Espresso is the best for preventing withdrawal. You can buy espresso cans like these. They end up costing around $1-2 per drink.

You can also consider buying a moka pot. Though, moka pot coffee isn't really espresso as it is extracted under much less pressure. But you can make your own and so save money. It tastes quite good.

A single shot of espresso from Starbucks, costs around $1.50. If you want something strong, I recommend a red-eye: a cup of drip coffee with a shot of espresso in it. This usually will keep you caffeinated for a few hours at least.

Black tea is easier than coffee because boiling water gives good results so you don't have to worry about letting it cool exactly the right amount.

Middle Eastern import stores sell very cheap bulk tea. Often the quality of their cheapest stuff is not high enough for the tea to be very enjoyable without added flavor, so I recommend Earl Grey or, if you don't like bergamot, plain black tea and adding a cinnamon stick or cardamom pod to the pot.

Caffeine pills are cheap, portable, fast-acting, and you can get an exact dose.

Well, energy drinks don't have that high a caffeine content compared to coffee -- a can of Rockstar has about 160 mg in it, which is comparable to a strong cup of coffee, but it's got somewhere around twice the volume. Red Bull is more like 80mg. So if your office coffee isn't scratching your itch, you're probably craving something other than caffeine, maybe even just sugar. I'd recommend experimenting with that a bit.

If you want to make good coffee easily, though, I recommend a burr grinder + French press or drip cone (I prefer the standalone kind, though a drip coffeemaker won't kill you), and the best-quality beans you can find: Philz is a good Bay Area choice. Toss a couple tablespoons of beans per cup of coffee into your grinder, grind them at a medium-fine setting, transfer to your coffee production system of choice, then add boiling water. French presses tend to make stronger coffee with more complex flavors, but add a timing parameter -- you can oversteep or understeep coffee made with a French press, while drip coffee is pretty idiotproof.

The simplest thing is caffeine pills. They're cheap and freely available over-the-counter.

Making yourself some coffee is not hard at all. Drip coffeemakers are ubiquitous and cheap, if you think the coffee is too weak just put more grounds into the basket. Otherwise try Aeropress, it's good. I also like Turkish coffee but most people think it's too muddy. If you want a hobby, buy a proper espresso machine :-)

Tea is even simpler, all you need is tea and boiling water. Experiment with different teas (they are VERY different), figure out what you like. I strongly recommend loose tea over teabags.

I don't think there any advantage of individuals to write blogs in that way. Having the blog separate and the links on "RECENT ON RATIONALITY BLOGS" seems to be a good solution.

I am an engineer practicing in Alberta, of course my trade is closer to math pure and physics than chemistry, but all the same I would be available for a text-based interview.

Imagine we often saw people coming to LW and saying things like

"Hello. I wholeheartedly agree with the basic goals of LW and I think rationality is awesome! But, if I may make a small criticism, I think LW is being a bit irrational itself in its complete dismissal of religion. Yes, many forms of religion are irrational, but others may not be so, and one must no throw the baby with the bathwater, etc. etc."

If there was a recurring pattern of this happening, with the pro-religion arguments being made by "newbies" and being things we have seen many times before, wouldn't we get impatient with it, give it a label (such as "concern trolling") and apply the label dismissively from then on? Perhaps this is not the most open-minded attitude, and it would be very inappropriate in a forum dedicated to open discussion between theists and atheists. But in a forum where most people have decided to their own satisfaction that these criticisms are incorrect, and are more interested in discussing other topics while taking atheism for granted than in rehashing what they see as basic stuff, can they really be faulted for taking it?

Despite his nickname, Gothgirl420666 is a cis male. Update his level of credibility on gender issues accordingly.

2.) In my experience, filling your rhetoric with filler words is a result of being uncertain speaking, or not being sure what you want to say.

For the first item, find public speaking practice/training. This does not have to be toastmasters, volunteer or join a club and step into a leadership position. Take a part time job at a tourist attraction and spend an afternoon a week telling stories to groups of strangers. You may be already at home talking to anyone, but if you are not, this will help.

For the second item, find public speaking practice/training. Too often I find myself repeating my last statement and using other filler methods to hold my place in the conversation while I order my thoughts. Take a breath, pause, figure out what you are going to say before you say it. It feels like an eternity to you, but it is only a moment's pause to the listener. Also, instead of holding your place with filler, practice body language, establish through posture and eye contact that you are still talking. Public speaking is again great practice for holding interest by body language alone.

Disclaimer: I'm from a very Wait Culture, results may vary in a Interrupt Culture

Edit for emphasis: Decide what you want to say then say it! You will use more precise language and less filler.

re: public speaking: There are in person groups like Toastmasters. Alternately, you can record yourself speaking about something and try to give yourself a self-critique.

Here's an exercise I've run before: Person 1 picks a word at random; Person 2 immediately starting speaking about something relevant. At 15 second intervals for 1-2 minutes, Person 1 throws out new words; Person 2 needs to keep speaking about the new words, and to flow smoothly between topics. (You can substitute Wikipedia's random article button for Person 1.)

"Concern trolling is frequently banned in feminist communities."

It may help if you consider the possibility that some feminist communities do not exist for the sake of rational dispassionate and balanced discussion of feminism. Rather, a feminist community may be a meeting place for the members of a feminist movement of some kind, which exists to achieve its goals. Like any other political movement.

TL;DR. LW is not the real world. In the real world, arguments are always soldiers (even if you pretend them not to be), discussion requires resources, and resources are finite.

Concern trolling is a widespread phenomenon, not specific to feminist communities. The definition given in the first two sentences of that article is the exact concept that the phrase was coined to name:

A concern troll is a person who participates in a debate posing as an actual or potential ally who simply has some concerns they need answered before they will ally themselves with a cause. In reality they are a critic.

The article does then go on to broaden the concept to the point where it can be used as a club to invalidate anyone:

Concern trolls are not always self-aware, they may also view themselves as potential allies

Well, no. The whole point of the concept is that a concern troll is lying. They are, in fact, an enemy deliberately, consciously, intentionally, posing as a friend in order to undermine discourse. Someone who is actually a friend with genuine questions that they actually want to be constructively discussed is not a concern troll, even if those who do not wish the questions to be raised at all call them that.

The site you linked gives a method for detecting concern trollery, so the concept is at least somewhat operationalized:

Concern trolls can be identified primarily because they will retreat from, rather than engage with or be convinced by, answers to the questions they pose. They may repeatedly ask a certain question in feminist discussions without ever absorbing or replying to answers from previous discussions. They will often back into typical anti-feminist arguments, such as expressing concern that an argument is too "extreme" or a feminist too "strident" or even "hysterical". Another common tactic is insisting that some subjects are more important than others, for example, that media depictions of women shouldn't be criticised while violence against women continues.

This seems quite distinct from "someone slightly to the right of me". If this description is correct, then someone who goes into a feminist space and argues forcefully against some tenet of feminism, replying substantively to the feminists' objections (rather than criticizing their tone), would not qualify as a concern troll.

Ad two: I have no particular expertise in this area, so all I can offer is a few remarks based on what I myself do when I want to change something about my speech (e.g. my accent, but also vocabulary). Basically, it's one of those things where what you need to do is train yourself to pay attention. In order to do this, it's important not to be afraid to speak slowly. There might be an unconscious inhibition to speaking slowly for fear of appearing dumb. If you overcome that, you have time to consciously double-check what you're saying, and to consciously intervene by actively thinking about what you're going to say, and then saying it, or by stopping yourself when you feel that you're about to say something undesirable (like "like").

Also, you couldn't be old-fashioned by wearing a fedora, if I'm correct in deducing from you username that you're a girl. ;-)

Concern trolling in the false flag political operation sense is a thing that happened

An example of this occurred in 2006 when Tad Furtado, a staffer for then-Congressman Charles Bass (R-NH), was caught posing as a "concerned" supporter of Bass' opponent, Democrat Paul Hodes, on several liberal New Hampshire blogs, using the pseudonyms "IndieNH" or "IndyNH". "IndyNH" expressed concern that Democrats might just be wasting their time or money on Hodes, because Bass was unbeatable.[37][38] Hodes eventually won the election.

You've listed one concrete goal and two stupendously vague goals. My first suggestion would be for your friend to spend the time figuring out what, exactly, they're trying to achieve with something like "form an alternative career" or "become a better person," then using the resulting knowledge to make an actionable plan. Clarifying goals is often the first step to achieving goals.

Other considerations: How far in the future will this be? How much money, if any, does this person have available for training or travel or the like? Is CFAR running a workshop during the relevant month?

Wow, how do you master Mandarin AND French with difficulties with akrasia & drive?

I think it's spot on.

What ASR said, and also this is a totally different domain. There is no code for the global financial system and no coder is going to fix it. There is no code for AGI, but some coder somewhere IS going to write it. The idea that fighting against billions of people and a system supported by all the money in the world is the same kind of activity as trying to prove theorems of friendliness is simply dense.

Is this the new 'but what about starving Africans?'

It's a short post, so you can read it quickly. What do you think about his argument?

I think it's silly. I suspect MIRI and every other singulatarian organization, and every other individual working on the challeges of unfriendly AI, could fit comfortably in a 100-person auditorium.

In contrast, "trying to fix industrial capitalism" is one of the main topics of political dispute everywhere in the world. "How to make markets work better" is one of the main areas of research in economics. The American Economic Association has 18,000 members. We have half a dozen large government agencies, with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars each, to protecting people from hostile capitalism. (The SEC, the OCC, the FTC, etc etc, are all ultimately about trying to curb capitalist excess. Each of these organizations has a large enforcement bureaucracy, and also a number of full-time salaried researchers.)

The resources and human energy devoted to unfriendly AI are tiny compared to the amount expended on politics and economics. So it's strange to complain about the diversion of resources.

I think that he sounds mind-killed. Calling the financial system a "hostile AI" sounds cool for about half a second until your brain wakes up and goes "Whaaaaat?" :-)

If he really wanted to talk about existing entities with agency and their own interests, well, the notion that the state is one is very very old.

Yes, this is sufficient. Well done.

I also didn't see my post appear under discussion/new before I deleted it. Where did it appear so that other people could look at it?

It appeared under Discussion (it is no longer there) and I am not sure why you weren't able to see it there.

Well ... isn't it? What others are you thinking of? None spring to my mind.

I had the same problem couple of months ago. It was about confirming an e-mail address: I received an email asking me to confirm the address I was using, with a link. After that, I could comment normally. Unfortunately I can't remember what I did in order to receive that email: something in preferences, probably.

I think that sufficiently downvoted users are prevented from commenting. Could it be that?

there no reason not to go down that road

I tried Beeminder and it didn't work. Basically, I just ignored it when there were $5 at stake, was briefly motivated by $10 and $30, and then just started lying. So, you need to have at least some self-respect in order to successfully use it. The most funny thing is that I paid them something around $300, before I found out how ineffective Beeminder was for me.

Yay positive reinforcement! (M&M's had helped me with Anki, to some extent (until I started lying :D))

I have a reason to not go down that road - I have a solid enough Anki habit as it is, and don't need extra push. Anki doesn't feel like a chore.

Temporary theraputic hypothermia is very useful for treatment of cardiac arrest and other neurological insults, as it reduces reperfusion injury and the slower inflammatory brain damage that happens in the hours and days after a period of ischemia.

As for life support, people can live for decades on tube feeding and artificial ventilation, and years on chemical feed dripped into their blood (at the cost of liver function). That's just letting normal biology proceed though, substituting some of the functions of a fully functional nervous system or other organ systems. If you are looking to try to preserve degrading function longer, or stretch out the time you have to treat something, you would want to try to replicate a state like hibernation, in which temperature and biochemical reaction rates can be lowered while maintaining the presence of actual life and repair functions. The particulars of such a state would dictate if someone who was already ill or damaged in some way stood much of a chance of surviving it. Though a lot of neurological trauma is already treated with artificial comas to reduce the brain's bloodflow and metabolic rate, and there was a recent report of successful treatment for rabies that involved a months-long induced coma.

...Though you really don't want to spend much time with your blood flow moving through tubes outside your body that you don't absolutely have to. It's just asking for infection and all sorts of clotting/embolism problems, either due to anticoagulants giving you bleeds inside your body, or your blood clotting in tubes not lined with endotheial cells and not shaped for near-perfect laminar flow, or microscopic bubbles entering the flow through a crack in the plastic too small to see. There's even indications that a large fraction of people on heart-lung machines for a single surgery have micro-embolisms throughout the brain caused by the blood issues that come about form extracorporial circulation.

You may be underestimating the amount of work involved in being a landlord. If you find financially stable, reliable, non-destructive people, it's a nice income stream. Even so, they will expect you to fix problems sooner than you might get around to doing it for yourself. You probably shouldn't count on having your rooms rented for every month, you might lose a tenant and not have one ready to replace them immediately.

All this is general knowledge. There's probably information somewhere about the expected costs to being a landlord.

It still might make sense to buy the house.

Here's a previous comment I wrote expressing skepticism about the whole Jake Barnett phenomenon (also see here and here). I haven't been keeping up with what the kid has been doing lately, so maybe my concerns are now moot. Briefly skimming some of the recent videos on his channel, he seems to basically know what he is talking about, although there's no evidence of any particularly deep insight into the topics.

I watched one of his videos explaining the path integral. It was definitely all correct, and the way he presented it convinces me that he wasn't just repeating something he had memorised from a text book. He was presenting it informally and in his own words. He even had a way of motivating the path integral hat I hadn't seen before. So I'd say that he genuinely does have a deep understanding.

At the same time, I see many Lesswrongers view eating as a chore that they would like to do away with.

I expect that this is a tiny but expressive minority.

Some subset of rationalists just don't seem to value pleasure at all. I know one who used to say his only goal in life was the acquisition of information; relief was appreciated in that it eliminated a distraction, but satisfaction just didn't count for anything. Struck me as Puritanical.

Interesting distinction, it makes intuitive sense, and it's certainly good to be aware that there is a possible satisfaction component to something - but it's still easily possible to value the satisfaction less than you would value being free from the need for the relief component.

I would like to drink Soylent when I want to focus on something else, and to eat at a restaurant when I want to feel the pleasure of eating. Or maybe sometimes cook at home... but only when I decide to.

If I may borrow your analogy, it would be like moving from compulsively masturbating three times a day to having great sex once in a while and doing something else the rest of the time.

Defecation, or a drink of water when you’re very thirsty bring you relief, but not really satisfaction.

I feel that both of these can provide satisfaction as well, though I'm less sure about the water.

I can understand the desire to minimize or eliminate the need for functions that serve only to provide relief, but I think the “let’s subsist on Soylent” people are throwing the satisfaction baby out with the relief bathwater.

Or they just get more satisfaction from other things than eating.

I would rather get rid of eating but keep defecation, though I don't know that I could say why. The relief/satisfaction thing is certainly interesting.

I once had a conversation in this vein that went like this:

• Him: In Heaven, pizza grows on trees.
• Me: In heaven, people wouldn't need to eat.
• Him: Good point. But maybe eating as a form of pleasure?
• Me: kinda flabberghasted

If nothing else, the parent got me to evaluate my preferences and realize that I was using them hypocritically in situations such as the above.

Methods!Hermione got just as much of an intelligence upgrade as Methods!Harry did

Harry's upgrade was much larger. At the recent HPMOR meetup in Boston someone asked Eliezer about this, and his response was that Hermione was already smart enough that this would have made her "smarter than the author" and made writing her much too difficult.

This was also discussed in an hpmor thread.

Adding you :P

I would start with looking at what are the most important issue that you face at the moment in your life.

Do you mean "hypothesis" as something that solves the problem?

If yes, then there's a problem. Either your beliefs are inconsistent (as they don't add up to 100%), or the hypotheses cannot be independent. Assuming your beliefs are consistent, your best best would be to figure out what's the correlation between these hypothesis is between choosing one to test. For example, C could be correlated with A. Choosing to pursue A (or C) would then give information about C (or A) as well.

If no, the amount of the information you'll get from testing them is incomparable. For example, B could be about a relatively minor thing, while A about 99% of the solution.

At one extreme is the weekly sudoku puzzle that is completed for my own enjoyment and I am content with my mastery level. At that extreme I pick A, it is not really a goal to improve my sudoku skill, negative results contribute little.

At the other extreme are your hard coding problems, complex engineering problems, and those little bent steel puzzles that you have to take apart and reassemble in apparently impossible ways; Here the long term goal is not to solve the single problem but to learn and solve the problem type. These problems are either without an A solution, or you want greater mastery of the field so that next time only A or B solutions are on the table instead of the B and C solutions. Eventually your peers start coming to you with their A, B, C dilemmas and you can give them the right answer with 100% confidence. After that you will be known as a guru in your field and reap all the prestige and profit that comes with that (results may vary depending on field).

In short it depends on your goal, A to solve the problem, C to solve the problem type. B is a compromise if you want C but the budget doesn't allow for it.

I agree with Nancy that this doesn't look like a prisoner's dilemma.

You could think about this as a dynamic game, but it seems simplest to model it as a static game with two strategies: eat heavily and eat lightly. Both have to choose eat heavily to actually eat enough to gain weight, since it sounds like both have to agree every time they eat. The payoffs then look something like:

..... Heavily | Lightly
Heavily | 1,0 | 0,1 |
Lightly | 0,1 | 0,1 |

with the bodybuilder as the row player and the model as the column player. Then (Heavily, Lightly) and (Lightly, Lightly) are both Nash Equilibria. Do those payoffs seem to capture the situation you were thinking of?

I don't think it's an exact match for a prisoner's dilemma because (as described) they don't have a shared goal like not going to prison. if they have an overarching shared goal like being happy with each other, the situation is different.

Being small enough to freeze solid quickly is a nonstarter.

Cells filling themselves up with trehalose (disaccharide that in many organisms including waterbears and my lab yeast serves as both a fast-degrading energy store [faster than glycogen] and protection against denaturing proteins during both desiccation and freezing) under stress is more plausible but runs afoul of the fact that large animals only have so much soluble sugar at any given time and can't make sugars from lipids - in many cases of organisms that use it as a protective feature it becomes like 10% or more of their weight.

Trying to eliminate the inflammatory response to hypoxia? No idea if that's plausible without causing immune system issues.

I recommend StayFocusd, but if it stops working, make a blacklist in your firewall and put it behind a ridiculously long passphrase that scolds you for not working. Use this one device for work and other devices for play.

Oh, and put those other devices in an underground vault 10 miles from your house.

I was using Leech Block for old fashioned reddit-block for some time, but then I switched to Rescue Time (free version) which tracks time you spend on certain internet sites, and found it much more user friendly. It does not block the sites, but it shows you a percentage estimate of how productive you are today (e.g. Today, 1 hour on internet out of which 30min on Less Wrong - so 50% productive).

StayFocusd

I think the Culture accepts immigrants. Why wouldn't it?

Somewhere in the books, I think in Look to Windward, it's pointed out that ambassadors to the Culture end up assimilated and serving unofficially as ambassadors for the Culture instead.

Also, the Culture appears to have trillions of citizens. You could have a large amount of immigration and still not see much of the impact.

He touches on that in "Consider Phlebas". Basically there were other technologically advanced civs with different values, not everyone wanted to join the Culture.

Another possible explanation is that the ship Minds controlled immigration in non-obvious ways (memetic weaponry).

Reminds me of my not-quite-awake-dream-state encounters with Q from Star Trek.

Quoting part of an old comment of mine:

I can, though, relay an interesting experience I had in unintentionally constructing some kind of similar mental archetype while dreaming that kind of stuck around in my mind for a while. I didn't reach into any pantheon though, my mind reached to a mythology which has had its claws in my psyche since childhood - star trek. Q is always trolling the crew of the Enterprise for humanity's benefit, in attempts to get them to meet their potential and progress in understanding or test them. He was there, and let's just say I was thoroughly trolled in a dream, in ways that emphasized certain capabilities of mine that I was not using. And just before waking up he specifically told me that he would be watching me with my own eyes since he was actully part of me that normally didn't speak. That sense of part of me watching and making sure I actually did what I was capable of stuck around for over a week.

Expanding on Ben's comment: local lesswrong meetup groups often grow into a communities of people who enjoy spending time together, at which point some of the people might decide to rent a house together.

These are group houses where a bunch of rationalists live together. Sometimes they hold events for the wider community or host visiting rationalists from out of town. I know of several that exist in the Bay Area, one in Boston, and one in New York. There are probably others.

This must mean that someone saw the title of it at -11 karma and thought "Sounds promising! Reading this now will be a good use of my time." And then they read it and went: "Arrgh! This turned out to be a disappointing post. Less like this, please. I'd better downvote it to warn others."

Not necessarily. Seeing a heavily downvoted post seems to trigger some kind of group-norm-reinforcement instinct in me: I often end up wanting to read it in the hopes of it being just as bad as the downvotes imply, so that I could join in the others in downvoting it. And I actually get pleasure out of being able to downvote it.

I'm not very proud of acting on that impulse, especially since I'm not going to be able to objectively evaluate a post's merit if I start reading it while hoping it to be bad. But sometimes I do act on it regardless. (I didn't do that with your post, though.)

Well, I didn't bother to look this time, but if every bad post got just -5 votes max, the noise would probably unbearable. The extra sting is there for you, not to warn other readers.

if we don't have downvoted topics some of the time it means we are being too conservative about what we judge will be useful to others. Only worry if too large a fraction of your stuff gets downvoted.

One possible solution would be to edit the article, add "[Deleted]" to the title, remove all text and replace it by an explanation like: "The article was deleted because it received a lot of downvotes, but the discussion seems worth keeping; please don't vote on the article anymore."

Just leave it. It can serve as lesson to you in the future but in a month no one but you will remember it as it falls off the scroll.

What are you supposed to do when you've nailed up a post that is generally disliked?

Grin and say "Fuck 'em!"

Giving that the post does contain upvoted comments that belong to it deleting it would prevent people from seeing those comments and be bad.

-12 points in the discussion section is a pretty trivial karma hit out o.f the 1132 I see you have at this moment. I'd try to do better next time.

Interesting, some questions.
1. What is high dose?
2. How was the dosing achieved?
3. What is your sodium and magnesium intake like?

I'm interested in this as well, can you send us a link of the research that you found linking potassium supplements to migraines? Thanks!

Can you link to your more important sources from you research? They could be useful to others.

An interesting case is a behavior that makes an initial good impression, but will sour a relationship when continued. Sharp sarcasm or negative joking is the most common example I've observed.

how easy is it to spoil somebody's impression of you when you have already known them for a bit?

Spoiling is trivially easy -- just mention that you like to torture kittens in your spare time.

Without such drastic admissions, are you really asking whether someone's opinion of you can radically decrease without you doing anything that seems out of the ordinary to you? I guess, but you also have to keep in mind the difference between what the other person things and what s/he is willing to show.

For example, let's say Alice and Bob meet. Alice doesn't really like Bob but she is polite so she doesn't show it in an obvious fashion plus she hopes that maybe Bob isn't as bad as he looks. After a bit of time Alice's opinion of Bob is still the same but now she sees less reason to be polite and have decided that yes, Bob is as bad as he looks. From the Bob's point of view it looks as if Alice took a sudden dislike to him, but from Alice's point of view she just allowed herself to show her true attitude which didn't change much.