curvise

This could be obvious to most people here but can you briefly explain how Neuralese is a new thing and not just "how LLMs worked before COT was invented"?

Even without understanding that though, I found this post excellent at catching me up on the topic!

if you're checking how many fruits you have, "apples and pears" makes sense.

If you're trading a bag of apples for a bag of pears, you might want to know the relative value of apples and pears, so you would indeed calculate "apples per pear".

I also thought it sounded... really annoying. something I may have found interesting 10 years ago but would now cause me to simply avoid the person. And it might ruin my night by making me feel like a party pooper, a la Thane's comment above.

Those are good points. I was expecting something different from this post but only based on my intuitions, not explicit framing.

I suspect you're way off the mark here. I downvoted this post because it felt like magical thinking. "Just break your phone addiction and your life will be exactly what you want" is not true. But that seems to be the entire message of this post... except possibly to smugly boast? (Not sure if this is the author's real life.)

The tone is moralizing but not actionable or insightful. What is there to like about this heaven-posting?

I've been tackling many "wobbly chair" problems in my life in the last few years due in large part to adopting just such a mindset: by removing annoyances/distractions, removing friction, and developing new abilities via these types of efforts, I'm able to take on bigger problems and goals. It has been very good for me, in that the scope of my hobbies has grown... but it's also surprisingly easy to feel like I've made no progress against the big issues on days where I'm unwell and struggle to concentrate. These "wobbly chair" type problems, once fixed, become invisible achievements, and I still often get trapped thinking I'm helpless against the big problems.

Strongly agree with the point about being more convincing while being flexible. Of the friends whose minds I've changed, every single one was won over while I was being flexible and expressing that it didn't need to be all or nothing.

Another point about cows is that their meat is the most wasteful of land and water, and the most polluting. These are "side" arguments but the collapse of ecosystems across the globe is also an important issue to me and I'm not sure why it wouldn't be to others who care about things like suffering reduction. It surely is inducing a lot of suffering now, human and otherwise, besides my personal belief that "a diverse and robust biosphere is intrinsically good."

As for your opening sentence on the health section, "you need to take medicine to not die - B12", I don't think a B12 supplement is medicine. Factory farmed animals are routinely fed B12 supplements and people don't consider meat medicine. Salt is supplemented with iodine to prevent deficiencies, also not medicine. 

I don't really understand why you're arguing this point in particular, but I don't think you're making a strong argument. 

Factory farmed animals do take medicine all the time; this has no bearing on whether we consider the* food derived from those animals* to be medicine. 

Additionally, food-as-medicine is indeed a growing school of thought (although industrial beef is not going to be a recommendation).

Lastly, taking a concentrated and packaged supplement to improve health is substantially different from eating a whole food which contains similar nutrients. It is an extremely common form of medicine: pills.