LESSWRONG
LW

All of Lakin's Comments + Replies

Alex_Altair's Shortform
Lakin10

Maybe you already thought of this, but it might be a nice project for someone to take the unfinished drafts you've published, talk to you, and then clean them up for you.  Apprentice/student kind of thing. (I'm not personally interested in this, though.)

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2Alex_Altair
I like that idea! I definitely welcome people to do that as practice in distillation/research, and to make their own polished posts of the content. (Although I'm not sure how interested I would be in having said person be mostly helping me get the posts "over the finish line".)
The Curse Of The Counterfactual
Lakin10

This seemed to me like a long way of saying that "many people believe that they can control others when they can't". I want to know what the OP thinks of this.

(And also the belief "you can't make yourself like anything", in the case of the person feeling guilty about unproductiveness.)

Things that still confuse me:

  • the "Nice Guy" bits do seem not derivable from the above?

 

This is important to me because it's central to some rationality research I'm doing currently.

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2pjeby
It seems like you read a very different article than what I wrote. Per the abstract: I do not understand how you got from this abstract to your summary - they seem utterly unrelated to me. For example, if one is thinking "I should have done this sooner", how is that about controlling others? Likewise, this isn't about conscious "belief": even when these things are directed at other people, we usually don't even realize we're trying to control anyone and would likely not say we believe we can control anyone. The way it feels from the inside is that something is wrong, in the sense of "someone is wrong on the internet" -- i.e. that there is some moral outrage occurring which must be stopped or at least punished or protested. What does liking have to do with anything? I'm seriously confused here. Ingvar's scenario doesn't say anything about liking anything? The issue being presented there is that the moral outrage feeling blocks us from thinking strategically, because actually useful or practical actions don't feel enough like they're punishing the perpetrator of our feeling of moral outrage. Once the outrage feeling was shut off, "Ingvar" (not anything like their real name) immediately began to think of practical solutions, solutions they could not think of just a few moments before, and that they admitted they would've rejected as irrelevant, useless, or even insulting had anyone proposed them prior to removing the feeling. The nice guy concept is presented as an instance of a class of counterfactuals: one in which we should live up to an unrealistic standard so then people should respond differently. Therefore (our brains assume), if people are not responding correctly, then we must have done something wrong... and so need to be punished. (Or alternately, if we believe we are performing correctly, then others must be punished for not being sufficiently nice in return.) i.e., once again illustrating how: This is the central theme of the article, and is merely
Introduction to abstract entropy
Lakin*12

Registering that I think "[entropy] can be used to explain the arrow of time" is bunk (I've linked 4:50, but see particularly the animation at 5:49): entropy works to explain the arrow of time only if we assume a low-entropy initial state (eg the big bang) in the past
Edit: Oh hm maybe the description isn't "time moves forward" but "time moves away from the big bang"

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Introduction to abstract entropy
Lakin10

I REALLY liked this. A few years ago I scoured the internet trying to find a good conceptual explanation of entropy, and I couldn't find any.  This is by far the best that I've seen. I'm glad you made it!

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Why don't Rationalists use bidets?
Lakin22

yeah, it doesn't seem like the Rationalist spirit to be hindered by this though :/

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Why don't Rationalists use bidets?
Lakin20

huh, you have large estimates

anyways thanks for the aella link

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1IrenicTruth
Reading the comments here, I think I may halve my estimate of self-install time.
Why don't Rationalists use bidets?
Lakin62

I'm a bit hungry for ... the thing that bidets are a metaphor for, here? Like, I think there's an interesting object-level question about the adoption of (almost strictly) superior ways-of-being, but I'm more curious about something like "what does the non-adoption of bidets tell us about how we are probably thinking and behaving sub-optimally elsewhere?"

That's the post that I wanted to write, actually— but I wasn't sure how to do it without being too aggressive

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Why don't Rationalists use bidets?
Lakin40

Is that because you simulate that there might be backwash back into the spigot?

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3dsj
I think something like that is part of it, yes.
Covid 12/2: But Aside From That
Lakin10

"Omicorn" was a really funny mispelling

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Thomas Kwa's Bounty List
Lakin10

Still use Roam? I use Obsidian and it seems like people are switching from Roam. Probably not that useful if you're used to Roam though.

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Thomas Kwa's Bounty List
Lakin10

sleep:

  • I see you already have this in your doc, but for me a chilipad really helps. (although maybe this isn't as helpful if living in the Bay Area, but if you ever move then definitely)
  • blue/green-blocking glasses
  • lights that change brightness/color throughout the day. 
    • I don't use an alarm to wake up, but instead I have my lights turn on bright. much calmer. I used to use a light-alarm clock, but having smart lights is better.
    • lights turn dim at 5pm, then completely red at 6pm, and then off at 8pm and I sleep at 10pm. Light has a big effect on me, and if
... (read more)
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Covid 7/1: Don’t Panic
Lakin30

Result: Positivity rate of 2.4% (up 0.6%) and deaths decline by 8%. 

Should this be "0.6 percentage points" rather than "0.6%"?

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2Zvi
I think that is worse and that no one thinks this means 0.6% of previous total.