9eB1

Karma: 1,234

9eB1 Apr 28, 2021, 4:13 PM
2 points
on: Better air is the easiest way not to die
Only tangentially related, but I found this recent comment thread on Hacker News very interesting. There are carbon scrubbers you can buy and attach to computer fans to completely eliminate odors without using air fresheners, much less incense or candles.

9eB1 Apr 10, 2021, 12:27 AM
9 points
on: Convict Conditioning Book Review
I’ve read this book and many other calisthenics and weightlifting focused fitness books. I like Convict Conditioning. It was pretty influential in the online fitness community when it came out, and remains so to some extent. That said, the information and programs in the book are somewhat out-of-date compared to more modern thinking.

I would recommend anyone interested in calisthenics to start with the reddit /r/bodyweightfitness FAQ. They have easy defaults (e.g. the Recommended Routine, or the Primer) which come with more battle-tested explanations and progression schemes. Additionally, having a community you can participate in for motivation or asking questions will make it more likely that you’ll stick with a program.

Sticking to the program is by far the hardest part of any workout program, though, so the most important thing is to find something that you can fully commit to regularly, especially if it’s something you find intrinsically fun or interesting.

9eB1 Mar 26, 2021, 5:35 AM
4 points
on: The best frequently don’t rise to the top
I watched a few of the DHH, Eric Normand and Be a Better Dev videos. DHH’s videos are very good, actually I was sucked into watching a couple, but he doesn’t have very many. Also, your link points to his old channel, and now all those videos are https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9wALaIpe0Py6E_oHCgTrD6FvFETwJLlx, although he only did one more in that series. The couple Eric Normand videos were pretty good, I could imagine that there are really good ones somewhere in the feed. For Be a Better Dev, the videos seemed pretty low quality, very focused on learning AWS-specific technologies. It gave me the impression that he was just following traffic for what to talk about, the exact opposite of DHH. It’s the equivalent of YouTube blogspam.

9eB1 Mar 19, 2021, 5:23 AM
8 points
on: Clubhouse
In the early stages of Quora, it was a legitimately awesome place to get unfiltered answers from people you were interested in. Eventually, the bleeding edge people got bored of it and left it to the vultures, the same people who had SEOed bullshit pages cluttering up google search results. I’ve never used Clubhouse, but this seems like a risk. Is there some structural reason this won’t come to pass?

9eB1 Mar 9, 2021, 5:58 PM
23 points
on: Why does Applied Divinity Studies think EA hasn’t grown since 2015?
ScottAlexander had a very interesting response to this post on reddit

9eB1 Feb 24, 2021, 9:26 PM
4 points
in reply to: intellectronica’s comment on: Are there good negotiation classes?
I second this. Most negotiation advice is geared toward formal “negotiation” settings, like when you are negotiating sales contracts or business transactions. For those purposes, having negotiation tools is really useful (my favorite is “Bargaining For Advantage” which I learned of from The Personal MBA). But for being a manager, you are almost never explicitly negotiating, and in fact trying to come into your work with that mindset is counterproductive. When you are working with your reports, it would be disastrous. When you are working with other internal teams, it’s mostly about informal tit-for-tat kind of long-term favor trading or reputation building (or just getting to fundamental value for the business for both parties and moving forward based on that), not explicit negotiating. These aren’t things that are taught under the term “negotiation.”

9eB1 Feb 15, 2021, 11:06 AM
2 points
on: Remembering people’s name with Anki
I have used Anki to remember names and faces on multiple occasions. It works well, usually I’ve only used it at the beginning of being in the environment. For the names of famous people I don’t think it passes the cost-benefits test. Gwern recommends only adding a card if it will save you 5 minutes over a lifetime, and so memorizing large corpuses where you may only need a handful of them ever is likely to be a bad tradeoff. The difference between these scenarios is that remembering faces and names is something you need to have instant access to, but misremembering famous people is either acceptable in the case of conversations, or can be referenced when it comes up in my writing or thinking.

9eB1 Jan 9, 2021, 3:05 PM
2 points
on: Evening drawing
My guess is head, painting photograph.

First (Head): Lacks the level of detail of the other two examples. A painting would also possibly be drawn from a reference, although I have no idea what even the style of painting you were referencing. The major distinction here is that the cheeks in the the second (painting) photo have mottling that suggests to me a better reference. The proportions also seem just a bit more exaggerated to me than the other two. The neck of the first one seems larger, and the shoulders have some asymmetry which is hard to interpret. It looks a bit as if her left shoulder is closer, but that doesn’t exactly fit with the posture of her face.

Second (Painting): Basically by comparison with the others. It feels intermediate in realisticness.

Third (photograph): This seems like the photograph to me because it captures more detail than I would hold in my mind’s eye, unlike the other two. In particular, crisp laugh lines and the detailed contrast of the eyes makes it feel like it had the most real-world reference. There is also the detail of the clothing, and I feel like most people wouldn’t draw that if they were drawing a face from their imagination. (That’s actually an argument for the first being painting and the second being head, though).

9eB1 Dec 28, 2020, 12:16 PM
7 points
on: Reviews as “How should this be improved to meet the bar?”
I have thought about a problem related to this very often. There was an Amazon shareholders letter written by Jeff Bezos that elaborates on their culture of high standards. In particular, it talks about the cost of high standards when writing Amazon’s “six-page memos.” The idea of having teams with high standards on their written memos resonated with me, but I have not been able to apply it that much in my professional career.

My standards are higher than those of the organization around me, and when it came down to spending the relationship capital to criticize people’t documents to the level I felt would make them really high-quality, I just can’t do it. Some documents achieve the standard already, so it’s not unachievable in general. What it really is is that to provide criticism that feels specific and kind, it feels like I would have to understand the underlying issue at the depth that I want that person to explain to me.

Basically, to get to that level of quality, I have to put in a large fraction of the effort of drafting the document, which I don’t have time to do. In some cases, I can point out areas that I feel could offer more elaboration, but sometimes the document feels inadequate and I can’t explain why without several hours of concentrated effort.

I feel the same issue could come up here. You can tell a really high quality post because it offers insights that are brilliant but unexpected, or it uncovers primary source data that is neglected and unknown, or it’s just a really compelling written explanation. But explaining how to create that out of an average post feels like it requires me to become the expert I want the author to be.

9eB1 Sep 16, 2020, 4:18 PM
3 points
in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers

Why do you think people don’t already do this?

They have to do it to some extent, otherwise replicability would be literally uncorrelated with publishability, which probably isn’t the case. But because of the outcomes, we can see that people aren’t doing it enough at the margin, so encouraging people to move as far in that direction as they can seems like a useful reminder.

There are two models here, one is that everyone is a homo economicus when citing papers, so no amount of persuasion is going to adjust people’s citations. They are already making the optimal tradeoff based on their utility function of their personal interests vs. society’s interests. The other is that people are subject to biases and blind spots, or just haven’t even really considered whether they have the OPTION of not citing something that is questionable, in which case reminding them is a useful affordance.

I’m trying to be charitable to the author here, to recover useful advice. They didn’t say things in the way I’m saying them. But they may have been pointing in a useful direction, and I’m trying to steelman that.

“the predators are running wild” does not mean “most people are acting in good faith, but are not competent enough for good faith to be a useful assumption”.

Even upon careful rereading of that sentence, I disagree. But to parse this out based on this little sentence is too pointless for me. Like I said, I’m trying to focus on finding useful substance, not nitpicking the author, or you!

9eB1 Sep 14, 2020, 11:44 PM
2 points
in reply to: Rohin Shah’s comment on: What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers
This problem seems to me to have the flavor of Moloch and/or inadequate equilibria. Your criticisms have two parts, the pre-edit part based on your personal experience, in which you state why the personal actions they recommend are actually not possible because of the inadequate equilibria (i.e. because of academic incentives), and the criticism of the author’s proposed non-personal actions, which you say is just based on intuition.

I think the author would be unsurprised that the personal actions are not reasonable. They have already said this problem requires government intervention, basically to resolve the incentive problem. But maybe at the margin you can take some of the actions that the author refers to in the personal actions. If a paper is on the cusp of “needing to be cited” but you think it won’t replicate, take that into account! Or if reviewing a paper, at least take into account the probability of replication in your decision.

I think you are maybe reading the author’s claim to “stop assuming good faith” too literally. In the subsequent sentence they are basically refining that to the idea that most people are acting in good faith, but are not competent enough for good faith to be a useful assumption, which seems reasonable to me.

9eB1 Jul 12, 2020, 6:11 PM
4 points
on: Hierarchy of Evidence
Typo: “Systemic reviews” should read “systematic reviews”.

9eB1 Jul 11, 2020, 6:12 AM
2 points
on: What is the scientific status of ‘Muscle Memory’?
The article about this on Strengtheory has links to sources (not as footnotes, in the text). May be useful to check out.

9eB1 Jun 24, 2020, 5:36 PM
2 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: How do you Murphyjitsu essentially risky activities?
When it comes to problems that are primarily related to motivation, the cost-benefit is so far weighted that the cost of implementing the plan probably doesn’t seem relevant to consider, but this is a good point.

I like the idea of using Murphyjitsu for modeling shorter iterations, that’s probably generally applicable.

9eB1 Jun 24, 2020, 5:34 PM
3 points
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: How do you Murphyjitsu essentially risky activities?
That seems mostly about the emotional content of a particular plan, while I see Murphyjitsu as a tool for avoiding the planning fallacy, forcing yourself to fully think through the implications of a plan, or getting more realistic predictions from System 1. I haven’t viewed it much as an emotional tool, but maybe other people do find it useful for that.

[Question] How do you Murphyjitsu essentially risky activities?

9eB1Jun 23, 2020, 9:09 PM

12 points

7 comments1 min readLW link

9eB1 Jun 19, 2020, 5:35 PM
2 points
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Bounty List
Whew, glad I didn’t invest more time in this. Seems there is lurking complexity everywhere.

9eB1 Jun 13, 2020, 2:00 AM
3 points
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Bounty List
At this price point this seems potentially doable. Some ideas in the order I’d try them:
1. There is a person that has Kickstarted similar projects and you could contact him to see if they are willing to do a custom one-off. They’d probably be willing to just give you advice if you asked, too. Given that their entire Kickstarter was only $7000, at your price point this seems pretty likely.
2. You can download a 3D model online and find a local machine shop to CNC you one. For example, just googling “tungsten machine shop san francisco” turned up http://www.acmanufacturing.com/ which will probably mill tungsten from CAD.
3. Same, but find a 3D printing company that can make one for you. There are a few online (https://www.wolfmet.com/ e.g.), and you’d have to request a quote, but it may be a better option if the feedstock for CNC ends up being cost prohibitive. I’m not sure if this kind of place will do individual retail orders.
This is a pretty fun format. Actually, I really like this gomboc idea and briefly considered doing a Kickstarter on it after reading your post. But then I realized that Kickstarter would only really make sense if everyone were willing to pay $800. The market is so niche, that it would have to be a passion project to be worth the hassle I think.

9eB1 May 11, 2020, 2:14 AM
8 points
in reply to: CheerfulWarrior’s comment on: Is there any scientific evidence for benefits of meditation?

I admit there might be reasons to invest in meditation practice that are not based on scientifically proven benefits (e.g., curiosity, sense of novelty, sense of belonging to a community). At the same time, I hope that most LW readers attach very little weight to those non-evidence-based reasons to meditate, just like I do.

I suppose I should admit the main reason I started meditating a long time ago was curiosity. I read Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (reviewed on SSC here) and thought “well, this person sounds like they are explaining mental states that seem pretty unbelievable to me, I wonder if this is all BS.” I was/am mentally healthy and emotionally stable more than the average person. I don’t meditate that consistently anymore, only when things are more stressful than usual. Having it in the toolbox, like fitness, is enough for me. I did enough practice to know that what MCTB is pointing at is a real phenomenon, but that’s it. I actually think that viewing it as a hobby is the healthiest way to approach the kind of serious practice needed for enlightenment.

Let’s start with the easy to verify claims that I generalise as...

In my experience, these claims are false. I occasionally tried to use mindfulness to help me with dieting or exercising, since those are also things I do, and it never helped in a way I could discern.

Do you have some sources to back this up? I’ve heard many declared reasons why people begin their meditation practice, and it was quite a diverse set, none seemed dominant.

Thank you for challenging me on this, that was based only on personal observation, which as I admit above doesn’t even square with my own experience! This survey has concrete data on why people meditate in Fig. 1. The top reason is “General wellness and general disease prevention.” None of them are specifically happiness related, so maybe that’s an overly specific claim.

I don’t buy this at all. If the only observable benefit of me meditating is that I used to self-report average well-being of 5.17 out of 10, and now I self-report 7.39 on average

Based on my mental model of meditation, you probably would be dissatisfied with the results. In section IV of the post above, Scott Alexander summarizes thus:

Ingram dedicates himself hard to debunking a lot of the things people would use to fill the gap. Pages 261-328 discuss the various claims Buddhist schools have made about enlightenment, mostly to deny them all. He has nothing but contempt for the obviously silly ones, like how enlightened people can fly around and zap you with their third eyes. But he’s equally dismissive of things that sort of seem like the basics. He denies claims about how enlightened people can’t get angry, or effortlessly resist temptation, or feel universal unconditional love, or things like that. Some of this he supports with stories of enlightened leaders behaving badly; other times he cites himself as an enlightened person who frequently experiences anger, pain, and the like. Once he’s stripped everything else away, he says the only thing one can say about enlightenment is that it grants a powerful true experience of the non-dual nature of the world. [9eb1: I’ve excluded the possible counterargument here for brevity]

There are external benefits I think meditation has given me that feel like they are real, but the effect size is too small for studies to realistically find them. I can fall asleep reliably by using meditation as a tool. I can tactically break my own rumination thought cycles by meditating as a tool (or I can workout, but sometimes you’ve already worked out that day). I definitely feel like I am harder to surprise (lack of “jump”), but that’s not a particularly practical superpower.

I’ve meditated for >300 hours (maybe 4 or 5). I don’t regret my hours. It is a hobby, it satisfies my curiosity, it makes me happy when I need it. Lack of personal transformation is fine.

To be clear, my values with regard to self-rated wellness are different from yours. I am glad to improve my self-rated wellness even if it has no measurable outward impact on my behavior. My happiness is super important to me. If I move the needle on that, that’s great even if I’m still an asshole. I have no interest in being a miserable saint.

There are several characteristics of nutrition and eating that make scientific scrutiny very difficult, and those characteristics are not shared with meditation

Those differences are subsumed in the “high short-term costs” side of my statement. The exact costs are different, that’s all. You can tell people not to do all the things you mentioned during a diet study, but they won’t follow your instruction.

9eB1 10 May 2020 6:24 UTC
16 points
on: Is there any scientific evidence for benefits of meditation?
I think it is right to be skeptical of the science around meditation. Meditation perfectly fits into the Bermuda triangle of phenomenon for which our current scientific institutions and practices are not well-prepared to study.

It shares with psychological studies the challenge that the thing under investigation is the internal mental state of the subject. When there are studies with objective endpoints, usually the objective endpoint isn’t the thing we want to get out of it, it’s just a more reliable metric so we know the subjects aren’t fooling themselves. As Science-based Medicine says:

But the more concrete and physiological the outcome, the smaller the placebo effect. Survival from serious forms of cancer, for example, has no demonstrable placebo effect. There is a “clinical trial effect,” as described above – being a subject in a trial tends to improve care and compliance, but no placebo effect beyond that. There is no compelling evidence that mood or thought alone can help fight off cancer or any similar disease.

In the case of meditation, people usually begin the practice to have mental well-being or greater happiness, which is among the outcomes least amenable to reliable objective observation. If it happens to also do something that could be reliably measured with a medical instrument, that would be a bit outside the point.

Meditation shares with nutritional science (also a wrecked landscape of low-quality studies that fail to answer our real questions) that performing the study relies on the subjects to reliably do something with a huge, short-term cost and an uncertain, long-term benefit, which humans are bad at.

High-quality studies on nutritional interventions rarely answer the questions that normal fitness-minded folks want answered, because we want the answer to the question “assuming I perfectly adhere to diet X, what results would I obtain.” Studies can only measure “assuming we take a random sampling of people with varying levels of conscientiousness and investment in their diet, and tell them to do X, what happens” which is too big a difference to be useful.

Similarly with meditation, what meditators want to know is “is it worth my time meditating if I do it approximately perfectly” not “is it worth someone ‘intervening’ to tell me about meditation taking into account the possibility that I’m too lazy to really follow through with it.” The second has more clinical relevance, but less personal relevance for the kind of people on Less Wrong.

All of that is a long precursor to saying “Is there any scientific evidence for benefits of meditation?” and “Are there good reasons for a typical reader of LessWrong to invest their time and effort into meditation practice?” are subtly different questions, so it would be wrong to literally equate them. The second is the answer we really care about, the first is one input which would, if available, fully resolve the question instead of leaving is in a state of uncertainty. You’re entitled to arguments, but not (that particular) proof.

There is objective evidence that meditation does something real (EEG studies of Tibetan monks, for example), but the evidence it does something both real and valuable is probably not up to that standard.

Another, smaller, point I’d like to make is that this post is attempting to perform its own meta-analysis, but with a higher quality bar than academic meta analyses. I don’t think crowdsourcing the best studies of meditation is likely to work this way. If you are interested in running a project to identify the top studies of meditation, I think you would need to identify all the relevant studies, get individuals who are interested in your project to review them, then collate the results. Just asking “the crowd” for the best studies they happen to have on hand I think is likely to fail regardless of what the evidence is.

9eB1

[Question] How do you Mur­phyjitsu es­sen­tially risky ac­tivi­ties?

[Question] How do you Murphyjitsu essentially risky activities?