Solved Problems Repository

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Mar 27, 2013

Follow-up to: Boring Advice Repository

Many practical problems in instrumental rationality appear to be wide open. Two I've been annoyed by recently are "what should I eat?" and "how should I exercise?" However, some appear to be more or less solved. For example, various mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, along with spaced repetition, seem to more or less solve the problem of memorization.

I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of solved problems in instrumental rationality. I'm pretty sure you all collectively know good examples; there's a comment I can't find from a user who said something like "taking a flattering photograph of yourself is a solved problem," and it's likely that there are other useful examples like this that aren't common knowledge. Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people.

(This thread is allowed to not be boring! Go wild!)

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My only problem with this flow is that it waits far too long before Googling.

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It's a nice joke, but I don't think it's actually good advice. There is a lot of background knowledge about how most computer software works that goes into actually executing the steps of this or similar procedures, e.g.

knowledge defining the “looks related” relation
knowledge about which things are likely to be destructive enough to exclude from “pick one at random”
knowledge about what “it worked” consists of when the shortest path to the goal is more than one step

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But you acquire that background knowledge faster when you follow the procedure.

My mother is retired, and sits paralyzed in front of the computer not knowing what button to press. I try to explain that you're unlikely to break anything, so just start looking around.

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I initially tried giving my mother the "you're unlikely to break anything" advice as well, then reconsidered after she'd followed that advice and gotten malware on the computer.

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"Boot into this live-CD and you're unlikely to break anything a reboot won't fix." (At least as long as you don't use webmail or similar persistent online accounts that can get hacked by malware you downloaded into RAM during the same session.)

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I learned most of what I learned -by- breaking things.

For example, I learned how page files worked because American Online and Dungeon Keeper both tried to seize them for themselves, and if Dungeon Keeper was run, AOL wouldn't run subsequently without a reboot. Research on the issue turned up that disabling page filing would fix it, which led me to research page filing to see what disabling it would do.

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I didn't think of this until the recent munchkin post, but one solved problem is what financial instruments to invest in. The answer is index funds with low fees in a tax advantaged account. Vanguard has some good funds with fees as low as 0.1%. Unless you're a professional investor (and maybe not even then) your chance of beating index fund performance over the long term is tiny. Not quite winning the lottery tiny, but maybe winning a big stuffed animal at a rigged carnival game tiny.

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Pablo_Stafforini

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At least for people with the right personality profile (relatively high openness, above bottom decile of extroversion), CouchSurfing seems to have solved the problem of finding cheap (indeed, free) and comfortable short-term accommodation in a foreign city.

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At least for me, getting up when the alarm clock rings used to be almost impossible and I kept staying in bed for 12 hours a day unless there was something that I absolutely had to get up in time for. Anders Sandberg's caffeine pill trick solved that problem for me, and it has worked for over five years now:

This week I have experimented with a new way of getting up in the morning. My problem is that Anders-Sleepy has different goals than Anders-Awake, and is quite adept at resetting the alarm clock. Now I, Anders-Awake, has found a way around this self:

I set my alarm to 6:00 and 8:00. At 6:00 I go up, take a 50mg caffeine pill, and go to bed again. Then I sleep and wake up rested and energetic around 8.

In my case the time for the pill to start working seems to be 1.5 hours. A dose of one pill ensures that I wake up (but still yawning) while two pills makes me start the day much more quickly. The added benefit is of course a regular sleep schedule.

I ran into the problem of a late night one of the days, where I remained awake until 3:30. In this case I adjusted the program slightly, taking the pill at 7:00 and sleeping to 8:30, this seemed to work and the rest of the day was efficient. I became tired earlier in the evening, which was fixed by going to sleep earlier.

Using caffeine to combat sleep inertia is not my idea; a study has shown that it works for naps. Music may also help.

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The problem of transferring large files over the internet has been solved by Dropbox or similar services.

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sixes_and_sevens

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For certain values of "large".

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"How do I get stronger?" has been solved and the solution is Starting Strength.

Evidence: The set of my friends who are strong is exactly the set of my friends who do / have done Starting Strength or a close variant. Also, I used to lift with several competitive power lifters (including someone ranked top 100 nationally in the deadlift) and they unanimously advocated it.

These are relatively large N and effect size btw, i.e. I know at least 15 people who've done SS and they're out-benching the non-SS'ers by 20 pounds on the low end, and 100 pounds on the high end (I pick bench because it is the exercise most people are familiar with; the gap for other things like squat is more like 50 pounds on low end, 200 pounds on high end).

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I wouldn't call SS the end-all, be-all solution for getting stronger, that would more closely be something like "progressive overload using compound exercises (or whatever you want to get stronger at) while under caloric surplus and having decent macro/micronutritional spreads. Also sleeping well and not having any other unusual health problems".

SS is a great program for beginners, but any other program that fits the above should work (like stronglifts). I also wouldn't recommend SS to intermediate or advanced lifters, when linear progression is no longer possible.

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ThrustVectoring

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As far as I can tell, ketogenic diets solve the problem of fat loss. I know, anecdotes are not data, but it's worked wonders for everyone I know who's tried it (myself included).

Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people.

This is the sole reason I'm posting this. Keto works for very many people. The short story of keto is that your brain can only eat certain kinds of chemicals. Glycogen from eating carbohydrates is one of them. Ketones generated from fat is another. Your body will preferentially use the first over the second, since turning fat into ketones is expensive. So if you eat few enough carbs (<30g per day is the figure I remember) and plenty enough fat (2:1 fat to protein is what I heard), your body will eventually start doing chemistry that turns dietary and body fat into ketones.

There's some more practical advice about how to induce ketosis quickly (muscles store glycogen, so exercise helps) and how to make low-carb versions of foods you enjoy, but that's pretty much the gist of it.

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Ketogenic dieting has been very effective for me. But I'm not convinced that this story about the body learning to turn body fat into ketones is actually how it works. My sense is that a super low-carb diet may just a good way of keeping appetite down and maintaining a caloric deficit. At the very least, that seems to be part of why it works so well: high fat low carb foods tend to be much more satisfying per calorie than foods heavy in carbohydrates. E.g. A Starbucks blueberry muffin is 380 calories which is like eating ten strips of bacon or 5 hardboiled eggs or more celery than you could possibly eat in one sitting. Whether or not the chemistry stuff is actually true keto is a good way to feel satisfied on a lower number of calories.

I wonder if a diet that was actually optimized for high satisfaction/calorie would be a) different and b) more effective.

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

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Hasn't worked for me.

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I would be very cautious about any claim that any "problem" is totally, finally, and uncontroversially solved.

When a problem gets to that point, no one is calling it a problem.

And even then, better solutions may come along.

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How can I keep warm when going outside on a blustery fall day? Wear clothing.

How can I eat without spending all my time hunting? Buy food from other people who specialize in that.

How can I retain key thoughts more precisely than by mere memorization? Write them down.

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Yes, but even so, there may be lots of problems that I think are 50% solved or maybe wide open and that it turns out are maybe 95% solved (loosely speaking), and I'd still like to hear about those.

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Can we start a thread for unproductive but frequently asked questions that can easily be replaced with other, more productive questions? Like if you're asking this, you probably mean to ask something else. Does that sound useful?

One example of these is yelling at a small child, demanding to know why they broke something, which is not that useful because small children sometimes don't have good answers or they have answers that don't quite take all of reality into account. (For example, maybe the child wanted to see what would happen but didn't realize might be permanent or unfavorable.) The more productive question is "How can we prevent you from breaking these types of objects again?"

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You can start whatever threads you want! You have the power! (What question should you have replaced that question with, I wonder...)

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"Do you think this is a good and useful idea? And can I perhaps legitimize the idea further by persuading you to start the thread instead of me since you've been starting a lot of repository threads lately?"

See? Questions are a tricky business! That was an unintentionally round-about and meta way of demonstrating it.

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