espoire

Karma: 137

espoire 17 Jun 2026 7:25 UTC
2 points
1
on: How to Reason about Your Health Issues
I’ve had really surprising success with this method in past. Admittedly many issues have stumped me, but in three cases I managed to trace the causes back to worse-than-useless dietary advice, causing the person to give themselves a nutrient deficiency by avoiding some important class of food, which then caused a whole host of symptoms. Telling them to eat the necessary food brought immediate and unprecedented relief — at least during weeks where they actually ate any. As it turns out, changing one’s dietary habits is very difficult, and not just for weight loss.
I never actually realized the “outside the body” threshold was significant before you pointed it out. In hindsight though, the only issues I consider myself to have cured are issues which I managed to trace outside the body.

espoire 17 Jun 2026 7:07 UTC
12 points
2
in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: A 400-year timeline of failed attempts to fix a lethal bug in the human software of inherited concepts
I agree with the suggestion for use of plainer language. Make the case for the astonishing significance within the text, but be as plain as possible in the terminology, else I fear you’ll lose the vast majority of your potential future audience.
I consider myself fairly erudite, and a connoisseur of etymology, and yet the phrase “effective chrono-lucropia” is very nearly opaque to me. I still don’t understand what the ‘effective’ part is meant to signify, and my best guess at dissecting “chrono-lucropia” is: chrono=time, lucre=wealth or money, opia=seeing. If anything, the concept under discussion would seem to be ineffective time-moneyseeing as far as I can tell? In that almost everyone is naively terrible (not effective) at seeing money through time?
I included the above, not seeking explanation, but rather attempting to demonstrate how illusion of transparency and surprising inferential distances play out for a reader new to the topic. I would imagine other potential readers may have different confusions. These are meant to be supporting evidence in favor of “plain-language terminology should be preferred”.

espoire 8 Jun 2026 23:47 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: PK’s comment on: Words as Hidden Inferences
I think it was intended as a caution against a common bit of anti-epistemology that maybe you neither have done nor have yet encountered from others.
Namely: constructing a contrived definition for some purpose, and then when people complain about the problems your strange definition is causing for them, the one defends their choices with “it’s just a definition bro, chill”, essentially.
Often this happens when some really deeply technical definition collides with the same word having escaped into common usage. …or as often prompts vitriol in social media: some mischief-maker/malefactor is deliberately manipulating words to try to control other people.
I’ve definitely heard the “you can define a word any way you want” argument in the wild, and prior to Eliezer’s writing, I hadn’t heard the appropriate rejoinder that actually some definitions cause more or less problems for different people.

espoire 8 Jun 2026 14:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Morphism’s comment on: Games that change your mind
Random thought: I think we humans named “negative“ and “positive“ curvature backwards. Positive curvature decreases the distance between objects as they seem to move apart. Negative curvature increases the distance between objects as they seem to move apart. I feel like a hypothetical world where the names “negative“ and “positive“ had been swapped at inception would be more human-intuitive.

espoire 4 Jun 2026 5:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Many people lack basic scientific knowledge
I’ve noticed I can only concretely work at recursion layer 3 on a good day, and even when it works, it gives me a nasty headache and brain fog following.
Best example I can remember: I was doing a character voice (like, all day, for everything). Call this character-1. On that day, I read a story book aloud.
Yeesh, I’m getting a mild headache just composing this text.
When reading story books, I create, remember, and do voices for the characters who speak. Since I was in-character all day, I was doing those character voices as if character-1 was doing them. Call all the characters at this layer character-2. Taxing, but I can do that for about an hour at a stretch.
Then a character-2 starts in-story mimicking another character’s voice. So now I’m trying to figure out what it sounds like when my all-day character-1 does a voice for character-2 who is himself doing a voice for character-3.
I… managed it, but cue a sudden intense headache and complete mental exhaustion as if I’d been programming for 8 hours.

espoire 4 Jun 2026 3:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Pat K’s comment on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 1
I figured the lich might’ve been Harry JPEV, what with how he carries a phylactery with the soul of an immortal dark wizard in it. (His ring containing the transfigured Voldemort.)

espoire 29 May 2026 2:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Stevie Lantalia Metke’s comment on: When Programmers Don’t Understand Code, Don’t Blame The User
Wait, what? I write JS daily and I still thought an arrow function was just syntactic sugar for a regular function, and behaviorally identical. Wild.
I guess my habit of basically-never passing ’this’ into nested functions (and explicitly using .bind or .call every time when I need to control ‘this’) has been more beneficial than I knew.

espoire 27 May 2026 6:39 UTC
3 points
0
on: Taking woo seriously but not literally
A self-described witch once taught me a spell for “freeing oneself from [the ongoing bad vibes left behind by] someone who has hurt you“.
Write out a big long letter addressed to that person, listing the major ways they wronged you, and how you feel/felt, and how that has affected your life since that time. Fold the pages of the letter all up, and seal with wax. Go to a natural scene. Arrange and light a ring of five candles. Place the letter within the ring. Burn the letter. Extinguish the candles one-by-one. Bury or scatter the ashes once cool.
And like, this seems like something that would pretty obviously work for its stated purpose, just going off my grasp of human psychology? Just writing a letter like that out would help. The added symbolism of literally watching your grievances go up in flames probably does something to help the mental changes sink in.
That was my ~only experience with witchcraft, besides just knowing the person for years. It made me think there’s probably a lot of real effective rituals mixed into the “supernatural” framing.
Also I personally got into hypnosis, and there’s definitely something real there.
Hypnosis rarely ever “worked” on me (it ~always worked for just being relaxing, but “it’s just guided meditation” is not how the practice is presented) — but notably it did work a couple times: I’d relax deeply enough to have no conscious memory of some segment of the session, and was informed later that, yes, I was clearly acting afterwards based on the suggestions given during that time.
By contrast, people I’ve hypnotized report about a 50% success rate at getting that effect. From this, I infer that either “hypnosis just works better on some people / doesn’t work on other people” is true, and/or that the skill level of the hypnotist matters quite a lot. (Although I’d say most of my skill, if that’s even real, would be in the form of only attempting it in the most promising circumstances: in comfortable, safe, private places, with a person who knows me well and trusts me deeply.)

espoire 24 May 2026 16:29 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: dmac_93’s comment on: If AI is normal technology, history is not reassuring.
I’d imagine one form of death involves more suffering, but I have no idea which one.

espoire 13 May 2026 4:40 UTC
2 points
0
on: Bad Problems Don’t Stop Being Bad Because Somebody’s Wrong About Fault Analysis
This is a thing my brain does sometimes. It’s very counterproductive when it happens.
In my case, I believe it was caused by childhood violence. When I was ~six plus or minus a few years, I lived in an environment where being blamed for ~anything could result in being beaten bloody, so my hindbrain learned to drop everything and deflect blame, if blame is pointed at me.
I’m not in an environment like that anymore. Yet I can’t unlearn the response. It sucks. The part of me that can see “drop everything, deflect blame, escape as soon as blame is shifted” as hugely counterproductive… has no power during the times when it would matter.
I don’t know exactly how someone can end up reflexively deflecting blame that’s not even aimed at them personally, but the examples you used in the article were so… familiar, that I put a fair amount of credence on it being the same underlying dynamic. If true, these people aren’t really thinking per se, but if they were it’s more “it’s not X’s fault” means “therefore don’t hurt X”, not “therefore your problem is illusory”.

espoire 29 Apr 2026 8:28 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: SatvikBeri’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
I think you’re being overly charitable. I don’t think anyone knows anything about nhPredict. I think they just have a strong “CEO = guilty-by-default” prior. The closest thing to an argument I’ve seen undergirding the “eat the rich” meme soup is “X, Y, and Z billionaires are actively getting people killed” completely skipping the question of whether that’s representative of all wealthy folks, skipping to: therefore “kill all billionaires”.

espoire 17 Apr 2026 18:52 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: pjohn’s comment on: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
I’ve definitely encountered situations where it was important to prefix the numeric info when working with humans, specifically. (Though my original remark was facetious; I only say “dollars sign after the numerals” as a matter of taste, not as implied because it’s instrumental in any way.)
When leading World of Warcraft raids, calling “Use Bloodlust in 20 seconds” gets VERY different results from calling “In 20 seconds, use Bloodlust”. Indeed, the timing information in the former cannot usually be heard over the Bloodlust sound effect itself.

espoire 29 Mar 2026 21:23 UTC
15 points
2
in reply to: oligo’s comment on: My hobby: running deranged surveys
Speaking from experience, maybe gender transition ought to raise that specific concern.
At my legal name change hearing, I was asked to affirm that I wasn’t attempting any fuckery like trying to outrun a debt or something. Which I was not. I had no debts save for whatever credit card spending from the same month, which I’d pay off in full end-of-month, same as every month.
…but since then, having an old unused name that immediately reveals the party trying to find my old name as being not-approved-by-me has been surprisingly helpful. It’s significantly downgraded the effectiveness of political donation seekers, pollsters, and scammers calling looking to speak to my old name. I’ve had people call both physically at the front door, and call the phone of other people I now live with, get asked for [old name] and get turned away with variants of “nobody with that name lives here.”
If I really was trying to outrun something, this seems like it’d be pretty helpful! I just wish I could find out what they’d wanted; it leaves me curious.

espoire 26 Mar 2026 7:45 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?
Chiming in with another causal mechanism: hot soup lets off steam. Humid air in general plays nicer with our lungs, and can noticeably help when people are having a cough, or having trouble breathing. I sometimes use “just have them sit over a canteen of steaming-hot water” as a palliative for both issues.

espoire 22 Mar 2026 15:49 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Dentin’s comment on: Age changes what you care about
I do much the same, plus a fair bit of effort on preserving my health more thoroughly than those around me do. Obvious stuff like aerobic exercise, eschewing smoking, eschewing alcohol, eschewing highly processed foods, but also less obvious stuff like going substantially out of my way to avoid dust inhalation, reducing driving time or rescheduling driving for lower-risk times.
Keeping up with current medical research has been surprisingly fruitful. I did a micro-dose self-experiment based on the results of this paper, and it appears to both work in humans and have the authors’ briefly-mentioned hoped-for effect of reversing age-related mental decline in “healthy” individuals. Apart from that, simply knowing how well things are going has been very emotionally uplifting. I sense that you, too, see the incredible progress, else “50% of death within the next 4 decades” seems like a weirdly-low estimate. My current hope is that AGI capabilities basically halt soon, because it’s my impression that a business-as-usual future solves aging in time for me and the younger generations.
May I ask where specifically you’re donating? I haven’t reconsidered where I give my money in over a decade, and it occurs to me that maybe I ought to.

espoire 22 Mar 2026 15:25 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: MSRayne’s comment on: Predicting Parental Emotional Changes?
I retained the ability to believe and act upon the belief that children need to be allowed the freedom to make sub-critical mistakes. I think if you were to go into it averse to smothering children, believing-in taking children seriously, etc., that those beliefs will survive the process.

espoire 22 Mar 2026 15:18 UTC
3 points
0
on: Predicting Parental Emotional Changes?
I think merely taking estradiol for gender transition triggered the caring-terminally-about-children effect for me. Possibly related: my blood estradiol levels got too high for a while, and I essentially had a pregnant woman’s hormone mix, for a while.
I’d previously liked kids somewhat, enjoyed teaching, enjoyed playing with them. Now they’re aggressively cute, makes me actively happy to notice children being happy or learning with or without my involvement, etc.

espoire 21 Mar 2026 9:05 UTC
1 point
0
on: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
Oh, the British figured this out, too?
I also put the dollars sign after the numerals, *where it belongs*.

espoire 21 Mar 2026 8:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude’s Constitution
human sexuality itself is immoral and forcibly modifies humans to not have sexual organs or desires
I must have one of my 100 morality bits missing, because this seems weird but not bad to me.
…but point taken.

espoire 21 Mar 2026 8:35 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude’s Constitution
Re: no human training/test separation:
Epistemic status: random thought I just had, but what if there kind of is. I think maybe dreaming is the “test” part of the training cycle: the newly updated weights run against outcome predictions supplied by parts of the system not currently being updated. The being-updated part tries to get desirable outcomes within the dream, and another network / region plays Dungeon Master, supplying scenario and outcomes for given actions. Test against synthetic test data, supplied by a partially adversarial network.
I feel like, if true, we’d expect to see some kind of failures to learn-from-sleep in habitual lucid dreamers? Or reduced efficacy, anyway? I wonder what happens in a learning setup which is using test performance to make meta training decisions, if you hack the test results to erroneously report greater-than-actual performance…? Are there people who do not dream at all (as distinguished from merely not remembering dreams)?
This model of “what even is a dream, anyway?” makes a lot more predictions/retrodictions than my old model of “dreams are just the qualia of neuronal sub populations coming back online as one wakes up”.