pandamonium

Karma: 15

pandamonium 30 May 2025 1:55 UTC
8 points
8
on: Truth or Dare
I have been in the Light World, then the Dark and I’ve been working on escaping it for years, with partial success. It felt good to read this essay, the fact that the move is doable but takes a ton of work and time resonates with my expérience. It’s a small example, but the example of the child psychopath who recovered thanks to professionnal help gave me hope. I have had to renunce to parts of my integrity, empathy and trust in the world and others in order to deal with difficult situations and build for myself a safe environment. I am working on gaining them back, but woah that’s hard !
Some things which helped me :
- Internal Family System and learning to communicate with love to all my parts, including the angry hurt ones, including the irrationnal ones
- Going no contact with my mother, who was the main source of emotional violence. Hardest choice of my life, I don’t regret it.
- Making new friends who are kind, warm and empathetic—and learn from them. Having old friends I trust a lot helped too.
- (not sure I would recommend it to anyone else, but it was necessary for me to change pattern) temporarily stopping to pursue big goals and limitting my responsabilities. Numbing my feelings was the only way I knew to deal with deadlines and responsibilities. Getting rid of external pressures gave me the space needed to learn how to explore and process my feelings in an healthier way. Cons : not always possible + create a disconnect from the world and from a sense of purpose

pandamonium 31 Dec 2024 0:41 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Chris Lakin’s comment on: Began a pay-on-results coaching experiment, made $40,300 since July
Disclaimer : I would not pay and want to pay that much money anyway—so I am not your intended audience

I’d trust you more (and I would think members of the rationalist community would too) if you gave several metrics, even if some of them are not so good, with explanations. Right now, it seems you chose a metric so that it looks good.

More metrics would take more time but not much if you have the data easily available. This would be my suggestion :

You can provide three percentages ( like when one provides three quantiles instead of just the mean of data values) :
- the percentage of success in people you discussed for at least an hour
- the percentage among the people with reasonable chances of success (motivated + didn’t bail + your expertise + spent at least X hours)
- the percentage among people with great chances of success.
These percentages, with precise information on what determines in which category clients fall in and the percentage of people treated who fall into each category, would give a first sound idea of the success rate.

Taking on low success rate people would not be a problem because their data is treated separately. It’s only a problem if 90% of your clients are unlikely to be helped but that would not be a good thing anyway.

pandamonium 20 Dec 2024 17:09 UTC
3 points
0
on: Correct my H5N1 research ($reward)
I am no biologist but I thought it would be fun to give it a try. Hoping it’s not too late to participate.
For the purpose of this experiment, I assumed everything written in sound scientific papers was right, as I had neither the time nor the knowledge to do a proper truth-check.
Here is what I found :
The fact that we see very few human cases compared to what we could expect for a virus which can become human-compatible with a single point mutation could be partially explained by the heterogeneity of the mutation rate over the genome:
- in this paper, a 1 to 100 ratio of mutation rate inside the human genome is mentioned : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35218359/
  There are known factors which hints at a low / large mutation rate for a sequence, so one could investigate further whether this would be the case for the “single point mutation” mentioned
  -> you can divide the probability by 100 in the best case
A paper where they infect ferret with H5N1 and test how to mutate the genome to make it airborne:
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4810786/
- “Four amino acid substitutions in the host receptor-binding protein hemagglutinin, and one in the polymerase complex protein basic polymerase 2, were consistently present in airborne-transmitted viruses.”
As an alternative to tamiflu which can also be used in combination with it : favipiravir
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163725820300401, a 2020 paper about it
- licensed as an influenza drug in Japan
- when used in combination with tamiflu, a 2020 paper (with small sample size = 40) suggests that combining tamiflu with favipiravir improve significantly the efficiency
- as it has been envisioned as a drug against COVID, it’s easy to find meta-analyses on the side-effects of this drug
- a huge problem with tamiflu is that the influenza viruses develop resistance to it. favipiavir does not seem to have this problem

pandamonium 13 Nov 2024 20:05 UTC
2 points
0
on: Introduction to Modern Dating: Strategic Dating Advice for beginners
I would like to highlight that the advice is sexist and not unisex as stated. All these steps for a guy to meet as many partners as they can in order to really find one which fit their goal, and the advice for the woman is only to actively pursue people they are attracted too ? If the goal was really for any person to meet the best partner for them, it would ensue that women, as rational agents, should also try to maximize their encounters with men, to maximize the chance to find a man who is a great fit to their preference. The advice given here for women (while helpful, I am all for expressing your interest to people you’re interested in) would be optimal if the goal was to help the men they’re interacting with find a good partner, not to help these women themselves.

Overall, this text has a bad vibe, I have the sense that this approach taken too literally and without concern on how the person you’re considering to date would feel could easily lead to creepy behaviors and interactions. If you want to give dating advice to men (given the writing of this text, I would assume that’s what you typically do), you would benefit from talking to women to get their perspective, reading feminist texts, queer ones even. Finding a good partner while making people you’re interacting with having pleasant experiences is highly preferable than doing it at the cost making dozens of people uncomfortable or even feeling unsafe with your approach. The later is ethically questionable.

pandamonium 28 Oct 2023 20:04 UTC
2 points
0
on: Bayesian Punishment
The discussion on the impact on false positive / false negatives would be more fair if you also discussed the negative impacts implementing bayesian punishment would have. For example, if you start giving small punishments for crimes with low credence of guilt, that would not be punished in the current system, this will add its lot of false positive.

I would not be confident it would be a good idea to implement this in our current justice systems. It may have a negative impact on people’s faith in justice (is it deserved ? yeah ! is it good ? not sure) and my view of the justice system is that it’s an essential part of society which is quite fragile as it relies in part on the lie that the justice system is fair and that it’s decision is the truth. Plus, more generally, I don’t think judges would handle the credences correctly, it’s quite a difficult task to transform an heteregoneous and large set of proofs, among which testimonials, into a credence.

pandamonium 28 Jun 2023 17:06 UTC
2 points
3
on: Self-administered EMDR without a therapist is very useful for a lot of things!
Thanks for the post ! I have tried doing EMDR by myself following these instructions after struggling to find a reliable EMDR therapist and it’s definitely a new addendum to my therapeutic toolbox. It’s great to process difficult events that happened in the past and the subsequent feelings.
In the link you refer to, there is a phase at the beginning where the therapist teaches self-care techniques to handle strong emotions (or they ensure that the patient already has such tools). This was lost in your post and I think it is important in order to avoid retraumatization and bad experiences. I felt confident trying the technique because I know how to soothe myself if needed and be present with my feelings, but I am pretty sure it would have been a scary or even maybe a painful experience otherwise.

pandamonium 18 Nov 2025 22:53 UTC
1 point
0
on: What are your impossible problems?
What a fruitful question. There are already things I deemed impossible that I managed to make happen :)
So two examples of what feel impossible now (but still in the realm of reality, not like wanting to eat the concept of a color x) ) :
- Preventing the general European move towards fascism (even achieving that in my country, France, would be amazing). Feels impossible because :
  Many competent and intelligent people already attempted that, without success.
  I don’t think these kind of mass movements are controllable by one person. It feels like they behave following laws we don’t necessarily know but can hardly break.
  I tried a little my hand at politics, it seems like a domain where deontology loses against consequentialism and it felt rotten + was really bad for my happiness. That’s the most obvious way to fight fascism and it’s extremely difficult and too exhausting for me to make the kind of effort necessary to have a chance
  Approaches like debate or education are great on paper but more long-term approaches.
  I am one person, it already requires a ton of effort to change minds at the level of my family or my company, the effort to change the minds of several countries i.e millions / billions of people feel inhuman
  I want to (non-negotiable) be happy and I get exhausted quickly, this has to be taken into account to assess the feasibility of any solution
- Finding an extremely satisfying place to live, which satisfy all the important criterion I care about : close enough to my family and friends in Paris and Rennes (several hours maximum), where people speak french, a great non-remote job with less than 30″ commute by bike, both calm, clean and safe and full of life, where people are kind to each other, where there is a feeling of community and welcoming of newcomers but no harsh judgment of difference, where I can find easily like-minded people to learn with, dance with and sing with, very close to beautiful nature, cheap enough to live well with a 80% part time salary. Feels impossible because :
  A lot of people look for that, if it existed, I would likely know about it
  I am looking for a combination of the best qualities I found in places I visited. Typically, I want the pros of big cities and of the countryside without accepting the cons. I want to have my cake and eat it, which is impossible :D
  The location limitation reduces tremendously the chances. The number of candidate places is finite and not so big, I’ve visited dozens of cities within the location bounds and they all fall short in one way or another. My current city is great in many ways, but the center is dirty, not so safe and smells like piss, which sucks.
  Start with a finite and not so big number of candidates, add more and more constraints which are very hard to satisfy and go in opposite directions … That’s the recipe for building a problem with no solution
  >> It is likely really impossible when the problem is presented like that. I see it as a hint that I should look for a better description of a place that would feel like a fully satisfying home. No cause for despair yet here.

pandamonium 9 Oct 2025 20:07 UTC
1 point
0
on: Do Things for as Many Reasons as Possible
Thanks for the idea ! I’ve never seen it before. I just tried it and unsurprisingly discovered that I feel way more motivated with three reasons than with one. As a fun example, it made me try to brush my teeth in a manner that feel like massaging my teeths and gums, which is quite pleasant while still efficient.

pandamonium 22 Jan 2025 12:28 UTC
1 point
0
on: Almost all growth is exponential growth
I agree with the fact that there are many examples of exponential growth in real life, but this post seems to overstate their importance.

Here, I feel that approximating a little quantity to zero led to a false conclusion. A lot of cool (and I guess bad) things in life are present in small quantity and it’s enough for them to be valuable and have a strong impact. There is one ethical breeder of the breed of dogs you love in France (example taken from a friend ;) ) : that’s all you need ! If you were limited to the main topics in conversations, it would get boring very fast. Thankfully, there are plenty of small new topics of conversations that appear when you talk to new people ! And, taking an example closer to LessWrong, you only need one powerful AI with weak safeguards to get the world into trouble.

pandamonium 22 Dec 2024 1:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Correct my H5N1 research ($reward)
Ah yes, you’re right. I don’t know why but I made the mental shortcut that the mutation rate was about the DNA of cows / humans and not the flu virus.

The general point still holds : I am wary of the assumption of a constant mutation rate of the flu virus. It really facilitates the computation, but if the computation under this simplifying hypothesis leads to a consequence which contradict reality, I would interrogate this assumption.
It’s surprising to have so few human cases considering the large number of cows infected if there is a human-compatible viron per cow.

Another cause of this discrepancy could also be that due to the large mutation rate, a non-negligible part of the virons are not viable / don’t replicate well / …

There are papers which show heterogeneity for influenza / RNA viruses but I don’t really know if it’s between the virus population (of the same kind of virus) or within the genome. And they are like a factor 4 or so in the papers I have seen. So maybe less relevant than expected.

Regarding the details, my lack of deep knowledge of the domain is limiting. But as a mathematician who had to modelize real phenomenon and adapt the model to handle the discrepancy between the model’s conclusion and reality, that’s the train of thought which comes naturally to mind.