Selfmaker662

Karma: 74

Selfmaker662 Jun 11, 2025, 8:41 AM
7 points
4
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t escalate those signs above a rather low threshold given any observers, and my intuition tells me other people would be similar in this regard. So not observing flirting could just imply people don’t flirt if you’re in the conversation with them. As an extreme example, I’ve never seen anyone having sex, but it seems as if people do that all the time.

Selfmaker662 May 27, 2025, 7:25 AM
2 points
1
on: Selfmaker662′s Shortform
Lately I’ve been trying to use Bayes’ Theorem in daily life — quick guesses, like someone’s nationality from a glance.
What I’ve noticed: my intuition does better when I don’t adjust for general priors. Corrections like “most people in Germany aren’t Russian” when someone looks vaguely Slavic often pull me further from the truth.
After five minutes of reflection, my best guess: explicit Bayes only really helps out-of-distribution, when we lack feedback loops — new domains, big decisions, reasoning about AI. That’s when 5 minutes of googling or reading a paper can give you better intuition than your System 1.

Is this roughly in line with the Sequences?

Selfmaker662 May 17, 2025, 12:49 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: Social Anxiety Isn’t About Being Liked
https://realityisdharma.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/focusing-eugene-t-gendlin.pdf
2nd part of the book
Or get a therapist if it’s bad enough.

Selfmaker662 May 15, 2025, 10:19 AM
3 points
2
in reply to: Nina Panickssery’s comment on: Saul Munn’s Shortform
As a black tea enjoyer I would argue it’s practically non existent, no decaf black tea I’d ever tried even comes close to the best “normal” black tea sorts.

Selfmaker662 May 14, 2025, 4:16 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit
There is “normal” love (with attachment)
There is higher (Christian / lovingkindness—like) love.

Selfmaker662 May 12, 2025, 6:33 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: moridinamael’s comment on: It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit
I think we still misunderstood each other on (3) - I was pushing back only on the part saying “some amount of negative feelings create a positive feedback loop making you more agentic”. I’m saying, less negative feelings, more intrinsic motivation, by any amount, is, up to sacrificing impact for personal happiness, always better.

Selfmaker662 May 11, 2025, 5:43 AM
21 points
10
on: It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit
1) I don’t know what kind of meditation you did, but for me, inner work and meditation tend to unlock more capacity for love. I can clearly see that I’d feel less pain if one of my closest friends left or died—and yet, I love them more than ever, with fewer contractions of insecurity or clinging, less of that sense that they’re the only thing standing between me and the abyss. That kind of love just feels better to me.

2) I love that you acknowledge feeling bad is okay. But one reads in III that you are still striving to not feel bad by considering stuff not going your way as a problem. I think, you’re walking along the same path as the Pali Canon, except solving your problems in an external way. Letting your inner desires out is undeniably great, at any rate, so I support not actively repressing your agentic side.
3) Where I’d also push back is on the assumption that feeling less bad when things go wrong would necessarily make you apathetic. My experience has been the opposite: intrinsic motivation works better for me, and Nate Soares makes a similar case somewhere in Replacing Guilt—that caring from a place other than guilt or pain can actually be more sustainable and energizing.

Selfmaker662 May 4, 2025, 12:04 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: 142857’s comment on: sam’s Shortform
part 2 of “Focusing” by Eugene Gendlin is very good to read and it helps to start.
This next article is my favourite one on all of the internet:
https://open.substack.com/pub/sashachapin/p/what-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-about?r=42y10u&utm_medium=ios
The key is to approach Focusing with the mindset of relaxing, having fun, playing around and experimenting. It’s emphasised in the talks on this website: https://hermesamara.org/teachings/metta. That particular series about loving kindness is very good.

I think there’s enough material in my head about it for a whole post, so I might write one eventually.

Selfmaker662 May 2, 2025, 7:33 AM
4 points
3
on: Prioritizing Work
I think this post being on LW calls for remembering the law of equal and opposite advice.
A good, concise one, still! Upvoted.

Selfmaker662 Apr 30, 2025, 7:37 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: stavros’s comment on: sam’s Shortform
Ouch, you beat me to my answer, but I’m always glad to see fellow practitioners :)

Selfmaker662 Apr 30, 2025, 7:36 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: sam’s comment on: sam’s Shortform
I want to suggest a long-term approach: learning to work with the emotions behind such persistent problems. Methods like IFS, Focusing, lovingkindness meditations are the right tools.
They *can* lead to practical improvements fairly quickly—once you get the hang of them. But learning to do them even right enough takes months of effort, curiosity, support from a community or a mentor. These things are basically meditations, subject to standard difficulties like overeffort, subtle wrong mindsets etc. They also tend to focus first on whatever feels most urgent to your subconscious system—like relationship stress or background anxiety you’ve gotten used to—so the email issue might not be the first thing that shifts.
Still, this is the only thing that really worked for me. And once it started working, it *really* worked.
If you’re interested, I can send my favourite links.

Selfmaker662 Dec 31, 2024, 1:25 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: mattmacdermott’s comment on: Selfmaker662′s Shortform
Thanks, from a very short wikipedia skim, it seems very relevant indeed!

Selfmaker662 Dec 31, 2024, 8:57 AM
1 point
0
on: Selfmaker662′s Shortform
Sometimes, when rating a film on IMDb, I give either 1 or 10 stars—not my honest rating—to maximally steer the average toward what I think it should be. Has anyone explored the dynamics of what happens if everyone always votes maximally or minimally to steer the average toward their desired value? Does this behavior have a name? I couldn’t find anything in a quick search.

I’ve done some thinking myself, and Monte Carlo^[1] simulations show a low average deviation (around 0.6/10 stars) between the steering equilibrium and the honest average when the population is split into a few distinct groups with different preferences, and then a stochastic generator spits out a new voter with probabilities ~ sizes of groups. It’s relatively straightforward to calculate where the vote would settle mathematically in this case.
If the groups appear in some order instead of being evenly mixed, this strategy favors the last group extremely heavily.
But even in an evenly mixed population, 0.6 isn’t 0, and I wonder if the golden rule would imply I should never do this for stable ratings (e.g., films). For dynamic things like restaurants, though, steering seems reasonable since their quality changes over time, and faster convergence to the “true” value might help everyone.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
1. ^
  GPT-o1 generated code without unit testing or reviewing the code

Selfmaker662 Nov 18, 2024, 12:09 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Chris Lakin’s comment on: Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”; and an upside of burnout
I wouldn’t say the subsconscious calibrating on more substantial measures of success, such has “how happy something made me” or “how much status that seems to have brought” is irrational. What you’re proposing, it seems to me, is calibrating only on how good of an idea it was from the predictor part / System 2. Which gets calibrated, I would guess, when the person analyses the situation? But if the system 2 is sufficiently bad, calibrating on pure results is a good idea to shield against pursuing some goal, the pursuit of which yields nothing but evaluations of System 2, that the person did well. Which is bad, if one of the end goals of the subconscious is “objective success”.

For example, a situation I could easily imagine myself to have been in: Every day I struggle to go to bed, because I can’t put away my phone. But when I do, at 23:30, I congratulate myself—it took a lot of effort, and I did actually succeed in giving myself enough time to sleep almost long enough. If I didn’t recalibrate rationally, and “me-who-uses-internal-metrics-of-success” were happy with good effort every day, I’d keep doing it. All while real me would get fed up soon, and get a screen blocker app to turn on at 23:00 every day to sleep well every day at no willpower cost. (+- the other factors and supposing phone after 23 isn’t very important for some parts of me)

Selfmaker662 Oct 20, 2024, 7:39 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Stephen Fowler’s comment on: Laziness death spirals
“My experience may not be applicable to you.”
Thanks for the note—my experience has been exactly the opposite. A classic case of the law of equal and opposite advice :)

Selfmaker662 Sep 22, 2024, 6:56 PM
12 points
7
on: Laziness death spirals
Another option after acknowledging the spiral is giving yourself 30 minutes to do nothing, and doing a Gendlin’s Focusing / IFS parts work with your emotional fatigue during that time. Perhaps laziness is guilt from not doing things in the last day or two. Perhaps it’s a symptom of long-term mental exhaustion. Either way, if you manage to find the time and are skilled enough in it, that’s one of the best ways to at the very least better understand what’s happening. In some cases, if it’s a very recent emotion, you can even become motivated and productive again in half an hour.

Selfmaker662 Jul 28, 2024, 8:12 AM
18 points
12
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
On your definition of ‘poverty’, Disneyland makes the world poorer.
I think the comparison with Disneyland misses the point. The essay measures poverty by the level of desperation people experience. People don’t typically work extra hours out of desperation to take their kids to Disneyland; they do it out of a desire for additional enjoyment. The 60-hour work week should be understood as working far more hours than one would if they weren’t desperate for essential resources.
Poverty is about lacking crucial resources necessary for living, not just lacking luxury items. Therefore, adding more Disneylands wouldn’t make people poorer, but people who are not poor might still strive for better things—from a position of security, not desperation. Interestingly, this aligns with your argument right above that “work produces nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it.”

Selfmaker662 10 Jul 2024 16:22 UTC
2 points
0
on: On saying “Thank you” instead of “I’m Sorry”
A really neat directly applicable article on LessWrong, thanks for sharing this! Since the trigger is obvious, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. Seems worth it, as those moments happen often to me.

Selfmaker662 11 May 2024 9:35 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: Selfmaker662′s Shortform
Right, I completely missed the network effects, 5 minutes of thinking through wasn’t enough. May be there even are good apps there, which didn’t make it through the development and marketing part. Thanks, Vanessa!

Selfmaker662 11 May 2024 6:42 UTC
7 points
0
on: Selfmaker662′s Shortform
I’m confused: if the dating apps keep getting worse, how come nobody has come up with a good one, or at least a clone of OkCupid? Like, as far as I can understand not even “a good matching system is somehow less profitable than making people swipe all the time (surely it’d still be profitable on the absolute scale)” or “it requires a decently big initial investment” can explain a complete lack of good products in a very demanded area. Has anyone digged into it / tried to start a good dating app as a summer project?