All of Tim Freeman's Comments + Replies

It is unreasonable to expect an output from biological evolution to do something reasonable in a situation vastly different from the situations it evolved in. In this case, you aren't going to learn much from the state of mind of a human who has been tortured more than his ancestors could have been tortured.

Trying to extract guidance from that story seems like an example of generalizing from fiction.

I'm not sure how the rest of the article is connected to the fiction at the beginning. Given that people tend to generalize from fiction and get to false concl... (read more)

My reading of the EMDR section was that the patient had panic attacks, did EMDR, then had a panic attack, and then either the patient ran out of money or it was time to write the paper, so we don't know about the presence or absence of panic attacks after that.

On rereading that section, it is clear that there is no claimed period of time when the patient was observed not to have a panic attack during that period of time. The last panic attack was labelled as "mild". I didn't bother to read back to see if any of the other panic attacks were "mild" before success was declared.

There is such a thing as a symptom pool. Some people who are having a difficult time instinctively acquire symptoms that are fashionable and signal their difficulty, but the symptoms are not related to the actual problem. The prototypical example for this, IIRC, is incidence of anorexia in some specific country (Hong Kong?). An anorexia awareness campaign caused that symptom to become fashionable and increased the apparent incidence much more than can be explained as an increased ability to observe the cases that were present before.

This applies to some b... (read more)

I would not categorize you as Christian. In my conversations with Christians, the unifying themes have been:

• God is good
• Heaven exists as a desirable place to go after you die.
• Jesus exists and has some significant role in getting you into Heaven.

You didn't mention Heaven at all and you seem to regard Jesus as another iteration in the general improvement of moral examples instead of as someone special.

I don't mean to imply that there is any reason for me to regard you as Christian. I'm just a little surprised, or maybe I have misunderstood you.

But to ge... (read more)

If you are Catholic, or remember being Catholic, and you're here, maybe you can explain something for me.

How do you reconcile God's benevolence and omnipotence with His communication patterns? Specifically: I assume you believe that the Good News was delivered at one specific place and time in the world, and then allowed to spread by natural means. God could have given everyone decent evidence that Jesus existed and was important, and God could have spread that information by some reliable means. I could imagine a trickster God playing games with an important message like that, but the Christian God is assumed to be good, not a trickster. How do you deal with this?

In response to "The real problem is humanity's lack of rationalist skills. We have bad epistemology, bad meta-ethics, and we don't update our beliefs based on evidence.":

Another missing rationalist skill is having some sensible way to decide who to trust. This is necessary because there isn't time to be rational about all topics. At best you can dig at the truth of a few important issues and trust friends to give you accurate beliefs about the rest. This failure has many ramifications:

• The SBF/FTX fiasco.
• I quit LessWrong for some years in part because th

>if you won't accept 1 pepper for 1 mushroom, then you should accept 2 mushrooms for 1 pepper

You need a bunch more assumptions for this to hold, and I would like to know what they are. For example: If I don't have or want any mushrooms, and nobody I know wants mushrooms, then I can't accept 1 pepper for 1 mushroom because I can't pay the mushroom. But it still doesn't make any sense for me to accept two mushrooms for one pepper either because I don't have any use for two mushrooms. To get intuition about this, replace "mushroom" with something that is b... (read more)

Found a different, perhaps better explanation: salt intake leads to temporary weight gain from water. Restaurant food is salty. https://youtu.be/j314amPw4RQ 42:30

I tend to have itchy eyes. An optometrist suggested "derm dry eye relief mask" by eyeeco. Heat it in the microwave 20 seconds or so and then lay down with this lump of warm stuff on your eyes for 10 minutes until it isn't warm anymore. Gently rub once afterward.

This seems to help and I do it fairly reliably.

The theory is that there are glands on your eyelids that secrete some magic substance that makes your eyes dry out slower. Those glands get clogged up if you stare at a computer screen and don't blink enough. Rubbing at them does a poor job of removing ... (read more)

In response to "how so?": If this catches on, you can sell a drug by infiltrating the forum and posting fake news of miracle cures under many different names.

For schemes like this to work, you need some way of guessing who trusts whom. The spammers might claim to trust each other, and you never really know who the spammers are. The best you can hope for is for the real people to get good information from other real people they trust, and the spammers get garbage information from other spammers but that doesn't matter because they are spammers.

I don't know of any implementations of this.

I read the book before reading this review. I have recently had success with the Conference Therapy technique they describe, so I highly recommend the book.

I actually started reading the book, rage-quit in the middle, then came back to it years later and found it useful. I rage-quit because the section on EMDR was about a patient with panic attacks, EMDR was done, and afterward the patient still had panic attacks but they claimed the treatment was a success anyway. Any sensible interpretation would call this failure. So at least one of the authors does mot... (read more)

In response to: "I don’t understand why or how weight-loss-that-is-definitely-not-changes-in-water-retention comes in chunks. If you have an answer I’m quite curious."

I too have observed that this happens. I read somewhere that if you lose fat, it is a few cells losing all of the fat instead of many cells each losing a little bit of the fat. The empty fat cells fill with water and your weight stays approximately constant. After there are enough empty fat cells that have been empty long enough, some of them do apoptosis and you pee out the water and you lose weight then.

I don't remember where I read it.

Does the discriminator get access to the symbolic representation of f, or just its behavior?

If the discriminator only gets access to the behavior of f, I might have a solution. Define g(y,z) = 1 if y = y * z, 0 otherwise. So g(y,z) is 1 if z is 1 or y is 0, which is two different mechanisms.

Pick some way to encode two numbers into one, so we have a one to one mapping E between pairs (y,z) and numbers x. Define f1(x) = g(E(x)).

Now pick a cryptographic hash H that might as well be sha256 except some fresh algorithm not known to the discriminator or guessable... (read more)

Eby hasn't updated his blog https://thinkingthingsdone.com/ in 10 years. He didn't even put a post there describing his wonderful next job or project, or his wonderful retirement. He is posting to Twitter, so he's not dead.

If his advice worked for him, he wouldn't be in that situation.