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Hi, I wanted to give an update. Capnometry biofeedback worked better than I expected. My baseline ET CO2 went from around 27mmHg to around 40mmHg in the first 1.5 weeks of using the device, and stayed there for the whole month I had access to the device. (I've now returned the device.) The key thing I discovered was that even though I was already nasal breathing 99.9% of the time, my nasal breaths were still quite audible and so I was overbreathing because of that. The biofeedback+coaching allowed me to switch my breathing to a silent nasal one in stages. I still experience air hunger, but it is a lot more subtle than before. I still have trouble talking, some of the time (I think talking makes me overbreathe, so if I start out with no air hunger then I can talk for quite a while, but if I start talking when I already have some air hunger, then I quickly reach my limits). I still on occasion mysteriously have a lot more air hunger than normal and feel like I "forgot how to breathe", and I wonder if that means I have some sort of autonomic problem... I've been writing up a lot of my thoughts here. I might retry capnometers in a few months or a year or something, but for now my plan is to go back to (original Russian-lineage) Buteyko method and really logging the time (rather than half-assing it, which is what I was doing previously with Buteyko). Feel free to ask any questions.
Interesting, I don't know anything about the quality of different SLIT manufacturers, but $2600 sounds a lot more affordable than $7000. I'll try to remember to ask my allergist about this if I ever see them again.
My understanding (based on watching some YouTube lectures and talking to my allergists) is that SCIT (aka allergy shots) and SLIT are equally effective but (at least in the US) SLIT is not covered by insurance so SCIT ends up being a lot cheaper for most people. The main problem with SCIT is that it requires going to the allergy clinic every week for a while, then every month for a while over a period of about 3 years (but it is possible to speed things up quite a bit by doing cluster shots or double shots). I tried doing SCIT last year but my chronic illness made it too difficult to go to the clinic each week so I eventually had to stop (I imagine this won't be a problem for most other people). My allergy clinic gave me an estimate that SLIT would cost roughly $7000 total over 3 years, whereas SCIT for me was free with my insurance.
How were you getting SLIT for $25/week, how much did SLIT cost in total for you, and were the doses tailored to your particular allergies based on tests?
I had a couple more questions about the CONTEC device:
- What's the lag time from when you breathe to when the waveform is displayed on the screen, and when the number updates?
- How does it prevent water (from exhaled air) from getting into the device? The CapnoTrainer uses water traps inserted between the cannula and the device itself, and these water traps need to be replaced every once in a while. But I haven't seen anything similar for the CONTEC device.
I haven't verified the correctness of what this person is saying, but this Reddit comment seems relevant:
Most yoga breathing techniques have been completely misinterpreted from the ancient texts, and incorrectly teach people to breath larger amounts of air, when true deep breathing (deep as in from the diaphragm) is very still and almost imperceptible at rest. Buteyko teaches how to reset the part of the brain that controls autonomic breathing back to this very gentle still breath. Lau Tzu said 'the perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing' . The things that throw out the breathing pattern/volume (and in turn the whole body's biochemistry) are stress and diet, and environmental toxins mostly, but once this happens its hard to reset the breath back to normal without a correct breath practice. And most yogic breathing as taught in the west is the sadly exact opposite of what is needed.
One data point: https://youtu.be/XliOGg8Tl98?t=230
Thank you, this is helpful!
I found someone in my local area who has a CapnoTrainer and was willing to rent it out to me and coach me, so it was a lot cheaper than the official route. But yeah, in general rentals are quite expensive unfortunately. If I couldn't find anyone who would rent one out to me for a reasonable price, I would probably have just gone with the CONTEC device as you did.
When I originally wrote this LW post, I had never used a capnometer of any kind (it just seemed quite promising and I was confused why basically no one was talking about it). After writing the post, I found someone who would rent a CapnoTrainer to me, and have been using the device now for about a week. The CapnoTrainer is still the only capnometer I have used. It's still too early for me to say whether the device "worked" or not, but so far it's been a quite promising experience (I'm planning to write more in maybe a month when the rental period ends).
The contec does show the waveform, it's just on a tiny screen so not the most detailed.
Huh, okay, that is good to know. I was looking at images like this one where the wave form is clearly the SpO2, rather than CO2:
But scrolling through more of the images, I do see this, which looks like a CO2 curve:
I am guessing there must be some way to switch which graph you see?
Talking is really bad too for me. If I talk for a sentence or less, let myself breathe a few breaths while not moving, then resume talking and keep pausing for a while after talking only a bit that helps a lot.
This sounds so much like me... (Luckily I don't seem to have the problem with movement, but eating (specifically swallowing) makes me nervous too.) I don't know if you've looked into Peter Litchfield's work (he has a bunch of videos on YouTube too), but he talks a lot about altering your subconscious/unconscious breathing habits instead of consciously using techniques as crutches to save you from an episode. I recently got access to a CapnoTrainer so that will be my plan for hopefully fixing my breathing (I already did this once when going from ~80% nose-breathing to ~99.9% nose-breathing -- it took about a month of anxiously paying too much attention to my breath, but after a month or so it became totally natural).
I self-studied a bunch of math in 2017-2019 in order to do AI alignment research (specifically, agent foundations type stuff), and have a lot of thoughts about how to do it. Feel free to message me if you want to discuss.
Thank you, this is really fascinating! After writing this post, I talked to someone who does biofeedback using a capnometer, and they also mentioned that same CONTEC device as a cheap but still accurate capnometer. Their main gripe with it was that it responds more slowly compared to the CapnoTrainer and doesn't show the wave form, so it is not as good for doing biofeedback with (e.g. apparently the CapnoTrainer can show things like aborted breaths or weird exhalation patterns, whereas the CONTEC device can't show that), but it is still good enough for detecting CO2 levels.
I would love to read more about your experiences with your breathing issue and what you've tried. Your description of your problem seems similar to my own -- for example, I notice that talking out loud seems to dysregulate my breathing pretty quickly.
Does this mean that a cheap "pseudo-capnometer" can be created which measures VOCs collected via a nasal cannula? Or would measuring VOCs instead of CO2 change the results at that level (but why?)?
Thank you!
Does "COTS" stand for "commercial off-the-shelf" or is this some more technical acronym related to CO2 measurements?
Ultimately the reason it's not popular is probably because it doesn't seem that useful. Breathing is automatic and regulated by blood CO2 concentration; I find it hard to believe that the majority of the population, with otherwise normal respiratory function, would be so off the mark. Is there strong evidence to suggest this is the case?
I agree that this wouldn't be useful for the majority of the population. (Some breathing gurus claim that poor breathing is responsible for pretty much every health problem ever including anxiety, depression, sleep problems, heart problems, brain fog, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, chronic pain, etc. I don't buy these strong claims.) As I tried to make clear in the original question, my own interest in this is personal: I've been having chronic shortness of breath for over a decade and the doctors just shrug and say "maybe it's anxiety" and give me inhalers which don't work. But I suspect others like me are not all that rare. This video (that explains air hunger in terms of carbon dioxide levels and overbreathing) has 53k views and 2.2k likes; Reddit is full of people complaining about air hunger; something like 8% of all EMS responses in the US are from a combination of "respiratory distress" and "shortness of breath" (most of which I assume are not life-threatening; see this Quora question for some evidence, and my one and only time so far on an ambulance to the ER was due to feeling like I couldn't breathe which in retrospect was probably due to overbreathing). So again, I don't think the majority of the population would need to do anything about their breathing, but that seems like quite a high bar that basically no health problem could clear. I'm instead suggesting that it's quite a common problem (but I don't know exactly how common), and asking why this device which seems like it would be helpful for this common problem is virtually unknown.
I was not familiar with that term, but I am aware of sleep apnea and how that can lead to too-high levels of carbon dioxide. Like I said in a different comment, my current understanding is that both too-high and too-low are problems. In my case (and in other cases where people have anxiety-like shortness of breath) I think what's going on is too-low carbon dioxide. But having a capnometer seems useful for correcting both too-low and too-high carbon dioxide.
My understanding is that like many things, both low and high are bad (high carbon dioxide is called hypercapnia), so you want to be in the "good" range (I typically see 35-45 mmHg of partial pressure carbon dioxide being cited as the good range). In rationalist circles I have seen discussion of too-high atmospheric carbon dioxide being bad, but I am myself confused on how that connects to carbon dioxide levels in the blood (and separately, I'm not convinced that higher carbon dioxide levels in the air are bad either).
Was the update ever posted? I am interested in getting a capnometer for an unrelated reason and was curious where people decided to get theirs.
I feel like doing correctness right requires originality after a certain point, so the two don't feel too distinct to me. Early in one's intellectual development it might make sense to just "shop around" for different worldviews by reading widely, but after a while you are going to be routinely bumping into things that aren't on the collective map.
The casus belli example Habryka gives in the "Correctness as defence against the dark arts" strikes me as an example of ... how originality helps defend against the dark arts! (I am guessing here that Habryka did not just read some old rationalist blog post called "Casus belli, how people use it to manipulate each other, and how to avoid getting got", but that he formed this connection himself.) More generally but also personally, I feel like several times in my life (including now) I have been in bad situations where the world just does not seem to have a solution to my problem, where no amount of google-fu, reading books, seeking societally-established forms of help (therapists, doctors, etc.) has helped. The only way out seems to be to do original thinking.
I also want to highlight that the mental motions of Correctness reasoning seems to be susceptible to the dark arts (to be clear, I think Habryka himself is smart enough to avoid this kind of thing, but I want to highlight this for others). I feel this most whenever I go on Twitter. Like, I go on there thinking "ok, for whatever reason many people (even Wei Dai now, apparently) are discoursing on here now, so I better read it to not fall behind, I better enlarge my hypothesis space by taking in new ideas and increase the range of thoughts I can think!" (this is the kind of thing I mean by "mental motions of Correctness reasoning" -- I am mainly motivated by making my map bigger, not making it more detailed). But then after a while I feel like the social environment is tugging me to feel a certain way, value certain things, believe certain things (or else I'm a bad person) (maybe I only had this line of thought because Qiaochu tugged me in a certain direction!). I started out wanting to just explore and try to make my map Correct, but turns out the territory contained adversarial computations... This sort of thing, it seems to me, is even worse for the non-LessWrong population. Again it seems to me most healthy to mostly just be thinking for myself and then periodically check in on Twitter discourse to see what's up (this is aspirational).
I don't actually know how to design things, but here's a simple prototype you can play around with: https://issarice.com/adaptive-typography (as is the case with all prototypes, I ask the user to please overlook any jankiness of the current implementation, and instead imagine you are interacting with a much more polished/idealized version of the same idea).
Two years later: an abstract algebra server was created (covering three books: Artin, Aluffi, and "Abel's Theorem in Problems and Solutions"), but never really took off. I also discovered a topology server (covering Munkres) but it is also now inactive. Meanwhile the Tao Discord is still alive, but I fear it is mostly only alive because I am still there answering people's questions...
There's a tricky trade-off where on one hand, I want to answer questions quickly enough that people don't feel blocked on not knowing the answer to their question, but on the other hand, if I don't answer a question, then that may actually cause someone else to step in and answer (which sort of "trains" the server to become more resilient, so it doesn't only depend on me for survival). (Reminds me of the quote about how the worst thing you can do is to completely solve a problem, and Bill Thurston's anecdote about how he killed a field by making too much progress on it alone.)
I wish I knew how to make more of these servers go well.
What would you recommend in cases where there isn't a single moment in time when one has given up? Most of my projects are inactive in the sense that I haven't done much with them in a while (months or years), but also, they aren't completely dead. I gradually lost interest in the project or prioritized doing other things, but there isn't a sharp cutoff when that happened, and I might pick it up again. To give a concrete example, one of my blogs has a posting history that looks like this (numbers in parentheses indicate number of blog posts in that month):
October 2023 (4)
May 2023 (2)
April 2023 (2)
August 2022 (1)
November 2021 (1)
September 2021 (2)
July 2021 (1)
April 2021 (1)
March 2021 (1)
February 2021 (1)
November 2020 (2)
October 2020 (1)
September 2020 (3)
August 2020 (3)
July 2020 (3)
June 2020 (12)
May 2020 (25)
April 2020 (28)
March 2020 (23)
I really like the idea of this page and gave this post a strong-upvote. Felt like this was worth mentioning, since in recent years I've felt increasingly alienated by LessWrong culture. My only major request here is that, if there are future iterations of this page, I'd like poll options to be solicited/submitted before any voting happens (this is so that early submissions don't get an unfair advantage just by having more eyeballs on them). A second more minor request is to hide the votes while I'm still voting (I'm trying very hard not to be influenced by vote counts and the names of specific people agreeing/disagreeing with things, but it's difficult).
I have about 500 Anki cards on basic immunology that I and a collaborator created while reading Philipp Dettmer's book Immune (Philipp Dettmer is the founder of the popular YouTube channel Kurzgesagt, which has been featured on LW before, and the book itself has also been reviewed on LW before). (ETA: When I first wrote this comment, I stupidly forgot to mention that my intention is to publish these cards on the internet for people to freely use, once they are polished.) However, neither of us is that knowledgeable about immunology (yet) so I'm worried about inaccuracies or misleading info in the cards. I'd like at least one person who knows a good amount of immunology (who has learned it from a source other than this book) to look over the cards and give feedback. I probably unfortunately can't pay any money for this.
I have about 5 years of serious Anki prompt-writing experience, and the cards follow current best practices for prompts as explained in e.g. Andy Matuschak's prompt-writing guide. In other words, these are not low-effort cloze deletions or ChatGPT-generated or anything like that.
I'm also open to arguments that the right thing to do is to just release the cards as they are, let people maybe point out flaws in public, etc.
I think another disadvantage that the post doesn't mention is that being an Organization confers a sense of legitimacy, in part because it acts as a costly signal that one can manage all the legal complexities, pay for paperwork, etc.; so being a sponsored project is a way to call yourself an Organization without paying the cost of the signal. In the limit of widespread knowledge about the legal subtleties of fiscal sponsorship, and due diligence on the part of the community to always keep the distinction in mind, this is not a problem. But people are lazy, and so this sort of confusion does I think benefit sponsored projects.
I've written up a few things on Reddit recently:
- Things I've tried with my breathing difficulty, including some things that helped quite a bit
- Things I've tried with my swallowing difficulty. This one I have not figured out how to improve reliably at all, so it's mostly asking people for help.
Based on this Wayback snapshot it seems to be a paper called "A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic" by Ethan Ludwin-Peery and Sarah Ludwin-Peery. I was able to download the PDF of the paper at this link (the main body of the PDF is 63 pages as claimed in this LW post, and the PDF is dated July 3, 2021, which is just before this LW post was published, so it is likely the version of the paper being discussed here).
The main blocker for me is social rather than technical. Back when the new wiki first started, I created a page but the LW devs (or at least one of them) didn't like the page. There was some back and forth, but I came away from the discussion feeling pretty unwelcome and worried that if I were to make more contributions they would also involve lengthy debates or my work would be removed. I haven't really kept up on the wiki since that time, but I haven't seen anything that has changed my mind about this.
A few technical things that would make it nicer to edit:
- Wikilinks (perhaps things have changed now, but it was not possible to surround words in double square brackets like on many wiki software)
- Automatic backlinks
I have not gotten prayer to really work for me yet, but I've experimented with it a bit (I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but yeah I've gotten desperate enough and have thought I was possibly going to die on multiple occasions now and have entered mental states where I think praying might be the only thing I can do).
"Prayer" in the sense of "ask for a thing in your head and then the thing happens in real life" is obviously not going to work. But I think this may be the wrong way to think about prayers/praying (disclaimer: I am not religious at all and never was, so I have no idea what I'm talking about). Anna Salamon has an old post where she talks about "useful attempted telekinesis", and I think this may be one valid way to make sense of praying. Repeatedly and vividly visualizing the things you value/the things you want may magically make it easier to get that thing, at least some of the time. Another way to think about it might be as a dual to gratitude journaling: in gratitude journaling you examine what you value/don't value in terms of what you already have, whereas in prayer you examine the same things in terms of what you don't currently have. (Why should the latter work? Shouldn't it just lead to envy/sour grapes/bitterness about your life? Yeah, I don't know. Anna's post talks about useful vs harmful telekinesis and I think there's possibly a lot to explore here.)
Praying combined with chanting + rocking may be even more effective, because the latter two have some shot at directly affecting your physiological state. I've not really gotten chanting to work for me, but rocking sometimes calms me down a little bit.
Homeopathy: yeah, agreed, not sure what's going on here and hope that I don't have to get to the point of trying it out.
People often claim that consumer products have been declining in quality over the decades. Some people even claim that such a decline is inevitable under market forces. I've seen this discussed a lot especially for laptops, where supposedly desirable qualities like durability and repairability have declined. I'll focus on these two qualities in particular below.[1]
In contrast to the observation above, I learned the following argument from one of David Friedman's books: if people are willing to buy a crappy product for $x, then they should be willing to pay $10x on the same product that lasts 10 times longer (because in both cases, the amortized cost is the same). So as long as the more durable product does not cost 10 times more to manufacture, the company's revenue is higher if they sell the more durable product.
From this, I conclude that one potential thing that could be going on is that the reason products are crappy is that consumers prefer the crappy product; they aren't willing to pay 10 times more for a 10 times more durable product. This might happen because of information asymmetry reasons (it's easier to tell which of two products are immediately better, than to tell which of two products will last much longer) or maybe because consumers prefer the small advancements they get if they keep buying new products, instead of staying with one product for a long time. Or maybe due to high temporal discounting and inability to save money, consumers prefer cheaper things.
I am still pretty confused about all of this, because I personally do prefer more durable/repairable products and would be willing to pay more for them. But perhaps my preferences are pretty unusual.
- ^
I'm focusing on durability and repairability because these seem more straightforward as they don't require answering questions about how much more one would pay in a given instant for a higher quality. For example, maybe kitchen shears are declining in how well they cut things but maybe that's okay because people just like cheaper shears that cut less well. Whereas if kitchen shears decline in durability, it doesn't matter how much money people would pay for shears to cut better; for any given preference, I can check whether someone is willing to pay 10 times more for something that lasts 10 times longer.
Home water testing: these are periodic tests rather than continuous monitors, and aren't cheap either. My doctor recommended this one but it's more expensive than the water filter I use, so maybe find a cheaper one or skip straight to filtering (the test did verify my filter worked, and this was pretty late in the filter's lifecycle). You can also use EWG to check your city's water data, although it will miss problems in your own pipes.
Did you have a reason to suspect that your tap water in particular was bad (e.g. after seeing EWG's measurements), or was the filtration more of an attempt to reduce all the possible environmental contaminants in general? I have heard a lot about air quality impacting health, but not as much about water quality. I would be grateful to hear about any resources you have in mind for why one should pay more attention to water quality.
A functioning liver.
What tests do you do or have done or consider to check for a functioning liver?
I found that if my tongue doesn’t block my mouth I can only breathe through my mouth and if it does I can only breathe through my nose.
Huh, this isn't what happens when I try it. If I keep my tongue out or at the base of my mouth, I can still definitely choose whether to make the air go through my nose or mouth. If I try to block my mouth with my tongue, that does obstruct the airflow through my mouth but I can still breathe mostly okay (even if I plug my nose).
I used to have a model of breathing that went something like this: when breathing in, the lungs somehow get bigger, creating lower air pressure inside the lungs causing air to flow in. Then when breathing out the lungs get smaller, creating higher air pressure inside the lungs and causing air to flow out. How do the lungs get bigger and smaller? Eventually I learned that there's a muscle called the diaphragm that is attached to the bottom of the lungs (??) that pulls or pushes the lungs. If I keep my nose plugged but my mouth open, the air will travel through my mouth. If I keep my mouth closed but my nose open, the air will travel through my nostrils. So far, so good.
Then a few days ago, I noticed that if I keep both my nose and mouth open, I could choose to breathe in solely through one or the other. This... doesn't make sense, according to the model. The model would predict that the air just flows through both pathways, maybe preferentially going through the mouth since that seems like the larger pathway.
So something is clearly wrong with how I think about breathing. Is there some sort of further switch inside that blocks one of the pathways? Does the nose or the mouth contain variable-size cavities that can control air pressure to direct the flow? I still have no idea. I'm eventually going to look it up, but I might think about this for a little bit longer (or maybe someone here will tell me).
I thought this was a pretty interesting example of how the explanations you hear about seemingly-basic things are easy to accept but don't make sense on further reflection. But it's hard to notice the flaw too. In my case, after a recent ENT visit where I was told my nasal passages are inflamed, I've been putting more effort into consciously breathing through my nose. Then one day I woke up and as soon as I woke up I did something like consciously breathe through my nose with mouth closed, and then somehow I opened my mouth but then still tried to breathe through my nose (or maybe it was that I noticed I was breathing through my mouth, and since I was still waking up I didn't bother to close my mouth and just tried to breathe through my nose with my mouth open), and was surprised this was even possible.
I don't think "throw every explanation possible" is the right takeaway from your experience. To me, it seems like the teacher was failing to model what you were getting stuck on, and so the takeaway would be something more like "try to model the learner better, so as to produce better (not more!) explanations".
"Throw every explanation possible" might still be learning-complete in some sense, so might be worth exploring.
Back in the 2010s, EAs spent a long time dunking on doctors for not having such a high impact (I'm going off memory here, but I think "instead of becoming a doctor, why don't you do X instead" was a common career pitch). I basically mostly unreflectively agreed with these opinions for a long time, and still think that doctors have less impact compared to stuff like x-risk reduction. But after having more personal experience dealing with the medical world (3 primary care doctors, ~10 specialist doctors, 2 psychiatrists, 2 naturopaths, 3 therapists, 2 nutritionists/dieticians, 2 coaching type people, all in the last 4 years (I counted some people under multiple categories)), I think a really agenty/knowledgeable/capable doctor or therapist can actually have a huge impact on the world (just going by intuition of how many even healthy-seeming people have a lot of health problems that bring down their productivity a lot, how crippling it is to have a mysterious health problem like mine, etc; I haven't actually tried crunching numbers). I think such a person is not likely to look like a typical doctor working in a hospital system though... probably more like a writer/researcher who also happens to do consultations with people.
If I had to rewrite the EA pitch for people who wanted to become doctors it would be something like "First think very hard about why you want to become a doctor, and if what you want is not specific to working in healthcare then maybe consider [list of common EA cause areas]. If you really want to work in healthcare though, that's great, but please consider becoming this weirder thing that's not quite a doctor, where first you learn a bunch of rationality/math/programming and then you learn as much as you can about medical stuff and then try to help people."
Typographers focus almost exclusively on designing texts that are meant to be read linearly (and typography guidelines follow this as well, telling writers to limit line length, use a certain font size, etc.). But if you look at the actual stuff happening in the reader's mind as they interact with a book or webpage, linear reading is only one of many possible ways of interacting with a text. In particular, searching for things, flipping around, cross-referencing, and other "movement" tasks are quite common. For such movement tasks, the standard typographic advice seems like a poor choice. Some websites, like the English Wikipedia until this year (example), seem to design for such movement tasks by making the font size smaller, line length longer, etc., but this runs into the opposite problem where if someone does want to linearly read an article on such a page, it will be harder to do so. Other websites, such as the 80,000 Hours podcast website (example), seem to come to a compromise by designing for both kinds of tasks simultaneously (but by doing so fits neither task perfectly). I propose that the typography of a page should dynamically change to match the reader's current task. This may be a bit disorienting at first, but skilled readers would be able to have the best typography in any situation. I don't have a great idea for how to implement this in practice (I welcome suggestions), but one naïve idea is to have a button at the corner of the page that can toggle between "absorbing/linear mode" and "movement mode" (and possibly other modes; I'm interested in hearing what other cognitive tasks should be prioritized by the design of a page).
A while ago a PDF article was posted in the EA space (written by people who are pretty deep into EA) which used the Computer Modern font (the default font used in LaTeX) but which was clearly created using Microsoft Word. The cynical interpretation is that (on some level) the authors wanted to deceive readers into thinking that LaTeX was used to typeset the paper when in fact it was not. I do believe such deception will work, because very few people seem to know anything about typography. (I don't claim to be much better; I've learned just a little bit more than the default state of zero knowledge.) I wonder how people feel about this sort of thing.
I found this Wikipedia article pretty interesting. Even in a supposedly copyright-maximalist country like the US, the font shapes themselves cannot be copyrighted, and design patents only last 15 years. Popular fonts like Helvetica have clones available for free. Other countries like Japan are similar, even though a full Japanese font requires designing 50,000+ glyphs! That is an insane amount of work that someone else can just take by copying all the shapes and repackaging it as a free font. In my experience there are only like a few main Japanese fonts, and I used to think it was just because it takes so much work to design such fonts, but now it occurs to me that the inability to make money from the design (because someone else can easily steal your designs) could be the bigger factor. (I have not yet done the virtuous thing of digging in to see if this is true.)
Not quite sure what you are asking, but if you mean something like taking some of my points and editing them into your own post, that's fine with me.
This post was apparently translated to Chinese, and there is some discussion there. I can't quite tell if it's actually humans writing the comments (and Chrome's translation is just not very good) or if the content and discussion is all AI-generated.
Here's the list I came up with when I did something similar (I was thinking about written explanations in general, which I called "word explanations" on that page). I have an older attempt here. And here's a similar thing I did for a specific textbook.
I didn't log the time I spent on the original blog post, and it's kinda hard to assign hours to this since most of the reading and thinking for the post happened while working on the modeling aspects of the MTAIR project. If I count just the time I sat down to write the blog post, I would guess maybe less than 20 hours.
As for the "convert the post to paper" part, I did log that time and it came out to 89 hours, so David's estimate of "perhaps another 100 hours" is fairly accurate.
This post by Brian Hamrick makes a similar point about how organizational mottos should prioritize a single thing (but leaves the "large company" part implicit).
Not the same paper, but related: https://twitter.com/jamespayor/status/1634447672303304705
Can someone say more about what is meant by credit allocation in this conversation? The credit allocation section here just talks about BATNAs and I don't see how BATNAs are related to what I imagine "credit allocation" might mean. I searched Michael Vassar's Twitter account but there are only three instances of the term and I couldn't quickly understand any of the tweets. I also don't understand what "being able to talk about deceptive behavior" has to do with credit allocation.
I upvoted this post because I think it's talking about some important stuff in ways (or tone or something) I somehow like better than what some previous posts in the same general area have done.
But also something feels really iffy about the way the word "fun" is used in this post. If I think back to the only time in my life I actually had fun, which was my childhood, I sure did not have fun in the ways described in this post. I had fun by riding bikes (but never once stopping to get curious about how bike gears work), playing Pokemon with my friends (but not actually being very strategic about it -- competitive battling/metagame would have been completely alien to my child's self), making dorodango (but, like, just for the fun of it, not because I wanted to get better at making them over time, and I sure did not ever wonder why different kinds of mud made more stable or shinier dorodango, or what the shine even consists of), etc.
The kind of "fun" that is described in this post is, I think, something I learned from other people when I was in my early teens or so, not something I was born with (as this post seems to imply?). And I learned and developed this skill because I was told (in books like Feynman's and the Sequences) that this is what actually smart people do.
So personally I feel like I am trying to get back the "original fun" that I experienced as a child, as well as trying to untangle the "useful/technical fun" from its social influences and trying to claim it as my own, or something, in addition to doing the kind of thing suggested by this post.
I think it's often easiest/most tempting to comment specifically on a sketchy thing that someone says instead of being like "I basically agree with you based on your strongest arguments" and leaving it at that (because the latter doesn't seem like it's adding any value). (I think there's been quite a bit of discussion about the psychology of nitpicking, which is similar to but distinct from the behavior you mention, though I can't find a good link right now.) Of course it would be better to give both one's overall epistemic state plus any specific counter-arguments one thought of, but I only see a few people doing this sort of thing consistently. That would be my guess as to what's going on in the situations you mention (like, I could imagine myself behaving like the people you mention, but it wouldn't be because I'm taking averages, it would be because I'm responding to whatever I happen to have the most thoughts on). But you have a lot more information about those situations so I could be totally off-base.
This doesn't seem to be what I or the people I regularly interact with do... I wish people would give some examples or link to conversations where this is happening.
My own silly counter-model is that people take the sum, but the later terms of the sum only get added if the running total stays above some level of plausibility. This accounts for idea inoculation (where people stop listening to arguments for something because they have already heard of an absurd version of the idea). It also explains the effect Ronny mentions about how "you may very quickly find that everyone perceives the anti-T-ers as being much more reasonable": people stopped listening to the popular-and-low-quality arguments in favor of T.
I bought these after seeing Wei Dai's post. Everyone in my family and in-person friend group refuses to wear this mask because it makes them look like a duck (besides one person, who refuses to wear it because it is harder to breathe through compared to a surgical mask). So I am the only one wearing this mask. So I agree with your assessment that "the main problem is that they make you look a bit like a duck", but I would add that this is apparently a very strong effect. People really would prefer to be less comfortable or increase their risk of COVID than to look weird.
I think I agree with everything in your comment. Seems like there was less disagreement here than I initially thought. Moving on... :)
I think it's often hard to tell whether something is a psychological problem for an individual or instead a cultural problem with the group. Past social progress can be framed as "society used to think certain individuals had a psychological problem, but then it turned out that the society's rules/norms/culture was the problem". It currently seems to me that a lot of what people view as "psychological problems" are actually an individual's way of saying "something about the culture I find myself in doesn't seem right". I read this post as kinda ignoring this whole issue and making it seem like it's obvious whose problem it is, which I think avoids the hard core of these situations.
I think if the umbrella blog post on which the user's shortform posts (which are just comments) get added was created before 2022-06-23 then it won't have agree/disagree votes, whereas ones created on or after that date do?