waveman

Karma: 1,676

waveman 9 Jan 2023 0:46 UTC
2 points
on: Consolidated Nature of Morality Thread
In line with the maxim “read the textbook first” I offer metaethics:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/

https://iep.utm.edu/metaethi/

Nietzsche claimed that “there are no moral facts at all”. It does seem that any moral system requires some axiom that cannot be derived from facts about the world, or logic.
Famously Kant’s Categorical Imperative is one such axiom.

waveman 24 Oct 2022 0:01 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Accountability Buddies: Why you might want one.
Your AB should ideally be:

I would add

d) A person who does not have RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria). This is a pretty common condition. A lot of people are just very averse to any feedback and such people do not make good accoutability partners. Such people may to be looking for cheerleaders not accountability partners.

Related ideas around immunity to change in this book https://www.amazon.com.au/Immunity-Change-Overcome-Potential-Organization/dp/1422117367
″Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization” by Robert Kegan

waveman 3 Oct 2022 7:49 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Baby Monitor with Delay
> Our youngest (15m) has recently started sleeping through the night

Initially I was going to point out that letting them cry themselves out sets the scene for neediness and insecurity down the track. But at 15 months it is a different story and what you are doing is fine. You must be at your wits’ ends. Ours slept through at 6 weeks which was bad enough.

waveman 26 Sep 2022 5:43 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Angela Pretorius’s comment on: Orexin and the quest for more waking hours
>Function of REM sleep

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep#Deprivation_effects

I had a Zeo sleep monitor and I noticed that I had more REM sleep when doing hard intellectual work or deliberate practice, or after emotionally intense experiences. I had more deep sleep when exercising hard e.g. sprints or resistance training. This suggests to me that these forms of sleep are respectively associated with learning and body repair.

I also notice that I can learn a lot faster when I have naps and/or ample sleep. And that I recover from hard exercise more quickly.

OK this is all a bit uncertain but not just vacuous speculation.

I would like to see some evidence that orexin does not detract from these alleged effects before using it. Edit—the EA article does provide some evidence for this.

waveman 26 Sep 2022 4:09 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) 101
For any of those who are not big fans of CBT, ACT is very different

My gripe with CBT is that it tends to resolve to telling yourself that your feelings are irrational, make no sense etc. This is OK if your problem is primarily due to thoughts that are just merely cognitively wrong but I find this is rarely true. The problem is usually at the emotional level and in that situation CBT basically only papers over the problem.

One extreme case of this was a relative of mine who was given CBT for an anxiety condition, which turned out to be due to a cortisol-secreting tumour. It had virtually no benefit as you might expect. A problem needs to be addressed in terms of the causal structure that creates and maintains it.

ACT on the other hand does work at the emotional level—helping you to accept ‘bad’ feelings and deal with them, and then decide on / commit to your goals and accept that working on them will likely come with bad feelings like boredom, frustration etc.

So to my mind ACT is far more powerful and deep than CBT.

Other techniques that work at deeper levels that I found useful include Internal Family Systems Therapy, Memory Reconsolidation techniques (book “Unlocking the emotional brain”) , Holotropic Breathwork*, and Trauma Release Exercises.

*inb4 woo woo

waveman 18 Sep 2022 1:04 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Many therapy schools work with inner multiplicity (not just IFS)
You are right that other therapies do recognize multiple parts in various ways.

From studying and using all of the above my conclusion is that IFS offers the most tractable approach to this issue of competing ‘parts’. And in many ways the most powerful.

When you read about modern therapies, they all borrow from one another in a way that did not occur say 50 years ago where there were very entrenched schools of thought.

General comment:

There was a post in this thread claiming therapies are useless. This seems ironic as IMHO there are now available powerful and life changing therapies that simply were not well known 20+ years ago.

Quite often I run into people with trauma and other issues who gave up on therapies years ago and who do not realize that the game has changed.

Examples:
CFT
IFS
The various memory reconsolidation techniques (EMDR, see also the book “Unlocking the emotional brain”).
Holotropic Breathwork (inb4 woo woo)
Reparenting therapy for lack of secure attachment.

One thing that I think is neglected is the power of stacking therapies. As one example I achieved a huge breakthrough by doing IFS during a Holotropic Breathwork session. This led to a cascade of breakthroughs to the point where I now seem to be—to my complete surprise—basically trauma free.

waveman 18 Sep 2022 0:12 UTC
2 points
on: A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic
After reading the whole thing I don’t think he disposed of the hyperpalatability hypothesis. That was the weakest part of the series.

One other thing that was missing related to sugars and seed oils. I have not been able to find any ‘native’ poulation with access to large quantities of both. You do have some with access to large amounts of fruit or honey, as mentioned. And also some (Kalahari desert dwellers eat large amounts of Omega 6 rich mongongo nuts “why farm when the world has mongongo nuts”) with access to large quantities of Omega 6 oils, one alleged culprit in seed oils. But I don’t see any that have both, Processed foods are rich in both and this is novel.

Still it is worth reading IMHO and I find myself somewhat convinced that Li has a role.

waveman 18 Sep 2022 0:05 UTC
2 points
in reply to: deepthoughtlife’s comment on: A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic
fruits, which are obviously ‘natural’
Given the massive changes in fruits from selective breeding, I disagree. I would classify most fruits in the hyperpalatable category.

How many of the bananas in the article below are you going to eat?

https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits-vegetables-before-domestication-photos-genetically-modified-food-natural

And then there is the issue of availability in nature. Most fruits are only available seasonally in nature but we have fixed that. This temporary availability in quantity may be IMHO what drives binge eating of sweet foods. Because in nature it is a case of use it or lose it.

waveman 13 Sep 2022 5:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ambigram’s comment on: Another Calming Example
Notice that jefftk is responding to the child from the child’s perspective.
Later on yes—perhaps—but not in real time. The question in my mind is why is the child so anxious about people taking their food and having enough food? Is this a thing that happens often? Is there a lack of security about getting enough food? Do adults behave in capricious ways that violate the child’s rights?

Explaining that there is actually enough food may actually miss the point. The point is that in the moment the child did not, for whatever reason, trust that they would have enough food. Why was that?

There is an analogy to my situation in that my problem is that I was very sad that my grandmother had died and it was explained that I was wrong to be sad because she was in heaven. Which my mother much later admitted she did not actually balieve. It was a lie to shut me down. And it was made clear that being sad or expressing sadness was not allowed.

Did they really address the child’s concerns—that someone can take their food and they will not have enough? What they did was showed that it was in the power of adults to get more food—not at all the same thing.

waveman 13 Sep 2022 5:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: p.b.’s comment on: Another Calming Example
> You have to realize that as a parent
I have been a parent for several decades.

> You can’t do a psychological deep dive everytime.

True—but would be looking out for other signs that the child is anxious about getting enough food to see if this is a one-off or not. I am still interested in the question of why the child is so anxious about getting enough food that they created this scene. Something here does not add up.

> she probably calmed you down a thousand other times without leaving any psychological scars

Actually denying the existence of real problems was her modus operandi. For example, her solution to my anxiety about having my teeth drilled with a slow drill and no pain-killers was to tell me that the drilling did not hurt—a blatant lie.

waveman 13 Sep 2022 1:22 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Time is not the bottleneck (on making progress thinking about difficult things)
There is a book “Daily Rituals” by Mason Currey which looks at the practices of various high achievers. Few were able to achieve much more than 4 hours a day of sustained high calibre intellectual work*. This suggests to me that going much past this is difficult as you would think others who could work harder would do so and win.

A typical day would look like this

1. Hard work in the morning for 4-5 hours with coffee or breakfast.
2. Lunch then take care of business.
3. Relax in the evening.

A nap at lunchtime can help you to eke out another hour or so (as in thar study of violinists who made it to become concert solists—which I can’t find right now). Personally I now see sleep not as wasted time but as a useful practice that helps me to learn and to exercise hard or to deal with emotionally challenging situations from the present or the past.

I think people should focus on getting in the 4 hours a day, which is hard enough. If you do that in a goal directed fashion you are likely to be awesome. And the good news is that you can also manage your life and enjoy yourself.

* Note we are not talking about busy work or repetitive work. If there is not a feeling of effort you are probably not working very hard. One example of hard work is deliberate practice.

waveman 3 Jun 2022 6:10 UTC
13 points
on: Another Calming Example
I remember a slightly similar incident from my own childhood. I was very upset and expressed my concerns, and it was explained to me why my concerns were wrong, and that the winning move was not to be upset any more. As far as the parents were concerned, problem solved. In fact I recall hearing my mother telling someone, many years later, about this as an example of her excellent parenting.

As far as I was concerned the problem was not solved and the message I received was that my concerns about [issue] were to be kept to myself in future and I was on my own in this and any similar matters. Combined with other traumatic events that happened the same year, this left a resudue that was with me for many years.

My question in this case is why does the child have a high degree of anxiety about not getting enough food? What is going on here? I mean, looking beneath the surface a bit...

waveman 23 May 2022 10:52 UTC
2 points
on: Help! What do I say at my wedding?
Keep your speech short. Briefly praise people who are there. Other than that, no-one cares.

An excessive pre-occupation with the wedding is a huge risk factor for a short marriage.

waveman 3 Apr 2022 23:02 UTC
3 points
on: Giving calibrated time estimates can have social costs
I ran into a similar problem. I was doing estimates of time and costs for projects which then went into the business case. As with OP my estimates were calibrated and usually fairly accurate.

Others’ estimates were massively biased to low $ and time and often wildly wrong—in one case too low by a factor of 12.5. This is not rare of course—Microsoft Word for Windows V1.0 took over 5 years but never had an “end date” more than 1 year out.

The problem is that the business units wanted lowball estimates so they could get their projects started. It was then not too hard to exploit the sunk cost fallacy to keep the project alive. They felt I was not a “team player” and so forth.

See the extracts from Moral Mazes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/45mNHCMaZgsvfDXbw/quotes-from-moral-mazes for more on this kind of world.

waveman 3 Apr 2022 11:53 UTC
19 points
on: Avoiding Moral Fads?
I think if a person cannot point to several opinions they currently have that are regarded as abhorrent or stupid by most people, then it is unlikely that they would actually have held “correct”* opinions on the matters mentioned above, and other similar matters.

*i.e. opinions regarded as correct in <current year>.

Intelligence is no antitode. The philosopher Heidegger was closely allied with the Nazis. The most famous economist J M Keynes was Director of the British Eugenics Society (1937-1944).

I do hold several such opinions but there is no way I am going to state them in public. One thing that has not changed is the intolerance for divergent opinions. If anything it has become worse.

I am old enough to have seen many changes such that opinions regarded as totally abhorrent have now become the orthodoxy. And the old opinion is now regarded as abhorrent. I see the new generation quietly adopt the new opinion and easily condemn those who grew up in earlier times.

A few years back a young less-wronger informed me how grateful he was to have grown up in a time and place where he had a peer group with correct opinions on all the important issues. My thought was that it was mostly likely that the reason he thought those opinions were correct was because they were held by his peer group. Not especially because they are correct.

We actually had a session on this at the local LW where we tried to imagine current beliefs that a future generation would regard as terrible.

One scenario someone came up with was that society became much more conservative (plausability from the idea that coservatives and the like tend to have more children) and many of the current ‘woke’ beliefs would be seen as very regrettable and harmful.

Another was a kind of Idiocracy scenario where the policies of our time were regarded as a catastrophe because they were dysgenic (e.g subsidies for low-IQ single mothers etc). I do stress these were scenarios we came up with, not beliefs we hold.

waveman 28 Mar 2022 3:15 UTC
6 points
on: The Opposite Of Autism
Actually non-autistic people are quite extreme in many ways when you look at it closely.

Here is my spoof DSM6 entry as illustration

From DSM-VI: Hyper-Social (Allistic) Spectrum Disorder
HSSD is a syndrome in which there is an over-focus on social phenomena at the expense of other aspects of the world. Contrast with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which is in many ways the opposite.
Diagnosis: Any 5 of the following are present:
Inability to express self clearly; use of ambiguous and vague language; discomfort with clear language
Obsessive interest in knowing personal details of acquaintances or strangers e.g. celebrities, or even fictional characters
Unfounded belief in being able to read other people’s minds, in particular to know if someone is lying or not.
Difficulty in thinking in a systematic logical way, e.g. to do math or program computers
Tendency to try to bend and stretch rules for no obvious reason. Discomfort with accurately following instructions and processes.
Forms beliefs based on the opinions of others rather than on facts and evidence
Tendency to affiliate with groups and to align all opinions to the group
Frequently lies for social convenience
Preoccupied with social status and “looking the part”
Focus on status symbols, and symbols of virtue and group affiliation
Focus on appearances more than underlying reality
Intolerance of diversity of opinion
Intolerance towards people who do not have HSSD
Spends large amounts of time on shallow “social” activities with little actual content. May lead to destructive activities such as substance abuse e.g. alcohol, and over-eating.
Lack of interest in mastering difficult, especially technical, subjects in depth
Tendency to stare into people’s eyes, and to believe that this gives great insight into the other person’s mind. Usually unaware that this can create discomfort in the other person.
Tendency to think that staring into people’s eyes demonstrates trustworthiness

waveman 26 Mar 2022 10:15 UTC
4 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: My mistake about the war in Ukraine
It’s not often we get good opportunities to make long-range falsifiable bets against mainstream beliefs about important issues.
Financial markets are full of such opportunities.

waveman 17 Mar 2022 8:49 UTC
6 points
on: Formal epistemiology for extracting truth from news sources
It is really hard, especially as these highly emotive situations tend to result in the frontal cortex shutting down due to blood supply being diverted. Thus you see otherwise smart people saying unbelievably stupid things.

My heuristics.:

1. Are they actually experts? Look at their track record. Have they been able to anticipate future events?

Did they say that a Russian invasion was likely? Did they predict the fall of communism in Eastern Europe? Were they sceptical about past hoaxes like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Iraq WMD hoax, the “Itaqis ripping babies out of incubators” hoax? How sceptical about the claims Trump colluded with the Russians on the election? What was their track record on covid?

Have policies they advocated worked? Did they support the invasion of Libya and did they anticipate the results?

2. Other influences on their stated views. Do their views seem to reflect the ideological landscape? Are their views predictable from the ideological landscape? e.g. Some were against the Trump vaccine but suddenly all for the Biden vaccine, even though it was the same vaccine? Are they for the science in some areas but against it in other areas?

In general (2) (being dominated by ideology) trumps (1) any level of actual skill.

Media can be OK on some issues but totally ideologically or financially determined in other areas.

waveman 15 Feb 2022 10:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Quotes from Moral Mazes
Partly the problems described here are a function of scale and time, I think. They occur when it is hard to link a person’s actions to real world results, as in very large organizations and those that have grown more complex over time. This may explain people’s experiences that it is not like this <where I work>.

In the early days (1970s) in IT it was not really like this even in large corporations. And in small organizations it is usually not so much like this either, except to the extent that they are dependent on maze-type organizations.

Large slabs of the quotes above (I read it all) could be taken verbatim from numerous organizations I was involved with.

Reading this was one of those experiences where you suspected something, but still retained some shreds of hope that it wasn’t so. And now you know that it is so. The covd19 pandemic also produced a lot of those types of experiences for me.

waveman 29 Jan 2022 14:44 UTC
2 points
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Book notes: “The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life”
I am coming around to the view that any study whose methods are not prepublished should be assumed to be p-hacked.