All of sediment's Comments + Replies

Ambiguous between sarcasm and sincerity :(

On putting all one's charitable eggs in one basket:

I note that GiveWell recommend splitting one's charitable giving between their top charities in a certain ratio. But it seems that this would reduce the expected value of one's giving. Is this considered by others to be the best way to donate, or is it better to give all of one's donation to that single charity estimated to be most effective? I imagine this is the sort of thing that has already been discussed, so pointers to any previous discussion would be of use.

Always glad to see pragmatism represented on LW. I feel like rationalist types instinctively lean towards a correspondence theory of truth, but I feel like as a group, they are actually (or at least, could be) more sympathetic to the pragmatist view of truth than they realized.

This post follows pretty closely the argument I was going to make in a LW-targeted defence of pragmatism of my own which I had been half-heartedly planning to post for a long time. Thanks for doing a good job of it.

No.

But the preface is extensive and interesting, and contains his updated thoughts on several aspects of the book.

That's the ticket! Thanks so much.

Weird; I'm starting to wonder whether I imagined the whole thing. Your link helps, at least, though. Thanks.

I seem to recall a discussion thread about ways one can spend money to save time (e.g. paying to get one's laundry done), together with estimates for their respective dollar/hour rates. I'm moving from unemployed to full-time employment this week, so the appropriate dollar value of my time is about to shift dramatically, and as such, I'd like to give this thread another look over, but I can't find it. Can anyone else remember what I'm talking about and/or provide a link? Thanks.

• Got a job in the field that I took a master's degree to enter (computer programming) at a company which appears to have a good culture and extremely good opportunities for progression. In particular, they expressed that they liked the fact that I'm not originally from a computer science background but still had good technical knowledge, and suggested that there might be potential for someone with my skill set to eventually move into the management/business side of the company, should that someone wish it. I start Monday. Going to set up a standing order t

And, while we're on the subject, here's a classic:

Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?

-- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner

(via Eliezer, natch.)

I also don't think this is a concern. It's just analogy, metaphor, figurative language, which is more or less what the human mind runs on. I also don't think it leads to real anthropomorphization in the minds of those using it; it's more just a useful shorthand. Compare something I overheard once about atoms of a certain reactive element "wanting" to bond with other atoms. I don't think either party was ascribing agency to those atoms in this case; rather, "it wants X" is commonly understood as a useful shorthand for "it behaves as... (read more)

Yes, perhaps for some, but I'm already closer to underweight than I am to overweight, so for me that's a big con.

Yep, the model in that post is quite close to the one I'm trying to describe.

A month or two ago I started taking Modafinil occasionally; I've probably taken it fewer than a dozen times overall.

I think I'd expected it to give a kind of Ritalin-like focus and concentrate, but that isn't really how it affected me. I'd describe the effects less in terms of "focus" and more in terms of a variable I term "wherewithal". I've recently started using this term in my internal monologue to describe my levels of "ability to undertake tasks". E.g., "I'm hungry, but I definitely don't have the wherewithal to coo... (read more)

I'm a vegetarian and I looked into this stuff a while back. The Examine.com page What beneficial compounds are primarily found in animal products? is a useful reference with sources and includes the ones you wrote above. An older page with some references is this one.

Thanks, this looks good. The sort of thing I was after.

I had a basic panel done

I've never heard this expression! I wonder whether that's just transatlantic terminology variation. Will look into whether I can get this on the NHS.

Excessive amounts of creatine (look up "loading"

• You should ask a dietician, not us.

I know plenty of LW people are interested in nutrition; it's within the realms of possibility that one of them might know enough about what I'm asking to be able to give me a quick summary of what I'm after. As for asking a dietician, I've never met one and wouldn't know how to go about getting hold of one to ask. (I'm also not totally sure I'd trust J. Random Dietician to have a good understanding of things like what counts as good evidence for or against a proposition. Nutrition is a field in which it's notoriously... (read more)

Yes, as of a few months ago when I researched the issue, I am OK with eating bivalves. I just haven't gotten around to doing so yet.

Reposting this because I posted it at the very end of the last open thread and hence, I think, missed the window for it to get much attention:

I'm vegetarian and currently ordering some dietary supplements to help, erm, supplement any possible deficits in my diet. For now, I'm getting B12, iron, and creatine. Two questions:

• Are there any important ones that I've missed? (Other things I've heard mentioned but of whose importance and effectiveness I'm not sure: zinc, taurine, carnitine, carnosine. Convince me!)
• Of the ones I've mentioned, how much should I b

I'm vegetarian and currently ordering some dietary supplements to help, erm, supplement any possible deficits in my diet. For now, I'm getting B12, iron, and creatine. Two questions:

• Are there any important ones that I've missed? (Other things I've heard mentioned but of whose importance and effectiveness I'm not sure: zinc, taurine, carnitine, carnosine.)
• Of the ones I've mentioned, how much should I be taking? In particular, all the information I could find on creatine was for bodybuilders trying to develop muscle mass. I did manage to find that the ave

Received the results for a master's degree in computer science which I completed this summer. I passed and got a "merit", with which I'm fairly happy. Translating grading conventions between countries is challenging, especially the UK's byzantine system for grading degree- and postgraduate- level qualifications, so I'll simply say that a merit is good though not astounding, being the category below "distinction", the best possible.

Nonetheless, I'm happy, especially given that I really struggled with the thesis which was a requirement of... (read more)

Alternately, it's no worse than the norm, and yet still isn't funny.

I find xkcd so horribly bad.

I remember Nassim Nicholas Taleb claiming exactly this in an interview a few years ago. He let his friends function as a kind of news filter, assuming that they would probably mention anything sufficiently important for him to know.

I was recently heartened to hear a very good discussion of effective altruism on BBC Radio 4's statistics programme, More or Less, in response to the "Ice Bucket Challenge". They speak to Neil Bowerman of the Centre for Effective Altruism and Elie Hassenfeld from GiveWell.

They even briefly raise the possibility that large drives of charitable donations to ineffective causes could be net negative as it's possible that people have a roughly fixed charity budget, which such drives would deplete. They admit there's not much hard evidence for such a c... (read more)

There may be such a thing as first-person laughter (laughing at yourself for having a mistaken expectation), but my point is that it seems like a stretch to say that the examples 9eB1 gave fit that pattern (though perhaps your phone example does).

I'm working on a longer comment in which I'll explain my points in more detail.

As a heterosexual I'm not your target audience, but I voted this up for being a well-compiled and useful (to its audience) bit of research.

Yes, by analogy with "hedons" and "utilons", hypothetical units of pleasure and utility respectively.

The first example is first-person laughter, where you laugh at yourself for your own expectations turning out to be so wrong, similar to looking for your phone then realizing you're on the phone already.

This sounds fishy. In particular, it seems like a very ad hoc way to shoehorn a category of joke that doesn't quite fit into your theory - which is a failure mode that seems common to theories of humour.

Oh, another thing: I remember thinking that it didn't make sense to favour either the many worlds interpretation or the copenhagen interpretation, because no empirical fact we could collect could point towards one or the other, being as we are stuck in just one universe and unable to observe any others. Whichever one was true, it couldn't possibly impact on one's life in any way, so the question should be discarded as meaningless, even to the extent that it didn't really make sense to talk about which one is true.

This seems like a basically positivist or p... (read more)

Good one! I think I also figured out a vague sort of compatibilism about that time.

I think I was a de facto utilitarian from a very young age; perhaps eight or so.

You're right.

I was glad to at least disrupt the de facto consensus. I agree that it's worth bearing in mind the silent majority of the audience as well as those who actually comment. The former probably outnumber the latter by an order of magnitude (or more?).

I suppose the meta-level point was also worth conveying. Ultimately, I don't care a great deal about the object-level point (how one should feel about a silly motivational bracelet) but the tacit, meta-level point was perhaps: "There are other ways, perhaps more useful, to evaluate things than the amount of moral indignation one can generate in response."

This makes some sense. I think part of the reason my contribution was taken so badly was, as I said, that I was arguing in a style that was clearly different to that of the rest of those present, and as such I was (in Villam Bur's phrasing) pattern-matched as a bad guy. (In other words, I didn't use the shibboleths.)

Significantly, no-one seemed to take issue with the actual thrust of my point.

Totally right.

Nabokov: "[reality is] one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes".

It's called the Pavlok. It seems to be able to monitor a variety of criteria, some fairly smart.

Only because I had a clear, concise, self-contained point to make and I figured I'd be able to walk away once I was done. I'll know better next time.

I mentioned beeminder and that I use it. Don't think anyone picked up on that part, cash evidently being less triggering than electricity.

Can you give a quick example with the blanks filled in? I'm interested, but I'm not sure I follow.

Well, there's a frustrating sort of ambiguity there: it's able to pivot between the two in an uncomfortable way which leaves one vulnerable to exploits like the above.

Sightings:

• Arguments that aren't actually arguments: argument by tribal affiliation was certainly in full force, as well as a certain general condescension bordering on insult.
• Statistical illiteracy: in an only minor variant of your hypothetical exchange, I said that very few people are doing too much exercise (tacitly, relative to the number of people who are doing too little), to which someone replied that they had once overtrained to their detriment, as if this disproved my point.

I was also struck by how weird it was that people were nitpicking tota... (read more)

Imagining myself as a human,

For some reason I found this very funny.

I recently made a dissenting comment on a biggish, well-known-ish social-justice-y blog. The comment was on a post about a bracelet which one could wear and which would zap you with a painful (though presumably safe) electric shock at the end of a day if you hadn't done enough exercise that day. The post was decrying this as an example of society's rampant body-shaming and fat-shaming, which had reached such an insane pitch that people are now willing to torture themselves in order to be content with their body image.

I explained as best I could in a couple... (read more)

I was pessimistic that this thread would yield anything worthwhile, but am gratified to be proven wrong.

Thanks. Do you feel like it's had much impact on your mental state when not meditating?

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Exercise: I recently started a regime of 2 x 1 hour bodyweight sessions / week with a friend of mine, but we haven't had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I'll start running on my own so I'm not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).

Pens: I actually like this advice. On the other hand, I use vim, a programmer's editor, to write everything (including my prose), and I love love love it. (I'm even writing this reply in it.) The 'feel' (not o... (read more)

Thanks. I had actually already wondered about whether I was depressed. I don't think I am, though this was not at all obvious to me, and I had to consider the possibility for some time before rejecting it. I perhaps have a slightly flat affect compared to some, but I think I enjoy life and have a basically happy disposition.

I recently starting a bodyweight exercise regime with a friend (2 x 1 hour sessions / week), but we haven't had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I'll start running on my own so I'm not so tied to t... (read more)

This makes sense.

Actually, I'm finding this weirdly coincidental: I was listening to DAF for the first time this week and it really made me want to do a project with electronics by me and shouty German vocals by a female friend of mine who happens to be fluent in shouty German. It even crossed my mind to do some heavy/weirded out versions of Kraftwerk songs.

Request for advice:

Like many people on lesswrong, I probably lie towards the smart end of the bell curve in terms of intelligence, but I'm starting to suspect that I lie somewhere below the mean in terms of ability to focus, concentrate, and direct my attention.

I only recently became concerned about this because it wasn't much of a problem when I was in school. There, I was able to do acceptably well overall by doing well in the subjects that came easily to me without working hard (science, maths... you know the score) and mediocrely in those that didn't. ... (read more)