Excellent facilitation Gretta. There are so many times when I was confused and then you asked Eliezer to clarify the thing I was confused about. I'm writing this after encountering the following, but there were others:

Gretta: Please explain Mary Sue, because some people aren't going to know what that is. 

My understanding is that toothpicks are for scraping the area in between teeth, not the surface of the tooth itself.

There are some contexts where you get to sidestep this, which is nice.

Business-facing software comes to mind. I'm building a B2B app right now and am not optimizing much for mobile since my users will be using it on desktops at work. And in my day job we're building internal tools that also are only used on desktop while people are at work.

Data-intensive apps too, I think you can often just decide that it's not intended for mobile users because the screen is too small for a good user experience. I sorta did that with Premium Poker Tools, an app that allows poker players to run various simulations.

I kinda feel like a lot of random commercial things are better than residential things:

• Napkin dispensers at restaurants vs at home. I like how at restaurants you pull and only one comes out. At home it takes a bit of fine motor skill to pluck just one napkin from a bunch of stacked napkins.
• Toilet paper holders in public have a serrated edge that makes it easy to tear.
• Soap dispensers in public bathrooms and showers are attached to the wall. I like how that saves counter space.

I wonder why there's this difference. I suspect people would find the commercial approaches at home to feel "too utilitarian" and "not homey".

That's a good call out about acidic food. I remember hearing that too and so don't brush after eating something pretty acidic. Also because my teeth are sensitive to acid and it hurts when I brush after eating something pretty acidic.

For the general case, this excerpt from the article sounded like it was indicating that you should brush after eating.

We’ve all heard that it’s best to brush our teeth after meals. But in some cases, did you know it is best to hold off brushing, at least temporarily?

So one in every 10,000 people gets hit by a car while walking every year.

Hm. 1 in 10k. I'm trying to think about how that squares with my expectation that "actual" is much less "intuition".

I'll pretty roughly approximate the number of "close calls" my intuition expects a person to encounter as something like 5-10 a year. Let's say 5. And I'll also guesstimate that for a given "close call", there's a 9/10 chance either you jump out of the way or the driver swerves out of the way, so only a 1/10 chance you actually get killed.

That'd mean that in a given year there's a 1 - (0.9)^5 ~ 0.41 probability of a given person dying, so 4,100 in every 10,000 rather than 1 in every 10,000.

I feel like I might be missing or misunderstanding something though.

I remember a hygienist at the dentist once telling me that toothpaste isn't a huge deal and that it's the mechanical friction of the toothbrush that provides most of the value. Since being told that, after a meal, I often wet my toothbrush with water and brush for 10 seconds or so.

I just researched it some more and from what I understand, after eating, food debris that remains on your teeth forms a sort of biofilm. Once the biofilm is formed you need those traditional 2 minute long tooth brushing sessions to break it down and remove it. But it takes 30+ minutes to form the biofilm. Before it is formed you don't need long brushing sessions to significantly reduce the amount of debris that is left on your teeth. So then, these short informal brushing sessions after meals seem like a great "bang for your buck" in terms of reward vs effort.

I wonder how widely agreed upon the whole "avoid unnecessarily political examples" in the "politics is the mindkiller" sense is. I was just reading Varieties Of Argumentative Examples by Scott Alexander. The examples seem maximally political:

“I can’t believe it’s 2018 and we’re still letting transphobes on this forum.”

“Just another purple-haired SJW snowflake who thinks all disagreement is oppression.”

“Really, do conservatives have any consistent beliefs other than hating black people and wanting the poor to starve?”

“I see we’ve got a Silicon Valley techbro STEMlord autist here.”

My memory is fuzzy, but it's telling me something like:

• Scott Alexander uses tons of political examples.
• People on LessWrong lean pretty strongly towards avoiding them.
• Robin Hanson uses them sometimes but tries to avoid them.
• Jacob Falkovich seems to not lean into it as much as Scott Alexander, but is somewhere in the vicinity.

Something kinda scary happened a few days ago. I was walking my dog and was trying to cross at an intersection. There's a stoplight which was red, and a cross walk which was on "walk". But this car was approaching the crosswalk really quickly. You could hear the motor rev and the driver was accelerating.

I didn't enter the crosswalk. I put my hand up to catch his attention. He came to a quick stop. I gave a shrug like "what are you doing". He gave a similar shrug back. Then after I crossed, he floored it right through the stop light that was still red, only to come to a stop light one block away that was also red.

It wasn't actually a close call. I looked before entering the crosswalk and wasn't at risk of getting hit. But I feel like it was a close call in a different sense.

I'm a very careful street crosser, but even I fail to look both ways sometimes when the crosswalk signal is on "walk", especially when visibility is poor. If there's a parked car or something that is blocking my view of oncoming traffic, sometimes I just go. What if this were one of those situations?

And furthermore, I've had a ton of similar encounters where a car seemingly would have hit and killed me if I weren't paying attention. I think it was a few weeks ago when I was walking on the sidewalk and a car jolted out of a parking garage without looking for pedestrians. If I had continued into the car's path -- an easy mistake to make -- I seemingly would have been ran over and killed.

But I don't think this logic actually adds up normality. The logic implies that vastly more people will get run over and killed than we actually observe. Given the number of close calls I've had in my life, it implies that I should probably be dead. And given how much safer and more cautious I am than other people, it implies that many of them would also be dead.

So then, I don't think these "close calls" are actually all that close. I'm just not sure why.

I came across this today. Pretty cool.

"If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and five minutes finding the solution." ~Einstein, maybe