XelaP

Karma: 1,121

Came for the Harry Potter fanfic, a positive vision of what do with atheism, and the anti-death ethos. Stayed for the good thinking.

I really like math and physics. I can program but am not a programmer—I’d have to learn how to make a website and struggle to handle more than a couple hundred LOC. Learning a little Haskell made me enjoy coding again, I’d like to get better at it.

I’m currently very bad at following through on commitments. I hope to fix this by tomorrow. I’ll probably fail, but I shoot for getting it down before my fifty thousandth tomorrow.

XelaP 2 Aug 2026 6:58 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Even in the cases where cutting off the previous connections is good, it seems likely to have the same control + destabilizing effects. It may be meliorated by the previous connections being even more controlling and destabilizing (and misery-inducing), but it’s still running the risks.
Hell, aren’t the Zizians an example of a cult or cult-like thing that operates in large part by exploiting the effects of leaving previous connections? I don’t know the details, but surely many of them involved had actively shitty family members who they were wise to have left, even if the choice of who to go to was terrible.

XelaP 2 Aug 2026 5:37 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: strawberry calm’s Shortform
One problem is that (from my outsider view) one major way people become more impactful is by working on less tractable but higher impact and neglectedness stuff! Earlier work may be more biased towards tractability: you aren’t confident in your own abilities, aren’t already established and so need more career capital, and typically they look more legibly good.

I’m not saying skewing towards career capital should be entirely off-limits, but given the way biases work one should be wary

XelaP 2 Aug 2026 1:28 UTC
2 points
0
on: Enemies vs Malefactors
The way I think about this is through the lens of Player vs Character. If the ‘player’ is exploiting you, you still need to respond, even as the ‘character’ honestly isn’t trying to hurt you.
An important part of this is the way that someone who is causing harm due to neither the player or the character being exploitative differs from an exploitative player. One involves someone being nudged down incentive gradients adversarial to your interests, while the other is causing harm for some other reason—imagine the difference between someone who says rude words in a way that increases their own social power as opposed to someone who just has Tourettes.

XelaP 31 Jul 2026 23:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Are bread crusts healthier?
I seem to observe the opposite. For low quality bread, the crust is at least nice and crunchy, with a little extra flavor. For high quality bread, the interior is so wonderful that it outperforms the crust. This is especially true if it has some fruit baked into it.

XelaP 31 Jul 2026 23:22 UTC
2 points
0
on: Are bread crusts healthier?
Do most people really find the crust so unpleasant?
As for the mechanism:
Firstly, it feels good if we can improve our lives via a simple action, and so we are biased in favor of theories that give us a way to do so.
Secondly, crusts seem sorta like whole grain bread (because it’s darker and tougher, and consists of the outside skin), which really is healthier. The heuristic “the skin contains healthy nutrients” is simply correct for grain.
Thirdly, most people probably heard the myth while young, and it takes time to update your intuitions.
Embarrassingly, I hadn’t realized that the reason bread has a crust is because it’s the outside of the thing you heat up, and so was heated more! When I’ve interacted with something since childhood (especially if I have no memories predating it), it will seem familiar to me. The heuristics that nudge me to investigate will act as if I’ve already investigated it.
How many other people hadn’t really realized what crusts are?

XelaP 29 Jul 2026 7:17 UTC
5 points
0
on: [Intuitive self-models] 5. Dissociative Identity (Multiple Personality) Disorder
I appear to feel more ‘mild amnesia’ with ordinary emotional states than others. When happy, I will intuitively mispredict what I’ll think when sad, and it will intuitively feel like I’ve always felt happy and always will. Similarly when sad. As a mundane example, I will intuitively overestimate how much food I’ll want while hungry, but underestimate while full—to combat this I do something similar to the outside-view technique for the planning fallacy, by ignoring my current judgements and instead asking “How much food do I tend to eat? What food do I tend to like?”

XelaP 29 Jul 2026 6:57 UTC
4 points
0
on: [Intuitive self-models] 4. Trance
Some people (including me, but I have strong reasons to think I’m unusually susceptible) can get hypnotized by a simple video, so if you’re curious you may want to try this 15 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Tf33yqpxk
It appeared to me to work by inducing a dissociative state. This might be distressing if you’ve never felt one before or have distressing ones—for example, temporarily being unable to recall your own name is understandably likely to distress many.
For myself: the arm-pushing thing worked, the name forgetting didn’t, the sleepy thing did seem to make me meaningfully more relaxed, and I didn’t attempt the metaphorical app deleting thing.

XelaP 28 Jul 2026 20:41 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Long (Self-)Correction
Why isn’t there a version of EA that explicitly talks about how to leverage people’s status motivations to do more good for the world? It’s very possible that explicit talk about status is actually counterproductive at least in the short run, e.g. it heightens status motivations and makes people less altruistic, but then do we just march into the future while blindfolding ourselves to this aspect of human nature?
Wait, what? As far as I understood it, that was explicitly a main consideration in the 10% pledge Schelling point, though it’s possible that I may have just came up with that argument myself and misattributed it.

XelaP 28 Jul 2026 7:06 UTC
7 points
0
on: Inevitable Uncertainty in Probabilistic World Models
I think a lot of explanations of statistical mechanics either don’t mention or don’t give enough focus on the way that basically everything depends on what probabilistic model you’re using. The most important quantity is the entropy (from which temperature is defined), and is a prime example: definitionally it requires a probability distribution, so “entropy (with very high probability) goes up over time” only makes sense if you pick a probability distribution.
However, often explanations of entropy talk about it as if it was a physical substance like energy (at least when they aren’t describing it as “chaos!”), to my continual frustration.
In fact, I wonder if having every student learning thermodynamics or statistical mechanics read some of John’s posts would make them understand it better. I definitely think it deconfused me about the foundations of the subject!
Perhaps another way of looking at it: Imagine searching for low-complexity models of the world, trying to figure out what code the universe is running. The lowest complexity program may explicitly define fish_mean = 52; fish_variance = 5 , and then pseudo-randomly draw from a normal distribution to determine how many fish there are. The Solomonoff Prior then might still have uncertainty about what the fish_mean variable was set to.

XelaP 27 Jul 2026 19:17 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Nick Bostrom: How big is the cosmic endowment?
Except, any physical reversible computing device is surely going to have to mantain itself against random fluctuations, which may make there be mounds on how long actually achievable devices could compute for.

XelaP 27 Jul 2026 3:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: David Joshua Sartor’s comment on: Visioning: Concretely Imagining What You Want
That link appears to be dead now, do you have other descriptors (brand? name?) about the product?

The problem with just adding more primary colors to a display is that my eyes are still using only three types of cones. Adding extra primaries will at best let you explore a bit more of the region of colors than a normal monitor can. The advantage of converting other spectra to the visible is so that I can see it at all, even if it looks identical to a normal color—basically, false-color for my eyes.

XelaP 26 Jul 2026 17:59 UTC
2 points
0
on: Unrolling social metacognition: Three levels of meta are not enough.
I was linked to this post after I showed someone my own example of level-5/6 reasoning that came up naturally. I think this example fits entirely within my head, without being ‘externalized’:
A stereotype, say “trans women are predators” is a level-1 belief about a group.
A meta-stereotype, say “cis people believe trans women are predators”, is a level-2 belief about what stereotypes others hold.
A meta-meta-stereotype, say “trans people believe cis people believe trans women are predators”, is a level-3 awareness of what meta-stereotype someone holds. A cis person might hold this belief, and react by acting extra-nice to a trans woman, in hopes of signalling that they are not prejudiced.
A meta-meta-meta-stereotype happens when I (a trans woman) am aware that people might do the previous, and so might discount niceties by strangers.
A meta-meta-meta-meta-stereotype happens when someone is aware that I’ll be discounting their niceties. In this case they may react by trying to ensure they aren’t too over-the-top.
I, of course, have no trouble imagining being such a person—and so am operating at level-6, though in real life I haven’t really been able to observe someone intentionally trying to tone down their niceties to make them feel genuine (but it’s surely happened). I know I’ve naturally thought “If I were such a person, interacting with me, I’d maybe start off with an extra-nice signal, but from then on act naturally and genuinely”.
Internally, it feels like what is actually being thought is:
1. “I don’t want them to think I’m prejudiced, so I’ll make sure to be clearly nice” (effectively level-2, as ‘prejudiced’ is treated like an attribute like ‘tall’)
2. “They’re just trying to look unprejudiced, I can’t trust their niceties to be genuine” (effectively level-3)
3. “I don’t want them to think I’m just trying to look unprejudiced, so I shouldn’t be too over-the-top” (effectively level-4)

XelaP 24 Jul 2026 12:33 UTC
2 points
0
on: What are your favorite examples of adults in and around this community publicly changing their minds?
One of my friends became polyamorous after initial strong feelings of reluctance when brought up by a partner thanks to arguments on the internet, and now desires it for themself. This is the second most impressive mind change I’ve witnessed in others (first is private, but think “changed behavior you’ve been doing for years that you’d think would be blatantly obviously bad to anyone that would’ve ever been able to change in the first place”).

XelaP 20 Jul 2026 15:05 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
...okay, I think I was much faster than you. When I started using contacts as a teen, the optometrist place had me do two 30 minute sessions with an employee that just involved me putting in my contacts. At the beginning the time required was ‘infinite’ (in that my reflex to close my eyes made it impossible to get a contact in), at the end the median time was probably like 30 seconds. The improvement since then has been in reliability.

XelaP 19 Jul 2026 19:17 UTC
4 points
0
on: Nuances in the Workings of the Eye and Retina
It seems like melanopsin cells play some role in vision, though merely a minor one, that may only be relevant if your rods and cone vision is borked for some reason:
The Wiki page on melanopsin containing retinal ganglion cells states:
ipRGCs were only definitively detected ipRGCs in humans during landmark experiments in 2007 on rodless, coneless humans.[15][16] As had been found in other mammals, the identity of the non-rod non-cone photoreceptor in humans was found to be a ganglion cell in the inner retina. The researchers had tracked down patients with rare diseases wiping out classic rod and cone photoreceptor function but preserving ganglion cell function.[15][16] Despite having no rods or cones the patients continued to exhibit circadian photoentrainment, circadian behavioural patterns, melanopsin suppression, and pupil reactions, with peak spectral sensitivities to environmental and experimental light matching that for the melanopsin photopigment. Their brains could also associate vision with light of this frequency.

XelaP 19 Jul 2026 1:59 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: XelaP’s comment on: Visioning: Concretely Imagining What You Want
The only downsides of fingerspikes are the obvious impracticalities, which aren’t worse than I expected (hard to use objects, they hurt a little to wear for a long period unless you don’t secure them that well, they take more than zero seconds to put on). They are otherwise quite cool! If the idea of fingerspikes seems obviously appealing to you and you have ten bucks, I recommend them: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F434WTR7. As typical for my experience with cheap amazon purchases, they look worse than in the advertising, but still look quite good in person.

XelaP 18 Jul 2026 17:14 UTC
2 points
0
on: Why I don’t believe in the placebo effect
See also this post https://carcinisation.com/2024/11/13/a-case-against-the-placebo-effect/ by a literal banana.

XelaP 17 Jul 2026 11:59 UTC
18 points
0
on: The Halo Defense
I’m not actually sure people are miscalibrated here, at least for close friends? If someone accuses my best friend of murder, I really do think that they are much more likely to be lying than my friend is to have committed murder (barring exceptional circumstance like self-defense). This is entirely because of my judgement of their character, so that “when would I commit this crime?” really does tell me a lot about when they would.
People who are generally honest, law-abiding, and moral are in fact less likely to lie, break the law, and violate common morality.
It’s seems likely that people are miscalibrated about weaker links, though, due to the reasons you’ve cited, the bonds of friendship, and the way that ill-doers will act differently (consciously or unconsciously) around people they think they can get away with harming.

XelaP 17 Jul 2026 0:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
I sometimes use a similar principle with stimulant drugs for ADHD (which are meant to be taken daily), waking 30 minutes beforehand. The main limiter there is that the overall effects are sometimes net negative, varying in a way that I partially understand, and so I won’t want to take them daily.
I also recommend the app (for both Android and iOS I think, though I’ve only tried the former) “Sleep Cycle”. You give it a 30 minute window, and it’ll try to wake you up during the part of your sleep when you are closest to being awake, thus reducing sleep inertia. I keep forgetting to use it, but I remember trying it years ago and finding that it worked fantastically. This feature is available without paying, though it will ask you to pay for a bunch of other features that I don’t care about.
(Caffeine pills sound like a bad idea for me, though I basically haven’t tried those specifically. Going off of soda consumption, I can easily drink 150 mg over an hour without feeling anything. The couple times I’ve tried a triple shot of espresso coffee has left me feeling “mentally tired but physically awake”, in that I’d feel tired but be unable to sleep, and wouldn’t feel the muscle weakness that normally comes with sleepyness. This, of course, is predicted by the increased prevalence of unusual caffeine reactions in ADHD)

XelaP 14 Jul 2026 5:07 UTC
2 points
0
on: Things are not a fixed size in mind-space
I’ve tried to reduce the loomingness of stuff in my mind before as a sheer act of will, and it’s done basically nothing. The only way I’ve managed to do it is to distract myself with something engaging. For something like a meeting, it also helps to have set multiple alarms and triple checked that they are at the right time, and then remind myself that for the most part I trust my alarms.
So… what are you doing?