Author: nancyhua

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Rationality Workshop: Valuing Choices

There was a period when every day someone would ask me why there wasn’t another HPMOR.

“When is Eliezer going to publish the next chapter? It’s been ages!”

“Stop asking me. I don’t know any more than you do. Maybe he’s busy with his 3 girlfriends- sadly he’s apparently not working on HPMOR every moment of his life. I am not privy to Eliezer’s every thought and daily agenda.”

This person would then generally begin complaining about how there would probably never be another HPMOR while I would begin an internal monologue with my fist of death. Many will never know how I grappled against my dark side for their sake.

Anyway the last time I was in the Bay area I decided to drop in on a rationality workshop at the Center for Applied Rationality to see exactly what it was that Eliezer was up to instead of HPMOR.

My genius friends, even the ones I got into HPMOR, mocked me for going to the rationality workshop.
“They’re going to brainwash you into donating millions to their AI research.”
“Nancy, can I come too so I can rock the boat and mock them for their singularity ideas?”
“Nancy’s going to some rationality class that teaches how to rationalize your crazy beliefs.”

I didn’t know what to expect, because, as far as I could tell, self-described rationalists were not really getting anywhere particularly awesome in any arenas in life; instead according to Isaacson it was the reality-distortionists who were dominating.

But the class was actually totally awesome! The above is a photo of one of the lecturers talking about thought experiments, a topic I’ll write about later. Anna (not pictured) taught us about using numbers to help make decisions.

Anna gave the example of figuring out if you should buy a faster microwave that could shave off 2 minutes a day in cooking time over the course of the microwave’s life, say 2 years. If you value your time at $50 an hour and the cost of getting the faster microwave is less than 2 minutes per day * 2 years * $50 per hour, then you should get the microwave.

Another example is if you are researching airline prices and wondering how much more time you should spend looking for a better deal. If you think you could save $100 if you research for another hour and you value your time at $100/hour, then you should spend less than (probably much less than) 1 more hour looking for a better deal.

Because Dilip had remarked to me that young people shouldn’t think their time was worthless, especially if they planned to be rich, because then one’s time is worth a lot more in expectation, I asked Anna, “If you think you’re going to be making a lot more money in the future, then you should value your current time as higher in expectation?”

Anna said, “Yes. That’s an error many college kids make, not realizing they’re going to be making 6 digits in a year or so and continuing to value their time as though it’s worth $10 an hour.”
“So if I believe I’m going to be a billionaire then I should value my time as crazily high in expectation and buy every new time saving device?”
“…Do you believe you’re going to be a billionaire?”
“Yes.”
“That’s kind of hard to do…”
“Maybe just hundreds of millions then.”

As a result of this particular lesson I now feel totally guiltless about owning 2 iPads, 2 iPhone 4S’s, and 7 kindles (each a different model) and extremely guilty about watching silly movies and getting manicures. So yeah, no more nail art and I still haven’t seen Madagascar 3…

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Bay Area Vibe

Everyone in NYC wants to be a star in some ferociously competitive industry, like finance,  entertainment, fashion. Every waiter wants to be a rock musician or top chef or something. Everyone’s very ambitious, yet the elites turn out to be old, white, male, tall, and business-y.

As an ambitious, driven person, the NYC atmosphere suited me better than Chicago, where I lived for the first 3 years after college. Chicago is a great city, but it’s definitely Midwest. People get married at age 23 and live super balanced, normal lives. They leave work at reasonable hours to go hang out at sporting events. Not feeling compelled to get married or settle down anytime soon, I sometimes felt out of place in Chicago.

Californians are as ambitious as New Yorkers, but in a more gadgety, nerdy way. Everyone seems to genuinely believe their new app is going to save the world, whereas most New Yorkers don’t seem to consider that when they talk about their work. Unlike in NYC, the successful Bay area people are nerdy, young, and not always white, male, or tall. I am nerdy, young, Asian, female, and average height. No wonder I keep going back to the Bay!

Here’s some photos of new places we hadn’t gone to before: French Laundry, Muir woods, Napa, Sonoma.

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Having It All: Magic Mike’s Life Lessons Better Than Brave’s

The sense of entitlement towards “having it all” is perpetuated by modern princess movies. What happened to all the gruesome, German fairy tales when failed seduction meant mermaids disintegrating into sea foam, when beauties sleeping too soundly meant getting raped? Bring back those wholesome tales- that’s what kids should be seeing and that’s what I read about in my Red Fairy Books, not stuff like Brave.

Pixar’s Brave disappointed me by implying you should have it all- shoot arrows, run a kingdom, do princess stuff- Merida shouldn’t have to choose! This is a dangerous message to send to anybody, male or female, because it’s false. Merida has no idea what she wants to do but according to Disney fantasy she can have everything once she figures it out- the mom inexplicably decides to break tradition and delay marriage until… whenever? Does Merida want to marry someone ever? Does she want to shoot arrows all day? Does she want to have a hand in running the kingdom? What is her goal? She’s a foolish child who inexplicably avoids negative consequences of her bad decisions. This is a fantasy and not a lesson I want my kids to learn. You have to choose what you want, you have to use precise word choice when discussing contracts- especially with magical beings- and then you have to bust your butt to achieve your goal.

Don’t get me wrong- I love old Disney princess movies. They have nice love stories and there’s cute animals singing and dancing about youthful yearning, or the origins of their murderous desires. Sadly Brave did not have any of these components. Although I enjoyed the visual beauty, they did not have one singing animal despite various extremely natural moments to throw that in. A magical bear doesn’t break into song even once? Come on.

Despite Pixar’s cliched perspective, the wait for a movie that sets the right tone is over. Hollywood appears to have been making leaps and bounds in terms of sexism, deciding even cutoff shorts are too much clothing for werewolves to suffer and must fly off. Now in Magic Mike we have Matthew McWhatever developing the same allergy to clothing endured by those same Native American werewolf tribes. Regardless of whether objectifying men counts as a win for feminism, I’m all for it (I was so inspired by Channing Tatum’s performance in Magic Mike that I followed him on twitter (he’s seriously probably one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen, makes it look natural and easy)).

Mike’s stripper wisdom is that everyone, even a hot guy, has to choose. If your goal is to make weird furniture but you spend your life having sex and doing drugs, then odds are 10 years will pass and you will be a lonely, aging stripper instead of a successful entrepreneur. When considering resource allocation, I tend to imagine vector arithmetic. If you invest your resources in a direction orthogonal to the direction of your ultimate goal, 5 or 10 years can pass and you won’t have anything to show for it. You want the divergence between the trajectory of your goal and the trajectory of your resource investments to be small.

I feel lucky my parents fought so hard so that I could think about the problems of philosophy instead of war (figuratively). My parents were not home very often. Mom took English classes during the day and worked at night. Dad labored in a lab deep underground with no end in sight. If your parents were immigrants you know no one has time to babysit you. It’s probably more like you babysitting your kid brother or something while they’re at work (luckily I was an only child and only had to be responsible for myself). For years my mom was never home and I was proud of her for it, but there are always costs. It wasn’t until we moved to Mt. Lebanon that I had some inkling that there existed kids whose parents did nothing but chauffeur them everywhere and endured the daily tribulations of middle school with them. If you want to haul your family from the depths of poverty you have to work a lot and sometimes you don’t bond as much with your ungrateful kids. Everyone has to choose.

Once, I was talking with my dad about love. I probably said something like how my vision of love involved trust and loyalty- I don’t remember what idea I had, probably based on princess movies instead of horrific Grimm fairy tales. I do remember my dad told me he thought love was about sacrifice. His perspective surprised me and I chalked it up to yet another example of the idiocy of my pathetic parents. Years later, I’m starting to see what he’s talking about.

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How I Motivate Myself

1) Thinking about myself as having an identical twin except she’s really productive and my master. The imaginary twin sees me watching True Blood and goes, “What are you doing? This is why you’re inferior to me and I’m in charge of you. Go finish your work! Maybe afterwards you can watch 30 Rock for 30 minutes. I’ve been doing air squats and kettle bell swings while you’ve been sitting there.”

2) Thinking about the person I want to be and working towards becoming more like that person. For example, I’d like being wise to be part of my identity. But I do stupid things all the time. Quandary! Can I read books or talk to smarter people to try to close the gap between my goal identity and my actual identity? How do I figure out a plan that makes me more like the wise person I want to be?

3) Thinking about myself as one instance out of many (potentially infinite) instances of me existing in parallel universes and wanting to compete with the other Nancy’s, in particular wanting to outperform Superposition Nancy. How embarrassing would it be to meet these other Nancy’s one day in a Jet Li-type “The One” situation and be way weaker and thus immediately annihilated?

4) Thinking about how glad I am not to have been born in the 9th century or in Sudan, or even 50 years ago. It’s a miracle I exist at all since my Chinese parents never touched (ever). Basically despite being born to a poor graduate student and a teacher, I feel born into privilege: everything my ancestors did for millennia led to… creating me! I’m basically the result of centuries of breeding. “With great power comes great responsibility,” etc.

Reading back over what I just wrote, I’ve never heard anyone else talk about thinking in this way, so maybe I’m crazy. Whatever, this all reminds me of the guy in Fight Club, except we appear to have (hopefully) skipped the psychotic break, etc.

Quora: How do I get my life back on track?