How to build a stockpile of testosterone for HRT, as a buffer in case of emergency:
Duncan has just replied on Facebook to my request for descriptions of what each person on his list does. He says it's fine to copy his reply over here.
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Julia Galef: something like, a science reporter whose hobby side project is doing science reporting for middle schoolers, and it’s in fact good and engaging and not stupid and boring. Wholesomeness, clarity, a tendency to correctly predict which parts of the explanation will break down for the audience and a corresponding slow and careful focus on those sections. Not unrelatedly: a sort of statesmanlike, re...
i'm sorry not to be engaging with the content of the post here; hopefully others have that covered. but i just wanna say, man this is so well written! at the sentence and paragraph level especially, i find it inspiring. it makes me wanna write more like i'm drunk and dgaf, though i doubt that exact thing would actually suffice to allow me to hit a similar stylistic target.
(the rest of this comment is gonna be largely for me and my own development, but maybe you'll like reading it anyway.)
i think you do a bunch of stuff that current me is too chicken to try...
I would dissuade no one from writing drunk, and I'm confident that you too can say that people are penguins! But I'm sorry to report that personally I don't do it by drinking but rather writing a much longer version with all those kinds of clarifications included and then obsessively editing it down.
A note on illustrations:
Somebody brought up that their friend assumed my illustrations are AI generated. So I want to clarify: With the exception of the two dancers in "Spaciousness In Partner Dance" (AI generated) and the spider web in "On Realness" (commissioned from Theresa Strohl, my mother), I've painted all the illustrations by hand myself. Duncan Sabien has edited them slightly to make them work with LW's site background.
I ordinarily do not allow discussions of Buddhism on my posts because I hate moderating them. I haven't worked out what exactly it is about Buddhism, but it seems to cause things to go wonky in a way that's sort of similar to politics.
Also, my way of thinking and writing and doing things in general seems to bring out a lot of people who want to talk about Buddhism, and I want my work discussed mostly on its own terms, without it being immediately embroiled in whatever thing it is that tends to happen when people start talking about Buddhism.
One of my moderation rules forbids discussion of Buddhism by default.
Since there was a big old section on meditation in this post, and the type of meditation I described is pretty specifically shikantaza from Soto Zen, I'm designating this here thread as the place where people can talk about Buddhism-related stuff if they want to, just this once, as a treat.
I don't promise to participate. My other moderation rules still apply.
This post helped me relate to my own work better. I feel less confused about what's going on with the differences between my own working pace and the pace of many around me. I am obviously more like a 10,000 day monk than a 10 day monk, and I should think and plan accordingly.
Partly because I read this post, I spend frewer resources frantically trying to show off a Marketable Product(TM) as quickly as possible ("How can I make a Unit out of this for the Workshop next month?"), and I spend more resources aiming for the progress I actually think would ...
(This is a review of the entire sequence.)
On the day when I first conceived of this sequence, my room was covered in giant graph paper sticky notes. The walls, the windows, the dressers, the floor. Sticky pads everywhere, and every one of them packed with word clouds and doodles in messy bold marker.
My world is rich. The grain of the wood on the desk in front of me, the slightly raw sensation inside my nostrils that brightens each time I inhale, the pressure of my search for words as I write that rises up through my chest and makes my brain feel like it’s ...
if you wanna second-guess yourself even harder,
1) look around the room and attempt to produce three instances of something resembling tiny quiet confusion (or louder than that if it's available)
2) try to precisely describe the difference between surprise and confusion
3) sketch a taxonomy of confusing experiences and then ask yourself what you might be missing
I feel embarrassed that I'm just now reading this. >_< ' (Ray knows but: I'm the aforementioned "Brienne Yudkowsky", my name's just different now.) I enjoyed it; it's really interesting and valuable to see my thoughts contextualized from the outside and narrativized. It's usually hard for me to see forests when I'm surrounded by trees.
> There are very few opportunities to practice noticing confusion.
I'm really curious how you relate to this claim six years later.
I wrote up "How To Think Of Things" for CFAR a while back. I probably wanna at least edit it some before making it a top level post, but I'm curious what you think of it.
"What did pregnancy do to your cognition?"
(Interested in responses to this from other people who have been pregnant, but here's my own answer.)
I think the main thing pregnancy seemed to do to my mind was reduce my associative speed. This had all kinds of effects on the rest of my cognition and experience, because it's a capacity I rely on almost constantly, but I think this was the central mechanism.
I'm not sure I have my concepts carved up right here, but by "associative speed" I mean "the thing that lets your thoughts go far and fast during a babble chal...
>They're... free? Nothing bad happens when you generate them. You ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
I understood BenWr to be suggesting this was false. His pruner is rejecting "bad ideas" for a reason, and perhaps it is a good reason; perhaps bad things do happen if he deliberately lets in more "bad ideas".
If that were true for people in general, or for a significant minority of people, I'd definitely want to understand what the bad thing is, how it works, whether "having bad ideas" tends to be good on net anyway, and ho...
I started out with the procedure I describe here, as a warmup. I got to number 11 in the first three minutes, then when I started the second half of the procedure I just kept going.
This list took me about 30 minutes, so it's probably not the same as "the best 50 ideas I can come up with in an hour". If I were going to do another 30 minutes to make a better list, I think I'd highlight my favorite ideas so far, ask myself what it was like to come up with those ones in particular, and try to adopt more of whatever mental postures those are for the rest ...
I think it was something like three to five out of 75 people (so like 5%).
Two of the three people I'm thinking of didn't tell me all that much detail. Most of my model of what's going on at least some of the time comes from talking in more depth with just one of them. That's nowhere near enough information to make any remotely confident generalized claims; but it did seem like enough to include a note of caution.
I think most of the people likely to run into this kind of trouble are autistic. According to my model (which is roughly the "weak central coheren...
My unedited notes while reading this post, including an initial exercise log:
"Your cognition is much more powerful than just the part you have conscious access to, and it's crucial to make good use of it."
heck yeah
"A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks."
"More creativity and good ideas just "popping into your head"."
"Once you realize exactly what is...
One of my "responsible use" notes in "How To Observe Abstract Objects" seems directly relevant here:
...However, a few people seem to have an overall cognitive strategy that crucially depends on not looking at things too closely (or something like that), and this is actively bad for some of them. If you try this for a minute and hate it, especially in an “I feel like I’m going crazy” kind of way, I do not recommend continuing. Go touch some grass instead. I’ve never seen this cause damage in just a few minutes (or at all, as far as I can tell), but I do think
I'm interested in a couple of things from people who have read the Sequences (or AI to Zombies) and have thought a lot about applied rationality.
1) I would like to hear what you think it might be especially valuable to study in this way. Which Sequence posts (or other existing resources) seem really important, but also lack crucial info about what exactly the concrete skill is or how to gain it? Also, what parts of rationality seem important to you but just do not seem to have been explored much from an application perspective? What do you think are ...
I've recently written up an overview of my naturalism project, including where it's been and where it's headed. I've tried this a few times, but this is the first time I'm actually pretty happy with the result. So I thought I'd share it.
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In the upcoming year, I intend to execute Part Three of my naturalism publication project.
(Briefly: What is naturalism?
Naturalism is an investigative method that focuses attention on the points in daily life where subjective experience intersects with crucial information. It brings reflective awareness to experiences...
The grinding inevitability is not a pressure on you from the outside, but a pressure from you, towards the world. This type of determination is the feeling of being an agent with desires and preferences. You are the unstoppable force, moving towards the things you care about, not because you have to but simply because that’s what it means to care.
Word.
I had a baby on June 20th. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff about what it was like for me to give birth at home without pain medication. I've just published it all to my website, along with photos and videos.
CN: If you click on "words", you won't see anybody naked. If you click on "photos" or "videos", you will see me very extra naked.
The "words" section includes a birth story, followed by a Q&A section with things like "What do contractions feel like?", "How did you handle the pain?", and "How did you think about labor, going into it?". Ther...
More on the moth:
Members of this particular species can be either nocturnal or diurnal. I noticed my confusion when I saw one pollinating a lilac in bright moonlight, because I'd never seen a hummingbird at night before. That's what prompted me to take a closer look; up close it was clearly not a bird at all, but a bug!
For many years, I thought, "The first time I saw a sphinx moth, I thought it was a hummingbird." I've only recently realized that I have no idea how many moths I mistook for hummingbirds before that point. I may have seen them dozens of times during the day and never thought twice about it.
I am curious whether reading or skimming the Wikipedia articles on "naturalistic observation" and "natural history" helps at all with getting where I'm coming from.
I certainly don't claim it was the best possible term to choose, but to me it seems extremely precise and accurate (though ambiguous, and i recognize that ppl round these parts are more familiar with philosophical naturalism qua ontological claim). In ecology, entomology, etc., the connotations go way beyond liking natural stuff, and suggest an orientation toward research topics and a correspond...
Oh perhaps some of the confusion with this post in particular is coming from the fact that I tried to contrast three different frameworks for experimentation. Sometimes when people contrast different frameworks, they are doing that because they want to convince the reader that one of them is better than the others. I'm definitely not trying to do that here! I contrasted three experimental frameworks because in order to take the actions that are part of the overall naturalist investigative method, it's important to deliberately avoid falling into either of the other two near-by frames. I was trying to describe the mindset that the actions comprising naturalist experimentation come from.
Thanks @Raemon. I agree with all of that.
>I don't know anyone who recommends "don't put much effort into understanding, just try stuff and see if it works", so I didn't expect that was the baseline that this sequence is arguing against.
@Dagon, I caution you that if you read this sequence (or the intro one) with the assumption that it's primarily trying to argue something, you'll probably be at risk of badly misinterpreting me.
I have a story that you're looking for and evaluating arguments here because you don't know what naturalism is or why it might be...
Related: Intro to Naturalism and especially The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism (still coming out, a few posts not yet published).
> I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally
K so let's start with, "Is it true that I identify as a trans man?" But in fact I'll look at the slightly different question, "Is it true that I identify as a man?", because I think that probably gets more quickly to the heart of the matter. It's at least clear that I do not identify as a cis man.
I think there's probably some ambiguity in the way "identify" is used that makes this a little hard for me to answer.
On the one hand, there's how I present myself to other people. I ...
Thank you for this comment. It's an extraordinarily perceptive, candid, and thorough look into a set of experiences few are familiar with, and gave me a great deal to chew on. I very much admire your commitment to becoming a parent despite the complexity of your position—good luck with it all, and thanks again for sharing your experience.
Yes, I think that's a good guess about one of the things that goes wrong. It's also, I think, almost exactly the thing that makes my writing especially valuable and nearly unique for the people who benefit a lot from it. The more of this kind of thing I have in a piece, the more the people who appreciate it really appreciate it, 'cause it's like I'm actually looking at things and helping their minds get the hang of actually looking at things, and mostly people just don't do that in writing, outside of maybe some poetry. But I think it's really super duper ...
TBC the main thing that prompted me to comment here was
>The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft.
I think that pretty few people have actually known a trans guy or nonbinary person who was out while pregnant. It's a pretty socially uncomfortable situation, and one that sort of points a microscope at many things about being trans. Maybe even among the relatively few of us w...
Hi! I'm not sure where exactly in this thread to jump in, so I'm just doing it here.
I like this thread! It's definitely one of my favorite discussions about gender between people with pretty different perspectives. I also like the OP; I found it to be surprisingly clear and grounded, and to point at some places where I am pretty confused myself.
>Originally you said that my post lacked an "understanding of the experiences of trans people" and I'm still eager to learn more! What am I missing exactly and what sources would you recommend I read?
I'm taking a...
>attempt to help people with something like 'generating the true hypotheses' rather than 'evaluating the hypotheses that I already have'. Or 'how to do ontological updates well and on-purpose'.
To me this seems like an accurate and beautifully succinct description.