All of mingyuan's Comments + Replies

[Context: For ~4 years up until a year ago it was my job to keep track of rationalist groups around the world, also I happen to have gone to UChicago]

I don't know of any other currently active rationality groups at universities, but I recommend joining this Discord server for people who run rationality meetups. Some of the organizers in there previously ran university groups, and even those who didn't will probably have helpful advice. 

For UChicago in particular, you probably already know this but you'll need to apply for RSO status before December 1s... (read more)

I do have some general sense here that those aren't emotionally realistic options for people with my emotional makeup.

Here's my take: From the inside, Nate feels like he is incapable of not becoming very frustrated, even angry. In a sense this is true. But this state of affairs is in fact a consequence of Nate not being subject to the same rules as everybody else.

I think I know what it's like, to an extent — I've had anger issues since I was born, and despite speaking openly about it to many people, I've never met anyone who's been able to really understan... (read more)

Whoops very late reply but in the pictures, the posters are actually just taped to 8.5"x10" sheets of black cardstock; after printing the virtues themselves we manually cut them all down to have 1/2" margins all around.

When we moved houses in 2019 we did frame them, using these frames that conveniently come in a 12 pack! (For the void we put a piece of black paper in the frame.)

Agree! Also, my response to the sentence you quoted would be: Playing guitar and playing piano are (for many people) almost entirely separate skills, which feel very different, are learned differently, and have different cultural connotations. People are more likely to base their choice of instrument on that (and the things TAG mentioned) than on some kind of optimization for 'most versatile musical instrument'.

But also I don't disagree with the original quote :) I mean, it definitely seems true that a lot of people play the piano and guitar, fewer (but st... (read more)

Good job!

The advice this post points to is probably useful for some people, but I think LessWrongers are the last people who need to be told to be less socially graceful in favor of more epistemic virtue. So much basic kindness is already lacking in the way that many rationalists interact, and it's often deeply painful to be around.

Also, I just don't really buy that there's a necessary, direct tradeoff between epistemic virtue and social grace. I am quite blunt, honest, and (I believe) epistemically virtuous, but I still generally interact in a way that endears me ... (read more)

I love this post, you're one of my favorite bloggers

A trauma is an instance where something hurts you, and you develop coping mechanisms to route around the hurt, but the coping mechanisms limit your action space, blind you to some things, and distort your thinking a bit.

🫣

You can fix your emotional problems/confusions, but it'll take awhile.

But how?

This is not a very good LW comment, but, I’m interested in talking about this with you some time if you’re up for it.

Okay I bought the specific LED lights you linked, and I have to disagree. The color temperature is nice enough, but they have a very noticeable refresh rate, such that if I wave them back and forth my eyes have trouble keeping track of them. I don't think these are any better than other LED string lights I have, and my husband thinks they're probably worse (more noticeable flicker, though perhaps comparable CRI). I would definitely not light a space with them.

That said, I'm not put out about having spent $10 on these, because they're supposedly meant for outdoor use, and I wanted our front porch to be more illuminated anyway and basically don't care about the light quality there. And the claim did seem worth testing!

Maybe, although the OP does say "How could something as fundamental as protein deficiency not be a standard, ordinary thing we test for?", so it sounded like it hadn't been tested at all.

But yeah now you've made me want to criticize the whole idea of normal ranges! One time I had a vitamin D deficiency that had me extremely ill for three months and even bedridden for part of that time, but clinically it was only mildly out of range, and the doctor just told me "Your vitamin D level is a bit low" – which I feel didn't sufficiently suggest that it might be t... (read more)

This comment made me happy! Thanks for the positivity!! 💖

Hm, so, I definitely agree about having very little faith in the modern medical system's ability to figure out most problems. I have a lot of experience with this myself and it's rough — I'm sorry it was bad for you and I'm glad you got better!

However, I'm pretty surprised that your protein levels were never tested! When I go to a doctor in America and tell them that some new thing is mysteriously wrong with me, their first recourse is pretty much always to order blood tests, and consequently I have had my blood protein levels checked six times in the past... (read more)

Interesting, I'll have to get some and see what I think! I usually steer clear of battery-pack lights because of some experiences where they died almost immediately, so I wouldn't have stumbled upon them myself. I am really sensitive to light quality though, so we'll see :)

I have not worked on the Inn, but the search term for that kind of light is 'recessed channel lighting' :) 

(I guess I should mention in the post that my recommendations were rental-space-oriented; Lightcone was able to install this recessed lighting because they own the space and can do whatever they want to it, but it's too invasive for a rental.)

I'm surprised that you've omitted window treatments. Maybe they're just less of a thing that people think about in the spaces that you're documenting here?

Yeah, I'd actually have a ton more to say about making a space good as it applies to your home, but it didn't all seem relevant here — e.g. the Lightcone offices were in a WeWork with windows that didn't open. (ETA: Like I said at the top of the post, this isn't a guide to what I think is optimal; that would look pretty different.)

But totally agree with everything you said about windows! I especially lov... (read more)

Oh thank you, I had no idea! I just thought the article was cool but knew very little about the topic going in.

Anyone claiming a particular style, brand, fabric, or article of clothing is optimal, full stop, is either lying, trying to sell you something, or confused about how optimization works

That's fair... but also I want to spread the word about my optimal dress. While it's only sold new on StitchFix, there are tons available secondhand (and usually cheaper) on Poshmark, and it comes in dozens of fabrics/patterns! (Search 'Kaileigh faux wrap dress' or just 'Kaileigh dress', in your size.)

It's obviously not actually 'optimal' but it's really comfortable and looks... (read more)

I basically haven't done any further research since I wrote this article, but my understanding was that you can fund a Cryonics Institute contract with work-provided life insurance, but it's not possible for Alcor, because Alcor has stipulations about who owns the policy. I hope that helps!

Epistemic check: Are you going off any kind of study or anything for baby boomers "being the most narcissistic in human history", or is that just a thing that feels good to say? 

I'm extremely skeptical that parents have become more abusive in general — life in the past was terrible in all sorts of ways and I'd be surprised if people were on average nicer fifty years ago. If you know more people your age who claim to have had abusive parents than people older than you who claim the same, consider the types of alternate explanations Zvi gives above, e.g... (read more)

I don't think it's that new or weird, I mean, I guess it depends what you mean by 'kids', but universities have been hotbeds of political activism since long before the internet. And I know that I had strong political 'opinions' growing up just by virtue of living in a city where 95% of the adults I encountered were liberal. My parents took me and my sister to protests against the Iraq War when I was five despite not being particularly politically involved people, and the 2011 Wisconsin protests happened when I was 14 and I and most of my friends were there (especially since school was canceled, so there wasn't much reason not to go).

Yup

What, lockdown? Absolutely not. Sticking around in Berkeley? I don't know, probably

Not Zvi and not a parent but: Every kid learns about death, and it is true for every kid that they might not get to grow up. Extinction is different, but not so different (to a child's mind) from the threat of nuclear war, or even regular war, both of which many children have had to face before. I'm also not aware of concrete policies on how to explain to kids that they and everyone they love will die, but it's not like it's a new problem.

The Chinese effort and one child policy would fall into the ‘young adult dystopia’ book section if it was fictional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Hidden

Oh my god we're finally here! It's been so very long. Your posts were so important to me during the worst of the pandemic; I wouldn't know how to possibly thank you enough, and also I 100% support you stopping. Onward and upward <3

I have seen this happen with one pair of shoes; not sure of the material but they disintegrated while being worn for the first time out of lockdown. But I've successfully stored (or seen stored) lots and lots of other pairs of shoes where the material has held up fine, including leather, cloth, suede, and rubber.

Also if you find a clothing item you really like, it's often a good idea to buy more than one, because clothing (/shoes/etc) is more likely to go out of production than most types of things, due to Fashion. 

I expect some of this is different masks, being a good fit for people with different shaped heads and different preferences

I've worn these before, but with long slippery hair they don't stay on that well and also mess up my hair like crazy

I don't understand why the target subject here should be people who have never put any effort or thought into their diet. That way you don't get relevant evidence about the prevalence of iron deficiency among veg*ns, but only the almost trivial conclusion that people who don't take any care of their dietary health have some deficiencies.

It makes plenty of sense to me; I think the vast majority of people don't put any thought into what vitamins they might be deficient in. I was vegan in college for ethical reasons, and I was in the school's vegan / an... (read more)

What was hard about drinking from a can?

My understanding is that the anti-tourniquet meme is outdated, and the emergency medical response advice now is that the benefits of potentially preventing someone's death from blood loss outweigh the risk of amputation. I recall being taught in my college course in 2015 that it's fine to put on a tourniquet, just mark it with the time. And a few years ago, when my mom pulled a heavily bleeding man out of the cab of his overturned truck and wouldn't let any of the other truckers apply a tourniquet to his arm because she'd been taught that you should never ... (read more)

I took an emergency medical response course in college (~40 hours, all in-person, with a mix of verbal lessons and practical exercises in each class), and the most important thing I learned was that having memorized what to do in an emergency is not sufficient to get you to actually act. [ETA: Also, to call 911 in an emergency!]

I got 100% on the written test and still remember much of it to this day, but I am an absolutely terrible person to go to in an emergency because I panic and freeze every time. I've seen this play out in myself many times over my li... (read more)

Thanks for the last section because that's totally what I was going to comment while reading the rest of it! Feminine beauty standards are so deeply internalized that they don't subjectively feel like they have anything to do with men or dating — they feel closer to, like, moral truths? Or something?

Like, I'm afraid of gaining weight not because I think it would be bad for my health or make my husband stop liking me, but because I've internalized the message that being fat is an unacceptable moral failing — and I've felt this way since at least the beginni... (read more)

I'm confused, it was my impression that a lot of Chinese people, including in the West, have been masking strategically since like 2003 (the first SARS wave), i.e. wearing a mask if they are sick, or if the risk of getting sick is unusually high (e.g. a bad flu season at university). The only people I ever saw wearing masks for illness prior to 2020 were Asian (except for one very immunocompromised white friend). Honestly it seems crazy to me that the norm prior to this was just to do nothing to try to prevent illness, because being sick is both terrible i... (read more)

I use ibuprofen almost exclusively because a source I trusted told me years ago that it was better for me longterm than acetaminophen (alas I have no idea what the source was) but I think the same principle applies. I always take one pill to start because I worry about developing tolerance / rebound headaches / kidney damage / stomach upset, and then if that doesn't seem to make a difference within 60-90 minutes, I take a second one. I find that usually I need two (i.e. the recommended dose), perhaps since I only take painkillers at all when the pain has r... (read more)

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bay-area-winter-solstice-2022-tickets-443735594107

This seems wrong to me? Hard to say because it was so long ago but I imagine I spent at least 15 hours a week on homework. I went to a basically normal public high school, and while most of the work wasn't hard for me (varying between mindnumbingly easy and moderately challenging), there was just so much of it that it took a ton of time. Sure I wasn't 'working smart', and I was a perfectionist to an unreasonable level, and I cared too much about what my teachers thought of me, but I imagine none of those things are unusual for kids trying to get into good schools.

No. I would wake up early to do homework, spend 8 to 10 hours at school (and often do homework during class), and then go home and do more homework. Looking back I got a lot more value out of my non-school activities and hobbies than I did out of doing homework, but there was just so little time for anything else. I was constantly stressed about missing deadlines and usually extremely tired. Meanwhile when my husband was in high school he did zero homework and actually did things in the world like building a house and starting a startup, which seems way be... (read more)

I feel emotional whiplash from moving out of young adulthood into regular adulthood. It feels like I was robbed of the transition between the two. I wish we could have peacefully handed the baton off to the next generation, rather than waking up one day and finding it gone.

I'm maybe five years younger than you but I feel much the same way. Before lockdown I felt like I was just beginning adulthood — I'd been out of college for less than three years and graduated pretty young, so in most workplaces or social situations I was one of the youngest people aroun... (read more)

[fixed link to Habryka's comment]

One of my objections is similar to benjamincosman's — people not taking no for an answer in romantic/sexual contexts is a problem I've seen in people of all ages, races, cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic status, social status, and points on the autism spectrum. It was a big problem at both my urban public high school and my elite private college.

Yes power differentials make it worse, yes it's more of a problem in an environment as gender-imbalanced as EA or the wider Bay Area tech scene, and yes people who are striving to be moral should hold themselves ... (read more)

One week left to audition!

I'm glad you like the sequence! I went with a $200,000 death benefit to hopefully account for inflation.

Note that the date has been changed to Thursday the 27th!

Logging on today, I noticed that all of the posts with this problem (today) were personal blogposts; are those treated differently? Also some of these are tagged 'ML', but that makes it through the AI filter, which.... I guess is intended behavior :/

Yeah this is a point that I failed to make in my own comment — it's not just that I'm not interested in AIS content / not technically up to speed, it's that seeing it is often actively extremely upsetting

I don't actually know how subforums are implemented on EA Forum but I was imagining like a big thing on the frontpage that's like "Do you want to see the AI stuff or the non-AI stuff?". Does this sound clunky when I write it out?... yes

I'm in favor of subforums — from these comments it seems to me that a significant fraction of people are coming to LW either for AI content, or for explicitly non-AI content (including some people who sometimes want one and sometimes the other); if those use cases are already so separate, it seems dumb to keep all those posts in the same stream, when most people are unhappy with that. (Yeah maybe I'm projecting because I'm personally unhappy with it, but, I am very unhappy.)

I used to be fine with the amount of AI content. Maybe a year ago I set a karma pen... (read more)

And see also also Anna Salamon's How to learn soft skills, which could possibly be helpful here