All of eukaryote's Comments + Replies

Delightful! I DO enjoy knowing that!

Advice: The AI-generated diagram here doesn't add anything and in fact indicates strongly that I wouldn't want to read the post. One of the things about diagrams being so important and eye-catching associated with writing is that they communicate information, so if a diagram is clearly half-assed and wrong, it makes one assume that the text is too. (Half-assed is maybe not the word - minimally-assed? MS Paint stick figures would be fine here, for instance.)

There's extraneous detail. The text is garbled and irrelevant.

 I think if you use image-generating AI to make diagrams you should then edit it afterwards to make sure it's actually, like, good and represents what you wanted, and add your own captions.

That's definitely a good point and model vis-a-vis "this group/ideology is targeting these people specifically".

I would also point out that specifically rejecting demographically-vulnerable people is likely to push more of them towards this ideology - though even if that effect weren't in play, it would still be shitty to tarnish a broad group of generally fine community members by common demographic.

I think this is a horrible thing to say. The murderers are associated with each other; that gives you much more information than just knowing that someone is trans or not. There are many, many stellar trans rationalists. I'm thinking you maybe are thinking of the standout dramatic cases you've heard of and don't know a lot of trans people to provide a baseline. 

I don't disagree with you about not wanting to read LLM output, but:

> Everyone in Cyborgism or AI Twitter or LW who talks a lot about talking a lot to LLMs for generic conversation, rather than specific tasks, seems to lose their edge and ability to think critically

- is a very strong claim to just throw out there. Everyone? Are you sure you're not remembering the people who stand out and confirm your theory? You're getting that they're (for twitter users) "losing their edge and ability to think critically" from, like, tweets?

I'd suggest writing about stuff you're interested in but that don't feel crucial to get right, if that makes sense. A hobby, fiction, stories from your life, about your day, funny observations...

If you don't have any other interests and just have to write about unimportant boring stuff - hey, yeah, sure, polish turds. I'm reading Ulysses right now and it's, like, mythologizing some guys going around their everyday lives and drinking and being casually rude. And it's one of the most beloved novels ever. Writing about boring everyday bullshit in ways that so... (read more)

Yeah, so I bet passive osmosis has in fact gotten you somewhere, but to go a bit beyond that -

• Can you identify when you're reading writing you like vs. writing you don't like?
• What's the difference?
• What kind of properties does writing you like have, compared to other writing? (Especially compared to writing that's "just okay", as opposed to actively bad)
  • Can you recreate these in your own writing?
• What effect does good writing have on you? (This is sort of an art more than a science, but like - do you understand the thing better? Do certain sentences just like really hit you? What's going on there?)

Okay, hm, interesting. (If I do write a "how to write good" post it'll probably be more general + kind of aimed at people with different problems than yours, like not writing enough, so I'll give this a shot now.) 

Obviously I don't know what you've tried already and it seems like you have tried some things (I looked up Dionysian Imitatio and was like "I think this person already knows more about writing methods than me", haha), so apologies if these ideas are completely off the mark -

Questions and people misinterpreting you

• In addition to asking the qu

😅 You know, I was thinking of calling it "Learn to write good BEFORE you have something worth saying", but figured I'd get some people rolling their eyes at the grammar of "write good" in a post purporting to offer writing advice. This would however have disambiguated the point you mentioned, which I hadn't thought about. Really goes to show you something or other.

Hm, let me think if I can come up with advice for you. What kind of problems do you run into when you start trying to express these things? (Or if more applicable, what's wrong with the finished product?)

That is definitely true and the title is being a little clickbaity about it, but my thinking is: the kind of person I'm imagining is going around thinking "I don't need to practice writing, I'll just wait til I figure out The Answer and it'll be fine" and I'm trying to convince them that they'll still want to be good at writing even once they know The Answer.

Post that made me pack a suit for Solstice

Yeah, agree. (Also agree with Dagon in not having an existing expectation of strong privacy in LW DMs. Weak privacy, yes, like that mods wouldn't read messages as a matter of course.) 

Here's how I would think to implement this unintrusively: little ℹ️-type icon on a top corner of the screen of the DM interface screen (or to the side of the "Conversation with XYZ" header, or something.) When you click on that icon, it toggles a writeup about circumstances in which information from the message might be sent to someone else (what information and who.)

Fair enough. You did write 

It might actually be essential that we try to divide people by sex wherever sexual dynamics can meaningfully affect a group's functionality.

and

But gosh, you know what would work really well to fix this?

which made it sound like you thought this would be a good idea.

Didn't like the post then, still don't like it in 2024. I think there are defensible points interwoven with assumptions and stereotypes. 

First: generalizes from personal experiences that are not universal. I think a lot of people don't have this or don't struggle with this or find it worth it, and the piece assumes everyone feels the way the author feels.  

Second: the thing it describes is a bias, and I don't think the essay realizes this.

Okay, part of the thing is that this doesn't make a case or acknowledge this romantic factor as being differe... (read more)

This was just a really good post. It starts off imaginative and on something I'd never really thought about - hey, spring shoes are a great idea, or at least the dream of them is. It looks at different ways this has sort have been implemented, checks assumptions, and goes down to the basic physics of it, and then explores some related ideas. I like someone who's just interested in a very specific thing exploring the idea critically from different angles and from the underlying principles. I want to read more posts like this. I also, now, want shoes with springs on them. 

Mostly saying the same thing twice, a rhetorical flourish. I guess just really doubling down on how this is not good, in case the reader was like "well this sucks incredibly but maybe there's a good upside" and then got to the second part and was like "ah no I see now it is genuinely bad", or vice versa.

Good point!

I really like this post. Thanks for explaining a complicated thing well!

I think this dynamic in relationships, especially in a more minor form, sometimes emerges from a thing where, like ... Especially if you're used to talking with your partner about brains and preferences and philosophy and rationality and etc - like, a close partner who you hang out day-to-day with is interesting! You get access to someone else making different decisions than you'd make, with different heuristics! 

When you want to do something hedonic with potential downsides, you ... (read more)

I respect your oatmeal respect and expertise but I think parts of your post are close-minded about certain things. "True roots" is nothing - if you're thinking really old tradition, why is a different new world fruit (blueberries) in there at all? Even if you're not restricting yourself to that, why should coconut in oatmeal be fine but not guava? That makes me think it's just about what tastes good and not really about tradition. 

(I haven't tried guava in oatmeal either, but guavas are great, a really unique flavor, I recommend trying it if you ever ... (read more)

As opposed to other species of bear, which are safe for children to engage with?

Source?

I happened to get to play Optimal Weave today and really liked it. I don't normally go for... well, board games at all, let alone strategy-type ones, but I had a lot of fun. The variable degree to which cooperation was a helpful strategy between goalsets (only sometimes) was neat. Good work!

I'm glad your symptoms went away! Sudden onset seizures sound terrifying. 

What made you think in the first place that the problem might be worms? Do you have any risk / exposure factors like the paper mentions?

Ah! I forget about a compass, honestly. He definitely came in with maps (and once he was out there for, like, over eight hours, he would have had cues from the sun.) A lot of the mystery / thing to explain is indeed "why despite being a reasonably competent hiker and map user, Ewasko would have traveled so far in the opposite direction from his car"; defs recommend Adam's videos because he lays out what seems like a very plausible story there.

(EDIT: was rewatching Adam's video, yes Bill absolutely had a compass and had probably used it not long before passing, they found one with his backpack near the top. Forgot that.)

Helicopters were used as part of the initial S&R efforts! Also tracking dogs. They just also didn't find him. There's a little about it in Tom's stuff. I don't know if Tom got the flight path / was able to map where it searched, I think there's some more info buried in this FOIA'd doc about the initial search that Tom Mahood got ahold of. 

(One thing I saw - can't remember who mentioned this, if it was Mahood or Adam Marsland - is that the FOIA'D doc mentions S&R requesting a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment to come search too, but tha... (read more)

Oh whoa, thanks for commenting! I really appreciate your videos and your work on the search.

Check out Marsland's post-coroner's-report video for all the details, but tentatively it looks like Ewasko:

• Hiked alone
• Didn't tell someone the exact trailhead/route he'd be hiking (later costing time, while he was still alive, while rescuers searched other parts of the park)
• Didn't have a GPS unit / PLB, just a regular (non-smart) cellphone (I don't actually know to what degree a regular smartphone works as a dedicated GPS unit - like, when you're at the edges of regular coverage, is it doing location stuff from phone + data coverage, or does it have a GPS c

Yeah, if anyone reading this liked this, I also really recommend Mahood's search for the Death Valley Germans. It's another kind of brilliant investigation.

Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that before! Hah, so that guy, KarmaFrog, is the same guy as Adam who posted the videos I recommended. He makes fun of himself in the video about the U-haul thing, which he has now, er, moved away from as a hypothesis.

Wait, just checking, when you say you got these examples from ChatGPT, do you know enough to verify that these are true? 

Also, what's the deal with the linked sources? They don't mention browser differences. Does Firefox not run this 2023 version of Javascript or something? I'm not a webdev expert.

Huh, clicked on a few of these. I haven't experienced this level of problems - like I said, I have a backup browser, but I don't need to break it out often (once or twice a week?) I mean, I believe these people, but I don't think I'm having some kind of consistently janky web experience that makes it not worth using, so as far as I'm concerned people should still give it a go.

(I also haven't run into problems using Claude on Firefox. Goes fine for me.)

Killer exploration into new avenues of digital mysticism. I have no idea how to assess it but I really enjoyed reading it.

Oh, TIL, fascinating, thanks! Wild.

Thanks for the extra info - this is good stuff! I figured the moon difference might be, like, some extra rocketry on top of ICBMs, but not necessarily a lot - but this makes sense that it's in fact a pretty substantial difference.

Yeah, I think people signing onto the OST really helped bury the idea. (It did not stop the USSR from at one point from violating it in 1974-75 by attaching a 23mm gun to a space station. (For "self defense". It was never used.) This probably isn't that related to the larger nukes question, I just learned that recently and thought it was a fun fact.)

I appreciate your excellent comment.

"I want to indicate an alien microbe," I thought. "I'll just draw something with a distinctly microbial feature but otherwise so weird there's no way it could exist." Archaea have shown me what for once again. 

Thank you for introducing me to this odd fellow.

I'm to understand that trichinopoly chain is structurally the same as knitting. See for instance this post and the diagrams included, which look a lot like knitting and describe it as circular knitting. Is that incorrect?

I hadn't seen this post at all until a couple weeks ago. I'd never heard "exfohazard" or similar used. 

Insisting on using a different word seems unnecessary. I see how it can be confusing. I also ran into people confused by this a few years ago, and proposed "cognitohazard" for the "thing that harms the knower" subgenre. That also has not caught on. XD The point is, I'm pro-disambiguating the terms, since they have different implications. But I still believe what I did then, that the original broader meaning of the word "infohazard" is occasionally us... (read more)

Yeah, great point! So to be fair to them, they were not doing tests that hinged on it having a specific codon scheme or amino acid. Like, they weren't sequencing the samples - it was 1969, they couldn't do that. They were putting it in nutrient-rich media or plants or animals or etc and seeing what happened. So maybe in such a case the coloration change would have been detected in, I don't know, the water of the shrimp tank. But as you say it could well have been too late at that point, if an organism grew in seawater.

Sure, Wikipedia, NASA's About Astrobiology page indicates this is pretty uncontroversial at NASA, Hawking, Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, this website from a NSF-funded exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science, Scientific American... I can't immediately find a "how do most biologists think that life came to be" survey but I bet if there is a good one, it would support this. In high school and undergrad, I was taught that abiogenesis was all but consensus, and that other things (divine intervention, panspermia, ??) were considered unlikely.

GREAT post. I sent it to my friends. It may be of interest that the oldest socks we know of have split toes, probably for being worn with sandals! So they've been uncool to wear with sandals for a while but they started out cool to wear with sandals, at least. History could be made to repeat itself.

End-of-2023 author retrospective: 

Yeah, this post holds up. I'm proud of it. The Roman dodecahedron and the fox lady still sit proudly on my desk.

I got the oldest known example wrong, but this was addressed in the sequel post: Who invented knitting? The plot thickens. If you haven't read the sequel, where I go looking for the origins of knitting, you will enjoy it. Yes, even if you're here for the broad ideas about history rather than specifically knitting. (That investigation ate my life for a few months in there. Please read it. 🥺)

I'm extremely ple... (read more)

Possibly if by "come in contact" we mean like ingesting or injecting or something. That's the going theory for how the Kuru epidemic started - consumption of the brain of a person with sporadic (randomly-naturally-occuring) CJD. Fortunately cannibalism isn't too common so this isn't a usual means of transmission. I think if anything less intensive (say, skin or saliva contact) made CJD transmissible, we would know by now. See also brain contact with contaminated materials e.g. iatrogenic CJD, or Alzheimers which I mention briefly in this piece.

it's possibl

Thank you!

Yeah, I mention one or two studies in the article that have to do with altering the host range. There aren't a lot of prion specialists, of course, but there's been quite a bit of interest in understanding how they work and spread, so there is some weird stuff out there.

Unless the meaning is something akin to "kills within X years of contracting the disease", it can only mean "kills the victim if they don't die of something else first."

The latter is true of every fatal disease, yes? Alzheimer's also has a long fuse til death but people don't recover from it. I'm also told there was a very popular recent television show about a man with terminal cancer who died from other causes.

Wikipedia lists fatal familial insomnia, and two others.

"Infectious" means "transmissible between people". As the name suggests, fatal familial in... (read more)

There are a bunch of coffee-tasting substitutes made from roasted grain or other stuff! Coffee beans or anything caffeine-producing don't enter the equation at all (as opposed to decaf coffee which is derived from coffee beans), the roasted plant taste is just similar. Chicory or dandelion roots are pretty well-known plant for this. Inka is another grain brand that's good and easy to make, you do it like instant coffee. I've seen others at large natural/health/hippie food type stores.

I get that we all want understanding in a situation like this but let's not go after people's appearances, cripes. Most people look weird in one way or another and are gonna be fine to sit next to on a bus. Come on.

I don't think there's much crossover. I hope you know that there are lots and lots of incentives for active deception and responding to deception in various parts of the natural world and evolutionary psychology - if you're interested in the workings of and responses to deception, definitely read more about it. Like, the argument you make for females being interested in "people over things" could also explain the reverse - males are incentivized to deceive females, which you can do better the better you model people, right? I think you are observing someth... (read more)

Gosh! Thank you, this is an unexpected boon.

Yes it was, thank you!

This is a very good point!