Ishaan

Karma: 2,225

Ishaan May 7, 2015, 9:04 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Stupid Questions May 2015
That one is fundamental attribution error, I think. The real reason you didn’t chat with neighbors is because you do not repeatedly bump into your neighbor in spontaneous circumstances on a regular basis—even very social people often don’t chat with neighbors. It’s more about circumstance than personality.

Ishaan May 7, 2015, 8:59 PM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Stupid Questions May 2015
Typical mind fallacy is “that person behaved that way for the same reasons I would behave that way, and they would like what I would like, and dislike what I dislike”.

Even if you think you are special and different, you might still implicitly assume that everyone knows that crinkling that noisy bag of chips is annoying simply because it’s annoying to you and therefore flare up in irritation at the one guy in the library doing so. You say “how inconsiderate”, but they don’t even notice when other people crinkle chips, so they think you just appeared out of nowhere and started being unreasonable and mean on purpose.

“Special snowflake” attitudes don’t run counter this, it’s an entirely separate thing, operating on a “higher” level. Your ego might think you’re a special snowflake, but your id doesn’t take that into account when you instantly react.

Ishaan May 6, 2015, 5:53 AM
1 point
in reply to: RowanE’s comment on: Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015
How old are you? If you are 18-25 years old, you are still physiologically completing the transition from adolescence to adulthood, which means at some point your circadian rhythm will “shorten” and you’ll start tending towards early to bed / early to rise, with both a shorter natural sleep phase and a shorter natural awake phase.

I noticed it happening to me pretty suddenly—my sleep patterns noticeably changed sometime during college despite no major lifestyle change. I wouldn’t be surprised if dramatic changes can happen within a year. As far as I know it’s permanent!

The nasty downside is that, whereas the adolescent body would refuse to sleep on time but once asleep continued sleeping even until noon and I always woke up refreshed, the adult body has no problem sleeping early but will wake up at a set certain time and refuse to go back to sleep, regardless of whether I’m well rested or how late I went to sleep. So on adult-mode I actually have to go to sleep on time if I want a productive day tomorrow, which was never an issue for me in adolescent-mode. “Going to bed too late” becomes equivalent to “waking up too early”.

So, if you buy the circadian explanation, then don’t take “waking up naturally” as a sure sign that you’ve slept enough!

Ishaan May 6, 2015, 4:47 AM
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015
Self consciousness =/= narcissism IMO. A person might be self conscious for many reasons.

I don’t think you can really get at the underlying reality of what you’re trying to explore if you use words like “narcissism”. I’d take a step back and look at Cluster B personality disorders as a whole to get a better idea of the clinical dimension of “narcissism” in a broader context, and to dissociate the popular meaning from the clinical one. There’s general deficits in emotional processing, the ability to take the perspective of others, and various vmPFCish thingies of that nature, and sometimes those present in a certain stereotyped fashion labeled “narcissistic”. I’d characterize it as more a deficit in self awareness and other awareness, with the rationalizations filling in the blanks left by that deficit sometimes but not always creating an inflated self perception.

how to spot the narc and how to figure out you are one or not: again, focusing more on the less obvious, shy-type, insecure type narcissism,

Rejection sensitivity, abnormally harsh self evaluations and feelings of inferiority can also fall into Cluster C, especially “avoidant”, and depressive states. I think the difference is that with Cluster B, there is at least some level at which a person is trying to defend a positive image of themselves even if they have deep-seated insecurities. There might be periods triggered by negative external events causing them to express some extremely negative feelings about themselves (which they later recover from and can be talked out of) but for the most part they like themselves. In contrast, an anxious, avoidant or depressed person just consistently insists that the low self evaluation is correct and it’s much harder to talk them out of it.

I think the briefest way to say it is that Cluster b is associated with basically normal emotional states, but those emotional states do not react normally to environmental cues, and the specific abnormality is what further characterizes them.

In the stereotypical and stigmatized case of narcissism, a person fails to accurately self monitor their own behavior and model how others see them and response to that by constant negotiating status, and if this is paired with a small degree of antisocial personality disorder they might also give more relative importance to themselves due to empathy gaps. The reality is probably more complex, with some people really caring about others but still lacking the ability to model how others view them, and so on.

(Bewarned, these are pretty arm-chairish thoughts. Then again, the DSM is pretty arm-chairish too.)

Another thing I would be interested in is social media

Relevant to your interests.

I suppose I just went ahead and discussed in the clinical sense even though you particularly didn’t want that.

Ishaan May 6, 2015, 3:07 AM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015
That’s partly the point—the fact that there’s variation shows that many of the behaviors people try to justify with “chesterton’s fence” aren’t particularly stable in the first place. I’d also stress the fact that the yanomami are also slash-and-burn horticulturalists, indicating that they’re experiencing enough scarcity to engage in fairly laborious tasks.

Downvoters probably just people who don’t want to talk about politics in general, and they probably have a point. I’m a feminist myself, there’s no good reason for anyone to shy away from discussing biological underpinnings, it’s just that politics in general is toxic.

Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.

Chimpanzee males as large groups primarily compete for territory. Adolescent, childless females are free to leave communities and join new ones as they please, but once they start reproducing they have to stay within their chosen group because a novel group’s males won’t tolerate the infant. Competition for mates occurs among males within a given territory.

With bonobos, territory doesn’t matter because food is plentiful everywhere, and any male or female can join any band at any time and everything is completely flexible. If any particular bonobo became aggressive, other bonobos would either avoid them or drive them away, either one of which results in the loss of social bonds and mating opportunities. Which isn’t to say there is no mating aggression, just that it’s way less frequent and the incentives for aggression are fewer as compared to chimpanzees.

Scarcity is probably the culprit for behavioral differences. Bonobo habitats have much more food than Chimpanzee habitats. If your territory is too small as a chimp, you don’t get enough food, so the most dominant, territory-defending individuals and those who successfully ally with them gain advantage. As a bonobo you can pretty much relax on that front.

So as far as evolution goes, I think what “prevents” it is the lack of scarcity. As for what “prevents” it in practice, I think both bonobos and humans have strong dominance heirarchy instincts leftover from ancestors, and we’ve each evolved strategies to subvert them (bonobos with sex as bonding and stress relief, humans with humor and stronger fairness instincts) but they are still under the surface, ready to arise again when high scarcity calls.

Ishaan May 4, 2015, 6:13 PM
1 point
in reply to: SanguineEmpiricist’s comment on: Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015

It’s a problem with scientists getting over-excited about the implications of their studies, they want to believe they can be a priesthood to the world when there is a higher plane of counsel & reference.

Well, I can’t say I agree with that sentiment at all (but I suspect that discussion will devolve into disagreements about tone, and which types of media we take as representative of “scientists”.)

Ishaan May 4, 2015, 5:07 PM
2 points
on: Gasoline Gal looks under the hood (post 1 of 3)

The Question: Is there good reason to suppose that Gal’s desire for internal combustion is irrational, and if so, where’s her mistake?

Preferences in-and-of-themselves can’t ever be irrational. That’s just a rule.

If Gal terminally values internal combustion then that’s not irrational, just kinda weird.

If Gal instrumentally values being certain that she’s using internal combustion because this is instrumental to the terminal value of her feeling more satisfied about the whole thing, then that’s not irrational and is pretty normal.

If we couple this with Gal terminally valuing truth, then we can also rule out deceiving Gal into taking a simulacrum for her own sake.

Ishaan May 4, 2015, 4:07 PM
2 points
in reply to: passive_fist’s comment on: Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015
I agree with your sentiment, but presumably there’s even greater variation among wolves than there is among dogs, yet most wolves are pretty similar. The stunning variation among dog breeds is due to variation in selection, not variation in genotype.

Ishaan May 4, 2015, 4:01 PM
5 points
in reply to: SanguineEmpiricist’s comment on: Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015
I mean, obviously parenting matters, right? You can’t just drop kids in the wilderness.

What’s actually being said here is that if we remove the extreme cases, the people who aren’t really fulfilling the role of “parents” as they should, the normal diversity we see among various types of parenting isn’t really a big deal as far as outcomes are concerned. (This is still a bold claim, because, as you said, we might just not be aware of the slice of diversity that matters.)

Ishaan May 4, 2015, 3:29 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015
But that entire realm of thinking doesn’t even come into play until high scarcity conditions break egalitarianism and patriarchy/hierarchy/private property/agriculture begins. My impression is that pressure towards masculinity varies greatly from culture to culture, and ours (by “ours” I mean most people who participates in the global economy instead of subsistence hunting/gathering/farming) is one in which it is particularly strong.

Height is unimportant in Hazda female mate choice. Practices such as the !kung insulting the meat illustrate active suppression of dominance-seeking instincts. I’d be really surprised if these people value machismo and dominance in the sense you describe.

Now, I’m not one to carelessly opine that these things are cultural constructs. I think there’s a fair case that humans are predisposed to one set of behaviors when they find themselves in a precarious, hierarchical, high-scarcity situations, and a second set of behaviors when faced with secure, egalitarian, resource abundant situations.

I think that any situation where individuals compete for dominance, the strongest individuals (which tends to be whoever has the most androgen exposure) tend to rise to the top, and that’s when you get strong cultural or selection pressure towards masculinity. Taken to the extreme, this produces gorillas and lions and hyenas. When largely removed, this produces bonobos and all the other animals without marked dimorphism or aggression. I think humans are somewhere in between, and our culture and behavior shifts according to circumstance.

But many hunter gatherers (especially those living in resource abundant areas) didn’t compete for dominance in that sense. Competing for dominance is not something humans must do, it’s only something that humans are forced into when resources are scarce. And your own example illustrated that while disgust instincts are ancestral, the objects of disgust is a matter of cultural conditioning.

Ishaan May 4, 2015, 5:24 AM
3 points
in reply to: VoiceOfRa’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015
Regarding marriage, obviously there’s a lot of variance, but it’s a generalization that at least some people who aren’t me make, and I know it’s at least true for the Mbuti and the Piraha.

Of course, we’d have to first define the practice first. I’d say that marriage in the broadest sense of the word means that there’s some sort of extensive activity (whether legal or ritual) which signifies that people who have romantic or sexual relations of some sort are in some way bonded, which remains in effect until death unless actively nullified.

I bet your average hunter-gatherer wouldn’t really know what homosexuality is, let alone be against it, since bands are small and it’s a minority phenomenon, but as far as I can tell there’s plenty of cultures where it isn’t taboo.

Given the diversity of cultures and the difficulty of cleanly delineating modern hunter-gatherers from agriculturists, it’s not exactly an open-and-shut case where broad generalizations can be made and the anthropologists doing the reporting are a pretty politically leftist bunch, but I think given the information we have to work with my general impression is reasonable.

Ishaan May 3, 2015, 5:12 PM
−2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015

An atheist version of the same belief would be that human minds did not evolve for the modern environment, the same destructive competitive instincts that worked right back then could ruin stuff today.

This is pretty much my view on many things relating to progress and danger, but I don’t think it’s necessarily “conservative”. I see the general principle behind chesterton’s fence, but I think civilization itself as terrifyingly novel.

So, I’m not gonna place my “every practice this point is probably okay since nothing terrible has happened yet” Chesterton’s-Fence anywhere near civilization. If you’ve gotta put your C-Fence somewhere, I think you should put it in the ancestral environment.

It’s all terrifyingly novel, we’re rapidly hurtling towards space, we’re in the 21st century mesosphere and people who make this argument for “traditional values” keep trying to stick the C-Fence into the 15-20th century stratosphere, whereas they aught to stick in into the paleolithic/neolithic ground because that’s the only place we’ve ever actually been stable as a species. Hunter gatherers did not care about homosexuality to use OPs example, many didn’t even have marriage, and one day suddenly we suddenly picked up pen and paper and built a rocket ship and now people want to arbitrarily stick the C-fence at some random point after takeoff which generally corresponds to whatever values were in vogue in the brief interval before they were born.

Ishaan May 3, 2015, 5:05 PM
0 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015

When I worried that the correlation between testosterone and politics means that political opinions are hopelessly biased by emotions, it was pointed out to me that it could be valid for emotions to affect values if not probability estimates.

It just so happens that deficits in emotional processing are usually linked to gambling disorders and in the lab are linked to difficulty in distinguishing good bets from bad bets. I suspect that most decisions are less “probability estimates” and more based on approach/avoid emotions. (And incidentally, political orientation is also linked to differences in approach/avoidance behaviors and differences corresponding brain regions. If you thought the testosterone link were bad wait till you read about the amygdala links).

In short, as far as humanity goes emotion basically is totally inextricable from accurate probability estimates, and differences in emotional processing are probably responsible for the variation in viewpoints that cannot be explained by variations in life experience.

Ishaan Apr 28, 2015, 6:52 PM
3 points
in reply to: D_Malik’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015

I’m not sure how much of the cancer reduction you could get from taking D3 and not getting sunlight.

My vague and untrustworthy impression is that D3 supplementation is better than nothing but has risks related to calcium going to the wrong places, which may be mitigated by Nitric oxide which is also sun linked, and might also be mitigated by not being K2 and magnesium deficient which most people are. I should probably start being better about archiving what I read so that I can stop being vague and untrustworthy.

The effect isn’t large enough to be noticeable.

I do notice a muscle and general relaxation effect which is deeper and lasts longer than, say, an equally warm shower. A blood panel I got back when I was not supplemented said I was pretty severely D deficient, so it might be that I feel the effects more. (Though from what I know of the biology of this the NO is more likely to be responsible for the relaxation effect than the D3.)

Ishaan Apr 28, 2015, 6:45 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015
Luckily I’m dark enough to never have burnt, unluckily that means I need more exposure.

Interesting. So 20 minute cycles over 2 hours is probably better than continuous 1 hour exposure. Not surprising, but unfortunately inconvenient from a scheduling standpoint, given that the peak time for D synthesis is supposed to be noon which is during most people’s workday. I kind of thought this might be the case and try to mimic cycling by flipping around frequently.

(That said, the noon people might be wrong, longer exposure over less intense evening sun might be better and intense noon exposure).

Ishaan Apr 28, 2015, 6:16 PM
1 point
in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015
Excellent, thank you! Looking over the figures I think this has the necessary info for calculating optimal sun exposure length, inputting skin tone, latitude, and month. Sadly, it doesn’t weigh dietary vitamin D against sun exposure or factor in the non-vitamin D stuff (I suspect the nitric oxide stuff and circadian regulation is pretty important), but still!

If If I sufficiently understand this then once I have more time I will try to give back by making an info-graphic which is more accessible to the public.

Judging from what I’m seeing here I think there might be benefit to timing when one’s skin personally begins to “redden”. I wonder if “darkening” is the same as “reddening”. (I’m north-Indian dark and start getting tan lines with only 10 minutes of sun, which disappear within a 1-2 hours of shade. I’m not sure if that’s analogous to the “skin reddening” they describe or if the skin reddening is a separate process indicating damage rather than melanin production. I’ve never actually gotten sunburn so I’m not sure when darkening ends and reddening begins, if it is indeed separate)

Ishaan Apr 27, 2015, 7:29 PM
10 points
on: Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015
I’ve intentionally been getting 45-90 minutes of daily sun and it feels good. Where can I find a good cost-benefit calculation for natural sun exposure vs. dietary vitamin D supplementation without sun? (Presumably mostly weighing cancer risk against vitamin d / nitric oxide / other benefits of natural sun?).

Bonus points if darker skin tones are taken into consideration.

Ishaan Apr 27, 2015, 1:59 PM
0 points
on: Self-verification
If you know of the existence of such tech before “tomorrow”, one way would be to have a secret-name that no one else knew. That is, create a word that means “a secret name referring to me that no one else knows that I use to ID myself” and keep thinking about it every day to put that word into your semantic memory so that the mind-wipe won’t touch it.

--edit2: this may be formally impossible, I don’t actually know. If anyone can demonstrate this I’d be very appreciative.

The case of Clive Wearing is the most profound memory loss I know of. He has a diary in which he keeps recording “NOW I AM AWAKE FOR THE FIRST TIME” and such as he keeps finidng himself conscious, and then crosses the previous entry because he thinks someone else wrote it. However, he retains knowledge of his wife (See the “hello darling I love you” entry in the diary) and how to play music.

Many of our most important memories (such as Clive Wearing’s wife) become intrinsic features of our semantic knowledge. He would have remembered “wife” even independantly of any particular memory he had of her because she would be a fact about his world, in the same sense that he’d remember “chair”. That’s not to say that those memories can’t be removed, but unless somehow targeted semantic dementia will also remove general knowledge about the world and word meanings.

Your character would only have Retrograde amnesia whereas Clive has both types of amnesia simultaneously, so if you wish to insert realism I’d suggest following the citations and reading some of the case studies. I imagine a villain might add capgras or prosopagnosia to the mix to circumvent recognition of loved ones.

Ishaan Apr 27, 2015, 1:42 PM
2 points
in reply to: Dentin’s comment on: How to sign up for Alcor cryo
Question: Wouldn’t brain-only be better, at least at this time?

My intuition suggests that the sort of technology required for repairing a body of all the damage from the expanding ice would necessarily imply technology required for synthesizing a new body, body transplants are relatively trivial, and plus brain only would presumably mean a higher quality preservation of brain tissue relative to whole body due to being more invasive, right? (Counterarguments: small chance that body implements far more of our personality than currently realized, small chance the future decides growing new brainless bodies is unethical)

Ishaan Apr 22, 2015, 9:40 AM
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Happiness and Goodness as Universal Terminal Virtues

I linked to it at the bottom of the article, but I was asking if there was any good reason to pursue ambition over total hedonism, and I now think that the answer is “goodness is an end-in-itself too” and I’m pretty okay with it.

The way I look at it is, I’m good because that is what I prefer. There are many possible futures. I prefer some of those futures more than the others. I try my best to choose my favorite future with my actions. “Goodness” is part of what I prefer to happen, which is why I choose it. (And a version of me which didn’t prefer goodness wouldn’t be me, preferring goodness is a pretty big part of what goes into the definition of “me”.)

Wow, I really like how you put that. Other people have tried to share a similar concept with me, but it always seemed cheesy and superficial. It never really started to sink in until now. I think it was the words “natural” and “warm” that did it for me. So thanks!

Very glad I could be helpful! I find Neil D.Tyson / Sagan-esque talk kinda cheesy too. But I remember when I was a kid dabbling in philosophy, thinking hard about free will and monitoring my own thoughts for any trace of randomness, and suddenly it just became really clear that my thoughts and feelings followed predictable processes and there wasn’t any sharp boundary between the laws governing objects and the laws governing minds. It was kind of a magical moment, I felt pretty connected to the universe and all that jazz. It is cheesy, but it’s pretty hard to talk about these sorts of spiritual-ish experiences without sounding cheesy.