All of tilia's Comments + Replies

tilia210

I've heard loads of... stories about DT. In my opinion, it is both an unhealthy environment for many types of people, as well as not being representative of the general concept of a group house. 

As someone who has lived in a quasi-rationalist bay area group house for nearly 10 years, and seen it through both good and bad sets of housemates, this post reads like someone writing, "Polyamory Could Be Toxic For Some People!" which is true, but nonetheless, a bit offensive, and not very informative. 

3Rob Bensinger
I've also heard a lot of negative accounts of DT (possibly the same accounts others in this thread have heard, so plausibly don't treat this as a separate data point). The conclusion I drew from the accounts is 'DT has unusually unhealthy norms for a group house, and the particular ways it's bad are pretty unusual for rationalist group houses'.
habryka230

Yeah, I think DT is very unrepresentative. I also think COVID really sucked for everyone, and increased the variance of everything by a lot. I am definitely extremely glad I wasn't living alone during COVID and had friends in my house that allowed me to maintain basic social functions during the harshest parts of quarantine, but it also definitely created conflict and was stressful for many. 

I agree that Decision Tree was non-representative by design (in ways I'm not sure are public), in ways that will make it perform worse on average. I think that should have been noted more explicitly. I also think deluks is being really brave in naming something that made them a worse person, and I'm grateful they provided that data point.

sapphire*140

A decent number of people get into polyamory due to the rationalist community. If someone got involved with polyamory thanks to the community and it went badly, I think it would be reasonable to write such a post. Especially if they would have done the opposite if things had gone well. I should note I myself am poly. There are definitely houses that have gone even worse than DT. 

Also the most obvious to me example of 'good standing outside the bay -> 'got into a huge amount of trouble in the bay' also had no connection to DT.

Raemon130

This is roughly my take. 

I think I probably agree with the object level advice here (i.e. "be careful", "make sure you have a good culture fit", "make sure you have an exit plan if you can afford one"), but it's framed a weirdly.

I agree with Tilia that DT, from the outside at least, looked like a pretty extreme outlier in terms of how bad group houses can get and not a good place to draw general conclusions from. 

I think there was also a ton on coronavirus-related-drama in lots of houses, and that this is more of a feature of "the pandemic is legitimately stressful, and I think it makes everything much harder for everyone, especially when multiple people have to suddenly renegotiate norms."

tilia10

I feel fine! I wouldn't say that I've felt noticeably different for having quit sugar.

The cravings were pretty bad for the first 2.5 weeks after I quit. I ate fresh fruit hand over fist during that time to try to mitigate it. Surprisingly, it worked!

tilia230

11 months later, I'm still living a sugar-free life

See original post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKCtbmYfanZ79Kh3F/tilia-s-shortform?commentId=vrhPHZoMbvSJDn74R

Hey folks. Last August I wrote about how I quit sugar using ripe fruit. I'm excited to share that I've managed to keep it up for nearly a year now.

Cooking: It helps that I'm proficient in the kitchen and can foods that satisfy my desire for variety, while keeping the carb count low. For someone who is less experienced, I could see them ending up eating the same thing and th... (read more)

2Raemon
Awesome! Congratulation!. 
2[anonymous]
Congrats! That's a great achievement. How do you feel after removing sugar? What did the timeline of cravings and their strength look like since you started quitting?
tilia20

Thats fabulous! I have been taking very tentative nibbles of people's desserts, and I'm glad to hear your 1-3 bites strategy is working for you because that's the strategy that I'd most like to use as well! (Social food is so important!)

tilia30

Re: Primary Thing -- kinda lo dayenu? If I'd only quit being quite so sweets-obsessed, and hadn't started the diet, that would still have been a huge win.

The Keto Diet: I'm not an expert and everyone is different, but there is a thing called "Keto Flu" which I am fortunate enough to not get. I believe that for some people when they switch into ketosis, they may spend as much as a week experiencing fatigue, headaches, and other symptoms until their body adjusts.

I think of exercise and diet as two fairly separate pillars of health. Like, as separate from each other as getting good sleep is from dental hygiene.

tilia30

Can confirm. I don't post on normal lesswrong because the discourse is brutal.

tilia280

How I managed to stop craving sweets in 3 weeks

For me at least, it is possible to eliminate/drastically reduce my sugar cravings.

Typically I feel cravings for something sweet whenever I’m hungry, bored, have just finished a meal, am feeling sad, or am feeling happy. In short, I eat a lot of sweets and also spend a lot of time and effort trying to resist them.

LAST TIME

A few years ago I managed to cold-turkey sweets while I was following a Keto diet. I noticed that in week 3 of keto, my cravings had vanished. No longer did the desire to finish a meal with... (read more)

5eigen
Some studies, such as this one, have been focusing more and more around the influence of gut bacteria control over eating behavior including the microbial influence on reward and satiety pathways and most importantly microbial influence on generating cravings for foods that they specialize on or foods that suppress their competitors. This implies a few ways to change cravings: * Stop eating sweets altogether, the gut bacteria structure changes drastically within 24 hours of changing the diet, so cravings should cease in due time. (until you eat another sweet again, which is a way back to the start!). * Probiotics (the paper I cited above says that an increased microbiota diversity is predicted to reduce cravings significantly). * Administration of antibiotics which may destroy your flora (cease your craving altogether, it goes without saying that I do not recommend this).
2billzito
Glad that you found something that worked for you! I used to struggle with trying to control my sweet tooth, but found that going "no sweets" was surprisingly effective as I never had to decide. The decision is where I've had problems in the past because if I'm excited/stressed/etc., I decide to have too many sweets. I've experimented with different versions of "no sweets" over the last three years, including no sweets except one cheat day a year, no sweets except one cheat day a month, no sweets except one-three bites of something after every meal, and no sweets except one-three bites of something if someone asks me to try something (my current experiment). I like my latest experiment best, because it lets me share in the social aspect of sharing dessert w/ others without having to deal with the annoying conversations of "I don't eat sweets," while still not needing a decision from me. I also eat 3 - 4 servings of fruit a day (a serving with every meal usually) so have plenty of natural sugars.
8Raemon
Congrats! Is the sweets the primary thing here, or was it just the hardest part of an overall keto diet? I've had several friends try keto, and on the 2-3rd day say "woah this feels so amazing I'm so energetic life is great!" and then a week or two later go "oh god this sucks everything is terrible." I haven't made an attempt to control my diet so far. For the past few years I've been incrementally doing more exercise, but if that's had any effect it's been (har har?) outweighed by the effect of, dunno, getting older or metabolism slowing down or something.
tilia30

Yes absolutely. Its been happening to me ever since high school.