All of c_edwards's Comments + Replies

It seems like the relevance would be if the technologically supplied superstimulus replaced a function previously supplied solely through partner relationships. The following chain of examples involving video games doesn't seem directly relevant, unless before the advent of video games, people played board games exclusively with their romantic partners.

There's really two independent things, though.

a) How to not be single/how to get someone to date you. b) How to find the person(s) and build/maintain the kind of relationship(s) that you want for the rest of your life (/the forseeable future).

In my experience, (a) is much easier than (b). The articles address (b), not (a).

Just pulled myself away from some of his other stuff. So much good stuff. At some point I need to compare his take on AI with the lw articles. So much to read, so little time.

(that said, at least in the fields I'm familiar with, the sabbatical is supposed to be a working holiday and a chance to start a new project in your own field, instead of try something fairly different)

If you contribute to a charity that increases by one part in a trillion the probability of mankind surviving the next century and >>if conditional on this survival mankind will colonize the universe and create a trillion times a trillion sentient lifeforms then >>your donation will on average save a trillion lives.

Alternately, if you do work that increases by one part in a trillion the probability of mankind surviving the next century...

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I think there is a lot of value in intelligent charity, but it's a mistake to assume that all car... (read more)

I find that actually scheduling my task on a calendar makes it a lot easier to trust myself. If it's on the calendar, I'm going to see it again, which means that my various sub modules can shout at me if I don't address it.

I'll have to try the offline training though - hadn't heard of doing that before.

Thank you for the advice - something I've already had in the works. My understanding is that typically diabetes-caused hypoglycemia is usually helped (and not harmed) by the consumption of simple sugars? One of the defining characteristics of my condition is that simple sugars make things worse, especially when I'm already experiencing the symptoms of hypoglycemia.

Agreed. "hypoglycemia" is really the symptom, not the cause.

What I have appears to be a genetic disorder (my father and his father had it) that doesn't seem to be associated with any other health impacts. I recently realized that I should probably actually get the specifics pinned down, and that's something I'm going to work on in the future.

My understanding (through my father, who had his hypoglycemia tested when he was younger) is that my pancreas overreacts, putting out more insulin than is necessary for any given blood sugar level. It's par... (read more)

Thanks for all the recipes!

I could probably stand to lose a few pounds, but not to much more than that - I wasn't really aiming to change my weight with my diet. My BMR is 2025.04, apparently. My understanding, though, is that exercising can increase your metabolic rate even after you're done? I've been working to implement a workout regime based on http://lesswrong.com/lw/juc/optimal_exercise/, and am lifting weights or doing interval cardio 4-6 days per week.

I don't actually track how many calories I'm eating in a day - it would probably be a good thing to do.

I've definitely made the same mistake before. More than once. Which is why I felt confident enough on this to offer a correction.

I'm probably being overly anal here, but this something I work with on a professional basis. Preface: when I'm talking about 'fitness', I mean the (slightly simplified) biological definition of the term, which means "number of offspring you have before you die"

I think what the OP means is that conditions which allow rapid population growth are conditions which reduce the >natural selection pressure.

This doesn't need to be true at all - see below.

An extreme version of this is the observation that if everyone survives and breeds, there is

Typically with the evolution of pathogens, we see a trade-off between the ability of a pathogen to spread ("virulence") and the ability of the pathogen to keep the host alive (although there's definitely a lot of variation depending on the life history of the pathogen and the behavior of the host). Overall pathogen fitness (for between-host dynamics - it gets more complicated if the pathogen is competing with other pathogens within the host) is based on (virulence) x (number of other hosts that infected host contacts). So increasing host lifespan... (read more)

Rapid population growth decreases the efficiency of purifying selection.

I don't think that's true, unless we're thinking about "efficiency" in different ways.

In general we think of selection in terms of gene frequencies, not raw abundance. Which means that all that is relevant is relative fitness, and if your fitness advantage remains the same, doubling everyone's reproduction rate doesn't change the force of selection.

Unless you're talking about the time until a deleterious, entirely recessive allele goes extinct? Since in that case drift i... (read more)

I probably should try adding soylent orange to my overall plan. Some part of me is uncomfortable with the idea of meal replacement shakes, but I don't think that's a rational feeling.

The only rational argument against it that I can think of is the same argument against repeating the same meal every day - the lack of diet diversity. RomeoStevens seems to have found no intermediate-term health issues on a mainly-soylent-orange diet, but additionally if I'm using soylent orange as only a part of my diet, I'm still going to have a decent mix of food sources.

Time to dust off the blender.

The Lactase is only there because of your lactose intolerance, right? It's not important for any other reason?

Absolutely worth mentioning. They're something I'm interested in looking into, but as you say the pricing is a fair bit higher, and at the moment I'd prefer to keep costs lower.

What I'm seeing is $85 for 6 packs of 2000 calories. Which means $14/day for a person consuming 2000 calories per day. I am a large male with an active metabolism who is attempting to exercise on a regular basis - I haven't counted it up, but I'm probably closer to 3000 calories, which means $20/day. Still great compared to other prepared food options, but not the best option ... (read more)

Thank you! Apparently this is fairly common knowledge (when I mentioned this to several friends they thought it was obvious). But I hadn't been aware, and that could have been very unpleasant.

I'm going to switch "tuna" to "canned salmon" in my post, and I'm trying out canned salmon today. Interestingly, when on sale there's not much difference in price between canned tuna and canned salmon, at least where I live.

Fantastic explanation, and now I have another book to read eventually. Thanks!

Swapped quick for fast. Thanks for pointing that out!

On whey protein - I was exposed to a lot of unverified health information by an ex. Much of that information came from a group of sources that take a conspiracy-theory approach to nutrition research (there's a big food industry that controls what gets published, and a lack of evidence for or any evidence against fact X is because of the food industry!). This is not to say that the facts I was exposed to were wrong, but rather that I need to verify them. So according to her, whey protein was bad. A qu... (read more)

Fantastic point. I'm blessed with fairly simple tastes when it comes to food, and I'm fine with some of my meals being fairly bland (pasta salad, for example, or spinach salads). But when it's easy and healthy, there's no reason not to make the food taste better.

Sidenote: the longevity article points out that garlic is linked to longer lifespans. So seasoning with garlic both increases flavor and health.

I think there might be some ambiguity with the "sidekick" thing. I understand framing this as a hero and side-kick dynamic, but I think it might be easier to create a mental model of a team with some people playing more of a support role. [For consistency with other posts, I'm going to largely phrase things in terms of hero and sidekick] Either way, though, I see two general way things can go, one healthy and one unhealthy.

"I am going to do whatever I can to help this hero, no matter what" is a version of side-kicking I see a lot in b... (read more)

This seems like a very good idea, but I'm not sure that it fills the same role as the traditional Pomodoro (grain of salt: still new to Pomodoro).

One of the problems that I find when programming (and a lot of other tasks, really) is that it's easy to get wrapped up in "how do I implement this?" instead of "What do I need to implement to achieve my goal?". This is especially problematic when it becomes even finer scaled - "I need to understand/rework this one little part because maybe it's causing the current bug/error" instea... (read more)

Found another helpful addition to the gmail part of the system - install google lab "Multiple Inboxes", and add an inbox for "Action" and an inbox for "Waiting" (or whatever labels you use for those categories). I set mine to show below the main inbox. So now whenever I go to gmail, I see my inbox, whatever "action" emails I need to deal with, and whatever emails I'm waiting for a response on. It helps make sure I don't forget about my "processed" emails.

What modifications? I really like the pomodoro t

Thank you for such a comprehensive (and immediately useable) guide. I just thought I would throw out one of my favorite aspects of Gmail - shortcut keys. You can turn them on through [gear symbol] > Settings > General > Keyboard shortcuts. I'd also recommend turning on Auto-advance (also in Settings > General, I like it at "Go to the Previous (older) conversation"). [EDIT: to enable Auto-advance, I believe you need to first enable the lab in [gear symbol]>Settings>Labs>Auto-advance]

With these two things on, the actual proc... (read more)