that it may be a good…| Iris van Rooij
I have not written many new blog posts this year. This is disappointing for me; I wish I had converted more time and thoughts into blog posts. For two years, like magic, a new mindlevelup post woul…| mindlevelup
The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles by Emily Martin [ Martin, Emily. 1991. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Const…| anthropolojamz
Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage by Victor Turner [ Turner, Victor. 1970. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Ritesde Passage” in The Forest of S…| anthropolojamz
This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting goals for next year. Overall, this was a reasonably good year with some challenges (the invasion of Ukraine and being sick a lot). Some hi…| Victoria Krakovna
I’ve been pretty confused lately about trying to think about how seriously I should be interpreting literary things. Or, not exactly literary things, but more like “life philosophies”. What I’m try…| mindlevelup
[When exposed to the same stimulus over and over, our response becomes dulled. This is often referred when someone says the “novelty faded”. Despite having strong evolutionary roots, I …| mindlevelup
Introduction| www.thelastrationalist.com