Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Punctuality - Arriving on Time and Math, published by Xachariah on the AI Alignment Forum. In hindsight, this post seems incredibly obvious. The meat of it already exists in sayings which we all know we ought to listen to: "Always arrive 10 minutes earlier than you think early is," "If you arrive on time, then you're late," or "Better three hours too soon than one minute too late." Yet even with these sayings, I still never trusted them nor arrived on time. I'd miss deadlines, show up late, and just be generally tardy. The reason is that I never truly understood what it took to arrive on time until I grokked the math of it. So, while this may be remedial reading for most of you, I'm posting this because maybe there's someone out there who missed the same obviousness that I missed. Statistical Distributions Everyone here understands that our universe is controlled and explained by math. Math describes how heavenly bodies move. Math describes how our computers run. Math describes how other people act in aggregate. Wait a second, something's not right with that statement... "other people". The way it comes out it's natural to think that math controls the way that other people act, and not myself. Intellectually, I am aware that I am not a special snowflake who is exempt from the laws of math. While I had managed to propagate this thought far enough to crush my belief in libertarian free will, I hadn't propagated it fully through my mind. Specifically, I hadn't realized I could also use math to describe my actions and reap the benefit of understanding them mathematically. I was still late to arrive and missing deadlines, and nothing seemed to help. But wait, I'm a rationalist! I know all about the planning fallacy; I know to take the outside view! That's enough to save me right? Well, not quite. It seemed I missed one last part of the puzzle... Bell Curves. When I go to work every day, the time from when I do nothing but getting ready to go to work until the time that I actually arrive there (I'll just call this prep time) usually takes 45 minutes, but sometimes it can take more time or less time. Weirdly and crazily enough, if you plot all the prep times on a graph, the shape would end up looking roughly like a bell. Well that's funny. Math is for other people, but my behavior appears like it can be described statistically. Some days I will have deviations from the normal routine that help me arrive faster while other days will have things that slow me down. Some of them happen more often, some of them happen less often. If I were describable by math, I could almost call these things standard deviations: days where I have almost zero traffic prep time takes 1 standard deviation less, days when I can't find my car keys my prep time takes 1 standard deviation more, days I realize would be late and skip showering take 2 standard deviations less, and days when there is a terrible accident on the freeway end up requiring +2 or +3 standard deviations more in time. To put it in other words, my prep time is a bell curve, and I've got 1-sigma and 2-sigma (and occasionally 3-sigma) events speeding me up and slowing me down. This holds true for more than just going to work. Everything's time-until-completion can be described this way: project completion times, homework, going to the airport, the duration of foreplay and sex. Everything. It's not always bell curves, but it's a probability distribution with respect to completion times, and that can help give useful insights. Starting 'On Time' Means You Won't be On Time What do we gain by understanding that our actions are described by a probability distribution? The first and most important take away is this: If you only allocate the exact amount of time to do something, you'll be late 50% of the time. I'm going to repeat it and it...