All of Elo's Comments + Replies
Following this post I spent an hour on one single statement. Trying to hone and adapt it. Felt metaphorically like trying to sharpen a knife. It didn't get much sharper and I could still see ways that I could manually make it sharper (since it was a 5 sentence paragraph).
I think it's still possible, but I would need more work and novel sharpening stones. (contextually - we use blunt stones to sharpen a knife) I believe it's possible but I'll keep playing and publish if I think I've found a more scissory scissor.
The whole concept depends on your opinions on psychological risk and also if such weapons are possible.
2Yes. Since 2017, I stopped reviewing. I still read more books but I felt a shift to "seeing the shape of the elephant" and felt comfortable with not writing about them.
I shifted the way I read to more letting the information wash over me and letting the ways that information needs to integrate with my being, self organise.
This year I read less but still about 50 books a year. My maximum was 130 books a year. My topics have shifted to psychology, therapy and business books. You can see my newer book list on my google doc here - https://docs.google.com/docum...
Dieting is more about therapeutically soothing one's self. The black box CICO is a good foundation but people eat because their emotions, cognition and somatic experience tell them they need to. Dieting is one of the hardest things people do because it's a long effort process, however I believe there's ways to do it easier. I haven't solved the dieting problem completely for myself but I feel like I am close.
I'd suggest people now to look at the immunity to change process in the book "right weight, right mind" and also do therapy with a therapist you trust on the issue if it remains significant and a battle.
Story of Richard hamming:
Richard hamming used to work at Bell labs, where he would befriend someone new in the cafeteria and talk to them about their field.
The next day he would ask them about the most prominent and important problems in their field.
And in the third day he would ask, "why aren't you working on the most important problem?"
On day 4 he would have to find a new friend to annoy at lunch time.
He inspires us to ask each other, "what is the most important problem in your life?" and "why aren't you working on it?"
S1 knows a lot of things. Some examples include "gut feel", that can usually be inquired about and led back to a memory.
Example: I was once playing Blood on the Clocktower, a group party game. I used my gut to suspect someone, when I asked it why, A moment of the person looking down in a particular way after saying something came to mind. Turns out I was right and we killed the evil person on the first turn. Something that's supposed to take all game.
S1 knows how to ski better than S2. When I went skiing a few years ago, people would ...
Looks like from a rational perspective we can notice that our sensors are fallible.
Breathing walls seems to be the whole body/heart beat throwing the visual field out of lock. Usually counteracted by the brain in normal processing of the vision.
Visual snow is the noise in the visual field if it's too sensitive and after image is literally after image in the proteins in the back of the eye.
The gap between the sensor bug, brain compensation mechanism and imaginary mental "control" of a kasina after image is a pretty slim one.
It is interesting to explore that
...There's something like a mental motion that I'd call "escalation". A sudden leap from zero to "aaaaaaah". you seem to be pointing to the way that brains sometimes escalate in unimportant situations (and build a narrative around what's going on and why escalation is the self justified behaviour).
I'm currently exploring causal chains. To use one of your examples,
I asked if I could bring a cushion from home for a retreat. I was told yes. I brought it. The cushion was orange, the zendo's cushions were black, it...
take it seriously?
That's up to you. I've got a lot of value from the structure he outlines. It's a lot more reasoned than some of the other mysterious odd things I read.
If there is something wrong with the theory and the way it maps to the practice, is it better to read more theory or do more practice and make new theories? I would suggest it depends on the person and what they have found to work in the past. And also with an awareness to the loops of bad habits - "sharpen the saw" type problems. Sometimes it's more valuable to stop sharpening the saw, and start cutting down the tree. (rationality frame of thinking loves to sharpen more and cut less)
I can offer an explanation that might fit. Rationalists tend toward expertise mode thinking (expert from the torbert action logic framework). Behaviour like reading the book is in line with the expert behaviour.
Cfar techniques and related in-person methods are not always about being the expert, they are about doing the best thing. Being a better expert is not always the same as being the better munchkin, the better person or the person who can step out of their knowledge beliefs.
In theory, the expert thing is the best thing. In theory there's no differenc
...I'd appreciate this information (about looking at votes) being published in meta.
The difference between "confusion" and "complain" is a grey area. I've heard people exclaim, "I'm so confused. This is exciting!" and other times people exclaim, "I'm so confused, this is frustrating".
I suspect you weren't sharing your confusion because you had a fun and jolly sentiment behind it. But being text, it's very hard to tell. (hence the follow up question, "how was that confusion for you?" - which I assume you weren't taking seriously and weren't going to answer, pa
...I am surprised that this got as many upvotes but zero discussion. I am wondering if I currently publish true and useful things that don't generate conversation? Should I adapt to try to publish posts that generate conversation over useful posts?
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My purpose here was to generate a list of possible tags for a sub-forum system. There being no discussion I am guessing this won't be taken seriously. I wish I could see how many people have read this and better understand if it's a generally agreed sentiment or generally disagreed sentiment...
Do what you like. I'd say that some people want to know, some don't. I wish we had tags like "typo" or "nitpick" because I might want to make a self aware comment that was one of those but we don't right now.
I suspect people like corrections but it's a hard thing to navigate with kindness at the forefront of "it's spelt wrong"
I'd offer a different question. And I'd suggest a reframe of anxiety. Anxiety is about the body delivering more energy to itself, it comes with extra mindful attention, and it's about protection yes, but not necessarily threat.
Most of the time when I get some sensation like anxiety I'm thinking about how I might benefit from this extra energy that my s1 has decided I need. How I might use it to pay extra attention and me more vigilant or cautious for errors.
As you said it's not really a threat, for me it's more about my concern that I'll make a mistake.
"anxious" energy is here to help me to be more vigilant and cautious about this concern.
There are two cultures in this particular trade-off. Collaborative and adversarial.
I pitch collaborative as, "let's work together to find the answer (truth)" and I pitch adversarial as, "let's work against each other to find the answer (truth)".
Internally the stance is different. For collaborative, it might look something like, "I need to consider the other argument and then offer my alternative view". For adversarial, it might look something like, "I need to advocate harder for my view because I'm right". (not quite a balanced description)
Collaborative: "
...Collaborative: "I don't know if that's true, what about x" Adversarial "you're wrong because of x".
Culturally 99% of either is fine as long as all parties agree on the culture and act like it.
Okay, but those mean different things. "I don't know if that's true, what about x" is expressing uncertainty about one's interlocutor's claim, and entreating them to consider x as an alternative. "You're wrong because of x" is a denial of one's interlocutor's claim for a specific reason.
I find myself needing to say both of these things, but in different situations,
...My experience is reactions are important for real time conversations with too many people at once. It allows one person to speak and several people to agree without adding another line of text and clogging up the discussion.
There is another use case of "supportive" emojis where I would react hug to "I've had a rough day" from a friend of mine.
There's all the humour uses of emoji too but that's not what we want on lw.
The battle over time and money (patient value for their time) (doc value for money) was more central to the discussion than life and death. Bringing in the subjective life and death claims helps to elevate the stakes of the discussion, but this "signalling game" was all about the time and the money, not the life and death as claimed by the report.
We can pretend it was about life and death but the ticking clock was still very long. I could think of it as a "runway". Yes at the end of the runway if the patient did nothing they could die in a week. On the oth
...By my understanding, leverage is working on human effectiveness. How to take a human and make them more effective at what they are doing.
There's a broad brush of choosing high leverage people to apply their efforts of effectiveness training and a broad brush of what counts as their effectiveness methodologies.
I am thinking of it as coaching from a perspective of "what works" above "what is proven", so branching into the post rationality area.
For example, if a person is learning piano. And they have maxed out deep work hours, and teacher hours, and relevant
...There are definitely rationalist positions that have unexamined potential in the pr direction, where a good excuse is, "I haven't looked yet". (and a bad excuse might be, "that's dumb I don't want to look there"). In that sense there is rationality that is not yet at Post-rational investigations.
I had to have some sense and experience of investigating and knowing the world before I turned that machine on itself and started to explore the inner workings of the investigation mechanism.
I would think of this in terms of rights. Who has the right to post a new theory? Who has the right to challenge an existing concept? Who has the right to reply? Who has the right to defence?Who has the right to demand?
Everyone can choose which ones you want to and which ones you don't want to, but it's not possible to bind other people to your preferences against their will.
This question is better informed by the works of Martin Seligman and his happiness/wellbeing department of psychology, Jordan Peterson's early book "Maps of meaning", and Victor Frankl.
Seligman suggests that meaning is one of the big things required to live a fulfilling and happy life.
Jordan Peterson proposed that meaning is narrative based and you can write your own meaning by journaling about your past/present/future.
Victor Frankl (post holocaust book - "man's search for meaning") invented logotherapy, suggesting that people need a reason and a purpose t
...If it's a non-public view count, I don't see it becoming a goodheart metric. If something is too clickbait or trash, it would get downvotes. If it doesn't get downvotes, maybe there's good reasons.
Maybe it would be worth internally having:
- page view count
- upvote count
- downvote count
- vote total (also possibly up and down vote total)
- comment count
- some sort of relative metric that can compare this article to the other articles nearby.
For me, I don't write a clickbait and I don't write a community drama. But I've written posts with 5 hours of work and posts with 30mins of work. And different styles and qualities of 30min posts. I'd love to know if people are reading them.
A post with 100 views and +10 up votes VS a post with 15 views and +10 up votes is a very different thing.
(Context - Digging up a 5 year old post...) The idea of pure clear seeing, is a momentary state of experience which ... wait I said this above.
Maybe it's a bit like finally "getting" a math equation. It seemed confusing for a while, then it seemed to not make sense, and then clear seeing ... at least in the mental understanding sense. In my experience, the subjective sense of "pure clear seeing" extends from literal visual stimuli appearing sharper and vivid, through emotional clarity, to mental constructs being sharp and vivid in the mind's eye as well.