All of wslafleur's Comments + Replies

wslafleur1-1

Our common agreement is that it's imperative for anyone with the wherewithal to show up and pay attention when dealing with others. The rest is surely context dependent, but I felt the need to push back a bit against what I see as a pernicious framing where both the empowered and disempowered parties are encouraged to view certain vices as essential.

This worries me because I'm not sure how to escape what I see as a sort of semantic trap. The discussion tends to settle itself around the topic of responsibility for hurt feelings when there are clearly deeper... (read more)

wslafleur1-1

While I appreciate that you took the time to pay some lip service to ask/tell culture perspectives, the article feels pretty unsympathetic to anyone that wants to draw a distinction between shallow kindness and deep goodness in how you treat others. The unspoken assumption here is that any well-calibrated application of consideration should inevitably lead you to accommodate any potential insecurities, fears and shyness. It places the locus of moral goodness squarely on avoiding hurt feelings. This is just not how I think of the world, and to me it looks a... (read more)

1dirk
I don't think you can cure other people's shyness, insecurity, and social anxiety by being less nice to them.
1silentbob
I appreciate your perspective, and I would agree there's something to it. I would at first vaguely claim that it depends a lot on the individual situation whether it's wise to be wary of people's insecurities and go out of one's way to not do any harm, or to challenge (or just ignore) these insecurities instead. One thing I've mentioned in the post is the situation of a community builder interacting with new people, e.g. during EA or lesswrong meetups. For such scenarios I would still defend the view that it's a good choice to be very careful not to throw people into uncomfortable situations. Not only because that's instrumentally suboptimal, but also because you're in a position of authority and have some responsibility not to e.g. push people to do something against their will. However, when you're dealing with people you know well, or even with strangers but on eye level, then there's much more wiggle room, and you can definitely make the case that it's the better policy to not broadly avoid uncomfortable situations for others.

Might be an uncharitable read of what's being recommended here. In particular, it might be worth revisiting the section that details what Deep Honesty is not. There's a large contingent of folks online who self-describe as 'borderline autistic', and one of their hallmark characteristics is blunt honesty, specifically the sort that's associated with an inability to pick up on ordinary social cues. My friend group is disproportionately comprised of this sort of person. So I've had a lot of opportunity to observe a few things about how honesty works.

Speaking ... (read more)

Look, all you need to do is have a discussion that is about the most efficient means of transporting dinosaurs by train. Then you're talking about both trains and dinosaurs.

On the one hand, I appreciate you articulating these models. On the other, I'm annoyed by the presupposition of conflict over consilience. I don't know that it would be helpful to whatever point you're trying to make, but the lack of any mention of synthesis-oriented behavioral models/approaches is easy to misconstrue as a failure of imagination. The zero-sum fallacy gives me a headache.

4Steven Byrnes
The very next paragraph after the dinosaur-train thing says: I think it’s really obvious that friends seek compromises and win-win-solutions where possible, and I think it’s also really obvious that not all participants in an interaction are going to wind up in the best of all possible worlds by their own lights. I think you’re unhappy that I’m spending the whole post talking about the latter, and basically don’t talk about finding win-wins apart from that one little paragraph, because you feel that this choice of emphasis conveys a vibe of “people are just out to get each other and fight for their own interest all the time” instead of a vibe of “kumbaya let’s all be friends”. If so, that’s not deliberate. I don’t feel that vibe and was not trying to convey it. I have friends and family just like you. Instead, I’m focusing on the latter because I think I have interesting things to say about it. I think there’s also something else going on with your comment though… As I mention in the third paragraph, there’s a kind of cultural taboo where we’re all supposed to keep up the pretense that mildly conflicting preferences between good friends simply don’t exist. Objectively speaking, I mean, what are the chances that my object-level preferences are exactly the same as yours down to the twelfth decimal place? Zero, right? But if we’re chatting, and you would very very slightly rather continue talking about sports, while I would very very slightly rather change the subject to the funny story that I heard at work, then we will mutually engage in a conspiracy of silence about this slight divergence, because mentioning the divergence out loud (and to some extent, even bringing it to conscious awareness in the privacy of your own head!) is not treated as pointing out an obvious innocuous truth, but rather a rude and pushy declaration that our perfectly normal slight divergence in immediate conversational interests is actually a big deal that poses a serious threat to our abi

This seems like a bunch of noise to me. It's not that difficult to distinguish between truth claims and a figure of speech expressing confidence in a subject. Doing so 'deceptively', consciously or otherwise, is just an example of virtue-signaling.

Surely it's obvious that these are all examples of what we in the business call a figure of speech. When somebody says "I believe in you!" they're offering reassurance by expressing confidence in you, as a person, or your abilities.


This is covered under most definitions of belief as:
2. Trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something. (a la Oxford Languages)

I'm not a board game buff, but I think their critique applies to video-games as well, where I feel much more confident asserting that there is a dearth of such games as do not fall into some sort of zero-sum or adversarial paradigm. Where they do not, they are increasingly strapping on extrinsic reward frameworks that are almost equally harmful to effectance motivation in the sense of being diametrically opposed.

I too would be interested in any examples you have to the contrary, mostly to see what you think constitutes a contradiction here. This is a prett... (read more)

"I think I have some high level critiques of the way Mako is pursuing this – there's a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer's got a vision they're attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn't quite resonate with players."

I find it amusing that, in response to a post dedicated to fundamentally challenging prevailing paradigms of modern games (y'know, the ones predicated on metrics that invariably narrow into adversarial dynamics), you've, perhaps inadvertently, suggested that OP might be failing by a narrow extrinsic measure of success. Time to abandon the vision and pursue mass-market appeal!

7Raemon
I think if you want a game to change the world, it actually does need mass market appeal. (If he’d phrased the goal less ambitiously I’d be orienting to this differently). That doesn’t mean catering to current mass market whims, but it does mean finding a way to connect to something that people want, even if they don’t know they want it. (But also, this feels like a kinda uncharitable misreading of what I was actually saying. I didn’t say anything about honing in on metrics and following them off a cliff)

Though I suspect there are mortality risks in being that isolated that are on the order of 1/30,000 a year too.

 

For some reason, I find this implication particularly irksome. First of all, it's borderline non sequitur speculative analysis. Second, it's broadcasting contempt for an elective lifestyle, which seems to be the whole motivation for including it. Unless you really think this sort of statistical prestidigitation supports the point you're trying to make(?)

Would you accept a similar argument based on how fucking dangerous people are to each oth... (read more)

1Timothy Underwood
Yeah, but I read somewhere that loneliness kills. So actually risking being murdered by grass is safer, because you'll be less lonely. I think we agree though. Making decisions based on tiny probabilities is generally a bad approach. Also, there is no option that is actually safe. You are right that I have no idea about whether near complete isolation has a higher life expectancy than being normally social, and the claim needed to compare them to make logical sense in that way. I think the claim does still make sense if interpreted as 'whether it is positive or negative on net, deciding to be completely isolated has way bigger consequences, even in terms of direct mortality risk, than taking the covid vaccine' - and thus avoiding the vaccine should not be seen as a major advantage of being isolated.

Your comment seems like a related aside, which I guess you admitted in a follow-up comment? But anyway, it makes me curious what the axiomatic precepts are for trade. The perception of mutual benefit and a shared ability to communicate this fact?

Also OP doesn't clearly distinguish between broader forms of quid pro quo and trade, so I'm just sort of adopting the broadest possible definition I can imagine.

I'm trying to decide to what extent this applies to my lived experience, but finding it difficult to distinguish between maintaining a healthy tranquility and cultivating habitual impassivity. My intuition is that I've had both experiences, but the internal feedback for either is very similar. Both seem to involve putting a functional amount of distance between yourself and your emotional response, and - in my experience - the healthy habit does reinforce itself, just like the negative version. But then, sometimes, I find myself noticing the lack of an emo... (read more)

The latter, although I don't think the gruesome details (beyond that) are really topical. I suspect that oral supplementation of this nature is significantly less effective and, other than a little mechanical discomfort, I don't know why anyone would opt for an oblique approach. The desired bacterial translocation is pretty straight-forward and you can achieve it in a similarly direct manner.

If your desire for details extends beyond mere curiosity, I'll respond to a DM. Just trying to be courteous to other uses.

This is relatable. I'm was diagnosed ASPD as a child, but never had any follow-up treatment or therapy. One noteworthy aspect of my transition into adulthood is the sheer amount of deliberate practice that went into learning how to properly socialize. Standing on the other side of all that effort, I feel that I've become more empathic than half my neurotypical friends and family members, quicker to accurately and elaborately imagine (in a humanizing fashion) another person's perspective. People regard me as eloquent and charming to be around, confident and... (read more)

That's super useful. Thank-you, I'll definitely follow-up on this. I imagine it would be.

Facile to the extent that it doesn't acknowledge the nuance of withholding judgement. One does not have to pretend at virtue for demanding a higher standard of rigor before committing to one position or another. This is especially true nowadays, when it is quick and cheap to track down the strongest arguments for, or against, any position and exceedingly difficult to thoroughly debunk them; when misinformation is everywhere and having domain specific expertise doesn't protect a source from bias.

The sort of pretention you're describing is contemptible, but ... (read more)

Oh, yeah. I should probably amend that. It's basically steroids, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories (whichever flavor you can handle) and a strong recommendation that you increase your fiber intake. I mentioned having been given each of these in roughly equal portions, but then failed to include it as a part of the prognosis.

My experience with corticosteroids was hit-or-miss, and I had severe, acute depression as a side-effect (I have never experienced anything like depression before or after, so it was pretty blatant). In any case, I don't really see steroi... (read more)

wslafleur*362

I've had gastrointestinal issues all my life. They started when I was a newborn; doctors diagnosed me as 'withholding', which is a polite way of implying that somebody is causing their own indigestion by refusing to take a shit. My distraught parents consulted several doctors who reaffirmed the original 'diagnosis' and finally resorted to administering enemas after other approaches had failed.

Presumably driven to innovation, half-mad with pain, sometime during my toilet training I arrived at a hack solution on my own. Rather than sitting on the toilet, I a... (read more)

1Portia
Mad respect. Hope you are okay now. It is bizarre how large an impact the microbiome has on human health. You have probably long tried this (in this case, feel free to ignore to hell and back), but for me, adding a probiotic with B. infantis in particular, supplementing psyllium (start low on that one) and consuming a lot of live, wild ferments (e.g. kimchi) made a huge difference.
1Steven Huang
I'm very curious about your homebrew FMT.. I'm assuming this was via a capsule of some sort and you ingested it? Or did you perform a self colonoscopy?
6ChristianKl
Have you seen https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i48nw33pW9kuXsFBw/being-a-donor-for-fecal-microbiota-transplants-fmt-do-good ?  If doing FMT once helped maybe doing it more frequently with even higher-quality material would help?
1theme_arrow
Very interesting story. One question: you said that the prognosis is "many rounds of heavy-duty antibiotics to hopefully induce periods of remission," but my understanding was that UC was autoimmune, and that the standard treatment was steroids or other immune system modulators? That's certainly what the Mayo Clinic says. Did the specialist mention any of these kinds of medications to you?

This is incorrect. The example only assumes that your only consideration was your spouse's view of how much you care about their experience. It makes no assumptions about what your spouse actually cares about.

Your claim, that for the majority of women that behavior isn't attractive, is just superfluous editorializing and I support Baisius's attempt to pressure you into more constructive discourse.

Does anybody know if there have been any sleep-deprivation studies that attempt to control for belief effects? I'm think about this sort of thing. The knock-on ramifications in either direction seem like they could be potentially significant. Among other things, belief effects could help to explain the swaths of contradictory studies around this topic.

This strikes me as deliberately obtuse. You advocate for externally recognizing a formula that basically amounts to what Razied is getting at, and pretending otherwise by saying he missed the point is, in my submission, obfuscation.

As you have noted, social interactions exist on a spectrum and it's unwise to disregard that context while discussing your proposal. However, I don't think there's any situation where formally acknowledging something to the effect of -

"I realize that, from now on, you will - naturally - be less inclined to invest your resources ... (read more)

These definitions of shame and guilt strike me as inherently dysfunctional because they seem to rely on direct external reference, rather than referencing some sort of internal 'Ideal Observer' which - in a healthy individual - should presumably be an amalgamate intuition, built on top of many disparate considerations and life experience.

2spkoc
The internal Ideal Observer is the amalgamated averaged out result of interactions with the world and other people alive and dead. Human beings don't come from the orangutan branch of the primate tree, we are fundamentally biologically not solitary creatures.  Our ecological niche depends on our ability to coordinate at a scale comparable to ants, but while maintaining the individual decision making autonomy of mammals. We're not a hive mind and we're not atomized individuals. We do and should constantly be balancing ourselves based on the feedback we get from physical reality and the social reality we live in. Is the Ideal Observer the thing doing that balancing? Sure. But then it becomes a very reduced sort of entity, kinda like science keeps reducing the space where the god of the gaps can hide. There's an inner utility function spitting out pleasure and pain based on stimuli, but I wouldn't call that me, there's a bit more flesh around me than just that nugget of calculation.