Also: Why are basically only Indonesians studying the effectiveness of the Pólya method
@niplav > "The more ambitious plan may have more chances of success […] provided it is not based on a mere pretension but on some vision of the things beyond those immediately present."
I call this "abstract leverage": given a specific problem, sometimes it's *easier* to try to find a more general solution which solves more than what you bargained for.
Spaced repetition is "memory leverage".
@niplav combine this w the fact that "the difficulty of solving a problem correlates only weakly wrt the utility gained by it,"* ("utility-invariance of ) and it explains part of the story of why i aim to be extremely ambitious.
*eg, the difficulty of inventing cheap cultured meat is invariant to the number of animals helped by it. etc.
@niplav another reason for extreme ambition is that it's easier to get 60 by tossing one 60-sided die compared to ten 6-sided dice. by internalizing more of the variables upon which world-saving depends (i.e., by ~only relying on myself, heroic responsibility, etc), i correlate the variables and flatten the tails of the convolved distribution. *even if* it reduces the utility of the median outcome, it increases my odds of sampling the tail.
@niplav furthermore, if world-saving is a ∃-game (we only need one/handfwl of ppl to succeed wildly, rather than most/all), the best community strat is for evybody to take risks.
