(www.greaterwrong.com/posts/iiWiHgtQekWNnmE6Q/if-you-demand-magic-magic-won-t-help)

If you need to live in a world with magic to take your life somewhere great and fulfil your dreams – 'if only magic were real' – you may be engaging in a fantasy that's comfortably out of reach so you need not even try. Realize that being in a world with magic would make it no longer special, the same way you treat lightbulbs as nothing special in this world. Thus, if you weren't studying difficult topics here, you wouldn't be studying magic there, as it'd be just another difficult topic that nobody regards as interesting. "What do you study?" "Magic." "Cool. I study art." "Bachelor's degree or…?"

Thus: if you're the sort of person to demand a magical world, actually living in that magical world wouldn't change anything, so what's the point?

What's a better way of staying up to date, than following news?

Follow blogs by the sort of people who like to try to explain to laymen. For example, Andrew Gelman's blog for topics surrounding statistics. Or simplystatistics.org/posts/2020-04-29-amplifying-people-i-trust-on-covid-19/

Following news sucks because

• The selection of news you see today is a nonrepresentative selection of what happened today, muddling the waters for your Availability heuristic and inner simulator.
• The selection of news you see today is what I might call counterfactually-arbitrary… I mean that from your perspective, a given day looks perfectly compatible with many different possible sets of news articles, without changing which world you live in. The information has low value because you don't have any idea of the process underlying why this ended up in the news and not other stuff, even if you trusted the editor.

• For academic topics, reliably they're just plain wrong (see Gell-Mann amnesia)! Perhaps it'd be worth reading if the news is actually good, but you can't judge this for yourself in most domains.

  From Gell-Mann Amnesia:

  If you or your company has EVER been the primary subject of a newspaper article, you know exactly what Crichton is talking about. The article is simply wrong. Not just wrong in minor detail, but wrong in motivation, cause, implication, fundamental facts … everything.

Also you need to read www.greaterwrong.com/posts/rvpEF2mBLeZE9j53n/how-to-bounded-distrust.

A trick may be to follow content-producers that don't put the idea of news itself as their product. Direct news made sense in the era of newspapers, it doesn't in the internet era. By its very nature, news will find its way to you in the course of your normal interactions with people and what they've written.

In fact, waiting for them this way ensures relevance to you, and it's more likely you hear it when you're working on something associated and thus you may be in a better position to act in response to the news.

I suspect there's one field for which you'll still want to explicitly follow news: geopolitics. Or new laws. You don't hear about all of it from your friends, and sometimes it's relevant sooner than later.

• volt - Alessandro Volta
• watt - James Watt
• ampere - Andre-Marie Ampere
• ohm
• angstrom
• becquerel - Henri Becquerel (who shared a Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie (1867–1934) for discovering radiation)
• newton - Isaac Newton (1642–1726)

Sometimes it's useful to talk about what an ideal reasoner would do in a situation, but isn't it subjective? No, if by "ideal reasoner" we're talking about a being that, as efficiently as possible, solves the problem of satisfying their desires.

Sidenote: That can be confusing, because as humans, when we hear a person using language such as "efficiently optimize for my desires" we may picture an egotistical sociopath. And that may be reasonable in everyday contexts… but think yourself into philosophy discussion at the university, where they use words very exactly. What does it mean to optimize for your desires or goals?

It just means the same thing we all try to do all the time: a vegan optimizes for the goal of lessening animal suffering, etc.

Human goals may be often fuzzy and self-contradictory, but rarely can a human's set of goals be described as completely selfish. So "efficient optimization" or "ideal reasoning" is not about that.

Ideal reasoning just means, if for example you want to rule the world, figuring out the shortest path to do so that's still aesthetic to you (destroying the world with nukes can be a quick way to rule it, but that may not be what you actually want, so you rule that path out). Or if you want to end animal farming, then ideal reasoning means figuring out the shortest way to bring about that result. Or if you want good friends, then ideal reasoning is finding a practical way to get good friends into your life. And so on.

With that definition in mind, there are all sorts of logical proofs about how an ideal reasoner would treat the information they have and any new information received. Failing to act according to these proofs opens up for taking sub-optimal actions (Dutch-booking)… and human beings can and often do act so sub-optimally that they fail at their quest!

Yet, we do know many basic principles of ideal reasoning! They just tend to hard to apply faithfully, due to computational limits, cognitive biases and self-defeating psychology.

How do we know about those principles? There's a whole tower of prescriptions arising from probability theory, decision theory and game theory, resting atop a small set of mathematical axioms and consistent with them and each other. Philosophers have thought about this sort of thing for a long time, and the only real way to reject a given prescription of probability theory is to reject one of the axioms it rests on, such as the staggeringly basic axiom of modus ponens: "if A implies B, and I learn A is true, then I also know B is true". As you can imagine, it'll look pretty ridiculous to try to deny any of them. And then, upon not denying any of them, the rest follows.