LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think this is a persuasive case that commitment devices aren't good for you. I'm very interested in how common this is, and if there's a way you could reframe commit devices to avoid this psychological reaction to them. One idea is to focus on incentive alignment that avoids the far end of the spectrum. With Beeminder in particular, you could set a low pledge cap and then focus on the positive reinforcement of keeping your graph pretty by keeping the datapoints on the right side of the red line.

All the smart trans girls I know were also smart prior to HRT.

Democritus also has a decent claim to that for being the first to imagine atoms and materialism altogether.

Another possible risk: Accidentally swallowing the iodine. This happened to me. I was using a squeezable nasal irrigation device, I squirted some of the mixture into my mouth, and it went right down my throat. I called Poison Control, followed their instructions (IIRC they told me to consume a lot of starchy food, I think maybe I took some activated charcoal too), and ended up being fine.

In psychometrics this is called "backward digit span".

There's an amazing HN comment that I mention everytime someone links to this essay. It says don't do what the essay says, you'll make yourself depressed. Instead do something a bit different, and maybe even opposite.

Let's say for example you feel annoyed by the fat checkout lady. DFW advises you to step over your annoyance, imagine the checkout lady is caring for her sick husband, and so on. But that kind of approach to your own feelings will hurt you in the long run, and maybe even seriously hurt you. Instead, the right thing is to simply feel annoyed at the checkout lady. Let the feeling come and be heard. After it's heard, it'll be gone by itself soon enough.

Here's the whole comment, to save people the click:

DFW is perfect towards the end, when he talks about acceptance and awareness— the thesis ("This is water") is spot on. But the way he approaches it, as a question of choosing what to think, is fundamentally, tragically wrong.

To Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy folks call that focusing on cognition rather than experience. It's the classic fallacy of beginning meditators, who believe the secret lies in choosing what to think, or in fact choosing not to think at all. It makes rational sense as a way to approach suffering; "Thinking this way is causing me to suffer. I must change my thinking so that the suffering stops."

In fact, the fundamental tenet of mindfulness is that this is impossible. Not even the most enlightened guru on this planet can not think of an elephant. You cannot choose what to think, cannot choose what to feel, cannot choose not to suffer.

Actually, that is not completely true. You can, through training over a period of time, teach yourself to feel nothing at all. We have a special word to describe these people: depressed.

The "trick" to both Buddhist mindfulness and MBCT, and the cure for depression if such a thing exists, lies in accepting that we are as powerless over our thoughts and emotions as we are over our circumstances. My mind, the "master" DFW talks about, is part of the water. If I am angry that an SUV cut me off, I must experience anger. If I'm disgusted by the fat woman in front of me in the supermarket, I must experience disgust. When I am joyful, I must experience joy, and when I suffer, I must experience suffering. There is no other option but death or madness— the quiet madness that pervades most peoples' lives as they suffer day in and day out in their frantic quest to avoid suffering.

Experience. Awareness. Acceptance. Never thought— you can't be mindful by thinking about mindfulness, it's an oxymoron. You have to just feel it.

There's something indescribably heartbreaking in hearing him come so close to finding the cure, to miss it only by a hair, knowing what happens next.

[Full disclosure: My mother is a psychiatrist who dabbles in MBCT. It cured her depression, and mine.]

And another comment from a different person making the same point:

Much of what DFW believed about the world, about himself, about the nature of reality, ran counter to his own mental wellbeing and ultimately his own survival. Of the psychotherapies with proven efficacy, all seek to inculcate a mode of thinking in stark contrast to Wallace's.

In this piece and others, Wallace encourages a mindset that appears to me to actively induce alienation in the pursuit of deeper truth. I believe that to be deeply maladaptive. A large proportion of his words in this piece are spent describing that his instinctive reaction to the world around him is one of disgust and disdain.

Rather than seeking to transmute those feelings into more neutral or positive ones, he seeks to elevate himself above what he sees as his natural perspective. Rather than sit in his car and enjoy the coolness of his A/C or the feeling of the wheel against his skin or the patterns the sunlight makes on his dash, he abstracts, he retreats into his mind and an imagined world of possibilities. He describes engaging with other people, but it's inside his head, it's intellectualised and profoundly distant. Rather than seeing the person in the SUV in front as merely another human and seeking to accept them unconditionally, he seeks a fictionalised narrative that renders them palatable to him.

He may have had some sort of underlying chemical or structural problem that caused his depression, but we have no real evidence for that, we have no real evidence that such things exist. What we do know is that patterns of cognition that he advocated run contrary to the basic tenets of the treatment for depression with the best evidence base - CBT and it's variants.

LOL! I don't think women's clothing is less itchy (my husband's isn't any itchier than mine), but even if it were, that advantage would be totally negated by most women having to wear a bra.

I would say "the thing that contains the inheritance particles" rather than "the inheritance particle". "Particulate inheritance" is a technical term within genetics and it refers to how children don't end up precisely with the mean of their parents' traits (blending inheritance), but rather with some noise around that mean, which particulate inheritance asserts is due to the genetic influence being separated into discrete particles with the children receiving random subsets of their parent's genes. The significance of this is that under blending inheritance, the genetic variation between organisms within a species would be averaged away in a small number of generations, which would make evolution by natural selection ~impossible (as natural selection doesn't work without genetic variation).

I've been tempted to do this sometime, but I fear the prior is performing one very important role you are not making explicit: defining the universe of possible hypothesis you consider.

In turn, defining that universe of probabilities defines how bayesian updates look like. Here is a problem that arises when you ignore this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R28ppqby8zftndDAM/a-bayesian-aggregation-paradox [LW · GW]

Isn't singular learning theory basically just another way of talking about the breadth of optima?