I am Issa Rice. https://issarice.com/
riceissa
Karma: 2,166
Idea: medical hypotheses app for mysterious chronic illnesses
This post was apparently translated to Chinese, and there is some discussion there. I can’t quite tell if it’s actually humans writing the comments (and Chrome’s translation is just not very good) or if the content and discussion is all AI-generated.
I didn’t log the time I spent on the original blog post, and it’s kinda hard to assign hours to this since most of the reading and thinking for the post happened while working on the modeling aspects of the MTAIR project. If I count just the time I sat down to write the blog post, I would guess maybe less than 20 hours.
As for the “convert the post to paper” part, I did log that time and it came out to 89 hours, so David’s estimate of “perhaps another 100 hours” is fairly accurate.
This post by Brian Hamrick makes a similar point about how organizational mottos should prioritize a single thing (but leaves the “large company” part implicit).
Not the same paper, but related: https://twitter.com/jamespayor/status/1634447672303304705
Can someone say more about what is meant by credit allocation in this conversation? The credit allocation section here just talks about BATNAs and I don’t see how BATNAs are related to what I imagine “credit allocation” might mean. I searched Michael Vassar’s Twitter account but there are only three instances of the term and I couldn’t quickly understand any of the tweets. I also don’t understand what “being able to talk about deceptive behavior” has to do with credit allocation.
I upvoted this post because I think it’s talking about some important stuff in ways (or tone or something) I somehow like better than what some previous posts in the same general area have done.
But also something feels really iffy about the way the word “fun” is used in this post. If I think back to the only time in my life I actually had fun, which was my childhood, I sure did not have fun in the ways described in this post. I had fun by riding bikes (but never once stopping to get curious about how bike gears work), playing Pokemon with my friends (but not actually being very strategic about it—competitive battling/metagame would have been completely alien to my child’s self), making dorodango (but, like, just for the fun of it, not because I wanted to get better at making them over time, and I sure did not ever wonder why different kinds of mud made more stable or shinier dorodango, or what the shine even consists of), etc.
The kind of “fun” that is described in this post is, I think, something I learned from other people when I was in my early teens or so, not something I was born with (as this post seems to imply?). And I learned and developed this skill because I was told (in books like Feynman’s and the Sequences) that this is what actually smart people do.
So personally I feel like I am trying to get back the “original fun” that I experienced as a child, as well as trying to untangle the “useful/technical fun” from its social influences and trying to claim it as my own, or something, in addition to doing the kind of thing suggested by this post.
I think it’s often easiest/most tempting to comment specifically on a sketchy thing that someone says instead of being like “I basically agree with you based on your strongest arguments” and leaving it at that (because the latter doesn’t seem like it’s adding any value). (I think there’s been quite a bit of discussion about the psychology of nitpicking, which is similar to but distinct from the behavior you mention, though I can’t find a good link right now.) Of course it would be better to give both one’s overall epistemic state plus any specific counter-arguments one thought of, but I only see a few people doing this sort of thing consistently. That would be my guess as to what’s going on in the situations you mention (like, I could imagine myself behaving like the people you mention, but it wouldn’t be because I’m taking averages, it would be because I’m responding to whatever I happen to have the most thoughts on). But you have a lot more information about those situations so I could be totally off-base.
This doesn’t seem to be what I or the people I regularly interact with do… I wish people would give some examples or link to conversations where this is happening.
My own silly counter-model is that people take the sum, but the later terms of the sum only get added if the running total stays above some level of plausibility. This accounts for idea inoculation (where people stop listening to arguments for something because they have already heard of an absurd version of the idea). It also explains the effect Ronny mentions about how “you may very quickly find that everyone perceives the anti-T-ers as being much more reasonable”: people stopped listening to the popular-and-low-quality arguments in favor of T.
I bought these after seeing Wei Dai’s post. Everyone in my family and in-person friend group refuses to wear this mask because it makes them look like a duck (besides one person, who refuses to wear it because it is harder to breathe through compared to a surgical mask). So I am the only one wearing this mask. So I agree with your assessment that “the main problem is that they make you look a bit like a duck”, but I would add that this is apparently a very strong effect. People really would prefer to be less comfortable or increase their risk of COVID than to look weird.
I think I agree with everything in your comment. Seems like there was less disagreement here than I initially thought. Moving on… :)
I think it’s often hard to tell whether something is a psychological problem for an individual or instead a cultural problem with the group. Past social progress can be framed as “society used to think certain individuals had a psychological problem, but then it turned out that the society’s rules/norms/culture was the problem”. It currently seems to me that a lot of what people view as “psychological problems” are actually an individual’s way of saying “something about the culture I find myself in doesn’t seem right”. I read this post as kinda ignoring this whole issue and making it seem like it’s obvious whose problem it is, which I think avoids the hard core of these situations.
I think if the umbrella blog post on which the user’s shortform posts (which are just comments) get added was created before 2022-06-23 then it won’t have agree/disagree votes, whereas ones created on or after that date do?
If you’re pasting sensitive data such as a password or card number for regular entry of that password, consider other options such as using the browser autofill or a password manager.
Some password managers like KeePassXC automatically clear the clipboard after 10 seconds or when you close the program (whichever comes first).
Some stuff I’ve encountered that I mostly haven’t looked much into and haven’t really tried but seem potentially useful to me: heart rate variability biofeedback training, getting sunlight at specific times of day, photobiomodulation (e.g. Vielight), red light therapy, neurofeedback, transcranial magnetic stimulation, specific supplement regimes (example), green powders like Athletic Greens, certain kinds of meditation.
Agreed on epistemically questionable info. I’ve seen a range of canned advice including defeatist ones.
Lynette’s post was interesting because I think I also have something like POTS, but her post is very unlike something I would write myself, and I wouldn’t have found the post useful when I was starting out (I actually probably even read the post when it first came out and probably didn’t find it useful). I am puzzled at what this means for how generalizable people’s experiences are.
And thanks, I’d be interested in introductions to potential collaborators!
Agreed on the epistemic standards of random health groups, and yeah, I’d be interested in a Discord server. I am aware of this Facebook group, if you use Facebook, though it’s not very active.
I’ve been having a mysterious chronic health problem for the past several years and have learned a bunch of things that I wish I knew back when all of this started. I am thinking about how to write down what I’ve learned so others can benefit, but what’s tricky here is that while the knowledge I’ve gained seems wide-ranging, it’s also extremely specific to whatever my problems are, so I don’t know how well it generalizes to other people. I welcome suggestions on how to make my efforts more useful to others. I also welcome pointers to books/articles/posts that already discuss the stuff below in a competent way.
But anyway here is some stuff I could talk about:
Rationality lessons of mysterious health problems: certain health conditions (like mine) are quite mysterious, e.g. having no clear cause or shifting symptoms or nonspecific symptoms. This makes the health problem not only challenging on the basic suffering/emotional level, but also at an epistemic level. Some weird epistemic stuff happens when you are dealing with such a health problem, including:
Your “most likely diagnosis” will keep shifting or will have a wide distribution, which can be confusing to reason about (it’s almost as if the health problem is an agent diagonalizing against me). My “most likely diagnosis” has changed like five times.
Some mistakes I think I made trying to reason too literally about symptoms and ruled things out too early instead of just being like “ok maybe I have this thing” and then just trying the low-effort/safe interventions just to see if they help.
Weird interacting nature of symptoms: ignoring certain symptoms because they aren’t the most painful can end up being a bad idea because eliminating that symptom can help with a lot of other symptoms, because the mind/body is weird and interconnected.
I think turning to certain quacks is actually rational in the case of certain chronic illnesses. These quacks were never the first choice for the ill person, but after the conventional/established medicine’s interventions have all failed and established medicine basically shrugs and says “we don’t know what this even is”, and gives up on you, it makes sense to keep going anyway and try wackier things.
You need to do “rationality on hard mode”—when you’re stressed, when you have brain fog, when you have few productive hours in the day, when your emotions get all messed up.
There is a kind of “lawyery” thing you have to do, where you simulate the objections people will raise about things you should have done or things you should try, and you have to preempt all that and try it and be like “see? I already tried it” so that they don’t have easy outs.
How to deal with the health bureaucracy (US-specific, but what I know is even more specific): how to get the benefits you need from health providers, how to deal with insurance, how to get referrals, how to push providers with questions, optimizing which health insurance to have.
How to do health research: how to find information about symptoms, how to organize your research, how to ask good questions when meeting doctors, the importance of talking to a lot of people.
Specific things I’ve learned about different drugs, nootropics, health devices, practices, etc., and which ones seem the most promising.
General life outlook stuff:
How to orient toward “this being your new life”
How to stay motivated to live life and accomplish things while chronically ill; the hardcoreness of being ill for so long and what this does to your personality.
How to maintain a “health tracker”: how to keep track of your symptoms, what you did each day, what you ate, how you slept, etc. for future reference, and whether or not tracking any of this is useful.
Productivity hacks:
Daily goal-setting: how to get shit done even if you feel like shit every day.
The importance of having a “health buddy” who has similar health problems who you can talk to all the time, as having a chronic health problem can be very isolating (very few people can understand or support you in the way you need).
The importance of just trying lots of things to see what helps, and what this looks like in practice.
Basic health stuff that seems good to do regardless of what the cause of your symptoms is: nutrition, exercise, sleep, wackier stuff.
Not quite sure what you are asking, but if you mean something like taking some of my points and editing them into your own post, that’s fine with me.