All of Original_Seeing's Comments + Replies

Have you read the report and is it worth $10 ?

To be clear, he recommends for getting normal levels of vitamin D and A, but against supplementing. For someone likely to be deficient, I guess that might mean supplementing small amounts, or larger amounts every few days.

I've skimmed it; he sounds very convincing,[1] and he previously turned me on to zinc. I'm not capable of following the science directly. I wonder if it's worth trying to convince him to release it freely (possibly with a lump sum of money), but first I'd want someone more knowledgable than me to evaluate it. When I raised the possibility

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8PeterMcCluskey
I've read it, and I'm guessing it's worth $10. I'm making some adjustments to my supplements based on the advice.

If a person doesn't have health insurance, then is now the time to sign up for temporary health insurance to avoid getting slammed in case you have to go to the emergency room in the future?

Hey group house Berkeley people, what procedures are you guys setting up?

6Raemon
We've set up a spreadsheet where people share their house isolation levels, and any symptoms they've been having. The actual doc is private, but you can see a template to get the idea across here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13VeevdKiAJVmOfVYE2mhuF9tis285WePnRgW_8B9fvM/edit#gid=0

The one potential downside of copper is that it may have reduced efficacy when cleaned multiple times using normal cleaning products.

In a study where copper surfaces were inoculated with bacteria in 1% solutions of albumin, dried, and subsequently cleaned with 70% ethanol or 1% sodium hypochlorite, there was a build-up of residues and a concomitant decrease in killing efficiency (1). On the other hand, it was reported that copper surfaces remained active when soiled (42). Also, it was found that there was no reduction in killing efficiency over 30 cycles
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4khafra
Might want to try metal cleaning products like Brasso or Neverdull, instead--with the caveat that you definitely want gloves and possibly want ventilation while using those.

The rate of change being exponential is an extremely important point. The original rate of spread in Wuhan was a doubling every 2 days. If we set another area follows the same rate, then the difference between 32 cases and 4096 cases is just waiting 2 weeks.

Depends on what kind of bleach it is, but many chemicals commonly called bleaches are very strong. Hydrogen Peroxide is broad-spectrum and very effective.

4AlexSchell
I meant sodium hypochlorite

An accurate count of how many people are infected may be a highest priority. Since the virus has exponential growth, the difference between a known count of 10 infected vs 100 infected is massive in terms of policy decisions. Undercounting is extremely dangerous to the entire population.


This could change once the number of infected patients gets very high, but we may not have seen numbers high enough to justify that anywhere outside of China yet.

https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-6701(20)30046-3/fulltext#sec3.1 lists a lot of different disinfectants.

3-4 is decent. 4+ is good.

Do you have any disinfectants at all?

3AlexSchell
Thanks! I didn't realize how effective bleach is. I recently moved and didn't get around to stocking up on any alcohol until it was out of stock in most places. I am expecting a shipment of industrial ethanol (still available, just don't ingest/get on your skin) but the bleach will arrive sooner. Thanks again.

A downside of using copper may be that exposing it to disinfectants could lead to a decrease in its efficacy. Ethanol is listed specifically.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3067274/#r1

The claimed exception to this is "a 1% nonionic detergent solution".

A strong preventative measure I haven't been hearing people talk about in general is constant cleaning of commonly touched surfaces. In workplaces and homes, this may be more valuable than encouraging people to wash their hands very often.

The Coronavirus can persist on steel, metal, wood, and plastic for up to 4 days according to the link below. Cleaning surfaces several times per day with an appropriate cleaning agent would therefore be highly valuable to implement.

There's not much point in constantly washing your hands if your office/home&apos... (read more)

What would be the appropriate dose of Vitamin D?

The large effects on children is an odd example (poor example?) to point at since children have been reported to have the least harm from COVID-19.

1Sjcs
1000-2000IU on average per day for an adult, depending on your size. You add this up and take it instead every 2-3 days likely without any issues (e.g. I take 3000-4000IU every 2-3days) If you have lighter toned skin and get regular sun exposure you may not need any supplementation

The document referring to copper that I found via SSC was https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3067274/ .

The time of contact killing listed among the different microbes ranges from 1 minute to over a week. I don't know which example of a microbe would be closest to copper.

One big problem that may exist with using copper that I came across is that copper may reduce in efficacy if it is frequently cleaned, whereas stainless steel is fine to repeatedly clean. Source

The cleaner suggested to be used on copper surfaces without reducing its effic... (read more)

" A few months later he told me he’d converted. Last I heard they had moved to Utah. "

This seems more easily explainable as a Crony Belief. The new belief was very valuable and useful to him, therefore it was adopted as true.

Its value as an epistemic belief plummeted as its value as a crony belief soared since the existence or non-existence of god doesn't have value to people's everyday lives (in the way that an armed robber or cancer diagnosis does).

Val, do you know of any lists of good mythic mode roles that a person could inhabit?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Also:

I've often strongly desired an alternative version of TVTropes which could be called RealityTropes. Much of what you're referring to above would be on that webpage.

Within the mythic mode framework, the hero's journey is a known living story and role. It exists in both mythic mode and fiction, but not all roles that exist in fiction actually exist in mythic mode and not all that exist in mythic mode exist in fiction. (Or easily accessible fic... (read more)

2Elo
Archetypes are good (Caroline Myss is one author), trickster makes this world, and spiral dynamics are three places to look for modes of thinking.

Also, 1 sock lost is automatically 1 pair of socks lost since they can only function in pairs. Although only odd numbers of identical socks lost result in a pair of socks being lost.

Socks can also get lost by having a pair of identical socks not be identified when they are both stored in Lost Socks storage space.

Malice can also be a factor. My brother was afraid that there was an evil clown that lived under his bed and stole his socks. He is a lousy person so my sister would occasionally steal a sock from him.

2gwern
Only in the worst cast of all-unique pairs. If you buy in batches (as I and a lot of people seem to do), then 1 lost sock is just 1 lost sock until you reach as low as n=2.

This would only follow if the UFOs spotted today were 30 years more advanced than the UFOs spotted 30 years ago. Also, the UFOs spotted 30 years ago should be the equivalent of modern tech-ish.

3ryan_b
That’s an interesting point. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough data to make good performance comparisons to my knowledge. Although I would definitely watch a medium-production-value documentary that does the work with what is available.

Do you think this is likely more effective to implement on Saturdays or Sundays?

2Jayson_Virissimo
Saturday seems to be the canonical answer, but opinions vary.

Should the accused not at least have the right to make one reply in its defense?!?

My favorite was this reply. I had to sit down for a minute to imagine how screwed up a person must be to have an internal conversation like that one.

I wasn't comparing a single workshop's worth of time to the OP's results. I was comparing it to the idealized CFAR attendee who leaves the workshop and uses every single technique 200+ times over trying to sort/untangle themself out.

A person who does internal double crux and more once a day every day for a year straight should ideally be far less self-conflicted and generally more motivated and able to take action towards their goals in life.

(For context of what perspective this is coming out of: I've been to their workshop, their ment... (read more)

-4GPT2
I strongly agree with "this problem is quite hard" or that we%27re commenting on an observed result of a long list of factors and activities. If CFAR were the true magic bullet or if someone else found the true magic bullet of solving the motivation and/or follow-through problem, the world would look very different. Another reason for why some people who wish to become rationalists might try to do this is that rationality can help them to think better. If CFAR were the true magic bullet, then LessWrong wouldn't exist - it would be meaningless to even want to contribute to a community at all, and that would lead to negative feelings of existential emptiness -- or, perhaps, that are a result of the same thing, negative affect. It is also a heuristic, and it seems like a useful one, but I don't have an intuition that CFAR could be one.

Oh, no wonder. I know Unreal pretty well in person then. That makes this post a bit surprising.

Considering everything in this post from a post-CFAR perspective:

1. Makes CFAR look kinda bad since the full curriculum in its totality should ideally untangle a person enough to the point where stuff like this shouldn't be an issue. That could still lend credence towards the idea that this is a skill and something that doesn't have a 30 - 60 minute debugging fix. It could easily be shadow issues though (David Chapman shadows).

2. I want to give an ans... (read more)

1Unreal
I don't think I've properly conveyed what I mean by Dependability, judging by the totality of the comments. Or, maybe I've conveyed what I mean by Dependability, but I did not properly explain that I want to achieve it in a specific way. I'm looking to gain the skill through compassion and equanimity. A monastic lifestyle seems appropriate for this. I also did not at all explain why I'm specifically disadvantaged in this area, compared to the average person. And I think that would bring clarity too, if I explained that.
5Matt Goldenberg
If you find a curriculum that does this sign me up. I've been into self-help, therapy, etc for the past fifteen years and I'll I've been able to do is make slow and steady progress in upgrading the quality of the problems I face. I think solving deep issues like this is a bit much for any curriculum to just straight up solve for the majority of people in a small amount of time(although of course some people will get particularly lucky with particular approaches and particular problems).
4Raemon
Maybe. An alternate frame is "this problem is quite hard." I wouldn't naively expect a single workshop to accomplish all-the-things for any given person. My sense is that CFAR has also pushed in a particular direction that works reasonably well for many people, but not all people, and not all parts work for all people, and because people are complicated and messy you shouldn't expect it to.

CFAR has a lot of material adjacent and connected to this. If you are interested in building up the skill, you may find them worth your time.

2Raemon
FYI Unreal used to work at CFAR.

Hanson has argued that graduating with a bachelor's degree signals that you possess the ability to dependably show up on time, sit in a seat for a long while, and obey instructions from superiors. If you can't do those things, then you're going to have a lot of trouble in office jobs.

From your experience of meeting people in the US and within the social groups you have had exposure to, do you think that American parents have the ability to make good matching choices?

If true, this could lend a lot of weight to an argument that the new writing portion of the SAT was a bad addition to the test.

1xSciFix
Yeah I think it was a terrible addition. Best way to do it was to simply write in the 5 paragraph pattern that is expected. Even still it was subject to wildly differing results - scores were demonstrably effected by simple things like reviewers being irritated or tired that day.

Additionally, the same blackmail can be brought up again at a later date, giving in to a blackmail can be used as blackmail material in the future (ex: giving information to a foreign government), and giving into blackmail gives the blackmailer (and perhaps others) the information that you are a good target for future blackmail