nim

• nim 31 Jan 2024 23:32 UTC

  52 points

  16

  on: Lead­ing The Parade

  If you’re talking about literal parades—I lead them annually at a smallish renaissance fair. Turns out that people with the combination of willingness to run around in front of a group looking silly, and enough time anxiety to actually show up to the morning ones, are in short supply.

  That parade goes where I put it. There are several possible paths through the faire and I choose which one the group takes, and make the appropriate exaggerated gestures to steer the front of the crowd in that direction, and then the rest follow.

  I also play a conspicuous looking instrument in the parade at a small annual local event that we convene a “band” for, as well. Since the instrument is large and obvious, I’m typically shoved to the front of the group as we line up. I’m pretty sure that if I went off script and took the parade out of the gathering’s area, they’d probably follow me, because nobody else is quite sure where we’re supposed to be going. If I conspired with the other musicians to take the group out of the event, we could almost certainly make that happen. I’m curious how far down the road we could get the dancers following the parade before they realize something is amiss, but also really don’t want to be the individual to instigate that sort of experiment.

  Back in high school, I did marching band, I think if our leader had been misinformed about where we should go, we would have followed them anyway. That’s mostly because marching band has an almost paramilitary obedience theme going on, and can get a bit culty about directors or leaders in my experience. Marching as a group also confers a certain immunity to individual responsibility as long as you’re following your orders. There’s this confidence that if the leader takes the group off course, that leader will be the only individual who’s personally in trouble for the error. The group might get yelled at collectively for having followed, but no one person in the group is any more responsible for the error than any other, except for the leader.

  From these experiences, I’d speculate that the reason we don’t see literal parades being counterfactually led off course like that on a regular basis is because the dynamic of leading it disincentivizes abusing that power. Being chosen and trusted by a group to lead them in a public setting where any errors you make will be instantly obvious to all onlookers confers a powerful desire to not mess up.

• nim 19 Jun 2023 15:00 UTC

  31 points

  16

  on: Guide to ra­tio­nal­ist in­te­rior decorating

  The other perk to tapestries is that they make a space echo less.

  I’m surprised that you’ve omitted window treatments. Maybe they’re just less of a thing that people think about in the spaces that you’re documenting here?

  tl;dr which I’d be happy to expand into a real post if it’s news to anyone:

  • fabric curtains are great for adding color/​pattern/​texture, and/​or reducing echoes, and work well in conjunction with shades for light and heat management. Also surprisingly cheap secondhand, washable, easy to swap up the look of a room. (this assumes you can mount a curtain rod or tension rod where you need it)

  • Blackout curtains in sleep spaces can be a huge quality of life improvement for folks who care about sleeping in the dark. The cheapest option is roller blinds.

  • Window treatments can have a huge impact on the thermal performance of a space, especially if it gets sunlight or wind on the exterior of the windows. Comfortable temperatures with less noise and ongoing energy use from heating/​cooling are usually a win.

  • If you find yourself leaving the blinds shut because you don’t want people seeing in through a window, there are lots of privacy film options. Many apply with soapy water and peel off when you pick at them, but not before. It’s often sufficient to put privacy film on only the bottom half of a window, so you can still have some view to the outside.

  • When I travel outside the US, I’m baffled by how many regions missed the cultural memo about the importance of window screens. The outdoors has lots of great stuff like leaves, insects, and small birds that are good to have outside your house but annoying to have inside, and screens keep them where they belong. Screens do not impede emergency egress because the frame of the screen is held in place with relatively weak springs, and the screen itself can be torn if necessary.

  • It’s possible to build impressively convincing false windows and false skylights out of old screens, but the analog version is even easier if you already have it available

  I think when we talk about building our own sun with a lumenator, it can be easy to forget that actually there’s also a perfectly good sun outside that many spaces can use for part of the day.

• nim 16 Jun 2023 17:02 UTC

  23 points

  on: nim’s Shortform

  Reading https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​nwJCzszw8gGjPTihM/​​i-still-think-it-s-very-unlikely-we-re-observing-alien and pondering the Bigfoot thing.

  On the one hand, We Have Cameras Everywhere(TM).

  On the other hand—pick any area of the pacific northwest and look at a map of where the permanent roads are. Pull it up side by side with a map of an area that you’re familiar with. Zoom in on both, to a magnification you’d consider reasonable for imagining things at walking-around scale. Pan around on the PNW map and try to find a permanent road. It’ll take a minute.

  Most land out here grows timber, sure. Timber is harvested roughly once every 30-50 years.

  At this point, I’d bet that every square mile of the area has been visited by humans. Forestry land is heavily trafficked once every few decades; conservation land is surveyed and studied and sometimes visited by tourists.

  The question, like a missing term in the Drake Equation, is when. The L term captures for-how-long, sure, but only implies a difference between “someone sent us radio signals for 100 years around 1000 AD” and “someone sent us radio signals for 100 years around 2000 AD”.

  I have two cats who hate me. (not their fault, they came from an animal hoarding situation so they’re probably kinda traumatized) They seem to think I’m noisy and conspicuous and I stink, and to their perceptions I certainly do. They despise being perceived. I can tell that they’re in my house because I can check every nook and cranny and learn their favorite hidey-holes, and the food I put out for them gets eaten, and their litter boxes get full. But if this was out in the woods instead of the artificial and tightly controlled environment of my home, I would likely not know they’re around, just like most hikers don’t know when they’re being watched by a mountain lion. The cats hate the places where I spend time, just as they love the parts of my house I rarely visit. The places they love and hate change as my habits do.

  Oh, and both cats are black longhairs. They move fast, so between that and the fur, every photo I’ve ever tried to take of them out and about has come out hideously blurry. I joke that they’re related to Sasquatches...

  Anyways, humanity’s forays into the woods are, from an animal perspective, loud and stinky and highly predictable. We place our cameras in places we can get to. We hike and camp where there are trails. We drive on the roads we build, loudly and stinkily. When we’re planning to log, we survey first, marking up the previously untouched woods with neon flagging tape and spray paint. Surveyors and hunters alike get to the woods in pickup trucks, and then traverse established human-trails for as long as they can before dipping into the shallow end of the “unoccupied” wilderness.

  If some creature hated everything about humanity the way my cats hate being seen by me, I wouldn’t be too surprised if a small population could simply migrate around between the areas that humanity is using the least, while we’re waiting for the next crop of timber to grow.

  I think that sasquatches are pretty unlikely for other reasons—with other things in the woods, we eventually see the side effects of their existence. Scat, browse, bones from them and their dinners. Trails, prints, hair with DNA in it. Holes in the food web when they all vanish, diseases of the known species whose habits interact with theirs, like overpopulated mangy deer after you take the wolves out of a region, even though most people never see a living wolf. Something would have to have an accurate and constantly evolving mental model of human abilities and expectations to hide all that evidence from us, so I think Occam’s Razor still says “probably not” to the Sasquatch.

  But “we have cameras” is, IMO, the weakest form of the argument. Our cameras are overwhelmingly concentrated around the sounds and smells of frequent human occupation, which is exactly where something with the temperament of my cats would not want to be. We do have some few unmanned cameras, solar powered, cellular uplink, that might be able to stream images from a single clearing in the woods for long enough to stop stinking of our presence. But that counts on guessing where to put the camera.

  I think people hear “forest” and imagine the forests they’ve been in, which in most of the world are something like parks. When you think of a forest, do you think of a space where you can walk around under the trees? Do you think of picturesque winding trails that lead somewhere?

  I grew up in the woods of the PNW, and every other forest I’ve visited around the world has felt wrong somehow. Thin, barren. Jungles, though… Jungles feel like home plus a bunch of venomous stuff that wants to kill you. But these forests… You can’t see, you can’t be seen. There’s about a month after it snows when you can see a little further, and that’s the time to make trails, but all the rest of the year the trails will do their best to heal themselves.

  What should it look like once a house has burned and the homestead is abandoned? Here, the forest eats it. A few years on, there’s nothing left but a cacophony of green. I have a friend who loses piercings if they take the jewelry out for more than a day—the woods are like their body, but with healing up their roads and trails. Every time you log, you have to cut the roads open again, often cutting into the soil where it’s built and slumped and covered over where you had the road just 20 years ago. Sure, you buy rock for the roads so the log trucks don’t sink into them, but it sinks into the clay and you’ll have to buy more next time you’re ready to log the place again.

  If you know where to look, you can find abandoned homesteads, but it’s not from manmade items lying around. The metal and plastic and glass are there under the soil if you dig for them, but it’s the plants that tell you where to dig: English Ivy is the first clue; it means the settlers planted it on a grave site or a gatepost nearby. Then, depending on the time of year, you look for symptoms of the other things they planted: Apples fermenting and deer-eaten, fallen in the fall, or daffodils signposting a former garden bed in spring.

  The woods here eat stuff, like that plant in the Broadway musical, just closer to impossible to kill. When something dies, the bones get spread and buried and gnawed. Even the deer will chew on bones; small rodents reduce antler sheds to powdered calcium back in the food chain. Vines subsume abandoned houses; deciduous trees pump nutrients from the subsoil to their leaves and mulch those leaves annually onto everything beneath them.

  I’ve been nearsighted all my life, but only in the classroom did I notice it. In these woods, in the parts of the year when it’s nice to be outdoors, distance vision is very nearly useless. Spotting motion helps; acute hearing helps greatly. But with how the flora capitalizes on every available photon of sunlight, there’s rarely more than a few feet of line-of-sight from anywhere to anywhere else.

  I guess all I’m really getting at here is the intuition that you might already have if you’re a birdwatcher: It takes a lot of luck to spot something. But the somethings in the woods which are “real” in the conventional sense can eventually be spotted, or at least their side effects can.

• nim 6 May 2021 3:45 UTC

  22 points

  on: Let’s Go Back To Normal

  I agree that governments should back off from trying to micromanage the lives of adults.

  However, I’ll personally continue to use high-quality masks in crowded situations indefinitely, because I would rather wear a mask than get any cold or flu. If you went back in time and told last-year-me that there was a single magic garment which I could wear to prevent all plane plagues, con cruds, office coughs, and myriad other droplet-borne ailments, and you’d shown me evidence of its effectiveness as compelling as what I’ve personally observed by avoiding the respiratory droplets emitted by strangers for the past year, past-me would have jumped at the opportunity just as enthusiastically as present-me does now.

• nim 1 Mar 2022 20:25 UTC

  21 points

  on: RFC WWIII

  Hello, neighbor! I am rural in your general part of the world, and disaster preparedness has been among my hobbies for most of my life, so I have a few comments!

  I notice that you seem to treat personal risks from WWIII as an isolated event, whereas I see it as more of a continuum. It’s like talking about the risks from covid only if one personally contracts the virus, versus considering the bigger picture of risks where the virus itself is one factor but other factors include supply chain interruptions from a combination of worker sickness and policy responses, interruptions of access to medical care even if the medical problem is unrelated to the virus, and so forth. One example of such an effect that I’d expect if the US was participating in a hypothetical WWIII is that the resources we typically use for wildland firefighting would be busy, so wildfires (started by lightning, to say nothing of those which might be intentionally set) could be expected to threaten more property (especially rural and suburban) and run uncontained for longer, generating a lot more smoke which people in cities would have to try not to breathe due to its health risks, and we’ve known for a very long time that masks keep particulates out of the lungs so you’ll still want n95s. Semi-unrelatedly, if that earthquake we’re overdue for manages to wreck the west coast, Bend will be the nearest airport so if you’re living there it’d be prudent to consider the nonzero possibility of a flood of refugees coming through at some point.

  How much do you value life?

  Covid has highlighted to me that the value of life in various possible futures may differ. One can, without inconsistency, place a high value on life in a world like we knew in 2019, a slightly lower value on life that is spent entirely like we spent 2020, and a lower still value of being the only survivor in a radioactive wasteland.

  One thing that comes up late in discussions of preparedness and makes many people quite uncomfortable at first is fully grasping the idea that nobody can survive everything. No matter how prepared you get, there will be some disasters that you simply cannot prepare for. You just get unlucky and bam, you’re dead. I cannot reasonably prevent a meteorite from crashing through my ceiling and smashing my skull open. I cannot reasonably prevent a hidden congenital vascular defect in my heart or brain from deciding that today is the day it stops keeping my blood in the proper tubing. I cannot reasonably prevent some driver from losing control of their vehicle and running me over while I’m walking down the sidewalk. There is always a “welp, guess I’ll die” condition to any preparedness plan, so figuring out where yours is can help dispel the illusion of obligation to prep for certain particularly extreme eventualities.

  Buy useful items

  Hazmat suits probably won’t help too much, unless you’re doing highly specialized tasks and have the training to use them. Masks probably will help, because lungs are for air and explosions kick up a lot of dust and other crud you don’t want to breathe. Also, there will probably be more fire around (especially in the summer, around here) and breathing smoke is really bad for you.

  IMO, there’s a surprising overlap between items that’d be genuinely useful in a disaster and items that are already useful in providing aid to the homeless. I think that useful items are the things that people can’t make themselves, and which reduce the incidence and transmission of sickness. Even if your area isn’t directly affected, it’ll probably be second-order affected by an influx of refugees, hopefully on their way to ports and airports to relocate to less-affected parts of the world. Simple stuff that people no longer make for themselves and yet need to avoid disease include soap, toothbrushes, and clean socks. Hats and blankets, too, in the winter. Water bottles, toilet paper. Perhaps camping style water filters—the Sawyer Mini works fine and can be had for pretty cheap. These things keep basically forever, can be usefully donated if you decide you don’t want to be prepared with them after all, and could be massively useful to make things suck less if society falls apart for a bit.

  Also, pick up a copy of the book Where There Is No Doctor (published by Hesperian). It reads a bit like simple english wikipedia, but it’s a great resource for deciding what to treat at home versus what it’s worth making a risky trip to medical aid for if you don’t have the kind of urgent care access available that we’ve gotten used to.

  Building a bomb shelter

  Whatever you do, don’t bury a shipping container. They’re only meant to withstand forces downward on the corners, and can collapse with you in them if you pile soil on the sides and roof and then the soil multiplies in weight as it gets wet. Getting the airflow right in any DIY’d shelter is pretty challenging, although there are some companies which sell actual engineered shelters if you’re willing to pay the premium to get it from specialists.

  How much do you value not having to move to X (or take whatever other action)?

  This intersects with risk assessment for other possible disasters. For instance, moving to Bend makes you a lot safer from that big earthquake, yet puts you at greater risk of impact from gas price fluctuations (since so much stuff is trucked there).

  Thinking about places that an enemy might want to destroy, it’s also not that hard to imagine a future in which datacenters are appealing targets. Facebook has a DC in Prineville right next to Bend, and I think Google has stuff in the Dalles. Folks are quiet about it, but DCs seem to pop up wherever there’s good hydroelectric power, probably for the combination of cheap electricity, cheap land, and easy access to cold water for thermal management.

[Question] What are the great­est near-fu­ture risks or dan­gers to you as an in­di­vi­d­ual?

• nim 26 Apr 2021 18:26 UTC

  17 points

  on: The Twelve Virtues of Rationality

  This asks a rhetorical question in passing which has a rather delightful answer:

  What tree nourishes us without fruit?

  Everything which photosynthesizes nourishes us with oxygen, whether or not it fruits.

  Or, if “nourish” means “provide food or medicine”: Acer saccharum nourishes us with its sap; Cinnamomum verum and Cinnamomum cassia flavor our food with their bark; the roots of Sassafras albidum flavor drinks and its leaves thicken sauces; Cinchona officinalis and Taxus baccata yield essential medicinal compounds from their bark; the flowers of Hibiscus rosa-sinensis make a delicious drink; the leaves of Moringa oleifera are edible and packed with nutrients. Those are only the trees which nourish us directly; anything which flowers gives us honey through bees; many species of tree return atmospheric nitrogen to the soil to enhance the growth of nearby crops.

• nim 17 Nov 2021 7:12 UTC

  15 points

  on: Why I am no longer driven

  I notice that the tasks you list as “don’t take effort” map closely to how I would describe stereotypes of tasks that are “women’s work”, and I often see what it takes to remember them and make sure they happen described as “emotional labor”. I wonder to what extent the perception of “takes effort” may map to, or stem from, “see it culturally praised/​rewarded”.

  I would be interested in reading more about how you balance the “it’s ok to take it easy some/​much of the time” mindset with still making good progress on the things you find important, because that’s something I struggle with myself. I craft some illusion of balance by fluctuating between being too strict with myself for the sake of productivity and too lenient with myself for various diverse excuses that dress up as good reasons, but I find the stable midpoint quite elusive.

• nim 4 Apr 2023 21:08 UTC

  14 points

  9

  on: LW Team is ad­just­ing mod­er­a­tion policy

  Thank you for the transparency!

  Comments from new users won’t display by default until they’ve been approved by a moderator.

  It sounds like you’re getting ready to add a pretty significant new workload to the tasks already incumbent upon the mod team. Approving all comments from new users seems like a high volume of work compared to my impression of your current duties, and it seems like the moderation skill threshhold for new user comment approval might potentially be lower than it is for moderators’ other duties.

  You may have already considered this possibility and ruled it out, but I wonder if it might make sense to let existing users above a given age and karma threshhold help with the new user comment queue. If LW is able to track who approved a given comment, it might be relatively easy to take away the newbie-queue-moderation permissions from anybody who let too many obviously bad ones through.

  I would be interested in helping out with a newbie comment queue to keep it moving quickly so that newbies can have a positive early experience on lesswrong, whereas I would not want to volunteer for the “real” mod team because I don’t have the requisite time and skills for reliably showing up for the more nuanced aspects of the role. Others who lurk here might also like to help out in this way, and might like to help out intermittently by opting in to a notification that the newbie comment queue is longer than usual and needs some curation.

  Thank you for the work you do in maintaining this well-kept garden, and I hope the necessary new work can be undertaken in a way that doesn’t risk burnout for our dedicated mods.

• nim 30 Apr 2021 18:13 UTC

  14 points

  0

  on: On silence

  I’ve spent most of my life in areas with low noise pollution. The best way I can describe the experience is that relevant ambient sounds build an understanding of my surroundings like the mini-map in the corner of a video game, which shows all the important events going on within a few hundred yards of the player’s character.

  In areas with low noise pollution, that mini-map is beneficial: it takes little to no conscious thought to keep it up to date, and it offers me information that I care about, such as where the people and animals around me are and what they’re doing. The wind makes different sounds when it blows different directions; rain’s various rhythms and drips tell me as much about it as I’d know if I watched it visually; bird songs reveal that the birds think it’s business as usual outside and their absence says that something out there has impressed the birds as being even more interesting than yelling at each other. In an area with few vehicles, it doesn’t take special effort to listen to each one: It’s easy to tell whether it’s light or heavy, gas or diesel, fast or slow, coming or going, traversing the paved road or a gravel driveway. Different people walk in different ways and make different little noises, which the brain starts picking out by itself when given enough good data to pattern match on.

  When I visit areas with higher noise pollution, that mini-map gets cluttered with dozens or hundreds of overlapping facts about the environment, to a point where it’s worse than useless and I try to turn it off by overriding it with distracting sounds like music or podcasts. When asking friends who were accustomed the noise why it didn’t bother them, it became clear that some people who spend most of their time in areas with high noise pollution don’t seem to experience that mini-map, or quarter-mile of personal space, that I take for granted when it’s available.

• nim 1 Apr 2024 15:42 UTC

  13 points

  8

  in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”

  It’s clear to me from the post that to properly enjoy it as performance art, the audience is meant to believe that the music is AI-generated.

  I don’t read the post as disclosing how the music was “actually” made, in the most literal real-world sense.

  Pretty cool, regardless, that we live in an era where ‘people pretending to be AI making music’ is not trivial to distinguish from ‘AI trying to make music’ :)

• nim 6 Jan 2023 6:04 UTC

  13 points

  2

  on: The In­vol­un­tary Pacifists

  Have you ever needed to take a test with such strict anti-cheating measures that the anti-cheating measures themselves inspired you to want to get away with cheating, even though you have no need nor desire to cheat on the actual test? That’s an emotional reaction that some, but perhaps not all, people feel toward such constraints. Since the reaction doesn’t directly do harm, it’s still allowed.

  First off, surgery is gonna be a problem. My mother and I are both only alive today because a surgeon violated her bodily integrity to get me out safely. If the limit is to non-consensual harm, we would have been okay as long as my mother had consented to surgery and/​or been conscious at the time that it was realized the surgery was needed.

  During some training recently, I got to work a few rotations in an emergency room, and one memorable moment was when some nurses let me tag along to watch an endoscopic surgery to physically remove a clot from a stroke patient’s brain. The cath lab team was waiting anxiously at the emergency room doors for the ambulance containing the unconscious patient to arrive. One of the paramedics on the ambulance crew happened to know the patient, so he handed me the ventilator he was carrying and got a family member of the patient on the phone so that an administrator from the cath lab could get the appropriate consent for treatment from the patient’s family. Patient, gurney, ventilator, IVs, medics, nurses, student, and a great noodliness of tubes rolled at almost a sprint down the hallway, into the elevator, along the next hall in a flurry of getting hairnets out of nurses’ pockets and onto everyone’s heads, and into the operating theater. The vent tech swapped the patient off the device I was holding onto a bigger and fancier machine to do a similar job, and all us field folks helped to transfer the electronically-animated body from the gurney to a slender padded table in the midst of the tangle of alien-looking machines. The ambulance crew got back to work, but those of us with time to stay and watch were shepherded into a radiation-safe viewing area as the system spun to life. I stayed out from underfoot and watched as they made an incision near the patient’s groin and, guided by imaging every second or two, gently threaded what’s essentially a miniature drain snake through the circulatory system into the brain. They found the clot and painstakingly removed it, piece by tiny little piece, to restore circulation. I don’t know what became of that patient afterwards, but the procedure I witnessed gave her a chance at recovery that someone with the same ailment even a few decades ago could never have enjoyed.

  Could your pacifists have performed that surgery?

  The patient was unconscious, and thus couldn’t consent having her circulatory system violated by a meter of bendy metal rod. Would that have stayed the surgeon’s hand?

  Perhaps the surgeon’s intent, desire to save life and certainty that the procedure is in the patient’s best interests, grants consent within the system you’re proposing. If that’s the case, a villain need only run their own medical “school”: Train surgeons who deeply and sincerely believe that certain procedures are the best thing for patients in certain circumstances. What if, on the very day I saw that surgery, there was some clinical trial going on somewhere that had completed research proving that the intervention I saw was ultimately worse than another for patients, and so some people in the world knew with certainty that it was the wrong thing to do, while other people knew with certainty that it was right? How would your system handle such disparities? You specified that lying is not forbidden, so our villain’s school can lie to students easily. Hone your understanding of exactly where the enforcement system draws the line, and soon you’re churning out soldiers who are religiously certain that their bullets are tools of peace and kindness, rescuing recipients from the horrifying senescence years of cancer or dementia that they’d eventually have to suffer if someone was so cruel as to continue leaving them alive.

  In the modern legal system, the patient’s immediate family was able to consent to the procedure on her behalf. Is that how yours would work, too? If so, a mentally ill parent who hates their child yet can consent on that child’s behalf can “formally accept violence from an opponent” on that child’s behalf, allowing anyone to do that violence unto the child.

  OK, let’s patch that loophole by saying that all children count as individuals, and themselves can do no harm but must consent for themselves. A conscious child with a broken limb won’t want to permit any adult to set that break. And at what age does the prohibition upon harm start? At the very genesis of reproduction, the placenta parasitizes the womb, violating the bodily integrity of the human who’s carrying it. Could a willing mother consent to a pregnancy at all, if the prospective future child lacks an individual identity and the capacity to understand that consent-to-implant at the time it’s needed? Would there be a particular moment in pregnancy, perhaps where the foetal brain is sufficiently formed for the system to begin acting upon it, where the prospective future child suddenly starts counting as a human? If not—if your system acts on the very atoms which will eventually become an adult—we get into some profoundly quirky edge cases about how, say, a kernel of corn gets eaten by a chicken, and its molecules become an egg, and the egg gets eaten by a prospective future parent, and those molecules are used by the human body to make reproductive cells that eventually become a baby, but only molecules from certain parts of the egg, and so forth. Wild.

  Back to the unconscious individual. Can some proxy consent to violation of bodily integrity on her behalf, or nah? If the proxy can consent to violation, the proxy can behave maliciously. Consent is just speech, and you’ve explicitly stated that speech which leads to harm, like scamming Grandma out of house and home so that she freezes to death in the winter streets, is still permitted. This raises the question: Is it forbidden to painlessly place someone into a state of unconsciousness from which everyone fully expects them to arise unharmed at the time it happens? Actually, we don’t even need that, because it isn’t forbidden to trick people. If you poison the victim’s favorite food and leave that food where you know they’ll see it and expect they’ll consume it, you’re not really actually harming them, are you? They had the choice not to partake of it, they consented by eating it, after all… If poisoning is forbidden, where’s the line at what constitutes poisoning? Does sufficiently bad cooking, such as using unsafe food handling practices, count? Does it count only if safer food handling practices are known and available? (if knowledge is relevant to the workings of the system, does suppression of relevant knowledge count as doing harm?) Introducing e coli or salmonella to an individual’s system via their food causes the recipient to at least feel harmed by that action, as anyone who’s simulated an all-too-creative multi-part fountain from a bout of food poisoning can attest. If someone contaminates a piece of food without being certain it’ll be eaten, and another person serves that food without being certain it was contaminated, is the prohibition on harm breached by one, both, or neither?

  And if no proxy can consent for a necessary violation of integrity, that stroke patient’s treatment would be halted. Congratulations, no human could have done it, but the pacifism enforcer’s mandatory inaction has ended a life that might, without it, have been saved.

  editing to add—P. S., if your system tries to work around this issue by prohibiting inaction in certain circumstances, that’s basically slavery with extra steps.

• nim 18 Feb 2022 3:50 UTC

  13 points

  on: A scheme for sam­pling durable goods first-hand be­fore mak­ing a purchase

  (like pillows, computer mice, and sleep masks)

  You skip a distinction between two types of “durable goods”, which seems relevant here: Whether the item would seem icky or benign to acquire secondhand.

  Everybody draws that line in a different place, but I’d propose that pillows and sleep masks (and headphone earcups, underwear, shoes) very commonly fall on the “eww” side of the line: You wouldn’t want to get the item secondhand, and/​or the amount of cleaning it would take to render a secondhand one of the item clean enough to not gross you out would destroy the item.

  I wouldn’t mind a secondhand pillowcase, because I can launder it on hot and dry it in the sun and be content that it’s as clean as anything I could buy new, possibly cleaner. But a secondhand pillow seems unpleasant; I don’t want to be sticking my face in all the dust and dander that’s gotten into it from other peoples’ houses, and laundering most pillows causes their filling to mat up and spoils their texture.

  I wouldn’t mind a secondhand computer mouse, because if it looks icky I can wipe it down with water or some cleaner on all the parts of it that I actually touch. But if I was getting a secondhand pair of over-ear headphones, I would want to replace the ear and headband padding (or at least launder it if it was designed to survive that) because rubbing a stranger’s skin and hair oils on myself like that would just be gross.

  Similarly, I’m happy to thrift or inherit solid wood furniture, but I’m extremely reluctant to accept secondhand upholstered items, because you can’t really wash upholstery and who knows what’s living in it.

  For items in the “ok with getting it secondhand” category, your scheme would work, but so would buying a secondhand version of the target item, keeping it if you like it, and selling it along at a price almost identical to what you paid for it if you don’t like it. This trades a little more hassle for a lot more control of when you get the item, and it is likely cheaper to buy and resell several of the item than to pay 2x the cost of new. Sure, you only get to try a used one, but only the first person in your scheme gets to try the item new anyway.

  For items in the “not ok with getting it secondhand” category, your scheme does not seem very tenable. Maybe you could choose an order of trying things based on how used an item each individual is willing to tolerate, and balance the prices for it based on how used the items are by the time they reach each participant? You could potentially use disposable covers over the parts that would be unhygenic without them, but that adds a lot of complexity and trust that the other people won’t be gross with the item.

  The usual way to try several of items you wouldn’t want secondhand is to travel to some brick-and-mortar stores and examine new instances of the item you’re considering. The showroom format for items like mattresses and pillows creates a strong social pressure to not interact with the display items in a way that would render them “used” (such as getting bodily fluids on a mattress or pillow). This pressure to keep items pristine, and subsequent trust that the item being tried has been kept in a situation with that pressure, would be hard to replicate in the scenario of letting people try the item at home.

  Another logistical constraint to the idea of shipping stuff from home to home is simply storage space. How many people do you know live in a house or apartment large enough to easily store a few dozen extras of a particular “durable good” for the time it’d take them to test them all?

  I would be very interested in seeing a price breakdown comparing doing a scheme like yours by mail against doing it with a series of regional showrooms. I’ve been shopping for a new vacuum cleaner and wishing that there was some format of event for such small appliances where people who love theirs would bring them in and let others try them. Maybe the manufacturers could be involved, either in promising to replace items broken by the event, or giving some small incentive to users whose participation causes others to purchase from that brand. I wouldn’t trust such a showcase held by any individual manufacturer, but a community organized one using a combination of items donated (or loaned) by brands and items purchased by the group from brands unwilling to donate would help buyers make more informed decisions and discover their own preferences.

  A dozen regional showrooms of this type could showcase a dozen different types of item, and rotate what items are shown where each month.

• nim 19 Aug 2023 17:13 UTC

  12 points

  3

  on: Are we run­ning out of new mu­sic/​movies/​art from a meta­phys­i­cal per­spec­tive? (up­dated)

  I’ve noticed the “genres getting full/​completed” thing, but I attribute it to how we define the genres.

  A friend once lamented how they’re not making good prog any more, and not knowing what prog was at the time, I responded with a volley of questions about what constitutes good prog and what happened to the people who used to make it and what we call music that’s sufficiently novel relative to prog. Turns out that what he called “good prog” was defined in a way that set up the category to get full: Sufficiently distinct new music wasn’t “really prog” because it was other genres, and new music sufficiently similar to existing prog wasn’t “good” because it lacked an element of novelty.

  My takeaway there was “well duh, if you go around defining genres like that, after awhile there won’t be room for quality novel stuff in them”.

  Mathematically, the amount of possible sequences of stimuli that a human can experience in a finite lifetime is huge but finite. Most of those subsets of stimuli won’t be experienced as “good art”, and the goalpost for what does qualify as “good art” also moves over time as a function of culture and individual experience.

  I don’t think we’re anywhere near exhausting the available spectrum of “good art”, though, considering that we’re still early in the game of inventing new ways to control what stimuli others experience. One excellent example is the pairing of music with altered mental states: we haven’t even found all the chemicals yet for safely, reliably, and desirably altering mental states. So a bunch of “good art” has never yet been experienced by humans (consider listening to a good album released this year, under the influence of each best intoxicant that will be released each year for the next several decades, as that many novel promising potential art experiences). I think it’s way too early about worrying about having had each potential “good art” experience enough times for it to get boring—and that doesn’t even start on the hypothesis that some experiences cannot even be fully and accurately remembered because of neurological limitations, and will thus feel novel each time they’re revisited.

  With all that said, though, as I grow older it feels like “good art” is becoming harder to find. My personal hypothesis on this is that part of what makes art into a personal favorite is related to the amount of novelty, or rate of personal change, associated with my circumstances when I first encountered it. I find that I can game that system by trying new music, shows, etc at times when I am particularly receptive to change—while traveling, exploring, experiencing major shifts in interpersonal relationships, etc.

  Adolescence is kind of a cheat code for attaching to and identifying with art in a way that keeps it enjoyable, because it’s a time of extreme change for pretty much everybody.

  tl;dr I think genres get full in general because of how we define them, but we keep making new art, and we keep making new ways to make and experience art. I think many people have a personal experience of “good art getting harder to find” because factors associated with different life stages impact our receptivity to exploring new art and forming new favorites.

• nim 12 Mar 2023 2:20 UTC

  12 points

  8

  on: Minor Life Op­ti­miza­tion: Con­sider Order­ing Your Food To-Go

  If you plan to eat at the restaurant, you can just ask them for a box if you have food left over.

  Also, ordering to-go and then eating there only works at places where you can just grab a seat. In many places I’ve eaten, saying “for here” is how you get allocated a place to sit if you want to eat there.

  If you want to save even more time, phone the restaurant and place your order before you begin traveling to it. That way they can prepare your food during your travel time.

  A potential con is that most food needs to be refrigerated if you want to keep it safe to eat for several hours. Depending on what happens between mealtime and snacks “later”, you may need to handle additional cognitive load to store the food appropriately.

• nim 3 Feb 2023 4:47 UTC

  12 points

  10

  on: You Don’t Ex­ist, Duncan

  I feel like I’m hearing disappointment from you directed at people who could have done better.

  I don’t feel that disappointment, and also I don’t think they could have done better.

  I have experienced something that takes a similar shape—probably less often than you do, probably less cuttingly toward my own self-image than you experience it—because I have met a certain category of generalizations often enough to can “I guess I’m nobody, then” as my default reply to them. Sometimes people cringe and sometimes they laugh, depending on the context and how the line is delivered.

  Some people can’t see some things. To most of the world, good code looks identically esoteric to bad code. To me, a poorly executed sports play looks indistinguishable from a well-executed one. A non-coder could infer the difference between good and bad code by watching an expert read each; I could infer the difference between a good play and a bad one by listening to the crowd’s response.

  The feelings I hear in this would make sense to me if they came from someone who imagined that others were doing some special favor for everyone else and withholding it from them. That’s how the phenomenon can look, from a certain perspective. But the way I model it in my own experiences, others are giving the same treatment to everybody. They’re modeling everyone around them in these small, simplistic models, and if the model predicts the subject accurately, it looks like the subject was “really seen”. If the subject is larger or more nuanced than the model can hold, the subject seems “ignored”.

  Maybe your world extends far enough beyond those of observers, in certain directions, that there’s a lot of you that they really can’t see. To be egalitarian and avoid causing offense, we could tack on an argument about how there are probably nuances to them that you can’t see either, but realistically it’s rather rude to pretend that those should matter to anyone as that person matters to themself.

  If somebody can’t grasp the meaning of a function no matter how carefully it’s explained to them, if they tell the function that it doesn’t exist in the way that it’s defined to… Yes, and?

• nim 5 Mar 2022 18:21 UTC

  11 points

  on: [Let­ter] Rus­si­ans are Wel­come in America

  It’s indelicate to point out, but I’d like to reiterate that our racism is based far more on physical appearance than on cultural background. When I’ve traveled in eastern Europe, only language, dress, and grooming preferences reveal that the locals are from there rather than from the US.

  If anxiety about English fluency is a sticking point for getting people out of there, is this a place where the community could step up? Would support like calls with and proofreading by fluent English speakers in this community help get people out who might have been unwilling to take that risk without it? If so, I would be interested in helping out in this way, because selfishly I like feeling like I’m doing something to help. Would others feel similarly?

[Question] What are your fa­vorite ex­am­ples of adults in and around this com­mu­nity pub­li­cly chang­ing their minds?

• nim 15 Jan 2024 4:57 UTC

  10 points

  6

  in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Gen­der Exploration

  Whether having breasts is a minor thing to the person who has them depends greatly on the size.

  Below a certain size, you can have breast development that’s visible when nude, but easy to hide if you want to. Bras aren’t generally necessary (though they can be an aesthetic preference or helpful for reducing friction when clothes move across the area), and little to no effort or discomfort is required to wear a sports bra or binder and comfortably wear clothing cut for body types without breasts. The current selfies in the post make look to me like the author is almost certainly in this category. Plenty of women, both cis and trans, have less volume of breast tissue than a certain phenotype of obese cis men.

  Above a certain size, having breasts can be a major inconvenience, even for people who generally like having them. Bras become mandatory for avoiding pain when moving about in one’s daily life, and rather than cute decorations, they’re expensive feats of structural engineering. Finding any clothing which fits flatteringly can become between difficult and impossible, and major social stigma can be experienced for choosing clothes that the viewer perceives as “too revealing”.

  Are you calling it a non-minor thing to you as a reader just learning about Sapphire’s journey, or a non-minor thing to you as someone considering the pros and cons of transition? The former would seem kind of out of line, but the latter seems very understandable to me.

  FWIW, breast growth generally proceeds slowly enough that you can stop it by stopping the hormones causing it, if that’s an option for you. (it’s not an option when the hormones show up by default at puberty, so that’s one of the many facets of being human that’s distressing to some teens...)

• nim 5 Apr 2023 3:15 UTC

  10 points

  2

  in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: LW Team is ad­just­ing mod­er­a­tion policy

  I too expect that testing whether someone can talk as if they’ve absorbed the sequences would measure password-guessing more accurately than comprehension.

  The idea gets me wondering whether it’s possible to design a game that’s easy to learn and win using the skills taught by the sequences, but difficult or impossible without them. Since the sequences teach a skill, it seems like we should be able to procedurally generate novel challenges that the skill makes it easy to complete.

  As someone who’s gone through the sequences yet isn’t sure whether they “really” “fully” understand them, I’d be interested in taking and retaking such a test from time to time (if it was accurate) to quantify any changes to my comprehension.