Sure! I’m assuming you’re talking about coffee. I aim to get the best coffee possible as cheap as possible, so these factors are by far not optimized but they’re good enough for me:

• Coffee beans: Getting coffee that you like is maybe the most important factor. The first time I tried floral coffee, I thought my cup was not properly washed and still had detergent in it. Now I know I don’t like floral coffee!
• Water: I hate myself for doing this because of the plastic waste I generate, but buying a massive container of water that has been purified by reverse osmosis consistently results in way better coffee than using my tap water.
• James Hoffman’s V60 recipe v.s. Osmotic flow: James Hoffman’s V60 recipe is a thousand times better. I think the main factor here is agitation; in this case, more is better. I have not experimented much beyond Hoffman’s recipe because I like it. It’s possible I could optimize a bit more with little cost.
• The cheapest grinder my partner used in their previous place v.s. the grinder we recently bought: I am so sorry if I sound like a snob, but getting a grinder that is capable of creating uniform grinds has been game changing. It’s not even close.

The way that I think about these factors is that I’m affecting the extraction of the coffee. I’m trying to take the things that taste good in coffee and leave the things that don’t taste so good. I’m playing a balancing game: not too extracted and bitter, not too underextracted and insipid.

Of course, there are other variables that I could try to optimize for, such as body, acidity, sweetness, etc… Maybe I will someday pay attention to it, and if it’s not expensive or hard to optimize for them, then I’ll be happy to change my way of making coffee. In the meantime, I’m happy with what I’ve got.

In the off chance you meant Scrum and ACT-Advisor stuff:

• In Scrum, I’d say a lot of the experiments end up affecting factors that have, in the literature, already been identified as important: happy workers are more productive, stable interfaces between teams leads to faster development and higher quality work, cross-functional teams are better than having handoffs, etc…
• As to the ACT-Advisor stuff, this may seem obvious, but doing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy improves my scores. I like to see that it’s not only therapy sessions that improve the scores, but also weeks of intensively doing ACT exercises on my own.

• Whenever I change something in my coffee setup, I do blind tastings for myself and sometimes others.
• Scrum retrospectives and Kaizens in a way are experiments to see how to improve 🤷‍♂️
• I regularly answer ACT-Advisor questions to see how I’m doing over time https://stevenchayes.com/tools/

Sorry if this seems strange, but do you do data analysis? If not, I’d be happy to explore and visualize the data! It’s always interesting to me to do it.

I should clarify - rather than ‘backfire,’ exaggeration in Majority Judgment either does nothing or carries a social cost. Here’s why:

• If a minority exaggerates votes, the median stays unchanged.
• If everyone exaggerates equally, the same winner emerges, but an artificial high tide of exaggerated grades obscures the real depth of public opinion. This defeats one of MJ’s key strengths: the ability to show when all candidates are viewed poorly and therefore create pressure for better options.

Regarding partisan concerns: Yes, MJ is vulnerable if partisan blocks coordinate to exaggerate grades. However, MJ offers two meaningful advantages in a two-party system:

1. Voters can grade third-party candidates highly without ‘wasting’ their vote, as they can still support their party’s candidate.
2. Once again, poor candidates from both parties could receive revealing low grades, encouraging better alternatives.

Of course, you were hinting at the fact that MJ’s success in a two-party system depends on fostering a political culture where candid evaluation flows more freely than partisan loyalty. But this is the current that all voting systems must swim against; partisan pressure can steer dolphins’ fins at the polling station regardless of the method used.

Either ranked-choice voting or majority judgement.

Thanks for sharing your method.

As to your take on Anki, I think it’s fair and accurate. I agree with you in that the learning curve is not in the features or the interface, but as you said: in the pacing. I really hope I can try to space the cards as much as possible, so that a regular practice doesn’t become burdensome.

I’m generally skeptical of comments on the internet, so almost every time I have read comments like this one that you’re reading right now, I’ve been like “yeah right”. Kinda like how “lol” means “laughing out loud” but when you read it online you don’t really expect whoever wrote “lol” to have laughed out loud? Anyway, I was drinking coffee, I read your comment, I snorted in laughter, and now my white shirt is full of coffee.

I guess I’m also kinda mad at myself for laughing so hard at such a silly joke. Regardless, have an updoot 👍

and Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis and Pascal’s wager, all subject to serious validity threats. All of these thought experiments are unfalsifiable. They can all be explained with different theories. They all rely on circular reasoning. They all anthropomorphize entities that maybe don’t resemble humans at all. They all fall for the mind projection fallacy. They all are prey to selection bias, because they cherry-pick scenarios among countless alternatives.

I agree that economics has serious problems that can leave it looking like a shriveled science not worthy of the title “science”. There is a reason for this. Economics has been undermined for more than a hundred years.

When capitalism was born, classical economics had the goal of describing and understanding these new dynamics. It sought to answer questions such as how prices are determined or how labor dynamics affected profits, to name a few. It came up with answers through observation, statistical modeling, and what we would call today the scientific process.

It was later, in the late eighteenth century, that economics shriveled as a science and bloomed as an ideological and political tool. Many of the classical observations —such as how pricing is set by firms, how costs change through time, or how labor affects the production process— were scrapped. This new perspective didn’t see the market as turbulent, war-like, and aggressively cost-cutting. Rather, it portrayed the market as a perfectly lubricated machine that optimally distributes resources, maximizing personal utility as well as social utility.

This perfect machine was not science, but a political tool so that classical economists wouldn’t dare being critical of market economies. Even more so, this perfect machine was built so that politicians would not dare interrupt the motions of the machine.

If you’re interested in learning how this perfect machine was built and how classical economics sees the world, you can check out Anwar Shaikh.

Alright. Given that you’re interested in psychology, feel free to check these resources out: https://dnav.international/video-audio-resources/ https://dnav.international/wp-content/uploads/DNA-V-workbook-april-15-2020.pdf

These are introductions to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

You can also check out the Healthy Minds Program https://hminnovations.org/meditation-app

You mention not having money for therapy. There is evidence suggesting that therapy like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is effective even if learned through books. What is important is to learn the mental processes that matter.

Here is an approach to therapy that you could try: https://youtu.be/o79_gmO5ppg

Sorry if my questions sound harsh. I genuinely want to know if this could help. How do you feel about reading books? Have you done it before? Do you have a place and time to read without distractions? Would reading from a device be feasible for you?

Ah, I see how my wording was confusing. I mean planning in the sense of “How will we complete the work that we already committed to?” and “What will we do today to achieve our Sprint goal?”

I arrived at the word planning because Scrum is sometimes described as a planning-planning-feedback-feedback cycle. You plan the Sprint, you plan daily (Daily Scrums), you get feedback on your work (Sprint Review), and you get feedback on your process (Sprint Retrospective).

My brother has a Framework 13 and mainly uses a combination of NixOS and Windows. Most of the time he uses NixOS, but sometimes the software he needs is broken on Nix. When that happens, he reverts to a previous version of Nix or he boots onto Windows. He has Windows installed in one of the external-drive socket thingies that he keeps plugged in at all times in case he needs Windows.

Apart from the occasional broken Nix package, he has had issues with the hyper-sensitive two-finger scrolling in Gnome (which I would say is not directly a Framework or Nix problem). Also, a while back, when I bought the computer with him, we bought Oloy RAM because it was fast and cheap, but that lead to weird crashes. Framework support helped us test the sticks and eventually we sold those sticks and got the Framework-tested Crucial sticks, which solved the problem. Finally, I remember he had to be careful about not just closing the laptop but actually clicking “sleep” and then closing it, because otherwise it would get super hot and lose a lot of battery.

Despite these struggles, he recently told my Mac-loving girlfriend that he will not get a “disposable” computer. I take this to mean he will keep using his Framework laptop.

lol I hope your standups are not actually like this! The purpose is to, as a team, plan what the team will do today to achieve the Sprint goal

How do you choose what facts matter? How do you choose how to communicate them? Who do you communicate them to? What does news reporting mean to you? What about news reporting makes it worth your precious time alive? What purpose do the people around you have when they amplify, ignore, or quiet your facts? These are all questions that are answered, explicitly or not, by everyone who communicates or relates to facts.

We could play the impossible “no agenda” game. We could lie to ourselves and to others. Or, we could notice that whenever we are dealing with the truth, we have a point of view. We stand here and not there. We can learn to travel around the mountain of truth, so that we mitigate our blindspots. We can be explicit about where in the mountain we are standing (The north base? The vegetated slope? The summit?).

Instead of playing the “god trick”, we can situate our knowledge. That’s the best we can do. Check out this article by Donna Haraway on situated knowledge. It changed my life. https://philpapers.org/archive/harskt.pdf

These have been around for quite a while, but I recently learned about clipboard managers. I haven’t met someone who uses one, perhaps because it is an inconspicuous tool. Regardless, I love being able to quickly paste text that I use frequently!

I’m still testing them, so I can’t really say “this one’s the best”, but here’s one: https://hluk.github.io/CopyQ/

I like the novelty/predictability ratio idea. There is also the idea of “create expectations and satisfy them”, which leads to a sense of stability. Our cultures and genres create expectations. Rhymes tied to a certain metric can become part of these expectations. Of course, you can also create expectations and frustrate them, which leads to a sense of instability. Searching for “fakeout rhyme” videos makes this evident. Pat Pattison, an expert in songwriting, could be a good source on this ☺️

The best habit perhaps is meditating daily and I developed it following Tiny Habits.

GTD is up there too!

I agree wholeheartedly. If you know how to build habits, habits can be fun and they can be tied to living a meaningful life! Tiny Habits, the book and framework, changed my life for the better.

Thanks for the response. I guess I do see much of human behavior through a contextual behaviorist lens. Sorry if it seems excessive. I am not Hayes or Hoffman. It is just frustrating to see blanket explanations for human behavior, instead of understanding specific processes. I guess I really want to avoid the fundamental attribution error and reductionism, something contextual behaviorism deliberately aims to avoid.

While I recognize Emotion Focused Therapy is helpful to understand and, if possible, change social behavior (which is why I mentioned it previously), I maybe should have brought up Emption Construction Theory or even Sapolsky’s multi-lens framework, considering different timescales of explanation. Would you have suggested something different? When does contextual behaviorism fail?

Thanks for helping me potentially falling into reductionism. I wouldn’t want to fall in that trap.