Having “interesting to journalists” but not “interesting for standard social interaction” covered might be a personal extreme that isn’t true for everybody in LW,
Second datapoint: I’ve been interviewed by journalists a few times, am terrible at people in general. (A whole half of these would have been dull and pointless interviews if not for my visual impairment. The others I could see happening regardless.)
My general expectation is that either you’re right, people will complain loudly until food and water stay cheap, or prices will avoid inflating because the people who produce need the people living on UBI to buy their stuff.
I have no general idea on which is more probable. I like the last one because it is the most convenient, but I’m not convinced it has any more probability than the first two.
Based on personal experience, I would have agreed with you, right up until last year, when I found myself in the rather terrifying position of being mentally aroused by a huge crash in my house, but unable to wake up all the way for several seconds afterward, during which my sleeping mind refused to reject the “something just blew a hole in the building we’re under attack!” hypothesis.
(It was an overfilled bag falling off the wall.)
But absent actual difficulty waking for potential emergencies, sure; hang out in Tel’aran’rhiod until you get bored.
More charitable hypothesis: The people most likely to notice an advancedatheist comment the quickest downvote. The next wave of people finds the downvoting excessive and upvote in response.
This doesn’t really predict −10 to +3 swings, though.
I tried entering the code in the examples there, with the labels replaced. It showed up as code. Then I noticed polls showing up in the Recent Comments list (where markdown is not rendered) as [poll id=\], and concluded there must be some middle step that was somehow obvious to everyone else that I couldn’t find.
One side-note: I notice that I seem to be almost the only one using polls. Why is that?
I tried a couple times, but couldn’t figure out how to make them work. The wiki wasn’t especially helpful.
My life got worse after I found LessWrong, but I can’t really attribute that to a causal relationship. I just don’t belong in this world, I think.
I can imagine LW-style rationality being helpful if you’re already far enough above baseline in enough areas that you would have been fairly close to winning regardless. (I am now imagining “baseline” as the surface of liquids in Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3. If I start having nightmares including the drowning music, … I’ll… … have a more colorful way to describe despair to the internet, I guess.)
As you say, if we use the number 1, then we shouldn’t wear seatbelts, get fire insurance, or eat healthy to avoid getting cancer, since all of those can be classified as Pascal’s Muggings.
And in fact, it has taken lots of pushing to make all of those things common enough that we can no longer say that no one does them. (In fact, looking back at hte 90s and early 2000s, it feels like wearing one’s seatbelt at all times was pretty contrarian, where I live. This is only changing thanks to intense advertising campaigns.)
Not that I’m aware, but you might check the “fiction” tag on Slatestarcodex. (I remember finding a similarly useful tag on his Livejournal, but I don’t remember what it was called OTTOMH).
(I don’t think it’s advisable, for a handful of reasons, [...])
I agree, even though I’m effectively punishing my past self in doing so.
I would like there to be a mechanism for making this possible, but it just seems too dangerous; even the idea of delaying puberty until the age of consent doesn’t work, because apparently this path can have permanent side-effects as well.
If the son is not transgender,
Possibly TMI:
I don’t consider myself transgender, but I have been wishing this had been done to me pretty much since I was 12.
The main thing I learned from this article is that everything I thought I knew about castration holds up under Lesswrongian analysis, including the part where I completely missed the opportunity and would probably be more likely to die early were I castrated now. There would still be some advantages, but it seems too late to be worth it.
You did specify “presumably normal”, though. Presumably, I am far from normal.
You aren’t possibly within range of Slate Star Codex meetups, by any chance?
(I am painfully aware that being in the same state (never mind country) is insufficient to provide easy access to people/events, but it seemed worth asking.)
A subset of Speech Therapy (especially for Autism Spectrum) covers exactly this sort of thing. I rather doubt it’s what you’re looking for, even if it’s an option, but it fits what you described almost perfectly. The major issues would be the tendency toward a more clinical setting, only being an hour or so a week, the limited pool of people to practice with, and establishing your existing skills.
Have you looked at whether there are times when your capacity for action and/or enjoyment is better? When it’s worse? This might give you some hypotheses to test to get some improvement.
I tried to do a somewhat quantified analysis of pairs of years, starting from 2002 (anything before 2002 is distorted by lots of things that I can’t change without technology and the rest of the world obliging). I found that the best phases seemed to correlate most strongly with something resembling enforced pomodoros, and something resembling access to people. Trying to artificially recreate these conditions is much harder than it sounds, and I have a sinking suspicion that there are some long-term effects of all this that would make it an uphill battle even then.
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Agreed and attempted. Too much sugar and carbs in a short span of time has a horrible effect; smaller amounts of sugar over a longer period seem to help, and there is a mild but noticeable improvement from other types of food, but I’ve never managed to sort out anything better than “find a way to get away from the concentrated sugars ASAP”.
What happened when you attempted to do pomodoros?
I’ve tried this more than once. Each time shows some improvement (each time, it’s less than the previous) for maybe a week or so at most, followed by horrible crashing.
Try doing whatever it is you need to do (not sure from your posting) physically with other people doing the same thing.
I’m blind and live in Northeast Arkansas and have no friends and the only part of this that seems like it should be easy is getting over the anxiety that prevents me from walking to the bus stop (I still haven’t done this. I’ve spoken to DSB about it but have no idea if anything will come of this). And my social skills are only technically extant.
I did try something last year where I talked to someone on Skype between us both trying pomodoros and such. I only lasted about a week.
(Akrasia, because that’s all I ever talk about):
I do not know to whose attention I should bring this so as to combat the problem, so I’m asking here:
http://caejones.livejournal.com/18117.html
I have a stupidly difficult time talking to people, too, especially my parents (who pretty much have to manage all the details, because of course they do). This does not help.
Yes, I’ve read all the Akrasia articles on Lesswrong that I can find. Mostly, I’m hoping there’s someone better equipped to fix this than me or the internet, and that someone can help me find that entity and extract a solution from them.
(But if that someone happens to post the solution here, first, that’d be nice. Although turning it into an arduous quest through the temple of doom seems like it could only help, assuming no crippling injuries along the way.)
In Praise of Life (Let’s Ditch the Cult of Longevity)
That article would be better titled “In Praise of Death”, and is a string of the usual platitudes and circularities.
I’m now curious: where are the essays that make actual arguments in favor of death? The linked article doesn’t make any; it just asserts that death is OK and we’re being silly for fighting it, without actually providing a reason (they cite Borges’s distopias at the end, but this paragraph has practically nothing in common with the rest of the article, which seems to assume immortality is impossible anyway).
Preference goes to arguments against Elven-style immortality (resistant but not completely immune to murder or disaster, suicide is an option, age-related disabilities are not a thing).
(I do not claim to speak for the_jaded_one, but this needs to be said.)
So, you can’t—for whatever reason—make yourself an alarm, a checklist, or basically anything that’s a sign that says “negative ROI—stop immedietly”?
No. On the occasion that this is an option, it is fairly useless.
akrasia as far as I can tell is usually codeword for “I’m a lazy fuck”.
Akrasia is shorthand for “I have spent the past nine years desperately trying to get the action part of my brain and the conscious desire part of my brain to agree, and I have failed so hard for nearly a decade that I’ve anthropomorphized the condition so I can disguise the resulting suicidality as threatening a supernatural being to a fight to the death”.
If you’d rather, Akrasia is code for “I am a lazy fuck, but not by choice”.
You might have some psychological problem.
It was obvious to me that this was a psychological problem seven years ago. Professionals have been so fucking useless I don’t even.
The only thing that’s ever helped* me reliably in the past is restrictions I can’t easily work around. If the_jaded_one is healthier enough that an easily-deleted smartphone-disabling app would help, then I find this post not absurd, but enviable.
* help is not a solution, but we’re talking the difference between suicidally depressed and “What the fuck do I say about Cahier d’un retour au pays natal?”.
Based on what I’ve encountered, I’ve interpreted the Japanese version as being more broad and metaphysical (the power of friendship, Killing intent), whereas the Chinese version is more like Alchemy: not quite science, but sorta-kinda tries to be (Fengshui and TCM, but also conservation of energy and such). There is considerable overlap, since ki is literally qi filtered through Japanese culture, but I generally expect people who talk about qi to be more interested in the Alternative Medicine route, whereas Ki indicates one or more of anime fan / Aikido practitioner / practitioner of Japanese spirituality. (These are more probabilities than hard categories; Reiki is a good counterexample.)