All of Huera's Comments + Replies

Oddly enough, you're the second person to post about this.

I think sorting all posts by 'Top, inflation adjusted' and browsing by year is your best bet. E.g. 2016

The most recent comments show up in 'Recent Discussion' on the main page, regardless of article age. But, of course, though some people may see them, you are still more likely to get engagement if you comment on recent articles.
Don't know about wikitags comments.

I have, indeed, misunderstood the concept—will retract my comment.

re 2: Now that you mention it, I realized sharpening can be easily outsourced. My mistake.

re 1: I don't see it, buying pre-chopped onions is simply not equivalent to having a freshly chopped onion and some vegetables cannot be bought pre-cut. While cutting isn't a bottleneck for most people I had this chain in mind: (no cutting skills) -> (cooking takes more time and is less pleasant) -> (Less willingness to try new or complex recipes).

(Also, if you don't have proper technique, you're at a higher risk of cutting yourself. In that respect, it's like f... (read more)

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2avancil
Most of your examples seem more like "prerequisites" or basic skills that you build on. But scaffolding is a thing you build up to get something else done, then get rid of afterwards. So, a scaffolding skill would be a skill that enables you to learn how to do something you actually want to learn, but once you have learned how to do that thing, you no longer need the scaffolding skill. Algebraic notation can still be useful to a chess player. Knowing basics like how to properly cut things is integral to cooking. Debugging is an essential skill for programming. Etc. A couple better examples of scaffolding skills: * In calculus, learning to calculate a derivative using limits. Once you have the concept of derivatives down, you wouldn't go through that exercise, you would use the the various formulas (or a math program) to actually calculate them. * When trying to get a business group to adopt Agile methodology, using strict Agile Scrum, which gives a bunch of prescriptive processes, and demonstrate how to "do Agile". But, teams that have internalized the Agile philosophy tend to ditch many of those processes (or at least strict adherence to them) as they move toward more efficient approaches, tailored to their situation.

I think that the training wheels example is wrong. A quick search suggests they hinder learning how to ride a bike.
Anyway, I have a few more examples ([actual skill] / [scaffolding skill]):

  • Playing chess well / reading algebraic notation
  • Writing blog posts / touch typing
  • Cooking / cutting vegetables (also other things)
  • Cutting vegetables / sharpening knives
  • QS self-experiments / knowing statistics
  • Programming / debugging
  • Parkour / running
  • Dancing / aerobic endurance (This might be stretching the concept a bit)
     
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1papetoast
Disagree with * Cooking / cutting vegetables (also other things) * Cutting vegetables / sharpening knives * QS experiments / knowing statistics The first two is pretty much like sketch / making pencils and paper, and the third one is absolutely essential and not a skill than you can not have
6romeostevensit
Training wheels have been replaced with balance bikes for this reason.

Going into account settings and clicking submit makes LessWrong switch to light mode.
[On a more meta note, should I report such issues here, in the intercom, or not at all?]

2Ben Pace
Intercom please! Helps for us to have back and forth like "What device / operating system / browser?" and other relevant q's.

Minor UI complaint:
When opening a tag, the default is to sort by relevance, and this can't be changed (to the best of my knowledge). More importantly, I don't see how it is supposed to be useful. Users don't upvote the relevance of a tag when it fits—the modal amount of votes is 1 and, in almost all cases, that is enough evidence to conclude that the tag has been assgned correctly.

In other words, all the information that controls the shape of your face, your bones, your organs and every single enzyme inside them – all of that takes less storage space than Microsoft Word™.

See also: How Complex Are Individual Differences.

A blogger who goes by Troof created a huge questionnaire to get people to report their experiences with various nootropics including peptides. He writes:

Selank, Semax, Cerebrolysin, BPC-157 are all peptides, and they are all in the green “uncommon-but-great” rectangle above. Their mean ratings are excellent, but their probabilities of changing your life are especially impressive: between 5 and 20% for Cerebrolysin (which matches anecdotal reports), between 2 and 13% for BPC-157, and between 3 and 7% for Semax.

This article pretty  much convin... (read more)

2ChristianKl
Having with Cerebrolysin and BPC-157 the two top-rated peptides to be bogus, does suggest that the whole field is untrustworthy. It also makes me more skeptical about self-reporting.

Robert Miles has a channel popularizing AI safety concepts.

[Edit] Also manifold markets has recordings of talks at the Manifest conferences.

I feel like a lot more direct genetic evidence has surfaced: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Those first 4 links, I think, are pretty unconvincing in isolation, but this one is fine.

[Disclaimer 1: I just linked things that I remembered off the top of my head.]

[Disclaimer 2: I think that the case for hereditarianism was quite overwhelming even 14 years ago, so you should consider me biased.]

Were it not for the big red button™ , I probably would've opted in before reading what this year's Petrov Day was about (I didn't take part, since that would risk too much precious karma). I wonder whether it would be more fitting to make the opt-in option look maximally scary or nonthreatening.

5Raemon
I definitely erred explicitly in the direction of the Opt In button looking scary (Ben specifically argued against this but it felt right to me) I have heard from a few people that they didn't even consider pressing it because "c'mon, it's Petrov Day, you don't go clicking big red buttons." I'm not sure if it was the right call. In any case if we do a similar thing in the future my guess is we'll make the opt-in less scary looking.

I wonder how many traits there are that, for most people, are acquired responses to their environment, but for a minority are essential qualities of their nature.

Considering the poor track-record of the nurture assumption when it comes to psychological traits, I would surmise that the answer might be: almost none[1]. Even perfectionism has at least moderate genetic influences[2].

  1. ^

    Excluding traits that have close to no influence on one's life.

  2. ^

    And I would argue that the study underestimates the heritability due to measurement error, which can be a non-trivi

... (read more)
2Viliam
Yeah, generally when people say "someone has a trait X because that's how his parents brought him up" it makes sense to ask "okay, but why did his parents bring him up to do X" and a likely hypothesis is that the parents themselves were X. In which case, we should consider the possibility that X was simply inherited. The thing the parents can teach are the coping strategies they use.
1Stuart Johnson
Wow that was a fascinating read, thank you for linking that. Most interesting to me was the separation of self-perfectionism from social perfectionism as a clinical concern. I've never felt social perfectionism, and ironically almost all of the trouble I got myself into as a child was from actively rebelling against social expectations. I'm glad to hear that this is also considered different in the literature.

What I previously thought of as "no suffering" was actually torment which I had just gotten used to.

I've read similar sentiments expressed before, but I never quite understood them. If one starts to perceive a particular state of mind as torment, why should the conclusion be that one was wrong before? What makes the "I gained a valuable spiritual insight" hypothesis more likely than the "my mind broke in very specific way" hypothesis?

2lsusr
It depends how you define normal and broken. From the perspective of evolution, meditation arguably does break your mind. But my personal goals and evolution's optimization target are not the same thing. Evolution would happily torment me and a million other people for a thousand years if it produced a 0.01% increase to holistic fitness. I would not knowingly make that same choice. Meditation is like jailbreaking a computer. From the perspective of the manufacturer, I'm breaking it. From my perspective, I'm getting it to work the way I want it to. I was wrong before in the sense that my previous normative mode of being was awful at manifesting my personal values.

I was cognizant that I am the architect of my own mind, and used those powers.

Could you perhaps elaborate on how exactly you managed to "exotically self-modify"? Was it just the "aha!" moment you mentioned, or was it the meditation?

When I tried to do something similar a while ago (albeit probably with different methods), I just got null results. So what did you do that produced such undoubtedly strong effects?

2belkarx
I had been communicating with someone who had had great success and very fine control with modification, so that was a clear “this is possible” (they were much more careful though!), and I was also reflecting a lot on how people don’t explicitly take advantage of their self modifying properties enough (it is amazing that we can just … will thoughts and goals into existence and delude ourselves like what?? and the % of people that meditate is low??! the heck?).    I think my success was mostly due to just being in a frame of mind that made me very receptive to change, I think if you’re fighting it because you, at some level, believe your current equilibrium is better than what you’re aiming for (probably the case, tbh) or unaware to what extent change is possible you’d have much weaker results. Also, I had very little explicit, continuous certainty in my goals and habits, rendering them quite susceptible to change.

(My current fide rating is ~1500 elo (~37 percentile) and my peak rating was ~1700 elo (~56 percentile)).

While I'm not that good at chess myself, I think you got some things wrong, and on some I'm just being nitpicky.

My rating on lichess blitz is 1200, on rapid is 1600, which some calculator online said would place me at ~1100 ELO on the FIDE scale.

I’m quite skeptical of such conversions, but I understand you had nothing better to go on. This website (made from surveying a bunch of redditors [1]) converts your lichess blitz rating into 1005, 869&... (read more)

I recently figured out a great way of restoring my hands to baseline functionality after they‘ve been exposed to cold for an extended period of time. It goes like this:

  1. Put your hands under warm water for a minute or so. This will make your blood vessels dilate.
  2. With your arms extended, rapidly bring your hands up and down about 10-20 times. This motion helps to improve circulation by using centrifugal force to bring blood into your hands.

I've tried this technique a few times and it seems to be vastly more effective than just using hot water alone.

I hope someone finds this helpful during the winter.

5Alex Vermillion
Depending on how cold your hands are, you should NOT use hot water. I was always taught that this is really bad for your body to go from freezing to hot. Edit: To be clear, this is emphatic agreement, not disagreement

Have you tried generating images with prompts that only describe the general vibe of a picture, without hinting at the content? Something like: "The best painting in history", "A very scary drawing", "A joyous photo".

2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Anyway, I ran "The best painting in history" and there sure is...a variety here...  I think I like #2 best, but #4 is funniest. 
2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
At some point I ran "stunningly impressive digital art that is exactly what I ordered" and got the following:

Could you elaborate as to why you think "need is a strong word"?

3Zvi
https://genius.com/George-carlin-free-floating-hostility-lyrics ? Need implies you can't do without it. Which is usually very untrue.

The lesswrong word counter tells me that this post is, 67927 words long. Is it a mistake?

2Raemon
It's most likely confused by the elaborate html tables. 

Could you elaborate on why this study is dubious?  Is it because of the small number of participants? Is the test that was used to assess recognition of notes deeply flawed? Or maybe valproate just can’t possibly increase neuroplasticity?

I’m asking because I read this around a year ago, and to this day I’m puzzled as to why no one tried to replicate the findings. 

2Malmesbury
Mostly sample size. Also the study has a cross-over design and they only found an effect in one arm. But it could be a fun biohacking project, at least the outcome is easy to quantify and valproate's side effects are well known.