I had seen recommendations for T3/T4 on twitter to help with low energy, and even purchased some, but haven’t taken it. I hadn’t considered that the thyroid might respond by shrinking, and now think that that’s a worrying intervention! So I’m glad I read this - thank you.

Oh… wait a minute! I looked up Principal of Indifference, to try and find stronger assertions on when it should or shouldn’t be used, and was surprised to see what it actually means! Wikipedia:

>The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or "degrees of belief") equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration. In Bayesian probability, this is the simplest non-informative prior.

So I think the superior is wrong to call it “principle of indifference”! You are the one arguing for indifference: “it could hit anywhere in a radius around the targets, and we can’t say more” is POI. “It is more likely to hit the adult you aimed at” is not POI! It’s an argument about the tendency of errors to cancel.

Error cancelling tends to produce Gaussian distributions. POI gives uniform distributions.

I still think I agree with the superior that it’s marginally more likely to hit the target aimed for, but now I disagree with them that this assertion is POI.

Having previously been supremely convinced of this way of thinking by reading The Last Psychiatrist, and having lived by it for the last few years, I do now suspect it’s possible to take it too far. 

I think the desire for status - the goal of being able to say and think “I am this type of person”, and be recognized for it - is a part of the motivation system. As you say, some (most?) take it too far. But if one truly excises this way of thinking from themselves, they’ve kind of… excised part of their motivational system!

I think you’ve anticipated this point, because you say

>”But what if I really want what’s in the mines? Sometimes you have to do unpleasant work to get what you want.” Absolutely, but when you’re honest about it, you’ll correctly recognize those situations as life-consuming work, and that’ll affect how you relate to the task. You’ll say, “I want to find three pieces of gold,” instead of saying, “I want to work in the mines.” And so you won’t expect to feel alive or rejuvenated or joyful from the work itself.

But I’m not so sure that replacement maintains the motivation that the identity-based motivation gives. For example, when I was training for and fighting in amateur boxing, I trained and ran all the time. During runs, especially sprinting, where I was tired and wanted to quit, I would say out loud (or even yell) things like “this is easy for me because I’m a fighter!” If I had instead been thinking “this sucks but I have to do it anyway because the payoff is worth it”, that would have felt a good deal less motivating.

Or, I don’t know, maybe in marital and relationship fidelity. I am not a person who cheats; it would be a stain on my soul if I cheated. “I must never be a person who cheats.” This makes it easy to not cheat. This identity-based rule works well for me, and I don’t think replacing it with non-identity thinking would be safe for me personally.

But again I think I do agree! And most normal people would probably be better off from the advice to do more things they want to do, and less things they want to have done. But to readers who have already gone down this road… don’t feel like you need to take it all the way! Preserving some identity-based motivation is good and important.

Interesting! I also agree with the superior, but I can see where your intuition might be coming from: if we drop a bouncy ball in the middle of a circle, there will be some bounce to it, and maybe the bounce will always be kinda large, so there might be good reason to think it ending up at rest in the very center is less likely than it ending up off-center. For the sniper’s bullet, however, I think it’s different.

Do you agree with AnthonyC’s view that the bullet’s perturbations are well-modeled by a random walk? If so, maybe I’ll simulate it if I have time and report back - but only makes sense to do that if you agree that the random walk model is appropriate in the first place.

>The semicircular canals track changes in your head’s orientation. The otoliths track which way is down. But why not just combine them? Why did they evolve to be separate?

Here’s an idea.

The body is completely obsessed with inferring its state of poisonedness, and uses inner ear orientation sensors to help infer this. This is why car / sea / VR sickness exist. Since inferring poisonedness quickly is important, so it can start forcing itself to throw up, having two sensors is better because.. it’s more.. fault-tolerant? Not sure. But maybe there’s something here.

Ahh. The correlations being dependent on inputs, but things appearing random to Alice and Bob, does seem trickier than whatever I was imaginining was meant by quantum randomness/uncertainty. Don't fully have my head around it yet, but this difference seems important. Thanks!

Ahh. One is uncertain which world they’re in. This feels like it could address it neatly. Thanks!

Strong-downvoted.

She’s all over the EA and AI-related subreddits /r/singularity, /r/artificial, /r/ArtificialIntelligence, /r/ChatGPT, /r/OpenAI, /r/Futurology

In other words, everywhere but here. Since that’s the case, it would be better to take your fight to those places. Ms. Woods’s only post on Less Wrong in the past year was a short notice about o3 safety testing sign-ups, which was unobjectionable. 

I don’t like the vibes.

I was thinking the same thing. This post badly, badly clashes with the vibe of Less Wrong. I think you should delete it, and repost to a site in which catty takedowns are part of the vibe. Less Wrong is not the place for it.

I expect our intuitions about objective randomness would clash quite violently! My own intuition revolts at even the phrase itself :)