Open thread, November 13 - November 20, 2017

I've been thinking a lot these days about subjective experience. If "objective" means stuff that you can point clearly at to third parties, then "subjective" experiences -- moods, impressions, ephemeral mental constructs, basically one's inner world -- seem to me to be most of experience.

Most smart & competent people I know think that subjective experience is basically not a thing people should try to share or think much about. If it isn't "firm" enough to last a long time or clear enough to be transmitted using logical plain language, then it's basically bullshit, and there's no sense either taking it seriously yourself or trying to communicate it to others. Inner experience is like dreaming -- it's basically meaningless noise and nobody wants to hear about it. This seems totally wrong to me -- the whole genre of lyric poetry seems to be about sharing inner experience, right?

I'm wondering if anybody else here has thought about this. Or has noticed that phenomenology is weird and, once you pay attention to it closely enough, doesn't look a hell of a lot like a nicely-bulleted list that anyone can understand. (If you have no idea what "lived experience is weird" might mean, read Donna Williams' Somebody Somewhere.)

Good news: As of a couple weeks ago, I have a new CPAP machine, and my blood oxygen isn't dropping to 80% overnight. I have improved mood, drive, and all that mental-functioning stuff.

My new plan: Take one of my year-old story outline drafts, and use my new drive, and the things I've learned in the past year, to hammer out the unsatisfactory parts, until I have an outline worth turning into actual narrative. The outside view says that, given past experience, I'll manage to write around 90% of a novel before pooping out. My hope is that the CPAP machine will make enough of a difference to get me over that hump.

Where you come in: If you want to comment on the original outline draft, it's a GDoc that can be found at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XcgNwELHCU-r7GuYUgDNDDIviThd8Y7Bdto_kMIcmlI/edit . I expect to be doing significant revision, especially to the later, societal sections.

Wish me luck - even with a fully-oxygenated brain, I'm going to need it. :)

[Meta: I posted this to Facebook and it occurred to me it could be a good thing to xpost here. I might have posted it top-level to the old LW Discussion, but somehow "Submit To Front Page" felt too big for it.]

Lighting, melatonin, etc

In addition to using f.lux (google it if you don't have it) I wear orange glasses in the evenings, to improve my sleep (and also the experience of looking at a screen at night).

This site makes glasses that are much more subtle and designed to be worn all the time. They seem to be implicitly claiming that

(A) looking at a blue screen is bad even midday,

(B) they have some way to block the blue light in a way that isn't annoying.

Re: claim B... hm. It seems their glasses are pretty clear. The way that LCD screens work, virtually all of the blue light coming out of your screen is exactly one wavelength (about 440nm, if you're curious). So maybe they've manufactured a material that absorbs say 50% of that wavelength but almost nothing of wavelengths more than 5nm away. That would be interesting—it would make computer screens have a distinct orangeness to them, while the rest of the world would look mostly normal. I think their tech is patented, so it might be something one could look up.

I am interested to hear what people think about claim A.

Oh, and there's another claim:

(C) that "digital eye strain" has something to do with color as opposed to just looking at something <2 feet away for hours on end.

I think if you wanted to help your eyes strainwise, you might be better off with a program that makes your screen go black for 20 seconds every 20 minutes, and to have a habit of looking at something 20 feet away every time (this is based on some heuristic I read about).

Where do we report bugs? For example, I was unable to leave a comment here using Chrome on an Android tablet. (Desktop is okay.)

Also, is source available? I might be able to make suggestions.

Both Lesswrong and Lesserwrong lack an open forum to ask questions. I’ve always felt this is a big limitation since both sites only allow posting essays and links to essays.

A simple forum or subforum which allowed asking questions or posts simple thoughts will improve the overall dynamic.

And no, a weekly ‘open thread‘ is not enough. It is only a little parchment.

What is the current recommended reading order for the Sequences? I'm thinking of reading through them all and record the experience.

The recent article of EY convinced me to get a daylight lamp. What should I keep in mind while buying a daylight lamp?

I would prefer to not have open threads. this feels like a hack to work around the site not having an ongoing open section, and it clutters up the ui.