dkl9

Con­ven­tional foot­notes con­sid­ered harmful

Boons and banes

• dkl9Sep 23, 2024, 6:05 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: kqr’s comment on: How harm­ful is mu­sic, re­ally?

  I added intention-to-treat statistics in an addendum.

• dkl9Sep 19, 2024, 2:53 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: kqr’s comment on: How harm­ful is mu­sic, re­ally?

  there might be a common antecedent that both improves your mood and causes you to listen to music. As a silly example, maybe you love shopping for jeans, and clothing stores tend to play music, so your mood will, on average, be better on the days you hear music for this reason alone.

  There might be a common antecedent that both worsens my mood and causes me to listen to music. As a silly example, maybe I hate shopping for jeans, but clothing stores tend to play music, which actually improves my mood enough to outweigh the shopping. That is, confounding could go both ways here; the effect could be greater than it appears, rather than less.

  An intention-to-treat approach where you make the random booleans the explainatory variable would be better, as in less biased and suffer less from confounding.

  I’ll reanalyse that way and post results, if I remember.

  How was this accomplished, technically?

  I made a script run in the background on my PC, something like

  while true:
      qt = random(0, INTERVAL)
      while time() % INTERVAL < qt:
          sleep(1)
      announce_interruption()
      mood = popup_input("mood (-1 to 1):")
      earworm = popup_input("song in head (N/D/R/O):")
      save_to_log(time(), mood, earworm)
      sleep(INTERVAL - time() % INTERVAL)

  The “constrained by convenience” part means that I recorded data when and only when I was at my PC. More reliable would be to run such a script on a device that’s with you most of the time, like a smartphone or smartwatch, but I’ve no such device.

How harm­ful is mu­sic, re­ally?

Op­ti­mis­ing un­der ar­bi­trar­ily many con­straint equations

• dkl9Jul 21, 2024, 3:05 PM

  9 points

  0

  on: Bab­ble challenge: 50 ways of hid­ing Ein­stein’s pen for fifty years

  1. bury the pen

  2. get a similar pen, put substitute pen in (expected) place of The Pen, and leave The Pen elsewhere

  3. disassemble the pen, reassemble just before sale to Einstein

  4. send it to other people to hold it thru a few steps, like The Onion Router

  5. leave it innocuously in a collection of similar pens

  6. get someone else to do Einstein’s work in 1855, before the evil forces can steal the pen

  7. destroy the pen, get a new one just before sale

  8. destroy the pen, trust that Einstein will find another (he’s really smart, right?)

  9. throw it in a haystack

  10. chemically modify it to be transparent

  11. send the pen to the moon (and hope we can get it back later without relativity)

  12. carry the pen with you at all times to defend it

  13. repeatedly mail it to yourself, so it’ll be “lost” in the postage system for most of the time

  14. send it to Albert’s ancestors and convince them to pass it down as an heirloom

  15. put the pen in a safe (why is this #15?)

  16. surround the pen with something repulsive, to discourage thieves

  17. write with the pen until it’s empty of ink, to discourage thieves (then refill it in 1904)

  18. throw it in a forest

  19. throw it in the ocean

  20. leave glue on the pen (and the pen secured in place), so the thieves get stuck to it

  21. obfuscate your location, so the evil forces don’t know where to look

  22. kill/​incapacitate the evil forces

  23. jump to 1905 via time travel (without relativity? hard)

  24. seal it in a lightbulb (or structurally-closest equivalent; they might not have been invented yet)

  25. swallow the pen

  26. leave it to someone else to figure out

  27. put the pen at the end of an obstacle course

  28. the pen is mightier than the sword, so use it to fight the evil forces already

  29. bribe the evil forces to stop conspiring

  30. wrap the pen in many layers

  31. leave it at the top of a mountain

  32. have HPMOR!Quirrell make it a horcrux

  33. establish a cult to worship the pen and protect it

  34. bake the pen into a dish

  35. throw it in the sewer

  36. throw it in Antarctica

  37. convince a church that the pen is holy, and give it to them

  38. get lots of copies of the pen, and scatter them, so if a few get stolen, there’ll still be at least one

  39. make a deal with the devil

  40. suspend the pen in the sky with a balloon

  41. leave lubricant on the pen, so the thieves can’t grip it

  42. wrap wood around it and make it one of a pair of drum-sticks

  43. put the pen in such an obvious place the evil forces will assume it’s fake

  44. leave the pen on a messy, easily-ignored desk

  45. throw it in a parallel universe

  46. give the pen to the evil forces … fooled them! that’s a fake, now they’ll stop looking

  47. throw it in a bush

  48. make the pen a step in a Rube Goldberg machine

  49. leave neurotoxin on the pen, so the thieves die

  50. banish the pen to Iceland

Holo­mor­phic sur­jec­tion the­o­rem (Pi­card’s lit­tle the­o­rem)

How to wash your hands pre­cisely and thoroughly

• dkl9Jul 14, 2024, 3:45 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Bare­foot FAQ

  Haven’t tried them.

  I figure they’re safer than literal bare feet, giving all the objective benefits and some (fewer) of the questionable benefits. I stick with bare feet, sith it’s easier—arguably the default action—compared to the trivial inconvenience of getting better shoes.

Clopen sandwiches

Me­moris­ing molec­u­lar structures

• dkl9Jun 4, 2024, 12:42 PM

  1 point

  0

  on: Awakening

  Many small corrections:

  Buddha statues on the alter → altar

  Then acquaintenances. → acquaintances

  recipe for Ecstacy → ecstasy

  Lots of mandelas → mandalas

  it was the hard doing math or lifting weights is hard. → it was hard like doing math or lifting weights is hard.

  that had more subjective conscious experience → that I had

  Lovecraftian summing ritual → summoning

• dkl9Mar 28, 2024, 11:26 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Bare­foot FAQ

  Your criticisms are mostly correct. I wrote the post to justify my actions rather than tell robust truth. Posting it as-is on LessWrong was my mistake.

  “Entangled closer with physical reality” was a poor choice of words. I meant something closer to “experience my surroundings in more detail”.

  Reducing what you need implies broadening what you tolerate, in the same sense that a system with fewer axioms has more models. Interpreting it as twisted greed-avoidance is novel and odd to me. If you get used to walking barefoot, then you can better handle situations where you lack shoes. On further reflection, that broadening is small compared to other methods (as learning a language).

Bare­foot FAQ

• dkl9Mar 22, 2024, 9:30 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Toki pona FAQ

  What exactly does “predictable” mean here?

  You can infer the toki pona word (phrase) to match a meaning by joining words (standard base concepts) according to meaning-clusters of the base words and rules for adjective order. That is, making a toki pona word-phrase, you only need to understand the intended meaning of the whole phrase and the small set of base words.

  Likewise, understanding a word-phrase to a good approximation depends only on the words in it and their arrangement. Understanding it exactly depends on context and conventions that build up around common terms.

  If the phrase for “phone” means “speech tool”, how do I tell between phone and loudspeaker or cough drop?

  You can add more adjectives (“phone” could be “tool of distant speech” and “loudspeaker”, “tool of strong speech”), or cope via context.

  If I want to say “apricot” do I need to say “small soft orange when ripe nonfuzzy stone deciduous tree fruit”? Or do I just say something shorter like ‘orange fruit’ and hope the other guy guesses which kind of orange fruit I mean?

  The latter is exactly what you do. If context leaves ambiguity, you add as many adjectives as needed, changing “fruit” to “orange fruit” to “small soft orange stone tree fruit”.

  How would I say “feldspar”? “Rock type #309″? How would I say “acetaminophen”?

  Toki pona is less opportune when you need great precision like that. I see three solutions

  • mash together lots of adjectives (feldspar = silicon-oxygen crystal + other details = square rock of bodily air and of moderate power movement …)

  • use numbers and symbols according to reductionism and the topic in question (acetaminophen = one-circly two-armed “C8H9NO2”)

  • bring in a loanword/​proper adjective (“misikeke Asitaminopen”)

• dkl9Mar 21, 2024, 8:52 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Toki pona FAQ

  If you call a multi-word phrase a word, we can more appositely claim that the formation of words and their associations to meanings, in toki pona, is very systematic and predictable. However many words it truly has, toki pona remains very easy to learn. The definition of “word” is flexible/​arbitrary, but that final observation is most obviously consistent with the few-words view.

Toki pona FAQ

• dkl9Mar 3, 2024, 6:48 PM

  22 points

  11

  on: If you weren’t such an idiot...

  • You would wash your hands properly at all the appropriate times.

  • You would study with spaced repetition.

  • You would stop looking at (mainstream, megacorporate) social media.

A te­dious and effec­tive way to learn 汉字 (Chi­nese char­ac­ters)