All of epigeios's Comments + Replies

Soft skills are hard. I'm extremely good at learning soft skills. I try as hard as I can to teach one whenever someone desires one, but they're damn near impossible to teach. I've thus far only been successful at teaching someone how to do something related, in a way that their mind can grasp and run with, so that a few years later they will have developed the soft skill "on their own" (At which point, they will be doing exactly as I said exactly how I told them to, and they will tell me about this cool new thing they figured out how to do, an... (read more)

People's inner simulator is almost always more accurate than their explicit models. It's just less precise. The thing about your statement of [if it were more accurate, people would be using it more, and be successful at more things] requires a few initial assumptions to be true. The first is that people are able to use their inner simulator on purpose, which is usually not the case from my observation. The second is that people are able and willing to take the path indicated by their inner simulator when it contrasts with their explicit models, which ... (read more)

RE: your frazzled after-busy state. Yeah, breathing meditation at that time is not only hard, it's kinda pointless. Well, until you get to the point where you can either enter a state of right-brain flow on purpose, or enter a REM-like state on purpose. When you can do those, breath control is a natural part of it.

A trick is to control your breath while you are busy. Every chance you get, especially when heavily focused on something, take a single slow breath, preferably into either your gut or your whole body (but just a slow breath with no direction i... (read more)

Speaking form personal experience, the breathing meditation you did is what spawned the ability to be mindful of your physical state. This is because in order to successfully breathe into various areas of your body, you have to be mindful of that area. It is directly practicing physical awareness.

The fact that you have become aware of subtleties of flight-or-flight responses is extremely good. That's stage 2 of what it is possible to be mindful of.

Stage 3 is emotions. Try purposefully creating emotions. Try listening to music, and enhancing the emotio... (read more)

Well, I hate to say something against your post here, because I quite agree with it all. Except there is one Mind Projection Fallacy of which I question whether it was done on purpose. The fallacy where you are reducing the poem to it's parts.

The majority of poetry is metaphor. All of the specific examples in that poem are metaphors for the feeling of majesty. So to the poet, those three examples are quite the same. The poet's distaste for scientific reduction isn't that everything is explained away, it's that explaining something reduces it's perceived... (read more)

Crap! I'm sorry I didn't see this. I've had a love/hate relationship with LessWrong while I've been getting as far as I can with meditation. a year late, hopefully you get this response so that it may have some use.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/blr/attention_control_is_critical_for/6frz. In this post I describe the steps for learning the prerequisite to Taoist meditation. At the time, I was not able to properly describe Taoist meditation, despite being very familiar with it. I can at least try now.

The prerequisite to Taoist meditation is about practicing bei... (read more)

• Imagine that something is true.
• Observe that it is not true.
• Keep imagining it is true.
• Listen to someone state that it is not true.
• Let the conflict between those two things continue to build up and manifest as a negative emotion directed at the person who stated that it is not true.

An example of imagining that something is true is having the idea that things ought to be a certain way, such as thinking that people ought to be not racist. Observe that people are racist. Continue to think that people ought to be not racist. Hear someone be racist.

The ... (read more)

The training method is called Taoist meditation.

Do this: be aware of yourself. Once you can do this to some extent, do the next step: be aware of your awareness of yourself.

Keep practicing this forever. That is meditation in a nutshell.

A checklist can help as long as it's used to further the practice of being aware. If you're having trouble being aware of yourself, practice being aware of other things first.

Oh, and another trick is that the fastest way to improve is to never go beyond 70% of your ability. One should only do so to gauge one's ability, to better know what 70% is.

At the low end of the mind, you're absolutely right. The options are: take the hit, dodge, hit back, or redirect the punch away, or don't even get near people in the first place. The best of those options is to redirect the punch away, which is very difficult to do.

At the high end of the mind, where extreme layers of subtlety exist, where most people don't even have the ability to be aware of at any time during their life, there is another way: realize that the punch is not directed at you. At that level of depth into the mind, the offendee actually enti... (read more)

The functional role sadness, fear, suffering, and all such emotions plays is the same role pain plays: It is an indicator, telling the mind where the problem is. There are certainly multiple ways to "fix" the problem. In the end, however, the methods that in any way dampen progress are methods that don't actually fix the problem. (The problem is never external)

Roughly 80% of the time, people are offended by things that they don't know they do themselves. That's why it is very important to listen to the emotional pain: to figure that out.

Roughly... (read more)

"being yourself": A metaphor for a feeling which is so far removed from modern language's ability to describe, that it's a local impossibility for all but a tiny portion of the people in the world to taboo it. It's purpose is to illicit the associated feeling in the listener, and not to be used as a descriptive reference. It is a feeling that is so deeply ingrained in 50% of people, that those people don't realize the other 50% of people don't know what it is; and so had never thought to even begin to try to explain it, much less taboo it.

tabooi... (read more)

You're the one skimming credit off the top.

My interpretation of this point is that the person doing the rewarding and punishing is the person doing the predicting.

This hints at the deeper problem, too: that the subconscious reinforcement of these predictions is causing them to continue. the most common reward is that a wrong prediction seems right. For most people, that is a reward in and of itself.

So the real question is: are you going to reward yourself for being wrong for the right reasons? how about being right for the wrong reasons?

It's not status that's the issue, it's the offendee's conception of reality. Status is just the most common (by far) example of this.

Whenever a person has an "image" (subconscious subtle bias) of how things work, without consciously being aware of it, that person's perception of reality is distorted by the image/bias. Then, whenever some input does not fit with the image; either due to someone else asserting their own conflicting image of reality, or due to someone speaking bluntly about a conflicting observation of reality, the biased person su... (read more)

This might be out in left field, but:

Can water be pumped through carbon nanotubes? If so, has anyone tried? If they have, has anyone tried running an electric current through a water-filled nanotube? How about a magnetic current? How about light? How about sound?

Can carbon nanotubes be used as an antenna? If they can be filled with water, could they then be used more effectively as an antenna?

Wait wait wait. A muon beam exists? How does that work? How accurate is it? Does it only shoot out muons, or does it also shoot out other particles?

I've got a lot of questions I just thought of today. I am personally hoping to think of a possible alternative model of quantum physics that doesn't need anything more than the generation 1 fermions and photons, and doesn't need the strong interaction.

• What is the reason for the existence of the theory of the charm quark (or any generation 2-3 quark)? What are some results of experiments that necessitate the existence of a charm quark?
• Which of the known hadrons can be directly observed in any way, as opposed to theorized as a mathematical in-between or

The errors are relevant. So what if the person who mentions an error doesn't have the capacity to deduce the relevancy? It's still possible that someone on here will deduce the relevancy.

Your post, by contrast, as well as Bob3's just above, are making the assumption that the only argument to be found is the one that was stated. Caledonian2 is right, and if you weren't focused on the irrelevancy of his argument, you might have been able to find the relevancy of his point.

Granted, Caledonian2 did his best to find an argument fitting his idea, and the argu... (read more)

It seems to me that diseases would be more likely to spread from robins to ducks than from ducks to robins. The reason I am thinking this is the case is that robins fly around more than ducks, and ducks rest in water. This means that ducks are fairly likely to come in contact with traces of past robins, but robins are unlikely to come in contact with traces of past ducks.

The idea that the spread of disease between species is equally likely not only ignores differences in immunity, as Caledonian2 said; it also assumes direct contact between the species. In... (read more)

Awesome! This is very useful. I now have a perfect way to describe why Taoist meditation is among the most useful things someone in this community can learn to do. And I have tons of experience to back it up.

Mindfulness meditation is the prerequisite for Taoist meditation. And Wikipedia doesn't explain how to practice Mindfulness meditation.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/blr/attention_control_is_critical_for/6frz How to learn how to meditate properly

In short: Yes, you will. This is how to accomplish that goal quickly and efficiently.

That's called learning how to meditate. And yes, it works wonders with cognitive ability and control of cognitive ability. The standard efficient process of learning how to meditate is:

• Focus attention somewhere for as long as possible.
• Move focused attention around from subject to subject, including inside your own body.
• Spread your attention outward from the focused point, making sure to maintain attention on the focused point.
• Scan your body. Just become aware of everything you observe when scanning; don't try to change anything.
• Scan again and again

The left side still has to employ massively parallel process to generate the chirps to the specific purpose.

What makes you say that? In your example, the left brain has 2 inputs, and only needs to find a plausible connection between the two.

Although, in hindsight, You're right. The brain uses many neurons in parallel no matter what or where it is processing.

I will now proceed to twist my words to attempt to better communicate what I mean. In reality, i spoke too hastily, generalized too greatly, and still obviously don't know the correct words to use... (read more)

Simple left-brain vs right-brain. The problem you refer to isn't that hard to fix, it's just that very few people know about it. Reading through the sequences will, in most cases, make people want to exercise their minds in daily life. Eventually, the right brain will activate despite the left-brain dominance of english-speaking culture.

to put it simply. The left brain's job is to process individual points of data in series as a pattern. The right brain's job is to process all points of data in parallel as a chaotic fractal flow.

Granted, most of the s... (read more)

So, first of all

The easiest way to help people learn this skill, I think, would be to teach people:

• Good posture

• How to relax and open their muscles and joints

• How to breath properly

And, the easiest way to teach people this skill, I think, is to instead teach them about this skill. This means that exercises should be somewhat indirect. Exercises should definitely get people to experience the problem instead of getting people to learn the solution, and only make available this solution as an option. Partly because the proposed solution is not the o... (read more)

8) Get people to recognize when other people want them to be more (or less) specific.

9) Get people to recognize when they are being specific about the wrong subject.

Okay, so split into sets of 2 people (or, split into 2 teams, or even dynamic teams could work). Person A asks a simple personal question about person B (such as "do you have a girlfriend?" or "do you have a college degree?" or "do you prefer dogs or cats?"). Person B then tries to answer like the people in the video did, by telling an abstract related story, or by answering a different question contained within or related to the question (like "well, dolphins are really my favorite animal" or "college degrees... (read more)

Most people don't even go as far as to make a hypothesis there. It's arguable that every time someone forms a question, it is the same as forming a hypothesis; purely because questions can be reworded as hypotheses. However, in the case of someone who is just exploring, they would not go so far as to hypothesize.

It's normal for the person to say something like "I wonder if it happens with all sodium compounds" or, "I wonder if there are any sodium compounds that explode as well". But in these cases, there is no basis and no reason to... (read more)

Here's something I'd love to put into an entire article, but can't because my karma's bad (see my other comment on this thread):

Many people make the false assumption that the scientific method starts with the hypothesis. They think: first hypothesize, then observe, then make a theory from the collection of hypotheses.

The reality is quite the opposite. The first point on the scientific method is the observation. Any hypotheses before observation will only diminish the pool of possible observations. Second is building a theory. Along the process, many t... (read more)

If you're having trouble changing, one easy thing I have found to work for me is: Take it upon myself to do the things I would normally do out of habit, and do them on purpose. Take it upon myself to do the things I would normally do as a reaction, and do them independently.

This, for me, sets my mind on the path of being conscious of and in control of what I was previously unable to change. So, I think you should do the opposite of the lesson you've learned from this. I think you should, for a short period of time, purposefully act the way you are current... (read more)

I, personally, tell the difference by paying attention to and observing reality without making any judgments. Then, I compare that with my expectations based on my judgments. If there is a difference, then I am thinking I am interacting instead of interacting.

Over time, I stop making judgments. And in essence, I stop thinking about interacting with the world, and just interact, and see what happens.

The less judgments I make, the more difficult the Turing Test becomes; as it is no longer about meeting my expectations, but instead satisfying my desired le... (read more)

When I was a kid, I didn't have a problem with procrastination. I procrastinated on purpose. Now, I have a problem with procrastination. I did it so much as a kid that I ingrained it into the depths of my mind.

Fortunately, I just now realized this. And now that I know it exists, it's really easy to fix.

My interpretation of the post in this case is: it's not that you're not employing willpower, instead you're not employing personal morality. So, while TORRENT vs BUY fits into the societal ethics view, it does not fit into your personal morality.

From the personal morality perspective, the bad feeling you get is the thing you need willpower to fight against/suppress. You probably also need willpower to fight against/suppress the bad feeling you might be getting from buying the album. These need not be mutually exclusive. Personal morality can be both against torrenting and against spending money unduly.

Name an object that isn't a jar of peanut butter. What did you immediately think of?

An elephant. Due to the fact that the question that's usually asked is about elephants. So I thought of elephants before I finished the sentence

Second, I thought of a jar of peanut butter.

I still haven't consciously thought of another object yet, except just now as I was thinking about what object I might think of, and thought of the spoon I was using to eat my food.