Ben Mann Monthly March 2020: quarantine, cooking, biking, antidepressant experiments, effective saving
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Quarantine @ community house
Quarantine isn't so bad with 10 friends! We all had to agree on extra strict guidelines. Now that we're in steady state it feels low risk. We've been much more social than before. We fixed a bunch of longstanding usability issues like broken thermostats and refrigerator organization.47 mile bike from SF to Fairfax
The farthest I've ever rode. By the end everything hurt, particularly my neck and lower back. My lesson is to eat more sugar early on so I don't bonk as much later.Industrial cooking
Sous vide poached apples, ethiopian curry lentils, hummus and beer pita, mac and cheese, japanese curry, channa masala, chocolate crinkle cookies, chicken mole, pancakes with strawberry compote, oatmeal blueberry cookies, so much more! We bought ~400 lbs of groceries from webrestaurantstore before things got crazy and are slowly eating through it.Bread from scratch
I always wondered how people used to make bread without buying yeast. It turns out if you just leave flour and water out it spontaneously turns into sourdough starter, with properties dependent on environment. This is especially relevant given the isolation-induced yeast shortage. I've fed it daily for a week, but it hasn't caught on yet.Effexor and wellbutrin
As part of my tour of antidepressants, I tried two more. I had blood in my stool every day for the week I was on effexor, so I stopped that early. I tried wellbutrin for about 3 weeks, but it didn't give me the mood effects I got from the SSRIs. I've since switched back to zoloft and will try adding trazodone to help sleep.Eight sleep
I used a chilli pad to control my bed's temperature for more than a year. It was pretty good, but now that I've upgraded to eight (← $200 off), I'll never look back. It's quieter, you only have to refill the water every 6 weeks, the temperature sensor is in the pad instead of the box, and you can schedule temperature changes through the night. Highly recommend!
Life updates
Published COVID data visualization
Registered for Santa Cruz half iron man in Sept
Nest thermostat E + PGE rebate = 💯
Work crunch → much less media consumption
Published COVID data exploration
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good 5/5
Thesis: you might be able to do more good by saving your money for hundreds of years rather than trying to donate now
Crux 1: you think now isn't particularly more "hinge-y" than the future, for example working AGI now would be unlikely to lead to compounding returns
Crux 2: you can encode your trust's mission in high enough fidelity it won't drift too much or not enough
If too vague, money gets expropriated for a purpose you don't care about
If too specific, can't help people. Examples: British War Widows trust has no widows to give money to; Rhodes scholarship used to be limited to white men before an act of parliament broadened it.
Crux 3: most interventions, such as global poverty, do not lead to compounding returns
Interest rates are a measure of market's impatience. The more the impatience, the more demand there is to spend money now, and thus the more valuable it is if you're willing to defer.
Based on this I'll start a donor advised fund this year.
Wearing improved masks may have given the Czeck Republic a huge advantage
Legal Systems Very Different From Ours 4/5
A fun exploration of alternate legal structures
My favorites: a panel of judges that only operate only on their own personal judgment of good and bad, and malpractice/grievance insurance for everything and everyone replacing the state