niceguyanon

Karma: 814

niceguyanon 17 May 2017 20:49 UTC
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in reply to: paperphone’s comment on: Open thread, May 15 - May 21, 2017
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living This is a good book.

Think about all the regrets and bad things that have happened to you, that you don’t know about – the time you dropped money or missed out on a life changing opportunity or mistakes you have made that never got your attention. You probably don’t or won’t because you don’t feel much for things that you don’t know that happened to you. So it is possible to feel no emotion about negative things. You have the power to hold no opinion about things, you just need to cultivate it. Regret is much like fear, you have come to your fate by dreading your fate.

niceguyanon 7 Apr 2017 16:32 UTC
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in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: The Ancient God Who Rules High School
I don’t think that the “show up neatly groomed and dressed” thing is teaching kids to emit particular social signals that is less suitable to a programmer coming to an interview. Both scenarios are about conforming to social norms and for students that happens to be literally neatly groomed/dressed, which for the programmer means no business suit. It’s just more useful to use the phrase neatly groomed/dressed than socially appropriate because for most things socially appropriate is neatly groomed/dressed.

Being socially appropriate is not overrated conditional on IQ – you have already established that the programmer (presumably your high IQ example) is aware of the dangers of coming in like a weirdo in a business suit to an interview. Why wouldn’t the younger version of this person also want to not look like a weirdo to their peers while in school?

niceguyanon 17 Mar 2017 18:59 UTC
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in reply to: MrMind’s comment on: Open thread, March 13 - March 19, 2017
I think there was a distinction made between planned C-sections and unplanned C-sections (medical emergencies), so that they were able differentiate outcomes following emergencies like a breech baby vs a completely planned C-section. And I think it showed that show C-sections overall were more risky than vaginal birth and long term health was better for vaginal births.

I haven’t done any google fu on this topic, other than reading a few passages in a book.

niceguyanon 16 Mar 2017 15:11 UTC
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in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, March 13 - March 19, 2017
I am constantly reminded of that fact daily!

niceguyanon 16 Mar 2017 15:01 UTC
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in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, March 13 - March 19, 2017
Ideally 100% of those that medically need C-sections will get it, and those that don’t wont.

I think there was a study that was cited in the book about the reduced C-sections rates, but of course the devil is in the details like you say, best to do your own research. I have personally updated my beliefs in favor being more resilient to time pressures of labor and that use of a doula isn’t just a waste of money as I previously had thought.

niceguyanon 16 Mar 2017 14:24 UTC
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on: Open thread, March 13 - March 19, 2017
I am reading Expecting Better, a book about evidence based pregnancy and in it, there are passages about the high rates of C-sections and why it might be. The conclusion was that one medical intervention, whether by drugs or over-monitoring, usually leads to another and another and you end up with a C-section. Non C-section births have better outcomes. So you want to avoid it if you can. The book also mentions that the use of a doula can reduce rates of C-sections to less than 10% from modern U.S. rates of 30%. That is very impressive. Why and how?

I interviewed a professional doula and just asked quite plainly how does her service provide such a dramatic decrease in C-sections. Her personal experience if she is to be believed, is in line with the 10% figure. Her answer is that by being an advocate for the mother and delaying any unnecessary medical intervention in the delivery room, and by providing a calm and coping environment for the mother, she is able to have better outcomes. This means not bringing the mother to the hospital too early.

The way she described it was that the delivery room is a high stress situation where there are doctors and nurses who are supposed to be doing something, and when nothing is happening, they tend to make things happen, when the right thing to do is just wait. Doulas often go to your home before you are in active labor and bring you to the hospital no earlier than you have too. This is the key, by going to the hospital too early you are increasing your chances of having some medical intervention.

So the take away is that there is good evidence that doulas are effective and do so by:
- timing the right time to go to the hospital
- preparing a mother to be calm and mentally strong
- advocating for a mother in the delivery room for more time, before intervention

niceguyanon 13 Mar 2017 17:47 UTC
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in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open Thread, March. 6 - March 12, 2017

Some are. But not all.

But how many? It seems more likely that most terrorist have shitty lives and got exposed to a dangerous and bad meme. The alternative would be that there is a certain genetic demographic that is predisposed to committing terrorism, sounds far fetched. If Christians during the crusades had modern technology 1000 years ago, we would probably have seen the kinds of solo terrorism we see today. It was really hard to be a lone fanatic trying to kill 10s of people back then with a blade.

niceguyanon 10 Mar 2017 15:25 UTC
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in reply to: DryHeap’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]

There seems to be an effort to propagate…

I don’t think so, or just a trivial amount. Looking at downvotes or lack of upvotes, I don’t get that sense at all. Political talk is almost always discouraged and when it does go on, its fairly even handed.

niceguyanon 9 Mar 2017 15:47 UTC
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in reply to: 9eB1’s comment on: why people romantice magic over most science.
Similarly I have mused that the closes thing we have to magic in the real world is the ability to forecast.

niceguyanon 24 Feb 2017 16:29 UTC
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in reply to: alex_zag_al’s comment on: The price you pay for arriving to class on time
Tangentially related, I’m surprised that students misjudge how high the cost of being late is to the cost of arriving early. I have a suspicion that people who insist on being exactly one minute early and no more are made up of two groups, the very efficient and the best procrastinators that are often late and when on time they get to pat themselves on the back for being efficient.

Getting to class early just to sit in the front row is the easiest way to boost your grade for most classes, IMO as an armchair psychologist.

niceguyanon 22 Feb 2017 21:00 UTC
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in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open Thread, Feb. 20 - Feb 26, 2017
I dunno, it’s hard enough trying to determine if and where profit was made, in order to tax it. If we didn’t tax profits and only distributions then there would be no taxes to collect. Companies and individuals would all claim that any profit are being retained for future investment or for hoarding and not actually distributed to owners. That is why we tax non distributed retained earning.

niceguyanon 21 Feb 2017 17:07 UTC
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in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Stupid Questions February 2017
I understand now. Thanks!

niceguyanon 10 Feb 2017 19:20 UTC
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in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Stupid Questions February 2017
So if we can distinguish between

“I know the probabilities involved and they are 50% for X and 50% for Y” and “I don’t know”.

Could we further distinguish between

a uniform distribution on the 0 to 1 range and “I don’t know”?

Let’s say a biased coin with unknown probability of landing heads is tossed, p is uniform on (0,1) and “I don’t know” means you can’t predict better than randomly guessing. So saying p is 50% doesn’t matter because it doesn’t beat random.

But what if we tossed the coin twice, and I had you guess twice, before the tosses. If you get at least one guess correct then you get to keep your life. Assuming you want to play to keep your life, then how would you play? Coin is still p uniform on (0,1), but it seems like “I don’t know” doesn’t mean the same thing anymore, because you can play in a way that can better predict the outcome of keeping your life.

You would guess (H,T) or (T,H) but avoid randomly guessing because it would produce things like (H,H) which is really bad because if p is uniform on (0,1), then probability of heads is 90% is just as likely as probability of heads is 10%, but heads at 10% is really bad for (H,H), so bad that even 90% heads doesn’t really help that much more.

If p is 90% or 10%, guessing (H,T) or (T,H) would result in the same small probability of dying at 9%. But (H,H) would result in at best 1% or 81% chance of dying. Saying I don’t know in this scenario doesn’t feel the same as I don’t know in the first scenario. I am probably confused.

niceguyanon 9 Feb 2017 21:13 UTC
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on: The Social Substrate
I enjoyed the post and appreciate the additional links for reading.

The main character’s reaction is sort of unhealthy/fake—better would have been to clarify that you overheard them bantering earlier.

I did not feel that way at all, the reaction is simple and appropriate. Imagine how clunky and awkward it would be for the main character trying to explain that in fact you over heard the banter and that you don’t want the mom to think, that you think its OK for there to be rude things said about her son, in front of her. That would come off as weird.

it’s not so much that wearing a gold watch isn’t about knowing the time, it’s that the owner’s actual desires got distorted by the lens of common knowledge. Knowing that someone would be paying attention to them to infer their desires, they filtered their desires to focus on the ones they thought would make them look good. This also can easily come off as inauthentic, and it seems fairly clear why to me: if you’re filtering your desires to make yourself look good, then that’s a signal that you need to fake your desires or else you won’t look good.

The gold watch wearer does not come off as inauthentic to me. If I had more information, like that the person was not well off then I would. Just because the gold watch wearer wants to look good in front of me doesn’t make it inauthentic nor does it mean the wearer is faking it. There isn’t much difference between the fashion and hygiene example and the gold watch example. Putting in the effort to look good by being well dressed and clean (presuming that is in fact true, people might think you fail at both), is the same as using money to wear a gold watch to convey wealth. All three attempt to convey some information about the person, and nothing is inauthentic if it’s true. How else do you let people know you got money?

niceguyanon 24 Jan 2017 19:28 UTC
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Strategic Thinking: Paradigm Selection
This is a really good example of when the organization does gets it right on the big picture, but it seems like they didn’t pick the right paradigm. An observation of mine is that organizations often seem dysfunctional to a lot of participants because they aren’t part of the profit center or privy to the overall strategy. A company can be fully aware of dysfunction or inefficiencies within, and find it acceptable, because fixing it or making someone happy isn’t worth the resources.

niceguyanon 24 Jan 2017 18:21 UTC
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on: Open thread, Jan. 23 - Jan. 29, 2017
Suggestion to sticky the welcome thread. Stickying the welcome thread to the sidebar would encourage participation/comments/content. And perhaps in the future add emphasis on communication norms to the thread, specifically that negative reception and/or lack of reception is more obvious on LessWrong – So have thick skin and do not take it personal. I’d imagine that quality control will be what it has always been, critical comments.

niceguyanon 24 Jan 2017 17:14 UTC
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in reply to: sdr’s comment on: Metrics to evaluate a Presidency
Admin intervention is way too much.

niceguyanon 24 Jan 2017 13:35 UTC
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in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: Self medicating for Schizophrenia with—cigarettes ?
But tobacco is still bad! E-Cigs are better.

niceguyanon 23 Jan 2017 21:44 UTC
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on: Evaluating Moral Theories
What are your own thoughts about the problem of monopolies, are they even a problem at all? The standard answer is that they either would not occur or would be a beneficial thing.

niceguyanon 19 Jan 2017 20:08 UTC
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in reply to: TiffanyAching’s comment on: Marginal Revolution Thoughts on Black Lives Matter Movement

My contention, however, is that racial prejudice is a factor in real-world police shootings/violence.

I’m not disagreeing with you but I just want to add to the conversation that I think the SSC comment is closest to the issue when he/she said:

Still, the incentive is there. And it’s based on math – racial prejudice not required.

Because I believe people tend to follow incentives, my current best guess is that police do over-profile (target the higher risk groups more than the actual risk differences would suggest), and they are going to, and the only question is to what extent this can be mitigated.

Let’s say you and another guard are manning a castle gate, and there is a serial killer outside in the village of 100 people. A peasant knocks and says “let me in”. You reply “I am sorry I value my life more than yours I can not let you in, even if you are probably not the killer”. The other guard says “I despise all peasants, I would never let you in” This repeats again and again. Both you and the other guard have caused a disproportionate amount of impact on innocent peasants, and your actions are indistinguishable, yet you are not prejudiced. If you change the mind of the other guard to not hate peasants, the predicament of the poor peasants do not change – you both still refuse entry. That doesn’t mean reducing prejudice can’t help. Imagine a third guard that is also a peasant hating misanthrope but he takes his hate to another level, so that when a peasant knocks, the third guard says to the others “Hey this guy is a peasant, let’s just kill him”. You and the second guard relieve the third guard of duty and that really did help the situation of the peasants, you saved them from violent prejudice, but the problem of innocent villagers stuck outside the wall remain. Getting rid of the third guard does help, but doesn’t solve everything.