Huera

Karma: 107

Huera 25 Aug 2025 17:10 UTC
5 points
2
on: A Comprehensive Guide to Running
Striking the ground on your heel and in front of the body is essentially creating a braking force, sending you backward. When you heel strike, you put excessive stress on your lower legs and knees, increasing the risk of injuries such as shin splints, stress fractures, and runner’s knee.
I feel like this conflates overstriding with heel-striking^[1]. Overstriding—one’s feet land too much in front of one’s center of mass. Even consulting your own image, the runner marked as ‘mid-foot striking’ could be heel-striking without changing anything in the overall posture.^[2] Though, I agree that mid-foot striking is still definitely better than heel-striking on net.
1. ^
  Specifically, I think the claims about braking and excessive stress are false for heel-striking when decoupled from overstriding.
2. ^
  I know plenty of runners with good running technique and years of experience who are lifelong heel-strikes. Though, I’m a forefoot to midfoot striker myself.

Huera 15 Aug 2025 9:40 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: European Links (15.08.25)
From Emily Oster’s Expecting Better [Chapter 18]:
VBAC: The other common cause of a scheduled C-section is if you’ve had one before. Women who have given birth once by C-section are very often advised to have future babies the same way. Having a vaginal birth after a C-section is possible (it’s often called a VBAC, for vaginal birth after Cesarean) but not usually the default. Is this right? It’s actually a bit hard to know. There are no randomized studies.6 The best we can do is to compare women who had a C-section and planned a vaginal birth to women who had a C-section and planned a repeat C-section. This isn’t perfect—the kind of women who want a VBAC may be different from those who are happy to have another C-section—but done right it can be pretty convincing. And studies like this suggest that there are some
increased risks to a VBAC. In one case, researchers studying women in Australia found that women who planned a VBAC had more serious infant complications and a greater likelihood of maternal hemorrhage. Both of these outcomes happened for about 2.5 percent of the women in the VBAC group versus only about 0.8 percent of the planned C-section group.7 The women in the two groups looked very similar in many ways—age, race, etc.—so we can have some confidence that the choice of delivery mode was responsible for the differences. And this is pretty consistent with other, similar studies.8 Without randomized evidence it’s hard to be rock solid on this, and, unlike in the breech case, many doctors will be fine with this type of delivery. Because of the possibility of increased risks, though, you do probably want a doctor who has experience with this situation so that she’ll know what to do if things start to go awry. If you do decide to attempt a vaginal birth, be prepared: about half of attempted VBACs end in a C-section.
The references are:
6. J. M. Dodd et al., “Planned Elective Repeat Caesarean Section Versus
Planned Vaginal Birth for Women with a Previous Caesarean Birth,” Cochrane
Database of Systematic Reviews 4, article no. CD 004224 (2004).
7
. Caroline Crowther et al., “Planned Vaginal Birth or Elective Repeat
Caesarean: Patient Preference Restricted Cohort with Nested Randomised Trial,”
PLOS Medicine 9, no. 3 (2012): e1001192.
8
. E. Mozurkewich and E. Hutton, “Elective Repeat Caesarean Delivery Versus
Trial of Labor: A Meta-Analysis of the Literature from 1989 to 1999,”
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 183 (2000): 1187–97.

Huera 14 Aug 2025 14:21 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA
If the distinction between the Buddhist meaning and the typical meaning of ‘suffering’ was explained^[1], I don’t think I would have ended up confused enough to ask my question. The Buddhist conception of suffering was different enough to mislead me, at least.
1. ^
  In a footnote, for example.

Huera 14 Aug 2025 13:04 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA
[EDIT Actually, nevermind. After reading answers downstream of this comment, it’s clear to me that when I asked about ‘suffering’ I meant something quite different from your conception of suffering. I’m no longer confused about why you would say that non-enlightenment is constant suffering, but I don’t see why it would be worth getting rid of.]

The latter option would be a very tall order. What I meant was that among
Hypothesis 1: You suffered but somehow this information never arrived to verbal thoughts
Hypothesis 2: You didn’t suffer, but after T=1 your perception changed and now the same things make you suffer.
Hypothesis 1. strikes me as very implausible a priori, for reasons I mentioned in my answer to Kaj. So, do you have an argument that it is not as unlikely as I think, that would be, indeed, “Understandable by someone who has not had the experience”.

Huera 14 Aug 2025 12:53 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA
Thanks, I think this could be what is happening. But:
1. Your examples that illustrate confusion/mistakes about one’s mental state are, how to put it, small-scale. I feel like there’s a huge leap between “Sometimes a person doesn’t realize how tired they are for a few hours (maybe days)” or “Some fraction of people who get depressed don’t realize it for months (maybe years)” and “Basically everyone’s default state is suffering they’re unaware of, and they don’t realize this during their whole lives”. Maybe you could come up with examples where misconceptions about one’s mental state are more severe, longer-lasting or more common than in my depression example, but I think there would probably be a huge gap between that and the “default state is suffering” hypothesis.
2. My understanding is that the typical reported experience of high school is mostly negative valence, but as people grow up they start to look back on that time in their lives ever more fondly. I don’t have a great model of how this works psychologically, but, when it happens, I’m inclined to think that the changed perspective is wrong. That the high-school-version of a person was more correct about his mental state than the current-version. All of which is to say that when one thinks “My past-self was unaware (or mistaken) of important parts of their conscious experience”, in most cases, this is correct, but in the high school and constant-suffering cases, it seems likely to me that one is wrong.

Huera 13 Aug 2025 16:18 UTC
16 points
4
on: Enlightenment AMA
[Re-asking a question i phrased awkwardly]
You have previously described your pre-enlightenment state as being full of suffering you were unaware of. Do you have externally legible reasons to think that your current perspective is correct and the perspective of your past-self about his experience is not?
Or, how a different commenter phrased it:
You’re like:
T=0: “I’m fine”
T=1: Meditation
T=2: “Oh, I actually wasn’t fine, it was a torment!”
Hypothesis 1: You suffered but somehow this information never arrived to verbal thoughts
Hypothesis 2: You didn’t suffer, but after T=1 your perception changed and now the same things make you suffer.
Why do you think it’s the first one that is correct?
What links here?
- Huera's comment on Enlightenment AMA by lsusr (14 Aug 2025 14:21 UTC; 6 points)

Huera 9 Jul 2025 11:25 UTC
12 points
5
on: An Opinionated Guide to Using Anki Correctly
I think it’s totally fine to have basically one deck for everything. I have such a deck, containing history facts alongside math alongside friends’ birthdays, and this is not a problem.
I think this was fine with the old anki algorithm, but less so with FSRS.
It’s sensible a priori to expect that your forgetting curves for birthdays and math are different. If you optimize parameters for a single deck, anki will treat every card in the set {birthdays, math, historical trivia} the same. But if you have separate decks (and deck groups) for each topic, FSRS will be able to extract more signal and pick better parameters.
Admittedly, using a single deck probably isn’t a huge mistake, but it seems like an unforced error to me.

Huera 30 Jun 2025 21:23 UTC
3 points
0
on: Substack and Other Blog Recommendations
Gwern still releases his monthly newsletters, he just stopped crossposting them to substack. Though admittedly, there’s less commentary and overall content. Here’s the january 2025 one.
I’ve randomly stumbled upon this back in march.

Huera 6 Jun 2025 18:31 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Dating Roundup #6
I’m curious if we know, is there a 180cm effect? Does the rest of the world get away with being a whole inch shorter without feeling the need to lie?
In my experience, this is correct. There’s a saying in my country, roughly: ‘a real man begins at 180cm’ expressed with varying levels of tongue-in-cheeckness. See also this comment from a hungarian.
So, I’d say it’s one of the many advantages of the metric system.

Huera 2 Jun 2025 19:05 UTC
1 point
0
on: ‘Wicked’: thoughts
I read a fantasy book with this plot once, where it turned out that the good and wise king—the protagonist’s main distant ally in a frightening world—really just had magic that let him commit murder then have eyewitnesses believe his words claiming innocence.
o3 believes this refers to Graceling, though the plot synopsis doesn’t suggest a perfect match. Could you confirm/discomfirm?

Huera 8 May 2025 6:10 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: Alex_Altair’s Shortform
Oddly enough, you’re the second person to post about this.

Huera 4 May 2025 14:45 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Drake Morrison’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2025
I think sorting all posts by ‘Top, inflation adjusted’ and browsing by year is your best bet. E.g. 2016

Huera 25 Apr 2025 7:10 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ihatenumbersinusernames7’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2025
The most recent comments show up in ‘Recent Discussion’ on the main page, regardless of article age. But, of course, though some people may see them, you are still more likely to get engagement if you comment on recent articles.
Don’t know about wikitags comments.

Huera 21 Apr 2025 6:37 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: avancil’s comment on: Scaffolding Skills
I have, indeed, misunderstood the concept—will retract my comment.

Huera 20 Apr 2025 5:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: papetoast’s comment on: Scaffolding Skills
re 2: Now that you mention it, I realized sharpening can be easily outsourced. My mistake.
re 1: I don’t see it, buying pre-chopped onions is simply not equivalent to having a freshly chopped onion and some vegetables cannot be bought pre-cut. While cutting isn’t a bottleneck for most people I had this chain in mind: (no cutting skills) → (cooking takes more time and is less pleasant) → (Less willingness to try new or complex recipes).
(Also, if you don’t have proper technique, you’re at a higher risk of cutting yourself. In that respect, it’s like free climbing / using safety ropes)
re 3: I had self-experiments in general in mind (people run self-experiments, without knowing statistics, or even gathering data), but it did not occur to me that not all self-experiments are QS (probably most aren’t). As written you are, of course, correct.

Huera 19 Apr 2025 12:00 UTC
2 points
0
on: Scaffolding Skills
I think that the training wheels example is wrong. A quick search suggests they hinder learning how to ride a bike.
Anyway, I have a few more examples ([actual skill] / [scaffolding skill]):
- Playing chess well / reading algebraic notation
- Writing blog posts / touch typing
- Cooking / cutting vegetables (also other things)
- ~~Cutting vegetables / sharpening knives~~
- QS self-experiments / knowing statistics
- Programming / debugging
- Parkour / running
- Dancing / aerobic endurance (This might be stretching the concept a bit)

Huera 4 Mar 2025 16:29 UTC
1 point
0
on: Open Thread Spring 2025
Going into account settings and clicking submit makes LessWrong switch to light mode.
[On a more meta note, should I report such issues here, in the intercom, or not at all?]

Huera 22 Jan 2025 21:55 UTC
1 point
0
on: Mechanisms too simple for humans to design
In other words, all the information that controls the shape of your face, your bones, your organs and every single enzyme inside them – all of that takes less storage space than Microsoft Word™.
See also: How Complex Are Individual Differences.

Huera 16 Jan 2025 5:14 UTC
6 points
6
on: Unregulated Peptides: Does BPC-157 hold its promises?
A blogger who goes by Troof created a huge questionnaire to get people to report their experiences with various nootropics including peptides. He writes:
Selank, Semax, Cerebrolysin, BPC-157 are all peptides, and they are all in the green “uncommon-but-great” rectangle above. Their mean ratings are excellent, but their probabilities of changing your life are especially impressive: between 5 and 20% for Cerebrolysin (which matches anecdotal reports), between 2 and 13% for BPC-157, and between 3 and 7% for Semax.
This article pretty much convinced me that cerebrosylin doesn’t work (as a nootropic), which made me quite sceptical of all popular peptides, since it’s also the highest-rated one in troof’s survey.

Huera 11 Jan 2025 12:31 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Open Thread Winter 2024/2025
Robert Miles has a channel popularizing AI safety concepts.
[Edit] Also manifold markets has recordings of talks at the Manifest conferences.