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At least their website now explains what their do. It took me a very long time to understand what OpenPhil does and where they get the money from. Now it’s all finally explained on the front page.
The default instructions “focus on your breath and observe your mind, gently letting go of distractions” are based on Vipassana — the same Vipassana that is bound to produce the Dark Night if you do it.
It’s based on Vipassana, but as you say yourself at the beginning of the post, it isn’t the authentic experience. What makes you think that focusing on your breath and observing your mind is capable of producing the same effect as full Vipassana practice? To me it feels like that would require much more effort and/or experience than just “being mindful” for an hour a day.
Seems like it’s fixed now
As a result, both going down and staying there often require consistent discipline, and the whole thing is rather unforgiving in terms of slip-ups, social occasions, and such.
I personally found it very helpful to use a “budget”-style calorie counter—ie. instead of just having a 2100kcal goal every day, you can eat more on some day and then your next day goal will be lower to keep the average at 2100 (and vice versa—if you eat less on a given day, you’ll be able to eat more later). This gave me a lot of freedom to not worry about eating too much at social occasions or just on bad days, while still keeping the weight loss results consistent.
Of course though, as with any weight loss method, this will really vary from person to person. I understand that for some people this might not be helpful or maybe may even be detrimental.
What is your threshold for a “thought” worth writing down? Most of the time there’s some sort of “static noise” of music or just random word/phrase fragments unconsciously circling in my head, I assume you didn’t notice and write down all of those? So what was your criteria for what you consider a thought?
This is not what the post talks about, but going outside without a phone is getting harder and harder for practical reasons because more and more things depend on you having a phone.
For example, my university dorm used annoying proprietary NFC locks that can only be opened with a mobile app. If I don’t take my phone with me when going outside, I won’t be able to go home.
There’s an increasing number of things that just expect you to have access to a mobile phone at all times.
That’s weird to hear from Harris, considering that he is a very strong proponent of the idea that all of our actions are pre-determined by past conditions of our life and we can never know our own true reason for doing something. Yes, Islamic terrorists do say their motivations, but how can Harris claim they don’t have those motivations for geopolitical or whatever other reasons?
From the AI’s messages seen in the video it’s possible that maybe he provided those instruction as user prompt instead of a system prompt. I wonder if the same thing would’ve happened if they were given as the system prompt instead.
Furthermore, Proton claims to keep no logs of your activity and has its no-logs implementation independently audited.
Yeah, of course, all trustworthy VPNs will do that, and I do generally believe that Proton actually doesn’t keep your traffic logs. It’s just that a lot of other VPN companies, like Nord or ExpressVPN, have very aggressive online marketing campaigns where they push false claims, like the claim that using a VPN can make you completely anonymous or even somehow protect you from getting hacked. This leads to most people’s understanding of VPNs being “it’s an app that changes my Netflix country and protects me from all evil”.
So I think it’s good to clarify that there is still trust involved in using a VPN, even if that trust is unlikely to be broken.
I was a little put off by the mention of “password managers” in the beginning since that’s handling over the keys of your privacy to external powers
Bitwarden encrypts all data on-device with a key derived from your master password. The plaintext of your passwords is never sent to their servers. See their security whitepaper for a good detailed explanation.
Your guide recommends Brave—do you know that Brave uses Google and Cloudflare and that it has built-in telemetry?
The guide also recommends Arkenfox/Librewolf, and there is a checklist on how to disable all optional telemetry in Brave. I’m not really sure what you mean by Brave “using Google and Cloudflare”.
Another great resource for privacy is https://privacyguides.org. I assume most of the recommendations there are approximately the same, but they may list additional private alternatives for some software.
I used to be pretty active in the online privacy community (PrivacyGuides, GrapheneOS, etc.) and I’ve seen a LOT of absolutely terrible misinformed privacy advice. Your guide doesn’t seem to parrot any of that, which is really refreshing to see.
From a quick glance, there are only two (pretty minor) issues I can find in your guides:
Your VPN section explains how VPNs hide your activity from the ISP, but it doesn’t seem to mention the fact that they just shift the trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. Yes, Proton is definitely more trustworthy than ISPs in authoritarian countries, but I think it should still be mentioned that VPNs don’t make you anonymous and you still need to trust a third-party with your traffic.
You recommend F-Droid for app downloads, which is fine, but it has some fundamental security issues and it’s considered better nowadays to use things like Obtainium. See here and here for more information.
I assume from your name that you’re Ukraininan, so maybe котрий is used in Ukrainian that way, but in Russian I personally would never use “который” in the meaning described here. I think the only examples I’ve seen of it being used in that way are in archaic folklore.
I’ve thought about the same thing recently. I use Numbat as my main tool for calculations, and the main reason I use this is exactly this—units offer a way of “type checking” and finding errors. If I’m trying to calculate time it takes to upload an image and I get
bit × px / sas a result, I’m probably doing something wrong.
Thanks. This makes sense, but I don’t get how tracking your prediction would lead to improvement in your prediction skills. Do you have to actively look at your past prediction statistics and see how you can improve, or does this improvement just comes naturally with practice?
Green is an obvious choice when this is a hypothetical situation, but if an actual mad scientist kidnapped you and other people and presented you with the choice, it wouldn’t be as easy. You’ll still probably pick green, but the most probable outcome is that the majority of people will pick it, and you’ll very likely feel guilt for the deaths of those who didn’t.
I didn’t say it would be a hard choice, I just said it would be harder; you’ll actually think about it for at least some time, unlike the second choice, where the correct response is immediately obvious
Assuming you meant “less than 50%” in the second question, they’re both isomorphic to the original pill problem, but the first choice would actually be harder to make.
With the first choice, there is somewhat of a moral dilemma—if you press the yellow button, you’ll be safe, but you will potentially be responsible for deaths of many other people.
The second choice is closer to the original pill question, and the only reason to press the “DEATH” button is to “help the people who also pressed it”—but if you don’t press it, it’s the killer and those people’s actions that led to their death, so you feel much less responsible for it
I’ve gotten a crush on a fake person from my dreams about 4 times. It was all the same girl that just randomly appeared in 4 of my dreams (they weren’t like erotic or anything, just normal dreams)
Can anyone who uses this or similar websites (eg. Predictionbook) explain what practical purpose websites like that have? Do you just want to check how correct your predictions are, or do you actually do something with that? Do you find the most value in the calibration graph and other statistics?
This sounds like a mental health problem rather than a purely intellectual one. Could be anything from short term burnout to depression. I think what @bodry said is a great idea, but if that still doesn’t help, asking a therapist would probably be more fruitful than trying to somehow force yourself to be curious and productive.