This blog has been moved

To https://sundaystopwatch.eu/ Please read it there!

How to make errands fun

Despite being a believer in outsourcing all tasks that cost less than my aspirational hourly rate, I regularly have to do such tasks when they're impractical to outsource. This is almost always, as the most outsourceable tasks are those that repeat often, but cannot be automated. Doing legwork to do paperwork always happens for unique …

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Zero to One: A Minimum Viable Review

This is Peter Thiel's matrix: In his book, Zero To One, and in this talk at SXSW, Thiel essentially explains that where we are as a society on this matrix defines how we act and what we do. Every quadrant is a religion, and each religion has a doctrine: Indefinite pessimism: Things will get worse, …

Rising rents and appropriate responses

I was recently involved in a discussion related to real estate and rising rents. A friend proposed this policy: "We should limit the extent to which the city can expand, and we should have rent caps so that the prices don't go up." I responded: "That means that purchase prices will go up dramatically, if …

What are all these children doing in my ponds?

(this is not criticism of effective altruism, only one analogy that's used as an argument) Peter Singer writes in the The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle: To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university …

Bureaucracy is a world of magic

I previously wrote about some practical game-theoretical (game-practical?) realizations I had while buying a house. Today I want to talk about how bureaucracy is a ritualistic, magical place. In our home-buying process, every step of the way, there were papers to be signed. Paperwork is how the magic of bureaucracy comes in view. I'm not …

Buying a house and making friends in unexpected places

I'm buying a house! A very exciting thing for me. In the process of finding and buying this house, I've come to some interesting game-theoretical realizations. Observe the three-step process: We find a house that we like. We contact the agency to organize things between us, the bank, and the homeowners. We do everything on …

Making friends

People self-select. This means that you will naturally fall into the same kinds of circles, even if you change the environment. An example from my life comes from mixed martial arts. An MMA gym isn't usually the most educated or the most "refined" place in town, however you define refined. It's working class guys who …

Taking money seriously

As a young environmental activist, I lived the stereotype by not giving money serious thought, both personally and politically. There is a point where the less money you have, the less you care about it, even though you should care more. Let's call it financial learned helplessness - a state of mind where you believe …

Becoming Overhuman is now Sunday Stopwatch

Why? The name "Becoming Overhuman" doesn't reflect what I'm writing about anymore. I used to write about training, meditation, exposure to harsh conditions, all with the aim to get as close as possible to impressive fictional characters. Did you stop doing all that? Yes and no. I still work towards improving myself, but I think …