I’m not sure what you mean by ‘the response here’, but I liked the article, if that wasn’t clear. ‘It points towards the dao’ is high praise, the way I mean it.
Togame
Karma: 27
I think buddism and daoism are eventually pointing at the same thing, and I think this post is pointing towards that thing too. I think the problem with that thing is that it is very hard to put into words, and in some way there is only very little you can say about it, so by word count, most writing is not about it. And then the cult attractor happens, and people start to want smart-sounding writing about the thing, which doesn’t work, and so you get a few people writing a few words about the thing here and there, and an absolute mountain of writing that pretends to be about the thing, that can sound smarter because it is not actually about the thing.
I think the point of the word ‘threat’ is that it is about a consequence which is illegitimate in some form, according to the wider culture. Like, if I say I’ll hit you if you don’t give me money, it is a threat, because I am not allowed to just randomly hit you. But if I say ‘If you break into my house, I’ll call the police’ that is not a threat, if that is normally what we do when a burglary happens.
So I would say that splitting the money evenly is in some way the fairest way to deal with this, and where we would want the culture to end up. So if I say that I’ll reject an unfavorable split, it is not a threat, but if I say I’ll reject anything under $9 it is a threat, because I am trying to get more than my fair share.
This also works nicely with ‘we shouldn’t give in to threats’. People shouldn’t give in to random threats of violence, but if the wider culture wants them to cooperate, giving in is prosocial. Not stealing because you’d get arrested is a good thing for society, in most cases.
Of course this does then require some sort of judgement on what the difference between a legitimate and illegitimate consequence is, and that is a really hard question. I don’t know how to answer it, but I’d gesture towards something like ‘those consequences that make society a better place to live in’.
I mean, I get that it is scary, and I never managed it yet without flinching, but it is basically safe to do.
and helps you avoid mental patterns where you produce syncopated rhythms by stretching your sense of time instead of playing with where the notes land.
Do you have something I could read that explains more about this? This sentence made me realize that I’m probably doing rhythm wrong in exactly this way.
Did you just buy lenses and only then try to put them in? When I tried to get contacts, I went to a optometrist, and they didn’t allow me to take home the lenses to practice, because they said it could be dangerous, so I only tried for a minute or so. They said I should just learn to touch my eye without flinching and then come back, but that never worked so I never did.
Did you practice to touch your pupil without flinching before trying to put lenses in, and if so, did you manage it?
In this article you say that you can learn a lot from a single data point, and then give the example of an alien learning a lot about humans by finding a Ford Focus. I don’t think this example illustrates your point very well. The reason you can’t learn much from a single data point is because you don’t know if that data point is average or a big outlier. For example, an alien can learn a lot from a Ford, but can also be majorly misled by a playground space ship. The alien doesn’t know whether the artifact is pretend, fake, unusual, outdated, and so can’t tell much for certain about humanity, beyond just ‘one human made this at one point’.
discovers handwashing saves lives, then refuses to publish evidence
From what I remember reading, and a short wikipedia read, something like ‘He expected there to be pushback, and so did not want to publish initially, and when he eventually did, he lost his job, got put in an asylum, and beaten to death’ would be a better summary. I don’t think ‘not publishing’ was the mistake here. If this is the general quality of the writing on mistakes that you got, then it is not very high.
Do you still have a link to the youtube video and the reddit post? This made me really curious to see the kettle in question.
That side will also become numb.
Obviously the opposite side should become numb, right?
Let’s say you do not want to breastfeed, and you have a good reason for that. Maybe breastfeeding really hurts your nipples, maybe you can’t seem to produce enough milk, maybe it is just really inconvenient given your lifestyle. I would think that this would also be correlated with breastfeeding being a bad choice for you in particular. If it hurts, maybe the bonding doesn’t work. If you don’t produce enough milk, the quality might also be bad, or maybe slight underfeeding causes problems. If it is inconvenient, maybe you will get postpartum depression. It might sound cliche, but this article makes me think that ‘pick whichever you feel like’ is indeed the right algorithm for this.
So let’s say you are (sort of) an Effective Altruist, I think that describes many people here, including me. And let’s say that you believe that hunger and desperation makes otherwise decent people do horrible things. (I do believe so) And let’s say that you buy supplies over years, which just gets absorbed by the current supply chain and causes no shortages. Then the net effect of your supplies being stolen during a disaster is still that someone gets to eat, who would otherwise just not get to, and that person is probably of average decency. That just seems good? Like, maybe less good than me in particular getting to eat, I am not completely selfless. But ‘your supplies will get stolen’ just doesn’t seem like a very good argument against stockpiling.
Maybe there’s some fancy statistical methods that mitigate this, but from what I know about study design, if 9 women are happy because their period is more manageable/gone, and one woman feels very down because of the hormones, that might show up as ‘no effect on mood’, and then this gets communicated as ‘it definitely does not have an effect on mood, we did proper studies’ even if there is a sizable minority that gets reliably suicidal on it. Not sure if there is a name for this, but I always try to keep this in mind for any drug. Humans are sometimes just very different in how they metabolize things.
I feel like the AI is unduly helped by the format here. I don’t actually consume a whole book one quote at a time, and that is also not the reading experience the author wrote for.
For example, with the literary fiction one, the story about the boy and the church feels sort of complete, like a micro-story, and I think that might be why I prefer it in isolation. You also don’t need to understand anything about these characters before reading, they are just the boy and the grandfather, and that is all they are and all you need to know. But with the quote from the judge, I have this feeling that there is more to this character, even without ever having read the book the quote is from, and that makes me feel a bit disoriented while reading. Am I supposed to agree with this guy? To root for him? Does the wider narrative disprove him? I don’t know, and that makes the quote hard to read.
But I don’t read novels to read fifty cool quotes in a row, I want cohesion, a narrative, character development, some sort of central thesis. Can AIs currently provide that? I doubt it, and this article doesn’t ask.
And I suspect that part of this is also about whether you read the book the human quotes are based on. I don’t know who that judge is, but maybe my disorientation would just disappear if I did, and then the quote would land better. So maybe the survey results are just dominated by people who feel confused about the actual book that sits around the human quotes, and the whole thing is more about how well you know the literary canon they draw from.
(I had 3⁄2 AI preference, 1,1 2,1 3,2 4,1 5,1)
First, I’m not a therapist, and I don’t have OCD so free free to disregard, but I had a thought that might be useful.
Your compulsion is you worrying about X risk, but specifically not doing anything real about X risk, right? Like, the problem is not that you are working on X risk too hard, the problem is that your worries prevent you from doing much of any sort of work. I would try to concentrate on noticing that difference. Like, say you don’t worry about X risk for a day, does that mean you did less on it? If not, then your worries probably don’t do anything productive, and noticing that might help. Maybe this can work within the exposure release therapy framework?
If you think you have something productive to contribute, you might set aside some amount of time to work on it, but then try to quit thinking about it the rest of the time, and then try to notice that that time becomes more productive with less worries at 3 AM.
What does your mind feel like, when you are trying to go to sleep? Is that state compatible with mental rest and relaxation? If not, what mental move could you use to go towards relaxation? What are your dreams like? Are there any persistent themes of anxiety or fear in your dreams, that might arouse your brain enough to interrupt a sleep cycle, or even wake you up? How might you cope better with those feelings, so they don’t interrupt?
You could also try setting different intentions before going to bed, like ‘tonight I will conjure boring fantasies to calm my my mind’ or ‘I will focus on my breath to calm my mind’ and then see how those influence your sleep.