In general, increasing GDP per capita has all sorts of positive second and third order effects on net, likely improving the collective welfare of society.
It's a bit far removed from what you might envision as "doing good" though. It's a bit too abstract to feel on an emotional level.
And true, not all acts are equal. The emotional valence of improving ad rates for Meta can't really be compared to saving a child from cancer on a moral scale that most humans intuitively understand. Nor would I demand that you try to do so.
I often find that "making the world a better place" is synonymous with "looking for meaning in my own life".
Having children is usually a good start, if you don't have any already. Making the world a better place for them does wonders for the soul.
Or so I've been told.
Alternatively, if neither children nor economics appeals to you, you can always just donate money to St. Jude's Hospital or another charity. The money you earn would then make the world a better place in a way you can directly feel.
I think Wordle is instructive here in that it has many lessons for how to make a game go viral or become even mildly popular.
For starters, perhaps you should make it also available on the web, if at all possible. That makes it easier to share and discover.
And maybe invest in the ability for users to export the gameplay as video. I could see it spreading more if people post long combos that last for minutes, sped up with music, for example and posting on TikTok, Twitter, etc. Otherwise, even if it's a good game, most people aren't ever going to discover it, except after many months.
Obviously it always helps to make a game more fun and compelling, but I presume you're already aware of that.
It helps to clarify your goals and what it is you want to do with your life, otherwise you’ll always have this ambiguous sense that you’re not progressing in the way that you want.
What do you mean by “productive”? What would progress look like for you? And towards what?
Highly recommend MovieLens if you have eclectic or niche movie tastes. It can be a bit of a nerd-snipe though. One of my favorites activities is rating movies and watching the recommended ratings (what rating it thinks I'll give a movie) update overnight.
It's at the very least, better than average chance at predicting which movies you will like.
If true, sounds like a strong argument for removing minimum wage laws, so as to provide more economic opportunities for people and create a skill ladder they can climb.
If a business doesn't pay a living wage, that effectively means that said business is being subsidized by a different entity. It could be the employee, the employee's spouse, the government, etc. But someone is subsidizing businesses that don't pay living wages.
>If a business doesn't pay a living wage, that effectively means that said business is being subsidized by a different entity. It could be the employee, the employee's spouse, the government, etc. But someone is subsidizing businesses that don't pay living wages.
I never understood this framing. If the person in question wasn't being employed, it's not as if he suddenly won't need food/housing/whatever, so why call it a subsidy when he decides to get a job?
The best mental model of MVP I have found is that it is in some sense a science experiment and you’re trying to test a specific hypothesis as efficiently as possible with the resources you have, because you ultimately don’t know what’s going to work.
I really enjoyed the Edward Herrman narration of the "At the Mountains of Madness" when I listened to it years ago.
What struck me is how it still feels haunting even decades later; it aged quite well. I couldn't help shake the creepy feeling there was something unearthly at the edges of our world.
Once your child grows a bit older (or is particularly precocious), I recommend Math Academy.
If you search for "Math Academy" on Twitter, you'll find all sorts of great stories about it. The creators have studied the science of pedagogy pretty well to optimize the learning process at scale to every user. Justin Skycak in particular on Twitter discusses what goes into creating the content, the scaffolding, interleaving methods they use, buildup of automaticity through memory, and how working memory affects rates of learning. Justin has even shared a textbook on his Twitter page that details a high overview of the various teaching methods that go into the curriculum (although from what I understand it's still a work in progress).
You can even try it yourself. A few mathematicians use it to brush up on old concepts they haven't used in a while or to add a little that they didn't know previously.
They're also constantly expanding the courses.
There was a great Reddit thread where the creators answered some questions about the program and why they made certain decisions (posts from thread below).
Highly recommend since it'll answer a lot of doubts you may have about it. I really do believe it's probably the most effective way to learn math today.
" '[Question 2] It's hard to believe that 5 hours a week for a year starting from basic multiplication tables (found on your homepage) will have me completely prepared for higher-level university courses. I'd prefer an explanation for people who are not familiar with the XP system.'
Yeah, I realize that this can be a bit shocking!
I think the most convincing way I can answer this question is to start by telling you that in our original in-school program, 6th graders start at various places in Prealgebra, and then do about 40-50 minutes of fully-focused work per school day for the next 3 years. This takes them all the way through Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, Precalculus, and AP Calculus BC, passing the AP exam by the end of 8th grade.
Of course, I realize that also may seem kind of shocking, but we have the AP scores to prove it, and there's been plenty of news coverage over the past decade: https://www.mathacademy.us/press (Let me know if you'd like me to elaborate more on this.)
Now, look at the numbers: 40-50 fully focused minutes/schoolday x 180 schooldays/year x 3 years comes out to about 24000 minutes or 400 hours, and our Foundations series is about two-thirds the size of that (since roughly a third of topics are not actually prerequisites for university math), which comes out to about 267 hours, and then divide by 52 weeks in a year, and you're at about 5 hours per week.
Anyway, if there are parts of this argument you want more clarity on, or any parts you're finding unconvincing, let me know and I'm happy to elaborate."
One of the other reasons why I recommend Math Academy over textbooks is because fundamentally the process can be so much more efficient than a textbook could ever provide. Justin himself notes the same:
"...Yeah, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is what I used to self-study a bunch of advanced math while growing up. OCW is a good resource and I came a long way with it, but for the amount of effort that I put into learning on OCW, I could have gone a lot further if my time were used more efficiently. (These issues are not OCW-specific; they apply to textbooks in general, Khan Academy, etc.) That's one reason why I’ve been so motivated to help build Math Academy. We take away as much of this learning friction as possible and maximize your learning efficiency.
It's a bit far removed from what you might envision as "doing good" though. It's a bit too abstract to feel on an emotional level.
And true, not all acts are equal. The emotional valence of improving ad rates for Meta can't really be compared to saving a child from cancer on a moral scale that most humans intuitively understand. Nor would I demand that you try to do so.
I often find that "making the world a better place" is synonymous with "looking for meaning in my own life".
Having children is usually a good start, if you don't have any already. Making the world a better place for them does wonders for the soul.
Or so I've been told.
Alternatively, if neither children nor economics appeals to you, you can always just donate money to St. Jude's Hospital or another charity. The money you earn would then make the world a better place in a way you can directly feel.