I highly recommend the book “The Media Training Bible” – I found it to be surprisingly insightful and broadly useful.
Specific to this thread, it teaches you how you can maximize the odds of being represented in a way you’re happy with, rather than feeling disappointed when you see how you’re quoted / the final article.
arikr
[Link] What opinions do you hold that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of effective altruists? Anonymous form.
[Link] Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success | Slate Star Codex
[Link] Research as a Stochastic Decision Process
[Link] Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
[Question] What things do you wish you discovered earlier?
[Link] Ideas on how to improve scientific research
[Link] A Modest Proposal: Eliminate Email
What books or bodies of work, not about EA or EA cause areas, might be beneficial to EAs?
[Link] Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain
Possible suggestion (for Julia): Posting the thread a day or two in advance will allow people to submit questions early (and vote on which questions they want to see answered), so that Holden’s time can be maximized by giving him more questions to answer on Monday. So that he’s not waiting on Mon, ready to answer questions but with no unanswered questions available.
(This only applies if you think that otherwise there might not be enough questions posted to fully utilize the 3 hours)
For people living in the US, at what point does it become particularly important to start following these methods? I assume it’s always beneficial, but risk adjusted not particularly important until there start being more cases in the US or until we start having more cases. Is that assumption right or dangerously wrong?
Thanks very much for posting this series. Thorough!
[Question] What opinions that you hold would you be reluctant to express publicly to other EAs?
[Link] A great set of free book summaries and notes
I think the “how” is roughly:
If you do not know the steps to your goal with high confidence, then do the following:
You can imagine that you’re looking at a map, and your distant goal is somewhere on the map, but the map is blurry / not yet revealed all the way to your distant goal
So then identify what options you *do* know the steps to (the ones that _are_ visible on the map), and then pick the option from those that is most novel
This is because the more novel it is, the more likely it is to reveal large and unexpected portions of the map, potentially including the part that gives you a visible path to your distant goal
So when uncertain, identify the most novel thing you know how to do/achieve, and repeat that, and that’s likely the best (albeit very roundabout!) route for getting to your distant not-yet-visible-path goal.
If the above is intriguing, I’d highly recommend watching the video – I think it’s a very well spent 15 minutes if watching on 2x speed.
Could you explain how Slack is better on these fronts than email? My intuition is that Slack would be worse on these fronts than email (I think in part because I’ve seen one or two medium posts that talk about the always on IM culture and how it makes it harder to do focused work).
For what it’s worth, I tried CBT-I and it wasn’t successful for me, then tried ACT for insomnia which solved the issue. Specifically via a book called “The Sleep Book” by Guy Meadows. Highly recommended.
Thanks! I’ve followed this and have added a link to the full spreadsheet in the OP now.
Just wanted to note that I really appreciate the clarity of the visual summary / ballpark timeline.