All of weft's Comments + Replies

It seems like you are assuming historic gender segregation, eg men go out and go hunting together, women stay nearby gathering, etc.

There has been a lot of recent evidence that this isn't so cut and dry, but rather that we were applying our own modern lens while interpreting the past.

Specifically, newer evidence is showing gender parity or near-parity in participation in large game hunting. For example I recall that there were many graves that were assumed male because they were warrior or hunter graves, containing weapons and the like. But when they went ... (read more)

I made it up! It's to fix some common beginner follower connection problems in lateral, which by now you probably don't have anyways.

Disagree that the mechanistic understanding in unhelpful.

As a person who was starting to give privates in zouk, a thing my students really appreciated was the ability to explain things more mechanistically.

Someone who already UNDERSTANDS what you mean by "grounding" or "leading with your projection" or whatnot only needs to be told those things as a reminder.

Someone who is learning how to do those things will just get confused and frustrated if you keep telling them words that just don't make sense to them yet.

But if you say "Shift your weight slightly for... (read more)

Interpersonal abuse (eg parental, partner, etc) has a similar issue. People like to talk as if the abuser is twirling their mustache in their abuse-scheme. And while this is occasionally the case, I claim that MOST abuse is perpetrated by people with a certain level of good intent. They may truly love their partner and be the only one who is there for them when they need it, BUT they lack the requisite skills to be in a healthy relationship.

Sadly this is often due to a mental illness, or a history of trauma, or not getting to practice these skills growing ... (read more)

Agreed! Everything that I shared is actually from my Soviet Ukrainian family, who used to just call themselves "Russian" as an easily-understood shorthand for Americans who wouldn't have known where "Ukraine" was back then.

I actually think just about anything Eastern European is good for this.

My Ukrainian dad's easy borscht recipe:

Vegetarian Borscht:

You need:
small cabbage (or half large one), I prefer red cabbage, but green is fine also.
1 can of sliced beets, onion, few garlic cloves, one potato, 2 bay leaves, salt/paper.

Pour 6-8 cups of water in a pot ( or fill pot up to half) and turn your stove on..

Once water is getting hot- slice onion on small pieces and add to the water, then start slicing cabbage on small pieces (editor's note- You can also use pre-sliced cabbage from a bag) then add to the water, bring it to the boil, reduce heat so... (read more)

fyi, I am a girl and I also find the "Hot girls excite me!" line to be off-putting and it makes me go ugh.  For me it isn't that it makes me think ogling women is a big hobby of yours, but rather that you mostly value women for their "hotness". And the term "hot" means a specific kind of attractiveness that is very expensive and high effort (as opposed to "cute", "pretty", "attractive", etc). So it means you prefer women who spend a lot of time and effort on their appearances rather than liking women as people. 

There is more reasons it's uncomfortable, but that's my initial 10 cents.

I felt a lot of internal resistance and push back when reading this. I agree that this is NOT WHAT YOU SAID, but I feel like there is already a lot of memery and pressure to let the long term / Mission folks be social free riders and leeches in every other part of their lives and I don't like it. My brain pattern matched this post into that meme space.

Cross-posted from FB:

During the 872 day long Siege of Leningrad, almost a million people died, mostly of starvation. Twelve of those people died while surrounded by food they refused to eat. They were the scientists and staff at the Institute of Plant Study, a seed bank containing the life's work of Nikolai Vavilov.

Vavilov had already starved to death in a Soviet gulag, for holding to Mendelian genetic theory, as opposed to the false-but-government-endorsed Lysenkoism. It wasn't just a principled stand either. Vavilov knew that the truth of genetics could ... (read more)

IDEAS THREAD:

• Team up with friends who already play DnD or write glowfic. Less scalable but can grab the $20k.

• Similarly, if you're unemployed/ have lots of free time just sit down and write it yourself.

• Recruit from a local University. This can be very scalable if you e.g. know the creative writing professor.

• Recruit from roleplaying groups or online roleplaying forums. Requires a bit more filtering than the above.

• Recruit from fiverr or similar. Requires lots of initial filtering but can end up with low price. Create a series of increasingly le

I can't tell if it is purposeful that this is set up in an adversarial/ winner-take-all kind of way. It's really off-putting to me, and seems to encourage everyone being out for themselves, rather than collaboration. Particularly for such an inherently collaborative product. Maybe Nate and Eliezer just expect cooperation to fail?

Anyways, if people DO want to attempt some kind of collaboration... EDIT- Don't join my Facebook group, join plex's Discord linked in the comment below instead

Multiple times on this thread I've seen you make the point about figuring out what responsibility should fall on Geoff, and what should be attributed to his underlings.

I just want to point out that it is a pattern for powerful bad actors to be VERY GOOD at never explicitly giving a command for a bad thing to happen, while still managing to get all their followers on board and doing the bad thing that they only hinted at/ set up incentive structures for, etc.

("So Kids Will Learn" is old enough that I expect lots of it too be mostly debunked growth mindset and the like, but I expect will still hold valuable bits)

Thank you! There is actually a whole bunch of similar books by the Fabers such as "How to Talk So Kids Will Learn" and "How To Talk When Kids Won't Listen."

I plan on listening to a few more in the next year or so.

I really enjoyed this book review and appreciated how well-written it was. It captured my attention and didn't feel like a slog to get through at all.

If I were to make a suggestion, it would be to think of some question you can ask that can spark discussion. After reading this review I feel like I gained knowledge, but don't feel like I have any good handles to comment about it. (to be fair, I tried to add some comment-affordances to my book review and also didn't get any responses, so maybe this advice is not actually great)

This feels like opinion stated as fact.

I have some strong disagreements with what you say, but I recognize that it may be true for some people. It feels like you're trying to universalize your own opinion / experiences.

I'm saying it's $25k PER CYCLE. (granted, this is Bay Area prices, but still)

IVF requires multiple other expenses that aren't the fertilization itself. These other expenses include about $5-6k of injectable drugs that stimulate egg production, and about $6000 for the implantation.

I agree. I think the IVF number is just plain wrong. I'm getting ready to have IVF myself and the total bill will be well over $25k even if we succeed in the first round, which is only 65% likely.

Maybe he researched the cost of "IVF" itself, but didn't think to add on the cost of implantation, injectable drugs, etc. which is a huge percentage of the cost.

I am rather good at not applying judgment to e.g. children or dogs, but relatedly have a very strong intuitive agent /patient split, which I understand doesn't actually match reality.

At the same time, I am rightfully frustrated by the self-serving picking and choosing of when to use an agentic frame v when to use a moral patient frame.

This is great and I want more.

I really resonated with a part of it. Building up a scaffolding of "morality" or "self-righteous Protestant work ethic" both allows me to function in a reasonable way at all, but also has a side effect of feeling strongly morally judgmental towards others. I do think a large underlining part of that is this need-to-distance.

Low-level specific recommendation: Here is a really great calculator for splitting rents for different rooms. You enter in some basic info (total rent, number of rooms), and it continuously adjust room rents and asks individuals what their preferred room would be at different rent splits until it finds a rent split at which everyone would prefer different rooms. You can keep running it a few rounds past that to refine the answer more too. 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/science/rent-division-calculator.html

I know it's a decade old now, but I still love Vi Hart's stuff on YouTube (less complex topics than the ones you listed though)

I am super-duper surprised she says it took a few weeks to teach the Outside button! It took about... 15 minutes to teach my dog to use her Food bell. And then the Outside bell and Treat bells were similarly fast. I don't think button pressing is inherently harder than bell ringing, so that shouldn't make a difference. 

I guess if the dog was starting at zero training it would take two weeks. (Robin already knew how to Target an item, which she learned after learning hand Touch, which she learned as part of the process of teaching how clicker-like trai... (read more)

My dog does this unusual roundhouse butt attack when she's playing with other dogs. It's unusual enough that people comment on it.

I've definitely noticed other dogs start doing it too after playing with her a bunch.

There also SEEMS to be a thing where in e.g. Berkeley the dogs at the park play quietly. I wondered how they taught their dogs not to bark while playing, because this is NOT the case in midwest dog parks. But apparently it's "cultural". If the dogs don't bark at the dog park you frequent, your dog will also not bark.

I'd do this! Right now my dog is my accountability partner, but she adjusts to waking up later herself! :) I'm in Pacific timezone

You can simplify the problem into straight behaviorism.... I'd have to look up which book I read this in (Don't Shoot the Dog, maybe?), but there is a game you can teach dogs, dolphins, etc where you give them a box or something, and only reward them for novel behavior. So you reward them the first time they push it with their nose, but not any subsequent times. This seems to "teach" creativity, in that animals that play this game regularly get good at quickly coming up with unusual actions. 

Note: I'm not saying the CORRECT thing to do is ignore all the substeps, conditions, pre-requisites, etc and go straight to "just reward the thing you want". It was just a cute anecdote that seemed relevant.

But they'd probably have to have years and years of correctly predicted boring missions to make up for the amount of incorrect 99% predictions, right?

Maybe the Star Trek universe has low key solved aging, so even though it doesn't seem like years between episodes, it really is. :P

There's the counter-identity of scorning people who "pick stuff up and put it down again" and calling all sports "sportsball", etc. 

I think it's related to what Julia mentioned about having an identity that's just against some other group. 

Thanks!  (Updating accordingly)

Oh wow. There is an example of a person who used to be certain they didn't want kids and changed their mind later, but felt awkward about it because older people used to be very patronizing about her desire to not have kids and would assure her that she'd change her mind when she got older.

This is me. Practically word for word how I've written about it. I would be certain this was literally me if it weren't for the fact that I'd expect Julia to have mentioned if she were using me as an example. And I know Scott Alexander has talked about really common issu... (read more)

Chapter 2: What the Soldier Mindset Protects

• Comfort, Self esteem, Morale, Pursuasion, Self Esteem, Belonging
   

Chapter 1: Two Types of Thinking

• Motivated Reasoning
  • "Can I believe this?" (searching for evidence something is true) v "Must I believe this?" (searching for evidence something is false)

Introduction: 
 

• Scout Mindset is the ability to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. 
• "Was I in the wrong in that argument?"
• How do we NOT self-decieve?
  • Realize that truth isn't in conflict with your other goals
  • Learn tools that make it easier to see clearly, e.g. the Outsider Test
  • Appreciate the emotional rewards of Scout Mindset

I expect this book to be well-written and have interesting examples, but I expect it will mostly cover ground I'm already familiar with. That's okay with me, the more I go over things, the more they get into my head and new examples help internalize thoughts in  a way factual knowledge doesn't.

I expect I will learn at least one new thing that isn't just an example. 

I expect that after listening to this book these ideas will be more in my head for the next week or month and so I will notice relevant issues and opportunities in my own life, which w... (read more)

Meta Thread

Pre-Reading Thoughts

Amusingly, the example of humans that are scared of dogs most reminded me of my rescue dog who was scared of humans! Common internet advice is to use food to lure the dog closer to humans. That way they can associate new humans with tasty treats. 

While this might work fine for dogs that are just mildly suspicious of strangers, it is actually bad for fearful dogs and reinforces the fear/stress response in the way Scott describes. Not knowing this, we tried the typical route and were surprised when our dog got even more reactive towards people. If she s... (read more)

Consider doing some epistemic spot checks

 The issue here is that the easy, straightforward facts are all legit to the best of my knowledge (e.g. the basic history of the Bronze Age collapse and such), but the points that his thesis is more strongly built upon are not just straightforward fact checks (e.g. Pretending to be a deer helps you hunt deer, and tribes with shamans outperformed tribes without, etc)

It's like you list a bunch of real facts and real knowledge in order to make your point sound legit, and then put a bunch of wild speculation on top... (read more)

His solution is to create an "ecosystem of practices" (such as meditation, journaling, circling and such) that are practiced communally. Sometimes he also calls it "The religion that isn't a religion"

Two episodes / two hours in and he hasn't mentioned any of this that I recall. I feel like the introductory session should at least vaguely mention where he's going to be steering BEFORE you've invested many hours. 

I've just watched two episodes now, and while it's interesting, it's also... throwing up a lot of epistemic red flags for me. 

He goes off on all these interesting tangents, but it feels more like "just so stories". Like he can throw all this information at me to get me to nod along and follow where he's going, without ever actually proving anything, and because there's all these tangents I feel like he can slip stuff in without me noticing. 

I've been listening to him for two hours now, and I still don't quite get what his thesis is, except "There... (read more)

His digression about shamans really getting into the mindset of a deer in order to better track them reminds me of a skill "Pretending to Be" that I think is useful for many skills.

I had previously watched an episode or two of this, and felt pretty meh about it. It felt like he overpromised and underdelivered, and talked a lot without getting to an actual point. I'm trying it again solely on the strength of your recommendation / it seems like you think there's a solid payoff if you stick with it. 

But building flat-pack furniture is ADULT LEGOS! 

Yes, you are correct that the Cheerful Price could be less than my normal wage. But this is not usually the case for me. People aren't usually asking my Cheerful Price to eat some ice cream, or something similarly pleasant. And unfortunately we don't live in a world where my regular wages are above my Cheerful Price. 

I expect most people on LW to be okay being asked their Cheerful Price to have sex with someone. But e.g. even contemplating "Cheerful Price to kill my dog" throws an error and causes large psychic damage.

(Otoh, I fell asleep pondering my Cheerful Price for various random things, and I think it's about $100k for my dog to stay with my ex instead of me)

(Edited: replaced torture thought experiment)

It's sometimes hard for me to figure out exactly where my "cheerful price" is. So when I'm "negotiating" with people I trust, I often list a couple of prices, that are some set of:

• I definitely would not do it at this price (without it being a favor/ social exchange)
• The lowest price I think I would do it at. 
• My Satisfied Price: I am happy to do the thing for you! This is what I normally get paid for similar jobs
• My Cheerful Price: I am excited to do the thing for you! This is more than my average, and I am actively happy about the opportunity!
• My Ecstati