Social stigma of PPE Nov 23, 2020

One reason to wear less PPE is that it can be embarrassing to wear more PPE.

This potential for embarrassment seems interesting. Especially where the main cost of precautions is the social stigma.¹ What exactly is the stigma stigmatizing? Being so concerned about a widely-acknowledged-to-be-worth-a-lot-to-avoid disease that you are willing to risk social stigma? Why should you be embarrassed by evaluating a disease as worse than social stigma? Couldn’t it just be that you don’t expect the social stigma to be that bad? Is there some equilibrium size of social stigma implied by such a situation? (Or even if you evaluate the disease to be bad, isn’t that pretty clearly demonstrated by now?)

Some beauty, mid-2020 edition Nov 22, 2020

10 things society might try having if it only contained variants of me Nov 21, 2020

(Other than desperate efforts to fend off an impending demographic disaster.)

1. Shopfronts where you can go and someone else figures out what you want. And you aren’t expected to be friendly or coherent about it. Like, if you are shopping, and yet not having fun, you go there and they figure out that you are the wrong temperature, don’t have enough blood sugar, are taking too serious an attitude to shopping, need ten minutes away from your companions, and should probably buy a pencil skirt. So they get you a smoothie and some comedy and a quiet place to sit down by yourself for a bit, and then send you off to the correct store.

2. Ubiquitous virtual queues. Each person’s phone keeps track of their priority waiting, so they don’t have to keep track of it with the location of their body.

3. Efficient plane disembarkment. Like this. Saving many hours per lifetime of thinking about how planes could be disembarked more efficiently.

Personal covid responses as a technology microcosm or 18 ways I know to make the pandemic suck less Nov 20, 2020

With covid-19, basically everyone in the world is facing a set of personal problems that they didn’t have before, but which have much in common with everyone else’s new problems. Most basically, how to go about life without catching a deadly or crippling disease. But also, how to make alternative activities workable, and how to thrive and be happy in this potentially oppressive circumstance.

With everyone thinking about what to do about similar problems, an interesting set of questions to me is where do ideas for ways to improve the situation come from, and how do they spread? That is, how do people learn about them? How much are people benefitting from other people’s thinking about similar problems?

I’ve been extremely lucky in having a job that can continue fine from my house, living with a bunch of people I like who can also work from home, having started dating someone I already lived with in January, being in San Francisco, and having some spare money this year, so I’m not compelled to do anything very risky and thus my exact problems and solutions may differ from others’. Nonetheless, it seems good to share them.

Here are pieces of my own current apparatus for avoiding covid and enjoying life despite it:

What is it like to be a tidy person? Nov 18, 2020

A thing I have been curious about since I was about fourteen is why my living quarters are so much messier than other people’s. At that point it was mostly not my own fault, and now that it is, they are less messy. But still, there’s a clear gap between my room and many other people’s rooms that I see. Like for me, if you can see the places where the floor and the walls meet, or if there is a clear path between the door and at least one reasonable place to be in a room, these are victories (bonus points if you don’t have to do any unusual jumping or balancing to follow the path). And other people have entire twelve-foot cubes full of immaculately placed objects.

Schelling points amidst communication Nov 17, 2020

If two people are trying to meet in New York City, and they forgot to pick a spot, and both of their phones are dead, so they both just go and stand under the clock in Grand Central Station, hoping that the other will expect them to do that, guessing that if they were going to pick a spot to do this, it would be that one, then what you have is a Schelling point.

This is a pretty contrived circumstance, and I usually hear Schelling points talked of as if they are neat but only relevant in those rare cases when communication is impossible. For instance, Wikipedia says ‘In game theory, a focal point (or Schelling point) is a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication.’

Octobillionupling effort Nov 17, 2020

When basically everyone in the world faces the same problem, it is interesting if everyone does their own working out to solve it. Even if there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer, you might think it would be massively more efficient to do a good job of answering once with some free variables.

For instance, my impression is that even before covid, basically everyone was sometimes possibly a bit sick and had to decide whether to go to an event, given that they might be contagious. The usual thing to do, I think, was to consider the question for a bit yourself (or not, depending on conscientiousness), and to maybe mention it to the host and try to guess how annoyed the other guests would be, and then to make a call. But this isn’t a highly personal question—if someone who knew more about infectious disease contagion than most people (which wouldn’t be hard) made a form to tell you what to do based on your symptoms and the number of people at the event, you would probably already be making a better choice, faster, than most people.

Why doesn’t this happen?

Schedules versus momentum Nov 15, 2020

A mundane issue that arises endlessly in my life, but which I haven’t heard that much advice on: what to do when your schedule says you should do one thing, but you have momentum on a different thing? Or more broadly, what to do when scheduling and energy for a task conflict?

The day of Hellfire Nov 15, 2020

With the 2020 reduction of variety in places and companionship that might set the days apart, there is a risk of swathes of time blending together and seeming short. One solution is to substitute other sources of visceral variety. Yesterday I had the song Hellfire from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame stuck in my head all day, which I can recommend as intense and a different vibe from normal.

Overlooking the obvious Nov 13, 2020

One can feel stupid for not having tried the obvious thing. For instance, if you have terrible anxiety, and you tell your friend, and your friend is like, ‘um, have you considered anxiety drugs?’, and somehow it hasn’t occurred to you, you can feel stupid.

I think this is often wrong, because there are so many obvious things.