All of juliawise's Comments + Replies

juliawise122

And "goal factoring" is a technique for figuring out what you actually want and different ways to get there. 

juliawise140

>As a community we produce more way more breastmilk than we can use!
This doesn't really seem right to me; or at least it relies on mothers' volunteer work to pump, sterilize, and store their milk. If you actually need to get rid of extra milk, pumping and dumping is way easier than keeping the milk clean and cold. And if you have an oversupply, pumping a lot is how to continue having an oversupply.

This is sort of like claims that we could produce lots of vegetables if everyone turned their front yard into a miniature farm and spent their spare time doing subsistence agriculture; technically true but not how most people want to spend their time.

1Nathan Helm-Burger
Does it currently rely on volunteer effort from mothers with available supply? Yes. Does it need to? No. As a society we could organize this better. For instance, by the breastmilk banks paying a fair price for the breastmilk. Where would the breastmilk banks get their money? From the government? From charging users? I don't know. I think the point is that we have a distribution problem, rather than a supply problem.

Other health claims: breastfeeding slightly reduces risk of breast cancer in the mother and increases chance of colorectal cancer and breast cancer in the child.

We've done the local public school, yes. More thoughts here: https://juliawise.net/school-your-mileage-may-vary/

Generally they're opposed to using toys not as intended. It is kinda dicey given they can't easily see if anyone is at the bottom of the slide, but the worst that happens is someone gets knocked over.

True. The "arm fracture" one on the Victoria chart seems pretty concrete, though.

I didn't read it all, but a couple thoughts:
Betadine is a brand name for a povidone iodine product - they're not different things.
Robitussin DM has both an expectorant (seems good) and a cough suppressant.  A cough suppressant might not be what you want if you want the gunk to get out of your lungs. If there's a "productive" cough I'd think it's better to just cough.

Apparently this was my husband's approach:

8-year-old:  Will humans go extinct in my lifetime?
Him: Definitely not
8-year-old: Why?
Him: If you're alive, humans aren't extinct yet
8-year-old: That doesn't make me feel better

I haven't had this conversation with my kids because they haven't asked, but I think the main things they disvalue about death are 1. their own death and 2. separation from people they love. I think the additional badness of "and everyone else would be dead too" is less salient to young kids. There might actually be some comfort in thinking we'd all go together instead of some people being left behind.

One of my kids got interested in asteroid strikes after learning about how dinosaurs went extinct, about age 4. She'd look out the window periodically to see... (read more)

4juliawise
Apparently this was my husband's approach: 8-year-old:  Will humans go extinct in my lifetime? Him: Definitely not 8-year-old: Why? Him: If you're alive, humans aren't extinct yet 8-year-old: That doesn't make me feel better

Thanks for this post, I saved it as comfort reading after a hard day.

On how anybody would invent knitting - 
I can kind of imagine grokking it if you started with something like finger weaving. (There are a couple of problems here, like starting with loops rather than a single long string, and the product is not obviously useful.)

I wonder how much we know about the history of cat's cradle? The material is going to be hard to recognize in archeological sites, since it's just a single loop and if it breaks somewhere it will just look like a string / piec... (read more)

I don't know what the supposed changes in growing and processing wheat are, but a lot of that will presumably have happened by the stage it's flour. So doing the mixing and baking yourself might not change anything.

I think of one of the main experts here as Kevin Esvelt, the first person to suggest using CRISPR to affect wild populations. Here's an article largely based on interviews with him that he recommends, explaining why he's against unilateral action here:
"Esvelt, whose work helped pave the way for Target Malaria’s efforts, is terrified, simply terrified, of a backlash between now and then that could derail it.  This is hardly a theoretical concern. In 2002, anti-GMO hysteria led the government of Zambia to reject 35,000 tons of food aid in the middle of ... (read more)

An EA contacted me who knows Kontsevich and is considering reaching out to him. If you want to coordinate with that person, let me know and I can put you in touch.

1P.
Please do! You can DM me their contact info, tell them about my accounts: either this one or my EA Forum one, or ask me for my email address.

I think it's often worth making a comparison to "what am I trying to achieve in my relationship with my partner? With another adult, you're not trying to mold them into a better human.  You're trying to enjoy the time you have together now, and next month, and over the decades.

There's a lot of parenting that makes a difference to how much you both enjoy the next 18 years. Like the "teaching them not to whine" thing - you will both be happier if they have other ways of getting their needs met.

1Dirichlet-to-Neumann
This is only tangential, but "does being friend with them pushes me into becoming a better human" is a pretty good question to ask about your friends. And if the answer is a resounding"no", considering not being friend with them is a good next step.
1Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
Exactly, well-put.
Answer by juliawise80

They make special pens for this. https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Health-Non-Lethal-Flexible-Point/dp/B00KALP5Z4
The other obvious workaround, if the facility allows, is to lend them a pen to sign something with and then take it back. One of the doctors I worked with did have someone disassemble the pen and steal the ink part from it during this process, which the doctor didn't notice until afterward, but he can't have been paying super close attention.

It depends a lot on the meeting. In some "popcorn" meetings there's a lot of talking with pauses between; in some the default is silence.

>"It seems to me the Quakers would also run into this problem at least sometimes. I'm curious how they deal"
I once saw someone else stand up and say that we'd heard what they have to say and it was now time for some silence. (Context was that this was a person who habitually talked a lot in meeting, and was starting to repeat themselves during a long message.)

It says "In New Zealand, the choice to attend a single-sex school is not a result of a family’s desire that their child attend a religious or military institution; choice is primarily determined by which school the pupil can most easily walk to." Looks like about 20% of government-run secondary schools are currently single-sex; not sure what it was like in the 70s or so when this was done. But I could imagine that in cases where parents particularly want a particular school they still chose based on things like whether it was single-sex and not only on wha... (read more)

2tailcalled
I mean, sure, it makes lots of sense that walking distance would be a core mediator, but what evidence do they have that walking distance is determined by chance, rather than being influenced by the family's desired school or resources?
4Richard_Kennaway
Or perhaps the parents' choice of where to live is influenced by proximity to the schools they prefer. Certainly in the UK, proximity to good schools is a big influence on house prices.

The new text is finally up: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes

Talking with you was one of the prompts to write it!

Sorry I missed this - we're working on a couple of updates to the mistakes page, including about this. I can let you know once the new text is up.

The new text is finally up: https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes

To add detail about my mistake:

When you asked if you could confidentially send me a draft of your post about Will's book to check, I said yes.

The next week you sent me a couple more emails with different versions of the draft. When I saw that the draft was 18 pages of technical material, I realized I wasn't going to be a good person to review it. That's when I forwarded to someone on Will's team asking if they could look at it instead of me. 

I should never have done that, because your original email asked me not to share it with anyone. For what it’s ... (read more)

I've now added info on this to the post about being a contact person and to CEA's mistakes page.

idle160

Personally, I don't really blame you or think less of you for this screwup. I never got the impression that you are the sort of person who should be sent confidential book review drafts. Maybe you'd disagree, but that seems like a misunderstanding of your role to me.

It seemed clear to me that you made yourself available to confidential reports regarding conflict, abuse, and community health. Not disagreements with a published book. It makes sense that you didn't have a habit of mentally flagging those emails as confidential.

Regardless, I trust that you've ... (read more)

8ChristianKl
Of course it doesn't show that it wasn't intentional to say "my mistake wasn't intentional but accidental". The only thing that shows that it wasn't intentional would be to take actual consequences that are meaningful enough so that it doesn't look like you benefited CEA with your mistake.

CEA regards it as one of our mistakes that the Pareto Fellowship was a CEA program, but our senior management didn't provide enough oversight of how the program was being run. To Beth and other participants or applicants who found it misleading or harmful in some way - we're sorry.

Why doesn't the mistake page say anything about Leverage being involved with the Pareto Fellowship? Is that a statement that this part wasn't seen as a mistake?

This was indeed a big screwup on my part.  Again, I'm really sorry I broke your trust.

Saying "I'm sorry I broke your trust" without engaging in any consequences for it feels cheap. To me such a mistake feels like you owe something to guzey.

One thing you could have done if you actually cared would have been to advocate for guzey in this exchange even if that goes against your personal positions.

Only admitting the mistake at comments and not in a more visible manner also doesn't feel like you treat it seriously enough. It likely deserves the same treatment as the mistakes on https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes

To add detail about my mistake:

When you asked if you could confidentially send me a draft of your post about Will's book to check, I said yes.

The next week you sent me a couple more emails with different versions of the draft. When I saw that the draft was 18 pages of technical material, I realized I wasn't going to be a good person to review it. That's when I forwarded to someone on Will's team asking if they could look at it instead of me. 

I should never have done that, because your original email asked me not to share it with anyone. For what it’s ... (read more)

If it's a shrub, it's a shrub that grows 30 feet in the air on the branch of a tree? Herbaceous seems right to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistletoe

1Mary Chernyshenko
So what if it does? It's got its lignin figured out. https://chatham.ces.ncsu.edu/2014/12/does-mistletoe-harm-trees-2/

This blew my mind!
A couple nitpicks on the chart:
- you said strawberry has a tree ancestor but none of its ancestors on the chart are trees
- pineapple is colored as "definitely a tree," but it's a bush

One of the chapters deals with getting rid of behaviors you don't want, with eight methods (some of which she doesn't recommend). For example, training an incompatible behavior: if don't want your dog to beg at the table during dinner, train your dog to lie down someplace else during dinner. Or "shape the absence" - reinforce everything that's not the unwanted behavior. 

I don't think I have anything much to add in the way of specific tips. 

I do think I'm a worse parent when I have less support (when I was home on maternity leave with a newborn and toddler, or when Jeff has been traveling and I've been alone with both kids for longer stretches than usual.) I agree that having childcare available, either paid or any kind, can help you be more patient and in-control. 

oh right, about the public speaking / communication type skills.

I was coming to say something similar [edited to add: about communication skills.]
I don't know much about this field, but one comparison that comes to mind is Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered that hand-cleaning prevented hospital deaths, but let his students write it up instead of trying to convince his colleagues more directly. The message got garbled, his colleagues thought he was a crank, and continental Europe's understanding of germ theory was delayed by 60 years as a result.

5Raemon
Which bit was this replying to?

He did write something along similar lines here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/do-you-feel-lucky-punk.html

I think architects are correct to be skeptical of their own ability to do stuff other than right angles. MIT's Stata Center is famously interesting, and also is full of leaks and mold because it doesn't do the basic building thing of keeping the rain out. https://www.core77.com/posts/8026/mits-stata-center-gets-moldy-gehry-sued-over-flawed-design-8026 

New Hampshire surprised me for this reason. There's a small group of LW types but my impression is they feel pretty isolated.

Is the Massachusetts number due to the huge amount of testing MIT is doing? MIT alone is responsible for 10% of the state's tests, and they've got low positive rates (7 positive tests this week out of about 10,000 tests). https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-testing-reopening-0824

Or the number of positive tests was literally negative? I agree that seems impossible unless they somehow overcounted before and were correcting for it

2Zvi
Literally negative. Which means it was some sort of correction, and shouldn't be treated as a real effect, because it can't be.

Fraternities and sororities do hazing in a way that's closest to the rituals described in the books (and the warm welcome to the group afterward).

My impression is that the passage into adulthood is quicker and more definitive in traditional societies. In my circle, you might graduate high school and leave home, which is the biggest change, then college is sort of a transitional stage where you're fed and housed communally on someone else's dime, then you transition to working and finding your own place to live some years later, and then mayb... (read more)

1[anonymous]
I guess the idea is that we prolong childhood/adolescence but direct it or protect it less. This can mean "a fulfilled, self-directed 20s and 30s and beyond", with runway in becoming yourself, or "a nightmare of bad decisions and unlucky circumstances that you have to pay for for years, inhibiting your freedom". Building agency (the ability to secure your own well-being or liberty) is important, and supporting people in their development of agency might best be done by saying "You are supported, be good at interdependence, not independence." (And then providing them good people with whom to be interdependent.) People need to make their mistakes in order to develop agency, but social and physical environments that are less dangerous foster that without injuring or killing people, and more supportive environments make injuries less serious so that they don't get worse. I think a "Western adult" is into independence more than interdependence, and so initiation into Western adulthood is "being thrown to the wolves". But "being thrown to the wolves" is the name for when the initiation takes its bleak form, and there's probably a different name people would use when the process goes more or less smoothly and successfully.

1. This was covered, including FGM, but seemed less consistent than the pattern for males.

2. There wasn't much on this - a few notes on swaddling or hammock systems that included some kind of drainage. One note on how in one culture men hold babies away from their bodies to avoid getting wet, while women hold the babies close (but I'm guessing getting dirty that way?) I also don't feel like I understand how this has worked historically, especially in colder climates where you can't just leave them bare.

3. They talk about how mobile cult... (read more)

But other people were sharing other articles saying different things ("this is all overblown"), or just something more moderate like "we'll have to social distance later but not yet" and other people were also taking those seriously. So I still don't know how to answer the question of "at the time, how should we have known who to listen to?"

jimmy200

Here's my answer:

There is an important distinction between "object level arguments" and "appeals to authority". Contrary to how it's normally spoken about, appeal to authority is not really fallacious and at times absolutely necessary. If I am unable to parse the object level arguments myself, I have to defer to experts. The only issue is whether I have the self awareness and integrity to say "I'm not capable of evaluating this myself, so unfortunately I have to defer to the people I trust to get these things right. ... (read more)

There are so many books on this topic that I didn't try to catalogue them. But thanks for the recommendation!

> It is probably too late though.

That might be technically true but I think it's misleading - I'm not clear on how common it was in China for one member of a household to get sick and others to stay well, but from anecdotal reports in the US I think it's fairly common for one person to get it and not spread it to e.g. their spouse and children.

So I'd think if one member of a household has symptoms, it's well worth quarantining within the household instead of assuming it's not worth trying to limit spread.

It's also important not to think of infection as binary, all-or-nothing: minimizing your cohabitants' inoculum may reduce the likelihood they get a severe case (I don't really know, I would just suggest that it's a possibility worth checking.)

The CDC recommends drying hands, because wet hands spread and receive microbes more easily. (Although that's microbes generally and they're not sure about disease-causing germs in particular). https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-handwashing.html

So I'd think that applying lotion and then, say, opening the bathroom door with lotiony hands will re-contaminate your hands. Doing it just before sitting at your desk for a while or going to bed might be a better time, so your hands can dry when you're not going to be walking around touching stuff.

4Elizabeth
I wonder about dryness and its effect on immune cells. Dryness can also kill certain immune cells, which can ultimately lead to a better environment for germs than if you had left the wound moist. My original source for this is a book on historical medicine that I can no longer remember, but a 20 minute literature check finds that modern wound care emphasizes keeping wounds moist (but not too moist, and not in all circumstances), both to prevent infection and promote faster healing: * Clinical and Financial Advantages of Moist Wound Management * Moisture and healing: beyond the jargon * Formation of the Scab and the Rate of Epithelization of Superficial Wounds in the Skin of the Young Domestic Pig * PREPARING THE WOUND BED 2003: FOCUS ON INFECTION AND INFLAMMATION I could imagine that handwashing is a similarly horseshoe shaped problem- too moist and you increase your hands' habitability for germs, too dry and you make it easier for germs to permeate your skin.

Their advice for healthcare settings is to prefer hand sanitizer, because it's better at killing germs, it doesn't dry your skin as much, and you're more likely to actually use it. https://www.cdc.gov/handhygiene/science/index.html

Their advice for community settings is to prefer soap and water, as far as I can tell because you're more likely to have stuff on your hands (grease, dirt), and because kids might drink it. https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-hand-sanitizer.html

This coronavirus-specific page seems to treat them... (read more)

Related: CDC recommends washing with warm or cool water as opposed to hot, because hot water doesn't help more and is more likely to bother your skin. https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-handwashing.html

Answer by juliawise*440

Edit: Sounds like this isn't very useful because you'll be able tell if you're having trouble breathing? See comment below.

Advice: Get a pulse oximeter to be able to triage at home.

Reasoning: If you're mildly sick, you probably don't want to go to a medical office (both because you'll be clogging up an overcrowded system, and because you'll be around people who are even sicker). But you need to know when you're sick enough to need medical care.

One way medical professionals triage is by vital signs. Most of them are o... (read more)

TL;DR. If you have (slightly) low PaO2, but no trouble breathing, you probably don't need to go to the hospital. And if you have trouble breathing, you should probably go to the hospital whether or not you have low PaO2. So testing for oxygen saturation doesn't add much.

I had an online conversation with an intensive care physician. I sent him a translated version of juliawise's text and he said he didn't think buying the pulse oximeter would help and then sent me a 5 minute audio explaining why. The following text is his audio translat... (read more)

3Blue-Jaypeg
This site provides link for medical kit. You can copy and paste the supply list rather than purchase, or follow link to each item. The logic is to "save you a trip to the doctor, or to support remote care via phone/video chat. " Recommended diagnostic tools are digital thermometer, finger oximeter, blood pressure cuff, and stethoscope for lung sounds. In order to avoid cross infection, it is a good idea to use telemedicine rather than emergency room or doctors' offices. Suggestion: research options for video chat, text messaging, or emailing doctors. Once you start to show symptoms, take critical measurements at regular intervals and log.
4insufferablejake
There seems to be a general variance in what pulse oximeters display when measuring healthy individuals with readings from 94% - 100%. I also seem to remember reading that they are sensitive to altitude, whether hands are cold etc (n.b typing on phone, can't verify at the mo) Talking to a doctor friend -- in clinical settings if an oximeter shows a reading < 90%, it's considered serious, but different people respond differently, but closely enough for the purposes of this discussion to fall into two groups. Either you develop a shortness of breath by the time its at 92%, for eg., and you have to go an ER anyway. Or you feel fine, but have less than 90% reading and you'll end up going to the ER (because you've looked at the range of normal measurements) If the suggestion of use of the pulse oximeter is supposed to be a diagnostic about whether you need to go to the ER or not (and thus avoid picking something up at the hospital), it doesn't seem to help? It also doesn't tell you anything specific to Covid-19, I mean, you could be short of breath for a variety of reaons (note: short of breath sustained for many minutes, not the kind where you are panting after climbing stairs for eg.)
4Adam Zerner
It seems to me that the usefulness of a pulse oximeter depends on the progression of the disease. If "low osat" comes before "fever etc", then a pulse oximeter would help you move from "low osat → fever etc. → see a doctor" to "low osat → see a doctor → fever etc.". But if "fever etc." comes first, I would think you would be at "fever etc. → see a doctor → get osat measured" regardless of whether you have a pulse oximeter, and so I don't see how the pulse oximeter would be useful. I googled around and don't have a great sense of what the progression is, but it seems that the fever comes before the more serious respiratory stuff (source: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-covid19-day-by-day-symptoms-patients-2020-2?op=1).
1LemonWatcher
Where would you buy one and what brand?

I never have a productive six-hour unbroken stretch of work, but my partner will occasionally have 6-hour bursts of very productive coding where he stays in the zone and doesn't notice time passing. He basically looks up and realizes it's night and everyone else had dinner hours ago. But the rest of the time he works normal hours with a more standard-to-loose level of concentration.

[speaking for myself, not for any organization]

If this is an allegory against appeals to consequences generally, well and good.

If there's some actual question about whether wrong cost effectiveness numbers are being promoted, could people please talk about those numbers specifically so we can all have a try at working out if that's really going on? E.g. this post made a similar claim to what's implied in this allegory, but it was helpful that it used concrete examples so people could work out whether they agreed (and, in that case, identify factual errors).

5jessicata
This is an allegory. While I didn't have any particular real-world example in mind, my dialogue-generation was influenced by a time I had seen appeals to consequences in EA; see EA Has A Lying Problem and this comment thread. So this was one of the more salient cases of a plausible moral case for shutting down true speech.

I note that one of Davis' categories was friends from competitive gaming - I'd guess there are a lot of nerdy, introverted types there. Some other activities that come to my mind as having a lot of people from that demographic: various other kinds of games (video/computer games, go, chess, pen-and-paper roleplaying games), juggling, historical reenactment, Wikipedia editing, fiber arts (spinning, dyeing, knitting, etc).

"Sites were randomly assigned to receive an experimental intervention (n = 16) modeled on the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative of the World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund, which emphasizes health care worker assistance with initiating and maintaining breastfeeding and lactation and postnatal breastfeeding support, or a control intervention (n = 15) of continuing usual infant feeding practices and policies."

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