All of Stuart Anderson's Comments + Replies

Androgens are not scribed for depression. Legally they're considered to be hard drugs. It will take you all of five minutes to get a script for oxy but getting a script for testosterone is very difficult indeed (or was. TRT is more of a thing these days). This is less a medical issue and more of a cultural one.

Testosterone has mood altering effects (as anyone that has had a male puberty can attest). Those effects can be positive but there is no guarantee thereof. This is something you can try without significant difficultly, you will see effects almost immediately, and you'll have a good idea whether it is a help or hinderance based on that.

You have your fall back position of retreat here, and very little to lose by experimenting with ways to break out of the behavioural loop you're stuck in. People alter their behaviour in response to your own. Therefore you can make iterative changes and observe the effects. 

That's all I'm trying to get you to consider.

1sudoLife
Hm, valid point I suppose. I just have to be careful to not end up with a bigger issue than I've started with.
1sudoLife
My strategy of having peace is described in my question. As to how to make peace, there have been a few ways suggested, e.g. setting boundaries. I can't see any others really. Do what you both agree on together, do the rest separately in your own way.

I'd do little more than write a role on a card (politician, corporate interest, activist, police, teacher, parent, student, etc.), and probably public and private motivations to prompt people beyond the obvious. Then you just let them at each other.

All this comes down to is putting people in situations of asymmetric power dynamics. Then it's just a matter of seeing how power corrupts. 

Then when you had a play through or two and made sure nobody's completely traumatised^(1) or anything like that you have a debrief. That's when you disclose player's pri... (read more)

Persuasion will most likely fail.

Learn how to deal with people unlike yourself without having to convert them to your beliefs or run away from them. The sooner you figure this out, the less avoidable suffering you'll have to endure.

Plausible solutions are middle grounds and / or moving out.

Here's a radical idea: if you don't like being at home, don't be at home.

Go out and get a job. That will get you some money, actual real world experience, and external perspectives that you currently lack.

2sudoLife
With all due respect, "learn how" is why I am here, it is in my very question. I do have a job, and hence some experience outside my family bubble. However, at work I deal with scientists who are a very different kind of people as you might imagine.

If there was something I wish were taught in schools it would be more practical roleplaying. It would take all of an hour to give students turns as the various stakeholders in this scenario for them to gain an understanding of why a school strike is pointless, and what might work instead.

1tcelferact
If you have time to share, I'll read it!
2Gytis Daujotas
This is counterintuitive to me - I haven't heard of androgens being prescribed for depression. Do you have more information?
Answer by Stuart Anderson20
  1. Slight of hand:

    If you're not bothered by injections and have appropriate technique then all you have to do is shoot saline in front of your mother.
     
  2. Operant conditioning:

    Apply the gold standard of animal training. Reward positive behaviours, ignore negative ones.

    The obvious problem with using OC on your relatives is that you typically have care for them. Micromanaging every interaction kills any hope of honesty or intimacy. They're just problems to be managed, not people you can actually share anything with.
     
  3. This situation is a test. It is not the
... (read more)
1sudoLife
I might do just that if I ever feel an urge to be confined in a psychiatry clinic. Agreed, that's something I'd use on my college peers, not relatives. I have mentioned what action seems obvious at the end of my question. Persuasion will most likely fail. Plausible solutions are middle grounds and / or moving out.

Pyrolysis and then burying the char as a soil amendment.

2Drea
For a concrete example, in our county, there is a group called CHIPs that does wood fuel clearing on private land and uses it to create syngas and biochar.  I need to check on their cost per acre for tree and brush clearing next week, so I'll report back.

I always try using my code editor hotkeys while editing text in non-coding contexts

AutoHotKey or other remapping/scripting utility perhaps?

Even if you can't remap usefully within context at least you can stop it from doing something annoying.

The obvious problem is that everyone wants none of certain kinds of people. We have the statistics about elective abortions of foetuses with Down's Syndrome. 

These things always start with the edge cases.

2habryka
Mod note:  This has nothing to do with the topic of this post, and veers into random political discussion. Comments like this are not welcome on LessWrong and can lead to a ban.
5lsusr
What do you mean?
1Kelly Smith
I don't know what you're even implying about the Fauci email drop. If you dig even a little into that story it's clear there was nothing there and it was the typical media tactic where they dig through thousands of emails and quote tiny snippets out of context to people who don't know better and will take the bait. If stories like these are popping up in the media you consume, that means you're consuming entertainment media, not actual journalism. Even if Fauci contradicted himself or made a mistake, who cares? He is one of the foremost public health experts in the world and his credentials are impeccable. If you listen to experts, you're going to be on the right side of the vast majority of issues.  ...which is why I don't agree that trustworthy sources "no longer exist". For people who are sufficiently motivated and good at doing research, it's never been easier to find accurate, trustworthy information. Why would you bother going to the mainstream media for news on a virus when you can get that information directly from the world's top physicians and research scientists? They're all on Twitter and many of them have blogs or podcasts.  When you're getting your Covid information from an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins or the Harvard School of Medicine, you aren't worried that it's poorly sourced, second hand information revolving around some political narrative. 
1AnthonyC
"You aren't going to change English in the same way you aren't going to change QWERTY layouts." I think you (for some value of "you") could do that in an otherwise-stable world, over a long enough timescale, but other technological changes will obviate the need for it to soon to do so. Things like natural language processing, automated translation, brain-computer interfaces, cochlear implants and other interventions making deafness rarer. Although now I'm wondering if any sign languages have their own dedicated written forms, and if so, what they're like. Also, whether anyone has created video-to-text software for sign languages, even if that needs to include a machine translation step to convert to a spoken language's written form.
1Crackatook
Its stout appearance gave me the impression it will protect me, even at the blast, which my house definitely can’t protect me from haha. Well, it makes sense that concrete will melt in the core of a nuclear explosion. Although I will hide and stay inside the bunker. 
2Alex Hollow
Most places have water, but how close is it to where you live? If you don't have a way of storing a significant amount of water, and live far enough from your local water source that you would have to drive, there is a benefit to having enough water storage so that you can transport a reasonable amount of water per trip. But I agree that having a water filter on hand is useful in cases where you have access to water, but you aren't sure whether it's safe to drink or not.
2ChristianKl
Not engaging is different then voting no confidence. It's essentially abstaining from any votes of no confidence.
1Maxwell Peterson
Thanks! I’ve been vaguely thinking I’d like to be able to cycle but I think I have to reduce my dependence first, to not be dead on the off days.
2ChristianKl
This is a bit like saying: "The politician that win the election these days are crazy so I stopped voting". The fact that a lot of bad calls get made makes it more important to engage and not less. (I think donations are a different matter, and don't think that there's a strong case for donating)
3ChristianKl
What does truly mean? The word points to the No true Scotsman-fallacy. Why would highly political governments which structures that don't lend themselves to truth finding have a better idea about whether it's truly an emergency then we do?  Where does your belief in governments being very competent come from?
2Maxwell Peterson
Yup yup - I was wondering if there was some weird less-known but persuasive reason it might be dangerous, so thought I’d do a double-check here. Cheers!
1Maxwell Peterson
I’ve wanted this additional dose for more than a month but didn’t want to take someone else’s dose, so I waited. It is my understanding that supply is no longer a limiting factor on vaccination rates. This is based on two things: 1. There are many unfilled vaccine appointments around me. 2. The cumulative-vaccinations-by-day graph is leveling off. In April in my state we had something like 3 to 4% of the total population being vaccinated each week - now that number is around 1%. And extra doses at my local CVS are probably not going to make it to India or Mexico or Africa if I skip my appointment. The vague feeling I’ve got is that the logistical issues are difficult enough that pharmacies won’t be sending vaccines back, though this is just a feeling. So I decided that this is a pretty different situation and doesn’t match the feeling I had in April of “I don’t want to take anybody else’s appointment”. Some states are literally running million-dollar lotteries to try and get people to get it!
5Maxwell Peterson
I agree in most cases, but here specifically, I’m worried that doctors are just going to follow CDC guidance and say something like “vaccine efficacy cannot be directly compared, and one J&J counts as fully vaccinated, so current guidelines say no, no more dose”. And it would cost my company around $500 to go to a doctor’s office and get their advice, which seems like a waste. Also, I’d already signed up for the appointment before posting this question, planning to go! So the alternatives here were not “ask LW or ask my doctor”, but rather “ask LW or ask no one”. The advice here is better than the no-advice option I would have gone with if LW didn’t exist, or deleted this type of question.
2mukashi
He is not asking to any random forum on the Internet, he is asking to a community of rationalists with many well-informed people about many different topics. 
2jaspax
I'm not sure that I agree with the notion that one needs to teach reasons before behaviours. When it comes to socialisation, one needs to teach the desired behaviours first, and the complicated rationale later, if at all. And we do this precisely because we DO care about outcomes: people (including highly intelligent, nerdy people; let's not flatter ourselves) are much better at applying heuristics and rules learned in early childhood than they are deriving proper action from first principles. I think that the general shape of childhood education in this matter is actually correct: first you teach people to do things because It's The Right Thing To Do; later, in an advanced course, you can break out the game theory to show how the prescription is derived.
3Vanilla_cabs
I can't find the american report I read years ago about acceleration, but the conclusion was that grade skipping's benefits almost always overwhelmed the drawbacks. In particular, socialisation does not always degrade after skipping, it might actually improve. Grade skipping has the advantage of being totally free (actually saving money for everyone involved including taxpayers) and applicable today. TL/DR: Grade skipping is a low hanging fruit.
3jaspax
Um? * How and when to say "please" and "thank you" * How to address and talk to police, firemen, and other public officials * The importance of "sharing", etc. * The bad of "bullying", etc. * How and when to write thank-you letters and other social niceties * Appropriate ways to talk to someone who lost a family member These and others were all things that I recall from my grade school years. One could critique the means and content of these lessons all day, but it seems unsupportable to claim that there are no lessons on such behaviours. (If you're autistic, your problem may be that you were taught the explicit, formal, and decontextualised rules that schools include, but failed to pick up the implicit, informal, and contextually-dependent behaviours that schools don't include.)
1benjaminikuta
Maybe one strategy is much more effective than another? I wouldn't assume that it's worthwhile just because it exists. 
2Gunnar_Zarncke
I think that would be worth exploring and might also explain why notes work for some people and not for others.   I do not have a strong visual imagination but I am very good with concepts and abstract relationships. I often connect topics on paper, place text close to other, or use lines and circles to group things.
habrykaModerator Comment140

We've given you some mod warnings in the past. This kind of comment really strikes me as quite a bit too tribal or aggressive for LessWrong, so consider this your final warning. On further comments like this, we will likely ban you. 

Answer by Stuart Anderson100
  1. I take a lot of notes because my working memory is shot to pieces. These notes are often unintelligible after even a short amount of time. These kind of notes are ephemera.
  2. I take notes and I consolidate notes. Consolidation is what turns my notes into something worth keeping or discarding. More important things get more consideration which translates to more editing which results in more coherent notes. These are notes that are more likely to be typed up (a good example of that is my reference sheet for my financial information and accounts. Nobody wants t
... (read more)
4Gunnar_Zarncke
OneNote is also good at this. though not as good as I need (e.g. I would want recognizing shapes).  But my point is different: Digitizing quick notes leads to a very different workflow. It creates incentives to create notes of permanent type ("disk"). Creating these takes more effort and reduces your RAM instead of expanding it so to speak.    
0tkpwaeub
The beauty of this is that it doesn't have to be the government implementing surge pricing. It can be the store owner etc.
Load More