What non-english content do you consume?

I want to try out a new system I came up with: a 'trickle' system, with some kind of interesting, but short text landing in my email box(/or comparable) each day, the words the text uses automatically compared to the list of words I already know, and the disjunction automatically queried from wiktionary and made into one sided flashcards. (reason being: I realized I cared for receptive abilities, but not so much for being able to express my thoughts in a different language. If it was a free action, great, but I feel like it usually is not.) And these words learned BEFORE reading the text. (as to avoid having too many breaks in the flow)

What was so wrong with the ending of HPMoR? rot13 please.

In terms of encouraging crossposting, what do you think would be the benefits and drawbacks of something like a RSS aggregator of rationality blogs on the Less Wrong site, especially if the posts on other blogs have a Creative Commons license, or something similar? That could make it relatively easy for someone with a blog elsewhere to share with Less Wrong, instead of manually crossposting all of the time.

What would it look like if someone did take the idea seriously? What do you want to happen?

Well the first step would be to take a CFS/FMS population and see if many of them have low basal metabolic rates and low peripheral body temperatures. If that's not true, then game over. It's hard to imagine hypothyroidism without slow basal metabolism.

After that we should try treating those people with desiccated thyroid, since that's what all the alternative types claim works. We should try carefully increasing the doses until we get some sort of reaction, and try to find the balance point where you're treated but not over-treated, which will probably be different for different people. I'd anticipate that doing a lot of good for at least some of them.

After that we could play around with T4/T3 combinations in various proportions, trying to find an optimal treatment, and working out what the various mechanisms are, and if there's something in NDT that makes it superior to the synthetics. It may be worse.

Once we had an idea of what sort of things work and on how many people, we could have a pop at a formal treatment protocol, and then I don't see why that couldn't be done double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled. All those things are important when you're trying to prove something works. But I think all of them probably get in the way when you're trying to elucidate mechanisms.

I think what I'm getting at is that alternative medicine has had a pop at the first bit, and gone a bit of the way down the road of finding out what's going on, whereas medical science has decided a priori what works and what doesn't, not checked particularly carefully, and then refused afterwards to accept any evidence except PCRTs as having any value at all. And in fact they seem to have mercilessly persecuted anyone who didn't follow their central guidelines. Which seems really weird, unless they trust doctors much less than I do.

I'm advocating a sort of combination approach. Which I'd call: 'The Scientific Method'.

in order that someone with real expertise in this area takes this idea seriously enough to have a go at refuting it?

What would it look like if someone did take the idea seriously? What do you want to happen?

EITHER (2.1) CFS/FMS/Hypothyroidism are extremely similar diseases which are nevertheless differently caused. OR (2.2) The blood test is failing to detect many cases of Hypothyroidism.

I don't think 2.1 and 2.2 are mutually exclusive. Both could be true.

I have a rationalist/rationalist-adjacent friend who would love a book recommendation on how to be good at dating and relationships. Their specific scenario is that they already have a stable relationship, but they're relatively new to having relationships in general, and are looking for lots of general advice.

Since the sanity waterline here is pretty high, I though I'd ask if anyone had any recommendations or not. If not, I'll just point them to this LW post, though having a bit more material to read through might suit them well.

Thanks!

I've just read an interview to a Danish artist/enterpreneur who invented a low cost light bulb, trying to promote it to a poor African village.
The reaction he got when he explained the project was "Yeah, it's a cute idea, but this is a prosperous village, you should try to sell it to the poorer village down the road".
He then moved to the next village, which had the same level of average earning, but proposing his light-bulb as an appliance for rich people, this time receiving a lot more interest. The artist later remodeled the bulb, keeping it low-cost but giving it a fancier appearance to suit this image of a light for rich dwellings in poor villages.
It should come to no surprise to LWers that people are almost exclusively interested in things that raise their social status, even when understanding their situation would be the first thing to do to get out of it.
This raises an interesting question: if you were offering a service that tried to help people, how would you reframe it so that users would not feel devalued?

If I understand what you're saying, you think that some subset of people with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia have undiagnosed thyroid problems that do not show up on standard tests, therefore treating them with dessicated thyroid could help.

I think that is plausible, and more reasonable than something like "all CFS and fibromyalgia can be explained by endocrine problems". It also seems to match the experience of some doctors who treat a lot of patients with these conditions.

There is also a difference between "helps to some extent" and "is enough to completely cure".

I would add to that:

The manufacturer of dessicated thyroid in the United States a few years ago added different fillers to the pills that can interfere with the medication. So if you are thinking of experimenting with that, check up on the non-active ingredients used, and precisely who manufactures it. There are differences between the pills from different manufacturers, they are not all the same, even if it looks like they ought to be interchangeable at first glance.

There are a number of doctors treating people with bioidentical hormones, that is, hormones in the same format that the body uses, not synthetic hormones that have similar, but not identical, structures. Bioidentical hormone supplementation seems to help some people. If you want to read up on that, Dr. Alvin Pettle has some lectures and books available where he goes into why, for example, horse hormones, derived from horse's urine, are problematic when in human women's bodies. In the context of thyroid problems, an alternative to dessicated thyroid would be bioidentical T3 and T4.

I would explain about blocking, how people can be matched up by profession, socio-economic status, smoker or non-smoker, and various other traits, to make comparisons where those factors are assumed to be equal.

I once took a math course where the first homework assignment involved sending the professor an email that included what we wanted to learn in the course (this assignment was mostly for logistical reasons: professor's email now autocompletes, eliminating a trivial inconvenience of emailing him questions and such, professor has all our emails, etc). I had trouble answering the question, since I was after learning unknown unknowns, thereby making it difficult to express what exactly it was I was looking to learn. Most mathematicians I've talked to agree that, more or less, what is taught in secondary school under the heading of "math" is not math, and it certainly bears only a passing resemblance to what mathematicians actually do. You are certainly correct that the thing labelled in secondary schools as "math" is probably better learned differently, but insofar as you're looking to learn the thing that mathematicians refer to as "math" (and the fact you're looking at Spivak's Calculus indicates you, in fact, are), looking at how to better learn the thing secondary schools refer to as "math" isn't actually helpful. So, let's try to get a better idea of what mathematicians refer to as math and then see what we can do.

The two best pieces I've read that really delve into the gap between secondary school "math" and mathematician's "math" are Lockhart's Lament and Terry Tao's Three Levels of Rigour. The common thread between them is that secondary school "math" involves computation, whereas mathematician's "math" is about proof. For whatever reason, computation is taught with little motivation, largely analogously to the "intolerably boring" approach to language acquisition; proof, on the other hand, is mostly taught by proving a bunch of things which, unlike computation, typically takes some degree of creativity, meaning it can't be taught in a rote manner. In general, a student of mathematics learns proofs by coming to accept a small set of highly general proof strategies (to prove a theorem of the form "if P then Q", assume P and derive Q); they first practice them on the simplest problems available (usually set theory) and then on progressively more complex problems. To continue Lockhart's analogy to music, this is somewhat like learning how to read the relevant clef for your instrument and then playing progressively more difficult music, starting with scales. [1] There's some amount of symbol-pushing, but most of the time, there's insight to be gleaned from it (although, sometimes, you just have to say "this is the correct result because the algebra says so", but this isn't overly common).

Proofs themselves are interesting creatures. In most schools, there's a "transition course" that takes aspiring math majors who have heretofore only done computation and trains them to write proofs; any proofy math book written for any other course just assumes this knowledge but, in my experience (both personally and working with other students), trying to make sense of what's going on in these books without familiarity with what makes a proof valid or not just doesn't work; it's not entirely unlike trying to understand a book on arithmetic that just assumes you understand what the + and * symbols mean. This transition course more or less teaches you to speak and understand a funny language mathematicians use to communicate why mathematical propositions are correct; without taking the time to learn this funny language, you can't really understand why the proof of a theorem actually does show the theorem is correct, nor will you be able to glean any insight as to why, on an intuitive level, the theorem is true (this is why I doubt you'd have much success trying to read Spivak, absent a transition course). After the transition course, this funny language becomes second nature, it's clear that the proofs after theorem statements, indeed, prove the theorems they claim to prove, and it's often possible, with a bit of work [2], to get an intuitive appreciation for why the theorem is true.

To summarize: the math I think you're looking to learn is proofy, not computational, in nature. This type of math is inherently impossible to learn in a rote manner; instead, you get to spend hours and hours by yourself trying to prove propositions [3] which isn't dull, but may take some practice to appreciate (as noted below, if you're at the right level, this activity should be flow-inducing). The first step is to do a transition, which will teach you how to write proofs and discriminate between correct proofs from incorrect; there will probably some set theory.

So, you want to transition; what's the best way to do it?

Well, super ideally, the best way is to have an experienced teacher explain what's going on, connecting the intuitive with the rigorous, available to answer questions. For most things mathematical, assuming a good book exists, I think it can be learned entirely from a book, but this is an exception. That said, How to Prove It is highly rated, I had a good experience with it, and other's I've recommended it to have done well. If you do decide to take this approach and have questions, pm me your email address and I'll do what I can.

1. This analogy breaks down somewhat when you look at the arc musicians go through. The typical progression for musicians I know is (1) start playing in whatever grade the music program of the school I'm attending starts, (2) focus mainly on ensemble (band, orchestra) playing, (3) after a high (>90%) attrition rate, we're left with three groups: those who are in it for easy credit (orchestra doesn't have homework!); those who practice a little, but are too busy or not interested enough to make a consistent effort; and those who are really serious. By the time they reach high school, everyone in this third group has private instructors and, if they're really serious about getting good, goes back and spends a lot of times practicing scales. Even at the highest level, musicians review scales, often daily, because they're the most fundamental thing: I once had the opportunity to ask Gloria dePasquale what the best way to improve general ability, and she told me that there's 12 major scales and 36 minor scales and, IIRC, that she practices all of them every day. Getting back to math, there's a lot here that's not analogous to math. Most notably, there's no analogue to practicing scales, no fundamental-level thing that you can put large amounts of time into practicing and get general returns to mathematical ability: there's just proofs, and once you can tell a valid proof from an invalid proof, there's almost no value that comes from studying set theory proofs very closely. There's certainly an aesthetic sense that can be refined, but studying whatever proofs happen to be at to slightly above your current level is probably the most helpful (like in flow), if it's too easy, you're just bored and learn nothing (there's nothing there to learn), and if it's too hard, you get frustrated and still learn nothing (since you're unable to understand what's going on).)

2. "With a bit of work", used in a math text, means that a mathematically literate reader who has understood everything up until the phrase's invocation should be able to come up with the result themselves, that it will require no real new insight; "with a bit of work, it can be shown that, for every positive integer n, (1 + 1/n)^n < e < (1 + 1/n)^(n+1)". This does not preclude needing to do several pages of scratch work or spending a few minutes trying various approaches until you figure out one that works; the tendency is for understatement. Related, most math texts will often leave proofs that require no novel insights or weird tricks as exercises for the reader. In Linear Algebra Done Right, for instance, Axler will often state a theorem followed by "as you should verify", which should require some writing on the reader's part; he explicitly spells this out in the preface, but this is standard in every math text I've read (and I only bother reading the best ones). You cannot read mathematics like a novel; as Axler notes, it can often take over an hour to work through a single page of text.

3. Most math books present definitions, state theorems, and give proofs. In general, you definitely want to spend a bit of time pondering definitions; notice why they're correct/how the match your intuition, and seeing why other definitions weren't used. When you come to a theorem, you should always take a few minutes to try to prove it before reading the book's proof. If you succeed, you'll probably learn something about how to write proofs better by comparing what you have to what the book has, and if you fail, you'll be better acquainted with the problem and thus have more of an idea as to why the book's doing what it's doing; it's just an empirical result (which I read ages ago and cannot find) that you'll understand a theorem better by trying to prove it yourself, successful or not. It's also good practice. There's some room for Anki (I make cards for definitions—word on front, definition on back—and theorems—for which reviews consist of outlining enough of a proof that I'm confident I could write it out fully if I so desired to) but I spend the vast majority of my time trying to prove things.