Benquo

Karma: 11,462

Benquo Jun 10, 2025, 8:06 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: DusanDNesic’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
Haven’t found the time to do a general writeup for years 2+ but here’s my writeup from child 1 year 1: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/happy-birthday-to-my-firstborn-baby-boy-a-memoir/

Benquo Jun 9, 2025, 1:40 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Letting Kids Be Outside
The earlier Zvi post I linked to has other anecdotes, including mine, so the total count of those is higher. Since for obvious reasons anecdotes from people previously known to you are much stronger evidence than sensational anecdotes promoted by an advertising platform like most “news” publications, it makes more sense to mention the former and not the latter, than the other way around.
Incidentally while there’s an obvious bad news bias that would promote overestimating the rate of such incidences, other factors suppress reporting. When this first happened to me, the sorts of responses I got when telling friends and family about it were mostly some combination of victim-blaming, and inventing a different, less politically inconvenient situation that they could take my side in (e.g. one friend decided that the real story was that the woman whose car had broken down wanted to kidnap my child). This made the whole thing demoralizing and stressful to talk about. In addition, getting arrested on the basis of an accusation from someone who was doing and admitting to an unambiguous felony while I was not, contributed to what I think is the rational impression that in some important respects I have more to lose socially from being seen as the sort of “loser” who gets arrested, than I have to gain from establishing that I have a legitimate grievance against the authorities.

Benquo Jun 9, 2025, 12:20 PM
13 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Letting Kids Be Outside
At that time often the easiest way for my toddler to take his daytime nap was to fall asleep on a stroller ride, and since we rent the second floor of a house, it was pretty difficult to transfer him from the stroller without ending the nap. So, sometimes we’d leave him in the stroller right at the front of the house, usually with one of us watching from the 2nd floor balcony, sometimes just leaving a window open to hear him when he woke up and called for us.
On this day I had the window open to listen, but instead of my child, I heard someone hollering “Hello?! Hello?!”. (I later learned her car had broken down on our block, which is why she was there.)
I went outside (initially to our 2nd floor balcony) and somewhat grumpily (I think this was an important error that escalated the problem) complained that she was yelling right next to a sleeping baby, which seemed to enrage her, so I ran down to talk with her at less distance since I was a little worried at this point about what she might do.
She told me that this wasn’t my child and demanded to see my “license,” which confused me since Connecticut doesn’t require a license to have a child, but eventually I figured out she meant my driver’s license. She also claimed to be an “officer” and said she’d take away my child and arrest me, turned to her boyfriend, and said, “babe, get your handcuffs.” I asked for her name and she refused to identify herself, then asked for a badge number and she said “152.” (I have this bit on camera, which my lawyer thought was likely helpful in getting the charges dismissed. The police report documents that she also confessed to the police when they arrived that she’d falsely told me that she and her boyfriend were police officers.)
At this point I decided to take the stroller through our gate to the backyard, and since the woman claiming not very credibly to be a police officer didn’t follow me, I called the non-emergency number of the New Haven Police Department on the assumption that, given a badge number and current location, they could likely tell me whether this was a real police officer or someone impersonating a police officer. (The police report I saw later described her explicitly as not an officer.) They told me they couldn’t check anything without the officer’s name since badge numbers are recycled.
At this point the police entered our backyard, asked me what happened (I stayed calm and told them what had happened instead of retreating into the house as soon as I saw them, which may have been my second major mistake) and then arrested me on the charge of child endangerment. I asked what the danger had been and they didn’t have a consistent story—one said “he could choke on something”, the other said he’d just come from a kidnapping call. (Since as I understood it stranger kidnappings of children are extremely rare in the US, I asked him afterwards when I saw him at the grocery store whether it had been a stranger kidnapping case, and he said no.)

Benquo Jun 8, 2025, 8:05 PM
8 points
0
on: Letting Kids Be Outside
This seems like a different worlds problem, probably related to social class.
Zvi cited examples from people personally known to him, not just “news stories,” so the incidence is higher than the latter would suggest, in a way that you seem motivated to unsee. That motivation is probably related to why you’re children are allowed to walk around in public on my own, while my toddler was not allowed to peacefully nap in his own stroller on our own front yard while I listened through the window so I could hear when he woke up.
I think the simplest explanation is that these things are behaviors one can get away with if they’re sufficiently normalized in the local context, but not things one can functionally have the right to do, even if there’s a law explicitly permitting it. Which is one of the reasons I wrote up Levels of Republicanism.

Benquo Jun 6, 2025, 2:26 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: tcheasdfjkl’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
Friend reported that they were considering barefoot shoes but their PT said their arches were too high and they were pigeon-toed.
Me
“arches are too high for barefoot shoes” just sounds like bullshit if they’re not also saying you need orthotics in the shower, in your house slippers, etc
Pigeon toeing is likely either due to imbalanced hip muscle development, or imbalanced foot muscle development—and either can cause the other as a secondary condition—in either case the cure is gradually introducing more high-dimensional movement
Is one foot affected more than the other?
FYI for barefoot shoes I found anyasreviews.com helpful to narrow down the search to a few brands
Specifically https://anyasreviews.com/best-barefoot-shoes-foot-type/ and https://anyasreviews.com/ufaq/whats-my-foot-type/
Friend
>”arches are too high for barefoot shoes” just sounds like bullshit if they’re not also saying you need orthotics in the shower, in your house slippers, etc
Yeah I was wondering about this
Me
though now I’m finally transitioning to Vibram FiveFingers after a good session with my shiatsu practitioner
Huh I just realized I’ve had more crazy “try to fix your condition X with wildly inappropriate intervention Y” from “conventional” than from “alternative” practitioners
Friend
I didn’t have time to ask the PT if I was supposed to be wearing shoes in the house which is where I spend half my daytime hours chasing kids around...
Me
like, after the urgent-care doc told me I definitely didn’t have gout (I did), I consulted a well-regarded podiatrist who said there was no way to know for sure if I had gout, so here’s some orthotic inserts (he had me buy cheap ones that he then bent himself to customize) and here’s a water bath to stick your foot in so we can electrocute it to help manage the pain
then months later I found a DO who correctly diagnosed the gout and prescribed the conventional cure
Pigeon toeing is likely either due to imbalanced hip muscle development, or imbalanced foot muscle development—and either can cause the other as a secondary condition—in either case the cure is gradually introducing more high-dimensional movement
Friend
I’m pretty sure it’s some core and hip unbalancing, my left side usually feels weaker but I think there is excess tension on my right. Some deep core weakness too
Me
I think I would count literally every time I’ve been recommended an antipyretic for a mild infection—WITHOUT being clearly advised of the symptom intensity / disease duration tradeoff—as an inappropriate crackpot intervention, too.
Friend
The pigeon toe thing has been present since I was five, I was told I had “weak ankles” and when I was seven a doctor told my mom it was simply too late to fix it, would have needed leg braces, etc
But it improved as I got older and was much better when I was doing strength training. More dramatic rn I think because of postpartum muscle/fascia stretching
I’m pretty sure it’s some core and hip unbalancing, my left side usually feels weaker but I think there is excess tension on my right. Some deep core weakness too
Me
If there are noticeable asymmetries in the pattern then that suggests some potential value in:
1 Balance practice standing on each foot separately (ironically, I think asymmetric walking like one-foot-on one-foot-off curb-walking can help with this, since it prevents you from using your normal asymmetric copes).
2 Trying out an eyepatch on each side separately.
Friend
Huh, eye patch?
Me
eye dominance is related to the overal pattern of balance asymmetry, I think
Friend
I’ve sussed out with meditation that the right/left asymmetry is all the way up my body; sometimes my jaw muscles relax and almost instantly the tops of my foot relax
Me
It’s cheap to try and if it doesn’t feel at least slightly interesting when you do it you can just stop
Friend
Thanks!
Me
I got the basic idea from Neal Hallinan’s YouTube channel—it didn’t seem as important an element for me as for him, but it’s an interesting idea that’s probably at least partly true for many people
Friend
There is some school of thought for movement...”repair,” I guess, that focuses a lot on a kind of asymmetry, wish I could recall the name
Me
>I’ve sussed out with meditation that the right/left asymmetry is all the way up my body; sometimes my jaw muscles relax and almost instantly the tops of my foot relax
Ooh, if you haven’t gently practiced closing your jaw without a lot of tension, that’s a thing to try too—I spend maybe 30m a few years ago holding my jaw at just the edge of where a lot of tension would kick in, waiting for it to relax, and moving it a bit closer
and, while I’ve since backslid occasionally, it’s easy to fix once I notice, as long as I’m a bit patient and seems like an important node in some larger complex system
I think this is the main thing that makes “Mewing” actually helpful, and the stuff about bone-structure changes may not quite be true but that’s just based on my experience
Friend
There is some school of thought for movement...”repair,” I guess, that focuses a lot on a kind of asymmetry, wish I could recall the name
When I looked up some info on this therapeutic school I discovered I supposedly have the mirror image of the most common asymmetric bias which was a bit odd
Me
Neil Hallinan’s associated with an org called Postural Restoration Institute
Friend
Jaw and perineum/pelvic+associated muscles seem to be pretty common places for “content” to get “stuck”
Yes, postural restoration, that was it!
Me
>Jaw and perineum/pelvic+associated muscles seem to be pretty common places for “content” to get “stuck”
When I can close my jaw without excess tension, I can also much more easily assert boundaries nonreactively
& OTOH when I get triggered into defensive reactivity my jaw tension returns
which means there are other things to retrain here
which is part of why I’m doing tai chi
Friend
I haven’t catalogued my triggers for jaw tension yet, mostly figuring them out by figuring out what kind of content arises when it can relax
Something here entangled with my mom and maternal side of the family, there was a major shift after she passed and I did some intense grief processing
I think I both take after her side genetically wrt hyper mobility and also picked up some of her health symptoms via mirroring
Probably my answer is still “more movement, more varied movement, more patience”
What do you mean by high dimensional movement exactly?
Specifically “high dimensional”
Me
>What do you mean by high dimensional movement exactly?
Less like isolated movement drills for your ankle, more like walking on cobblestones or balancing on one leg.
Friend
Aha
Me
Less like practicing specific hip stretches, more like squat-walking and other sorts of playing around.
Literally dancing close to the edge of difficulty
Friend
Ok that tracks with what my personal movement practice was turning into before third trimester kind of knocked me out
Me
One important advantage of this is it competes less with child care for attention, than the formalized isolated drills do, since it can be a fun activity to do together
Friend
Which indicates that I was on the right track and am just still in recovery
>One important advantage of this is it competes less with child care for attention, than the formalized isolated drills do, since it can be a fun activity to do together
Very important!
Me
Main reason it doesn’t get recommended in the formal literature AFAICT is it’s not trivially reproducible
but when they can slap a label on it like “tai chi” all of a sudden it counts as reproducible, sorta
Friend
Seems like that’s bc it would be very idiosyncratic and those kinds of practices and schools of thought tend to have massive variation in quality of instruction?
Like it comes closer to “art”
Than something that is simple to turn into a procedure
Me
yeah the expense of formalizing a set of instructions unambiguously and reproducibly can expand combinatorially with the degrees of freedom involved, I think.
Then, about 2 months later:
Friend
Trying out the eye patch today
Definitely does something different to my coordination and tension patterns
Me
Nice
Interested in details if you can articulate them
Friend
A bunch of jaw and temple tension on the right side of my face dissolves when I have both eyes open but the right one covered
Sensory input is a little crispier
Easier to attend to taste and tactile input
Me
>A bunch of jaw and temple tension on the right side of my face dissolves when I have both eyes open but the right one covered
Ooh I wonder what happens if you gently investigate some triggers in that state
Friend
Hmm...left hip moves forward a bit
There is a spiral holding pattern that seems to relax a bit the longer I wear it.
Possibly that pattern is a bit loadbearing to avoid some kinds of sensory overwhelm and maybe suppress certain stims
It’s connected to verbal cues like “pay attention”
I was screened for scoliosis as a kid bc of my intense asymmetric posture when writing
Me
>Possibly that pattern is a bit loadbearing to avoid some kinds of sensory overwhelm and maybe suppress certain stims
Alternatively it may have been load-bearing at a past developmental stage, & other skills are chained to it, but can be refactored while wearing the eyepatch to remove the dependency.
No guarantees
Friend
Yeah I’m not sure about the relationships here yet
I’ve been doing some primitive reflex integration stuff, experimentally
Me
Other direction to investigate would be if you can consciously & directly invoke/activate the spiral pattern—if you can learn to do that, you may become better at consciously relaxing it.
Friend
Oh I hadn’t thought of that
2 more months go by
Friend
Eye patch tip has been excellent! Thank you. Yesterday a bunch of stuff clicked and I realized I have a mild lazy eye, convergence insufficiency that got much worse during COVID. Looked up vision exercises and got instant relief from a bunch of stuff I thought was purely psychological
Me
Love to hear it

Benquo Jun 5, 2025, 6:07 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: iceman’s comment on: My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy
I’d say that near-universal falling fertility rates already below replacement in the post-British global system, combined with continued net integration of unaligned countries into that system, implies that not taking ideas seriously isn’t healthy. Taking new ideas seriously is high-variance, with more downside when few people are doing it (so there’s less error-correction), so one might recommend conservatism if things basically seem to be going well. But in some key respects they don’t.

Benquo Jun 5, 2025, 6:01 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: iceman’s comment on: A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
The situation actually seems worse, as MIRI got more money than they knew what to do with and still didn’t quite say “oops” (an April Fools’ Day post endorsing “death with dignity” doesn’t count since they didn’t actually do a fault analysis). I think this reflects conditioning to substitute the idea of social validation momentum in place of the idea of object-level efficacy at something you care about.

Benquo May 28, 2025, 7:03 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Levels of Republicanism
If you can extend your system of accountability to include people already making product X, that’s frequently going to be better than diverting productive resources already being used profitably to make product Y, to make product X instead. But the “integration” element is important; I expect vertical integration or import substitution to be profitable if it protects you from monopolistic behavior by horizontal integrationists, or if it allows you to produce intermediate goods more suitable for their purpose than can be bought externally for the same cost. I think this responds adequately to your arguments 1 and 2.
“Identical” may have been too strong, as there is an edge case where one buys a supplier and then doesn’t change anything about them. This may be formally considered “vertical integration” under some schemas, but it’s not an interesting case. But as I see it, the meaning of expressions like “vertical integration” or “import substitution” is their functional relation to the long-run profitability of a firm/state. And that if we don’t make an unprincipled distinction between Westphalian states and other sorts of firm, the distinction collapses. Production of a good by immigrants who used to make it for export in the old country, or by people living in newly annexed territory, would generally still be considered “import substitution,” and that’s strongly analogous to the sorts of “vertical integration” cases you mentioned.
3 seems confused. I didn’t bring up Apple and Amazon to suggest that import substitution is the most profitable strategy considered in terms of external currency, but to suggest that even firms trying to maximize long-run profits in terms of external currency like US dollars sometimes do so more effectively through developing their supply chains in-house than they could by focusing solely on exports. A fortiori people who aren’t dollar-nihilists but want anything else in life also ought to see some upside some of the time in import substitution. I then suggested some specific ways in which I thought import substitution would be profitable. Either you agree or disagree with the specifics; if “economics” recommends never doing import substitution then “economics” is obviously wrong.

Benquo May 26, 2025, 6:44 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Levels of Republicanism
This doesn’t seem like it implies any sort of disagreement and I don’t understand why you think it’s relevant additional information in this context. Maybe you’re treating vertical integration as a very different thing from import substitution, while from my perspective they are identical; I didn’t mean to say that the USA has done well by import substitution via Apple and Amazon, but that Apple and Amazon themselves, as statelike clients of the US-led global financial system, have done well through import substitution.

Benquo May 25, 2025, 7:18 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Levels of Republicanism
I don’t think “someone tried a thing and failed” invalidates trying things. I do think the culture of paranoid secrecy at MIRI (articulately described by Jessica Taylor a couple of years ago) was bad. Growing your own grain is a bad value proposition because a lot of farmers are trying to grow grain cheaply and selling it at commodity prices to competing distributors. Doing your own health care is sometimes a good value proposition and sometimes a bad one because there is legitimate technical expertise and returns to scale for sharing costly equipment, but there’s also cartelization and bad-faith gatekeeping. If the schools are trying to mentally cripple the children, it shouldn’t be very hard to do better at pretty small scales. One has to look at the details.

Apple and Amazon have done very well at import substitution over the past couple decades.

Benquo May 14, 2025, 9:23 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Ivan Vendrov’s comment on: Preference Inversion
I don’t see how to interpret those verses any other way, which is why I strongly hold my opinion rather than cousin_it’s.

Benquo May 13, 2025, 1:27 PM
2 points
2
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Levels of Republicanism
Neither is generically healthier considered in isolation. One wouldn’t want to strictly focus on replacing imports, or maximizing export value, but doing each when it’s more profitable to do so.
Export orientation seems very bad for e.g. child care when fertility rates are below replacement & educational institutions have almost uniformly been deeply sabotaged. OTOH it would be stupid for most groups to try to grow all their own crops.
The Rationalist movement is explicitly premised on the idea that people seeking to do well on crucial decisions can and ought to do a lot of import replacement with respect to knowledge at least temporarily.

Benquo May 13, 2025, 9:22 AM
19 points
1
on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
This is pointing in an interesting direction. In hindsight I wish I’d noticed your post on RadVac and written to you for help getting (or making) a dose, as I mainly didn’t do it because the prospect felt overwhelming and you probably would have been happy to help. The sparsity of social fabric that led to this course of action not occurring to me seems important to repair.
The main reason I haven’t been motivated to do much of the sort of thing you’re describing is that it seems to me like there’s an oversupply of people trying to do something impressively interesting and novel, relative to people doing (or controlling the surplus of) primary production, to be legitimately impressed and interested. I’ve tried various ways of occupying the latter position without losing my mind, and gradually downshifted to just trying to raise good children in a politically non-naive way without lying to them, supporting their agency as much as possible, and crippling their agency as little as society will let me get away with.
So I don’t know if I’m a good candidate for a primary contributor to the sort of event you’re describing. But the life circumstances you’re describing seems like a central case of the sort of thing I’d be willing to move and/or spend some money to make available to my family; highly aligned with my vision here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xNf9ZkjXLkFYPDscs/levels-of-republicanism
I don’t know how to move this forward but I’ll try to reveal some information related to potential opportunities for collaboration:
- Automation of high-value massage
- Basic physical science education for a toddler
- Some things I can do
Automation of high-value massage
Recently a friend wrote to me asking for advice^[1] about how to use a massage gun effectively. Valentin Rozlomii ( visceralcure.com ) is the one I learned this from—I decided to try his services out when Michael Vassar told me he uses an infrared camera to find areas of the body that have poor circulation to the muscles (they’re cold). One piece of advice I gave was that the muscles running along the spine are especially high leverage to work on, since if they’re chronically tight they can impinge on major nerves innervating large sections of the body, so they can be responsible for a lot of referred pain. This is hard to get at with a massage gun for obvious anatomical reasons, but Valentin is working on a solution. Last I checked he’s designing parts with a 3D printer but could use a mechanically inclined collaborator to get the whole thing working, so if you’re interested I’d be happy to connect you.
Basic physical science education for a toddler
My 2 ¹⁄₂ year old son Danny has various toy trains he plays with, including a couple Thomas the Tank Engine style trains. His Thomas is a Brio-style train you can push along a wooden track, but his Percy has an electric motor he can switch on and off that drives the wheels. When I found him touching Percy’s wheels to Thomas’s to drive Thomas’s wheels with the power of Percy’s motor, I decided he was ready to absorb information about gears and other simple machines.
The iPad “educational games on machines we could find seemed actively bad, and the main apparent transfer learning effect was that he started hitting his little brother.
One thing we tried was watching the David MacAulay cartoon series The Way Things Work, on YouTube. He hated it a few months prior when I offered it to him, but now he appreciates it some. We started with the episode on gears. When we got to an episode on flight, he was interested enough—and mentioned that he wanted to fly—that I looked up which kites were recommended on Metafilter and Reddit, and ended up buying an Into the Wind Kids’ Delta kite, which we flew on the next convenient windy day. I’m glad I bothered to find a nice one, as it flew noticeably more easily than the ones I remember from my childhood (which kind of put me off kites).
I bought a toy gear set from a local toy shop with bolts to attach them to a board, and drill bits you can put on either a fixed handle or a toy power drill to drive the bolts or the gears. He’s getting proficient with that.
Another thing I did was order a bunch of educational kits through Walmart.com. He enjoyed helping me put together an LED-powered windmill (he handed me the screws) and was excited to go out and see the wind turn the blades fast enough to power the light. He likes playing with the pulley set we ordered, but it’s flimsy, and I’d like to buy or build him a better one. Other kits I have queued up:
- Water purification kit
- Electric motor circuit kit
- Battery-powered fan circuit kit
- Fruit battery powered light circuit kit
- Magic Schoolbus 10-activity mechanics kit we found at Barnes and Noble for $10 - haven’t looked carefully at it yet.
Danny’s also interested in the idea of rockets and I’d love to give him some safe practical experience with very simple rocketry principles, so I wrote to a localish rocketry group asking if anyone would be interested in showing him what they know.

All this is an inferior substitute to having friends doing interesting physical work that they are happy to explain and demonstrate to their very young new friend. Our live-in landlord is happy to let Danny watch and when safe and convenient participate in the home improvements he does. In another year or so Danny might be ready to learn some basic carpentry from the father of a childhood friend of mine if he’s willing to teach. Designing and bulding his own kite might actually be a good craft project for him after he’s able to draw simple shapes like rectangles freeform.
Some things I can do
I’ve invested a fair amount of time into cooking. I often optimize on time-quality tradeoffs but frequently throw things together from why’s laying around that impresses people. When I lived in Harlem there was a Paulownia tree with branches touching our balcony. I looked it up and found the flowers were edible, so I made cheese omelettes with Paulownia flowers for houseguests. Eventually I set up a drip agriculture garden on the balcony to grow herbs, which are relatively high value per square inch of space. We didn’t have an outdoor tap, so I bought a rain bucket to feed the drip system, and filled it up with a hose running from the kitchen sink about once a week.
I also have some accumulated knowledge on simple nutritional health hacks that seem to frequently get good results when people bother to try them (e.g. for anxiety, try magnesium BEFORE trying benzos, the side effect profile is much milder and MANY people are deficient in magnesium).
I’m not an expert at Tai Chi but I can teach a few things about balance; this causes people to think I’m a lot stronger than I am because with clear consciousness of balance (center of mass etc) it’s much easier to pick up heavy objects and move them around without much strain. Looking into Feldenkrais and other paradigms has given me an implied catalog of cheap-to-try mind-body heuristics that some friends report legit helping them, which I only bring up in conversation when I have reason to think they’d be actually useful (e.g. a friend reported hip problems that made me suggest wearing an eyepatch sometimes, which seemed to help with identifying and fixing lateral asymmetries).
1. ^
  Here’s my whole response to the friend in case anyone could use the info.
  A few principles & heuristics:
  If you are already readily conscious of the sensation in a muscle, and know how to move it through its full range of motion under normal loads, then the only reason to massage it is to transiently relax it in order to access muscles under it. Blank spots, ticklish spots, extremely tender muscles, or very weak or chronically shortened muscles are good candidates for massage.
  Pay attention to which muscles are partial or total antagonists. If you have conscious trouble with one muscle, check for its antagonist or other muscles in the cluster to see whether one of those is a better candidate for focus.
  Start with fast vibrations to superficially relax, work up to slower deep penetration.
  If you start feeling warmth or itching that’s a good sign that you’re oxygenating tissue that needed it. Ideally go deeper once the warmth/itching fades. I don’t have a strong sense of whether it’s good or bad to push through some muscle pain in the process; Valentin seemed to think it was fine as long as it’s not so painful that you involuntarily brace or something. But plausibly it would be more effective in the long run to be more patient. FAFO I guess.
  The muscles running along the spine just to each side are particularly high-leverage since it’s common for them to be weak and tight, and they impinge on major nerves that innervate much of the body. You won’t be able to reach them well at some spinal latitudes holding a massage gun yourself—Valentin is developing a machine to help with that—but a partner or a lacrosse ball can help. Twisting around the point in various ways once you’ve got some pressure on it can help too.
  Looking up images or videos of e.g. the deep shoulder muscles (rotator cuff, pectoralis minor, serratus, etc), the deep hip/abdominal muscles (e.g. iliacus and psoas) was helpful for me.

Levels of Republicanism

BenquoMay 13, 2025, 8:35 AM

23 points

8 comments6 min readLW link

(benjaminrosshoffman.com)

Benquo Feb 10, 2025, 3:36 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Hzn’s comment on: Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics
I built the explanatory model based on my experience employed by and reading about other vaguely analogous institutions, but an acquaintance who’d previously worked at the World Bank said it seemed like an accurate characterization of that institution as well.

Benquo Jan 31, 2025, 5:32 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Predation as Payment for Criticism
The post describes how predation creates a specific gradient favoring better modeling of predator behavior. While fact that most predated species don’t develop high intelligence is Bayesian evidence against this explanation, it’s very weak counterevidence because general self-aware intelligence is a very narrow target. More importantly, why would sexual selection specifically target intelligence rather than any other trait?
Looking at peacocks, we can see what appears to be an initial predation-driven selection for looking like they had big intimidating eyes on their backs (similar to butterflies), followed by sexual selection amplifying along roughly that same gradient direction.

Predation as Payment for Criticism

BenquoJan 30, 2025, 1:06 AM

10 points

6 comments1 min readLW link

(benjaminrosshoffman.com)

Benquo Jan 20, 2025, 1:37 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Guilt, Shame, and Depravity
Contempt of court penalties for noncompliance with an investigative process is a mainstream example of 1.
Burning Man has some aspects of the second, as do some camping trips, or simply living in a relatively harsh climate. Compare measured levels of corruption in southern vs northern Europe, for instance. When modern democracies fight big wars, the first year involves learning which parts of their warfighting institutions are corrupt and incompetent, & repairing or replacing them.

Benquo 16 Jan 2025 2:22 UTC
8 points
1
on: Rough Sketch for Product to Enhance Citizen Participation in Politics
Your proposal is well-structured and interesting but has a fundamental flaw that needs to be addressed. Interest keyword-based filtering will primarily encourage politics-as-identity, which is actively harmful—it directs attention towards zero-sum thinking and performative identities, rather than creative problem solving. As Bryan Caplan demonstrates in The Myth of the Rational Voter, people already tend to vote to express identities and affiliations rather than to achieve better outcomes. We shouldn’t build tools that further entrench this destructive pattern.
Instead, imagine a tool that:
1. Has users journal daily about their life—activities, hopes, problems, and worries
2. Uses AI to identify where their constraints are plausibly caused by or could be alleviated by government action, especially local government
3. Maps them to specific opportunities for formal recourse, with guidance on process, likely outcomes, and practical assistance (like drafting letters or legal documents)
4. For issues requiring collective action, connects users facing similar constraints and helps coordinate through mechanisms like dominant assurance contracts where appropriate
This approach would ground political participation in the solving of one’s own problems rather than identity expression. While technically more challenging to implement than interest-based filtering, it would generate higher-quality engagement that expands our collective problem-solving capacity rather than just reallocating political power between existing interest groups.
The patterns emerging from aggregated user experiences would naturally reveal systemic issues and preventive opportunities, especially in how regulations and policies interact to shape people’s choices and planning horizons. While building reliable AI judgment about political causation is challenging, it’s better to attempt something hard that would be beneficial if feasible, than to facilitate the destructive forces of identity-based politics simply because they’re easier to implement.

LLMs for language learning

Benquo15 Jan 2025 14:08 UTC

10 points

2 comments7 min readLW link

(benjaminrosshoffman.com)

Benquo

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