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All of jimmy's Comments + Replies

Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

But from what little bit of BJJ rolling I've done, my impression is yes, folk who don't know the unbendable arm trick end up struggling sometimes in ways they don't have to.

I should clarify what would actually surprise me.

Most people at a jiu jitsu gym don't really get jiu jitsu, and struggle in ways that they don't have to if they were to just learn jiu jitsu. This is unavoidable, as learning to jiu jitsu takes time, but it also means that even if BJJ has an equivalent concept of this Unbending Arm thing you should expect these results. I don't doubt that... (read more)

Scaffolding Skills

jimmy14d30

I like the idea, but looking at your examples I'm skeptical that it actually works out that way much in practice. Let's look at your examples, in order.

Hearing pitch isn't scaffolding you remove once you learn to sing, which is why skilled vocalists still have ear pieces so that they can hear themselves when they perform. I'm sure they could still sing better than you even with earplugs in, but not to their potential -- and their performance would likely degrade with time if you cut that feedback loop.

"Rolling" is absolutely a big part of fighting. It's no... (read more)

1Valdes12d

I think you're right but I also think I can provide examples of "true" scaffolding skills: 1. How to pass an exam: in order to keep learning with the academic system/university/school you need to regularly do good enough at exams. That is a skill in itself (read the exam in its entirety, know when to move on, learn how hard a question is likely to be depending on the phrasing of the following questions, ...) Almost everyone safely forget most of this skill once they are done studying. 2. Learn to understand your teacher's feedback: many teachers, professional or otherwise, suck at communicating their feedback. You often need to develop a skill of understanding that specific individual's feedback. Of course there is a underlying universal skill of "being good at learning how individuals give feedback"; we could think of it as the skill "being good at building a specific kind of scaffolding". 3. Learn to accept humiliating defeat: A martial artist friend told me it is important at first to learn to accept losing all the time because you learn in the company of strictly better martial artists. Once you get better, you presumably lose less often.

Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

jimmy15d110

I'm very, very confident it doesn't work via moving goalposts.

I think we may be talking past each other a bit here.

I think we're in agreement that it works through force vector diagrams, not through magic that defies the physics of force vector diagrams. Similarly, I think we're in agreement that we get to force vector diagrams by patterns of muscular activation and limb positioning. It's not that the visualization is a required component for doing or explaining, it's that it allows you to do something that you don't know how to explain (or do?) otherwise.... (read more)

2Valentine13d

I don't have enough MMA experience to know with much confidence. But from what little bit of BJJ rolling I've done, my impression is yes, folk who don't know the unbendable arm trick end up struggling sometimes in ways they don't have to. It's reflected on both sides, really. If BJJ folk really understood this unbendable joint thing, they wouldn't keep trying to bend my arm to get through the grip I have (e.g. holding their lapel on either side with each hand). They pointlessly exhaust themselves. Usually more experienced folk will switch strategies at that point. But the fact that so many of them even try suggests to me that they're used to most people they roll with not being able to do this thing. But I don't know. Maybe I'm just unfamiliar with those arts and this tool isn't useful in those situations. I don't know about "dumb". Maybe "ignorant", the way an infant is ignorant of how to stand, or someone unpracticed will fall over if standing on one leg with their eyes closed. It takes a while of using the body in a way it hasn't been used before in order for the new skill to click into place. Otherwise yeah, what you're saying makes sense to me. And it's true, I don't know whether the unbendable arm is at all novel or useful to you. It's clearly novel for most people IME. Including very practiced martial artists who haven't otherwise worked with it. But I don't know, maybe you already do something equivalent. Or maybe it's irrelevant to the things you care about. Yep, still in the Bay Area. Sounds good. And yep, I agree RE force diagram etc. Maybe by others, but I don't need it. I can do it on my back. Or mid leap (though that's harder to demo :P ). Or upside down. I think I can do it with my arm stretched behind my back, but I'm less confident of that one; I'd have to try it. But if my upper arm is pinned in a way that keeps me from moving my elbow, then yeah, I think that breaks the technique. Although in practice most people can't pin my uppe

Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

jimmy18d62

I'm guessing that either (a) you're not much stronger than your wife or (b) she didn't click into the thing the visualization is meant to help people click into.

Oh, no. I'm so much stronger than my wife that there's no way she's keeping her arm straight if I'm serious about bending her arm. The test was 1) is she tensing her bicep when I don't subtly suggest she should and 2) is she able to put up more resistance when visualizing instead.

Seriously, the thing I mean when I point at this technique isn't a vague "energy" trick that fails upon encountering an

... (read more)

2Valentine18d

Boy do I relate. For whatever reason, the demos on YouTube are almost universally weirdly bad. I'm guessing Ivan found the one he linked to because I linked to it; it's the clearest short demo I'd found. I'll see about making one sometime. It's a little tricky for me in particular to convey over video because I'm so visibly strong. But I'll give it some thought. Maybe I can ask for help from some of the bodybuilders at one of the local gyms. Sadly I can't draw a force diagram because I honestly don't know how it works. I can almost make sense of it. The technique works perfectly well if I put my wrist on an unyielding inanimate object like a table, so I think I'm somehow transferring the downward force near the elbow into the upward force on the wrist. But I'm not at all sure how that "somehow" works. I just… do it. By "extending ki". :-P This one is just awful. Just utterly dumb. It's correct that losing focus when you're learning the technique causes it to fail. But at no point in the video does he demonstrate the actual thing. They're treating it like mysterious magic — which makes sense! It's hard to do without treating it like a bit of magic at first. I can do the unbendable arm while distracted now. It's something my body just does when I choose for it to. Yeah, I'm with you, this isn't impressive. It's kind of sort of right ish. But his understanding of how to do it is sloppy IMO. That slop shows up in how he stumbles around. Complete relaxation is not necessary for doing this technique. But if you're doing the technique right, tremendous relaxation is possible. So if you want to check if you're doing it right, you can try relaxing more than you would be relaxed if you were fighting to keep your arm straight. He's right that the arm might bend a little. It's an adjustment thing. Kind of like how your knees might bend a little if you catch a falling heavy object: it's just a spring action as your body adjusts to the new incoming force. But if you'

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jimmy21d2-2

No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.

This is a very strange read, for two reasons.

First, "happens on its own" is a bizarre way to frame things that are entirely composed of human behavior. If a ball is placed on an incline, it will roll down hill on its own with no further human input. If a woman smiles at you, nothing happens unless you do something. If you're smiling and talking to a woman, it seems really strange to... (read more)

4Richard_Kennaway20d

The story began (emphasis added) (ETA: more emphasis added): And I took that to be the pattern of the subsequent mutual 1%-ing, neither of the participants noticing what they are doing until you envisage some outside witness waking them up: Of course there are skills. But they all begin with noticing. I am claiming no particular social skills for myself, only perhaps a general skill of noticing.

Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

jimmy21d82

But people vary widely in somatic skills and how they interpret verbal instructions;

Yeah, that's why I actually ran the test. It's also why I used my wife as a test subject rather than one of the guys at jiu jitsu for example. My wife is definitely on the "less aware of how to use her body" side, so the fact that she got it right is more meaningful.

I definitely interpreted it as 'tense your arm really hard' and that's probably why the beam / firehose visualization helped.

I wasn't there so I can't say, but it's worth noting that the cues on how to interpret... (read more)

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jimmy21d00

"Frog boiling" is standing in for "responding skillfully to women expressing subtle interest, and managing to turn it into clear cut interest so that asking her out is no longer a leap of faith"... right?

Am I reading this correctly that you're patting yourself on the back for successfully avoiding this experience? Is accidentally intentionally getting women too obviously interested in them the problem that you think most men have in dating?

Don't get me wrong, I know that's a real problem that can be had. It just seems like a weird flex, since most men would be more interested in knowing how to cultivate those experiences intentionally than how to avoid them. The latter is fairly self evident.

4Richard_Kennaway21d

No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it. No. No, that strikes me as so far fetched a scenario as to only occur in the fiction of another era.

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[+]jimmy21d-70

Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

jimmy21d*335

It turns out that for most people, the default intention of “holding your arm straight” by tensing your muscles and resisting your partner is not very effective.

Notice the presupposition that "tensing your muscles" is the default way most that most people hold their arm straight? Notice how in the video you linked he explicitly specified "really tight" and didn't just say "don't let me bend your arm", letting people do what actually comes by default? They seem to always specify to make the arm tense, which is unsurprising because if you're not told to resi... (read more)

4Valentine19d

Kudos on doing the test! FWIW, the key thing in unbendable arm isn't about tensing only the relevant opposing muscles. It's more about redirecting incoming forces at each other instead of fighting them directly. The real test is in dealing with someone who's way stronger than you. If you have no hope of keeping your arm straight via tricep strength. I'm guessing that either (a) you're not much stronger than your wife or (b) she didn't click into the thing the visualization is meant to help people click into. Seriously, the thing I mean when I point at this technique isn't a vague "energy" trick that fails upon encountering an MMA fighter or whatever. And it definitely doesn't rely on subtly deceiving people into tensing the wrong muscles. Unbendable arm is immensely demonstrable. As weird as the following might sound, I use it every day. It's easily in the top ten most useful things I learned from aikido and might be in the top three.

5Ivan Vendrov21d

thanks for running the test! IIRC the first time this was demonstrated to me it didn't come with any instructions about tensing or holding, just 'Don't let me bend your arm', exactly the language you used with your wife. But people vary widely in somatic skills and how they interpret verbal instructions; I definitely interpreted it as 'tense your arm really hard' and that's probably why the beam / firehose visualization helped. Makes me think the same is likely true of religious beliefs - they help address a range of common mental mistakes but for each particular mistake there are people who have learned not to make them using some other process. e.g. "Inshallah" helps neurotic people cut off unhelpful rumination, whereas low neuroticism people just don't need it.

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jimmy23d2-2

That all sounds right to me.

Yes, if you're considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues, you've likely noticed that you're considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues. That's something where you're quite likely to be wrong in a way that stings, so you're likely to notice what you're doing and rethink things.

When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don't stop and wonder whether it's a sign or not. You won't think anything of it because it's well within the noise -- b... (read more)

4Richard_Kennaway23d

I do not believe that any such frog-boiling has ever happened to me. It is said that humans who are not paying attention are not general intelligences. I try to cultivate the virtue of attention.

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jimmy23d-40

I don't see your response to my other comment as responsive to my questions so I'm bailing there. I'll likely bail here soon too, but you've managed to draw me back in and get me curious.

First:

No, it's actually by definition. I see why you say that, you're misreading what I'm saying, whatever. Not worth hashing out.

Second:

I'm genuinely confused. Are you aware of the ways in which your restatement is still completely absurd? Doesn't matter I guess. Whatever.

As far as I can tell, there is no distinction between noticing a thing and noticing when I’ve noticed

... (read more)

2Said Achmiz23d

Yes, of course. On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.) And it is entirely possible that they simply co-occur basically always, as @Richard_Kennaway describes. On the contrary again: what you are describing here is simply Bob not having noticed the basketball, and then truthfully reporting this fact. (Note that this is different from the scenario where Bob is not preoccupied, notices the basketball, steps around, but then forgets that this happened; and, when later asked, falsely reports that he did not notice the basketball. In other words, these are what Dennett colorfully described in Consciousness Explained as the “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” scenarios, respectively.) Here you are again describing these people not having noticed the chair. And if you walk around the basketball, wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that…? I have not had this experience (of it being hard to imagine this distinction); it has always been clear to me that it’s important and worth tracking. But of course I am aware that some people do think thus. Sure. Have you ever noticed individual hydrogen atoms? No? Well, why doesn’t that serve as an example of a thing that you didn’t notice? Because you can’t notice them, of course. (Unless you have one of them fancy quantum microscopes, anyway.) There are plenty of “low-level” representations in our brains (and auxiliary organs) which are inaccessible to conscious awareness. These are of a different kind than mental representations as we ordinarily think of them. For example, take color vision: would you say that we “notice” the individual lightness values of the three color channels formed by signals from the three types of cone cells in our retina? I think that it would be very silly to say that yes, we notice this information, but we do not noti

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jimmy24d2-2

The distinction always exists. The quotation is never its referent. Whether they can be collapsed into one concept without loss is another question --- and the answer to that question is still "No".

The answer could only be yes in the second extreme, and that second extreme doesn't exist.

I'll illustrate with an analogy.

"Has eyes open" is a different concept than "can see". Regardless of how well they correlate, we can test the former by looking at a person and seeing that they have eyes which aren't blocked by eyelids. We can test the latter by presen... (read more)

4Richard_Kennaway23d

The perception and the perception of the perception are always different things. But to return to the situation at hand, I find it difficult to imagine responding to subtle clues by asking for the other person's phone number, without being aware that "here I am, responding to what I think are probably clues by considering possible responses", and also going on to higher levels of the ladder, like considering whether my perception of these supposed clues is correct, how i know what I think I know, deciding whether if clues these be I wish to build something on them (depending on the person, maybe I'd rather put them off than draw them on), deciding how long to maintain plausible deniability that there is anything going on here and when to break cover, and so on. The searchlight of attention, of noticing, sweeps over all of these, in less time than it takes to read this paragraph. At least, that is how it is for me.

2Said Achmiz24d

I was more or less with you for most of this comment, but it seems to me that you go astray in the end, in two ways. First: This doesn’t work at all. Now, if we remove the words “by definition”, then we’d be left with an empirical claim, which could be true or false (I think it’s false, but more on that later), which is fine. But “by definition”? No, absolutely not. The reason it’s wrong is that you’re equivocating between two concepts: someone who (as @Richard_Kennaway put it) “is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves”, and someone who is “very skilled in self awareness”. You could claim that those are, empirically, the same thing! But they are not the same thing by definition. One is defined in one way, and the other is defined in another way. To claim that these two concepts have the same referent is an empirical claim. Second: Perhaps it is, but that’s because it is a mischaracterization of the concept described in the grandparent comment. Instead we can imagine a person saying: “I have never made this mistake myself (so naturally I have never noticed myself making this mistake, there having never been anything to notice in that regard); unsurprisingly, it thus also never occurred to me that other people might make such a mistake”. Such a statement may be true or false, and we may draw various conclusions about its author in either case; but “self-disproving” it certainly is not. For my part, while I won’t claim to embody the ultimate extreme on the spectrum described in the grandparent, I’m certainly quite a bit closer to the latter end of it than to the former end. Likewise, I have read, and participated in, enough conversations like this one to be aware that other people’s mind work differently; but I certainly find it strange. And yet, am I “skilled in self awareness”? You

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jimmy24d20

Remember, we’re talking about the following situation:

If that's what you think we're talking about then I have a couple questions for you:

1) I told you that I addressed this failure mode in another comment. Why did you ignore when I told you this instead of reading that comment and responding to what I said over there instead? Isn't that the only thing that makes sense, if that's all you want to talk about?

2) Why are you talking whether men pick up on these things in general? It feels like you're saying "We're talking about the people who died during heart... (read more)

2Said Achmiz24d

I read the comment in question (this one, yes? if that’s not the comment you meant then please link the correct one) and it did not seem to me to have addressed this. (I did not particularly find anything specific to respond in it, either, although I certainly can’t say that I agree with the model you give therein.) Because, as I have said, I agree with johnswentworth when he wrote: ---------------------------------------- EDIT: In fact, let me expand on this. Your linked comment answers the question “why don’t women just ask, if they really want the guy”. (I find the answer unconvincing, as I said, but that’s actually beside the point here.) But the reason I brought up the scenario in question wasn’t to pose the question “why don’t women just ask”, but rather to point out that in said scenario: 1. The woman is definitely sending cues as hard as she can. 2. The man does not pick up on those cues. 3. If asked later, the man will say that he did not perceive any cues. (Indeed, he’d be surprised by the question—“Cues, what cues? From whom…? That one woman? Flirting? With whom? With me?! No, you’ve got something mixed up, surely…”) 4. If asked later, the woman will say that the man did not pick up on any cues. (And will be very frustrated by this; she was being so obvious, how could this absolute dunce of a man not have noticed?! Ridiculous! And she was really into the guy, too…) So even in this case where one person is trying as hard as they can to send cues, nevertheless the other person is totally oblivious. (Does this happen all the time? Yes it does.) Given this, does the suggestion that actually, everyone is perceiving all the cues all the time, is obviously silly. If even trying this hard, “sending” this “loudly”—at such extreme “transmission intensity”—can fail to be enough to get the signal through, at all, then how could it be true that the signal is actually successfully getting through pretty much all the time? The answer is obvious: it can’t be t

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jimmy25d40

I think perhaps you have missed the point I was making, which is that what you call “being aware that you have sensed a cue” is just what everyone else calls “sensing the cue” (perhaps “perceiving the cue” might be a better phrase

I haven't. It's just something you're going to struggle to understand until you recognize the difference -- and the importance of the difference -- between the quotation and its referent. So that's where we have to start.

It is true that many people will call the thing I refer to as "being aware that you have sensed the cue" "sensi... (read more)

3Said Achmiz25d

What do you mean by “matter” here? Remember, we’re talking about the following situation: 1. Woman attempts to “send cues”, with the intended result being that a certain man will perceive these cues and react in a certain desired way. 2. Man has no idea that this is happening. 3. Man does not react in the desired way to the supposed cues that the woman is supposedly sending (and how could he, not being aware of any such things?). 4. Woman is annoyed, frustrated, etc., that she is not getting what she wants. Now you’re claiming that, somehow, these cues are nevertheless being “sensed” (ok, sure), and also that they nevertheless “matter” in some way. What is the meaning of “matter” in this context that makes your claim true? EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience: I’ve never encountered this usage from anyone other than you.

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jimmy25d20

What is the distinction between “sensing the cue” and “being aware that you have sensed a cue”?

There is a meta level jump between noticing "She's smiling" and noticing "I have noticed that she's smiling". "She's smiling" is a very different thing than "I have noticed she's smiling".

If you're lacking awareness of the latter but not the former, that doesn't mean that you won't smile back at someone who smiles at you. It just means that you either won't notice that you're doing it, or you won't know why you are.

Failure to grasp this distinction gets people al... (read more)

4Richard_Kennaway24d

Different minds may operate quite differently. The distinction you are describing may be very important and salient to you, but it does not necessarily even exist for someone else. At one extreme, someone who is always effectively asleep (by comparison to the other extreme) and barely aware of their own existence, permanently on automatic pilot, senses things without being aware of themselves sensing things, because they are hardly aware of themselves at all. At the other, someone who is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves. At either of those extremes, the distinction you are drawing does not exist. In the first case, because the person is never aware of themselves; in the second, because they always are.

8Said Achmiz25d

I think perhaps you have missed the point I was making, which is that what you call “being aware that you have sensed a cue” is just what everyone else calls “sensing the cue” (perhaps “perceiving the cue” might be a better phrase, by the way; that does seem to me to be more consonant with how the concepts of perception and sensation are used elsewhere…). Whatever we call it, the interesting and important thing is the part where the intended cue-recipient ends up having any idea whatsoever that a cue is being sent (or, more likely, instead fails to end up with any such idea). Thus we had the following exchange: johnswentworth: jimmy: Now, given the way you are using the phrase “sensing the cue”, we can now see that the second quote is totally non-responsive to the first. Like, it’s literally just a non sequitur. An analogy: suppose that certain billboards, signs, etc., were designed in such a way that they secretly also worked like those Magic Eye pictures, and if you squinted at them just right, you could see a hidden image. Suppose that such special double-duty displays weren’t marked in any obvious way. Now, suppose I said: “You know how some billboards and signs and such are secretly also magic eye images? I have no idea how to spot when a sign is one of those! Much less how to squint at them the right way, even if I did spot them…” And suppose you replied: “Well, you know, the light reflected from the those signs is hitting your retina, so you can totally tell that the signs exist.” Would that be an even remotely useful reply? Does the reply point out any errors in the complaint, or contradict the complaint in any way at all? No, of course not. Does the reply talk about anything whatsoever to do with the reason why the problem exists? Not in the least. Can it possibly point the way to a solution? Not a chance. If you follow this up with “ah, but there is a distinction between noticing ‘the billboard exists’ and noticing ‘I have noticed that the billboa

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jimmy26d4-2

The problem with your argument is that it doesn’t at all explain all the cases where

I understand that I hadn't made this part very clear in the comments I made prior to this comment of yours. I have since addressed it in my latest response to johnswentworth.

But of course this is an absurd requirement. If she knows he’s going to be interested, of course that makes it vastly easier!

It's also not the real requirement, as I was cutting corners for sake of brevity at the cost of precision. The actual requirement is trickier to nail down both concretely and conc... (read more)

6Said Achmiz26d

What is the distinction between “sensing the cue” and “being aware that you have sensed a cue”? If, in “approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not”, you mean by the phrase “sense women’s cues” something which can be done without even being aware that you have sensed anything, then what exactly are you saying? Is this claim falsifiable at all? How would you falsify it? How would the world look different in the following two cases: 1. Everyone senses women’s cues, although some (many?) people do this without having any awareness at all that they have sensed anything whatsoever. 2. Some people do not sense women’s cues. What observations would you expect to make in one of those scenarios but not in the other? Which is perfectly sensible, because I have in fact encountered cases where women would say things like that to men, but give no other indication of being interested in said men, and would react with bafflement to suggestions that they were interested in dating said men, etc. (Being a third party in these cases, I could observe in a disinterested way, and found these observations quite instructive.) The same, by the way, can be said of this: I have absolutely known women who have done this with guys whom they had no intention whatsoever to kiss or do anything else with. As far as I can tell, you are using the phrase “sense a cue” in a way that I can only describe as completely useless. Obviously it is impossible to literally not perceive the the physical presence of a woman in front of you (assuming that you aren’t blind, it’s not dark, your eyes aren’t closed, etc.), but that is not what anyone means by “sense a cue”. What the phrase means is “recognize a specific action or behavior as a cue”. “Recognition of the thing to be explained” is worth nothing. For example, suppose I am walking down the street and I see a woman walking in the opposite direction toward me. Is this a “thing to be explained”? Taking the broad v

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jimmy26d6-2

That's the main thing, yeah. The next bit is even what look like exceptions are actually the same thing in a less obvious way.

When a woman knows she's attracted to a guy and is bummed out that he's not picking up on her subtle signals, that's a lot like a man knowing he's attracted to a woman and being bummed out that she's not giving him super clear signals to ask her out. He could ask her out anyway, if he's willing to face rejection, and that would greatly increase his chances of getting a date with this woman. It'd also greatly increase his chances of ... (read more)

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jimmy1mo151

but man it sure sounds like "not noticing womens' subtle cues" is the near-universal experience, even among other women when people actually try to test that.

Yeah, I get where you're coming from. That's definitely a near universal experience. I've been there. As have my friends.

One story that stands out is when my friend was tutoring an attractive woman during college. She kept doing things like leaning over exposing her cleavage to him. At one point she conspicuously announced that she had to take her birth control and then took it in front of him. At the... (read more)

6Said Achmiz26d

You mean, like the woman in your anecdote about your friend tutoring in college…? The problem with your argument is that it doesn’t at all explain all the cases where the woman definitely wants a date, is definitely interested in the guy, is very frustrated by (what she would characterize as) the guy’s obliviousness (and quite likely complains about this to her friends), and yet still won’t say anything. But of course this is an absurd requirement. If she knows he’s going to be interested, of course that makes it vastly easier! … and yet, according to your own account, women still won’t say anything in that situation, despite having a guarantee of a positive response. What does that tell you? In fact there is no such as “forcing the man to contend with” anything. People (not just men) are, as it turns out, perfectly capable of totally ignoring a cue like this, and indeed of not even noticing it in the first place. A woman who thinks that leaning in and waiting to be kissed is somehow a guarantee that a man will correctly perceive the cue, is sadly, sadly mistaken. Sorry, but this is empirically false.

johnswentworth1mo100

That was a very useful answer, thank you! I'm going to try to repeat back the model in my own words and relate back to the frame of the post and rest of this comment thread. Please let me know if it still sounds like I'm missing something.

Model: the cases where a woman has a decent idea of what she wants aren't the central use-case of subtle cues in the first place. The central use case is when the guy seems maybe interesting, and therefore she mostly just wants to spend more time around him, not in an explicitly romantic or sexual way yet. The "subtle sig... (read more)

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jimmy1mo222

Now, one could reasonably counter-argue that the yin strategy delivers value somewhere else, besides just e.g. "probability of a date".

Yeah, probability of a date isn't something you want to Goodhart on.

That said, the post conspicuously avoids asking: how well will this yin strategy actually work? How much will the yin strategy improve this girl's chance of a date with the guy, compared to (a) doing nothing and acting normally, or (b) directly asking him out? It seems very obvious that the yin stuff will result in a date-probability only marginally higher

... (read more)

johnswentworth1mo137

Sometimes this is due to the woman in question not recognizing how subtle she's being, and losing out on a date with a man she's still interested in.

I would guess that this is approximately 100% of the time in practice, excluding cases where the man doesn't pick up on the cues but happens to ask her out anyway. Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens' subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here). If the woman just wants a guy who will ask her out, that's still a perfectly fine utility... (read more)

5Gurkenglas1mo

Nah, that's still less obvious than asking.

How I talk to those above me

jimmy1mo147

I am not exactly sure why this difference - a total inversion! -

The boxing and corporate situations don't seem that different to me. In both cases, the higher ups are providing direction and the people lower down are allowed to ask questions -- but might get in trouble for trying to challenge those higher up.

In the situation where you describe talking to a senior statistician, "Why'd you use the mean instead of the median?" sounds a whole lot like "Why don't we stand like this instead?" in a boxing gym. Those are both "Hey expert who is deservedly above me... (read more)

Sapir-Whorf Ego Death

jimmy2mo20

2) If I manage to create a strong object-level want, I will boost my attention without needing to coerce myself
[...]
I was more curious about how the difference between a third-person and a first-person perspective affects my meditation.

This is what I'm talking about. Defaulting to the third person perspective and forgetting about the first person perspective causes a lot of trouble. It's not just "here's an unrelated hack for making it easier to do meditation", it's that it completely changes your meditation.

You notice that your third person "I... (read more)

1Jonathan Moregård1mo

Makes sense, I'll see if I manage to get there in time. Seems like your approach is cohering across perspectives while including more aspects into conscious awareness. Seems more likely to lead to integration/wholeness instead of dissociation/lost purposes. edit: I'm also curious about your background/experience of meditation, if you are open to sharing.

Sapir-Whorf Ego Death

jimmy2mo20

Untrained people (and semi-trained people like me) can't sustain focus for extended amounts of time—even if I set my mind to the breath, it will slip away.

What I would say is that untrained people don't sustain focus on their breath for extended amounts of time. When you introduce the word "can" you're claiming more than just what is observed and making claims about what they would do in other counterfactuals too. If we're careful with those counterfactual choices, I think the claim that they "can't" turns out to be false.

The difference between "trying to ... (read more)

1Jonathan Moregård2mo

I'll answer to both your replies here. Sorry about any confusion that the deletion of my first reply caused. It seems like your argument is roughly: 1) There's a difference between "wanting to want" and "object-level wanting" 2) If I manage to create a strong object-level want, I will boost my attention without needing to coerce myself With some extra ideas: * Having mistaken beliefs about what you want—ones not connected to revealed preference—is harmful, since it leads to self-delusion and stuckness. * Actually-viscerally-motivated people can sustain attention to a meditation object, even without much training If my understanding is correct, then we are largely in agreement. You are highlighting coercive tendencies in my post, and I do believe that there's great value in anchoring my wants in something visceral. My usage of "should" might point to an inner conflict that's useful to resolve, and I will look into this. However, this wasn't the key thing I wanted to focus on in the post - I was more curious about how the difference between a third-person and a first-person perspective affects my meditation. I'm also convinced that actual-visceral motivation isn't sufficient for an untrained person to sustain attention to the breath for a long amount of time, even if it is (roughly) necessary—or at least very helpful/useful. Finally—you ask why I am attempting to do such an unusual thing. For me, meditation is connected to wellbeing, the amount of conscious awareness I can bring to my everyday life. I notice when I skip meditation, similarly to how I notice when I mess up my sleep or skip workouts. These factors lead to me treating it as important—in the "wanting to want" sense. Turning that into an actual-visceral motivation is part of the challenge of meditation—it's a practice arena for challenging mistaken beliefs about my wants and turning them into actual-visceral motivation. It's similar to my just-woken-up self after a period of poor sleep hygiene—my m

Sapir-Whorf Ego Death

jimmy2mo40

When I practice focus meditation, I train myself to sustain a focus on my breath, for unusual amounts of time, to unusual degrees.

Right, and to what end? What drives you to want to do this unusual thing? Why isn't that already connecting to a desire that pulls your focus to your breath?

The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between "I want to focus on my breath" and "I am not focusing on my breath".

Your model of things seem to assume that this level of focus is possible to sustain through "really wanting to" [...] I

... (read more)

Sapir-Whorf Ego Death

jimmy2mo118

Some time ago, I realized that the perspective "I want to focus on the breath" is self-defeating. [...] The problem with "I should focus on the breath" is that it assumes a self who is monitoring, evaluating, striving.

It often makes sense to talk about "I". "I" makes sense. I am writing this, for one. You know exactly what that means, it is clearly true, and there is nothing that noticing this requires you to flinch away from.

"Should", on the other hand, falls apart very quickly and is usually functioning to preserve a disconnect from reality. ... (read more)

1Jonathan Moregård2mo

I initially wrote another comment, that was written hastily. I decided to delete it, and want to give you a proper response. -- >It often makes sense to talk about "I". "I" makes sense. I am writing this, for one. You know exactly what that means, it is clearly true, and there is nothing that noticing this requires you to flinch away from. Agreed. >"Should", on the other hand, falls apart very quickly and is usually functioning to preserve a disconnect from reality. Valentine talks about it here, and So8res talks about it here. Agreed, I generally like the advice in replacing guilt. >You say you should focus on your breath. Why? Why aren't you already drawn to your breath, if that's what you want to focus on? >Sensations of the breath are arising, yes. And so are many other things. If those sensations are interesting and worth attending to (according to you), then simply noticing that they're there is enough. If it's not, then "I want to focus on the breath" is empirically shown to be false -- so now you have a question of why you're trying to force yourself to do a thing you don't want to do. The post is in the context of focus meditation, where I practice my ability to sustain attention/focus for unusual amounts of time. Untrained people (and semi-trained people like me) can't sustain focus for extended amounts of time—even if I set my mind to the breath, it will slip away. Sustained focus can be practised through a process of self-conditioning: 1) Try to sustain focus on the breath 2) Realize that your mind has wandered (auto-switch) 3) Catch yourself and refocus on the breath >The lack of "self language" when talking to oneself comes straight from maintaining connection to reality instead of BSing yourself. I might tell my wife I want to eat lunch, if that helps coordinate with her. But if I'm telling myself that I want to eat lunch, then with whom am I attempting to coordinate? I'll just eat or not eat. It's not that there's never any such thing as a "

Studies of Human Error Rate

jimmy3mo20

Instead, skeptics often gesture to hallucinations, errors. [...] However, such arguments reliably rule out human "understanding" as well!

"Can do some impressive things, but struggles with basic arithmetic and likes to make stuff up" is such a fitting description of humans that I was quite surprised when it turned out to be true of LLMs too.

Whenever I see a someone claim that it means LLM can't "understand" something, I find it quite amusing that they're almost demonstrating their own point; just not in the way they think they are.

C'mon guys, Deliberate Practice is Real

jimmy3mo20

My "c'mon guys" here is not "c'mon the empirical evidence here is overwhelming." It's more like "look, which world do you actually expect to result in you making better decisions faster: the one where you spend >0 days on testing and reflecting on your thinking in areas where there is real feedback, or the one where you just spend all your time on 'object level work' that doesn't really have the ability to tell you you were wrong?".
(and, a host of similar questions, with the meta question is "do you really expect the optimal thing here to be zero effort

... (read more)

hypnosis question

Answer by jimmyFeb 06, 202580

1) Yes and no, depending on what you mean by "real thing".

The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis is a giant tome of scientific knowledge on "hypnosis"; none of which suggests that it's not real. Hypnotists really can do seemingly wild shit that most people cannot do. Most hypnotherapists like to say "It's not mind control like Hollywood depicts", but even that is only partially true. The lawyer Michael Fine used hypnosis to sexually assault his clients and give them amnesia for it, and he is in prison now only because he was dumb enough about it that his victims ... (read more)

1KvmanThinking3mo

Your answer wasn't cryptic at all. Don't worry. This is a great answer. Let me know when you're done with that sequence. I'll have to read it. (Also, it's horrifying that people can be hypnotized against their will. That makes me simultaneously thankful-that and curious-why it isn't more widely practiced...)

The Clueless Sniper and the Principle of Indifference

jimmy3mo20

There are several complications in the example you give, and I'm not sure which are intentional.

Let's start with a simpler example. You somehow end up needing to take a 400 meter shot down a tunnel with an experimental rifle/ammo you've been working on. You know the rifle/ammo inside and out due to your work and there is no wind, but the rifle/ammo combination has very high normal dispersion, and all that is exposed is a headshot.

In this case, where you center your probability distribution depends on the value of the kids life. If the terrorist is about to... (read more)

Preference Inversion

jimmy4mo20

No, that does not sound like a fair characterization. My claims are cover a lot more than "it doesn't always happen" and yours sure don't seem limited to "it doesn't never happen".

Here's the motivating question for this whole essay:

You asked why people who "believe in" avoiding nonmarital sex so frequently engage in and report badly regretting it

and here's part of your conclusion

At this point the behavior you describe should no longer be perplexing.

You're talking about this as if it needs falsification of preferences to explain and my stance is that ... (read more)

6Benquo4mo

Initially, you argued that societal pressure often reflects genuine wisdom, using examples where a 'society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets' might be wiser than a child's raw preferences. You suggested that what I was calling 'intrinsic preferences' might just be 'shallow preferences' that hadn't yet been trained to reflect reality. Now you're making a different and more sophisticated argument - that the whole framework of 'intrinsic' versus 'external' preferences is problematic because preferences necessarily develop within and respond to reality, including social reality. While this is an interesting perspective that deserves consideration, it seems substantially different from your initial defense of social restrictions as transmitting wisdom. There's also an important point about my own position that I should clarify. When I said 'generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others' preferences as calculated prior to such influences,' I wasn't making a claim about how often admonitions reflect preference inversions. Rather, I was suggesting that if people were to reflect explicitly on cases of preference inversion, they typically wouldn't want those inverted preferences to count; they would recognize these as preferences shaped by forces systematically opposed to their interests. This connects to what I see as the core distinction: I'm not just talking about external influences or errors in the transmission of wisdom. I'm specifically pointing to cases where restrictions are moralized for the purpose of restriction itself - where the system is systematically deprecating the evolutionarily fit preferences of the person being restricted. This isn't just clumsy teaching or social pressure - it's adversarial. The system works by first making people feel guilty about their natural inclinations, then betting that they won't fully succeed at suppressing those inclinations despite earnestly trying to adopt the system's restri

Preference Inversion

jimmy4mo20

Agreed in full

2Benquo4mo

Seems like we've now established that we largely agree on the explicit propositions we've stated all through this thread. Given that, your initial response feels to me like a bit of a non-sequitur. As I understand it, your response argued against a universal claim that social pressure always inverts genuine preferences, while I had explicitly made the narrower claim that this sometimes happens and is worth watching out for. Does that seem like a fair characterization? If so, can you help me understand why your initial response felt important and relevant to you in context?

If all trade is voluntary, then what is "exploitation?"

jimmy4mo119

The problem there isn't the Econ-101, it's the fool in the arm chair.

You can't just say "I have a simple armchair argument that no one could ever demand sexual favors", because that's not even a valid prediction of Econ-101. Maybe the person does want to provide sexual favors. Maybe they even want to provide sexual favors and then also claim purity and victimhood status to gullible people. That's entirely consistent with Econ-101.

Or maybe they aren't productive enough to earn their wage otherwise, and their job is better conceptualized as half prostitute. ... (read more)

Preference Inversion

jimmy4mo20

I agree that there is a meaningful difference, but I disagree that they're so cleanly separable that we can say that it is one or the other.

I don't teach my kid that sugar is evil and I give her the chance to learn how much sugar she wants for herself. I try to minimize coercion because it impairs learning, and I want my kid to actually integrate the information so that she can make coherent rather than fractured decisions.

At the same time, I want to protect her from things that are beyond her capability to handle and learn from. We don't want our ch... (read more)

Preference Inversion

jimmy4mo42

You're arguing that attempts to decrease candy consumption are coercive rather than informative, and are in ways counterproductive. I agree with this. You take this to mean it's not a "good faith attempt", but as a general rule people don't know how to do any better than this.

It's true that people can appeal to "sinfully delicious" to sell you their dessert, but why don't broccoli salesmen do the same? Why not toothbrush salesmen? If "Sinful" means "good", actually, and it originates with salesmen, then why isn't everything "sinful"?

The answer is tha... (read more)

6Benquo4mo

Sometimes people really don't know any better. Other times they're playing dumb because of a guilty conscience. Nearly everyone is motivated not to acknowledge the when someone's playing dumb, because they share the aforementioned guilty conscience, so many cases of playing dumb are commonly misattributed to really not knowing better. In cases where I had a strong preexisting relationship with people, they've sometimes admitted, after initially claiming not to be able to understand me when I asked them to do something differently (with my child or otherwise), that they were just being defensive because they felt judged and attacked by the request, and upon a moment's relaxed reflection it's easy for them to see what the problem was.

Preference Inversion

jimmy4mo51

Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both "not be ill e.g. with diabetes" and "eat tasty things".

That sounds basically right to me, which is why I put effort into learning (and teaching) to enjoy the right things. I'm pretty proud of the fact that both my little girls like "liver treats".

Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average.

I thi... (read more)

Preference Inversion

jimmy4mo163

I object to the framing of society being all-wise,

Society certainly is not all-wise, and I did not frame it as such. But it is wiser than the person who thinks "Trying heroin seems like a good idea", and then proceeds to treat heroin as if it's the most important thing in the universe.

Is it wiser than you, in some limited way in some limited context that you are unaware of? Is it less wise, in other ways? I'd bet on "both" before either.

Consequently, I'd prefer "bunch of candy and no diabetes still" outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into

... (read more)

5ProgramCrafter4mo

After thinking on this a bit, I've somewhat changed my mind. (Epistemic status: filtered evidence.) Technology and other progress has two general directions: a) more power for those who are able to wield it; b) increasing forgiveness, distance to failure. For some reason, I thought that b) was a given at least on average. However, now it came to mind that it's possible for someone to 1) get two dates to accidentally overlap (or before confirming with partners-to-be that poly is OK), 2) lose an arbitrarily large bunch of money on gambling just online, 3) take revenge on a past offender with a firearm (or more destructive ways, as it happens), and I'm not sure the failure margins have widened over time at all. By the way, if technology effects aren't really on topic, I'm open to move that discussion to shortform/dialogue. --- (Epistemic status: obtained with introspection.) Continuing the example with sweets, I estimate my terminal goals to include both "not be ill e.g. with diabetes" and "eat tasty things". Given tech level and my current lifestyle, there isn't instrumental goal "eat more sweets" nor "eat less sweets"; I think I'm somewhere near the balance, and I wouldn't want society to pass any judgement.

Preference Inversion

jimmy4mo20

The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I'm saying. It's not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it's also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.

"Reflectively stable in abse... (read more)

Preference Inversion

jimmy4mo3712

I don't think it's so simple at all.

If you start with the conclusion that sex is great, and anti-premarital sex campaigns are really just anti-you-procreating campaigns and therefore oppressive and bad, then sure. I don't think that's a fair assumption across the board (e.g. Amish as an existence proof of "something more"), but it certainly doesn't work for all preferences and it's generally not so clear.

Let's look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it's unhealthy, and from the... (read more)

6Benquo4mo

You raise an important distinction I should engage with more directly. Just as there's a difference between teaching 'sugar is evil and eating it makes you bad' versus teaching healthy eating habits, there's clearly a difference between social pressure that helps people learn from others' accumulated wisdom (like warning children about drug addiction) versus pressure that creates persistent dysfunction (like sexual shame that continues in marriage)." Looking at outcomes could help distinguish these: * Does the pressure help people better achieve their other goals, or create persistent internal conflicts? * Do people who successfully internalize the norm show better life outcomes in relevant domains? * Does violating the norm lead to open criticism and constructive learning, or cycles of shame and indulgence? * Is hypocrisy necessary for the system to function, or just an implementation failure? My post focused on identifying a specific harmful pattern of preference inversion. But you're right that not all restrictive social pressure fits this pattern. Some pressure genuinely helps people align behavior with their other goals through learning from collective wisdom. The challenge is that preference-inverting systems often justify themselves by pointing to genuine wisdom they preserve. The question isn't whether society has useful things to teach us (it clearly does), but how to distinguish wisdom-transmission from control mechanisms that create persistent dysfunction.

Benquo4mo*268

Actually, I don't think anti-candy messaging originates as a good-faith attempt to teach dietary wisdom; instead, it exemplifies preference inversion through moralized restriction. Rather than providing actionable information about metabolic effects, it constructs an idea of candy as a moral temptation, creating the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.

Take sugar. The standard message is "sugar is bad, candy will rot your teeth and make you fat." But instead of preventing candy consumption, this attitude turns candy into forbidden fr... (read more)

2Benquo4mo

Religions that regulate sexuality comprise a heterogeneous category. I wouldn't describe Amish regulation of sex as a case of preference inversion; the Amish try to make sure people consider leaving the community if they don't on balance like living under its standards. But it seems like some variants of Christianity do in effect adopt a generalized anti-sex posture. Since some of these groups depend for reproductive viability on people failing to comply with the anti-sex posture, this guarantees that the anti-sex groups that survive intergenerationally are populated mainly by people who want to have sex.

1ProgramCrafter4mo

I object to the framing of society being all-wise, and instead believe that for most issues it's possible to get the benefits of both ways given some innovators on that issue. For example, visual communication was either face-to-face or heavily resource-bounded till the computer era - then there were problems of quality and price, but those have been almost fully solved in our days. Consequently, I'd prefer "bunch of candy and no diabetes still" outcome, and there are some lines of research/ideas into how this can be done. As for "nonmarital sex <...> will result in blowing past Goodhart's warnings into more [personal psychological, I suppose] harm than good", that seems already solved with the concept of "commitment"? The society might accept someone disregarding another person if that's done with plausible deniability like "I didn't know they would even care", and commitment often makes you promise to care about partner's feelings, solving* the particular problem in a more granular way than "couples should marry no matter what". The same thing goes with other issues. That said, I've recently started to think that it's better to not push other people to less-socially-accepted preferences unless you have a really good case they can revert from exploration well and would be better off (and, thus, better not to push over social networks at all), since the limit point of person's preferences might shift - wicked leading to more wicked and so on - to the point person wouldn't endorse outcomes of change on reflection. I'm still considering if just noting that certain behavior is possible is a nudge significant enough to be disadvantaged (downvoted or like). *I'd stop believing in that if commitment-based cultures had higher rate of partners failing on their promises to care than marriage-based; would be interested in some evidence either way.

4Nick_Tarleton4mo

The OP addresses cases like this: I agree that the comment you're replying to is (narrowly) wrong (if understanding 'prior' as 'temporally prior'), because someone might socially acquire a preference not to overeat sugar before they get the chance to learn they don't want to overeat sugar. ISTM this is repaired by comparing not to '(temporally) prior preference' but something like 'reflectively stable preference absent coercive pressure'.

Began a pay-on-results coaching experiment, made $40,300 since July

jimmy4mo70

What are the failure rates? So, I would love to share data on the cases I haven’t (yet) been able to help… but I don’t know how?

1) How many cumulative hours have you spent on things where there has been no success and you guys aren't working together anymore on the issue? How does this compare to the number of hours which have resulted in success, and the number where the result is tbd? How many hours have resulted in partial or incremental success, without meeting agreed upon win criteria?

2) Of those where someone bailed how many times did they bail and h... (read more)

If all trade is voluntary, then what is "exploitation?"

jimmy4mo5-1

I think there's not much to update. "Exploitation" is a shortcut for a particular, negative feeling we humans tend to naturally get from certain type of situation, and as I tried to explain, it is a rather simple thing. [...] *Before you red-flag 'unfair' as well: Again, I'm simply referring to the way people tend to perceive things, on average or so.

This is where I disagree. I don't think it is simple, partly because I don't think "unfair" is simple. People's perceptions of what is "unfair", like people's perceptions of anything else that means anything a... (read more)

2Viliam4mo

Interestingly, armchair Econ-101 reasoning could easily lead us to conclusion that the situation with demanding sexual favors could never possibly happen in real life, because if the employees do not wish to provide sexual favors, and they are productive enough to deserve their wage, they can... simply go work somewhere else, right? (But I guess we have some evidence that such things sometimes happen in real life, especially when they are not illegal, which means that we should be suspicious about the armchair reasoning.)

-1FlorianH4mo

Notice how you had to create a strawman of what people commonsensically call exploitation. The person you describe does exactly NOT seem to be employing the workers merely to "gaining disproportionate benefit from someone’s work because their alternatives are poor". In your example, informed about the situation, with about 0 sec of reflection, people would understand him to NOT be exploitative. Of course, people usually would NOT blame Mother Theresa for having poor people work in her facilities and earning little, IF Mother Theresa did so just out of good heart, without ulterior motives, without deriving disproportionate benefit, and while paying 99.98% of receipts to staff, even if that was little. Note, me saying exploitation is 'simple' and is just what it is even if there is a sort of tension with econ 101, doesn't mean every report about supposed exploitation would be correct, and I never maintained it wouldn't be easy - with usual one paragraph newspaper reports - to mislead the superficial mob into seeing something as exploitation even when it isn't. It remains really easy to make sense of usual usage of 'exploitation' vis a vis econ 101 also in your example: * The guy is how you describe? No hint of exploitation, and indeed a good deal for the poor. * The situation is slightly different, the guy would earn more and does it such as to merely to get as rich as possible? He's an exploitative business man. Yes, the world is better off with him doing his thing, but of course he's not a good* man. He'd have to e.g. share his wealth one way or another in a useful way if he really wanted to be. Basta. (*usual disclaimer about the term..)

If all trade is voluntary, then what is "exploitation?"

jimmy4mo4-4

that the elephant in the room is that the rich should help the poor independently of the question of the labor exchange itself, i.e. that the overwhelming moral point is that, if we care, we should simply donate some of our resources.

"Should" is a red flag word, which serves to hide the facets of reality that generate sense of obligation. It helps to taboo it, and find out what's left.

If a rich person wants to help the poor, it will be more effective so simply help the poor -- i.e. with some of their own resources. Trying to distort the market leads ... (read more)

1FlorianH4mo

I think we agree on at least one of the main points thus. Regarding I did not mean to invoke a particularly heavy philosophical absolutist 'ought' or anything like that, with my "should". It was instead simply a sloppy shortcut - and you're right to call that out - to say the banal: the rich considering whether she's exploiting the poor and/or whether it's a win win, might want to consider - what tends to be surprisingly often overseen - that the exploitation vs. beneficial trade may have no easily satisfying solution as long as she keeps the bulk of her riches to herself vis a vis the sheer poverty of her potential poor interlocutant. But with regards to having to (I add the emphasis): I think there's not much to update. "Exploitation" is a shortcut for a particular, negative feeling we humans tend to naturally get from certain type of situation, and as I tried to explain, it is a rather simple thing. We cannot just define that general aversion away just to square everything we like in a simple way. 'Exploitation' simply is exploitation even if it is (e.g. slightly) better for the poor than one other unfair counterfactual (non-exploitation without sharing the unfairly* distributed riches), nothing can change that. Only bulk sharing of our resources may lead to a situation we may wholeheartedly embrace with regards to (i) exploitation and (ii) economics. So if we're not willing to bite the bullet of bulk-sharing of resources, we're stuck with either being unhappy about exploitation or about foregoing gains of trade (unless we've imbibed econ 101 so strongly that we've grown insensitive to 'exploitation' at least as long as we don't use simple thought experiments to remind ourselves how exploitative even some win-win trades can be). *Before you red-flag 'unfair' as well: Again, I'm simply referring to the way people tend to perceive things, on average or so.

Circling as practice for “just be yourself”

jimmy4mo30

Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.
If someone asks me a question, I should answer.

No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.
In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.
That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not.

So then is circling just the voicing of the ever-present f... (read more)

Which Biases are most important to Overcome?

jimmy5mo70

Here the two definitions of rationality diverge: believing the truth is now at odds with doing what works. It will obviously work better to believe what your friends and neighbors believe, so you won't be in arguments with them and they'll support you more when you need it.

This is only true if you can't figure out how to handle disagreements.

It will often be better to have wrong beliefs if it keeps you from acting on the even wronger belief that you must argue with everyone who disagrees. It's better yet to believe the truth on both fronts, and simpl... (read more)

Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?

jimmy5mo306

So far as I can tell, the common line that bear spray is more effective than firearms is based on an atrociously bad reading of the (limited) science, which is disavowed by the author of the studies. In short, successfully spraying a bear is more effective at driving off curious bears than simply having a firearm is are at stopping charging bears, but when you're comparing apples to apples then firearms are much more effective.

Here's a pretty good overview: https://www.outsideonline.com/2401248/does-bear-spray-work. I haven't put a ton of work into v... (read more)

4DCasey5mo

I quite liked this video on the topic when I watched it awhile back: Where he goes over the 2 reports and 2 studies on the topic and discusses "hey, wind tho." What I most remember from is a high rated comment on the video, rather than in it proper. An author who had been mauled, done interviews, and written a book on the topic claimed that bears committed to killing you don't tend to engage in threat displays - they stalk you, charge you from downwind and run you over, then circle back to start eating. Many people reporting what did or didn't work to prevent being attacked by a bear were likely not actually at high risk of being attacked, they just shot or sprayed a bear who was attempting to be very clear about their boundaries. Right or wrong, what the comment illustrates well is that the studies don't distinguish between aggression as threat display and aggression as actively dangerous behavior.

[Intuitive self-models] 4. Trance

jimmy6mo160

I'm the person JenniferRM mentioned. I'm also a physics guy, and got into studying/practicing hypnosis in ~2010/2011. I kinda moved on from "hypnosis" and drifted up the abstraction ladder, but still working on similar things and working on tying them together.

Anyway, here are my thoughts.

Suppose I really want her to be spinning clockwise in my mind. What might I do?

What worked for me is to focus on the foot alone and ignore the broader context so that I had a "clean slate" without "confirmatory experience" blocking my desired conclusion. When looking at t... (read more)

The hostile telepaths problem

jimmy6mo21

If someone's only option for dealing with a hostile telepath is self-deception, and then you come in and punish them for using it, thou art a dick.
Like, do you think it helps the abused mothers I named if you punish them somehow for not acknowledging their partners' abuse? Does it even help the social circle around them?

If that's their only option, and the hostility in your telepathy is antisocial, then yes. In some cases though, people do have other options and their self-deception is offensive, so hostile telepathy is pro-social.

For example, ... (read more)

The Median Researcher Problem

jimmy6mo50

The reason I trust research in physics in general is that it doesn't end with publishing a paper. It often ends with building machines that depend on that research being right.
We don't just "trust the science" that light is a wave; we use microwave ovens at home.

Well said. I'm gonna have to steal that.

Therefore, in a world where we all do power poses all the time, and if you forget to do them, you will predictably fail the exam...
...well, actually that could just be a placebo effect.

Yeah, "Can I fail my exam" is a bad test, because when the tes... (read more)

The Median Researcher Problem

jimmy6mo115

Can you come up with a better way of doing Psychology research?

Yes. More emphasis on concrete useful results, less emphasis on trying to find simple correlations in complex situations.

For example, "Do power poses work?". They did studies like this one where they tell people to hold a pose for five minutes while preparing for a fake job interview, and then found that the pretend employers pretended to hire them more often in the "power pose" condition. Even assuming there's a real effect where those students from that university actually impress those... (read more)

Viliam6mo105

The reason I trust research in physics in general is that it doesn't end with publishing a paper. It often ends with building machines that depend on that research being right.

We don't just "trust the science" that light is a wave; we use microwave ovens at home. We don't just "trust the science" that relativity is right; we use the relativistic equations to adjust GPS measurements. Therefore it would be quite surprising to find out that any of these underlying theories is wrong. (I mean, it could be wrong, but it would have to be wrong in the right way th... (read more)

The Median Researcher Problem

jimmy6mo107

Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. [...] Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it’s mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.

This assumes the median researchers can't recognize who the competent researchers are, or otherwise don't look to them as thought leaders.

I'm not arguing that this isn't often the case, just that it isn't alw... (read more)

The Median Researcher Problem

jimmy6mo60

There's no norm saying you can't be ignorant of stats and read, or even post about things not requiring an understanding of stats, but there's still a critical mass of people who do understand the topic well enough to enforce norms against actively contributing with that illiteracy. (E.g. how do you expect it to go over if someone makes a post claiming that p=0.05 means that there's a 95% change that the hypothesis is true?)

Taking it a step further, I'd say my household "has norms which basically require everyone to speak English", but that doesn't mean th... (read more)

Liability regimes for AI

jimmy8mo20

I think this is correct as a conditional statement, but I don't think one can deduce the unconditional implication that attempting to price some externalities in domains where many externalities are difficult to price is generally bad.

It's not "attempting to price some externalities where many are difficult to price is generally bad", it's "attempting to price some externalities where the difficult to price externalities on the other side is bad". Sometimes the difficulty of pricing them means it's hard to know which side they primarily lie on, but n... (read more)