Adam Zerner
Some people, when speaking to children or old folks, use simple words spoken in a high-pitched, slow, baby-like voice. But for me, whatever the age of someone—child, adult, elder—I always speak to them like they’re my equal. The only time I use a baby voice is when I’m speaking to my cat.
Yeah, I try to take a similar approach. The following really inspired me:
But that assumes that you can only be normal around someone you know well, which is not true. I started using a new barber last year, and I was pleasantly surprised when instead of making small talk or asking me questions about my life, he just started talking to me like I was his friend or involving me in his conversations with the other barber. By doing so, he spared both of us the massive inauthenticity of a typical barber-customer relationship and I actually enjoy going there now. He doesn’t go by the above graph, but rather, sees things more like three doors that you can choose from:
You’re not required to either smalltalk or pretend to want to get to know someone—it’s a choice to do either and you can choose “Be Normal” instead. Unfortunately, the Social Rulebook doesn’t talk about being normal with acquaintances, only a bunch of chapters about how to survive the terror of an acquaintance interaction, authentic or not. We badly need to make a Rulebook amendment here—until we do, my barber relationship will be a rare one.
— https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html
Feels pretty meh. For higher ground I know my area well enough to know where that is. Same with open space. And if I didn’t I don’t think a map would be of much help.
Hm, maybe. I have this map of my city printed out and it does list places like schools and hospitals.
Yeah but my model is that if, say, out of 100 people 5 know where they’re going, those 5 will tell another 5, and then those 10 will relay to another 10, until the group as a whole has enough of a sense. Do you not expect something like that to happen?
Good points. Volcanic ash, and I suppose other natural disasters could screw with light. Personally I have a battery pack for my phone so I imagine that’d last for some time—enough time to get me through a large majority of disasters—but it’s possible my phone breaks or doesn’t work, so the redundancy that flashlights provide is good.
I’m flabbergasted that I’d never seen anyone else use one of these (not even at their homes, where they wouldn’t need to carry external peripherals around), nor had I heard of them before my friend told me about their existence.
I see them once in a while when I work from coffee shops. It’s a fun moment when I have my laptop stand, someone else has their laptop stand, and we make eye contact and acknowledge each other.
No GPS. I hadn’t had offline downloaded maps but just downloaded them. Thanks for the idea!
Hm, so you’re saying that maps are useful for situations where you’re trying to escape. A few things here.
Personally I don’t have a car. I suppose maybe I’d somehow gain access to one, or be in a car with someone else and need to go somewhere though.
Maps only seem useful if there’s a specific location I’d need to get to. If it’s just generally that I need to “get away”, following the roads and winging it seem good enough. And even if it is a specific location, if it’s local enough I very well might be able to figure it out without a map.
There’d be people around who I can ask for directions. Yes, things would be hectic and crazy, but I dunno, if everyone needs to evacuate to some area, I feel like people would be relaying messages amongst each other.
What do you think?
Oh, interesting. Thanks for mentioning that. I lean towards grabbing a cheap, small water filter then.
What use cases do you think I should aim to cover?
I suppose no water filter would help in the event of a nuke.
Biological attack, I’m not sure but that also seems unlikely.
In the event of a flood, I guess the scenario would be that I’m trapped, have used up my three gallons of water, the sink doesn’t work, authorities haven’t been able to reach me, and the water filter gives me access to water that I wouldn’t otherwise have? Seems kinda implausible, but not impossible.
Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are the two natural disasters that seem plausible where I live in Portland, OR. I don’t envision water filters being useful in either of those scenarios, but maybe I’m wrong.
Despite it seeming implausible, I still lean towards buying a water filter. My threshold for plausibility is very low, and the fact that I have trouble imagining scenarios where it proves useful isn’t very strong evidence that those scenarios in fact are implausible.
A big part of where I’m coming from with my questions is that I find it fun and interesting to discuss. Part of it though is genuinely wanting to know what type of water filter would make sense for me to get.
Hm. I have a hard time evaluating how handy it is without concrete examples, and I struggle to think of concrete examples of where either would be particularly handy. I guess that’s why I went with “seems”.
Are there concrete examples that come to your mind? For light, the thing is that I am able to get light from the windows and from my phone, so the time that a flashlight would be useful is if I’m not able to get light from either of those sources. Which does seem possible, but doesn’t seem plausible and consequential enough to be “really handy”, although my intuition here isn’t particularly refined.
You’re right! Sorry about that. Fixed.
Ah thanks for the catch. Fixed.
They’re these little tabs that provide some basic macro and micro nutrients. They only provide 240 calories per day which isn’t great, but I like the fact that they have a super long shelf life (25 years?) and don’t take up a lot of space.
My emergency kit
Communication culture is important. It is a high level action that, if improved, has lots of nice downstream benefits.
One aspect of communication culture to address is interruption. What should the expectations be about interruption? Do you always wait for the other person to finish talking before you can start talking? Are you allowed to interrupt if it seems worthwhile? What determines whether an interruption is worthwhile? Where is the threshold for how worthwhile an interruption needs to be in order for it to be justified?
I feel like there are various conversations I end up in that get derailed by too many interruptions. And I’ve seen it happen in many contexts: at work, with my family, with my friends, at rationalist meetups. This seems important.
I’m not sure what the answers are for how to deal with “interruption culture”, but it seems like something worth discussing. I am seeing this post from 12 years ago, but other than that, I don’t really see much discussion here on LessWrong. I also don’t really recall much discussion of the topic elsewhere, like on other blogs or in academia.
My hunch is that there are probably a handful of archetypes, and different archetypes will work better for different conversations. It seems like it’d be helpful if we kinda outlined what these archetypes are, what the pros and cons are, and when each tends to work best (depends on the people involved, the conversation topic, the emotions, etc). From there, especially if these archetypes were “in the water” and became common knowledge (eg. in our community), then I can envision people saying “hey, do you guys mind if we take archetype A here?” or “hey, I feel like we’re using archetype C right now and it’s not working well, can we switch to B?”.
Another hunch I have is that low levels of interruption is a low risk option. I feel like I see conversations get derailed and ruined when there are high levels of interruption, but with low levels of interruption, I don’t really recall that happening. I guess the exception is if one person rambles chaotically; in that case it seems worth being pragmatic and choosing to interrupt them. So with that said, in the absence of better norms and stuff here, I think it usually makes sense to default to low levels of interruption.
Also consider that it might be more productive to communicate asynchronously via text!
I think there’s probably a bunch of non AI related things that just hadn’t been mentioned in the original brainstorming. Stuff like “have you considered building a lumenator?”
Ah, that makes sense and is interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.
A related data point: the expensive and presumably very high quality Brighter Lamp ranges in color temperature from 2220K (“warm sunset”) to 6500K (“pure daylight”). I think that further points towards optimal color temperature falling somewhere in that range for most people.
This Shit Rationalists Say video kinda seems like a good way of giving a smart person who isn’t themself a rationalist and idea of what rationalists are like.
Yes, the non-rationalist won’t understand all of the lingo, but they’ll understand some, and I feel like they’d pick up on a lot of vibes. I think the facts that it’s using the medium of video + audio as opposed to text and that it is a fire hose of data points work in it’s favor.
Take note of how brightness makes you feel
Makes sense. The urbanism meetup I mentioned actually specifies that it’s for “women and femmes”. It sounds like the “and femmes” part, perhaps along with clarification on what is meant by “femme”, might make sense.
There’s a meetup near me that is for women who are interested in urbanism. The idea I think is that a women-only space is more inviting and comfortable to a lot of women who are interested in urbanism. I wonder if something similar would make sense for rationality: a women-only rationalist meetup.
From what I can tell, meetups are typically very male dominated. And it seems likely to me that women tend to feel at least mildly uncomfortable in such male dominated spaces. I suspect that they show up, I dunno, at least 10% less often than they would with better gender ratios. I think my best guess would be something like 50%, but it’s hard for me to say. I’m a man who isn’t particularly knowledgeable or enlightened about this stuff.
The cost to trying a women-only rationalist meetup is low though. What’s the protocol for starting a meetup? Iirc it’s basically just to announce that you’ll be somewhere, show up to that place consistently—every other week or whatever—and hope other people show up too. Maybe a few other things.
But anyway, when the cost to trying something is low, the bar to justify trying it isn’t very high. The cost of starting a women-only rationalist meetup does in fact seem quite low, the possibility of being helpful pretty plausible, and magnitude of impact if successful possibly kinda big. It could make our community a lot more appealing to 50% of the population.
This excerpt from HPMoR reminded me of this post:
“I can’t believe you did that, Harry!” said Granger.
“Sorry,” Harry said, not sounding sorry at all, his lips curved up in a merry smile of evil. “Remember, Hermione, it is just a game, and why should generals like us be the only ones who get to plot? And besides, what are the two of you going to do about it? Team up against me?”
Draco traded glances with Granger, knowing that his own face was as tight as hers. Harry had been relying, more and more openly and gloatingly, on Draco’s refusal to make common cause with a mudblood girl; and Draco was beginning to get sick of having that used against him.
I call these “nod posts”. They’re posts that make you nod in agreement rather than prompting you to say something like “Oh, I didn’t realize that before but I’m glad that I do now!”
I think there is often a fair amount of value in reading nod posts though. They can deepen your understanding of a topic, remind you of something important, give you more frames and mental models to utilize, amongst other things. I agree that such posts are overrated though, in terms of the karma they get and, relatedly, how much priority they get in the feed.
Along those lines, I understand what it is you believe, but I don’t feel like I have a very good understanding of why you believe it. I guess a combination of “the closer our environment matches the ancestral environment, the happier we tend to be”, “personal experience introspecting on what I like”, and “experience talking to people about what they like”?
Relatedly I am not clear on how confident you are in your claims but am interested in knowing how confident you are in your claims.
Personally, I spent some time recently digging into lighting. Amongst other things, I did a little (informal) experiment using an app to measure lux (and color temperature) in various places to see how they made me feel. Hopefully I’ll write more about this some time, but in short, I feel like up to 1,000 to maybe 1,500 lux it felt better, but I don’t feel very confident about that. It’s hard to say, and there are lots of potentially confounding variables.
As for CRI, my research wasn’t very fruitful. The impression I got was that 95+ CRI is useful in contexts involving things like photography and art but not in everyday scenarios, and that brightness is way more important for things like focus and mood. I hadn’t realized that outdoor lighting has great CRI though; I find the evolutionary reasoning to be plausible, so the fact that outdoor lighting has great CRI makes me more bullish about CRI having a more meaningful impact on things like mood and focus.
Maybe I’ll write more about this too, but FWIW, I felt like I was spending too much time researching all this stuff and figuring out what products to buy, so I kinda just punted and bought the Brighter Lamp. It should last like 20+ years and at that longevity, it’s like $5/month. Whatever.