LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think the way to learn any skill is to basically:

1. Practice it
2. Sleep
3. Goto 1

And the time spent in each iteration of item 1 is capped in usefulness or at least has diminishing returns. I think this has nothing to do with frustration. Also, I think reminding yourself of the experience is not that important and I think there is no cap of 1 thing a day.

I don't speak Esperanto myself, but took that meditation example from someone who speaks it. I don't know how that actually boils down to Esperanto words.

Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don't seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Naive predictions often seem wrong in many domains. 

For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and yet, ethnic Russians don't seem less nationalistic.

The English are unlikely to say that the Irish are really English after all in the way that you have Russians say that the Ukranians are really Russian. The Russian idea that everyone who's descending from a culture that had mass with Old Church Slavonic is Russian, is quite different than how other people in Europe think about the relevant concepts of identity.

The idea that Ukrainians are really Russians seems to make a lot more sense to Russian speakers than it does to most Europeans. 

A Russian friend told me that when he speaks with other Russians, this involves a lot of references to Russian literature in a way that you wouldn't do in English or German conversation. Reasoning by literature analogy is quite different from a lot of the way reasoning happens in English or German.

This is also because of Jevon's Paradox. As the cost of doing an experiment reduces with experience, the number of experiments run tends to rise.

In one of those two cases, the entire "quote" was one sentence, completely made up (and crazy).

The other case was a mixed bag, where most statements were quoted correctly (not literally, but in a way that didn't change their meaning, and I am perfectly okay with that), but there was one specific thing where the journalist clearly wanted me to say something, tried various ways of "but wouldn't it be possible that..." and "you can't be 100% sure that it isn't the case that...", and after I stubbornly resisted, she just made up a quote that agreed with her, and that I would obviously never have said.

But outside of that one thing, the rest of the interview was okay.

I also know two journalists who make interviews in a style "let's talk for half an hour in front of a camera, then publish it online with minimum editing". One of them started doing it on YouTube, later he got employed in a mainstream newspaper. The other already started as a journalist, first doing paper interviews, later also video interviews. (Both of them non-English.) These two I would trust in a video interview, and probably also in a paper interview. But I've never interacted with either of them.

In other words, there is an in-universe for an out of universe constraint

Out of universe: we don't want player characters to be too powerful.

In universe: Well, we all know what happens to those guys in Lovecraft stories, right?

I think there is a conflation of two different things:

1. Human brain has two hemispheres which communicate through a relatively lower-bandwidth channel, which means they process a lot of things independently.
2. There is the dissociative identity disorder / alter ego / tulpa phenomenon, where a human can produce two or more identities. This is probably something that exists on a spectrum, where the extreme forms are full different personalities with dissociative amnesia; imaginary friends and brainwashing are somewhere in the middle; and the everyday forms are role-playing or different moods.

If I understand it correctly, Ziz assumes that these two are the same thing. Which is pseudoscientific, and in my opinion clearly wrong.

First, because there can be more than two identities (but no one has more than two brain hemispheres, I suppose). Yes, two is the most famous number, but that's simply because two is the smallest integer that is greater than one, and more personalities are less frequent.

Second, even if there are exactly two identities, there is no evidence mapping them to two hemispheres (as opposed to each of them using both hemispheres), and a lot of obvious evidence against that, for example the fact that each personality can use both hands etc.

However the idea of "left brain, right brain" is quite popular in our culture. And there were a few experiments showing that the hemispheres can be separated, and then weird things happen. Which means that Ziz's theory may sound plausible to many people, even in the rationalist community.

Ziz assumes that there are (1) exactly two (2) permanent "cores" in every human. The number two and the permanence are the crucial parts of her ideology; in my opinion this is incompatible with any Buddhist doctrine, which would actually put the emphasis on their impermanence.

The permanence of the "cores", and the Manichean perspective that each of them is either perfectly good or perfectly evil, is the basis of social control that Ziz has over her followers. You can't meaningfully disagree with Ziz, because she is 100% good, and you are 50% good and 50% evil, which means that any disagreement must obviously originate in your evil half, and therefore you should mobilize your good half to fight against it (or kill yourself, if you cannot win). The only moral choice is to believe and obey Ziz unconditionally.

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I kinda assume that multiple personalities are "just" a stronger form of what people normally do, and that different personalities can present as different genders (including agender etc.).

I reject the "exactly two" and "it maps to hemispheres" parts, the permanence of the personalities, and the Manichean ethics.

Call of Cthulhu GM's have the advantage that the player character is dealing with entities that will probably eat them if they try to be too clever.

Some RPGs with magic (Ars Magica comes to mind), illusions are cheap but changing actual physical matter is hard. This provides a ready answer to many questions about chicanery.

I think this comment would be a lot better without the attempts to psychoanalyze OP.

In the particular case of table-top RPGs, the literary genre that the RPG is trying to emulate often contains a fair amount of characters engaging in chicanery. A meta rule (understood by both players and GM) might be: chicanery is about as limited as it is in the literary sources the particular RPG is based on.

Player: I tell the stormtrooper "These droids are not the ones you want."

GM: I'd like a roll against your Force skill, please.