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This is: Give it a google , published by adamzerner on the AI Alignment Forum.
I'm a programmer. In programming, people talk about how the ability to Google is such an important skill. No one knows everything. In practice, people are always looking things up and running into weird situations that they have to figure out.
That's not what this post is about. Not quite. This post is about the decision to give it a google in the first place.
Poker
Here's an example. I play poker. It's hard to get good at poker, but not sucking at poker isn't very hard. Don't play junky hands preflop. Don't open-limp. Learn some basic poker math such as pot odds. If you can follow basic guidelines like that, you won't suck.
Yet if you sit down at a $1-2 game in Vegas, where hundreds of dollars are exchanging hands, people who have been playing poker longer than I have been alive often don't understand these basic ideas. Ideas that you would learn if you spent ten minutes googling "basics of poker strategy". You'd come across articles like How Not to Suck at Poker and you wouldn't be making such mistakes at the table.
As an even more extreme example, I've played in home games where despite playing poker for many years, people don't know even more basic things such as sizing your bets according to the size of the pot. Betting $20 into a $200 pot is a very small bet even if $20 feels like a lot of money. Your opponent only needs to put in $20 to have the chance at a $220 pot. Great risk-reward. In general, bet sizing is an incredibly complex topic, but all you have to know is to size your bet between 1/2 and the full size of the pot. The 80/20 principle really, really applies here.
Health
Recently my girlfriend and I have been waking up with scratchy throats. Intuitively we thought it might be because it's getting colder out. Especially as we sleep. So we tried sleeping with the heat on higher.
Turns out that was the exact wrong thing to do. I gave it a google and the issue seems to be that using the heat dries out the air, and dry air causes the sore throat symptoms we were experiencing.
Shopping
I bought a humidifier last night. I could have just surfed around on Amazon a bit and picked something out. Instead, I gave it a google first.
It worked out well, I learned some really interesting things. A humidifier is something that seems simple where it doesn't really matter which one you choose. Turns out that intuition was also wrong.
It's something that you'll probably need to refill once a day, so you want it to be easy to refill. That means purchasing one that has a flat edge so you can sit it down on the counter while you refill it. My previous one was spherical so I couldn't sit it down like that. I had to hold it in one hand while I used the other hand to pour water into it. Such awkwardness adds up in the long run.
Same story with ease of cleaning. With my previous one, the spout was small enough where I couldn't really reach inside to clean it and it had weird nooks and crannies that were hard/impossible to clean.
One type of humidifier is called an evaporative humidifer. The main advantage is that it won't overhumidify your area. Once the humidity hits ~50% or so, it'll naturally stop producing as much humidity. The downside is that it is loud, has more moving parts, and requires you to purchase parts for it as a recurring expense.
After learning all of this stuff on The Wirecutter's humidifier guide, I was able to pick the right humidifier for my needs instead of just finding the cheapest one on Amazon with decent reviews, which probably would have led to a good amount of future frustration.
Tennis
My girlfriend and I started playing tennis. We had played three times and made a little bit of progress, but still weren't very good.
Before our fourth time, I decided to give it a google. I came ...
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