Sometimes I do blatantly useless things so I can flaunt my rejection of the often unhealthy “always optimize” pressures within the effective altruism community. So today, I’m going to write about rock music criticism.
I certainly don’t endorse “always optimize”! I spend far too much time reading manga and trying to win Magic: the Gathering tournaments for that. I fully endorse analyzing things that are interesting/entertaining. But it seems bad to get stuck with something that is both low-expected-impact and low-interest. Someone who really likes Folding@Home should totally give the analysis a go; someone who doesn’t care and just wants evaluation practice has many other options.
cf. Gwern’s study of catnip.
Also Luke’s post on Scaruffi:
I certainly don’t endorse “always optimize”! I spend far too much time reading manga and trying to win Magic: the Gathering tournaments for that. I fully endorse analyzing things that are interesting/entertaining. But it seems bad to get stuck with something that is both low-expected-impact and low-interest. Someone who really likes Folding@Home should totally give the analysis a go; someone who doesn’t care and just wants evaluation practice has many other options.