All of lululu's Comments + Replies

0someonewrongonthenet
Thanks for the update! It's hopeful / helpful to know that the quick recovery was indeed fairly permanent. Wish I could say my process was going that well!

I could believe that a 3 hour core could contain a lot of SWS, making it definitely better than Uberman. In those little naps, it's easy to jump into REM and hard to jump into SWS. I was under the impression that 3 hours is still less SWS than the minimum to prevent sleep deprivation symptoms, but I also am endlessly impressed by the capacity of the human brain to adapt to any symptom. Did you do any cognitive functioning tests before/after switching to Everyman?

0Gunnar_Zarncke
Also consider how different humans are. Even the recommended sleep ranges have a spread of almost x2 between min and max. infographic that is too large to inline

Evidence please. Your idea relies heavily on the thesis that poorer people are happier and have better social relations than rich people, do you have anything not anecdotal to support that?

My experience of seeing poverty in the US is that it comes with or from a whole host of other social problems like addiction, untreated physical and mental health issues, abuse, anxiety, overcrowding, fear of violence. These co-morbid problems are not conducive to neither happiness nor strong social ties, except in an unhealthy codependent way. I do know that children w... (read more)

As a narcoleptic, I am always suspicious of extreme polyphasic sleep claims. Biphasic seems to be natural, but anything like the uberman schedule seems to conflict with what I know about narcolepsy.

The primary symptom or possibly the primary cause of narcolepsy is skipping straight from light sleep to REM within minutes of falling asleep. When I was tested, I entered REM between 3 and 7 minutes of falling asleep. Sleep cycles are fractured and slow wave sleep is reduced or skipped entirely.

By contrast, a normal person enters REM after usually more than an... (read more)

4matt
I'm polyphasic on Everyman 3 since about March 2011 (Jan and Feb spent unsuccessfully trying to make Uberman work). According to my aging Zeo I get approximately the same REM and SWS as I did on 7.4hrs of monophasic sleep before I adapted. Nearly all of the SWS is in my 3hr core. On Uberman I never achieved enough SWS in my naps to get me through. The adaptation was ridiculously hard - both for how very unpleasant it was and for having to get through that while sleep deprived.
0Capla
I agree with your skepticism. The polyphasic community claims that they are able to make drastic reduction in sleep time because they go straight into REMs when taking a nap. This conflicts with a lot of my understanding. It is my suspicion that they are mistaken about that, and that actually, if a person has acclimated to polyphasic, he/she isn't going into REM at all and that this is where gains come from.

Given the speed of AI development in other countries, do we know if any of the work on friendly AI is being translated or implemented outside of the US? Or what the level of awareness of AI friendliness issues among AI researchers in non-English speaking countries?

(I realize that IQ isn't an effective test of AI, but this is the article that prompted me wondering: http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-ai-beat-humans-in-an-iq-test-2015-6. )

1V_V
Anybody who can contribute to AI research can read English.

Fully agreed that this incentive would also be well spent on programs directly for the prisoner. Unfortunately, there is no way that you could convince law makers to consider this. Imagine the headlines: "My Rapist Is Payed More than Me," "Go Directly to Jail, Collect $200", "Pennsylvania Begins New Steal to Earn Program," "Don't Qualify for Student Loans? Steal a Car!"

People are more comfortable if the money goes to some intermediary. I would expect prisons are the best group to insensitivize because they have the c... (read more)

People's past experience with the justice system would no doubt be part of the model, as well as factors possibly including: Career area, Dependents/spouse, Time in current job, Past (unconvicted) run ins with cops, Known drug addictions, Track record of arresting cop and sentencing judge, ect.

With a good model, it would be hard to charge "normal" people in a way that actually gamed the statistics, because their probability to re-offend is very low to begin with. When they don't re-offend it would be expected behavior and not represent in drop i... (read more)

re: futures market in recidivism - http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/reducing-recidivism-through-incentives/

If participants stop returning to jail at a rate of 10% or greater, Goldman will earn $2.1 million. If the recidivism rate rises above 10% over four years, Goldman stands to lose $2.4 million.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that it would interact with the idea of retribution. I'm personally not behind the idea of retribution as the final goal of our justice system, but of this proposal would be adding rehabilitation as an explicit end goal without making any statement for or against retribution as a possible concurrent end goal. This isn't a proposal to reduce or alter sentences in any way, in other words, in the mind of people who demand retributive justice, justice will continue to be served.

In an ideal world, I would rather that the US moved away... (read more)

A very good point! If someone dies, I guess their expected recidivism rate should drop to zero so as not to affect the rate that the prison is targeting.

And I wonder what the incentives are for parole boards and officers? Who controls regulations, bonuses, and promotions for this group? This is definitely something worth researching.

This still incentivizes prisons to help along the death of prisoners that they predict are more likely then the prison-wide average to repeat-offend, in the same way average utilitarianism recommends killing everyone but the happiest person (so to speak).

Reduced recidivism bonuses don't say how to achieve reduced recidivism. This policy change would arguably be neither tougher nor softer on crime because it doesn't change the length of the sentences or make any value judgement on which treatment methods should be used.

In other words, if being soft on crime isn't working, then prisons don't get a bonus for being soft on crime. Everything we know about human psychology, though, says traumatic experiences make someone more likely to commit crime or suffer mental problems that contribute to increased crime risk, so I don't expect that harsher prisons are the answer. But who am I to know, let the data show what works.

9Lumifer
The incentive would be to charge random "normal" people with some crime because they're likely to not re-offend. Professional criminals, on the other hand, would be a drag and better avoided.

Evidence? Given the history of attempts at rehabilitation programs, this is a rather dubious statement.

Mostly just because of the coordination problems necessary to cook the books in a statistically meaningful way. Individual teachers cheat standardized tests all the time by staying late and correcting student's answers, but cooking the books to reduce the appearance of recidivism would involve a top-to-bottom conspiracy involving police precincts, parole boards and officers, and judges. And even then, the top-to-bottom conspiracy would benefit one pris... (read more)

0VoiceOfRa
The problem is that the only way your proposal could get implemented is if a politician campaigns on being more humane without increasing crime, which means he'll have an incentive to show the system works by execrating the rehabilitation statistics. Not much, simply they avoid patrolling ghettos (as tends to happen unless there is a "tough on crime" mayor in office) and thus the correctional institutions can declare people "reformed" who aren't. Failure to control for population. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but the recidivism rate among people in the US with Scandinavian ancestry is probably similar to the Scandinavian one.

At some point, someone will need to crunch a lot of data in order to create some reliable heuristics by which a majority of virulent DNA could be flagged for further review or quarantine. Preferably the sequences could be uploaded and scanned automatically before they are synthesized. This would go a long way towards reducing a big extinction threat. The first true Virus Scanner?

To be effective, you might need to cooperate with someone who has more technical skills, but your partner would certainly need your assistance to interpret the DNA strands before they could be effective so it is a good match.

Kind of. Its possible to cultivate a large network of high quality friends but it requires sifting through a large number of low quality non-friends, sometimes people whose low quality is not apparent until a significant investment has been made or a significant amount of friend entanglement has occurred. And you can't alienate the people you aren't sure of or already decided you don't want to promote to good friend status, because then you lose access to their networks and network affects can no longer continually refresh your friend pool and increase your friend quality. Still, I can easily think of 15 high quality friends off the top of my head because I've been continually sifting, and that number continues to grow.

I think people are SEVERELY overestimating the utility of perfect memory (74% yes, 10% no), and underestimating the value of traumatic and unpleasant experiences fading over time. Some people currently have perfect memory, it is not a good experience.

A better selective memory is a good thing. Electing to remember where you placed your keys or the name of your mailman is a good idea. Having perfect memory of all the idiotic things you said or did during your first break up or that fight with your mom, or more importantly that time you were molested or almo... (read more)

2Gunnar_Zarncke
Insightful. But that really 'only' means that these transhumanists just want conscious access to the availability of the memory too.

Here is my favorite method -

Situation: Someone says something totally cuckoo crazy but they are someone I have to cooperate with in order to complete a task or who I have to maintain a good social relationship because we share friends or because they are otherwise cool. Also, the person is not convincible (I hang with hippies, this happens a lot).

Solution: a conspiratory shrug followed by "ehh... who can say, really" or "eh... the world is a strange place" or, if the statement is totally super crazy, just "ehh..."

Examples:

&... (read more)

0TheVoraciousObserver
I agree, and I think this is probably the most effective method, and is generally what "polite" behavior is supposed to be. In etiquette it is considered poor manners to simply tell people, straight to their face, that they are mistaken unless they specifically asked for an honest opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politeness#Techniques_to_show_politeness I suspect politeness is the most effective method to deal with 'people who are totally wrong' because it is very rare to actually convince someone else they are wrong. It is much easier for people to change their own minds, then have an outsider change it for them.
4[anonymous]
Reading comments like this make me feel far better about my relative lack of social life. The things people who have it must go through... I think would rather be confined to my family (thankfully I am married to an intelligent woman) than to have to bite my tongue and not tell idiots that they are idi... well, at least telling them that they are wrong. Is it a useful model that the enjoyment of having larger social circles comes at the price of frequent tongue-biting and being polite when you feel like doing a dramatic facepalm?
6query
Seconded! Another phrase (whose delivery might be hard to convey in text) is "Look, I dunno, but anyways..." Maybe the big idea is to come across as not expressing much interest in the claim, instead of opposing the claim? I think most people are happy to move on with the conversation when they get a "move on" signal, and we exchange these signals all the time. I also like that this is an honest way to think about: I really am not interested in what I expect will happen with that conversation (even if I am interested in the details of countering your claim.)

see my comment on shminux's post ^^

I've always wanted this, but in a magical genie kind of way! OK cupid tries to do something like this by matching people pre-meeting. At an IRL interaction I can't imagine how a computer would figure this out before I did unless it had a very accurate idea of every personality in the group. So every person would have to have personality tests on file. Which I guess isn't implausible in the future!

I also wonder if this would silo people even more among others similar to them. If anti-vaxers only talk to other anti-vaxers, and none of them have ever been fri... (read more)

Also note that most pre-cancerous and even post-cancerous cells are dealt with easily by the immune system. Its a very small minority of cancer cells that escape, you would end up just driving yourself crazy by sensing/noticing each one. This is why they aren't recommending mammograms, pap smears, or prostate exams as much or for as wide an age range as they used to, for young and healthy immune systems, treatment has worse outcomes than just letting the body do its thing.

I could see this successfully using face-recognition software and tied into the auditory sense. I can't remember where I read it, but I read that people on the autism spectrum respond as strongly to the emotions evoked in music as neurotypical people. An emotion decoding computer (those exist and are pretty good now) can decide whether a person's mood should be represented by a happy C chord or a sad D minor or an angry discordant sound or an stressed buzz, and the musicality would be a good non-invasive emotional injector/empathizator.

Somewhere in between your level of discomfort from not doing things and my level (which is 0)...

I think it would be kind of nice to have it embodied in an actual physical sensation like needing to pee, instead of a nagging and building sense of guilt and self-directed frustration? You could externalize those feelings and maybe it would let you train those skills without developing the same emotional ugh fields.

For the majority of pathogens this already exists. Certain ones like botulism are tasteless /odorless, but our built in chemorecepters are sensitive to the metabolites of most pathogens even at a high ppm (in other words, rotten/rancid food smells gross even when it is just starting to turn.)

6DanArmak
Don't you mean at a low ppm, i.e. when there are few of the particles being detected?
3[anonymous]
Alas! My nose is a vengeful, deceitful liar.

How about: as a commitment mechanism, a small but nagging amount of discomfort related to your procrastination on a measurable task. I'm picturing this working something like the need to pee, with the difference that it resets at night: the discomfort could build throughout the day and instantly be resolved when you completed the task and reduced as you work toward the task.

For instance, if you committed to exercising a certain amount, accelerameters could estimate physical activity. for every step you took, your discomfort would decrease and for ever ho... (read more)

2DanArmak
How about a reward mechanism instead of a punishment one? Make productive work enjoyable. (But don't make it merely addictive!)
4The_Duck
I already have this and it's horrible.
0Lumifer
Pain collars on autopilot, no thanks X-0

Assume that you judge that re-entering the relationship will make you happier than not doing so.

This holds true if you are comparing it to being single and lonely, but off-and-on relationships bring only slightly more happiness than singlehood and much less happiness than stable relationships. By reentering the old unstable relationship you are incurring a very heavy opportunity cost of the greatly increased happiness you could get from a new and stable relationships you could enter into.

This logic falls apart in a poly relationship, though.

2Adam Zerner
In a relationship that had gone on->off->on->off... multiple times, I could see why it'd be unlikely that re-entering the relationship would make you too happy. But what about... a) A relationship that had just gone from on-> off? I imagine that there are cases where the expected utility of going back on is very high. And where it'd be hard to find someone else with whom you could be as happy. b) A relationship that was declined from the get go? I realize that these cases aren't what you were explicitly talking about in your post. And so I should have been more clear about what I'm referring to. I'm thinking about the more general question of what to do when you've been denied and when you think that if the other person changed their mind, entering a relationship with them would be rational from an expected utility standpoint.

Hahaha, third wave for psychiatry...we're pretty slow on the uptake.

I'm only familiar with the clinical western version, which is mindfulness based. So the main focus is on being aware in the current moment of sensations in your body and how they change. Basically just noticing. Also a very high emphasis on acceptance and gentle redirection back to the present moment when you notice that thoughts begin to form. Posture is whatever position is comfortable: a straight backed chair or laying on the ground.

I can see the similarities between the meditations yo... (read more)

Definitely! Attachment was the main problem I think. Attachment requires a confluence of a lot of happy emotions at high levels and in connection with a specific person. Happy emotions yes, but not at high enough levels I think.

For the record, after I wrote my last post I realized I had never actually asked him if my best guess of why he ended it was accurate. According to him, mostly accurate but my low conscientiousness was less of a factor then I assumed, but low energy was a factor in terms of me wanting to do things with our mutual friends and him not wanting to.

I will definitely update in a few months! I'm curious too...

Very interesting link! Gender differences are definitely non-trivial, I'm just not sure in which ways.

In my specific case he had a slightly easier time securing post-breakup dates because he already was dating someone (however that someone is pretty emotionally unhealthy by any measure, herself going through a psychological crisis). My low conscientiousness meant that, despite improving in this realm, he did more of the traditional caretaking (chores, cooking, cleaning), meanwhile I got a heavier... (read more)

Smiling Mind is an excellent and very low commitment course on the basics of mindfulness meditiation. http://smilingmind.com.au/

Maybe the information that isn't being conveyed is the subjective experience of being inside a brain reshaped by meditation practice?

Smiling Mind is an excellent and very low commitment course on the basics of mindfulness meditiation. http://smilingmind.com.au/

It is perfectly normal to not want to get over it, because you cherish the feeling of love even though it hurts now to a letting go.

There is a certain sweetness and poetic appeal to being sad for love's sake, though I'm not sure if it is a healthy thing to wallow in for extended times.

On the other hand, suppressing your sadness directly is a sure way for those feelings to become stronger and more powerful, feeling suppression is an ironic process. The stronger your efforts to suppress your unhappiness, the more powerless against them you become. (http:/... (read more)

2[anonymous]
Sure, if third wave means 500 BC roughly :) I suppose you mean something like vipassana or Zazen where the object of meditation is breath. esp. breathing out. I tried that like a lot, as I used to have a huge interest in Buddhism. The results are not very good. Zazen worked for me only when and if my posture was perfect, such as using a high pillow and under the tailbone only, not sitting on it, which IMHO corrects for the usual anterior pelvic tilt and the local teacher pushed down my shoulders like a dozen times because I tend to pull them up to my ears, then it worked. When I just sat on a pillow or chair and tried to hold myself more or less erect, nope. The less perfect posture used in Tibetan originated gompas. No luck. I don't know how strongly Westernized, clinical version of it focuses on posture. They usually just tell people to sit up straight. People then pull their shoulders back a bit, but it does not correct the lower back. You can never have a perfect lower back on a chair. I don't think this works this way, at least for me it never did. Also, we should consider what is the goal. The goal of vipassana / Zazen is to achieve a state of mind that is a bit like getting high on acid. A really bright but objectless awareness. When the posture is perfect, Zazen achieves it by making the breathways really easy, that and looking at a white wall with eyes 45 degrees cast down tends to generate this objectless awareness. The Tibetan versions also often included visualizing some lights that is probably a better idea. I like the idea that you visualize shooting rainbow lights at people from your heart center and this light making them happy. It is supposed to increase compassion, and if it does, that can be actually useful against ruminations. There are also the more "religious" stuff like mantras or buddha-forms meditations.
0lululu
Smiling Mind is an excellent and very low commitment course on the basics of mindfulness meditiation. http://smilingmind.com.au/

By using the word calm, I think I did a poor job of explaining what neuroticism means and implies. I think the Wikipedia page would be best for this, but my own experience is that I feel the same range and variety of emotions, I just deal with negative emotions in an extremely healthy and productive way, so the duration of negative feelings tends to be shorter and positive feeling tend to last longer. My attachment style is secure and my empathy is unusually strong, so from at least my perspective it wasn't a relationship of two people just doing things to... (read more)

1bogus
For the record, I do agree with this. I would never suggest that a depressed person should not be dating - far from it. In fact, I wouldn't even see such a relationship as being "low quality" in any real sense. What I meant to say is that I would certainly put more effort than usual into keeping the emotional channels open - and yes, this would be separate and in addition to the usual support you might give to someone who's going thru depression. Because, while social support and attachment are related, they're not the same thing, and it's all too easy unfortunately to work towards the former while neglecting the latter.

Partially because I forgot that it was a wiki, thanks for the reminder! I don't know, though, it's a very personal story of one person's journey, super narrative based. I think it might be more appropriate if I linked to this from there and they remain separate.

0Elo
yes, probably a link somewhere as "additional reading"

It was very helpful for me to read your wiki about your break up, some very good advice there! I think it is also very helpful to see people who have gone through difficult break ups and returned to their normal level of happiness. Impact bias makes it hard to remember that very few things have lasting negative effects on happiness.

I should say that research shows people had better outcomes recovering from break ups when they started dating someone. I'm not sure if this is because it makes you feel wanted, because of selection bias (more people who dated were ready to date), or because the new relationship itself. On the other hand, overwhelming colloquial knowledge has it that rebound relationships are not a good idea, but I couldn't find actual any evidence to that effect. I'm not totally sure which to believe; the science is strong evidence from a small sample size, colloquial evidence is weak evidence from a huge sample size.

0Andy_McKenzie
Interesting data and makes sense. My intuition is that colloquial knowledge is positing a short run vs long run trade-off, in so far as you're more likely to settle in a rebound relationship, and then this could set you up for another break-up and associated long-term unhappiness. Short-term studies are not well-suited to address this.

I'm not totally sure about how to classify a rebound relationship, a cursory Google search shows that most of the sources on this are Cosmo and Yahoo Answers. I define it to myself as a relationship which is started because of the end of a prior relationship. It is either to stop from being lonely or to move on from the ex. The new relationship is compared and/or contrasted with the old one. The new one doesn't have room to become it's own thing. Usually they seem to move faster and burn out sooner than normal relationships. But that is just my definition, anyone else have any thoughts on how to answer this question?

And thank you!

2lululu
I should say that research shows people had better outcomes recovering from break ups when they started dating someone. I'm not sure if this is because it makes you feel wanted, because of selection bias (more people who dated were ready to date), or because the new relationship itself. On the other hand, overwhelming colloquial knowledge has it that rebound relationships are not a good idea, but I couldn't find actual any evidence to that effect. I'm not totally sure which to believe; the science is strong evidence from a small sample size, colloquial evidence is weak evidence from a huge sample size.

For the purposes of this post, it isn't meaningful what state my relationship was in when it ended. Many or most people reading this will have much less peaceful break ups than I (although maybe less surprising)

I do think you're making a lot of assumptions with this. I never said he didn't reciprocate. I don't require emotional support because I am very calm, as I said, with a very low neuroticism. On the other hand, I'm in the 5 percentile for conscientiousness (barely conscientious at all!), so he kept me from losing things, kept me on time, kept me on t... (read more)

0bogus
Thanks for providing this info - this does clear up a lot of things. Updating now. Still, I do have to wonder if a relationship can be sustained in the long term when one of the partners is not engaging emotionally to an appreciable extent, if at all - even if that's because of their admirable calmness and low neuroticism - and the other suffers from depression, which generally comes with its own kind of emotional withdrawal. IME, this looks more like folks just doing things together, hanging out, than anything resembling an enduring relationship. The fact that you were "providing support" does not really change things much - again, that's not a good position to be in anyway.

Yeah, I read during my initial research and I really appreciated the last section, New Directions, as directly relevant to my situation

0Elo
why don't you update it with some of your suggestions?

OK, thank you. This is my first LessWrong post. I posted to discussion, hopefully it will find its place.

Here are a couple of the papers I saw that described this similarity:

Addiction isn't the only thing that happens in that part of the brain, and that isn't the only part of the brain that is active. But the addiction/craving similarity is the most useful metaphor for someone going through a break... (read more)

0Elo
edit above! Most people don't mind edits; just write
6NancyLebovitz
I'm not sure about whether you should edit your text, but citations and/or footnotes would be a good idea.

When should a draft be posted in discussion and when should it be posted in LessWrong?

I just wrote a 3000+ word post on science-supported/rational strategies to get over a break-up, I'm not sure where to put it!

7NancyLebovitz
Do you mean whether it should be posted to Discussion or Main? You can post it to Discussion. It might get promoted to Main. I'm not sure who makes those decisions. You can post it to Main, and take your chances on it being downvoted. You can post a link to it, and see if you get advice on where you should post it.

I can think of two, but I also think the number of people who don't use long-term thinking and should far outweighs the number of people who do and shouldn't, so I still think that teaching that skill is a great idea.

  1. If someone doesn't know the amount of time or effort to complete a goal, they could end up very unhappily pouring effort into a sunk-cost situation because they are imagining a long-term (but not guaranteed) future where that goal is achieved. In this situation, present-oriented thinking would be more useful.

  2. Future (or past) oriented thin

... (read more)
0Gleb_Tsipursky
I can see your point about Case 1, it depends on how the concept of long-term thinking is defined. A long-term approach to winning would evaluate the probabilistic estimate of a situation being a sunk-cost scenario, and factor that into long-term oriented goals. However, there can be some mistakes made with long-term oriented thinking in that context, so it's a complex one to get exactly right. Still, I think the overall point we agree on, namely that promoting long-term thinking will probably help far more people than it hurts.

Yeah! I think its a great idea, I was considering doing this anyway. Expect a post in the next couple days! I finally have enough karma to write one now (long time lurker, this is a new account)

You're correct that modern farming techniques are fairly efficient, but within the confines of any specific crop being grown. Efficiently watered corn, for instance, still takes less water input than efficiently watered rice, millet takes less water still. Techniques are good but crop selection is questionable. Beef/alfalfa is the thing on the top of my mind when I say this.

Looks like almost twice as much goes to lawn maintenance as to the entire industrial and commercial sectors, and by contrast, lawns have absolutely no productivity or economic benefits.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/

Yeah, I've been downvoted to a negative number in Quora with a nice, detailed, science based article about why someone's "recently recovered early-childhood memory" were probably not reliable enough for her to publicly accuse someone of molesting children and without first talking to a counselor and preferably a councilor who understood memory. It was all very reasonable and with ample evidence to support every statement.

I got down-voted to negative by a guy who said she should try a past-life regression and literally used the phrase "sort o... (read more)

This one is pretty personal. After being surprise broken up with at the end of a very rewarding 5 year long relationship, I immediately looked up papers on how people recover from break-ups, what leads to best outcomes, how people can internalize lessons learned in relationships, etc.

When I discovered that getting over the relationship itself is different from no longer liking the person on the other side of the relationship, I was able to do the work to get over the relationship itself in about 4 to 5 days. (actually, it was exponential, most of the resul... (read more)

3[anonymous]
Wow, a post on this would be an amazing resource. Up for writing one? IF not, I'd be happy to do a quick google hangout video with you about it and post the video up :).
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