Haven’t tried them.
I figure they’re safer than literal bare feet, giving all the objective benefits and some (fewer) of the questionable benefits. I stick with bare feet, sith it’s easier—arguably the default action—compared to the trivial inconvenience of getting better shoes.
Many small corrections:
Buddha statues on the alter → altar
Then acquaintenances. → acquaintances
recipe for Ecstacy → ecstasy
Lots of mandelas → mandalas
it was the hard doing math or lifting weights is hard. → it was hard like doing math or lifting weights is hard.
that had more subjective conscious experience → that I had
Lovecraftian summing ritual → summoning
Your criticisms are mostly correct. I wrote the post to justify my actions rather than tell robust truth. Posting it as-is on LessWrong was my mistake.
“Entangled closer with physical reality” was a poor choice of words. I meant something closer to “experience my surroundings in more detail”.
Reducing what you need implies broadening what you tolerate, in the same sense that a system with fewer axioms has more models. Interpreting it as twisted greed-avoidance is novel and odd to me. If you get used to walking barefoot, then you can better handle situations where you lack shoes. On further reflection, that broadening is small compared to other methods (as learning a language).
What exactly does “predictable” mean here?
You can infer the toki pona word (phrase) to match a meaning by joining words (standard base concepts) according to meaning-clusters of the base words and rules for adjective order. That is, making a toki pona word-phrase, you only need to understand the intended meaning of the whole phrase and the small set of base words.
Likewise, understanding a word-phrase to a good approximation depends only on the words in it and their arrangement. Understanding it exactly depends on context and conventions that build up around common terms.
If the phrase for “phone” means “speech tool”, how do I tell between phone and loudspeaker or cough drop?
You can add more adjectives (“phone” could be “tool of distant speech” and “loudspeaker”, “tool of strong speech”), or cope via context.
If I want to say “apricot” do I need to say “small soft orange when ripe nonfuzzy stone deciduous tree fruit”? Or do I just say something shorter like ‘orange fruit’ and hope the other guy guesses which kind of orange fruit I mean?
The latter is exactly what you do. If context leaves ambiguity, you add as many adjectives as needed, changing “fruit” to “orange fruit” to “small soft orange stone tree fruit”.
How would I say “feldspar”? “Rock type #309″? How would I say “acetaminophen”?
Toki pona is less opportune when you need great precision like that. I see three solutions
mash together lots of adjectives (feldspar = silicon-oxygen crystal + other details = square rock of bodily air and of moderate power movement …)
use numbers and symbols according to reductionism and the topic in question (acetaminophen = one-circly two-armed “C8H9NO2”)
bring in a loanword/proper adjective (“misikeke Asitaminopen”)
If you call a multi-word phrase a word, we can more appositely claim that the formation of words and their associations to meanings, in toki pona, is very systematic and predictable. However many words it truly has, toki pona remains very easy to learn. The definition of “word” is flexible/arbitrary, but that final observation is most obviously consistent with the few-words view.
You would wash your hands properly at all the appropriate times.
You would study with spaced repetition.
You would stop looking at (mainstream, megacorporate) social media.
The ability to quickly recall what I studied for its application.
I thought that was obvious. Why do you ask? What am I missing?
You almost always have some information to concentrate your priors. Between mutually-helpful speakers, implicit with an answer to a question is that the answer gives all the information you have on the question that could benefit the questioner. E.g.
What will the closing price of Apple be at the end of the year?
“Almost certainly somewhere between $150 and $250.”
positive statements like “Stay away from the wires” are more effective than negative statements, like “Don’t touch the wires,” because your brain basically ignores the negative part of it. “*mumble mumble* touch the wires? Don’t mind if I do!”
That’s what I was going for with
When reading or hearing a negation used in language, you must first process the positive form it contains to understand the entire statement. For example, to understand “the sky is not green”, you must first understand “the sky is green”, then negate it. Usually, this happens quickly and subconsciously, but it can harmfully slow down or weaken understanding by making you first consider a false idea.
I predict that it mostly gets worked around, by using only a few extra words.
“The sky is something other than blue” and “I will be somewhere else tomorrow” are both semantically-equivalent to the forbidden forms. Even “I deny that the sky is blue” is a positive-form negation of the object-level statement.
I suspect all such workarounds depend on one of a relatively small set of negation-enabling words, such as “other”, “else”, and “deny”, as you demonstrate. Prohibiting more words should eventually block all workarounds, while making writing more annoying.
bury the pen
get a similar pen, put substitute pen in (expected) place of The Pen, and leave The Pen elsewhere
disassemble the pen, reassemble just before sale to Einstein
send it to other people to hold it thru a few steps, like The Onion Router
leave it innocuously in a collection of similar pens
get someone else to do Einstein’s work in 1855, before the evil forces can steal the pen
destroy the pen, get a new one just before sale
destroy the pen, trust that Einstein will find another (he’s really smart, right?)
throw it in a haystack
chemically modify it to be transparent
send the pen to the moon (and hope we can get it back later without relativity)
carry the pen with you at all times to defend it
repeatedly mail it to yourself, so it’ll be “lost” in the postage system for most of the time
send it to Albert’s ancestors and convince them to pass it down as an heirloom
put the pen in a safe (why is this #15?)
surround the pen with something repulsive, to discourage thieves
write with the pen until it’s empty of ink, to discourage thieves (then refill it in 1904)
throw it in a forest
throw it in the ocean
leave glue on the pen (and the pen secured in place), so the thieves get stuck to it
obfuscate your location, so the evil forces don’t know where to look
kill/incapacitate the evil forces
jump to 1905 via time travel (without relativity? hard)
seal it in a lightbulb (or structurally-closest equivalent; they might not have been invented yet)
swallow the pen
leave it to someone else to figure out
put the pen at the end of an obstacle course
the pen is mightier than the sword, so use it to fight the evil forces already
bribe the evil forces to stop conspiring
wrap the pen in many layers
leave it at the top of a mountain
have HPMOR!Quirrell make it a horcrux
establish a cult to worship the pen and protect it
bake the pen into a dish
throw it in the sewer
throw it in Antarctica
convince a church that the pen is holy, and give it to them
get lots of copies of the pen, and scatter them, so if a few get stolen, there’ll still be at least one
make a deal with the devil
suspend the pen in the sky with a balloon
leave lubricant on the pen, so the thieves can’t grip it
wrap wood around it and make it one of a pair of drum-sticks
put the pen in such an obvious place the evil forces will assume it’s fake
leave the pen on a messy, easily-ignored desk
throw it in a parallel universe
give the pen to the evil forces … fooled them! that’s a fake, now they’ll stop looking
throw it in a bush
make the pen a step in a Rube Goldberg machine
leave neurotoxin on the pen, so the thieves die
banish the pen to Iceland