Alicorn
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New Ratfic: Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility
I’ve had tests for Basic Deficiencies in Important Stuff, but maybe once I get a new pcp I’ll ask about a physical therapist.
I haven’t tried physical therapists in particular and my initial reaction is pretty considerable skepticism. It seems like this would require a lot of investment of time in appointments, I doubt my insurance would cover it, and then I’d have to pay attention to some sort of instruction they gave me, all the time whenever I moved, which, if I could do that, I’d have better posture.
The catalyst was the Costco scooter and from there it was just a matter of hunting down something with the right specs, but what led me to trying it that day? I don’t know, probably some combination of “they were right there and obviously free to try” and “I really really wanted to sit down right then” (maybe we parked far away).
I think it’s not unrelated to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ZodFr54FtpLThHZh/experiential-pica as a concept. If you do something weird, that might just be you being weird, but there could also be an underlying problem you could fix.
Nyoom
It seems unlikely that the memory can be reconstructed (although it could be recreated, if the AI happens to know who-all was at the gym that day). Your perspective makes sense to me but for my part I don’t think that kind of detail is important to me; it’s okay if I wake up missing a lot of minor episodic memories like that.
AI Reading Group Thoughts (2/?): Reconstructive Psychosurgery
Y Couchinator
AI Reading Group Thoughts (1/?): The Mandate of Heaven
The more naive interpretation of the phrase is instead represented by “self-aware”, if that’s helpful.
Hm, I guess that’s a slightly stronger claim, but I do endorse it now that I think about the distinction; not to the point where every single such piece of advice should come bundled with an unsolicited painfulness model, but to the point where if you’re giving painful advice you should have the model on hand.
What I mean is more like “if someone is suggesting that you do something painful, they should present you with a model of why and how that pain is okay”. This doesn’t rule out misappropriation—I’m sure cult leaders and certain brands of interpersonal abusers do it handily, especially if they’re weaponizing guilt—but it’s at least robust against generic, opaque commands to “suck it up”, and if you go in with that expectation you’ll have an opportunity to notice something is wrong if someone tells you that you shouldn’t be in pain and your pain is invalid (they don’t have a model that describes the thing you are in fact feeling, so they don’t have a good model of the situation as a whole).
Expected Pain Parameters
I think those examples are fine in many possible contexts. You can make a blog post with either instance as content just fine. My objection would come up if someone said “incel” and you said it was a horrible word instead of responding to their statement about incels—make that suggestion at another time. You could, if genuinely puzzled, ask if they mean incels as in lonely or incels as in violent misogynists, but I think context will tend to make that clear. And where it doesn’t they don’t in fact mean one of those things—they mean the conflation, and the word communicated that!
I want to point out that there are lots of situations where English speakers fluently use words that don’t have clear dividing lines between their applicability and their inapplicability—it depends on context and details. “The music is loud.” What if I’m deaf or far away or like to be able to feel the bass line in my bones? That doesn’t make the sentence impermissible or even hard to understand and I don’t need the speaker to produce a decibel value. “If you go to high altitudes, the air is thinner and you might get dizzy.” How high? If I’m dizzy in Denver and the speaker thinks you shouldn’t need to adjust your behavior until there are Sherpas about and meanwhile Batman can breathe in space, that doesn’t make the sentence false, let alone useless. “It’s cold, bring a jacket.” Oh you sweet summer child, I’m good in short sleeves, thanks, I just don’t know what you meant by “cold” -
There are lots of conversational purposes for which you don’t in fact have to know where someone draws the line. You don’t even need to be able to agree on every point’s ordering in the spectrum (“it’s colder today” “that’s just windchill”). The words gesture in a direction. I think “chemicals” does too, and you know what direction because you came up with “unprocessed” as a gloss on “low in chemicals”. If someone doesn’t buy that brand of dip before it’s full of chemicals, in your innocent confusion I suggest you glance at the ingredients list for a guess at the threshold in question.
Suggesting search engine terms might be helpful. I don’t think I’d ever find “you’re going to confuse people” helpful—either I already know that I’m not being very precisely expressive and these are all the words I have, or, if that’s not the case, “could you elaborate/rephrase that” would be better. I didn’t feel exasperated by this comment but might by a long chain of them on this branch.
Some people are in fact responsive to “that’s a slur; the preferred term is X”, especially if X isn’t a barbarous use of language, if they were using the slur to encompass the whole group and got caught by a euphemism treadmill or just pick up their vocabulary from sources unsympathetic to Xes. And you don’t have to reject an offered word for being a syllable longer if you want to make that tradeoff. I think this is a case of Postel’s law, or should be.
I wish to clarify that I’m not asserting that everyone knows exactly what things are “chemicals” and what things are not. There’s room for disagreement, for one thing, and the disagreements might turn on all kinds of little points about where a substance came from and even why it was added to the food. But I do think that given two lists of ingredients for different brands of, say, packaged guacamole, you could distinguish “few to no chemicals” from “lots of chemicals”. That there isn’t a strict, look-up-able boundary of necessary and sufficient conditions that fits in a “coherent model” doesn’t mean it’s not useful to gesture at for some purposes, sort of like music genres. I don’t have a coherent model of music genres and I couldn’t elaborate much on what I mean if I call a song “poppy” or “jazzy” but that doesn’t mean it’s not a statement I might reasonably utter.
Yeah, I don’t fully endorse the linked Tumblr post; in particular there’s certainly ways to resolve these conflicts that aren’t “abdicate the terminology yourself”. But some of it is highly relevant and well said.
I expect that when I replace my scooter at the end of its useful life I will be able to get a much better scooter. For me, this one is at what I think is currently a good tradeoff between portability (more battery is heavier, more torque might require a heavier machine too), plausibility as a wheelchair (for use indoors and on the sidewalk rather than among cars), and price (I’d pay more knowing what I know, but when I got it I didn’t actually realize quite how big a deal it was going to be for me).