All of karlkeefer's Comments + Replies

I find the cultural relativity bit of this the most fascinating. I share your cultural context, and for most of my young life the personality preferences built into this culture felt like facts about the world. Agreeable people were just better, more likeable people, full stop.

After traveling a bit and reading about other cultures I've learned that's not the case, but I still find it fascinating to attempt to "try on" different values. I often need to make an effort to steelman different preferences, as my default (negative) response to cultures/people wit... (read more)

1weathersystems
Heh, I got the same feeling from the Dutch people I met. My ex wife once did a corporate training thing where they were learning about the power of "yes and" in improve and in working with others. She and one other European person (from Switzerland maybe?) were both kinda upset about it and decided to turn their improve into a "no but" version. Ya I definitely took agreeableness == good as just an obvious fact until that relationship.

On the general point, as a recently-turned vegan (~1 yr), my spending is roughly the same. Money saved on not buying meat/milk/cheese was basically directly replaced by splurging on expensive stuff like avocados, cashews, faux-cheeses, and fancy salads. All of those are non-essential, but budget wasn't ever my primary motive in choosing foods.

The following thoughts are mostly in response to your last claim around market dynamics and the foods people choose.

A big part of the observed frequency of meat eating is explained by cultural inertia, esp. with the h... (read more)

This site doesn't exist anymore but the described functionality sounded great to me, so I'm building a thing that has the same functionality called Email Notebook.

I originally built it with gratitude journaling in mind, but pre-launch feedback from folks suggested that this tool would be useful for people that wanted to maintain some other kind of journal. There were also some folks that wanted e.g. short story prompts, so I architected this thing to (eventually) support a variety of prompt types. I'll try to make the homepage copy more clear!

Answer by karlkeefer*20

There's a trade-off to be wary of here in trying to improve the list only by adding. Making it complete might also make it too long to actually get much use.

Can you optimize the list to keep the most valuable bits while also keeping it nice and short to increase the chance someone will go through the effort of answering the questions?

I noticed in your own use of the template, you only included a few of the sub-questions.

1weathersystems
I added in a few more of the questions from the template that seem relevant. Including the one about possible difficulties. I think what's there cover's your trade-off.
1weathersystems
I was thinking that the template would be something where you could just keep the sections that seem relevant and delete the rest.  But I guess even that would start to get annoying if the thing was super long. That's a good consideration to keep in mind.

Not OP, but I read their comment about related problems as something more like this:

The system in question likely already has feedback or correction mechanisms that respond to other potential problems - asking about those mechanisms might reveal strengths of the system that can be easily adapted for your purposes. I'm not sure how easy it will be to find these, though, as the best-functioning ones might be invisible if they actually eliminate the other problems completely.

That might not be their intent, but I think it's also a useful consideration so even if my interpretation isn't matched I hope this comment is still useful :)

Is this substantially different from "cohousing"?

There are a huge number of existing projects like this, with a huge variation in the degree of "codependence" from one community to another. https://www.cohousing.org/directory/wpbdp_category/comm/

2lincolnquirk
Thanks! I will browse the site and see if there are useful details about what others have tried!

There are a few people in my social network experiencing "long covid" who were otherwise healthy and young. I think some of the unknowns there provide more than enough reason to take low-cost precautions like getting and wearing masks.

The long term symptoms aren't being talked about much because lots of people are still dying, but also because most of the infections are still really recent so we don't have much data on the long-term.

https://predictionbook.com/ has a skeleton that could be extended with prompts for belief updates. It already has prompts for adjudication of your previous predictions.

#20 reminded me of a bizarre experience where I attempted to pass a hacky-sack through the open windows of a car to a friend of mine, and it disappeared. We looked inside and outside the car for a full 15 minutes before realizing it had landed, balanced, on the narrow handle above the window. We never looked up!

Answer by karlkeefer20

In March-May I didn't interact with anyone in-person outside of my housemates, who were doing the same. One of us went shopping, about once a month, and we made an effort to get most things delivered. We quarantined the mail for 3 days before opening it, etc. We were pretty intense.

Now, we don't quarantine the mail at all (not really worried about surface transmission in general), and we do "go into work" but in our case it's a huge building and 90% of the time we're only in the same room as people in our germ pod. We also frequently host some small gather... (read more)

2George3d6
Not sure this is directed at me or just a question for poetic reasons, but I'm going to answer it anyway: 1. The "bradykinin hypothesis" is the only one that has a reasonable model of long term damage, basically attributing it to ACE2 expression in tissues where it would be normally close-to-absent and bradykinin overproduction being triggered in part by that an synergizing badly with it. 2. This is "hopeful" in that it predicts side effects are non-random and instead associated with a poor immune response. That is to say, youth's protective role against death also protects against side effects. 3. I found no quantifiable studies of side effects after the infection, the ones that exist are case studies and/or very small n and in older demographics (i.e. the kind that needs to attend the hospital in the first place and is then monitored long term after the infection passed) 4. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and a model of infection is just a useful tool not a predictor of reality, plus my understanding of it is likely simplistic. But that same statement I could make about a lot of coronavrisues and influenza viruses I expose myself to every year.

Kids (and adults) are only lazy in the context of being made to do things they don't want to do. Kids who aren't subjected to school have lots of energy because they're exploring things they're excited about. Learning is playing for them.

Not OP, but I've done a bit of digging on this. Education research is really in a bit of a bind when it comes to looking at very-different models. The conventional model is so well established and broadly applied that it's really hard to get powerful studies of anything radically different from what you see in public schools today. Nearly all of the energy in Ed departments at various universities is focused there because that's where 95%+ of kids spend their time.

There are a handful of homeschooling studies that differentiate between "unschoolers" and mor... (read more)

You just described Self-Directed Education.

Of particular interest, at least to me, are Peter Gray's optimizing conditions.

You mentioned a few of them: Ample time for play, access to tools. I think the others combine to outline a sort of litmus test for learning environments that conform to our natural ways of learning.

An umbrella term for this style of learning (and systems that support it) is "self-directed education". You can find places that practice this low-coercion and self-directed style here. There are a small handful of places in Central Europe that might fit the bill.

These places often serve as a refuge for kids that don't fit in the conventional school model, so you often encounter a high rate of neuro-atypicality. There are lots of kids that might have earned themselves a diagnosis in a school setting who are thriving in an environment that can bend to their

... (read more)
2kotrfa
Thanks for the tip and links. Unfortunately, it doesn't show much in Prague (but still gives me a hint about what to look for even if some school isn't registered in the linked project). Hm... I don't think I would have issues of having to do so. I am trying to understand how to think about this, and this simply didn't occur to me before. In fact, it seems that me and my girlfriend are currently rather at the side of trying to figure out how to do this in self-directed-way, but it's still in early stages.

I'm going to try to come to this! Thanks for organizing/posting it.

I'd love to talk about the "What to do about the woo?" section of the paper reviewed recently here - but generally interested just to meet some folks.