All of jimmy's Comments + Replies

2) If I manage to create a strong object-level want, I will boost my attention without needing to coerce myself

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I was more curious about how the difference between a third-person and a first-person perspective affects my meditation. 

This is what I'm talking about. Defaulting to the third person perspective and forgetting about the first person perspective causes a lot of trouble. It's not just "here's an unrelated hack for making it easier to do meditation", it's that it completely changes your meditation. 

You notice that your third person "I... (read more)

Untrained people (and semi-trained people like me) can't sustain focus for extended amounts of time—even if I set my mind to the breath, it will slip away.

What I would say is that untrained people don't sustain focus on their breath for extended amounts of time. When you introduce the word "can" you're claiming more than just what is observed and making claims about what they would do in other counterfactuals too. If we're careful with those counterfactual choices, I think the claim that they "can't" turns out to be false.

The difference between "trying to ... (read more)

When I practice focus meditation, I train myself to sustain a focus on my breath, for unusual amounts of time, to unusual degrees.

Right, and to what end? What drives you to want to do this unusual thing? Why isn't that already connecting to a desire that pulls your focus to your breath? 

The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between "I want to focus on my breath" and "I am not focusing on my breath".

Your model of things seem to assume that this level of focus is possible to sustain through "really wanting to" [...] I

Some time ago, I realized that the perspective "I want to focus on the breath" is self-defeating. [...] The problem with "I should focus on the breath" is that it assumes a self who is monitoring, evaluating, striving. 

It often makes sense to talk about "I". "I" makes sense. I am writing this, for one. You know exactly what that means, it is clearly true, and there is nothing that noticing this requires you to flinch away from.

"Should", on the other hand, falls apart very quickly and is usually functioning to preserve a disconnect from reality. ... (read more)

Instead, skeptics often gesture to hallucinations, errors. [...] However, such arguments reliably rule out human "understanding" as well! 

"Can do some impressive things, but struggles with basic arithmetic and likes to make stuff up" is such a fitting description of humans that I was quite surprised when it turned out to be true of LLMs too.

Whenever I see a someone claim that it means LLM can't "understand" something, I find it quite amusing that they're almost demonstrating their own point; just not in the way they think they are.

My "c'mon guys" here is not "c'mon the empirical evidence here is overwhelming." It's more like "look, which world do you actually expect to result in you making better decisions faster: the one where you spend >0 days on testing and reflecting on your thinking in areas where there is real feedback, or the one where you just spend all your time on 'object level work' that doesn't really have the ability to tell you you were wrong?".

(and, a host of similar questions, with the meta question is "do you really expect the optimal thing here to be zero effort

There are several complications in the example you give, and I'm not sure which are intentional.

Let's start with a simpler example. You somehow end up needing to take a 400 meter shot down a tunnel with an experimental rifle/ammo you've been working on. You know the rifle/ammo inside and out due to your work and there is no wind, but the rifle/ammo combination has very high normal dispersion, and all that is exposed is a headshot.

In this case, where you center your probability distribution depends on the value of the kids life. If the terrorist is about to... (read more)

No, that does not sound like a fair characterization. My claims are cover a lot more than "it doesn't always happen" and yours sure don't seem limited to "it doesn't never happen".

Here's the motivating question for this whole essay:

You asked why people who "believe in" avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it

and here's part of  your conclusion

At this point the behavior you describe should no longer be perplexing.

You're talking about this as if it needs falsification of preferences to explain and my stance is that ... (read more)

Agreed in full 

The problem there isn't the Econ-101, it's the fool in the arm chair.

You can't just say "I have a simple armchair argument that no one could ever demand sexual favors", because that's not even a valid prediction of Econ-101. Maybe the person does want to provide sexual favors. Maybe they even want to provide sexual favors and then also claim purity and victimhood status to gullible people. That's entirely consistent with Econ-101.

Or maybe they aren't productive enough to earn their wage otherwise, and their job is better conceptualized as half prostitute. ... (read more)

I agree that there is a meaningful difference, but I disagree that they're so cleanly separable that we can say that it is one or the other.

I don't teach my kid that sugar is evil and I give her the chance to learn how much sugar she wants for herself. I try to minimize coercion because it impairs learning, and I want my kid to actually integrate the information so that she can make coherent rather than fractured decisions. 

At the same time, I want to protect her from things that are beyond her capability to handle and learn from. We don't want our ch... (read more)

You're arguing that attempts to decrease candy consumption are coercive rather than informative, and are in ways counterproductive. I agree with this. You take this to mean it's not a "good faith attempt", but as a general rule people don't know how to do any better than this. 

It's true that people can appeal to "sinfully delicious" to sell you their dessert, but why don't broccoli salesmen do the same? Why not toothbrush salesmen? If "Sinful" means "good", actually, and it originates with salesmen, then why isn't everything "sinful"?

The answer is tha... (read more)

Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both "not be ill e.g. with diabetes" and "eat tasty things".

That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I'm pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like "liver treats".

Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average.

I thi... (read more)

I object to the framing of society being all-wise,

Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks "Trying heroin seems like a good idea", and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it's the most important thing in the universe.

Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I'd bet on "both" before either.

Consequently, I'd prefer "bunch of candy and no diabetes still" outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into

The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I'm saying. It's not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it's also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.

"Reflectively stable in abse... (read more)

I don't think it's so simple at all.

If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don't think that's a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of "something more"), but it certainly doesn't work for all preferences and it's generally not so clear.

Let's look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it's unhealthy, and from the... (read more)

What are the failure rates? So, I would love to share data on the cases I haven’t (yet) been able to help… but I don’t know how?

1) How many cumulative hours have you spent on things where there has been no success and you guys aren't working together anymore on the issue? How does this compare to the number of hours which have resulted in success, and the number where the result is tbd? How many hours have resulted in partial or incremental success, without meeting agreed upon win criteria?

2) Of those where someone bailed how many times did they bail and h... (read more)

I think there's not much to update. "Exploitation" is a shortcut for a particular, negative feeling we humans tend to naturally get from certain type of situation, and as I tried to explain, it is a rather simple thing. [...] *Before you red-flag 'unfair' as well: Again, I'm simply referring to the way people tend to perceive things, on average or so.

This is where I disagree. I don't think it is simple, partly because I don't think "unfair" is simple. People's perceptions of what is "unfair", like people's perceptions of anything else that means anything a... (read more)

 that the elephant in the room is that the rich should help the poor independently of the question of the labor exchange itself, i.e. that the overwhelming moral point is that, if we care, we should simply donate some of our resources.

"Should" is a red flag word, which serves to hide the facets of reality that generate sense of obligation. It helps to taboo it, and find out what's left.

If a rich person wants to help the poor, it will be more effective so simply help the poor -- i.e. with some of their own resources. Trying to distort the market leads ... (read more)

Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.

If someone asks me a question, I should answer.

No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.

In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.

That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not.

So then is circling just the voicing of the ever-present f... (read more)

Here the two definitions of rationality diverge: believing the truth is now at odds with doing what works. It will obviously work better to believe what your friends and neighbors believe, so you won't be in arguments with them and they'll support you more when you need it.

This is only true if you can't figure out how to handle disagreements.

It will often be better to have wrong beliefs if it keeps you from acting on the even wronger belief that you must argue with everyone who disagrees. It's better yet to believe the truth on both fronts, and simpl... (read more)

So far as I can tell, the common line that bear spray is more effective than firearms is based on an atrociously bad reading of the (limited) science, which is disavowed by the author of the studies. In short, successfully spraying a bear is more effective at driving off curious bears than simply having a firearm is are at stopping charging bears, but when you're comparing apples to apples then firearms are much more effective.

Here's a pretty good overview: https://www.outsideonline.com/2401248/does-bear-spray-work.  I haven't put a ton of work into v... (read more)

I'm the person JenniferRM mentioned. I'm also a physics guy, and got into studying/practicing hypnosis in ~2010/2011. I kinda moved on from "hypnosis" and drifted up the abstraction ladder, but still working on similar things and working on tying them together.

Anyway, here are my thoughts.

Suppose I really want her to be spinning clockwise in my mind. What might I do?

What worked for me is to focus on the foot alone and ignore the broader context so that I had a "clean slate" without "confirmatory experience" blocking my desired conclusion. When looking at t... (read more)

If someone's only option for dealing with a hostile telepath is self-deception, and then you come in and punish them for using it, thou art a dick.

Like, do you think it helps the abused mothers I named if you punish them somehow for not acknowledging their partners' abuse? Does it even help the social circle around them?

If that's their only option, and the hostility in your telepathy is antisocial, then yes. In some cases though, people do have other options and their self-deception is offensive, so hostile telepathy is pro-social. 

For example, ... (read more)

The reason I trust research in physics in general is that it doesn't end with publishing a paper. It often ends with building machines that depend on that research being right.

We don't just "trust the science" that light is a wave; we use microwave ovens at home.

Well said. I'm gonna have to steal that.

Therefore, in a world where we all do power poses all the time, and if you forget to do them, you will predictably fail the exam...

...well, actually that could just be a placebo effect.

Yeah, "Can I fail my exam" is a bad test, because when the tes... (read more)

Can you come up with a better way of doing Psychology research?

Yes. More emphasis on concrete useful results, less emphasis on trying to find simple correlations in complex situations.

For example, "Do power poses work?". They did studies like this one where they tell people to hold a pose for five minutes while preparing for a fake job interview, and then found that the pretend employers pretended to hire them more often in the "power pose" condition. Even assuming there's a real effect where those students from that university actually impress those... (read more)

Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. [...] Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it’s mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.

This assumes the median researchers can't recognize who the competent researchers are, or otherwise don't look to them as thought leaders.

I'm not arguing that this isn't often the case, just that it isn't alw... (read more)

There's no norm saying you can't be ignorant of stats and read, or even post about things not requiring an understanding of stats, but there's still a critical mass of people who do understand the topic well enough to enforce norms against actively contributing with that illiteracy. (E.g. how do you expect it to go over if someone makes a post claiming that p=0.05 means that there's a 95% change that the hypothesis is true?)

Taking it a step further, I'd say my household "has norms which basically require everyone to speak English", but that doesn't mean th... (read more)

I think this is correct as a conditional statement, but I don't think one can deduce the unconditional implication that attempting to price some externalities in domains where many externalities are difficult to price is generally bad.

It's not "attempting to price some externalities where many are difficult to price is generally bad", it's "attempting to price some externalities where the difficult to price externalities on the other side is bad". Sometimes the difficulty of pricing them means it's hard to know which side they primarily lie on, but n... (read more)

I think my main point would be that Coase's theorem is great for profitable actions with externalities, but doesn't really work for punishment/elimination of non-monetary-incented actions where the cost is very hard to calculate. 

This brings up another important point which is that a lot of externalities are impossible to calculate,  and therefore such approaches end up fixating on the part that seems calculable without even accounting for (or even noticing) the incalculable part. If the calculable externalities happen to be opposed to larg... (read more)

The frustrating thing about the discussion about the origins is that people seldom show recognition of the priorities here, and all get lost in the weeds.

You can get n layers deep into the details, and if the bottom is at n+1 you're fucked. To give an example I see people talking about with this debate, "The lab was working on doing gain of function to coronaviruses just like this!" sounds pretty damning but "actually the grant was denied, do you think they'd be working on it in secret after they were denied funding?" completely reverses it. Then after the... (read more)

The difference between what I strive for (and would advocate) and "epistemic learned helplessness" is that it's not helpless. I do trust myself to figure out the answers to these kinds of things when I need to -- or at least, to be able to come to a perspective that is worth contending with.

The solution I'm pointing at is simply humility. If you pretend that you know things you don't know, you're setting yourself up for failure. If you don't wanna say "I dunno, maybe" and can't say "Definitely not, and here's why" (or "That's irrelevant and here's why" or ... (read more)

I think "subject specific knowledge is helpful in distinguishing between bullshit and non-bullshit claims." is pretty clear on its own, and if you want to add an example it'd be sufficient to do something simple and vague like "If someone cites scientific studies you haven't had time to read, it can sound like they've actually done their research. Except sometimes when you do this you'll find that the study doesn't actually support their claim".

"How to formulate a rebuttal" sounds like a very different thing, depending on what your social goals are with th... (read more)

I did get feedback warning that the Ramaswamy example was quite distracting (my beta reader reccomended flat eartherism or anti-vaxxing instead). In hindsight it may have been a better choice, but I'm not too familiar with geology or medicine, so I didn't think I could do the proper rebuttal justice.

My response to your Ramaswamy example was to skip ahead without reading it to see if you would conclude with "My counterarguments were bullshit, did you catch it?".

After going back and skimming a bit, it's still not clear to me that they're not.

The uninformed j

The frequency explanation doesn't really work, because men do sometimes get excess compliments and it doesn't actually become annoying; it's just background. Also, when women give men the kind of compliments that men tend to give women, it can be quite unwanted even when infrequent.

The common thing, which you both gesture at, is whether it's genuinely a compliment or simply a bid for sexual attention, borne out of neediness. The validation given by a compliment is of questionable legitimacy when paired with some sort of tug for reciprocation, and it's simp... (read more)

 I want there to be a way to trade action for knowledge- to credibly claim I won't get upset or tell anyone if a lizardman admits their secret to me- but obviously the lizardman wouldn't know that I could be trusted to keep to that, 

The thing people are generally trying to avoid, when hiding their socially disapproved of traits, isn't so much "People are going to see me for what I am", but that they won't. 

Imagine you and your wife are into BDSM, and it's a completely healthy and consensual thing -- at least, so far as you see. Then imagine ... (read more)

I get that "humans are screwed up" is a sequences take, that you're not really sure how to carve up the different parts of your mind, etc. What I'm pointing at here is substantive, not merely semantic. 

1. The dissociation of saying "humans are messed up"/"my brain is messed up" feels different than saying "I am messed up". The latter is speaking from a perspective that is associated with the problem and has the responsibility to fix it from the first person. This perspective shift is absolutely crucial, and trying to solve your problems "from the outside

1) You keep saying "My brain", which distances you from it. You say "Human minds are screwed up", but what are you if not a human mind? Why not say "I am screwed up"? Notice how that one feels different and weightier? Almost like there's something you could do about it, and a motivation to do it?

2) Why does homework seem so unfun to you? Why do you feel tempted to put off homework and socialize? Have you put much thought into figuring out if "your brain" might be right about something here?

In my experience, most homework is indeed a waste of time, some hom... (read more)

As an update, the 3rd thing I tried also failed. Now I ran out of things to try.

I wouldn't be discouraged. There are a lot of ways to do "the same thing" differently, and I wouldn't expect a first try success. In particular, I'd expect you to need a lot more time letting yourself "run free" -- at least "in sim" -- and using that to figure out what exactly it is that you want and how to actually get it without screwing anything else up. Like, "Okay, if I get that, then what?"/"What's so great about that" and drilling down on that felt sense until something ... (read more)

Good, I'm glad my comments had the effect I was aiming for.

It's an interesting and fun project for sure. A few notes...

* I wouldn't expect to get it all figured out quickly, but rather for things to change shape over the course of years. Pieces can change quickly of course, but there's a lot to figure out and sometimes you need to find yourself in the right experience to have the perspective to see what comes next.

* I'd also caution against putting the cart too far ahead of the horse, even if you have pretty good justification. "Extension of non-sexual lov... (read more)

I feel like had the technique been "Imagine ice cream tastes like pure turmeric powder", it would basically be the same technique.

It would.

In that case, I predict people would not have had these (from my perspective) very weird reactions.

We would. I would, at least, and I predict that others would too because the fundamental reason remains.

I haven't tried this, but maybe this would work for somebody who is fantasizing about eating ice cream, which causes them to eat too much ice cream.

If you think that you've been eating "too much" ice cream, presuma... (read more)

Reality is that you have junk between your legs. You engage in this thought experiment "What if I didn't?". You realize that if reality were different than it is, it would call for a different response than it seems to call for when you are looking at reality. So far so good, no darkness in noticing this.

You then go on to apply the response to the imagined falsehood to reality, knowing that you only reached this response because you were imagining a falsehood. This is fundamentally  "dark" and "irrational" because it is building and acting upon known ... (read more)

It's not that flat earth arguments sound equally persuasive to people (they don't). It's that the reason they don't sound persuasive is that "this group they like" says not to take the arguments seriously enough to risk being persuaded by them, and they recognize that they don't actually understand things well enough for it to matter. The response to a flat earth argument is "Haha! What a silly argument!", but when you press them on it, they can't actually tell you what's wrong with it. They might think they can, but if pressed it falls apart.

This is more ... (read more)

Setting aside the object level question here, trying to redefine words in order to avoid challenging connotations is a way to go crazy.

If someone is theorizing about a conspiracy, that's a conspiracy theory by plain meaning of the words. If it's also true, then the connotation about conspiracy theories being false is itself at least partly false. 

The point is to recognize that it does belong in the same class, and how accurate/strong those connotations are for this particular example of that reference class, and letting connotations shift to match as ... (read more)

There's an important and underappreciated point here, but it's not quite right.

Conspiracy theorists come up with crazy theories, but they usually aren't so crazy that average people can see for themselves where the errors are. You can have flat earthers debate round earthers and actually make better points, because your average round earther doesn't know how to deduce the roundness themselves and is essentially just taking people's word for it. For the round earther to say "Hm. I can't see any problem with your argument" and then to be convinced would be a... (read more)

A Spanish windlass works (in part) on the same principle.

I'd say "Don't be that guy who injects themselves into the middle of a conversation about something else, and cause everyone to oppose you by trying to coopt the conversation to make it about your pet cause".

And "Instead, introduce your influence into the things people are already fighting for and not looking at, so that they get the most progress on the issue they're fighting by building on your input (rather than choosing to pick an additional battle with you)."

For example, I certainly wouldn't position myself by saying "Regardless of where we draw the l... (read more)

Here's a thought experiment to illuminate what I expect you're seeing:

You're pulling a rope south against a group of people pulling the rope north. The group in front of you now starts pulling towards the rope north north west. What do you do? Do you A) begin to side step west so that you can continue to pull due south, attempting to rotate the rope from it's current direction, or B) shift your weight so that you don't get pulled sideways, and continue to pull against the rope which now means pulling somewhat easterly? 

Now imagine you're pulling a rop... (read more)

He was essentially gaslighted into thinking he had to sit there and suffer about it, rather than saying "oops" and laughing it off.

He already knew how to relate to pain pretty well from his older brothers playfully "beating him up" in what is essentially a rough game of "tickling" that teaches comfort with mild/non-harmful pain. In fact, when I stopped to ask him if it was the pain that he was distressed about, his response -- after briefly saying "Yeah!" and then realizing that it didn't fit -- was that when he feels pain his brain interprets it as "tickl... (read more)