toonalfrink

Am­s­ter­dam Ra­tion­al­ity Dojo

• toonalfrink 31 Dec 2021 4:32 UTC

  10 points

  on: What are the pros and cons of seek­ing a for­mal di­ag­no­sis of autism?

  I have received a formal diagnosis twice in my life, once when I was 10 and once when I was 23.

  Negative impacts: none. I can disclose or not disclose as I wish. I like to tell people I’m autistic after interacting with them for a while because their surprise gives me a confidence boost. Apparently I’m smart enough to hide it.

  Positive impacts: the diagnostic track was quite rigorous, including all kinds of tests (IQ, social intelligence, some qualitative stuff), and the resulting data has been useful for me to understand myself better (for example the subscales of my IQ are highly irregular).

  So I’d say: do it. Mildly beneficial.

• toonalfrink 27 Dec 2021 14:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Razied’s comment on: Reneg­ing Prosocially

  (Maybe violence is the one exception where these norms aren’t sufficient, but I’m going to roll with it)

  Something that Duncan maybe didn’t stress enough is that these norms work best in conjunction with freedom of association. You’re free to punch people in the face as much as you want, but you’ll very quickly end up with a set of friends who like to be punched in the face (the empty set).

  Acknowledging that people that don’t like face-punching are correct about their preferences just helps them figure out more quickly that their choice not to interact with you is valid.

  If you don’t do this, and you’re convincing enough that the punching was actually good for them, that’s when you run into some pretty dark failure modes.

• toonalfrink 27 Dec 2021 14:18 UTC

  3 points

  on: Reneg­ing Prosocially

  This is excellent. I associate many of these behaviors with upper-class norms, and I think that upper-class norms generally perform best when optimizing social trust, affordance to coordinate, etc.

  While it’s great to have a write-up of these behaviors, I feel that they’re best learned through osmosis, i.e. by frequently interacting with someone who was raised that way, or having them as a role model. I’d expect that to work best when you actually endorse that their habits are (in some ways) better than yours.

  I also think that the value of these ideas will scale superlinearly with their uptake. So I’m sharing this with a few fellow group organizers and I’ll try to signal-boost it more generally (though I’m not in a position to make promises)

• toonalfrink 23 Dec 2021 12:58 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Two (very differ­ent) kinds of donors

  Ah yeah, on second thought the “father” vibe might also be one that is (disagreeably) investing in the agent, not buying their activities, and when you are buying the activity it seems that the disagreeable/​agreeable dimension kind of collapses, i.e. it doesn’t matter how the recipient feels about it, they’re just an object.
  
  How about means versus ends? More precisely, I suppose you can turn this binary distinction into a discrete one by saying that while one donor might be supporting your current activities, the next one might be supporting the one-level-up goal that your current activities are pursuing, while the next one might be supporting the two-levels-up goal that your current activities are pursuing, etc.
  
  In other words, different donors might have different levels of tolerance if you pivot. The more fundamentally you change your plans, the more the donor has to be on the “investing in the agent” end of the spectrum to support it.

• toonalfrink 23 Dec 2021 12:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: bfinn’s comment on: Six Spe­cial­iza­tions Makes You World-Class

  thanks, fixed it

• toonalfrink 22 Dec 2021 9:21 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Six Spe­cial­iza­tions Makes You World-Class

  Maybe there are better ways to come to agreement on the feasibility of discovery. Perhaps we should look at the success rate of startups? Do you have other ideas?

• toonalfrink 22 Dec 2021 9:00 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Six Spe­cial­iza­tions Makes You World-Class

  Our double crux seems to be about the feasibility of finding new combinations that are meaningful.
  
  Using previously discovered combinations as examples doesn’t count, because discovery is easy in hindsight.
  
  Could you come up with a bunch of novel combinations, right here and now, that sound like they might be useful to the world at large?

• toonalfrink 22 Dec 2021 8:45 UTC

  11 points

  on: Book Launch: The Eng­ines of Cognition

  5 x 7.75 inches

  fwiw that’s 12.7 x 19.7 cm

• toonalfrink 22 Dec 2021 8:42 UTC

  4 points

  on: Two (very differ­ent) kinds of donors

  I’m curious to what extent this distinction can be mapped to the disagreeable/​agreeable spectrum. Also curious if this thing can be generalized to diff kinds of support in general, i.e. conditional/​unconditional love. I’m also getting father/​mother archetypes vibes from this.

• toonalfrink 22 Dec 2021 8:33 UTC

  52 points

  on: Six Spe­cial­iza­tions Makes You World-Class

  Except that all the meaningful combinations are already being competed on, while all the meaningless combinations are not.
  
  The amount of meaningful combinations is not $s^n$, but much lower. This website lists 12.000 career paths. I’d wager that the true number is not more than an order of magnitude away from it. If we take a (totally arbitrary) upper bound guess of 100.000 career paths, that means to be world class you still have to compete with 80.000 people.
  
  Of course you can try and invent a new meaningful combination of skills, but that’s just another skill combination, and it’s one that a lot of people are already competing on.

• toonalfrink 21 Dec 2021 20:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ADifferentAnonymous’s comment on: Mo­tive Ambiguity

  fwiw: I was hazed in uni, and I’m actually quite happy it happened, and so are my friends who went through it. One of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

• toonalfrink 21 Dec 2021 14:31 UTC

  2 points

  on: Is there a term /​ bet­ter way of phras­ing the gen­eral case where an in­ter­ven­tion helps cer­tain in­di­vi­d­u­als do bet­ter at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any ex­ter­nal value?

  Maybe rent seeking

• toonalfrink 21 Dec 2021 14:10 UTC

  8 points

  on: How I be­came a per­son who wakes up early

  I start work every weekday at 9:15. Have been doing this for 2 years. Most mornings I would stay in bed until 9:05 or so, grudgingly getting up to join the day start.

  About 3 weeks ago, I have started taking melatonin at 18:00 and sometimes 20:00 every day. Additionally I started blocking my access to internet starting at 18:00 every day.

  I’m still baffled just how effective it has been. I now wake up naturally at ±7:00 every day. I haven’t needed to set an alarm clock once in those 3 weeks.

  None of the other things worked. I spent most of my adult life trying to achieve this outcome. Regulating my exposure to light, heat, food, exercising during the day, etc etc, it would only work in small ways.

• toonalfrink 21 Dec 2021 13:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raj Thimmiah’s comment on: Dear Self; We Need To Talk About So­cial Media

  This is a good example of what I call synchronizing your s2 with your s1

Am­s­ter­dam Ra­tion­al­ity Dojo

• toonalfrink 14 Dec 2021 12:02 UTC

  14 points

  on: Dear Self; We Need To Talk About So­cial Media

  This should be a good place to describe my system of keeping Facebook working for me
  The centerpiece of this system is a tool called FocusMe. No other tool (of the 10 or so that I have evaluated) can do this job.
  
  FocusMe is blocking software, but it’s the only blocking software that has 2 essential features:
  - It can be airtight, i.e. you can set it up in a way that it cannot be switched off (without factory resetting your device)
  - It can block parts of a website without blocking others (with regexes).

  My problem with Facebook is that the feed reliably makes my life worse while the groups and the events functions make my life considerably better. As an organiser of LessWrong events I need to be on Facebook to attract a large chunk of the attendance. Just going ballistic on FB by blocking its IP address range (like many blockers do) is not an option for me. I also want to kinda keep using messenger and definitely whatsapp.

  So I block facebook.com and whitelist facebook.com/​​events, facebook.com/​​groups and facebook.com/​​login, and I happily do all the right things and none of the wrong things, and not a moment goes by that I miss the days of willpower.

  That’s just my laptop. For my phone, things are somewhat trickier with less options for total control, but you can still have it your way with burg… Mobile Device Management (MDM) software. The overall feeling of niceness of my life was quite saliently improved once my phone no longer had a browser on it. I also tend to block instant messaging in favor of keeping that stuff on my laptop, where I can manage my access to it on a more granular level. After trying 4 or 5 MDM solutions I settled on Jamfnow, but you have options here.

  My general philosophy is the following: seriously, fuck willpower as a solution for anything. It requires a constant tenseness and alertness. Instead, control yourself in two ways: by synchronizing your s2 with your s1 to the point that your “bad” impulses dissolve, or by simply making it practically impossible for yourself to do “bad” things, and then joyfully following your impulses. It turns out that my impulses are totally productive as long as I take their addictions away, and after a while I cease to make a distinction between “me” and “my brain” at all, since they always agree anyway.

• toonalfrink 10 Dec 2021 13:44 UTC

  2 points

  on: Pair de­bug­ging & ap­plied rationality

  Raymond is doing the workshop this time. He says:
  
  ”This time we are going to practice circling. Circling is a technique to practice awareness of how one connect and relate to others by paying attention to what is happening in the present moment. More information can be found here: https://​​www.circlingeurope.com/​​what-is-circling

  The plan is to start with some small authentic relating game to get more comfortable and practice some skills related to circling and then do circling for about an hour.”

• toonalfrink 9 Dec 2021 20:17 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: What have your ro­man­tic ex­pe­riences with non-EAs/​non-Ra­tion­al­ists been like?

  this

• toonalfrink 6 Dec 2021 16:08 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai’s comment on: Mo­ral­ity is Scary

  The alternative is egoism. To the extent that we are allies, I’d be happy if you adopted it.