LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The problem is not that the answer of 12 cents is wrong, or even that the answer is orders of magnitude wrong.

Ah yes, strong "Verizon can't do math" vibes here.

Epic Lizka post is epic.

Also, I absolutely love the word "shard" but my brain refuses to use it because then it feels like we won't get credit for discovering these notions by ourselves. Well, also just because the words "domain", "context", "scope", "niche", "trigger", "preimage" (wrt to a neural function/policy / "neureme") adequately serve the same purpose and are currently more semantically/semiotically granular in my head.

trigger/preimage ⊆ scope ⊆ domain

"niche" is a category in function space (including domain, operation, and codomain), "domain" is a set.

"scope" is great because of programming connotations and can be used as a verb. "This neural function is scoped to these contexts."

(From the top of my head, maybe I’ll change my mind if I think about it more or see a good point.) What can be destroyed by truth, shall be. Emotions and beliefs are entangled. If you don’t think about how high p(doom) actually is because on the back of your mind you don’t want to be sad, you end up working on things that don’t reduce p(doom).

As long as you know the truth, emotions are only important depending on your terminal values. But many feelings are related to what we end up believing, motivated cognition, etc.

For those of us who haven't already, don't miss out on the paper this was based off of. It's a serious banger for anyone interested in the situation on the ground and probably one of the most interesting and relevant papers this year.

It's not something to miss just because you don't find environmentalism itself very valuable; if you think about it for a while, it's pretty easy to see the reasons why they're a fantastic case study for a wide variety of purposes.

Here's a snapshot of the table of contents:

(the link to the report seems to be broken; are the 4 blog posts roughly the same piece?)

If my interpretation is right, the relative dose from humming compared to NO nasal spray is ~1000 times lower than this post claims, so humming is unlikely to work.

I think 0.11 ppm*hrs means that the integral of the curve of NO concentration added by the nasal spray is 0.11 ppm*hr. This is consistent with the dose being 130µl of a dilute liquid. If NO is produced and reacts immediately, say in 20 seconds, this means the concentration achieved is 19.8 ppm, not 0.88 ppm, which seems far in excess of what is possible through humming. The study linked (Weitzberg et al) found nasal NO concentrations ranging between 0.08 and 1 ppm depending on subject, with the center (mean log concentration) being 0.252 ppm, not this post's estimate of 2-3 ppm.

If the effectiveness of NO depends on the integral of NO concentration over time, then one would have to hum for 0.436 hours to match one spray of Enovid, and it is unclear if it works like this. It could be that NO needs to reach some threshold concentration >1ppm to have an antiseptic effect, or that the production of NO in the sinuses would drop off after a few minutes. On the other hand it could be that 0.252ppm is enough and the high concentrations delivered by Enovid are overkill. In this case humming would work, but so would a 100x lower dose of the nasal spray. Which someone should study inasmuch as you still believe in humming.

Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it's very important, but my sense is that it's some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don't already know what it's supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don't like "I will go listen to it" as an answer.

So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don't get it yet.

I haven't looked into it; seems plausible it helps, but since it's a signalling molecule I'm wary of amplifying it too much. 

The best known amplifier of NO in the bloodstream is viagra. My understanding is they haven't found general health effects from it, despite looking really hard and first investigating it as a treatment for heart disease. 

Yeah when I was writing this part of me kept saying "but humming is so cheap, why shouldn't everyone do it all the time?", and I had to remind myself that attention is a cost. This is despite the fact that it's not cheap for me (due to trigeminal neuralgia; I'll probably stick with enovid myslf) and attention is a limiting reagent for me. The too-cheap-to-meter argument is really seductive. 

Maybe I could even write a sequence on this?