I'm not sure what the point of your reply is - my comment wasn't about why people read "great literature", it was about how the canonical list of great works changes over time and the implications of that.

Yeah, sorry, this was probably the wrong place to put it. I'm just trying to figure out why people read "great literature", because it seems weird to me and I suspect I might be wrong that it's not worthwhile, especially because some aspiring rationalists seem to think it's worthwhile.

Perhaps you're eager to signal that you think reading classics is all about signalling?

Ha, I missed that :) I'm writing under a pseudonym though, and I've never told the stuff in the grandparent to anyone in person, because it:

has middle-school rebel written all over it

Maybe my ape-brain wants to metacontrarianly signal that it's so smart it can afford to signal middle-schooler-level stupidity? Still, I think middle-schoolers are largely right about "great literature".

It's not even wrong

Do you think it's wrong to say that "great literature" (by which I mean things like Shakespeare or The Great Gatsby) is read mainly to signal intelligence/culturedness? I really think it is, because for instance it impresses people, and it's difficult, and it's not as fun as most things you could read, and I don't think reading (a small amount of) "great literature" has taught me anything useful for anything other than signalling. By saying I think it's about signalling I'm not trying to imply that it's wrong or that you shouldn't do it, but if you know you're signalling then you can optimize for signalling (by e.g. reading summaries rather than the original).

My impression was that "great literature" is mostly read to signal intelligence/culturedness to people who don't realize that reading them doesn't require much intelligence, and that fiction doesn't "teach lessons" as much/well as people claim, and that people only claim that it does because they need some justification (to themselves and others) for spending long periods of time in fake worlds. I've only read like 3 or 4 classics though, and I could be convinced to read more if I found one that actually seemed to teach something, but that hasn't happened yet.

I have a list of ~500 concepts / "patterns in reality" that I think it would be useful to have "handles" to, by having words/phrases for them or just having them as mentally-cached concepts. (Once I started actively looking for such concepts I found quite a lot of them.) I'm planning to someday-soon sit down and actually make up words/phrases for each of these; I've made up words/phrases for 37 of them, and my notes-to-self are already peppered with them. Unfortunately I don't have the time right now to put them all here, but I probably will when my notes are more organized (like, when I've actually made up the words).

One example of such a concept: "imposing conditions that would have been evidence about optimal behavior in the EEA, with the intent of making oneself more prone to that behavior" - I call this "savannah-signalling" and it comes up in a lot of places.

This agrees with your experience with "hassle": from an article linked to by bcoburn in the munchkin thread:

In our field studies of sit-stand workstations we have found little evidence of widespread benefits and users only stand for very short-periods (15 minutes or less total per day). Other studies have found that the use of sit-stand stations rapidly declines so that after 1 month a majority of people are sitting all the time, so compliance can be problematic.

Do you have strong reasons to not just stand all the time while using your computer?

Don't do anything like that unless you know something about how to undo it.

Urging caution sounds wise, but I think it's exactly wrong here. One's goal in giving advice should be to alter others' behavior in beneficial ways; people will probably tend to take fewer risks with emetics than is optimal (because they're risk-averse, and vomiting is unpleasant), so your advice is in the wrong direction. Caution (higher significance criterion) is the act of increasing missed opportunities (false negatives) so that you take less wrong actions (false positives); this is a tradeoff.

This is analogous to how, for instance, the FDA kills more people by delaying medications' approval than it saves by ensuring medication is safe before approving it.

All over this thread, people keep urging caution where my judgment is that they should be urging the exact opposite.

Thanks for actually trying this! I tried to get hold of syrup of ipecac, which seems to reliably cause vomiting, but it's hard to get in US pharmacies, and Amazon doesn't sell it (except homeopathically). Did your friends say that mustard water works better than syrup of ipecac?

Around two years ago, I tried devising a language for roughly this purpose. I concluded that it wasn't a worthwhile use of time; devising it is easy, but becoming fluent takes way too much time, especially since there's no corpus (or a very small corpus, if you use something like Lojban).

I write down and regularly review all my ideas, experiences, etc., and I've found it very useful to invent my own words (interspersed in normal English) for concepts that need annoying circumlocutions in normal English. I also use the derivational morphology of Esperanto and my own conlangs.

For an interesting example of a personal language created as a psychological experiment, see gjâ-zym-byn.

probably unethical anyway

Sure, but it's a way to sell a small part of your soul for lots of money. You can then do an arbitrage operation, by using that money to buy lots of cheap soul, e.g. through efficient charity.

An example of this might be Bob Ross. Apparently doctors, psychotherapists, hairdressers, audiobook readers, etc. also do this to some extent.

I would be interested in hearing more about rational financial planning. :)