Need Roommate In Mountain View/Sunnyvale area ASAP

rubegoldbergsaciddreams:

Hello yes this is tumblr user rubegoldbergsaciddreams. 
I’m losing a roommate this weekend and the person who had agreed to move in instead just backed out on me and I’m freaking out a little. If you or anyone you know needs a room in sunnyvale with some rationalist adjacent people / programmers / introverts please please contact me and if not, please consider reblogging this?

Can vouch for @rubegoldbergsaciddreams and his roommate @skiesalight being cool people. If you follow me you will probably get along with them!

Also I used to live in the aformentioned apartment, and can vouch for it being a pleasant place in a quiet area that’s biking distance to Google campus and a Caltrain station, as well as being close to a 101 on-ramp.

slatestarscratchpad:

I promised @towardsagentlerworld pictures of Malaysian mosques I liked, so:

these are pretty! 

theunitofcaring:

basically “skill deficit” is always more useful to me than “character flaw”. “Skill deficit” doesn’t mean I expect them to change or I am obliged to teach them or even that I’ll continue interacting with them, it just means “instead of thinking about their behavior as a reified Part Of Their Essence, I’ll think about it as a consequence of the situation and their abilities”. It’s more accurate. 

If I say “Salgant is unemployed because he’s lazy” that doesn’t invite any solutions except “stop helping Salgant/make him do real work/cut him off”.

If I say “Salgant is unemployed and not motivated to get a job”, I still get to decide “and I don’t have the time to help him/the money to support him”. But now I’m also allowing myself to ask “if he’s suffering from inability to be motivated in general, has he been screened for depression? would he prefer to have a job? if his current situation is preferable to work for him, is it sustainable? if not, what is his plan when he stops having situations preferable to work? are there jobs he would be motivated to do? could he work if someone drove him to work? could he work if he could work from home?” 

Now I’m treating the unemployment as a combination of situation and abilities and desires, instead of as a consequence of Who He Fundamentally Is.

Or maybe I have no interest in solving this problem, I just want a good model of the guy. I still think “Salgant is unemployed because sending out resumes is too hard” or “Salgant is unemployed because he can only work about 10 hours a week and he can’t find anyone okay with those hours” or “Salgant is unemployed because he prefers his current hobbies to working and his partner is supporting him” are all way more useful than “Salgant is lazy”, in terms of actually understanding people. 

And I might still decide “the situation and his abilities and his desires won’t change, so he’ll stay unemployed, which is a dealbreaker for me”. But I don’t think I benefit at all from modeling him as a Flawed Person, unless I think I’m only allowed to dislike or avoid people for character flaws and I have to put up with them if they merely have skill deficits.

when people are going “stop calling that a skill deficit, it’s a character flaw!!!”, this comes across as “stop treating your problems like they’re solvable, they are fundamentally part of you; your very existence is wrong and evil.” But I think what they actually mean is just “this is a thing I’m allowed to stop doing troubleshooting on”, and so it’s important to emphasize that the skill deficit approach isn’t just useful for troubleshooting. 

ozymandias271:

ilzolende:

Recently found out that my bank account, like that of all minors, is a joint account. [sigh]

Things Ilzo Owns:

• Rights to her IP content on the Internet that she can access just with a password and without special hardware. (I do have those except to the extent that websites the things are hosted on also have some, right? Right? Basic web searches mostly pull up “tell your kids not to pirate” stuff. Please tell me my parents can’t sell my art or writing without my consent.)
• That’s apparently it.
• [sigh]

original post

Bad news, Ilzo….

(via transgirlkyloren)

shlevy:

itsbenedict:

OKAY HOLY SMOKES, I just landed a real interview with a games company that wants to hire me in San Francisco! It’s looking pretty likely that I’ll get it, but first they want to know what my salary requirements are. And… living in the Bay is, from what I’ve heard, incredibly expensive?

So, before I email the guy back- I know a bunch of you live in the Bay Area, so do you have any advice for me? Gamedev salaries aren’t the same as general tech salaries, so I want to give him a pretty small number, but I don’t really know what the cost of living’s like.

Relatedly, there’s rationalist group housing in the Bay, right? I know there’s Volterra, at least- who’s still got space, what kind of options are available, and what’s the rent/cost of living like there? Can I get a crash course in how to live in the Bay?

( @michaelblume @ozymandias271 @luminousalicorn @theunitofcaring and anyone else who’s in the bay (but who i can’t be sure i remembered where they live correctly so i didn’t tag them))

Re: pretty small number: Beware of lowballing yourself. Once you find a number that makes sense to you given comparable roles, cost of living, etc., inflate it a bit.

(This is not specific to game development, general salary negotiation advice for a new hire).

Oh! I have salary negotiation advice since I *just* did this with my new job! 

Don’t give them a small number. They already have a salary in mind for you, and they’re trying to see if they can save money by having you accept a lower salary. So, if you name a lower salary than what they were thinking, they will definitely give you the exact salary you named and not any higher. If you quote a higher salary than what they were thinking of, they’ll try to negotiate you down, but (unless the number you mentioned was *waaay* too high to be reasonable), you’re basically not going to lose an offer because the number you gave them was too high.

If you can, avoid naming a number altogether – when they ask you, say something like “it’s hard for me to name an exact number without having a better idea of the full compensation package. I’d be looking for market rate for a game dev of my skill level in the Bay Area, though. Could you tell me what the company is thinking?" 

It may sound weird and evasive, but this is a really common thing for candidates to say, so the HR/recruiter person will be expecting it as a possible response.

I evaded the question with the job I just accepted – I asked them what salary they were thinking of – and it turned out the salary they were thinking of was >10% higher than what I’d been expecting / what I’d have been comfortable naming. 

I…. actually have a longish email’s worth of salary negotiation advice / accepting-an-offer advice in general, that I could forward to you if you PM me your email address.

@itsbenedict 

And congratulations / good luck!!! :D

nostalgebraist:

Also, I am finally caught up with Unsong.  I really like it.  It’s a lot like a version of Good Omens that’s based (mostly) on Judaism rather than Christianity, although I am enjoying it more than I enjoyed Good Omens.

Also does (effectively) the same thing I try to do in my fiction where it keeps introducing mind-warping ideas on a regular basis while fitting these ideas together with earlier ones, rather than just starting with one “big concept” and then developing it.

(I put it on my Kindle because reading fiction in a browser is hard for me.  If anyone else wants to do this, here is the scraper I used, although the documentation confused me for a while because it told me to install dependencies like nokogiri that I couldn’t install because they naturally came with Ruby)

it keeps introducing mind-warping ideas on a regular basis while fitting these ideas together with earlier ones, rather than just starting with one “big concept” and then developing it

I might’ve already recommended this to you, but have you read Fine Structure? “Multiple mind-warping ideas that all end up fitting together” describes FS really well, and it’s one of the things I found so appealing about it.

(I actually think that one of FS’ flaws is that the author introduced too many strange and interesting threads – so while a lot of the threads introduced early on get satisfyingly tied together in surprising and cool ways, some of the later threads are left unexplained, to the point where he had to create a FAQ after the story ended to answer readers’ common questions.)

And yes, agreed that Unsong is excellent, and that it reminds me a bit of Good Omens.

3dspacejesus asked: How much to spend five years alone on a Mars colony? (You're guaranteed to survive, can bring a hard drive of your own media, and will have access to email.)

sinesalvatorem:

theunitofcaring:

Ooohhhh. I anticipate that I would be happy in this environment, in which case it’d just be the opportunity cost and the sadness that my friends would possibly experience. So, like $500k? Maybe $700k to adjust for the possibility I’d get lonely? 

That’s assuming I don’t get any benefits like “I can anticipate a super cool book deal when I come back home” or “my presence there is good for the flourishing of happy beings” or anything. If I get those I’d probably do it for free. 

Today in Alison Is Confused By Introversion:

I read that three times before I figured out that it wasn’t saying the obviously correct answer that absolutely anyone would give: “No amount to be happy about it, because I’d kill myself within a year.”

@sinesalvatorem: saaaaame. 

also saaaame for #the weirdest thing is that young!me would have been willing to do this too, #but i have changed so much that i still manage to forget that thought pattern is possible

child!me was fairly introverted, i think – or at least, very content to spend lots of time curled up in her room alone, reading books. (in fact, i spent most of my time like this during childhood summer vacations, barely interacting with anyone aside from my dad when he got home from work each evening.)

On 3^^^3 and freedom of speech

rubegoldbergsaciddreams:

There’s a thread going around. One of these pops up every couple of months. I try to ignore it when it happens, because I was asked to unilaterally disarm in this war of words, and I did, for a while; I’m mostly a lurker here, and it doesn’t seem nice to pick on people who have an irrational hate response to my ingroup, and piling on is easy to do and it can easily overwhelm people. But I do not wish to see the words I want to be said go unspoken, and have people think less of me and mine because of it. 

…I used to really like stormingtheivory. Their fantasy analysis is interesting, I loved what they wrote about Pacific Rim when I read it, and I respect their Homestuck meta writings. I don’t know how or why it started, but every time they get a sniff of anything LW related they lash out and ridicule us. We were asked not to respond, not to reblog those posts, not to fight back, because it’s bad for their mental health to interact with us, and past arguments seriously impacted them.

I don’t want to make people’s lives worse and so I will not reblog stormingtheivory’s post directly, but I also don’t enjoy being endlessly strawmanned and mocked, and it sucks that the people willing to ignore yxoque’s request (or unaware of it) are the kind of people I don’t want speaking for me, and so I will compromise by posting an argument here instead.

Paraphrasing the dust speck thought experiment as “torturing one person for five years is indisputably, literally, MATHEMATICALLY better than letting a billion people get a dust speck in their eyes” is misrepresenting the original claim on a literally unthinkable level. 3^^^3 is so much larger than a billion that the words “scope insensitivity” fail to describe the depth of the error being made here. If you were to scale the original question to “a billion people having dust specks in their eyes”, the amount of time the individual would be tortured for is literally undetectable. It’s less than amount of time it takes light to travel the Planck length. It’s so much less than the Planck time that I actually cannot give any analogy sufficient to explain it. If it were not physically impossible to construct a machine capable of torturing someone for such a period of time, they would never feel it. Their neurons would not be able to fire, their body would not be able to react to the stimuli. The actual comparison would be  “One person experiencing literally no adverse effects is better than a billion people getting a dust speck in their eyes”, which isn’t actually fair because WE LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE TIME AND SPACE ARE DISCRETE AND I HAVE TO ROUND EPSILON DOWN TO ZERO.

The volume of the known universe, measured in planck lengths cubed (8.711375 * 10^187), is less than 3^^^3.

If you recorded every thing ever spoken by a human to an audio file (estimated to take up about 42 Zettabytes) and then flipped 336000000000000000000000 coins, one for each bit of data, the probability that your coin flips would perfectly correspond to the data is greater than 1/3^^^3.

Actually, I can do better than that. There are ~ 10^82 atoms in the universe. If you assigned each of those atoms a random location anywhere in the universe (8.711375 * 10^187), the probability that each of those atoms ends up exactly where it started is greater than 1/3^^^3.

If you see a number like 3^^^3, you should conceptualize it as being about the same size as infinity. You’ll still be wrong about it, you’ll still think of it as much, much smaller than it actually is, but you might at least avoid making the kind of mistake that stormingtheivory did here.

The reason such a huge number was used in this case was because it was needed to get the point across: the counterfactual to EY’s claim (that 3^^^3 dust specks in eyes  is better than 1 person being tortured for 50 years) implies that there’s a discontinuity in utility aggregation, and if we really believe that such a thing exists, than it’s very important to discuss where that line should be drawn and why. EY believes that no such discontinuity exists, and that’s a perfectly defendable position: others disagree, and there are merits to their beliefs as well.  

Rationalists value freedom of speech because we believe that it’s always important to seek the truth, even if it’s not a happy truth, because if you don’t know what reality really looks like how can you solve any problems? And if you’re afraid to even ask the questions, if your social policies forbid even asking “what if this terrible thing is true?”, you will make mistakes and you will never be able to fix them. And so we would prefer to associate with people who have bad ideas than with people who would tell us that we deserve to be shunned, to be attacked, to be killed, for asking the wrong questions or believing the wrong things.

I’m not so naive to believe that my own thinking is without bias. I honestly find a lot of the alt-right stuff distressing, or obnoxious; i limit my interactions with them. And there are obvious pragmatic reasons why minorities should want social norms that limit the extent to which social pressure and harassment are used as tools to stifle ideas. But it’s simpler than that, really; I’m a Jewish rationalist and the only people on tumblr I’ve seen call for my death were leftists of some form or another, and in general, if someone thinks everyone like me should be killed, I don’t really want to discuss ideas with them. 

sinesalvatorem:

@theunitofcaring, @towardsagentlerworld, and I hung out yesterday.