I just started a new job and I’ve been exporting Confluence pages to PDF and putting them in a Claude project so I can just ask Claude stuff.
Dustin
Karma: 1,727
SketchUp makes it where creating these sort of drawings is pretty easy! It’s a great tool for ideation.
I live/work in a fairly rural area where there are 7 towns with the biggest having a population of ~10k and the smallest ~2k and they all have varying requirements. I’ve had conversations with the single code enforcement officer or director in each of them and we all agree how aggravating it is that the requirements vary from town to town. Three of these towns butt right up next to each other so the code requirements can vary from one side of the street to the next!
Contrary to what I would expect, the biggest town, and the county seat, has by far the fewest regulations on homes of them all.
Anyway, of the two which enforce anything about bedroom dimensions it’s 9′ for smallest allowable dimension. I think only one of them requires closets, but I can’t recall for sure.
Your parenthetical requirement reminded me of two things:
I think more people should be thinking about resale when building/remodeling their home. You never know what the future holds!
Since we rent out houses as well, I always aim for HUD compliance. HUD requires closets in bedrooms. While HUD doesn’t require 10x10, I know the three people at HUD who handle the surrounding 3 counties worth of HUD voucher recipients and they all strongly recommend it and steer clients towards such properties. (though currently they’re hurting for properties, so they’re more likely to not turn their nose up at <10′ dimensions)
Yeah, I flip houses fairly often and it’s something I have to be aware of when remodeling stuff.
I’m sure it’s different in different areas.
Interestingly, and ridiculously, this bedroom would not pass city code where I live for two reasons:
7ft dimension
No built-in closet.
I’m not exactly claiming that it is or is not useful in improving outcomes, I’m just wondering if any “hard, sterilized” data exists.
Anyway...
Your comment does make me wonder some things. Take the following more as me exploring my state of mind on a lazy Sunday afternoon and less as a retort or rebuttal.
I’m not sure that we actually disagree...it’s hard to quantify the amount of skepticism we’re both talking about. You can’t say “you should be skeptical level 3” and I can’t say “no you should be skeptical level 4.3″. For all either of us knows from the conversation so far is that I’m less skeptical than you!
Be careful not to cargo-cult skepticism
Yes, I think this is a dangerous failure mode...but I think it’s likely that the flipside is a more common failure out there in the real world.
dealing with a set of hundreds of people … the most reasonable hypothesis is that it was useful.
Maybe? I’d have to think about that more. However, being the most reasonable doesn’t mean there are no other reasonable hypotheses. We should work hard to increase the “reasonableness delta” so that we can increase our confidence.
There’s millions of otherwise reasonable and successful people (often people I respect) telling me that they talk to ghosts or that loading up on Vitamin Omega Delta Seventeen Power Plus is the key to perfect health.
Combine that with the fact that this intervention seems pretty susceptible to not being able to distinguish between “feels useful” and “is useful” and this is the largest item raising my skepticism level. Whether this is true could be an interesting line of inquiry.
We just have to use other things like “does not conflict with how I think the world works” and “these people are generally (in)correct about subjects in this area” and “how likely is it that they tricked themselves” to weight the evidence of “these people say this is useful” to adjust our skepticism level towards the appropriate amount.
Millions of people tell me lots of things like “statins work” and “drunk driving increases risk of bad things”. I’m less skeptical of those things because of the same sort of things mentioned in the previous paragraph.
To me, by far the strongest point in reducing the skepticism level is the studies backing up TAP. In fact, it seems like this point is so strong that I’m a little confused by the proportion of your comment directed towards “believing people” vs “TAP studies”.
I’m not interested enough in the subject to dive into the studies, but if I was I’d really be looking into whatever delta existed between CFAR’s practices and the literature. (Besides trying to generate the hard, sterilized data, of course)
All that being said, I’m still not sure if I’m more or less skeptical than you on the subject.
I guess I should’ve also stressed the difference between alumni thinking it’s proven useful (which is easy to determine) and it actually being useful in accomplishing stuff (which is the more interesting and harder to determine part).
None of the things you mention seem like fool-proof methods of determining the second case.
has proven useful to the majority of our alumni
Curious as to how this was established. I can see lots of ways for confirmation bias to creep into this.
What about something like text buttons?
When I’m designing a UI, I try to use text if there is not a good iconographic way of representing a concept.
Something like:
AGREE (-12) DISAGREEI’m not sure how that would look with the current karma widget. Would require some experimentation.
First of all, I agree with the gist of your comment.
That is uncomfortably hot.
I...do not agree. I keep my room temperature 72-74.
keep my room temperature around 68-70 F ish. The internet tells me that this is actually the definition of a “comfortable room temperature”
Going from first four google results for “what is comfortable room temperature”:
WHO according to wikipedia: 64-75
www.cielowigle.com: 68-72
www.vivint.com: 68-76
www.provicincialheating.ca: 68-76
Seems like both of our preferred temperatures are consistent with “normal human being”.
Your comment describes me.
I’m not confident that this is an inherent thing about me rather than luck.
I wonder if it’s just that I’ve lucked out and mostly avoided the bad type of situations wherein my more analytical side is seemingly suppressed to the degree Kaj describes in his post. I’ve had a pretty good life so far.
That’s not to say I haven’t had bad things happen to me. (possibly uncomfortable TMI about bad things happening in following spoiler-ed text)
Probably the worst thing that has happened to me is that we had a child die during childbirth. That was really bad and it causes me some amount of sadness when I think about it even 15 years later. It just never was a thing that caused anything like what is described in this post. It was sadness that lasted longer and was more intense than previous things that made me sad, but it wasn’t a fundamentally different sort of sadness.
I think it’s possible that I’ve just been lucky in that I’ve not had the life events whose exact characteristics mesh with the exact characteristics of my mind to lead to the sort of feeling described in this post or really most (all?) of the types of things I read about when people talk about trauma of various sorts.
On the other hand, there are things about me that make me think maybe I have innate characteristics which lead me to not feel the way the post describes. I’m a happy person. Things don’t keep me down. I think positively about myself and others. I’m analytical. I’m pragmatic. I’m a bunch of things that fit into a cluster that would probably include “doesn’t hold incoherent emotional beliefs so tightly as to need it’s own word”.
Thanks! I was to the cardiologist this week going back beginning of June for echo, treadmill, etc.
In January I went to the ER because I was having a lot of heart palpitations...still haven’t found anything conclusive to determine the cause. However, I had a visit with my primary care doctor and she told me to cut back on or preferably eliminate the caffeine I was drinking via hot tea.
I went from ~6 cups per day to <1 cup per day cold turkey.
It was a rough week, but now I have no desire for it and have a good amount more energy throughout my day.
(Palpitations have more or less disappeared, but I’m not sure if that’s because of caffeine, the 11 pounds I’ve lost, and/or something else)
A potential way to think about this:
I learn a lot from most projects, and I think this is a huge benefit from at least starting a project. I then have whatever I learned to use in the projects I do end up taking to completion.
Also remember that most projects are likely to be failures in some way (at least I think this is the case, I don’t have the data lined up to back this up). Once you’ve squeezed much of the learning potential out of them, then it’s likely you’re not losing much, if anything by dropping the project.
Less so, but it just leads to the question of “why do you think it’s suspicious?”. If at all possible I’d prefer just engaging with whether the root claim is true or false.
I think I see a way towards mutual intelligibility on this, but unfortunately I don’t think I have the bandwidth to get to that point. I will just point out this:
But as I understood it, we were discussing existence, not possibility per se.
Hmm, I was more interested in the possibility.
I find “AR” more difficult to actually say out loud than “EA”.
Er… I think there’s been some confusion.
I was referring to this part of your text:
(Awfully convenient, isn’t it? This trait that already gave us cause to feel superior to others, happens also to make us the only people who can learn the terrible secret thing without going mad! Yeah, right…)
It seemed to me like your parentheticals were you stepping out of the hypothetical and making commentary about the standpoint in your hypotheticals. I apologize if I interpreted that wrong.
My point is that before we can even get to the stage where we’re talking about which of your cases apply, we need to figure out what sort of scenario (from among my four cases, or perhaps others I didn’t list?) we’re dealing with.
Yeah, I think I understood that is what you’re saying, I’m saying I don’t think your point is accurate. I do not think you have to figure out which of your scenarios we’re dealing with. The scenario type is orthogonal to the question I’m asking.
I’m asking if you think it’s possible for these sort of ideas to exist in the real world:
“these ideas are harmful to hear for people who aren’t me/us (because we’re enlightened/rational/hyper-analytic/educated/etc. and they’re not)”
I’m confused about how what you’ve said has a bearing on the answerability of my root question.
Do you think that such things exist?
I...don’t know.
My prior is that they can exist. It’s doesn’t break any laws of physics. I don’t think it breaks any laws of logic. I think there are things that some people are better able to understand than others. It’s not insane to think that some people are less prone to manipulation than others. Just because believing something makes someone feel superior does not logically mean that the thing they believe is wrong.
As far as if they do exist: There are things that have happened on LW like Roko’s basilisk that raise my prior that there are things that some people can hold in their heads safely and others can’t. Of course, that could be down to quirks of individual minds instead of general features of some group. I’d be interested in someone exploring that idea further. When do we go from saying “that’s just a quirk” to “that’s a general feature”? I dunno.
Hard to answer that question given how much work the clause ‘for some definition of “safely”’ is doing in that sentence.
I think the amount of work that clause does is part of what makes the question worth answering...or at least makes the question worth asking.
Awfully convenient, isn’t it? This trait that already gave us cause to feel superior to others, happens also to make us the only people who can learn the terrible secret thing without going mad! Yeah, right…
I’m not a fan of inserting this type of phrasing into an argument. I think it’d be better to either argue that the claim is true or not true. To me, this type of claim feels like an applause light. Of course, it’s also possibly literally accurate...maybe most claims of the type we’re talking about are erroneous and clung to because of the makes-us-feel-superior issue, but I don’t think that literally accurate aspect of the argument makes the argument more useful or less of an applause light.
In other words, I don’t have access to an argument that says both of these cannot exist:
Cases that just make Group A feel superior because Group A erroneously thinks they are the only ones who can know it safely.
Cases that make Group A feel superior because Group A accurately thinks they are the only ones who can know it safely.
In either case Group A comes across badly, but in case 2, Group A is right.
If we cannot gather any more information or make any more arguments, it seems likely that case #1 is going to usually be the reality we’re looking at. However, we can gather more information and make more arguments. Since that is so, I don’t think it’s useful to assume bad motives or errors on the part of Group A.
So which of these examples is the closest to the sort of thing the OP talks about, in your view?
I don’t really know. The reason for my root question was to suss out whether you had more information and arguments or were just going by the heuristics that make you default to my case #1. Maybe you have a good argument that case #2 cannot exist. (I’ve never heard of a good argument for that.)
eta: I’m not completely satisfied with this comment at this time as I don’t think it completely gets across the point I’m trying to make. That being said, I assign < 50% chance that I’ll finish rewriting it in some manner so I’m going to leave it as is and hope I’m being overly negative in my assessment of it or at least that someone will be able to extract some meaning from it.
Yeah, I haven’t got it automated yet. Someday I’ll have the time.
Another place I did this was with the mountain of onboarding docs I got. Now I can just ask Claude stuff like “how early do I have to request time off and who do I contact?” or “What’s my dental insurance deductible?”