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cowardice
liability aversion
In maneuver warfare, you get convinced to waste your resources fighting the wrong battles. Journalists are not reliable sources of anything, and fighting in the faction wars around that is probably not pulling the rope sideways.
I believe that one of the effects of the current schooling system is training people to shy away from cruxyness, which makes you somewhat less of a liability for employment.
One of the hypotheses is that hoarding calories is supposed to be a fall preparing for winter thing and something about the modern diet is putting us in that state all the time rather than for three months out of the year. Eating a bunch of root vegetables seems to help. Might be gut microbiome related (starches) and/or hormone related or something else.
Wrt to the calorie deficit really sucking, I found, per the potato diet, that eating potatoes to satiety (wound up being about 25% of calories overall average) removed most of the hard part of the calorie deficit. I still had to pay attention, but I didn't have to try to go to sleep hungry.
It was notable that, in practice, the diet wound up being both low added sugar and low added fat. This has a calorie effect of course, but also some think that these processed carbs and fats are doing some sort of metabolic shenanigans, perhaps being treated by the body structurally as damaged etc.
Seems like you've aggregated lvt with central planning problems. There are multiple proposals to do it other ways.
Physical views are somewhat interesting if you haven't seen them before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d1eyZBpLn8
Thank you for sharing your experience. There is a balance in societies between tolerance for crime and tolerance for imperfect enforcement of law in ways that might rob the accused of some rights. I don't know much about Taiwan, but by all accounts the Japanese penal system accepts a substantially higher rate of false positives in punishing the accused. This trade-off point might make a lot of sense in a society with a lower overall disposition towards violent crime.
The thief's preferences bear no cost as well. Leaving his preference structure to change arbitrarily to whichever one will drive the highest utility for them. Preference falsification is an undesirable property for a system to incentivize, see strategic voting gameable systems as causing outcomes no-one prefers.
The dimensionality of possible improvements is both hopeful and also daunting. Lots of improvements being possible feels pretty cool in high agency states. Things needing lots of dimensions of improvement before they aren't terrible feels hopeless from low agency states.
LLMs would be expected to have heavily overlapping ontologies, a question is what capability boosting does to the AI ontology.
Keep in mind that long (>280 character) replies don't notify the people in the thread, so you have to manually tag them if you leave a high quality reply.
Update, I pinged him on Twitter and he said that people getting jhana on retreat and then thinking that the path is about getting 'back to that' is very common, instead of the person pursuing insight practices that lead to day to day changes Rather than peak experiences.
I don't have theistic beliefs but have found prayer useful.
This is oddly different from what he said in person. Also he wrote the first edition of mctb also about twenty years ago now, so I wouldn't be surprised if his opinion is different from his thirty year old self.
I don't think you need to take any of the Buddhist claims seriously, just do your own investigation. I think it's much closer to something like 'people take instrumental goals as terminal, then twist themselves into knots over this error'.
Ingram has actively hunted for any jhana hunters for twenty years and hasn't found any. The reason why becomes obvious once one gains a bit of insight into why/how jhana works. Though it's trickier to describe.
I think letting go of desire is a terrible description of the insight. I still feel like a normal person, I just suffer a lot less. There's a tendency to overestimate the magnitude of changes in their close aftermath. It takes a few years before the mountains truly are mountains again.
More objective psychometrics like neuroticism and the reports of friends, family, partners.
They're coextensive/parasitic on virtues, virtues being hard won compressions of lots of contextual information about how to prioritize and behave for min-maxing costs and benefits in a side-effect free way. Since virtues are illegible to younger people who haven't built up enough data yet, values are an easy attribute substitution.
Imaginal worlds, escapism. Video games, tabletop gaming, fantasy movies and books, comics and anime, collecting things, model building or mechanically intricate things.
Puzzle games and real math are pretty non central examples of nerdy interests in my ontology. I think of nerdy interests as fake compression, they provide a simpler world with a working memory number of variables to optimize instead of the mess of the real world. Results can be knowably optimal etc.
In both examples: 2 degrees of freedom, two pieces of information. The information is sufficient to restrict one of the degrees of freedom (to within some bound in the second clustering example rather than precise).
Due to diagnostic ambiguity, a lot of the solutions don't generalize, which is anathema to the nerdy interest tick in my experience.
More generally, dealing with the arrow-of-time loopiness problems by expanding the time window to contain the causal process in question. I would guess this epicycle introduces more complications than it solves sometimes though, requiring a block universe model in some circumstances (UDT related?).
Several dozen people now presumably have Lumina in their mouths. Can we not simply crowdsource some assays of their saliva? I would chip money in to this. Key questions around ethanol levels, aldehyde levels, antibacterial levels, and whether the organism itself stays colonized at useful levels.
I would appreciate a version of this post that evaluate dangers. This post uses a lot of fear mongering language that I don't feel helps me calibrate as someone considering the product.
Generally: in maneuver warfare you seek to make your opponent spend more energy per unit of reaction/movement than you do, wearing them down or putting them in a position of weakness.
People should focus way more on things that make them better partners because they make you a healthier more rounded person and way less on idiosyncratic dating market dynamics imo. When you climb the health hill you meet others also climbing the health hill. When you climb fake hills you meet others climbing fake hills.
Most of the useful ones are fairly symmetrical. Things like taking care of health and appearance for yourself but also more effort than you would otherwise on the margin because you care about your partner's experience. Taking note of things that seem specific to your partner/make them happy and noticing opportunities to do them. Noticing that the way your partner expresses care is probably the way they also wish they could receive it, and symmetrically noticing that the ways you keep expressing care for your partner are ways you secretly want care and doing the counterintuitively difficult emotional work of learning to ask for it instead of resenting their lack of mind-reading.
Creating space in which your partner can be vulnerable to expose their real preference (e.g. sexual preferences). Both men and women have a pretty hard time with this (especially any gender-narrative dystonic preferences) and often have had some pretty hurtful rejections in the past from other unthinking young people.
Then there are things that people present as if they are relationship obligations and try to avoid the emotional maturity of having them be explicitly discussed requests instead of tacitly held/resented demands. Such as coddling their coping mechanisms while not being allowed to acknowledge that you are paying costs to accommodate them (or you doing this to them).
Men often wind up in the valley of bad emotional sensitivity where they think that going into these sorts of things will make them unattractive/feminine (see: gender-narrative dystonic), mostly because they haven't had solid models of masculine emotional space-holding from their fathers and older male peers, modern age siloing isolates people from a lot of feedback from older people at every stage of life. They don't have a context in which to train the first awkward 100 hours of these skills. I think this is often why people report things like circling being very helpful.
Oh yeah, food banks for sure!
Finding a loan to move to somewhere with jobs is probably your best bet. This may devolve to begging amongst any social circles as well, which is a big pride hit. Many probably won't believe you will wind up with the means to pay it back. Minimizing the cost of the move by getting rid of non essential belongings. It is probably somewhat easier these days to line up a far away job via zoom interviewing. Quantity over quality.
One thing that I think is non-obvious: if you lay out the case for the loan in detail, that demonstrates intelligence and conscientiousness and will increase people's sense that you are doing something useful and thus willingness to lend. Basically, treat it as a business case, but the business happens to just be getting you and your partner employed. Show past cash flow, expected future cash flow given salaries of the sorts of places you are applying to, estimates of how many jobs you can reasonably apply to, how much of a monthly payment you could pay back, etc. Use chatgpt for help with outlining this.
'Evidence based' in the skincare industry mostly means a company paid a consultancy to do 'scientific testing.' Very little shows any signs of actual large effect sizes other than blocking UV damage, afaik. Moisturizer does seem to help, especially in low humidity climes. Which moisturizer your skin responds best to seems to be trial and error, ie the detectable/subjective metrics are all we really have. Retinoids are one exception, but come with tradeoffs that I don't fully understand.
I settled on snail mucin as a more natural alternative, but a significant fraction of people have mild allergic reactions to it apparently.
I think binary examples are deceptive in the reversed stupidity is not intelligence sense. Thinking through things from first principles is most important in areas that are new or rapidly changing where there are fewer references classes and experts to talk to. It's also helpful for areas where the consensus view is optimized for someone very unlike you.
If some some pre-modern hominids ate high animal diets, and some populations of humans did, and that continued through history, I wouldn't call that relatively recent. I'm not the same person making the claim that there is overwhelming evidence that saturated fats can't possibly be bad for you. I'm making a much more restricted claim.
I would have guessed high T is associated with lower neuroticism, but studies found weak or no effects afaict.
AFAIK, analysis of paleolithic diets is that there were a range of things depending on availability and some groups were indeed pretty high on animal protein. We don't have differential analysis of the resulting health, but I just wanted to point out that the trope of 'trad diets were low protein' is not super well supported. Trad diets were mostly lower fat does have some support, as raising very fatty, sedentary animals is more recent, and accelerated a bunch in the last hundred years. Although the connection between higher fat diets and negative health outcomes is then another inferential step that hasn't been strongly supported and is, AFAIK, somewhat genetically mediated (some people/groups do much better on high fat diets than others in terms of blood lipid profiles).
These can often be operationalized 'How much of the variance in the output do you predict is controlled by your proposed input?'
Our sensible Chesterton fences
His biased priors
Their inflexible ideological commitments
In addition to epistemic priors, there are also ontological priors and teleological priors to cross compare, each with their own problems. On top of which, people are even worse at comparing non epistemic priors than they are at comparing epistemic priors. As such, attempts to point out that these are an issue will be seen as a battle tactic: move the argument from a domain in which they have the upper hand (from their perspective) to unfamiliar territory in which you'll have an advantage, and resisted.
You may share the experience I've had that most attempts at discussion don't go anywhere. We mostly repeat our cached knowledge at each other. If two people who are earnestly trying to grok each other's positions drill down for long enough they'll get to a bit of ontology comparison, where it turns out they have different intuitions because they are using different conceptual metaphors for different moving parts of their model. But this takes so long that by the time it happens only a few bits of information get exchanged before one or both parties are too tired to continue. The workaround seems to be that if two people have a working relationship then, over time, they can accrue enough bits to get to real cruxes, and this can occasionally suggest novel research directions.
My main theory of change is therefore to find potentially productive pairings of people faster, and create the conditions under which they can speedrun getting to useful cruxes. Unfortunately, Eli Tyre tried this theory of change and reported that it mostly didn't work, after a bunch of good faith efforts from a bunch of people. I'm not sure what's next. I personally believe more progress could be made if people were trained in consciousness of abstraction (per Korzybski), but this is a sufficiently difficult ask as to fail people's priors on how much effort to spend on novel skills with unclear payoffs. And a theory of change that has a curiosity stopper that halts on "other people should do this thing that they clearly aren't going to do" is also not very useful.
Unclear. High fat and high carb diets have been directly compared and not found to be a smoking gun.
Correlation to increased consumption of hidden trans fats looks like a promising angle for figuring out some of the conflicting data.
I don't have a cite handy, but proportion of free acids was found to strongly increase with repeated heating of vegetable oils in cooking. There's a story here where pufa is more fragile, and incorporation of damaged fats into bodily tissue is not good. In particular, fat cells made up of damaged fats might mess with normal lipid balance processes. This is one possible story for why processed meats are so bad. We'd be doubling up on this process, feeding animals such that they have lots of damaged fats in their tissues (eg we feed pigs expired candy because it is cheap, and high BMI is desirable), killing and processing them such that it's even more damaged, and then eating it.
Overall, I'm bullish on the story that processing is bad, potentially through multiple mechanisms.
I'm bearish on pufa being bad in generality, if it were I don't think we'd see some of the strongest effects in nutrition science on reduced mortality from nuts and fish. I personally consume both raw on the processing is bad story.
CRPGs with a lot of open world dynamics might work, where the goal is for the person to identify the most important experiments to run in a limited time window in order to manmax certain stats.
Tracing out the chain of uncertainty. Lets say that I'm thinking about my business and come up with an idea. I'm uncertain how much to prioritize the idea vs the other swirling thoughts. If I thought it might cause my business to 2x revenue I'd obviously drop a lot and pursue it. Ok, how likely is that based on prior ideas? What reference class is the idea in? Under what world model is the business revenue particularly sensitive to the outputs of this idea? What's the most uncertain part of that model? How would I quickly test it? Who would already know the answer? etc.
My shorthand has been 'decision leverage.' But that might not hit the center of what you're aiming at here.
This is true, but we still wish to cooperate with the largest alliance that will have us/some subset of our values that are capable of attaining reflective equilibrium.
If conflict exists, one thing it can be useful for agents to do is misrepresent themselves as being weaker or stronger than they are.
Some data: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/odi.12341
Firstly, S. mutans does not colonize the epithelium. It lives almost exclusively on enamel. The total surface area in the mouth that it could realistically inhabit is exceptionally small, unless Lumina can live in places that S. mutans generally does not.
Big crux! Thanks for the investigative effort. Sounds mostly resolvable via assay of existing Lumina customer saliva.
An interesting twist: drinking ethanol doesn't just cause acute exposure but "The concentration of ethanol in the oral cavity increases immediately after an alcoholic beverage is consumed and then decreases. It was reported after intake of an alcoholic beverage that the concentration of ethanol remaining in the oral cavity decreases gradually, as ethanol flows back into saliva from the blood for a few hours after it is taken into the body [25,26]. Most previous studies of acetaldehyde production by oral bacteria, including our study [24], used ethanol concentrations as low as 11–22 mM (approximately 0.05–0.1%), which corresponds to the ethanol concentrations seen in saliva a few hours after alcohol consumption [20,22,26,27]. " From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8204988/
The relevant SNP is rs671, though 23 and me will already have it in your dashboard.
Thanks! This is much closer to the amount of ethanol you'd get eating 50 bananas a day. That's at least one sanity check it fails then, even under these ideal conditions since, as you noted, there is probably a larger bacteria population than what was measured there.
Now I'm wondering about sanity checks in the other direction though. Is ~.5 ml per hour of ethanol actually a realistic production?
If it's really more like 10^6 and not 10^7 that's five bananas worth and not something I would worry about. Isn't this resolvable via saliva assay?