I've seen a lot of people on LW use tools like Predictionbook or Fatebook for tracking personal predictions in their daily life. However, I wasn't able to find any information on specific reasons to do that. Fatebook lists a few vague points on its about page, but they aren't really...
The default instructions “focus on your breath and observe your mind, gently letting go of distractions” are based on Vipassana — the same Vipassana that is bound to produce the Dark Night if you do it.
It's based on Vipassana, but as you say yourself at the beginning of the post, it isn't the authentic experience. What makes you think that focusing on your breath and observing your mind is capable of producing the same effect as full Vipassana practice? To me it feels like that would require much more effort and/or experience than just "being mindful" for an hour a day.
Seems like it's fixed now
As a result, both going down and staying there often require consistent discipline, and the whole thing is rather unforgiving in terms of slip-ups, social occasions, and such.
I personally found it very helpful to use a "budget"-style calorie counter - ie. instead of just having a 2100kcal goal every day, you can eat more on some day and then your next day goal will be lower to keep the average at 2100 (and vice versa - if you eat less on a given day, you'll be able to eat more later). This gave me a lot of freedom to not worry about eating too much at social occasions or just on bad days, while still keeping the weight loss results consistent.
Of course though, as with any weight loss method, this will really vary from person to person. I understand that for some people this might not be helpful or maybe may even be detrimental.
What is your threshold for a "thought" worth writing down? Most of the time there's some sort of "static noise" of music or just random word/phrase fragments unconsciously circling in my head, I assume you didn't notice and write down all of those? So what was your criteria for what you consider a thought?
This is not what the post talks about, but going outside without a phone is getting harder and harder for practical reasons because more and more things depend on you having a phone.
For example, my university dorm used annoying proprietary NFC locks that can only be opened with a mobile app. If I don't take my phone with me when going outside, I won't be able to go home.
There's an increasing number of things that just expect you to have access to a mobile phone at all times.
That's weird to hear from Harris, considering that he is a very strong proponent of the idea that all of our actions are pre-determined by past conditions of our life and we can never know our own true reason for doing something. Yes, Islamic terrorists do say their motivations, but how can Harris claim they don't have those motivations for geopolitical or whatever other reasons?
From the AI's messages seen in the video it's possible that maybe he provided those instruction as user prompt instead of a system prompt. I wonder if the same thing would've happened if they were given as the system prompt instead.
Furthermore, Proton claims to keep no logs of your activity and has its no-logs implementation independently audited.
Yeah, of course, all trustworthy VPNs will do that, and I do generally believe that Proton actually doesn't keep your traffic logs. It's just that a lot of other VPN companies, like Nord or ExpressVPN, have very aggressive online marketing campaigns where they push false claims, like the claim that using a VPN can make you completely anonymous or even somehow protect you from getting hacked. This leads to most people's understanding of VPNs being "it's an app that changes my Netflix country and protects me from all evil".
So I think it's good to clarify that there is still trust involved in using a VPN, even if that trust is unlikely to be broken.
I was a little put off by the mention of "password managers" in the beginning since that's handling over the keys of your privacy to external powers
Bitwarden encrypts all data on-device with a key derived from your master password. The plaintext of your passwords is never sent to their servers. See their security whitepaper for a good detailed explanation.
Your guide recommends Brave - do you know that Brave uses Google and Cloudflare and that it has built-in telemetry?
The guide also recommends Arkenfox/Librewolf, and there is a checklist on how to disable all optional telemetry in Brave. I'm not really sure what you mean by Brave "using Google and Cloudflare".
I've seen a lot of people on LW use tools like Predictionbook or Fatebook for tracking personal predictions in their daily life. However, I wasn't able to find any information on specific reasons to do that. Fatebook lists a few vague points on its about page, but they aren't really elaborated on.
Is personal prediction tracking just a more interesting version of a calibration test? So you just track your predictions about your life and then look at the calibration graph to check if you're over- or underconfident? Or are there any other benefits?
The aforementioned Fatebook page lists "make better decisions" and "communicate more clearly". I can see how phrasing your beliefs as probabilities instead of "yes/no" questions could help with that - but how does prediction tracking in particular help with it?
At least their website now explains what their do. It took me a very long time to understand what OpenPhil does and where they get the money from. Now it's all finally explained on the front page.