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I agree getting told to eat less is not helpful advice. Here is the Facebook post, which I don't think your steelman applies to.
>Furthermore, the curves that you present are way too steep. The average American puts on about 1 pound/year,
Because they're already in their higher weight state. The graph was a hypothetical 1980 person being moved to 2010 and upping their intake. When we see studies putting people in metabolic wards we find that a 500 calorie a day surplus corresponds to a 1 lb a week weight gain, which is consistent with my curves
>There's pretty strong evidence that the rise in obesity is not primarily behavioral
How are you defining behavioral? The body is pretty efficient at turning extra calories into weight, a disease can't make you gain 20lbs by processing the food more. It can make you lose weight by processing the food less. The only mechanism a contaminant would have to raise your weight is by influencing your behavior so you spend less calories or intake more. There is no other mechanism by which a contaminant would work. It /must/ include an intermediate behavioral step
Fair point that I didn't include as much detail as I could.
My belief is that most people react to "the average weight went up over 20lbs between 1980 and 2010" with "wow that's a lot, there must be something really weird going on we need a complex thesis with a scary name" but react to "the average calorie budget per day went up 200 calories" with "wow that's it? I'd expect it to be more given, ya know, everything".
My post was mostly just meant to put the magnitude of the change in perspective for them.
It would have taken me a lot longer than the 20 minutes I spent on the post if I wanted to find sources on the prevalence of low-satiety foods sedentary entertainment to talk about how they're more common. I was trying to nail an effort:usefulness sweet spot
Aren't those types of ads usually pay per click? I've never purposefully clicked an ad* on a site so it's really no different to them if I use an ad blocker
*Not counting things like the front page of steam where I'm coming for the ads specifically
I've always felt weird about my contribution to ads. Half the projects I've worked on at Microsoft were ads and I'm currently waiting to hear back from hiring committee at Google about working on some different ads for them instead.
I guess the part I'm not sure about is, are the people who purchase something in response to an ad better off? The only purchase that stemmed from an unsolicited ad I saw was bugging my mom for some Heelys as a kid; but every time I've let an "almost ad" like a friend talking about something convince me to buy something it has always felt like it made my life 0% better and was a waste of money. I generally notice friends spending a lot of money on things that they grow bored of so quickly and get very little enjoyment out of. I wonder if ads are pushing behavior that makes people less happy in the end.
Edit: I have had a coworker suggest the most moral thing I could do was stay on the team and intentionally sandbag. I'm still not sure if she's right.
For me, five hours laying in bed and three hours of sleep is much closer to eight hours sleep than it is three hours. There have been some studies on how much sleep you can replace with meditation and I don't remember the exact conversation rate, but you did say low barrier to entry on comments. When I'm stressing at being unable to sleep, as long as I relax everything and meditate I wake up feeling as good as if I didn't have insomnia issues. Note that it took me a lot of practice to be able to relax everything, you often don't notice some of your muscle tension. It's also an interesting thing to note that I sometimes have rapid involuntary eye movements while doing things which makes me think something sleep like is happening.
I'm finding myself wishing for more resources on picking where to live. I'm in an uncommon situation: Single. Enough money to not need to work anymore unless I'm in a high cost of living place so I want to take a few years off. The only area that I have lots of friends in I already know isn't right for me due to seasonal depression. Finding the right place to live through my own research will be long having to visit places for long enough to see what they're like but there just doesn't exist super great resources for researching things ahead of time unless I'm missing something.
In related news: I hear Atlanta has a decent dance scene. Anyone live in the Atlanta area have comments?
I actually think the fun part explains it even more. I have a buddy I game with all the time. I always end up better then them. They ask for help. I point out something I've identified as a fundamental in the game (the equivalent of aiming/positioning in FPS games, or building workers in RTS games) and some little practice method that I went away and did for 2 or 3 hours one day to get better at that fundamental. Then, every time, they say "that would make it not fun" and just spam some games. Because there's a fun inefficient way to practice they just do that instead of the less fun efficient way to practice.
Just to clarify, we're still talking about getting above 3500 when the average is 2500 and pro is 4500? So, getting to the top 20-25% or so of the game? What do you find to be the limiting factor on the people stuck below 3500? It's my impression that when we're talking about that sort of rank for a game we're still talking about people who haven't gotten down the basic fundamentals and haven't gotten to the point higher level strategy is super important. For the equivalent rank in sc2 you can still just pick any random strat you want and work on your fundamentals. It wasn't till around top 2% I felt the need to learn actual strategy instead of just "spend all your money as fast as possible". Tons of top20% players would be like "I spent all week practicing this new strategy I saw someone do in the last tournament" but still be floating tons of minerals because practicing spending money faster is boring.
Some general thoughts from a former masters SC2 player, who has also been decently highly ranked at many other games
There was a famous starcraft caster who was constantly being asked how to become a starcraft caster by people who said it was their dream. He told them all "Go record yourself trying to cast 100 games then send me a message". Literally only one person took him up on that, and now they're a famous starcraft caster.
My prediction is that people willing to do the work can get good insanely quickly and people who aren't won't. I think "most people say they are willing to do the work but aren't" explains the vast majority of the phenomenon you call out. You can train a dedicated person to be good really fast but most coaches find 95% of their clients are people looking to get good quick with no work. I think being willing to put in that effort is a far more important variable than raw intellect. If you have someone willing to spend 1000 hours deliberately practicing aiming but isn't smart enough to keep up with the pros when it comes to thinking presciently and can only handle a few very common scenarios then I expect them to get to an obscenely high ranking (much like how "never stop building workers" usually gets you to the diamond equivalent in any RTS game without having to practice any other skills)
I do have limits to how far I'd go. The impression I have in my head is that the two ways to jump in line are 1) malfunctions where they have to give them away or throw them away 2) areas where the demand is so low that they're having to choose fairly lax rules or throw them away. My hope is that there's a way to get a vaccine that wouldn't have gone to anyone truly in need without having to do anything particularly illegal
So, we know a small number of people have jumped ahead in the vaccine line by being at the right place at the right time when a freezer broke and there weren't enough eligible people.
How would one maximize their chance of jumping in line if they were limited to the continental united states? What city would you spend your time prowling for unused vaccine?
Edit: I could get to 30 BMI in about two weeks. Creatine + an overreaching block + stuffing myself on wings should get me that last 15lbs
Prediction: The two most common notes would be "Note - Not jacobjacob" and "Note - Not Jacobian"
<3
I took a bit to try and remember where all my identities came from and an interesting thing to note is how quickly external validation can change your identity.
- As a kid my only socialization was my mother, all she complimented was academics, I saw myself as the smart kid, studying was easy
- My first romantic success was related to depression commiseration, I started to see that as my identity, suddenly I became way more depressed, most things got harder (especially whenever I'm actively dating)
- I was an awful wrestler, then my one-trick-pony move started getting referred to by a nickname with my name in it, suddenly I found training easy and actually got good
- Once I cooked for other people and got praised for it I was able to cook complicated meals in the depths of my worst depressions when I can't get out of bed for literally anything other than cooking
I guess what I'm saying is yall need to compliment me for starting a side project this month so I actually stick to it instead of laying around reading Reddit all the time
Problem: I'm depressed and bored. Covid took away dance/bjj and I need physical touch/play. I at least need something to be fixated on. Single with no roommates and not close to family. All my friends have disappeared into their relationships. My job isn't fulfilling and I'm not even sure if I need any more money to make it the rest of my life so idk why I'm still in it.
- Join an MMO, I was happy when I had a good community in a guild
- Ignore covid, find a bjj gym that's already open
- Move to NZ where covid is over
- Host secret dance nights. Though I don't have enough floor space
- Treat online dating like a full time job till I find something fulfilling
- Move back to FL, set up mat room for bjj, train with old friend
- Try and reconnect with family
- Road trip. I'd really prefer to do this after covid so I can see what places are normally like to pick my next city to live in
- Take up outdoor rock climbing. Why is it so cold here
- Take up rock hounding. Why is it so cold here
- Dedicate myself to the side project idea L said he'd buy if I made
- Dedicate myself to babbling side project ideas every day until I find something I like even better
- Go back and get a ML PhD
- Dedicate myself to finding a really big signing bonus that doesn't require much vesting to finish up the last of the money I need
- Quit, let myself be really bored for a while so I find inspiration
- Find some sort of online community outside of an MMO
- End it all
- Become a monk
- Donate everything to light a fire under my ass to earn it back
- Come up with some cool series to write for LW, live off the validation in the comments
- Become a game dev
- Become an indie game dev
- Start learning a solo dance, replace swing dancing with zoom dances
- Learn parkour
- Write a book
- Survey everyone I can access both in person and online how they're staying social to get more ideas
- Dedicate myself to wood working
- Dedicate myself to fixing my house up to increase the sale value
- Hang out at parks and try and start as many conversations as possible
- Find some sort of social game that involves talking to strangers at the park
- Bike through the parks, trying to start at least one conversation a day but mostly just bike
- Learn an instrument. Busk in the park
- Set up Bob ross painting stations in the park. Let strangers join
- Start dating my ex who would probably still date me, even though I don't think enough issues have fixed for it to work and it would cause drama
- Bike through the whole city and note the areas with the most people who look receptive to conversations
- Switch careers to psychotherapy. Get my social needs fulfilled from comforting my clients. Yes I know it doesn't work like that, but no pruning
- Become twitch streamer
- Try and obtain monk like contentment without becoming a monk
- Switch to using kink based online dating sites, possibly find better matches?
- Learn tarot cards, give readings in the park
- Read in the park
- Get a cat
- Get a bonded pair of cats
- Start a life project to gamify everything I can
- Play a lot of video games to numb the pain
- Start an only fans
- Restart competitive programming
- Hand out baked goods at the park
- Really try and push for wings & liftin' nights to happen as often as possible
- Try and really optimize my health to see if that affects my mental health
- Antidepressants
- Antianxieties
- Prune this list, because boy does it need it
Retrospective: More useful than I thought it would be. Partially because it increased my resolve for the things I had kinda sorta considered now that I feel like I've finished considering my alternative options
I feel happy pulling up kattis and doing some algorithm questions so there is definitely joy to be had chasing technical questions. Ben doesn't seem to be disputing that but is offering two other things you can chase.
Rather than competing for an A+ on a hard problem, I could try to solve an easy problem as quickly as possible
I don't know if this is different person to person but for me gamifying a problem can make me care more about something but it can't make me care about something I don't care about at all
So don’t look for hard problems—important ones are ultimately more fun!
This has been in my head for months because everyone* gives a variation of this advice and it feels like it's missing the hard part. It started when I saw a clip on Reddit of Dr. K from Healthy Gamer saying something along the lines of "If you don't know what you want to do, get a piece of paper and write down everything wrong with the world. In 5 minutes the paper will be almost full" and... What? No? I mean, things are problems in that they make people's lives worse. But I notice very very little actually changes how I feel. So why would I expect anything I do to change how someone else feels if nothing they do can change how I feel? There are only two axis that actually change how I feel about life: lonely VS belonging and bored VS engaged. I don't really have a reason to expect other people are very different except that people in worse life situations also have an unsafe VS secure axis. So the problems are "loneliness" and "listlessness". Everyone acts like there are important problems everywhere. You see people saying ideas for side projects are a dime a dozen but here I am where I actually have the funds to quit and make something I thought had value and just nothing I can think of that seems to have any value.
*Everyone except one friend on Paxil who assures me the solution to my problem is Paxil and one friend who is convinced LSD is the solution to all problems. I remain unconvinced.
I'm so bored of my job, I need a programming job that has actual math/algorithms :/ I'm curious to hear about people here who have programming jobs that are more interesting. In college I competed at a high level in ICPC, but I got into my head that there are so few programming jobs with actual advanced algorithms that if your name on topcoder isn't red you might as well forget about it. I ended up just taking a boring job at a top tech company that pays well but does very little for society and is not intellectually stimulating at all.
Most relatable post of all time. I had actually been doing really good this year minus a depressed period right at the start of covid; then now I'm relapsed since a month ago when stand up was cancelled removing the only structure in my day. I've been calling mine "adult onset akrasia" because before I was 18 I just was constantly working and extremely high achieving and then I just... broke. I have a lot of theories as to things that contribute in my case. Since it got even worse when I moved from college to my final job there will be some things in the list that match up with getting my first job (jr. year HS) and some when I moved to my post-college job.
- After you start working you no longer really take more than 1 week in a row off ever, but I think continuous time off is very important and spreading a month of time off throughout a year doesn't really do the same thing. For me I would only ever start cool side projects on my third week off forward
- Grades/medals in sports were discrete rewards to chase. An X% higher bonus that means nothing other than enabling you to donate a bit more to charity in your life feels so intangible
- The bar is just so much lower. It feels like 5 hours a week of work would be enough to keep my job (dev at the chillest of the top tech companies)
- The work isn't interesting. I don't think improving our product really improves people's lives much. There's no math/algorithms in it so it's not fun to code. I miss ICPC :( Though I'm probably not making a good case why anyone should DM me job offers here lol
- Too continuous. In school you eventually hit a point where you've finished everything. At work if you finish early the start date for the next thing just moves up
- Less factored goals. The further you get in life the less you have a list of 1000 questions that take 5 minutes each and the more you have one 5000 minute question that just feels like like an overwhelming cloud of fog
- Discovered Reddit, got a smartphone. Distractions too close. No longer resting in solitude bouncing around possible solutions to hard questions on a school bus. Now I'm reading stuff I don't even care about any time I have 30 seconds without someone interacting with me
I think there are a few reasons this post got a comment like Rafael's but your others didn't.
Any community that is about dating seems to attract the kind of people needed to turn it into /r/theredpill. So I see the need to post places like here although they need to be more infrequent as not to turn this place sour in the same manner. This is perhaps the inflection point where it has hit too many posts in too short a time.
There does seem to be more risk of violating "do no harm" here than your other posts. You mention trying to seek out a positistion teaching GRE materials where you could flirt with someone you have some level of authority over and seeking out black women who often have insecurities over how they are viewed in regards to what is conventionally considered attractive in America. Seeking out a power imbalance can put you in positions where you hurt someone.
Signaling does have a use. Leaving the article the same, but adding 1-4 additional sentences with signaling stuff just showing you know pick up artist type stuff can hurt people and that isn't your intention would change the entire tone. People here don't know you in person and we can't pick up on body language so sometimes you really do just need to type out the virtues you had hoped people would assume you had. You did have more signaling of that in your first post. The way you talked painted a picture of a honest confused guy whereas these more fleshed out plans paints a serial pick up artist even though I know that isn't your intention.
Personally, I did just want to call out that you should question the potential power balance of the GRE teaching situation and other than that don't have many comments. There are some things I think aren't optimally effective, but I generally think this stuff needs to be discovered through experimentation and too much borrowed power is bad for both people in the relationship. I left my advice on your first post vague when I could have given you a flowchart for a reason. I stick to calling out potential areas you may regret rather than optimizing the actual plan.
I just don't feel anything. I do have a certain logical appreciation that if I made a billion dollar company it would be impressive, I'd probably improve people's lives with it, and I could buy more stuff (mostly donate I guess? I don't have much else I need...) but I don't feel anything. Those are the words I feel flowing through my head but I don't feel any of the wordless feelings that make up my system 1.
Hell, I don't even feel anything thinking about the pleasure I'd get from getting a peach from my kitchen and there's a 95% chance the peach is good and ripe today. I just do it because I know I'll have good feels once I actually have the peach. Which is enough to make me do something low effort like get a peach but not start a company.
Edit: If anyone was curious, the peach was indeed delicious
I feel like one of the people you're writing this for. 25. 900k NW yet still working a boring programming job for one of the top tech companies that I don't care about. Last time I seriously tried at Tinder I had 5 dates planned in the first weekend and 112 matches in the first week yet I'm spending my time with a casual partner I'm lukewarm about. Every time I start a side project I go two days and then think "eh, I bet nobody will care about it" and stop. Besides the job the only reason to stay where I am is I like the swing dancing scene here but that's closed with covid and I don't like much else about here. In my hobbies I'll get bored right before I'm impressive. Leaving just before world finals in ICPC. Switching to be more casual about my lifting a few pounds short of a state record.
I don't need to start making Kelly Bets, I just need to start making bets period. I don't know what it would take for me to start doing that. I have a friend who makes big bets and I look up to him but I don't copy him. I think a big part is I just don't really trust there to be payoff. I don't feel like I'll be much happier. I don't expect any of my side project ideas will be that useful to people. Or maybe that's just an excuse. I mostly feel blankness when I try and think of the tradeoffs so maybe there's some emotional block about my inability to take risks? I'm not even sure where it would come from. Most of my problems I have an obvious source of trauma to blame it on but not here.
Yep, I don't think you're completely wrong I just had those little bits to add. I support self-experimentation and liberal applications of the law of equal and opposite advice. Even towards my advice if you're feeling saucy.
I also recommend reading The Game not because it's actionable; but just because seeing the degenerate case when someone takes it too far and becomes an asshole instills some guard rails.
I don't think talking about this stuff should be disallowed. Romance is such an important part of life and the right advice leads people towards increased compassion while no advice leads to the red pill.
I think you're still missing two things
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We appreciate that cats are picky only after they pick us. The most charismatic people take slightly longer to smile when they see you, as if it was all the memories of you flooding into them and not just seeing a random person. We feel more heard when someone pauses slightly before responding. People don't want you to be unavailable. They want you to become available because of something special about them. That's incredibly validating. The solution isn't just to try and be less interested in people, it's to get genuinely curious about them and be interested in the unique parts of them you honestly think are special.
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Many things cause strong emotions. Chasing, being chased, trying to change someone, commiserating over all the things going wrong in your life, etc.. Strong emotions can cause emotional relationships. Being the unavailable prize is one strategy, but it isn't the only one. You should be able to come up with obvious examples of people who could be as available as they want and get suitors and people who'd still be unseen no mater how aloof. Be aware that any strategy will filter who is interested in you and that being successful in making a relationship happen is only really a success if you both enjoy it.
Curious, what do you consider your bottlenecks?
I have almost no experience with drugs. Used weed twice, have had maybe two dozen drinks in my life mostly separated by at least 3 months, and only had a month or so period in my life where I drank coffee.
I developed visual snow after spending a lot of time working with computers. If I can stay away from screens for a few days it goes away. I've been told by a doctor that it's just eye fatigue leading to a poor ability to see contrast so solid colors look snowy with contrast that isn't actually there. I don't know enough about eyes to know for sure if that's a plausible statement.
Under The Law of Equal and Opposite Advice I'm going to say that some people spend too much dakka on things that are actively harmful and I'd recommend literally the opposite.
I use Google Fi so I can text/call from anywhere I have internet on any device and then I simply leave my phone off hidden in my car for emergencies. I keep a small pocket notebook for anything I need to write down. I do take my phone out for podcasts or audiobooks while cleaning but that's it. If you have kids you probably do need to get a dumb phone to keep on you but otherwise no.
Phones destroy slack. They are not a compact cost and getting a smartphone was a horrible decision for me. Now I just write down what I'm interested in and check it when I get home. The things that were time wasters don't make it on the list. I batch more so I only need to check things once. I take more time to sit and think and relax. This is the single best thing I've done for my happiness in the last year.
Somewhat unrelated to that comment but:
After reading that article and the comments I still don't buy monogamous relationships expecting their partner to fulfill all their needs. I have two besties, one male and one female, who both provide me things that I often lack in relationships. It still feels like the only difference between poly with a primary partner and monogamy is the sex/kink/cuddling* stuff. It feels like a strawman argument; but if I'm wrong this wouldn't be the first time I misinterpreted someone in a situation like this.
*I considered excluding cuddling from this list, but it seemed disingenuous to count that one monogamous couple that cuddles everyone as representative of all monogamous people
Topping from the bottom is more like backseat driving. Going in with the intention of being submissive and then micromanaging things during the scene. Knowing what you want, seeking it out, and describing it exactly before hand is just good communication.
I don't think we need to find a way to describe why that kink would be evolutionarily advantageous or good sexual selection. People's feelings leak from one part of who they are into every part of them so it's completely possible for it to be a nonsexual part of them requesting to add that into their sex life. Which meshes well with how the more kinky someone is the less sex is actually included in their play.
In my experience people's kinks are mostly related to their fears and insecurities. A chance to play them out and see that they are still loved. To see that your thoughts are real and valid and while they're awful you're still OK. Take the submissive high powered exec trope. Having an insecurity where you need to be strong and perfect and are awful until you're the richest man in the world will really push you to get that CEO spot. But then in the bedroom they want to be weak and be loved for it not in spite of it. So I'd say the loser dom fetish is either "Even -he- can dom me, I'm that pathetic" or "I've pinned so hard for an ideal I'll never have, here I am with someone like -him-". Which can be really comforting when that side receives love and there's no need to worry about being great/getting your ideal for a hour.
Note that I pull from a biased sample of the kind of people who are open about this with people like me. I also think my explanation currently is still too vague, there are too many kink/insecurity combinations that are easy to explain. I still need a way to constrain the predictions it makes a bit more.
"We don't have replication crisis in exercise science because nobody expects any of the studies to replicate" - paraphrased joke from Eric Trexler. PhD, >30 publications in the field, pro bodybuilder, professional coach
So, a lot studies related to health&fitness are horrible. Without funding they are run on 20 random college students for the duration of a single semester. Measuring what they actually want to measure is usually expensive to impossible, so usually a proxy will be chosen without any formal proof that the proxy is accurate. In general everyone in every health and fitness study is unhealthy and almost any intervention will help them so there are a lot of studies showing that ~miracle training~ works but really it's because literally anything would have helped.
But if I flail around in the space of possible exercise interventions for my musculoskeletal problems I honestly expect that to go pretty well.
A lot of bone things can't really be fixed with exercise, only worked around. Most muscle things are made better by getting stronger. People achieve world class deadlifts with scoliosis because they've strengthened everything else so much that the scoliosis can be compensated for. Rarely your shoulder bones are in a shape where you're basically guaranteed to get rotator cuff damage if you work in certain planes. So some bone things are just impossible to fix, that person will never be able to do the volume of overhead work as someone else. But like, when your tendon gets inflamed and starts to hurt you can just stop doing overhead work and avoid injury. Even if you push through it and get a small tear, most people over 40 have scar tissue in their rotator cuff and experience 0 negative symptoms. And the scoliosis dude is better than where he started. Sure he might need some surgery to make it go away for good, but he needed that beforehand too.
So don't worry about doing the best thing. Cardio probably won't help any skeletal issue, but is good for general health. Warmups are good but don't need to be long. A lot of warmups are just a chance for your body to settle back into good form. For muscular issues, you generally want to work on the muscle+synergists+antagonists. The muscle that hurts, the ones that move with it, and the muscle that does the opposite motion all three need to be strengthened to allow that plane of movement to be painless. Lifting with a proper progression scheme is many many times better at strengthening muscles than the next best thing. Yoga type things are nice for old tendon injuries. Just doing movements all through the range of motion can help you learn to compensate. Also sometimes a muscle isn't activating right causing other muscles to have to compensate for that muscle. That's a bit harder to explain in a short post (at least, at my current skill level) but it's worth looking into if you have range of motion issues that isn't solved with training that area specifically.
Note that this is assuming you have some normal back pain. I used to have lordosis that was bad enough that it hurt to walk >5min. Through the power of deadlifts I have fixed it and now I have medals from powerlifting meets. But for "oh god, I spent a month writhing in agony level" issues please disregard my advice that was aimed at the general public and see a physical therapist who works with athletes and those are usually the best. They will be able to give you advice specific to your situation, including possibly saying "above my paygrade, get surgery". Also nutrition and medication are harder, this applies more to physical interventions than other types.
I've saved all the links for this weekend. Thanks for the post btw, the post/comments from you/Hazard have helped and given me a lot to think about. This is all kinda a new realization after a year where I handled this all really poorly so I'm happy to get opportunities to explore it like this.
I haven't read it yet but I've saved all the links for this weekend.
I'm still not sure how "real" the dichotomy is for me. I think I understand and agree with what you're saying about s1 and s2 just being different types of processing. But sometimes while control is transferring between me and notme it really feels like there are two people in my head. It's not like how I can make two imaginary people to represent two subagents I know I have, it's like a person who is already there and doesn't need to be created. It's my understanding that that's not a super rare symptom, but that it's also not normal. I'm not sure "meVSnotme" and "s2VSs1" are the same thing, but I map pretty well onto s2 and notme maps pretty well onto s1. I'm not sure how much this paragraph makes sense but I'm still figuring things out.
Thanks for the post btw, the post/comments from you/kaj have helped and given me a lot to think about. This is all kinda a new realization after a year where I handled this all really poorly so I'm happy to get opportunities to explore it like this.
Well, notme has REALLY great examples for everyone being fragile. He can't really come up with good reasons why hurting them is worth negative infinity points to me other than "Can you blame me?". Which, no, no I can't. He did the best one could expect of someone that age.
If I talk with notme about how not everyone is fragile, the only thing I have to offer is a hope that I'm just in a filter bubble and there's some way to get out where people aren't like this. He only gives a vague admission that's a possibility. He feels very suspicious with the way I'm throwing around hope and hypotheticals. He also loses some confidence in me. Says I'm abandoning things and running away. The conversation ends here. I know that evidence points towards it being just a filter bubble, but notme really isn't willing to have this discussion.
If I talk with notme about how it's not his responsibility to make sure they stay undamaged... huh, he's a little bit open to the idea that I could assign a very high but not negative infinity weight to the thought of hurting someone. Still suspicious, he's asking for a concession in return, and he's asking me to come up with what that concession is... but he's slightly more open to lowering the weight when I acknowledge his venting a bit more first.
Sometimes you scrape your knee really badly and don't notice. It's nice to not feel the pain, but also you just bled all over the carpet and now your mom is mad at you because she has to scrub the carpet for 20 minutes to get the dried blood off it.
If you could notice you scraped your knee immediately, make a fair assessment as to what care the scraped knee needs, and then turn the feeling off that is a super power. Sometimes I do that and it's awesome. But I don't have the power to turn them back on. They turn back on when they want, not when I want. Now I'm stuck in a bad state until something shocks me out of it. Plus sometimes they turn off completely involuntarily like the worst habit one could ever have.
My symptoms might be slightly different than Hazard's because I specifically relate to depersonalization symptoms but here are some negative things I deal with when I have involuntary disconnect.
1) Sometimes I try and move my body and nothing happens. I feel the sensations of movement, but my body doesn't move. When my feelings turned off, so did everything else.
2) Sometimes I can't empathize. I can logically say what someone is feeling, but I don't feel any true empathy for them when I'm in that state. I can't turn just my feelings off, my ability to feel other people's emotions turns off too. It leads to me treating people like they are disposable. It leads to me not enjoying talking about other people, as feeling their feels is what makes that fun.
3) My memory is extremely bad. I don't remember what I say when I'm depersonalized. If someone wants me to repeat something they liked, oh boy is that stressful because I have no clue what I said or if I could say something similar. I was completely unaware of how I treated people when depersonalized because I remember so little of it. I don't really remember much from last August to this June to be honest.
4) Sometimes I feel inhuman. If I spend a long period of time not feeling anything, then I've kinda opted out of the human experience and it's like why am I even bothering to be alive? I'm not suicidal, just kinda meh.
5) Sometimes I make a bad call when to turn it off on purpose. Someone will be upset, I'll turn my feelings off so it doesn't bother me, and then the problem comes back later when honestly if I had faced the feelings I would have come up with a solution to the issue.
6) I have a weird relationship with akrasia. Sometimes I am the master of akrasia, just turning off my feelings and doing it anyways! But then I stop caring enough to even do that. Until my system 1 turns back on my system 2 won't even care enough to input a new command.
7) "Turn off feelings" for me is a bit of a simplification. It's just like, the feelings were in notme (my system 1?) so when I separate from notme I don't feel it but it's still there in notme. And then when I reconnect with notme they're calm enough that I don't really notice them but they are still lurking around in very faint ways.
8) I stay in situations I shouldn't. My natural reaction to a bad romantic experience is just to turn off my bad feelings and continue the relationship. Without the negative reaction there isn't really anything pushing me to call things off. So I spend a lot of time sticking in things I shouldn't.
I relate to this a lot. Gonna skip over the young childhood stuff that started me on this path, but this really became an issue starting in high school. I was really stressed out trying to manage my girlfriend's fragile mental state. Developed acid reflux and thought I was having a heart attack because I ate through the inner lining of my esophagus and breathing was extremely painful. So I picked up meditation. And without a teacher I only focused on quieting my "monologue of upsetness". I had some symptoms of depersonalization before, but this is when it really developed into a full on disorder. And honestly until I realized it was a disorder I was quite proud of it. I'd leave my body and then I wouldn't feel any pain, I'd just observe "notme" handling it. A downright superpower if you ignore all the horrible side effects.
Some thoughts on the "..and now?" I've been wrestling with
1) Much like how I went "idk, I'll just learn to stop feeling bad and then I can keep dating her" I'm now going "idk, I'll just learn to stop worrying about the things that trigger me to feel nothing" which seems like it might just be a bandaid
2) Metta meditation seems to help a little. Focusing on having feelings instead of stopping them. It ended up having me come to my own parent-child model and when I offered notme to be his father that led to him calming down a lot. (notme ~= my system 1? I know there's not actually another me, this is just how it ~feels~)
3) I've found a core belief of "People are fragile, I must be resilient or I'll damage people" that is at the base of it all, but it's not so easy to just knock out the belief at the base of yourself. notme still doesn't believe that everything isn't about to come crashing down because of someone else's fragility. My internal double crux always gets down to this point and then notme says prove it and I don't know how which leads me to...
4) Progressive overload is normally my answer to everything, but how? I can't just sort people I know by how triggering they are to me and ask them to trigger me. It's not the same in that context, and that's not the most compassionate thing to ask someone to do. I'd have to find some way to naturally be in an environment I find triggering without feeling like I was using the people there. I'm probably not just being creative enough; or maybe I'm losing sight of the end goal by focusing on this and not trying to find other ways to convince notme everything is fine
Is there a book or source you recommend? I really like the axises it chose so even if I end up disbelieving it I think I'd really enjoy knowing enough about it to discuss with people what ways they do/don't fit.
Edit: reordering the columns to change my perceived importance of each column has -vastly- improved my opinion of the system and my interest in it has gone up. Except now this list says I'm grull (red/green) which has never appealed to me. Black/green/blue all the way.
Simic here: Never heard of enneagram before. I generally model people based on their fear so I like the axises it uses to evaluate people; but honestly every one of them feels like they fit except one and even then I could stretch it to kinda fit. Kinda like the Forer Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect ). Posting mostly to combat publishing(?) bias where I expect you to only be able to find posts by people who fit the system really well.
5 years powerlifting, 5 years wrestling, 3 years BJJ, 2 years dancing (normally don't count that, but for Beat Saber I guess it's relevant?), and a spattering of other sports like climbing/hiking for shorter time periods. Have helped a small handful of friends get fit, the biggest success story dropping 100lbs and now being pretty decent at BJJ where he initially couldn't walk over half a mile without a long rest.
Little formal training but I enjoy reading about the theory. I don't have any particularly compelling example to give here. Just lots of books/articles/diagrams/studies/self-experiments spread out over that time. For an example of the kinda person I read look up any study review by Greg Nuckols.
The comments on safety I have a high amount of confidence in. They're all things that follow directly from knowledge of anatomy. Tennis existing is convenient because it's always nice to have a real world example to verify what the theory would predict.
The rest is half anecdotal half me trying to think about how similar-but-different studies I've read in the past could apply. Studies I thought about before replying were 1) even walks are enough to improve mortality 2) any study with short workouts with no long term progression plan show only minor body improvements 3) rotator cuff injuries are both surprisingly common and surprisingly benign 4) crossfit injury statistics are relevant since you'll be going for speed and be fatigued at the end. Anecdotes I thought about include 1) my DDR playing friends certainly don't go hard enough to match real cardio training, but they do more than just walks 2) I know a dozen tennis players, only one got tennis elbow, and it went away in a few weeks 3) Even people who do the Charleston all night don't get biker-tier legs 4) Napkin math is enough to see this won't be great for fat loss without diet changes
Also, there are health reasons to care about the muscle/fat stuff and not just cardio. Muscle mass has been linked pretty well to a reduced risk of alzheimer's. Obesity has been shown to still increase mortality even controlling for cardiovascular ability.
The 80-20 rule applies though. Find a sport/activity you like (weighted Beat Saber counts imo), control your calorie input, and get a good variety of nutrients and you'll be fine. If you have any reason to believe you're in a risk group and need more I can help point you towards the right resources to read to evaluate that.
I put on Backside by Think Twice and grabbed some 2.5/5/10 lbs weights and did some playing around. I tried optimizing for including shoulder movement.
Safety:
10 lbs I wouldn't do without a lot of working up to it. The thing to watch for is when you can't stop the momentum of the weight then it's time to lower it because the momentum can keep carrying a movement past your limit. I think 10lbs would probably actually give you tennis elbow if you consistently did it to a song that wasn't super slow. 2.5lbs and 5lbs both felt fun and safe to me. I OHP 185lbs and deadlift 500lbs, so adjust based on your fitness level. Also note the more fatigued you are the higher your chance of injury. Pyramid sets are a nice way to account for that and your warmup all at once. Note that speed and form will always be a tradeoff; so when it comes to something fast like Beat Saber I expect nobody to ever work up to particularly large weights
Cardio Efficiency:
I definitely felt as though with 5lbs I would have only needed a few songs to get my cardio in but unweighted would take a while. Which it's really fine either way. Endurance runners and sprinters both have great cardiovascular health. One is just more time efficient.
Muscle/Fat Efficiency:
I feel like doing this with 2.5lbs is actually a pretty nice rotator cuff exercise but even with 5lbs it felt mediocre at everything else. The farther away I held it the more shoulders it was, the closer I held it the more bicep/tricep. Also noticed some traps needed. I think to an untrained person you could get some muscle growth doing this with weights, but I'd rather people go into it expecting nothing and being happy with what they get considering the possibility for disappointment.
*What is the injury risk*
To establish what the concern is: 1) the next joint up is the elbow* and that is the one that will have extra stress 2) "joints" tends to either mean tendons or ligaments. I doubt there are any studies on Beat Saber, but this is similar to tennis. In tennis you hold an object of ~1lb at the end of your arms; plus when you hit the ball there is much more force than just weight of the racket. I expect any injury from the weights would be similar to tennis elbow, which is inflammation of the tendon in the elbow.
I wouldn't expect this to be a big deal at all. 1) Most people over 40 have scar tissue in their tendons, most people are basically unaffected by it 2) Not everyone in tennis gets tennis elbow 3) Because there is a more consistent force rather than the sudden impact of the ball I expect this to have a lower injury rate than tennis (note how pulling the slack out of a barbell before lifting it drastically improves safety when the movement is less sudden)
*Yes the shoulder is a thing, but based on watching a single video of Beat Saber on youtube I don't expect much additional shoulder stress from the weights
*Should you use them while playing*
Eh, I'd base that more around what's fun for you. If ya wanna get ripped, you'll need more than this. If you wanna get skinny, that's mostly in the kitchen. If ya wanna improve your cardiovascular health this will help but I don't expect the wrist weights to make or break it.
One interesting thing with WoW, or at least pre-cata WoW, is that the longer you play the higher amount of social interaction is needed. Up to level 15 you play almost completely alone. Then you start being pushed into meeting some randos; maybe having joined one of their guilds by 30. By 50 you're playing mostly with the same people, and by 60 you look forward to scheduled interactions with those people one to five times a week.
I haven't played the new versions, but my impression as to why the recent versions are less addictive:
1) More time with randos, less with friends. No ramp up into the parts that require social ties so it's harder to get over that hump.
2) More randomization of rewards leads to less strong feedback loop of "work hard -> get stronger"
3) Homogenization of rewards and fewer social ties lead to less strong feedback loop of "get stronger -> get prestige"
I view the social connections and the ability for anyone to feel prestigious with relatively simple work as a core part of the addictiveness.
> But then again, maybe the reason why I don't like most people and find them shallow is my lack of empathy, so the causes and effects might be tangled up here.
http://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2015/05/tortoise-report-3-empathy_16.html
A good read for anyone who thinks they might have that problem (which was my problem up until about two years ago)
If you're informing me of something I prefer bullets. If you're persuading me of something I prefer paragraphs. I find that bullet points lose out on the ability to include story type data that my system 1 responds to. My ideal world would be each article started with bullets for if it's something I already mostly agreed with and ended with stories about it for if it was something I'd need convincing of.
Give me a month to make a fitness one. I train a bunch of my friends including one rationalist friend that has been pushing me towards writing some analyses of studies; so I have a good amount of experience trying to find ways to get people into fitness who've had issues fighting against their baser urges just to sit down and conserve calories.
My post are badly-argued. For instance, the Effective Egoist one was very short and implicit, and did not give any precise/well-justified arguments.
I've only read two of your posts but this is the thing I noticed. For Effective Egoist, the farther something is from the accepted set of priors for a community the more justification it needs. The only way I could see that article changing my mind is if I already bought the original premise and just had to slightly shift my conclusion. Your arguments were each only a few sentences long and you didn't address any of the obvious counter arguments in the original article so nobody with different priors was going to come out of that article feeling changed.
I also read the dating one and it didn't feel like it made any strong claims. It started off going in the same direction as the posts that go into the math behind "if you want to be married by X age, date Y people and then marry the next person better than the best person you've dated so far", but then doesn't actually get to that point. It then goes on to say you've had poor experiences with online dating and meeting people through friends so you did better going out to events. Which is a decent conclusion and possibly worth a post telling people to stop wasting resources on things that aren't paying off for them... but it comes off more as the afterthought the way it's packed into the middle of a different section. If that's your conclusion it should have its own pretty header and a bit more support.
Overall, it feels like your actual claims aren't supported by the rest of your writing and I don't feel like someone who doesn't already agree with you will walk away with a positive view of your writing.
I think it's more about situations that have insufficient information. The initial example has him being called "rapey" for a light tap on a friends shoulder for the first time. It's different if he were to slug them hard and it's different if the recipient already expressed they aren't interested. But if the first time someone taps their friend on their shoulder is compared to actual rape in any way then we clearly need to reevaluate something.
A bit about my history that colors this - I grew up being taught in a way that I thought going up to someone, especially a woman, introducing myself, and extending my hand for a handshake was vaguely rapey. People with different experiences than mine may find the article a lot less important than I do. In my personal pendulum swing I still avoid punch buggy like things towards people who have said no to them but am a lot more open to trying it for the first time with a new person who seems like the type who'd enjoy them.
As someone who is here mostly to improve my personal life (and perhaps since that tends to generate a surplus, get some EA done along the way) it's definitely worth it for me. A few points on the things in your list
- Think of your practice:theory ratio for a thing you're good at. Think of how often you deliberately practice conversational skills like connecting with other people. Realize you should be doing less reading more doing. Feel scared to start. Go somewhere nobody will know you and practice anyways.
- Side note: I feel like there must be a better feedback loop since this just gives a fail/pass/ace result and little feedback as to why. Close friends are poor feedback loops for this due to their bias and selection bias in general.
- Tone and posture > attractiveness. Marilyn Monroe could turn her charisma on and off with body language. Read the whole book for more specifics. Controlling my lisp and lordosis causes a visible change in the reaction of people I approach. Losing 20 lbs of muscle in a long period of sloth changed things a little but not proportional to the amount of time it took to gain 20lbs of muscle.
- Making a habit of simulating other people with your system 1 side before including your system 2 side makes conversation more fun and makes people feel more cared about by you. But that's something I got from this site so you may have already read about this.
In my experience, those are the only things specific to rhetoric I've had to learn to get to the level I could have fulfilling and productive interactions with other humans. I'm aware I'm still behind a lot of other people so I would be happy if someone pointed out things they feel are important. Discovering a new deficiency always comes with some great effort:reward areas of focus.
" …the next year would automatically be composed of approximate copies of today? "
This one was interesting to me. If you ask how I want to spend the next year my answer involves almost no hedonism, lots of hard work, and a scarily high chance of burn out. But when you phrase it this way my first response is "...I would try really hard to get laid by the end of the day" and it takes me a second to realize I actually want to accomplish things with that year too.
Possibly has helped me accept that adding more hedonism to my life could be better in the long run.
Edit: After some sleep, the moral I've pulled from this experience is "An AI can do much more complicated tasks when the reward function gives incrementally more as progress is made than when it is only rewarded at the finish line. Perhaps humans are similar"
Very helpful, I've been trying to generate better ideas for restful leisure since too many of my activities are the kind of things you record yourself often and focus improvement and I often feel tired even after my "rest" activities. I'd be really interested for more people to say what they do at each level. For me I think the list would look like
1. Laying down, meditating
2. cooking something I know by heart, sport I don't think hard about (hiking, lifting, climbing, sometimes dance), driving without GPS, human interactions with inner circle
3. Reading fiction, shonen anime, music
4. New Cooking, thinking sport(bjj, sometimes dance), driving with GPS, reading nonfiction, videogames, human interactions outside of inner circle
5. planning, nonfiction, browsing/smartphone usage, work for self at a level with no planning
6. Work for money, work for self at a level that requires planning
7. Anything I have ever called akrasia (social media, certain videogames)
Now if only it was Thursday so I hadn't already failed today with this planning
I don't necessarily disagree that this dichotomy exists; but this way of looking at it feels exagerated. People tend to do what gets rewarded. We get rewarded for saying factually correct things, so we build maps around what is factually correct. Other people get rewarded for saying emotionally correct things, so they build maps around what is emotionally correct. It is still a map though. I'm not necessarily certain it's a bad map. It makes them happy, it can build a good sense of community, and generally matches something humans have loved and chased since before we even evolved into humans. I'd bet on about 3:2 odds they average happier than us.
It is useful to have a post detailing how some people use their maps to describe territories other than factuality along with how to talk to those people. This has about two sentences about those interactions and a lot of "did you know the outgroup can't even think abstractly?"