Arjun Panickssery

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-year effective altruist; you just got finished reading some Oxford philosopher, Will MacAskill probably. You're gonna be convinced of that till next month when you get to Nick Bostrom. Then you're going to be talking about how the

people like to endorse ideas that don't actually make sense but have a quirky "fair play" quality e.g. support for German policy not to penalize prison escapees, preventing casinos from banning players for unusual success, keeping the drinking age <= the minimum enlistment age

I love ChatGPT There are many random blog posts I remember strongly that I assumed I would never find "Random Quora answers" mostly remain elusive, and the one "random WallStreetOasis reply" is probably never going to be found and may have been a hallucination to begin with

unfortunately the test only goes up to 145 it's funny there's a vocabulary test and that it's apparently the most g-loaded subtest; intuitively I think I know more words than equally smart people and my acquaintances' vocabulary seems to vary independent of their intelligence

"After the end of the war in 1918, Tolkien's first civilian job was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W" During that time he did not publish, unlike later as a professor

Two equally successful people could value their time differently—maybe a CEO has almost linear returns to work while I'm told that novelists (or e.g. mathematicians) almost never work more than ~5 hrs/day In my mind this is a point in favor of becoming a writer or mathematician

professional athletes don't make as much money as people think (or maybe they do—I'm not sure how much money people think they make) median player salaries from 2024 afaict: - NBA: $6.6m - NFL: $3.2m - NHL: $2.8m - MLB: $1.4m senior staff roles at bigtech are already in range

in Boston suburbs a house right across a school-district boundary may be valued 25% higher but comparing public-school applicants to three Boston and three NYC exam schools found that for students within 20 percentile points of the cutoff there weren't always real improvements

One more audition . . .

Berkson's Paradox suggests that somewhere beyond your band of diverse associates with anti-correlated traits (IQ, conscientiousness, neuroticism, attractiveness, social graces) is a band of equally diverse others who are just better along every dimension: richer, stronger, etc

So what actually constitutes tortious interference here I've never actually heard of a successful tortious interference lawsuit

Hyper-productive late-19th-century Pope Leo XIII (after whom the current Pope Leo chose his name) took cocaine “to fortify himself when prayer was insufficient”

"President Biden's internal polling showed that President-elect Trump would win '400 electoral votes.'" imagine if Biden had stayed in the race and then Trump won New Jersey and Illinois and there was an automatic recount in New York because he only lost by 0.5%

Kush means black in Egyptian, Ethiopia means burnt in Greek, Mauritania means dark in Greek, Sudan means black in Arabic, Zanzibar means black in Persian, maybe Mali/Guinea/Senegal too but Niger—named by an Andalusi diplomat—is just from a Berber phrase meaning "water of waters"

Is the specific lifespan of ~1870–1960 the most extreme length of history for someone to see? Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), Picasso (1881–1973) Ideally live into your 90s and barely catch Gagarin or Apollo 11