btrettel

Karma: 621

btrettel 19 Jan 2015 18:18 UTC
29 points
in reply to: Dorikka’s comment on: Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015
I meant to post something about my experience with armodafinil about a year ago, but I never got around to it. My overall experience was strongly negative. Looks like I did write a long post in a text file a day or so after taking armodafinil, so here’s what I had to say back then:

Some background:

I’m a white male in my mid-20s. I have excessive daytime sleepiness, and I believe this is because I’m a long sleeper who has difficulty getting an adequate duration of sleep. There are several long sleepers in my family. My mother and I tend to not like how stimulants make us feel, e.g., pseudoephedrine makes us fairly nervous, though it will help our nasal congestion from allergies and help wake us up. I was interested in trying modafinil because I hear it has proportionally less of the negative effects compared against its wake-promoting effects.

My neurologist gave me a few samples of armodafinil, which is basically a variant of modafinil. I was busy in the month after I met my neurologist last and didn’t think about taking it at all, but come mid-February I remembered to try it.

Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014:

I woke up at 8:30 am, as I usually did, and started eating a chocolate chip muffin for breakfast. During the breakfast I took 4000 IU of vitamin D and 150 mg of armodafinil. I took these at 8:37 am.

I started organizing files on my computer. I still felt fairly tired, and considered going back to sleep, but I did not because I try to keep a very regular sleep schedule. I will take naps in the afternoon (before 8 pm, or so, to avoid delaying my bedtime) if necessary, but I try to wait until then. Until around 10:30 am, I thought armodafinil was doing absolutely nothing. I know armodafinil takes some time to kick in, but I didn’t expect that long. Maybe I’m one of the people for which modafinil doesn’t work?

At around 11 am I realized that I felt weird. It was obvious that the armodafinil had kicked in fierce at that point. I checked my heart rate: 75 bpm, which is higher than normal, though not as high as other stimulants take me. I wouldn’t quite describe how I felt as more awake, though I don’t think I could involuntarily fall asleep now. It felt as if I could fall asleep if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I felt a bit more nervous, perhaps, but that might just be the placebo effect. It certainly was not as strong as what 60 mg of pseudoephedrine does to me. I got a phone call from my apartment manager saying that they’ll be showing my apartment today, so I (slowly) started sweeping and vacuuming to make my apartment a bit more presentable. I was pacing around like crazy while doing this.

At about 11:30 am I took a shower. I started realizing that I have no impulse control. Instead of washing myself, I’d start, get distracted by some thought, think about that for a while, realize I’m in the shower, forget where I was in my shower routine, etc. I started thinking that armodafinil might have given me ADHD, which is odd given that I’ve read it might be useful for the treatment of ADHD.

After the shower I consulted the note packet that came with the armodafinil. Given what these notes said, I think I was experiencing a side effect. The notes said to discontinue use of armodafinil if you experience these symptoms. “Okay, can do.” is what I thought.

I went to the LessWrong meetup and told Vaniver that I think armodafinil is not doing nice things for me. Another LWer suggested that perhaps these effects go away with repeated use; I said that I didn’t know, but I don’t intend to find out. During the entire meetup I had a lot of difficulty sitting still. I got up a few times to get water, or a napkin, or a bag of chips, but I don’t think I actually wanted any of those things; I guess I just didn’t want to stay still.

The early afternoon is the hardest time for me to stay awake, and this meetup spanned that time entirely. I yawned a few times during the meetup, but I didn’t become so drowsy that I had to take a nap, as I often do. I take this as evidence that armodafinil helps my EDS, though it’s not that strong because I never really felt “awake” during this entire process. I felt really weird in a way that I can’t quite describe.

After the meetup (about 4 pm), I rode my bike to the downtown library to return a book. Purely subjectively, I’d say armodafinil increased my endurance. I’m in reasonable shape now, but I felt that I could maintain 20+ mph easier today than a few days ago. Objectively, though, it doesn’t seem that my average speed increased much if at all; it was about 13 mph on Saturday and 12 to 13 on most days.

When I got back to my apartment, I felt a little better. Still fidgety and easily distracted, but slightly better. Perhaps the exercise helps, or the armodafinil was wearing off? I go running around now usually anyway, so I hoped this would help more. I went on a run, but it didn’t have quite the effect the bike ride did. I then started making dinner, but I was continually distracted by my computer through that.

I noticed that my tinnitus was much worse today. Not sure if this was due to the armodafinil, but it sounded at least 10 dB louder than usual. Ambient noises could not mask it.

Around 10 pm, I started feeling more tired, so I figured the armodafinil must be wearing off. I still felt odd and easily distracted, though. I read on my couch for a while until I felt as if I could fall asleep quickly, and I slept briefly on my couch. I woke up and moved to my bed, where it took me a while to fall asleep again, but I did. I woke up several times during the night and felt I had to try quite a few positions before I found something comfortable. This wasn’t particularly restful. Otherwise, I don’t think armodafinil did much to my nighttime sleep. I think if it hadn’t caused some manic symptoms, I probably wouldn’t have had any issues sleeping.

Sunday, Feb. 16, 2014:

I still felt a little odd when I woke up, but it was very obvious now that these effects were wearing off. I had read that armodafinil has a half-life of about 12 to 15 hours, so using a simple exponential decay with a conservative half-life, I saw that I still had the equivalent of about 45 mg of armodafinil in my system. Tomorrow morning that decrease to about 15 mg; after the third day it’s down to 5 mg. I can’t wait for this to be out of my system.

Overall, I’d say taking armodafinil was worthwhile as I learned something about myself, which is that I probably should avoid stimulants as much as possible.

(Not from my original intended post: I want to note that I’m doing much better now, after getting more sleep. No stimulants necessary. I haven’t seen a neurologist since I wrote the post above and probably won’t again.)

btrettel 3 Dec 2015 4:09 UTC
27 points
on: LessWrong 2.0
You bring up a number of important points. Perhaps I missed this when reading, but one role LessWrong plays and continues to play is a good source of discussion. Often I’ll find the discussion to be more interesting than a particular article. It’s not uncommon for me to be linked to a particular comment divorced from its larger context and not be interested in the larger context. I don’t know how common this behavior is, but this is not uncommon for me, and I don’t think replacing the rationalist materials with a wiki or Q&A site would suit this well at all. This is one reason to favor something like Reddit.

I’m also generally not a fan of shutting down even semi-active forums. In one online community I’ve participated in, there were several major forum closures, and each time there was a period of confusion about what to do if you’re interested in discussion, along with basically sectarian posturing to get active posters. The sectarian stuff caused major problems down the line, and the current discussion forum for this community more or less voluntarily avoids those conflicts now. There also are a number of roles LessWrong plays that I’m not sure would survive a transition to the diaspora, like the page about sharing academic papers. I also often enjoy reading the open threads. Perhaps transitioning LessWrong more towards discussion would be a good middle ground.

Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.

btrettel 1 Jul 2015 2:14 UTC
16 points
0
in reply to: jacob_cannell’s comment on: Solving sleep: just a toe-dipping
You are absolutely correct. Thank you. It appears I misread the abstract, which is worrisome, but I’m glad to have been corrected. I added a note to the original post retracting that statement. I also tracked down another post where I made the same claim and retracted the claim there. I’ll have to read things more carefully*.

I am now not aware of any studies which looked at the long term effects of melatonin supplementation. I would not be surprised at all if oral melatonin lost effectiveness over time, though I recall gwern saying he did not see evidence of a tolerance effect. I also think people claim many positive things about melatonin that don’t seem to check out (negative things, too, in my case). In particular, I don’t see solid reasons to believe melatonin improves sleep quality. It seems to basically only shift the circadian cycle, which can be useful in circadian rhythm disorders and insomnia. I don’t have my papers available right now, but I can pull up a few on melatonin’s effect on sleep architecture if you are interested. (I’ll probably do this anyway just to make sure I read them correctly after the mistake you highlighted!)

* To be honest, when I was reading studies about sleep a year-ish ago, I was very tired. My motivation was understanding why I might be so tired during the day. I should not be surprised if I was sloppy through this process. I decided I’m a long sleeper, and I’ve been considerably better since trying to get as much a sleep as possible.

btrettel 30 Dec 2014 20:52 UTC
15 points
in reply to: pan’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015
I disrecommend this practice for text and equations. It will save you a small amount of time up front, but may cost you more overall. First, your ability to search is compromised depending on how much is a graphic. I search fairly frequently, especially when I want to update a card. That’s the second disadvantage: you can’t update a card so easily now. There’s a third disadvantage: Typing up a paragraph from a book (in your own words) has additional learning benefits.

A fourth disadvantage is that different sources may have different notation. I’ve struggled to keep consistent notation for a number of my decks. You don’t have much of a choice in the notation if you just take screenshots. It is a good idea to have multiple notations in your decks, but my suggestion would be to have consistent notation for the main cards and have extra cards about the less common notations.

In my experience, deciding what to add takes much more time than adding it. I make this as easy as possible by noting what I think is important when reading, reviewing, etc. I have lists of text files of things to add along with where to find more information. I have a Beeminder goal to add 3 cards daily that I don’t mark as easy right off the bat, and I generally think about what would be most useful to myself and take them from my text files. (What I add tends to be technical, e.g., I am relearning combustion theory at the moment. 3 a day is reasonable for this, but the rate should depend on the subject and how much time you can invest.)

Graphical things are okay to take from books. However, I will frequently make my own graphic for the learning benefits and because I want to tweak/improve what I see.

btrettel 23 Aug 2015 21:22 UTC
13 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Instrumental Rationality Questions Thread
One strategy I’ve seen recommended is to ramble a bit, including potential conversation starters on topics which are more interesting to you as part of the ramble.

For example, let’s say you’re talking with someone you just met in the laundry room of your apartment building. You’re talking about the weather, or something similar. You want to see if this person is interested in cooking, so as you load some clothes you casually mention how you made a mess of your shirt last time you cooked to see if they bite.

I have not tried this myself, but it seems very general and subtle enough that it’s not out of the ordinary.

btrettel 30 Jul 2015 23:58 UTC
13 points
on: Wear a Helmet While Driving a Car
Good suggestion. I’m a cyclist and sometimes I walk around wearing my bike helmet. Some people give me funny looks, but I don’t care. To regularly wear helmets, you have to recognize that avoiding TBI is more important than looking slightly silly or messing up your hair. Unfortunately most people don’t get this. I think if helmets become more popular people will find that they don’t actually mind the look, as you suggested in another comment.

Risk compensation is one potential problem with wearing a helmet. An example was mentioned in the original post: drivers passing cyclists who wear helmets closer. Also concerning is that cyclists ride more dangerously if they wear helmets (here’s an article which I haven’t read in full, but it discusses this issue). I imagine seat belts have a similar effect, as might drivers wearing helmets. Based on this idea backwards, I’ve read a proposal to add a spike to steering wheels to reduce dangerous driving.

Also worth noting is that avoiding long commutes and drives improves safety. Risk (probably) increases monotonically with duration.

One last suggestion would be to drive with a dashcam to make yourself slightly safer. I ride my bike with a very obvious helmet cam and I have observed that some drivers seem to drive safer around me when they notice it. I’m recording them, so if they make a bad move they’ll be much worse off in court. I also think the camera makes me ride safer for the same reasons.

btrettel 19 Feb 2014 4:46 UTC
13 points
on: Open Thread for February 18-24 2014
Given the importance of communication style in interpersonal relationships, I am looking to create an OkCupid question to determine if someone is an asker/teller or guesser. I’m having difficulty creating an unbiased question. Any way I’ve written the question makes ask/tell seem obviously better, e.g., here are two possibilities:
1. When you want someone to do something for you, do you prefer to ask them directly or do you prefer to mention something related and expect that they infer what you want?
2. Should your partner “just know” what you want without you ever saying so explicitly?
That perception might just be my own bias. Quite a few people I know would probably answer #2 as yes.

Unfortunately, this question probably won’t be answered very often, so it’s also useful to look for a proxy. Vaniver suggested a question about gifts when I mentioned this at a meetup, and I believe he meant the question “How often should your significant other buy you gifts, jewelry, or other things more expensive than, say, dinner, cards, or flowers?” This question is a reasonable proxy because many guessers I know seem to expect people to “just know” what sort of gifts are appropriate for them. Unfortunately, many guessers might not care that someone buys things for them with any regularity.

Another possibility is “Imagine that a friend asks you to read a short story they wrote. Unfortunately, you find it to be very boring. Which is closest to how you might respond when they ask you what you think of it?” I think that indirectly gets to the core of the ask vs. guess issue. Saying negative things is considered inappropriate to most guessers. Any other potential proxy questions?

btrettel 4 Feb 2014 22:24 UTC
13 points
on: Open Thread for February 3 − 10
How do you organize your computer files? How do you maintain organization of your computer files? Anyone have any tips or best practices for computer file organization?

I’ve recently started formalizing my computer file organization. For years my computer file organization would have been best described as ad-hoc and short-sighted. Even now, after trying to clean up the mess, when I look at some directories from 5 or more years ago I have a very hard time telling what separates two different versions of the same directory. I rarely left README like files explaining what’s what, mostly because I didn’t think about it.

Here are a few things I’ve learned:
- Decide on a reasonable directory structure and iterate towards a better one. I can’t anticipate how my needs would be better served by a different structure in the future, so I don’t try that hard to. I can create new directories and move things around as needed. My current home directory is roughly structured into the following directories: backups, classes, logs, misc (financial info, etc.), music, notes, projects (old projects the preceded my use of version control), reference, svn, temp (files awaiting organization, mostly because I couldn’t immediately think of an appropriate place for them), utils (local executable utilities).
- Symbolic links are necessary when you think a file might fit well in two places in a hierarchy. I don’t care too much about making a consistent rule about where to put the actual file.
- Version control allows you to synchronize files across different computers, share them with others, track changes, roll back to older versions (where you can know what changed based on what you wrote in the log), and encourages good habits (e.g., documenting changes in each revision). I use version control for most of my current projects, even those that do not involve programming (e.g., my notes repository is about 700 text files). I don’t think which version control system you use is that important, though some (e.g., cvs) are worse than others. I use Subversion because it’s simple.
- I store papers, books, and other writings that I keep in a directory named reference. I try to keep a consistent file naming scheme: Author_Year_JournalAbbreviation.pdf. I have a text file that lists my own journal abbreviation conventions. If the file is not from a journal, I’ll use something like “chapter” or “book” as appropriate. (Other people use softwares like Zotero or Mendeley for this purpose. I have Zotero, but mostly use it for citation management because I find it to be inconvenient to use.)
- In terms of naming files, I try to think about how I’d find the file in the future and try to make it obvious if I navigate to the file or search for it. For PDFs, you often can’t search the text, so perhaps my file naming convention should include the paper title to help with searching.
- README files explaining things in a directory are often very helpful, especially after returning to a project after several years. Try to anticipate what you might not remember about a project several years disconnected from it.
- Synchronizing files across different computers seems to encourage me to make sure the directory structure makes at least some sense. My main motivation in cleaning things up was to make synchronizing files easier. I use rsync; another popular option is Dropbox.
Using scripts to help maintain your files is enormously helpful. My goals are to have descriptive file names, to have correct permissions (important for security; I’ve found that files that touched a Windows system often have completely wrong permissions), to minimize disk space used, and to interact well with other computers. I have a script that I titled “flint” (file system lint) that does the following and more:
- checks for duplicate files, sorting them by file size (fdupes doesn’t do that; my script is pretty crude and not yet worth sharing)
- scans for Windows viruses
- checks for files with bad permissions (777, can’t be written to, can’t be read, executable when it shouldn’t be, etc.)
- deletes unneeded files, mostly from other filesystems (.DS_Store, Thumbs.db, Desktop.ini, .bak and .asv files where the original exists, core dumps, etc.)
- checks for nondescriptive file names (e.g., New Folder, untitled, etc.)
- checks for broken symbolic links
- lists the largest files on my computer
- lists the most common filenames on my computer
- lists empty directories and empty files
I’d be very interested in any other tips, as I often find my computer file organization to be a bottleneck in my productivity.

btrettel 9 Mar 2015 18:24 UTC
12 points
in reply to: DataPacRat’s comment on: Open thread, Mar. 9 - Mar. 15, 2015
You can’t ever be entirely sure if an idea wasn’t thought of before. But, if you care to demonstrate originality, you can try an extensive literature review to see if anyone else has thought of the same idea. After that, the best you can say is that you haven’t seen anyone else with the same idea.

Personally, I don’t think being the first person to have an idea is worth much. It depends entirely on what you do with it. I tend to do detailed literature reviews because they help me generate ideas, not because they help me verify that my ideas are original.

btrettel 30 Nov 2016 16:19 UTC
11 points
in reply to: namespace’s comment on: On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus
I’ll second the suggestion that we should consider other options. While I know Vaniver personally and believe he would do an excellent job, I think Vaniver would agree that considering other candidates too would be a wise choice. (Narrow framing is one of the “villians” of decision making in a book on decision making he suggested to me, Decisive.) Plus, I scanned this thread and I haven’t seen Vaniver say he is okay with such a role.

btrettel 27 Jun 2015 1:01 UTC
10 points
on: Beyond Statistics 101
PCA and other dimensionality reduction techniques are great, but there’s another very useful technique that most people (even statisticians) are unaware of: dimensional analysis, and in particular, the Buckingham pi theorem. For some reason, this technique is used primarily by engineers in fluid dynamics and heat transfer despite its broad applicability. This is the technique that allows scale models like wind tunnels to work, but it’s more useful than just allowing for scaling. I find it very useful to reduce the number of variables when developing models and conducting experiments.

Dimensional analysis recognizes a few basic axioms about models with dimensions and sees what they imply. You can use these to construct new variables from the old variables. The model is usually complete in a smaller number of these new variables. The technique does not tell you which variables are “correct”, just how many independent ones are needed. Identifying “correct” variables requires data, domain knowledge, or both. (And sometimes, there’s no clear “best” variable; multiple work equivalently well.)

Dimensional analysis does not help with categorical variables, or numbers which are already dimensionless (though by luck, sometimes combinations of dimensionless variables are actually what’s “correct”). This is the main restriction that applies. And you can expect at best a reduction in the number of variables of about 3. Dimensional analysis is most useful for physical problems with maybe 3 to 10 variables.

The basic idea is this: Dimensions are some sort of metadata which can tell you something about the structure of the problem. You can always rewrite a dimensional equation, for example, to be dimensionless on both sides. You should notice that some terms become constants when this is done, and that simplifies the equation.

Here’s a physical example: Let’s say you want to measure the drag on a sphere (units: N). You know this depends on the air speed (units: m/s), viscosity (units: m^2/s), air density (units: kg/m^3), and the diameter of the sphere (units: m). So, you have 5 variables in total. Let’s say you want to do a factorial design with 4 levels in each variable, with no replications. You’d have to do 4^4 = 256 experiments. This is clearly too complicated.

What fluid dynamicists have recognized is that you can rewrite the relationship in terms of different variables, and nothing is missing. The Buckingham pi theorem mentioned previously says that we only need 2 dimensionless variables given our 5 dimensional variables. So, instead of the drag force, you use the drag coefficient, and instead of the speed, viscosity, etc., you use the Reynolds number. Now, you only need to do 4 experiments to get the same level of representation.

As it turns out, you can use techniques like PCA on top of dimensional analysis to determine that certain dimensionless parameters are unimportant (there are other ways too). This further simplifies models.

There’s a lot more on this topic than what I have covered and mentioned here. I would recommend reading the book Dimensional analysis and the theory of models for more details and the proof of the pi theorem.

(Another advantage of dimensional analysis: If you discover a useful dimensionless variable, you can get it named after yourself.)
What links here?
- btrettel's comment on Which areas of rationality are underexplored? - Discussion Thread by casebash (12 Dec 2016 21:16 UTC; 2 points)

btrettel 4 Mar 2015 2:36 UTC
10 points
on: Open thread, Mar. 2 - Mar. 8, 2015
I want to make some new friends outside of my current social circle. I’m looking to meet smart and open minded people. What are some activities I could do or groups I could participate in where I’m likely to meet such people?

I’m particularly interested in personal experiences meeting people, rather than speculation, e.g. “I imagine ballroom dancing would be great” is not as good as “I met my partner and best friend ballroom dancing.”

Also of interest would be groups where this is bad, e.g., if ballroom dancing was no good then “I never made any friends ballroom dancing, despite what I initially thought” would be a useful comment.

(I have a small list of candidate groups already, but I want to see what other people suggest to verify my thinking.)

btrettel 7 Jan 2015 1:18 UTC
9 points
on: Negative polyamory outcomes?
My only experience with poly was negative. (There were details here, but I removed them for reasons.)

I have decided that poly is way too complicated for me and I have no intention of pursuing a poly relationship in the future. I left this feeling more like a piece in a collection than a human.

btrettel 11 Dec 2015 1:40 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: hg00’s comment on: LessWrong 2.0
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” is good advice.

There’s no reason to shut down the entire forum if the problems can be solved with less collateral damage.

Having participated in online communities which would somewhat regularly get made fun of by others, I’m not sure I agree that others making fun of an online community tarnishes its reputation in the general population. Seems to me that most people aren’t aware of the people making fun of the community. I think dishonest representations with wider distribution are much more harmful, e.g., RationalWiki’s take on LessWrong. And we should do something about that, but again, I don’t think shutting down the forum is the right approach.

Also, I tend to ignore farewell posts like that. In my experience, they happen regardless of the “health” of the community. I can think of one online community I’ve participated in that regularly has such threads, despite activity being at an all time high. They can describe real problems which should be fixed, but often don’t.

btrettel 2 Mar 2014 3:35 UTC
7 points
on: Open Thread February 25 - March 3
Does anyone have any advice about understanding implicit communication? I regularly interact with guessers and have difficulty understanding their communication. A fair bit of this has to do with my poor hearing, but I’ve had issues even on text based communication mediums where I understand every word.

My strategy right now is to request explicit confirmation of my suspicions, e.g., here’s a recent online chat I had with a friend (I’m A and they’re B):

A: Hey, how have you been?

B: I’ve been ok

B: working in the lab now

A: Okay. Just to be clear, do you mean that you don’t want to be disturbed?

B: yeah

“[W]orking in the lab now” is ambiguous. This friend does sometimes chat online when working in the lab. But, I suspected that perhaps they didn’t want to chat, so I asked explicitly.

Requesting explicit confirmation seems to annoy most guessers. I’ve heard quite a few times that I should “just know” what they mean. Perhaps they think that they have some sort of accurate mental model of others’ intentions, but I don’t think any of us do. Many guessers have been wrong about my thoughts.

I suspect there probably is no good general strategy other than asking for explicit confirmation. Trying to make guessers be askers is tempting, though probably bound to fail in general.

btrettel 4 Feb 2014 21:39 UTC
7 points
in reply to: ThrustVectoring’s comment on: Open Thread for February 3 − 10
I’ve lived car-free for several years now and I think it’s one of the best choices I’ve ever made. I’m saving a lot of money, staying in great shape from biking, and avoiding a stressful commute. Most people think I’m an eccentric for this, but I’m okay with that.

btrettel 30 Nov 2016 16:31 UTC
6 points
in reply to: casebash’s comment on: On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus
Some sort of emoticon could work, like what Facebook does.

Personally, I find the lack of feedback from an upvote or downvote to be discouraging. I understand that many people don’t want to take the time to provide a quick comment, but personally I think that’s silly as a 10 second comment could help a lot in many cases. If there is a possibility for a 1 second feedback method to allow a little more information than up or down, I think it’s worth trying.

btrettel 1 Nov 2016 0:48 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Cariyaga’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 31 - Nov. 6, 2016
I did a fair amount of research into various techniques for reducing sleep need.

There are certain drugs which increase deep sleep at the expense of other stages (preferably at the expense of light sleep). It is plausible these drugs could reduce sleep need. However, I should note that there are no studies into whether these actually reduce sleep need. This is purely speculation. Some candidates include ritanserin (available only for research purposes), trazodone (a common anti-depressant, used more commonly for insomnia), mirtazapine, pregabalin, gabapentin, and GHB. GHB is extremely highly regulated and is only available by prescription for narcolepsy. Moreover, it appears to be highly dangerous and I absolutely recommend against it. I should note that some of these drugs may have unacceptable side effects, or even unknown effects in the case of ritanserin. Ritanserin, however, is the strongest deep sleep booster I have seen.

With that being said, it’s not clear that the lighter stages of sleep are unnecessary, and there could be serious adverse affects from taking these drugs regularly for these purposes. I do not recommend taking these drugs for these purposes.

My impression from the research was that no stimulant actually reduces sleep requirements. And I would count the -afinils as stimulants; the promotional literature wants to believe otherwise, but I see no reason to justify that. Future narcolepsy treatments may perform much better than stimulants do in terms of feeling, by physically turning off sleep signals in the brain. However, I suspect this would be ill advised for long term use absent narcolepsy.

As for behavioral interventions, as I recall, there is reasonable evidence that exercise increases deep sleep.

If you are interested, I could dig up the studies on these topics again and give you some things to read.

Edit: I also want to add that the drugs I listed above are not anticholinergic, or are only mildly so (e.g., trazodone). Anticholinergic drugs could contribute to mental decline when taken for long periods of time. From what I understand many antihistamines which cause drowsiness also would increase deep sleep, but I would not recommend taking them for long periods of time due to the anticholinergic effects these drugs have. So taking benadryl daily to improve your sleep quality is probably a bad idea.

btrettel 30 Jul 2015 23:35 UTC
6 points
on: The horrifying importance of domain knowledge
Addressing common misconceptions is worthwhile, and lists are a good way to do it. You can find similar lists in the academic literature for many different subjects, e.g., here’s an article about common misconceptions in thermodynamics. I’ve also mentioned math books listing counterexamples before. Many counterexamples address common misconceptions.

I like to create Anki cards for common misconceptions, to make sure I don’t makes these mistakes myself. One issue with this is whether correcting specific cases causes my brain to recognize a more general case. I’m not sure it always does, but this is better than nothing. I try to include problem solving in my daily life partly as a way to make my beliefs propagate (e.g., I could realize that something is an example of a principle I have a card for).

Edit: Also, to be pedantic, many of the problems listed in the links above would most charitably be called approximations. Programmers might make these because of laziness, for example. Calling them false beliefs could be misleading as the programmer could know something is false but not care about corner cases.

btrettel 25 Jul 2015 14:06 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Acty’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
The best non-mathematical introduction I have seen is Shape and Flow: The Fluid Dynamics of Drag. This book is fairly short; it has 186 pages, but each page is small and there are many pictures. It explains some basic concepts of fluid dynamics like the Reynolds number, what controls drag at low and high Reynolds numbers, why golf balls (or roughened spheres in general) have less drag than smooth spheres at high Reynolds number (this does not imply that roughening always reduces drag; it does not on streamlined bodies as is explained in the book), how drag can decrease as you increase speed in certain cases, how wind tunnels and other similar scale modeling works, etc.

You could also watch this series of videos on drag. They were made by the same person who wrote Shape and Drag. There is also a related collection of videos on other topics in fluid dynamics.

Beyond that, the most popular undergraduate textbook by Munson is quite good. I’d suggest buying an old edition if you want to learn more; the newer editions do not add anything of value to an autodidact. I linked to the fifth edition, which is what I own.

I’ll offer a few possibilities about why fluids is generally seen as less attractive than QM, but I want to be clear that I think these ideas are all very tentative.

This study suggests that in an artificial music market, the popularity charts are only weakly influenced by the quality of the music. (Note that I haven’t read this beyond the abstract.) Social influence had a much stronger effect. One possible application of this idea to different fields is that QM became more attractive for social reasons, e.g., the Matthew effect is likely one reason.

The vast majority of the field of fluid mechanics is based on classical mechanics, i.e., F = m a is one of the fundamental equations used to derive the Navier-Stokes equations. Maybe because the field is largely based on classical effects, it’s seen as less interesting. This could be particularly compelling for physicists, as novelty is often valued over everything else.

I’ve also previously mentioned that fluid dynamics is more useful than quantum mechanics, so people who believe useless things are better might find QM more interesting.

There also is the related issue that a wide variety of physical science is lumped into the category “physics” at the high school level, so someone with a particular interest might get the mistaken impression that physics covers everything. I majored in mechanical engineering in college, and basically did it because my father did. My interest even when I was a teenager was fluids, but I hadn’t realized that physicists don’t study the subject in any depth. I was lucky to have picked the right major. I suppose this is a social effect of the type mentioned above.

(Also, to be clear, I don’t want to give the impression that more people do QM than fluids. I actually think the opposite is more likely to be true. I’m saying that QM is “cooler” than fluids.)

Fluid mechanics used to be “cooler” back in the late 1800s. Physicists like Rayleigh and Kelvin both made seminal contributions to the subject, but neither received their Nobel for fluids research. I recall reading that two very famous fluid dynamicists in the early 20th century, Prandtl and Taylor, were recommended for the prize in physics, but neither received it. These two made foundational contributions to physics in the broadest sense of the word. Taylor speculated the lack of Nobels for fluid mechanics was due to how the Nobel prize is rewarded. I also recall reading that there was indications that the committee found the mathematical approximations used to be distasteful even when they were very accurate. Unfortunately those approximations were necessary at the time, and even today we still use approximations, though they are different. Maybe the lack of Nobels contributes to fluids not being as “cool” today.