I think the complement sandwich can be useful as a stepping stone to good communication. That said, I think of it as a narrow formulation of a more general (and less precisely defined) approach to conversation that I might point to with phrases like "work with people where they are at" and "be aware of the emotions that your words induce in other people". There was an article on LessWrong that I can't find, arguing that clear communication is worded to pre-emptively avoid likely misunderstandings and misconceptions. The idea I'm pointing to is like that, but concerning the emotional interpretation of your words rather than the literal meaning. I think this can apply just as much to the rationalist community as to any other community (although I haven't had any conversations with rationalists so I don't know for sure).

Like literary and conversational techniques in general, if they are followed as a hard rule then they risk coming across as formulaic and hence inauthentic. However I can imagine that it might be useful to adopt the complement sandwich as a rule until you gain a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanics.

I very much appreciate this post, because it strongly resonates with my own experience of laziness and willpower. Reading this post feels less like learning something new and more like an important reminder.

This is not quite accurate. You can't uniformly pick a random rational number from 0 to 1, because there are countably many such numbers, and any probability distribution you assign will have to add up to 1. Every probability distribution on this set assigns a nonzero probability to every number.

You can have a uniform distribution on an uncountable set, such as the real numbers between 0 and 1, but since you can't pick an arbitrary element of an uncountable set in the real world this is theoretical rather than a real-world issue.

As far as I know, any mathematical case in which something with probability 0 can happen does not actually occur in the real world in a way that we can observe.

On the other hand, the more you get accustomed to a pleasurable stimulus, the less pleasure you receive from it over time (hedonic adaptation). Since this happens to both positive and negative emotions, it seems to me that there is a kind of symmetry here. To me this suggests that decreasing prediction error results in more neutral emotional states rather than pleasant states.

I disagree that all prediction error equates to suffering. When you step into a warm shower you experience prediction error just as much as if you step into a cold shower, but I don't think the initial experience of a warm shower contains any discomfort for most people, whereas I expect the cold shower usually does.

Furthermore, far more prediction error is experienced in life than suffering. Simply going for a walk leads to a continuous stream of prediction error, most of which people feel pretty neutral about.

This reminds me of a lot of discussions I've had with people where we seem to be talking past each other, but can't quite pin down what the disagreement is.

Usually we just end up talking about something else instead that we both seem to derive value from.

It seems to me that the constraints of reality are implicit. I don't think "it can be done by a human" is satisfied by a method requiring time travel with a very specific form of paradox resolution. It sounds like you're arguing that the Church-Turing thesis is simply worded ambiguously.

It looks Deutschian CTCs are similar to a computer that can produce all possible outputs in different realities, then selectively destroy the realities that don't solve the problem. It's not surprising that you could solve the halting problem in such a framework.

Our symbolic conception of numbers is already logarithmic, as order of magnitude corresponds to the number of digits. I think an estimate of a product based on an imaginary slide rule would be roughly equivalent to estimating based on the number of digits and the first digit.

Similar to point 2: I find that reading a book in the morning helps my mood. Particularly a physical fiction book.