anna_macdonald

Karma: 215

anna_macdonald 29 Jul 2019 5:00 UTC
3 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: Is this info on zinc lozenges accurate?
I take it the concentration of H+ is inversely related to the concentration of negative ions, because if there’s a high concentration of both, they’ll just bind each other
For the most part, and to my limited memory of chem...yes.
H+ captures the acetate away from the zinc, but the negative ion doesn’t then bind the Zn+
Umm. Hmm. *goes back and reads the relevant parts of your post* I don’t know any of this off the top of my head. Let’s see… Wiki says zinc acetate is a salt of zinc and acetic acid. Ok, so zinc acetate is already zinc ions and acetate ions. (CH3CO2-). Two of those ions for each Zn, so each Zn ion is Zn+2. You stick the Zn(CH3CO2)2 into the pH 5 saliva solution, which has a lot of extra H+ sticking around. The H+s in the pH 5 solution are already outnumbering any loose negative ions...that’s what it means to be pH5. So when you stick the salt in it, the H+s grab the negative acetate ions and tear the salt structure apart. The Zn becomes free-floating ions because there aren’t enough negative ions around to bind with them.
If you drop the zinc acetate in a neutral solution, it might still dissolve into ions; sometimes with water, what happens is basically everything just pulls at everything else, and things stay in constant flux instead of settling into neutral compounds. [This is my understanding of what happens with NaCl, for example: you don’t get NaOH and HCl so much as you get lots of Na+ and Cl- floating around in H2O with the H+ and OH-, constantly forming and unforming all the possible combinations in insignificant amounts.]
I feel compelled to point out here that low pH values are bad for your teeth. Low pH destroys the protective biofilm and leaches phosphorus and the like out of the teeth, weakening them and leading to cavities. I only know this because I recently proofread a dentist’s book all about it. So, like, maybe don’t try to lower your saliva pH to get more zinc.

anna_macdonald 27 Jul 2019 22:59 UTC
4 points
on: Is this info on zinc lozenges accurate?
I have not the faintest clue about zinc or your overall question, but this part:
saliva pH is 5; over 100 times more acidic than pH of cellular environment which is 7.4
7.4 is basic, right? “100 times more acidic than [something on the other side of neutral]” seems like a weird thing to say?
pH is basically the (negative) exponent in the concentration of H+; a concentration of 10^-2 gives a pH of 2, a concentration of 10^-7 gives a pH of 7. So moving from 5 to 7 on the pH scale is a factor of 100 in the concentration of H+. That’s why they say it’s “100 times more acidic”. (Also, the neutral point in the pH scale is neutral because that’s the concentration at which the positive H+ ions are balanced by negative...usually OH-...ions.)

anna_macdonald 7 Jul 2019 4:18 UTC
4 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Thoughts on The Replacing Guilt Series⁠ — pt 1
http://mindingourway.com/guilt/

anna_macdonald 6 Jul 2019 22:22 UTC
14 points
on: Thank You, Old Man Jevons, For My Job
One problem I see with that analysis is this part:
After all, workers are producing 20% more, so the amount of profit from hiring an extra worker increases by 20%.
If demand isn’t being met, or if it’s elastic, then increasing your production = increasing your profits. But if demand for your product is not elastic, increasing your production will just leave you with unsold product and decrease your profits; you’d make more money by using those new machines to reduce your work force.

anna_macdonald 30 Jun 2019 17:02 UTC
36 points
on: Do children lose ‘childlike curiosity?’ Why?
I have 7 kids, so I feel qualified to make some observations on this topic.
Kid #1 asked “why” questions all the time when she was young. As a teenager, her questions have definitely decreased in frequency. This is primarily because all the questions she had as a young child actually got answered. There was a LOT of low-hanging fruit, and she picked it when she was young. She is still curious; her teachers enjoy her genuine interest in learning. It competes with her love of fan fiction, though.
Kid #4 also has some curiosity, and asks questions, though not as often as Kid#1 ever did. He, too, has fewer questions as he ages.
Kids #2, 3, and 5 never actually went through a “why” phase. They ask “Why can’t I have that candy bar?” but they don’t ask “Why is the sky blue?” They ask practical questions about what, when, where, and they may be quite interested if there’s an interesting demonstration of something, but curiosity isn’t a big part of their makeup. I have also noticed other people’s kids who aren’t that curious. People who say that all young kids are curious are basing that on observations of kids who are. Confirmation bias: they aren’t looking for kids who aren’t curious.
Kid #6 isn’t very curious, but she is extremely social and wants to always hear the sound of her voice and mine, so she asks lots of questions and then doesn’t listen to the content of the answers. Kid #7 ’s vocab consists mostly of a handful of food items and “shoes”, so her curiosity can’t be gauged yet.
So I’d say it’s not the case that most young kids are curious and lose that as they grow older. Rather, most young kids are not that curious, and continue not to be curious as adults. The kids who are uber-curious grow up to be adults who are still curious, but whose questions are less incessant because they find answers as they go.

anna_macdonald 16 Jun 2019 6:31 UTC
15 points
on: Reasonable Explanations
I was making tea. I poured hot water into a travel mug. The interior sides of the travel mug were silver. The liquid looked yellow. (Before I put the tea bag in.) To see if the yellow contamination had come from the kettle that I had heated over the stove, I poured some of the remaining water into the sink. That water was clear, with no evidence of a yellowish tinge. The mug had been taken from a cupboard of clean dishes. I was fairly certain I had looked in the mug before using it and seen that it was clean. After seeing the yellowish liquid, I still saw no other indication that the mug might have been dirty (no gunk on the inside or outside). Just the mysteriously yellow liquid.
Guvf jnf n onq pnfr bs zbzzl oenva. V cbherq ubarl vagb gur obggbz bs gur zht svefg, gura sbetbg V unq qbar gung ol gur gvzr V cbherq gur jngre va. Gur ubg jngre vzzrqvngryl qvffbyirq gur ubarl, naq vg tnir gur jngre gur lryybjvfu gvatr. V fcrag svir zvahgrf gelvat gb engvbanyyl qvntabfr gur ceboyrz orsber erzrzorevat nobhg gur ubarl.

anna_macdonald 22 Apr 2019 16:42 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Three-Monkey Mind’s comment on: Generating a novelty scale
Conveying that is often worthwhile, but it’s situational enough that simply stating the context of what you’re doing is probably a better idea than formalizing a novelty scale.
Also, I didn’t mention this above, but re-hashing stuff that isn’t novel can be highly useful. Penetration of an idea into the population would never happen if people only ever pointed to the original source for an idea without conveying/spreading it themselves. It’s helpful to have a million blog posts about the same thing, because each of those blogs is reaching a slightly different audience.

anna_macdonald 20 Apr 2019 23:43 UTC
6 points
on: Generating a novelty scale
The problem with a novelty scale is that novelty has a high degree of circumstantial/subjectivity to it. What’s new to one person is old hat to another. Millions of people may independently recreate the same wisdom based on their life experiences, and that insight feels new to them, but might not be new to those they share it with. In the modern age, not even a google search can guarantee that an idea hasn’t been laid out somewhere by someone.

anna_macdonald 8 Mar 2019 18:20 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Clyde Rathbone’s comment on: One Website To Rule Them All?
Is the Letters site itself, the project you mention, or was one particular conversation on that page discussing the idea (if so, which one)?

anna_macdonald 20 Feb 2019 19:06 UTC
8 points
on: When does introspection avoid the pitfalls of rumination?
Your definition of ruminating includes that you introspect on causes and consequences as opposed to solutions. The techniques you mention may include focusing on causes and consequences, but they are very solution-oriented.
If there is a difference in their successfulness, I think that solution-orientedness is why. People who ruminate are thinking about a problem without trying to solve it. That’s, frankly, a depressing thing to do. Feeling like you have a problem that can’t be solved is almost the definition of frustration, and just reminding yourself of a problem without any sense of moving forward or making progress will reinforce negative thought patterns without accomplishing anything.
By contrast, people who engage in focusing, IFS, and related techniques have a goal in mind. They’re not just reviewing the problem and its causes; they’re trying to get somewhere. There’s an underlying optimism that is being fostered, especially if it works well enough for people to want to keep trying it.

anna_macdonald 12 Feb 2019 23:39 UTC
2 points
on: Perfecting The Motion
Batch processing and interrupt coalescing basically come down to scheduling the things you have to do in a regular basis in a manner so as to minimize the instances of context-switching, so as to maximize the amount of time spent on one task uninterruptedly.
Is it possible to do this if you have kids (especially little ones)?

anna_macdonald 23 Jan 2019 19:58 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TheMajor’s comment on: One Website To Rule Them All?
Those are all concerns I share. I don’t have solutions either. I feel like my choice is to either build the website despite the lack of solutions and the high risk—or settle for not having anything that does what I want.
If I tried to do research on how to make websites grow, I would expect to encounter a lot of advice that’s based on survivorship bias, and therefore unreliable. (I mostly expect that luck is a/the dominant factor.) Do you think research on that would produce helpful results?
Moderation, on the other hand, is probably something that I could start with some research on, to see what might or might not be possible/helpful.

anna_macdonald 18 Jan 2019 23:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jacob Falkovich’s comment on: Finance Followups
I don’t think everything politicians touch turns to crap. Some, but not all.
“Mandating 401k donations” would probably look a lot like replacing automatic Social Security paycheck withdrawals with automatic 401k paycheck withdrawals. A phase-over plan could include sucking it up and using taxes to pay premiums for people who are already withdrawing SS and people within, say, 10 years of being able to do so, while younger people get the amount that they have already paid into Social Security simply deposited into their 401k for them.
Mandating paying off debt would be trickier to enact, because we don’t have the kind of intermediaries who currently handle that. But it might be worth a trial run.

anna_macdonald 18 Jan 2019 19:28 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jacob Falkovich’s comment on: Finance Followups
I think your second and third bullet points would make great laws. That might not be what most people have in mind when they talk about “finance regulation”, but it’s an area where the government could force people to act in their own long-term interest instead of responding to shorter-term incentives. (And if people want to nitpick exceptions, many exceptions could be written into the law.)
People’s spending (bullet points #1 and #4) might respond to laws that limit advertising, but I don’t know what else. I think your #4 is one of those suggestions that doesn’t intuitively grasp the scope or nature of the problem, like people who suggest that exhausted parents of newborns sleep when the baby sleeps. People who buy things so that others think they’re cool are rarely consciously aware that that’s a significant motivation for them, and they aren’t going to stop and perform mental gymnastics before purchases. I have a friend who is in debt because shopping makes her feel better when she’s stressed. Most purchasing incentives like these are deeply rooted and not easily solved, even with education.

anna_macdonald 17 Jan 2019 21:15 UTC
11 points
on: Finance Followups
The only solution to this is financial literacy education
Maybe. But I suspect that financial literacy education will be about as successful at improving people’s financial choices as education about diet and exercise are at improving people’s weight. (Which is to say, not at all.)
People may not know how much debt they have or how much it’s costing them, but they know they have debt and they know it’s costing them. They know they should save, but saving doesn’t trigger a release of endorphins or dopamine or whatever in the brain that you get from buying a more comfortable car or clothes that you adore or even from donating.
Sure there’s a few edge cases, like your friend that wants to invest before paying off loans, that might be helped by some financial education. But chances are good that even he is more influenced by reward structures than by ignorance; investing can feel like gambling, which is risky, and therefore fun to people who like risks...in a way that paying off debt obligations is not.
I’m not better at saving than my husband is because I’m more financially literate that he is. He’s worked as an accountant; I’m pretty sure he knows more than I do. But I’m better at saving than he is because risk is extremely unpleasant to me, unpleasant enough to override my desire for most things that I want to own. He likes risk more than I do, and so he doesn’t have the same incentive to resist the urge to buy things, so he doesn’t resist those urges.

anna_macdonald 17 Jan 2019 6:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: One Website To Rule Them All?
I...only followed some of what you said here. *Googles slack channel* … Sure, if you know other people who are interested in a similar concept, that might be worthwhile. How do we go about it?
What is weirdsun?

anna_macdonald 13 Jan 2019 16:50 UTC
1 point
in reply to: quanticle’s comment on: One Website To Rule Them All?
Minimum wage is actually somewhat like diet, since it could be that some places and not others would be better off adopting it, depending on their varied conditions. While values dominate discussions of actions, I think the epistemic questions of what the consequences of those actions are are very important. And “if X, then Y” is a claim of truth.
In the end, I think that both actions and truth-claims rely heavily on both objective truth and on values. Valuing Breitbart or Slate as a reliable source can determine what facts you believe, and it isn’t possible to completely divorce questions of truth from values about sources, about what level of evidence is needed before accepting a claim, and such. I would like to make those more explicit.
I do think the diet thing would be the kind of question that would be hardest to succeed at. I think the Site could handle some degree of “different solutions for different situations”, but the level of variability in medical questions might be beyond it.

anna_macdonald 12 Jan 2019 23:31 UTC
14 points
in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: One Website To Rule Them All?
Right off the top of my head, every debate website I’ve come across so far puts topics into simplified yes/no questions instead of considering multiple possible alternatives next to each other. That’s true of Kialo, DebateIsland, Debate.org, ProCon.org, CreateDebate, iDebate.org, and more.

anna_macdonald 12 Jan 2019 20:35 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Peter Weistroffer’s comment on: One Website To Rule Them All?
What do you think is the minimum subset to build and sustain a userbase?
Really large, which is a major fail point.
I don’t think reaching consensus is generally possible for the kind of arguments you’re interested in
I think consensus is not possible for some of them; we’re not going to “solve” abortion or God. On issues like that, the best that could be accomplished is helping people understand where the other is coming from and reducing animosity a little. (Which I think would be very worthwhile, if that could be accomplished, but even that might not happen.) Some compromise actions might possibly become popular, like privately funding programs for low-income women who might otherwise have abortions.
On other topics, I think we might be able to come much closer to a consensus than we are. Maybe not 100%, but a well-laid-out argument for adopting a different voting system, enacting a particular set of campaign finance reforms, a phase-out plan for eliminating or changing government farm subsidies, or a suggestion for how amazon can increase employee satisfaction without losing profits...those might make it pretty close to consensus.
Pinterest for arguments
That’s...a really interesting idea. That might satisfy my desire to quickly find all the important aspects on an issue in one place. You’d have to mentally build the organization between ideas and options yourself, instead of having them visually laid out, but you’d spare yourself the trouble of forcing people to build or agree on that organization. Are you going to build it? Do you think a lot of people would use it if you did?

anna_macdonald 12 Jan 2019 19:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: One Website To Rule Them All?
That’s a really cool site. I think it only can cover truth-claims from the past (not proposed actions or if-then truth-claims about the future), but it will really excel at those. I’ll keep it bookmarked.