nim

Karma: 1,024

nim 6 May 2024 20:57 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: michael_mjd’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2024
More concrete than your actual question, but there’s a couple options you can take:
- acknowledge that there’s a form of social truth whereby the things people insist upon believing are functionally true. For instance, there may be no absolute moral value to criticism of a particular leader, but in certain countries the social system creates a very unambiguous negative value to it. Stick to the observable—if he does an experiment, replicate that experiment for yourself and share the results. If you get different results, examine why. IMO, attempting in good faith to replicate whatever experiments have convinced him that the world works differently from how he previously thought would be the best steelman for someone framing religion as rationalism.
- There is of course the “which bible?” question. Irrefutable proof of the veracity of the old testament, if someone had it, wouldn’t answer the question of which modern religion incorporating it is “most correct”.
- It’s entirely valid and consistent with rationalism to have the personal preference to not accept any document as fully and literally true. If you can gently find out how he handles the internal contradictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_consistency_of_the_Bible), you’ve got a ready-made argument for taking some things figuratively.
And as unsolicited social advice, distinct from the questions of rationalism—don’t strawman him into someone who criticizes your atheism until he as an actual human tells you what if any actual critiques he has. That’s not nice. What is nice is to frame it as a harm reduction option, because organized religion can be great for some people with mental health struggles, and tell him the truth about what you see in his current behavior that you like and support. For instance if his church gets him more involved with the community, or encourages him to do more healthy behaviors or less unhealthy ones, maintain common ground by endorsing the outcomes of his beliefs rather than endorsing the beliefs themselves.

nim 6 May 2024 20:41 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: skybluecat’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2024
Welcome! If you have the emotional capacity to happily tolerate being disagreed with or ignored, you should absolutely participate in discussions. In the best case, you teach others something they didn’t know before, or get a misconception of your own corrected. In the worst case, your remarks are downvoted or ignored.

Your question on games would do well fleshed out into at least a quick take, if not a whole post, answering:
- What games you’ve ruled out for this and why
- what games in other genres you’ve found to capture the “truly simulation-like” aspect that you’re seeking
- examples of game experiences that you experience as narrative railroading
- examples of ways that games that get mostly there do a “hard science/AI/transhumanist theme” in the way that you’re looking for
- perhaps what you get from it being a game that you miss if it’s a book, movie, or show?
If you’ve tried a lot of things and disliked most, then good clear descriptions of what you dislike about them can actually function as helpful positive recommendations for people with different preferences.

nim 6 May 2024 20:35 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2024
Can random people donate images for the sequence-items that are missing them, or can images only be provided by the authors? I notice that I am surprised that some sequences are missing out on being listed just because images weren’t uploaded, considering that I don’t recall having experienced other sequences’ art as particularly transformative or essential.

nim 6 May 2024 20:32 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: thornoar’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2024
Congratulations! I’m in today’s lucky 10,000 for learning that Asymptote exists. Perhaps due to my not being much of a mathematician, I didn’t understand it very clearly from the README… but the examples comparing code to its output make sense! Comparing your examples to the kind of things Asymptote likes to show off (https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/gallery/), I see why you might have needed to build the additional tooling.

I don’t think you necessarily have to compare smoothmanifold to a JavaScript framework to get the point across—it seems to be an abstraction layer that allows one to describe a drawn image in slightly more general terms than Asymptote supports.

I admire how you’re investing so much effort to use your talents to help others.

nim 6 May 2024 20:09 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: atergitna’s comment on: Open Thread Spring 2024
hey, welcome! Congrats on de-lurking, I think? I fondly remember my own teenage years of lurking online—one certainly learns a lot about the human condition.

If I was sending my 14-year-old self a time capsule of LW, it’d start with the sequences, and beyond that I’d emphasize the writings of adults examining how their own cognition works. Two reasons—first, being aware that one is living in a brain as it finishes wiring itself together is super entertaining if you’re into that kind of thing, and even more fun when you have better data to guess how it’s going to end up. (I got the gist of that from having well-educated and openminded parents, who explained that it’s prudent to hold off on recreational drug use until one’s brain is entirely done with being a kid, because most recreational substances make one’s brain temporarily more childlike in some way and the real thing is better. Now I’m in my 30s and can confirm that’s how such things, including alcohol, have worked for me)

Second, my 20s would have been much better if someone had taken kid-me aside and explained some neurodiversity stuff to her: “here’s the range of normal, here’s the degree of suffering that’s not expected nor normal and is worth consulting a professional for even if you’re managing through great effort to keep it together”, etc.

If you’d like to capitalize on your age for some free internet karma, I would personally enjoy reading your thoughts on what your peers think of technology, how they get their information, and how you’re all updating the language at the moment.

I also wish that my 14-year-old self had paid more attention to the musical trends and attempted to guess which music that was popular while I was of highschool age would stand the test of time and remain on the radio over the subsequent decades. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure I could probably have taken some decent guesses, but I didn’t so now I’ll never know whether I would have guessed right :)

nim 6 May 2024 14:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Tigerlily’s comment on: How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
I hear you, describing how weird social norms in the world can be. I hear you describing how you followed those norms to show consideration for readers by dressing up a very terrible situation as a slightly less bad one. In social settings where people both know who you are and are compelled by the circumstances to listen to what you say, that’s still the right way to go about it.

The rudeness of taking peoples’ time is very real in person, where a listener is socially “forced” to invest time in listening or effort in escaping the conversation. But posts online are different: especially when you lack the social capital of “this post is by someone I know I often like reading, so I should read it to see what they say”, readers should feel no obligation to read your whole post, nor to reply, if they don’t want to. When you’re brand new to a community, readers can easily dismiss your post as a bot or scammer and simply ignore it, so you have done them no harm in the way that consuming someone’s time in person harms them. A few trolls may choose to read your post and then pretend you forced them to do so, but anyone who behaves like that is inherently outing themself as someone whose opinions about you don’t deserve much regard. (and then you get some randos who like how you write and decide to be micro-penpals… hi there!)

However, there’s another option for how to approach this kind of thing online. You can spin up an anonymous throwaway and play the “asking for a friend” game—take the option of direct help or directly contacting the “actual person” off the table, and you’ve ruled out being a gofundme scam. Sometimes asking on behalf of a fictional person whose circumstances happen to be more like the specifics of your own than you would disclose in public gets far better answers.

For instance, if the fictional person had a car problem involving a specific model year of vehicle and a specific insurance company, the internet may point out that there’s a recall on some part of that particular car and you have the manufacturer as a recourse, or they may offer a specific number that gets you a customer complaint line that’s actually responsive at the insurance company. If the fictional person had a highly specific medical condition, there may be a new treatment with studies that you have to know to ask to get into, and the internet may be able to offer that information.

At this point, I don’t think it would be wise for someone in your situation to do a throwaway account on lesswrong in particular. However, I would seriously consider using several separate throwaways and asking about various facets of the details on the relevant subreddits. Reddit will get you a lot of chaff in the replies, but if you’re sifting the internet for novel ideas, it’s also a good way to query the hivemind for kernels of utility as well.

All that is to say, part of your search for insight and ideas should probably involve carving up the aspects of the situation that you cannot justify sharing here into pieces that you can justify sharing elsewhere, and pursue those lines of inquiry. Those topics contain potential insight that cannot be found under the circumstances you’ve created here, and that’s ok—I just want to make sure not to endorse leaving them un-explored.

nim 4 May 2024 14:10 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Tigerlily’s comment on: How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
Ah, so you have skill and a portfolio in writing. You have the cognitive infrastructure to support using the language as art. That infrastructure itself is what you should be trying to rent to tech companies—not the art it’s capable of producing.

If the art part of writing is out of reach for you right now, that’s ok—it’s almost a benefit in this case, because if it’s not around it can’t feel left out if you turn to more pragmatic ends the skills you used to celebrate it with.

Normally I wouldn’t suggest startups, because they’re so risky/uncertain… but in a situation as precarious as yours, it’s no worse to see who’s looking for writers on a startup-flavored site like https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs.

And finally, I’m taking the titular “severe emergency” to be the whole situation, because it sounds pretty dire. If there’s a specific sub-emergency that drove you to ask—a medical bill, a car breakdown—there may be more-specific resources that folks haven’t mentioned yet. (or if you’ve explained that in someone else’s comment thread, i apologize for asking redundantly; i’ve not read your replies to others)

nim 3 May 2024 16:27 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Anders Lindström’s comment on: Which skincare products are evidence-based?
“Minimize excessive UV exposure” is the steelman to the pro-sunscreen arguments. The evidence against tanning beds demonstrates that excess UV is almost certainly harmful.

I think where the pro-sunscreen arguments go wrong is in assuming that sunscreen is the best or only way to minimize excess UV.

I personally don’t have what it takes to use sunscreen “correctly” (apply every day, “reapply every 2 hours”, tolerate the sensory experience of smearing anything on my face every day, etc) so I mitigate UV exposure in other ways:
- Pursue a career of work that can be done indoors
- Avoid doing optional outdoor activities during the parts of the day with the highest UV levels—before and after the heat of the day is more pleasant to be out in anyway
- use sun-protective clothing like UV-proof gloves, wide-brimmed hats, UV hoodies, etc
- choose shady over sunny locations, or create shade with a large hat or parasol
- choose full-coverage swimwear for outdoor recreation
- wear dark colors on hot days, because dark clothing makes it uncomfortable to remain in the sun very long. I’m good at noticing when I’m too warm, so that’s my cue to relocate to shade.

nim 3 May 2024 15:59 UTC
5 points
2
on: How would you navigate a severe financial emergency with no help or resources?
You’re here, which tells me you have internet access.

I mentally categorize options like Fiverr and mturk as “about as scammy as DoorDash”. I don’t think they’re a good option, but I also don’t think DoorDash is a very good option either. It’s probably worth looking into online gig economy options.

What skills were you renting to companies before you became a stay-at-home parent? There are probably online options to rent the same skills to others around the world.

You write fluently in English and it sounds like English is your first language. Have you considered renting your linguistic skills to people with English as a second language? You may be able to find wealthy international people who value your proof-reading skills on their college work, or conversational skills to practice their spoken English with gentle correction as needed. It won’t pay competitively with the tech industry, but it’ll pay more than nothing.

If you’re in excellent health, the classic “super weird side gig” is stool donor programs. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i48nw33pW9kuXsFBw/being-a-donor-for-fecal-microbiota-transplants-fmt-do-good for more.

Another weird one that depends on your age and health and bodily situation, since you’ve had more than 0 kids of your own, is gestational surrogacy. Maybe not a good fit, but hey, you asked for weird.

For a less weird one, try browsing Craigslist in a more affluent area to see what personal services people offer. House cleaning? Gardening? Dog walking? Browse Craigslist in your area and see which of those niches seem under-populated relative to elsewhere. Then use what you saw in the professionalism of the ads in wealthier areas to offer the missing services. This may get 0 results, but you might discover that there are local rich techies who would quite enjoy outsourcing certain household services for a rate that seems affordable to them but game-changing to you. Basically anything you imagine servants doing for a fairytale princess, someone with money probably wants to hire a person to do for them.

You mention that your kids are in the picture. This suggests a couple options:
1. Have you contacted social services to find out what options are available to support kids whose parents are in situations like yours? You probably qualify for food stamps, and there may be options for insurance, kids’ clothing, etc through municipal or school programs. If your kids are in school, asking whatever school district employee you have the best personal rapport with is an excellent starting point.
2. What do childcare prices look like in your area? Do you have friends who are parents and need childcare? Can you rent your time to other parents to provide childcare for their kids at a rate lower than their other options? This may or may not be feasible depending on your living situation.

nim 30 Apr 2024 14:36 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Shortform
If you don’t need 12 tubes of superglue, dollar stores often carry 4 tiny tubes for a buck or so.

I’m glad that superglue is working for you! I personally find that a combination of sharp nail clippers used at the first sign of a hangnail, and keeping my hands moisturized, works for me. Flush cutters of the sort you’d use to trim the sprues off of plastic models are also amazing for removing proto-hangnails without any jagged edge.

Another trick to avoiding hangnails is to prevent the cuticles from growing too long, by pushing them back regularly. I personally like to use my teeth to push back my cuticles when showering, since the cuticle is soft from the water, my hands are super clean, and it requires no extra tools. I recognize that this is a weird habit, though, and I think the more normal ways to push cuticles are to use your fingernails or a wooden stick (manicurists use a special type of dowel but a popsicle stick works fine).

You can also buy cuticle remover online, which is a chemical that softens the dried skin of the cuticle and makes it easier to remove from your nails. It’s probably unnecessary, but if you’re really trying to get your hands into a condition where they stop developing hangnails, it’s worth considering.

nim 27 Apr 2024 3:45 UTC
2 points
0
on: nim’s Shortform
I’ve found an interesting “bug” in my cognition: a reluctance to rate subjective experiences on a subjective scale useful for comparing them. When I fuzz this reluctance against many possible rating scales, I find that it seems to arise from the comparison-power itself.

The concrete case is that I’ve spun up a habit tracker on my phone and I’m trying to build a routine of gathering some trivial subjective-wellbeing and lifestyle-factor data into it. My prototype of this system includes tracking the high and low points of my mood through the day as recalled at the end of the day. This is causing me to interrogate the experiences as they’re happening to see if a particular moment is a candidate for best or worst of the day, and attempt to mentally store a score for it to log later.

I designed the rough draft of the system with the ease of it in mind—I didn’t think it would induce such struggle to slap a quick number on things. Yet I find myself worrying more than anticipated about whether I’m using the scoring scale “correctly”, whether I’m biased by the moment to perceive the experience in a way that I’d regard as inaccurate in retrospect, and so forth.

Fortunately it’s not a big problem, as nothing particularly bad will happen if my data is sloppy, or if I don’t collect it at all. But it strikes me as interesting, a gap in my self-knowledge that wants picking-at like peeling the inedible skin away to get at a tropical fruit.

nim 11 Apr 2024 16:22 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dentosal’s comment on: Things can be difficult in 3 ways: Painful, time-consuming, or uncontrollable. Is this reasonable to say?
To extend this angle—I notice that we’re more likely to call things “difficult” when our expectations of whether we “should” be able to do it are mismatched from our observations of whether we are “able to” do it.

The “oh, that’s hard actually” observation shows up reliably for me when I underestimated the effort, pain, or luck required to attain a certain outcome.

nim 11 Apr 2024 16:18 UTC
3 points
2
on: Things can be difficult in 3 ways: Painful, time-consuming, or uncontrollable. Is this reasonable to say?
“time-consuming” does not cleanly encapsulate difficulty, because lots of easy things are time-consuming too.

Perhaps “slow to reward” is a better way to gesture at the phenomenon you mean? Learning a language takes a high effort investment before you can have a conversation; getting in shape takes a high effort investment before you see unambiguous bodily changes beyond just soreness. Watching TV and scrolling social media are both time-consuming, but I don’t see people going around calling those activities difficult.

nim 2 Apr 2024 18:48 UTC
2 points
0
on: On green
Green, on its face, seems like one of the main mistakes. Green is what told the rationalists to be more OK with death, and the EAs to be more OK with wild animal suffering. Green thinks that Nature is a harmony that human agency easily disrupts.
The shallow-green that’s easy/possible to talk about characterizes humans as separate from or outside of nature. Shallow-green is also characteristic of scientists who probe and measure the world and present their findings as if the ways they touched the world to measure it were irrelevant—in a sense, the changes made by the instruments’ presence don’t matter, but there’s also a sense in which they matter greatly.
By contrast, imagine a deep-green: a perspective from which humanity is from and of nature itself. This deep-green is impractical to communicate about, and cutting it up into little pieces to try to address them one at a time loses something important of its nature.
One place it’s relatively easy to point at this deep-green is our understanding what time means. It touches the way that we accept base-12 and base-60 in our clocks and calendars, and in the reasons that no “better” alternative has been “better” enough to win over the whole world.
The characterization of green as “harmony through acceptance” in your image from Duncan Sabien points at another interesting facet of green: “denial” of reality is antithetical to both “acceptance” and “rationality”, albeit with slightly different connotations for each.
Then again, in this system I’d describe myself as having arrived at green through black, so perhaps it’s only my biases talking.

nim 1 Apr 2024 18:25 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: Back to Basics: Truth is Unitary
I misread it as “murakami-sama” at first, which was also disproportionately charming.

nim 1 Apr 2024 15:42 UTC
13 points
8
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”
It’s clear to me from the post that to properly enjoy it as performance art, the audience is meant to believe that the music is AI-generated.

I don’t read the post as disclosing how the music was “actually” made, in the most literal real-world sense.

Pretty cool, regardless, that we live in an era where ‘people pretending to be AI making music’ is not trivial to distinguish from ‘AI trying to make music’ :)

nim 26 Mar 2024 17:42 UTC
4 points
0
on: Barefoot FAQ
I like going barefoot. However, I live in a climate that’s muddy for most of the year. When I’m entering and exiting my house frequently, being barefoot is impractical because the time it takes to adequately clean my feet is much greater than the time it takes to slip off a pair of shoes at the door.

Also, in the colder parts of the year, I find that covering my feet indoors allows me to be generally comfortable at lower ambient temperatures than I would require for being barefoot in the house. This isn’t much of an issue during outdoor activities that promote circulation to the feet, but it’s annoying when reading, at the computer, or doing other activities that involve staying relatively still.

nim 24 Mar 2024 15:00 UTC
1 point
0
on: nim’s Shortform
“to clean house” as implication of violence...

Due to a tragic shortage of outbuildings (to be remedied in the mid term but not immediately), my living room is the garage/makerspace of my home. I cleaned as one cleans for guests last week, because a friend from way back was dropping by. I then got to enjoy a clean-enough-for-guests home for several days, which is a big part of why it is nice to be visited by friends un-intimate enough to feel like cleaning for.

Then my partner-in-crafts came over, and we re-occupied every table with a combination of resin casting and miniature clay sculpting shenanigans. It’s an excellent time.

We also went shopping for fabric together because I plan to make a baby quilt kid-in-progress of the aforementioned friend from way back. Partner-in-crafts idly asked me when I was planning to do the quilt stuff, because historically I would be expected to launch into it immediately as soon as the fabric came out of the dryer.

However, I found something new in myself: A reluctance to start a new project without a clean place to start it in. I’m not sure where this reluctance came from, as I think it seems new, but I also think I like it. So I got to tidying up the stuff that was un-tidyable last night because the resin was still sticky, but is eminently tidyable now because it cured over time, and carefully examining my reluctance-to-tidy as it tried to yell at me.

In that reluctance-to-tidy, I find time travel again: We store information in the position of objects in our environment. Object location encodes memory, so moving someone else’s objects has certain commonalities with the rewriting-of-memory that we call gaslighting when pathological.

For better or worse, my architecture of cognition defaults to relying on empathy twice over when reasoning about moving stuff that someone else was using, or someone else’s stuff. By recognizing an object’s location as a person’s memory of where-they-left-it, I view moving it as rewriting that memory.

The double-empathy thing comes in where I reason about what moves of stuff it’s ok to make. If I put the thing where the person will have an easy time finding it, if I model them well enough to guess correctly where they’ll first look when they want it, then I can help them by moving it. I can move it from somewhere they’d look later to somewhere they’d look sooner, and thereby improve their life at the moment of seeking it, and that’s a clearly good act.

That’s the first empathy layer. The second empathy layer comes of a natural tendency to anthropomorphize objects, which I’ve considered trying to eradicate from myself but settled on keeping because I find it quite convenient to have around in other circumstances. This is the animism of where something “wants” to go, creating a “home” for your keys by the door, and so forth.

So there’s 2 layers of modeling minds—one of complex real minds who are likely to contain surprises in their expectations, and one of simple virtual “minds” that follow from the real-minds as a convenient shortcut. I guess one way to put it is that I figure stuff has/channels feelings kinda like how houseplants do—they probably don’t experience firsthand emotion in any way that would be recognizable to people, but there’s a lot of secondhand emotion that’s shown in how they’re related to and cared for.

Not sure where I’m going with all that, other than noticing how the urge to tidy up can be resisted by the same aesthetic sensibility that says it’s generally bad to erase anybody’s memories.

nim 9 Feb 2024 16:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: Running the Numbers on a Heat Pump
Seconding the importance of insulation, especially for disaster preparedness and weathering utility outages.

If any of your friends have a fancy thermal camera, see if you can borrow it. If not, there are some cheap options for building your own or pre-built ones on ebay. The cheap ones don’t have great screens or refresh rates, but they do the job of visualizing which things are warmer and which are cooler.

Using a thermal imager, I managed to figure out the importance of closing the window blinds to keep the house warm. Having modern high-efficiency windows lulls me into a false sense of security about their insulative value, which I’m still un-learning.

nim 9 Feb 2024 16:24 UTC
3 points
0
on: Running the Numbers on a Heat Pump
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that even though the electricity here is mostly produced by burning gas you do actually burn less gas by turning it into electricity and then using it to run a heat pump than just burning it for heat.
Fascinating! I guess it’d fall into the “more moving parts to break” bucket, but it gets me wondering about switching from my current propane HVAC to propane generator + electric heat pump.
Searching the web for models that do both in a single unit, I find a lot of heat pumps using propane as their refrigerant, but no immediate hits using it as their fuel.