On having a routine, or don’t—I really like this advice. I feel we would benefit from having a default routine that we’ve set once and then don’t have to repeat the decision for. This could be a morning routine or what to order for lunch. Even though its a default, you can make it intentional the times you choose to override it like when you override a setting on your phone. This allows for exploration and whimsy while the other 80% of your choices are alleviated by having the default.
On working unless you actively decide otherwise—I don’t think this applies as well to general situations. I have found there is a benefit to time constraints on a task so you focus more deeply on it rather than assuming you have 14 hours in the day to do it. It also forces prioritization so you eliminate distractions like emails which can take up your most productive hours and also make you feel “busy”. Also Josh Watzkin talks about being able to turn your peak state on and off so you can control your energy. Ultimately I think it will depend on what type of work the person has to do so I think it warrants each person to consider if they can be more effective by leveraging constraints.
Patrick Liu
Patrick Liu’s Quick takes
Hi, there may be a use case for people wanting a change of scenario for inspiration on a challenge or may want to hunker down to do some deep work. In such cases, a month long stay may be needed to do some effective work. Has it been considered to do housing swaps?
Assessing and Onboarding candidates is a challenge for all organizations but it may be worse in EA as they may not be large enough to have HR departments and seem to have staff mainly to do the research but not people development and training. A lot of this tends to be maturing the culture so while there are commercial solutions, they have to meet the culture. I don’t look at the problem as developing new software but rather adapting something existing and operates at the right scale to get the job done.
+100 Randy Pausch also make this rec in his OG productivity video
I’ve also been hearing on the 80K hrs podcast and several posts reflecting that our EA orgs have an issue deploying talent. They mention the difficultly assessing and onboarding candidates effectively. I’ve been considering if a workflow platform can provide a quick win and would be interested in exploring more.
Shower thoughts: AI has advanced its intelligence so fast by running thousands of iterations of training. In a way, it has lived a thousand lifetimes during our human lifespan. If each training run was one life, could that be analogous to one human life? If AGI has a survival instinct, could that be analogous to the drive for the survival of the human race as a species? Does that then change the way to look at control or coexistence mechanisms with AGI?