Comment author: iceman 25 September 2015 06:50:34AM 1 point [-]

It's not just you. I can't use the arrow keys either. Chrome 45 on Windows 8.

Comment author: matt 24 November 2015 09:53:44AM 0 points [-]

Anyone else having trouble with keyboard input on Lesswrong? (Arrow keys and page up & down work for me on OSX Chrome, Firefox & Safari.)

Comment author: lululu 02 July 2015 06:56:22PM *  5 points [-]

As a narcoleptic, I am always suspicious of extreme polyphasic sleep claims. Biphasic seems to be natural, but anything like the uberman schedule seems to conflict with what I know about narcolepsy.

The primary symptom or possibly the primary cause of narcolepsy is skipping straight from light sleep to REM within minutes of falling asleep. When I was tested, I entered REM between 3 and 7 minutes of falling asleep. Sleep cycles are fractured and slow wave sleep is reduced or skipped entirely.

By contrast, a normal person enters REM after usually more than an hour, stopping along the way in three different phases of sleep. The deepest stage, slow wave sleep, is where quite a lot of brain repair occurs. Glial cells are restored, free radicals are cleared out, glucose is stored in the brain. Growth hormones repair tissue damage.

Many of the claims of ubermen proponents seem to rest on entering REM almost immediately after staring a nap. Much like a narcoleptic. Stage four is arguably more important for mental health, but this stage is not mentioned by proponents that I have seen. Furthermore, some of the symptoms of narcolepsy seem to match the experiences of polyphasic sleepers, particularly the general awakeness/non-grogginess which is occasional unexpected and uncontrollably strong daytime sleepiness.

Background: The idea of less sleep super appeals to me because I need so much. Before I was diagnosed I tried Uberman but it didn't seem to reduce my daily hours of sleep needed, and in retrospect it obviously could never have done that for me. But my natural sleep cycle is super polyphasic, 3 or 4 naps a day and reduced sleep at night. Unfortunately, my body wants is 10+ hours regardless of whether its in one chunk or spaced out throughout the day, and spacing seems irrelevant since I rarely have SWS regardless.

Comment author: matt 10 July 2015 01:23:09AM *  2 points [-]

I'm polyphasic on Everyman 3 since about March 2011 (Jan and Feb spent unsuccessfully trying to make Uberman work). According to my aging Zeo I get approximately the same REM and SWS as I did on 7.4hrs of monophasic sleep before I adapted. Nearly all of the SWS is in my 3hr core. On Uberman I never achieved enough SWS in my naps to get me through. The adaptation was ridiculously hard - both for how very unpleasant it was and for having to get through that while sleep deprived.

Comment author: lmm 03 February 2014 07:06:39PM 0 points [-]

Seriously, citation needed; all the claims I've seen are that cycling is dramatically safer.

Comment author: matt 05 March 2014 10:30:53AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: ciphergoth 16 January 2014 05:32:45PM 0 points [-]

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/107056/Minicamp2012/PolyphasicSleep/index.html

This is now a 404.

(Came here to re-download the nap tracks, which still work fine :))

Comment author: matt 18 January 2014 07:53:18PM *  0 points [-]
Comment author: Baughn 31 May 2013 01:40:25PM *  6 points [-]

Actually, I would suggest not focusing your attention on evolutionary anthropology while you're supposed to be piloting a multi-ton vehicle at high speeds.

Most people are far worse at driving than they believe themselves to be.

Now, assuming you're not in a car at the moment, you can probably hack something up using mplayer - there's at least one android port of that. You may need to write your own UI, though, and I suspect it'll reduce your battery life significantly. (Android native players take advantage of decoding hardware, mplayer probably doesn't. Also, the fourier transform required to speed up voice without affecting pitch is expensive.)

Comment author: matt 28 June 2013 04:51:26PM 3 points [-]

Actually, I would suggest not focusing your attention on evolutionary anthropology while you're supposed to be piloting a multi-ton vehicle at high speeds.

When you're driving a daily commute your mind is going to wander unless you have extraordinary focus control / mindfulness training. It's not obvious to me that it's more dangerous to have it directed to evolutionary anthropology than to what you're going to do when you get home (or wherever else it wandered).

Comment author: JoshuaZ 26 June 2013 10:58:32PM *  17 points [-]

Many of those references don't support the claim or only support it very weakly. For example, one of the articles in the long list of citations is this one, and says:

None of the LI changes observed between and within the three arms of the trial were found to be statistically significant. Thus we failed to prove that glucose consistently stimulates or lipids inhibit tumour proliferation despite a trend in this sense.

So the data isn't quite that strong. Some of the other bits above are a little weaker than one would hope for:

Ketone bodies can serve as an alternative energy source for those cells with normal mitochondrial function [23], [24], but not for cancer cells [25].

But the reference for 25 is only for brain tumors in certain limited contexts in children.

Overall, this is an interesting area of ongoing work, but it isn't nearly as universal as you might think. There are also other issues involved: people with late stage cancers often have enough trouble eating as is (a large fraction actually die of starvation), and getting them to eat anything is an accomplishment. So at that level, for a lot of post-metastasis patients, this will be happening naturally anyways.

Comment author: matt 28 June 2013 04:19:56PM 3 points [-]

people with late stage cancers often have enough trouble eating as is (a large fraction actually die of starvation), and getting them to eat anything is an accomplishment. So at that level, for a lot of post-metastasis patients, this will be happening naturally anyways.

Starvation does not equal ketosis. If cancer patients are suffering from nausea and lack of motivation to eat anything, they and their carers may not select high fat low carbohydrate foods that would promote and sustain ketosis and may instead choose simple and easy to digest carbohydrates and sugary treats.

(Your comment upvoted.)

Comment author: [deleted] 06 May 2013 05:29:15PM 5 points [-]

Conversely, there are some niche places that look very favorably upon LaTeX CVs. It's important to know the culture.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Maximizing Your Donations via a Job
Comment author: matt 07 May 2013 10:52:25PM 10 points [-]

At TrikeApps our job ads say "Choose an appropriate file format for your resume – we’ll draw conclusions about you from the tools you use". Anyone who expects us to prefer a proprietary file format over LaTeX or PDF is probably applying to the wrong place :)

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 10 April 2013 03:26:02AM *  15 points [-]

Do you want to get more specific about what you mean by "tight feedback loops"? I spent a few years focusing on startup things, and I don't think "tight feedback loops" are a good characterization. It can take a lot of work to figure out whether a startup idea is viable. That's why it's so valuable to gather advance data when possible (hence the lean startup movement). If you want "tight feedback loops", it seems like trying to master some flash game would offer a much better opportunity.

As far as I can tell, what actual entrepreneurs have that wannabee entrepreneurs don't is the ability to translate their ideas in to action. They're bold enough to punch through unendorsed aversions, they're not afraid to make fools of themselves, they don't procrastinate, they actually try stuff out, and they push on without getting easily discouraged. You could think of these skills as being multipliers on rationality... if your ability to act on your ideas is 0, it doesn't matter how good your ideas are and you should focus on improving your ability to act, not improving your ideas. It might help to start distrusting yourself whenever you say "I'll do X" and think "hm... am I really going to do X? What's the first step? When and how am I going to take that step? Why am I not taking it now? If I'm not going to take it now, will I ever take it?" (Relevant.)

BTW, one possible explanation for why some people are able to make good decisions in practice but not in theory could be the near/far thing Robin Hanson likes to bring up.

Lots of people are successful at many things, but that doesn't mean that for any particular person, like Oprah, there will be generalizable insights about success to be gathered from their life. For example, maybe what caused Oprah to skyrocket to billionaire status (instead of being a regular old driven, fairly successful person) was that she came up with a great gimmick. I'm not sure studying her example would provide much insight in to how to be successful for non-talk show people. But if you think it would, there are lots of biographies of famous, successful people you could mine for success insights.

Comment author: matt 07 May 2013 07:09:45AM *  5 points [-]

They're bold enough to punch through unendorsed aversions, they're not afraid to make fools of themselves, they don't procrastinate, they actually try stuff out, and they push on without getting easily discouraged.

For what it's worth, I'm a pretty successful entrepreneur and I'd say this more like:

They manage on the whole to punch through many of their unendorsed aversions (at least the big ones that look like they're getting in the way), they're just as afraid to make fools of themselves as you are but they have ways of making themselves act anyway most of the time, they keep their procrastination under control and manage to spend most of their time working, they actually try stuff out, and they have ways to push through their discouragement when it strikes.

(Your version scans better.)

I'm commenting mostly against a characterisation of this stuff being easy for successful entrepreneurs. If you try something entrepreneurial and find that it's hard, that's not very useful information and it doesn't mean that you're not one of the elect and should give up - it's bloody hard for many successful people, but you can keep working on your own systems until they work (if you try to just keep working I think you'll fail - go meta and work on both what's not working to make it work better and on what is working to get more of it).

In response to The Singularity Wars
Comment author: matt 14 February 2013 09:41:19PM *  18 points [-]

singularity.org, recently acquired after a rather confused and tacky domain-squatter abandoned it

I would not have described the previous owner of singularity.org as a domain squatter. He provided a small amount of relevant info and linked to other relevant organizations. SI/MIRI made more of the domain than he had, but that hardly earns him membership in that pestilential club.

He sold the domain rather than abandoning it, and behaved honestly and reasonably throughout the transaction.

In response to The Singularity Wars
Comment author: ciphergoth 14 February 2013 06:24:53PM 14 points [-]

I feel like the closest kin to MIRI/CFAR outside the existential risk world is the efficient charity world: GiveWell, GWWC, 80,000 Hours, Efficient Animal Activism etc. There's also this: http://gcrinstitute.org/

Comment author: matt 14 February 2013 09:29:34PM 8 points [-]

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