All of Sabiola's Comments + Replies

Sabiola00

Those side effects don't seem so bad. I'm not planning to put it in my ear; I don't get any irritation or allergic reactions, and the way I'm using it (applying a toothpaste containing it around my implants after brushing my teeth, as prescribed by my dental hygienist) doesn't seem to discolor my teeth either. 4-chloroaniline and hexamethylenediamine do look scary though...

2bhauth
As you were writing that, did you consider why chlorhexidine might cause hearing damage?
Sabiola21

What is so bad about chlorhexidine? 

4bhauth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorhexidine#Side_effects It can also obviously break down to 4-chloroaniline and hexamethylenediamine. Which are rather bad. This was not considered in the FDA's evaluation of it.

LOL! I don't think women's clothing is less itchy (my husband's isn't any itchier than mine), but even if it were, that advantage would be totally negated by most women having to wear a bra.

Yes, exactly. From a bit later in the article:

"The causes of this distrust are complex and diverse. They include psychological traits that predispose some people towards paranoid worldviews; institutional failures, such as telling noble lies to manage public behaviour and dismissing legitimate ideas as conspiracy theories; and feelings—often justified—of exclusion from positions of power and influence."

Sabiola3-1

See also https://iai.tv/articles/misinformation-is-the-symptom-not-the-disease-daniel-walliams-auid-2690:
"Nevertheless, the model of misinformation as a societal disease often gets things backwards. In many cases, false or misleading information is better viewed as a symptom of societal pathologies such as institutional distrust, political sectarianism, and anti-establishment worldviews. When that is true, censorship and other interventions designed to debunk or prebunk misinformation are unlikely to be very effective and might even exacerbate the problems... (read more)

4Richard_Kennaway
Perhaps, in many cases, these "societal pathologies" are better viewed as symptoms of deeper pathologies, such as untrustworthy institutions, mainstream parties acting as sects competing for power, and corrupt establishment worldviews.

Huh, whatever it was, it appears to have been solved; the link works like it should now. I haven't changed anything on my end.

Today when I allowed the site in the viruschecker, Firefox said:

>Secure Connection Failed

>An error occurred during a connection to www.secretorum.life. Peer received a valid certificate, but access was denied.

>Error code: SSL_ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED_ALERT

   >The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
   >Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

and I could only choose Retry, which didn't work.

After telling the viruschecker to allo... (read more)

1rogersbacon
hmmm weird...

My viruschecker thinks Life on the Grid: Terra Incognita is dangerous, and says I shouldn't go there...

1rogersbacon
Huh, you might want to get your virus-checker checked - it's just a link to a substack page https://www.secretorum.life/p/life-on-the-grid-part-2
Answer by Sabiola20

62 seconds.

68-year-old woman
take a 45-60 min. walk every day
go to fitness bootcamp 2x/week

Oh yes, of course. I was only talking about the people Stephen mentioned, "who have no care for the truth and will say whatever they think will make them look good in the short term or give them immediate pleasure".

They're bullshitters. 
"Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavour either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. ...The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

7Dweomite
Note that bullshitting is only one subtype of bad faith argument.  There are other strategies of bad faith argument that don't require making untrue statements, such as cherry picking, gish galloping, making intentional logical errors, or being intentionally confusing or distracting.

Nitpick: in the help text, "effect your beliefs" should be "affect your beliefs".

4Adele Lopez
Fixed now (but may require a cache refresh)!

conscious

Typo, should be conscience

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Isaac Asimov

1archeon
Sabiola, the Homo Sapiens stone age lasted 300,000 years during which time we were the ultimate invasive species successfully covering the globe. They were ignorant about science but extremely knowledgeable about how to live a sustainable lifestyle. We are knowledgeable about science but ignorant about how to live a sustainable lifestyle. For those few who crawl out of the abyss of our own making, knowledge of how to live a sustainable lifestyle would be preferable to knowledge of science.

Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose,
more proud the spirit as our power lessens!
Mind shall not falter nor mood waver,
though doom shall come and dark conquer.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son

Make sure the names are written in big, bold letters, so they can be read from normal talking distance. Give people a thick marker to write with if you have them write their own names.

3Screwtape
Thank you for the addition! This is now added under Quick Tips. Anything else you'd suggest?

Thank you!  I was already eating pretty healthy, but now I'm replacing milk yogurt with soy yogurt, and eating fewer eggs and more bread with nut butter. I already don't eat a lot of meat, but I'm also replacing meat with tempeh in one more meal.

3Eli_
After learning about the Portfolio Diet I have been doing the same! Whenever I'm cooking I tend to ask three questions: 1. Can I add nuts or a nut paste to this dish? I love adding tahini! 2. Can I add more fiber? Tends to be by replacing the source of carbohydrates with black rice, quinoa, bulgur or whole wheat bread. And I always have oats for breakfast.  3. Can I add some plant protein? Either by replacing something or by adding something extra.  For me these questions work because I'm already eating plenty of fruits and vegetables. And, I haven't really added plant sterols into my diet yet.  Good luck to you!

DF decreases estrogen (which could cause cancer)

There's your negative effect: DF may be partly responsible for my low sex drive.

>The question is whether future humans will even bother trying to carry Earth animals with them or not?

Of course we will bring our pets! I don't know about other animals though. If it's up to me, mosquitoes will get left behind, for one.

Sabiola-30

This guy says it's fructose, plus salt and MSG. "Nature puts a “survival switch” in our bodies to protect us from starvation. Stuck in the “on” position, it’s the hidden source of weight gain, heart disease, and many other common health struggles. But you can turn it off." I think he's on to something; since I've been following his recommendations, I've been able to lose weight again ( ~9 kg since the end of April).

Maybe you don't have to stab the entity to death?

Same for me. I remember one dream from when I was little, before we even had a TV, let alone a color TV. It was in color.

Small nitpick about English: it's "life expectancy", not "live expectancy". 

Answer by Sabiola40

As I've gotten older, my inner voice has been getting ever quieter, and now I often go long stretches without it. Like you, I sometimes feel like my inner critic has been saying something nasty, but mostly the thing has just shut up, which is very nice! At the same time I've gotten over my depression (never officially diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I had it). Coincidence? I think not, but I don't know which is cause and which effect, or just how it happened, so I don't have any advice.

Answer by Sabiola40

I guess the thing to do would be to correct yourself right away, apologize to the person you told the lie to and tell the truth. Of course that will be embarrassing, but if you let S1 get away with lying, it will get rewarded for doing it and it won't stop.

1Randomized, Controlled
Yes, I agree this is a good policy to try and pre-commit to. In the past ~five years I can think of three times when S1 lied. Once I "rolled it back" fairly quickly, but I think even then it was several minutes worth of sitting with my discomfort before I was able to make that heavy lift. This policy feels equivalent to me of saying "try harder" -- it's not actually clear to me what the mental moves involved in following it is, nor how I can provision the mental resources needed ahead of time in order to be able to carry those moves out when needed to, unexpectedly. More specifically, my model is some like: * S2 realizes that S1 just put us in a hole. * Minor flight/flight reaction kicks in. This leads to a dramatic reduction of global workspace and executive control. * Some part of S2 formulates the plan "admit to this lie and back us out of this hole at the earliest opportunity" and submits it to the global workspace * Some other systems (S2?? S1??? Something else???) submits the plan: "continue the conversation as normal, don't worry about this, it's unlikely it will ever come to light". * Brain systems enter the thunderdome.

Please don't 'twist some wires together', connect them with connector strips like these. Much safer!

I understand why there is niceness. I don't understand why I should be nice if God doesn't exist.

Because being nice feels nice. Humans are a social species. We can't survive alone, and so we evolved gut feelings that make us behave nicely to each other (at least inside the in-group).

2Measure
For the minority of humans for whom being nice doesn't feel nice, is it okay for them to do whatever feels nice to them?

Many, I bet! Me, for one. I'm actually quite happy now, but if someone offered me the chance to live my life over the same way again, I'd refuse. And I haven't even had a bad life, objectively.

No, I have no idea about how/whether it's enforced.

The Netherlands allows dual nationality only for people from countries that don't allow one to give up their nationality. If your country allows you to give up your nationality, you have to do that in order to become Dutch.

1Josh Jacobson
1. This is great to note, thanks for pointing it out. 2. I didn't know that it was impossible to renounce some citizenships. A Dutch government site says "Greek and Iranian nationals, for example, cannot give up their nationality: it is not legally possible. In Morocco giving up your nationality is not accepted in practice." Interesting. 3. Do you happen to know about enforcement for this? I've read in multiple instances of some countries having a rule requiring renouncing a previous citizenship 'on the books', but in practice it never being enforced nor adhered to. On the same government site as above it also says, "Other nationalities no longer recorded in the personal records database Since 6 January 2014, second or multiple nationalities are no longer recorded in the Personal Records Database. If you have another nationality besides Dutch nationality, this will no longer be noted when you register." I'm not sure whether to take this quote as an indicator of a lack of enforcement or not.

Yes, I think it was where he explained that you don't really feel better when you smoke. What happens is that a smoker feels worse in the times they don't smoke, and then a cigarette brings them up to normal again for a short while; so while you're smoking you feel as good as a non-smoker feels all the time. But I don't know if just reading that would have done the trick without the rest of the book.

I'm actually not quite sure. It's not a whole program; you just read the book, and (if you're anything like me) you're sober, just like that. I'm not a 'recovering alcoholic' the way I see some people writing who have been sober for even longer than I have; I'm done with alcohol, for good, and I knew it right away. He basically talks about the negatives of drinking and the positives of sobriety, with stories and examples, in a way that just 'clicked' for me.

1BeanSprugget
I see. Thanks.
Sabiola110

I'm Dutch, and not into homesteading or anything like that at all, but I also chose the cow going with the grass. Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker of English? Do you interpret 'goes with' as 'is more like'? I'd have thought it means 'belongs together'. (Of course the cow and the chicken also belong together, in the sense that both live on a farm, but 'one eats the other' seems like a more direct relationship.)

2lsusr
When you put it like that I feel like the homesteading answer is more correct and results from increased knowledge absent from the urban population.
7DirectedEvolution
Right, I think it's just hard to interpret the results of this test. 
9Rob Bensinger
"X goes with Y" is vague in English. Even "belongs together" could mean that the two things belong together in a category, rather than belonging together physically. My intuition is that American kids are pretty used to exercises where you're supposed to sort things by classifications like "animal vs. non-animal", so they're to some extent expecting that when you show them this kind of picture.
Answer by Sabiola70

High intelligence has the same problem as four-wheel-drive. It lets you get stuck much farther away from help. –Karl Gallagher

Answer by Sabiola50

I'll probably just go out for dinner with my husband. Usually I have a party with friends and family as well, but this year that isn't a good idea. Just when I'm turning 65, too... :(

Very interesting! I'd like to read the rest, too.

5cogitoprime
Hebrew vs Greek Essay. I have to apologize upfront for the source. It's actually from an appendix of an LDS/Mormon scripture study guide. The author is a Levinas scholar and professional philosopher. His main source is a book called Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek by Thorlief Bowman, but he's also heavily drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. https://www.amazon.com/Hebrew-Thought-Compared-Greek-Thorleif/dp/0393005348 In it, he makes some pretty audacious claims about how ancient Greek people "thought" based off the structure of the Hebrew language that have since been called tenuous, unjustified leaps. I personally see the book and this essay as insight into the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, one of my favorite existential phenomenological philosophers. So even if ancient Hebrews did not think this way, Emmanual Levinas did, and it may have insight into the phenomenology of the "ethical structure of subjectivity" as he described his philosophical project. https://www.dropbox.com/s/wbyk5pejqn4cph8/Faulconer%20Hebrew%20Greek.pdf?dl=0T
1simbyotic
As would I.

I'm not sure that sites like that look that way because they just don't know any better. I think they may be signaling they're not an 'establishment' site, and so *increase* their trustworthiness in the eyes of their target audience.

4jimmy
That's an interesting hypothesis, and seems plausible as a partial explanation to me. I don't buy it as a full explanation for a couple reasons. One is that it is inherently harder to read and follow rather than being an equally valid aesthetic. It may also function as a signal that you are on team Incoherent Thought, and there may occasionally be reasons to fake a disability, but generally genuine shortcomings don't become attractive things to signal. Even the king of losers is a loser, and generally the impression that I get is that these people did wish they had more mainstream acceptance and would take it in a heartbeat if they could get it at the level that they feel like they deserve. That doesn't mean that they won't flout it when they can, but the signs are there. They spend a lot more time talking about "the establishment" than the establishment spends talking about them, for example. The main point holds though. If your target audience sees formal attire as a sign of "conformism and closed mindedness" rather than a sign that you are able to shave and afford pricey clothing, then the honest thing to do is to show that you don't have to conform by not wearing a suit when you meet with them. When you're meeting the people who do want to make sure you can shave and put on fancy clothes, it's honest to show that you can do that too.

I took 10 lessons, and I think I could probably have done it with 8. I still feel myself sagging now and again, and then I have to correct myself (and then I wonder why I sagged to begin with, because the correct posture is actually more comfortable). I have also bought a new chair ( https://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/p/kullaberg-bureaustoel-zwart-90325518/, only mine has a different color) and removed the backrest. I have found that chairs with a backrest and armrests tempt you to lean on them, and then you can end up sitting in a wrong posture for a long time without noticing. Without them, I soon notice and can correct myself.

Yes, and I had tried several times before, without success. The difference is that earlier I just wanted to stop smoking for health reasons, but I still loved smoking. After reading the book, I don't want to smoke because I just don't like it anymore.

1oast
Was there anything in particular in the book that triggered you to not enjoy smoking anymore?
Answer by Sabiola50

Taking Alexander technique classes improved my posture a lot, and cured the tendinitis I used to get in my shoulders.

1Sameer Jain
How much time did the classes take, in terms of upfront investment and any ongoing investment required?
Answer by Sabiola60

Reading https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easy-Control-Alcohol-ebook/dp/B07B7QRWTH enabled me to quit drinking alcohol very easily. It was almost like it just turned off my desire to drink for good. ~3.5 years alcohol-free now.

1BeanSprugget
What does he do specifically? It's very unclear just from reading the Amazon description. Or is it like an entire program. I'm skeptical: I have never heard of this anywhere else, so it seems like one of those $100-bill-on-the-subway-floor type things.
-1Pattern
This comment is posted twice, btw. Here are the links in case they move around: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PX7AdEkpuChKqrNoj/what-are-your-greatest-one-shot-life-improvements?commentId=okgDAMjWnQdGAbz4e https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PX7AdEkpuChKqrNoj/what-are-your-greatest-one-shot-life-improvements?commentId=fSy4WybvH9Mv8sge2
Answer by Sabiola60

Reading https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easy-Stop-Smoking-ebook/dp/B0051XSN50/ enabled me to stop smoking very easily, and I've not wanted a smoke in 25+ years now.

2Thomas Kwa
Did you already want to stop smoking at the time you read it?

I'm missing Allen Carr's book (https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easy-Control-Alcohol-ebook/dp/B07B7QRWTH ) in the list of books. I quit drinking after reading that book over 3 years ago, and it was almost like flipping a switch, so fast did it turn off my desire to drink.

4juliawise
There are so many books on this topic that I didn't try to catalogue them. But thanks for the recommendation!
Answer by Sabiola90

Almost half a century ago, when I was 16 or 17 and still believed in God, I went to a synagogue with some people of my church for some kind of exchange thing. The service was quite boring though, as everything was in Hebrew and I didn't understand a thing. But there was nothing to be done except sitting still trying to be respectful. So I guess I fell into some kind of meditative state, and I don't remember anything about that, but just afterwards I felt that I had been in the presence of God, and a sense of great gratitude. I'm still surprised I didn't convert to Judaism on the spot; maybe I would have if I weren't so shy...

Answer by Sabiola40

OK, I'll go first. I'd correct people's grammar and spelling a lot, and I'd tell overweight people how to lose weight.

Oh wait, I misunderstood the afterimage thing. No, I usually don't see them while I'm looking at something, only when I close my eyes or look away. I do sometimes get the effect you describe, but not often. I tried to see the 'snow' again just now, but I didn't see any.

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