All of Three-Monkey Mind's Comments + Replies

You could regain this skill easily. What’s stopping you?

To answer your question more directly:

In almost all cases, I don’t care enough about the random patch of land on the way to and around my destination to build up a mental map of it before setting out.

A while back, I was driving to a friend's house every few months to hang out.

The first time, of course, I used a GPS to direct me there. Had this happened in the early 2000s, I would have printed out Google Maps turn-by-turn directions.

After a few times, I tried not using the GPS to direct me there, although I screwed up the final turns a bit and might have turned on the GPS to direct me around the twisty maze of curved streets and cul-de-sacs.

I wouldn’t have done that kind of thing if I had an appointment that I didn’t want to be late to.

Also, using a GPS... (read more)

He plays Diablo 4, right?

In-game season changes come with balance-patch changes, but if his rift-clearing abilities are tanking, that says something.

ow my balls [image] [image]

I can tell that this is a game being shown on ESPN between the New York Mets and the Milwaukee Brewers. I also think that the earlier estimation of winning is 50/50 in the first picture and 61/39 (favoring Milwaukee) in the second picture even though all the numbers around MIL are lower than the numbers around NYM.

I have no idea what to make of the “Live Money Line” part in the first picture.

For those of us who are interested in betting in the abstract but know nearly nothing about sports betting, would you explain what the picture is showing?

A stupid question, maybe, but:

I assume that if I want to get better at writing, I’ll have to get better at editing and revising.

However, how do I get better at writing if I don’t have anything to say?

Do I — and this task is likely underspecified/underdescribed — spend hours polishing turds?

What’s the causal mechanism behind “read good writing, and you’ll be able to write better”?

I assume I’m already used to reading good writing, and I’m not going to pick up any additional techniques by mere passive osmosis anymore.

Does this post make its readers more sane? If not, why was it posted to Less Wrong?

400 kg/kg/day

400 kcal/kg/day, right?

If even one out of every ten accessibility advocates/experts/etc. did these things, then all these bugs would’ve been fixed years ago.

Maybe you're aware of an OOM more accessibility advocates than I am, but I come across all sorts of well-written blog posts explaining this or that bug, which browser/etc. it happens in, and how to work around it. That's most of the bullet points, although it might not be in the bug tracker of choice for the project.

What people aren't doing, as far as I have seen, is starting pooled-funds bug bounties for these things. Pe... (read more)

They do not have any incentive whatever to help to fix bugs in screen reader programs. What would that do for them? The better such programs work, the less work there is for these people to do, the less there is to talk about on the subject of how to make your website accessible (“do nothing special, because screen readers work very well and will simply handle your website properly without you having to do anything or think about the problem at all” hardly constitutes special expertise…), the less demand there is for them on the job market…

You don't eve... (read more)

While I can imagine why others would want to see this sort of thing, it seems to me that "this will go on your permanent record" would be a strong disincentive to engage seriously with the text or mention anything aloud that you wouldn't be comfortable with anyone in the world, ever, knowing about you.

I do actually have plans to learn enough html to swap my Wordpress site over to a self-hosted self-designed website, I just have to, like, get good enough with HTML and CSS and especially CSS to get Gwern’s nice sidenotes

You can start with the Dan Luu aesthetic and then redesign your site, either incrementally or in big leaps, possibly repeatedly, later. Redesigning websites is totally a thing. https://gwern.net gets near-constant upgrades, and all sorts of famous web-nerd bloggers have improved their sites' designs over the years and now decades.

and

I'd like to second this comment, at least broadly. I've seen the e notation in blog posts and the like and I've struggled to put the × 10 in the right place.

One of the reasons why I dislike trying to understand numbers written in scientific notation is because I have trouble mapping them to normal numbers with lots of commas in them. Engineering notation helps a lot with this — at least for numbers greater than 1 — by having the exponent be a multiple of 3. Oftentimes, losing significant figures isn't an issue in anything but the most technical scientific writing.

Is there an alternative to constantly adding endless features? Can software be designed to operate without daily updates, similar to programming languages?

"daily" in "daily updates" is hyperbole, but you can probably get most of the way there with

• a subscription-based model (annual and/or monthly)
• periodic updates to ensure it works properly when the underlying platform changes (like when Apple adds dark mode to its OS and exposes this to websites with prefers-color-scheme).

The second bullet point is important, at least occasionally. I dropped my bel... (read more)

Cassandra/Mule: If Alice knew she were talking to a brick wall, she would give up; and if Bob knew Alice was trying to help, he would actually listen.

I've seen mules in the wild in internet forums (which, admittedly is outside the scope of your post). They usually present as ardent defenders of the faith, repeating well-known talking points…and never updating, ever.

AI safety posts generally go over my head, although the last one I read seemed fantastically important and accessible.

AI-safety posts are probably the most valuable posts here, even if they crowd out other posts (both posts I think are valuable and posts I think are, at best, chaff).

If there were one dial I’d want to experiment with turning on LW it would be writing quality, in the direction of more of it.

I'd like to highlight this. In general, I think fewer things should be promoted to the front page.

[edit, several days later]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SiPX84DAeNKGZEfr5/do-websites-and-apps-actually-generally-get-worse-after is a prime example. This has nothing to do with rationality or AI alignment. This is the sort of off-topic chatter that belongs somewhere else on the Internet.

[edit, almost a year later]: https://www.le... (read more)

I'd like to like this more but I don't have a clear idea of when to up one, up the other, down one, down the other, or down one and up the other.

Would you rather live in a society that valued “niceness, community and civilization”, or one that valued “meanness, community and civilization”? I don’t think it’s a tough choice.

This is an awful straw man. Compare instead:

1. niceness, community, and civilization
2. community and civilization

Having seen what "niceness" entails, I'll opt for (2), which doesn't prioritize niceness or anti-niceness, and is niceness-agnostic.

That’s a lot of readers to throw away

Depends on how popular you are. Even if you make the highly questionable assumption that browser statistics collected on sites like cnn.com and such are representative of the readership of jefftk.com, if jefftk.com has hundreds of readers, he's still doing a lot of work for a group that can only manage to claim that there are "dozens of us", and in any case really ought to upgrade to a proper browser (and in probably most cases, OS) anyway, for security reasons.

Daring Fireball, a site you've probably heard of, seems to do OK with only browser-supplied fonts:

	font-family: Verdana, system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Also, jefftk said "requiring". Sure, he could have a site that uses Inter, either loaded from his own site or from a CDN like Google Fonts, but if Inter doesn't load (mostly likely because of user preference), then everything will be fine.

If TeX fonts don't load…then what happens? Does the user see raw TeX, or nothing at all, or…?

I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals

BLM's policy proposals have changed since you wrote that. Currently, they're at https://impact.blacklivesmatter.com/policy/. They are:

• defund the police
• No On Prop 25
• voting-rights legislation
• support for the Congressional Oversight of Unjust Policing Act (COUP Act)
• Medicare for All
• the police not using stuff made for the military
• opposing Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court
• DC statehood
• ending the filibuster
• "climate justice"

(emphasis added)

Keep clicking on "Next Pillar"... (read more)

Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do.

20 years ago or so, Eliezer Yudkowsky said that the biggest obstacle to raising the sanity waterline was religion. This seemed very reasonable at the time.

I'm unconvinced that's still true in the West. What seems the larger barrier now are the things people say and believ... (read more)

A key problem to loss of LBM is that you’re either losing bone density (a terrible thing) or muscle (a pretty damn bad thing).

Could also be skin. Losing skin if you're losing fat is a good thing, I'd think, since you don't want to weigh 200 pounds yet still have all the skin you had when you were 300 pounds.

Has any work been done to see where the LBM has been coming from?

Oh, that's something significantly different from what I had in mind. Thanks for pointing me to the page that explains the concept.

Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means?

I'm not jp, but:

• too awake to sleep
• too brain-fogged to do thinking work
• possibly too brain-fogged to listen to a podcast and retain anything from it
• too physically tired to go for a walk or do other similar low-intensity exercise, like easy yoga
• probably too brain-fogged to read — and really digest — the web articles that I've been postponing for months because they seem great, but I can never get around to

Meanwhile, here's what I can do in a low-energy state, some of the time (but I freq... (read more)

We might iterate on the exact implementation here (for example, we might only give this option to users with 100+ karma or equivalent)

I could be misunderstanding all sorts of things about this feature that you've just implemented, but…

Why would you want to limit newer users from being able to declare that rate-limited users should be able to post as much as they like on newer users' posts? Shouldn't I, as a post author, be able to let Said, Duncan, and Zack post as much as they like on my posts?

writing things down

A good idea but too general to be good advice.

More specifically (not an exhaustive list):

• If you have a multistep 1- or 2-hour task, strongly consider scribbling down a quick checklist of what needs doing before your working memory gets swamped with the details of a subtask or three.
• If you're in the middle of a programming project and need to pause your work, strongly consider typing out a message in a sticky-note-equivalent app like Tot that says "Welcome back. You were frobnicating the gleeberks because the gleeberks don't snozzl

Two responses:

1. It's unclear to me what would make diet advice "rationalist".
2. The only novel, actionable consensus I've seen seems to be "avoid eating or drinking things with sugar added to them, especially if there's a lot of added sugar".

This appears to be a personal wiki.

If “refining the art of human rationality” is our goal, we should be doing a lot more outreach and a lot more production of very accessible rationality materials.

I agree, and I'm in favor of this sort of thing. I try to do this sort of thing among my friends. Sometimes it works, at least a little bit.

On the other hand, if we're trying to save Earth from being turned into paperclips, we ought to focus our efforts on people who're smart enough to be able to meaningfully contribute to AI risk reduction.

On the other other hand, there are people here who cou

Also, I find myself vexed with thoughts […] How do professional or amatuer traders deal with this?

Habituation, meditation, and/or alcohol.

Subjective experience:

• Polyester (elastane, etc.) clothes are much more common these days. Back in the 80s, people wore way more cotton shirts to the gym. Nowadays, most people wear some sort of sweat-wicking heat-venting material. They're also cheaper; Under Armour used to run about $50. Nowadays, UA shirts tend to run about 3/5 that.

• Remember back when wool was only for itchy sweaters? Nowadays, merino wool, which is less itchy for most people, is used for shirts and undershirts and even socks and underpants. The great thing about wool shirts is that

But if passages aren’t dense with that or other uses, then you wouldn’t need to use subscripting much, by definition....

Agreed.

Perhaps you meant, “assuming that it remains a unique convention, most readers will have to pay a one-time cost of comprehension/dislike as overhead, and only then can gain from it[…]

Agreed so far…

[…] so you’ll need them to read a lot of it to pay off, and such passages may be quite rare”?

You'll need a bunch in a single passage. If you don't need to disambiguate a large hairball of differently-timed people (like in My Be

This seems like a solid improvement over X!Y notation. X!Y seems to not fit my brain in the same way that XのY seems to not fit my brain, and mentally substituting “’s” for “の” helps only partially.

Does it do enough good to be worth using despite the considerable hit to weirdness points? That I don’t know.

A better question, I think, would be this: "When is it worth it to use this one weird trick to boost the clarity of a work?"

It seems worth it in nerdy circles (i.e. among people who're already familiar with subscripting) for passages that are dense wit

we’ve e.g. carefully moved a group the conversation around not putting pressure on them to explain why they were unavailable last Tuesday.

What do you mean by "a group the conversation"?

A general rule that I try to follow is “never write something which someone else has already written better”.

A sensible rule, but I'd like to bring some rationalist insights to other communities that might be able to benefit from seeing how people who've read the Sequences handle things. This seems to necessitate a little bit of redundant writing.

Also, I could stand to get better at writing. On the other hand, if I limit myself to writing only novel things, I wouldn't practice nearly as much as I ought to do. Of course, the decision to publish any given

Very true. I think I'm mainly trying to preempt accusations that I'm simply rehashing Taboo Your Words (which I pretty much am rehashing!)

Also, by stating "this isn't very novel", I'm also communicating to the neophyte (as opposed to current rationalists) that there's a wide body of knowledge out there that's quite similar to what I've written. That's potentially useful to the neophyte.

On the current four-point scale: 3±ε, where 3 − ε > 2 and 3 + ε ≪ 4. Like I said, these points aren't uniformly distributed.

I'm also familiar with trying to define a unit of enlightenment, so the whole idea of "make a scale" doesn't strike me as a very novel idea.

Drive-by suggestion: I'd suggest doing the archiving maybe a week or month after posting. That way, most updates to the post are archived, too.