Three-Monkey Mind

• Three-Monkey MindNov 20, 2023, 9:55 PM

  16 points

  2

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: For Civ­i­liza­tion and Against Niceness

  Would you rather live in a society that valued “niceness, community and civilization”, or one that valued “meanness, community and civilization”? I don’t think it’s a tough choice.

  This is an awful straw man. Compare instead:

  1. niceness, community, and civilization

  2. community and civilization

  Having seen what “niceness” entails, I’ll opt for (2), which doesn’t prioritize niceness or anti-niceness, and is niceness-agnostic.

• Three-Monkey MindSep 25, 2023, 12:07 AM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Hand-writ­ing MathML

  That’s a lot of readers to throw away

  Depends on how popular you are. Even if you make the highly questionable assumption that browser statistics collected on sites like cnn.com and such are representative of the readership of jefftk.com, if jefftk.com has hundreds of readers, he’s still doing a lot of work for a group that can only manage to claim that there are “dozens of us”, and in any case really ought to upgrade to a proper browser (and in probably most cases, OS) anyway, for security reasons.

• Three-Monkey MindSep 24, 2023, 11:47 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Hand-writ­ing MathML

  Daring Fireball, a site you’ve probably heard of, seems to do OK with only browser-supplied fonts:

  	font-family: Verdana, system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  

  Also, jefftk said “requiring”. Sure, he could have a site that uses Inter, either loaded from his own site or from a CDN like Google Fonts, but if Inter doesn’t load (mostly likely because of user preference), then everything will be fine.

  If TeX fonts don’t load…then what happens? Does the user see raw TeX, or nothing at all, or…?

• Three-Monkey MindSep 5, 2023, 8:30 PM

  36 points

  9

  on: De­fund­ing My Mistake

  I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals

  BLM’s policy proposals have changed since you wrote that. Currently, they’re at https://​​impact.blacklivesmatter.com/​​policy/​​. They are:

  • defund the police

  • No On Prop 25

  • voting-rights legislation

  • support for the Congressional Oversight of Unjust Policing Act (COUP Act)

  • Medicare for All

  • the police not using stuff made for the military

  • opposing Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court

  • DC statehood

  • ending the filibuster

  • “climate justice”

  (emphasis added)

  Keep clicking on “Next Pillar” at the top right of the page; eventually they get around to bragging about how they’ve countered Amazon’s attempts to keep a union from forming.

  I’m not really a libertarian any more, but is this close enough to your beliefs that you still think the organization is worth supporting? Or have you considered voicing support for some other organization that has enough cachet in your social circle to ensure that you don’t spend weekend nights alone?

• Three-Monkey MindSep 5, 2023, 8:08 PM

  23 points

  10

  on: De­fund­ing My Mistake

  Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do.

  20 years ago or so, Eliezer Yudkowsky said that the biggest obstacle to raising the sanity waterline was religion. This seemed very reasonable at the time.

  I’m unconvinced that’s still true in the West. What seems the larger barrier now are the things people say and believe that ensure they’ll keep getting invited to dinner parties.

  I’m likely overlooking other factors of course, and there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I’ll be better equipped to unearth it.

  You’ve identified a very powerful bias. If you’re looking for easy wins to root out incorrect beliefs, have you considered first looking at all the ones that would dry up your dating pool if you stopped believing in them and told other people in your social circle about how you changed your mind?

• Three-Monkey MindJul 28, 2023, 8:54 PM

  6 points

  0

  on: Semaglu­tide and Muscle

  A key problem to loss of LBM is that you’re either losing bone density (a terrible thing) or muscle (a pretty damn bad thing).

  Could also be skin. Losing skin if you’re losing fat is a good thing, I’d think, since you don’t want to weigh 200 pounds yet still have all the skin you had when you were 300 pounds.

  Has any work been done to see where the LBM has been coming from?

• Three-Monkey MindMay 2, 2023, 4:39 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: jp’s comment on: jp’s Shortform

  Oh, that’s something significantly different from what I had in mind. Thanks for pointing me to the page that explains the concept.

• Three-Monkey MindApr 30, 2023, 3:21 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: jp’s Shortform

  Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means?

  I’m not jp, but:

  • too awake to sleep

  • too brain-fogged to do thinking work

  • possibly too brain-fogged to listen to a podcast and retain anything from it

  • too physically tired to go for a walk or do other similar low-intensity exercise, like easy yoga

  • probably too brain-fogged to read — and really digest — the web articles that I’ve been postponing for months because they seem great, but I can never get around to

  Meanwhile, here’s what I can do in a low-energy state, some of the time (but I frequently don’t want to):

  • balance a checkbook, but it seems like I get roughly $n$ hours/​week of low-energy time, but maybe $n/10$ hours/​week of time that I need to spend balancing checkbooks

  • delete e-mails, but not be able to think of a couple good new categories that I’d need to get my inbox to zero

  • get photos off my phone and file them appropriately, but possibly spend a little too long thinking of good, descriptive filenames that I’ll be able to use to search for them later, or just fail to have a name with the words that I’ll want to use to retrieve it later

• Three-Monkey MindApr 24, 2023, 10:27 PM

  11 points

  9

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Moder­a­tion notes re: re­cent Said/​Dun­can threads

  We might iterate on the exact implementation here (for example, we might only give this option to users with 100+ karma or equivalent)

  I could be misunderstanding all sorts of things about this feature that you’ve just implemented, but…

  Why would you want to limit newer users from being able to declare that rate-limited users should be able to post as much as they like on newer users’ posts? Shouldn’t I, as a post author, be able to let Said, Duncan, and Zack post as much as they like on my posts?

• Three-Monkey MindAug 22, 2022, 12:42 AM

  4 points

  0

  on: Ways to in­crease work­ing mem­ory, and/​or cope with low work­ing mem­ory?

  writing things down

  A good idea but too general to be good advice.

  More specifically (not an exhaustive list):

  • If you have a multistep 1- or 2-hour task, strongly consider scribbling down a quick checklist of what needs doing before your working memory gets swamped with the details of a subtask or three.

  • If you’re in the middle of a programming project and need to pause your work, strongly consider typing out a message in a sticky-note-equivalent app like Tot that says “Welcome back. You were frobnicating the gleeberks because the gleeberks don’t snozzle as well as they should.”

  More generally, consider dumping your mental state to a written medium more often. You should probably have a way to do this on both your phone and computer that doesn’t take too much thinking to summon up a text field that you can edit and then have the text get stored in an inbox or similar catch-all folder somewhere.

  If you feel silly writing down trivial stuff, it’s helpful to think “I want to remember all of it, not just most of it.”

• Three-Monkey MindJun 30, 2022, 2:05 AM

  3 points

  4

  on: any good ra­tio­nal­ist guides to nu­tri­tion /​ healthy eat­ing?

  Two responses:

  1. It’s unclear to me what would make diet advice “rationalist”.

  2. The only novel, actionable consensus I’ve seen seems to be “avoid eating or drinking things with sugar added to them, especially if there’s a lot of added sugar”.

• Three-Monkey MindJul 9, 2020, 6:28 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: George3d6’s comment on: Ob­sidian: A Mind Map­ping Mark­down Editor

  This appears to be a personal wiki.

• Three-Monkey MindJun 2, 2020, 10:22 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: chaosmage’s comment on: What are your con­trar­ian views?

  If “refining the art of human rationality” is our goal, we should be doing a lot more outreach and a lot more production of very accessible rationality materials.

  I agree, and I’m in favor of this sort of thing. I try to do this sort of thing among my friends. Sometimes it works, at least a little bit.

  On the other hand, if we’re trying to save Earth from being turned into paperclips, we ought to focus our efforts on people who’re smart enough to be able to meaningfully contribute to AI risk reduction.

  On the other other hand, there are people here who could help with sanity-line-raising materials who can’t help with rationality training as a way to avert AI x-risk.

  On the other other other hand, some people who might be able to help with AI risk might get into the possibly-less-important sanity-waterline-raising projects, and this would be a bad thing.

• Three-Monkey MindMay 24, 2020, 6:44 AM

  19 points

  on: What are ob­jects that have made your life bet­ter?

  A second laptop charger.

  It’s nice to be able to charge your laptop at your desk, with a cord that snakes behind the desk, and not have to go in and undo all that just to get power to your laptop when you’re out and about.

  And if you’re not getting out with your laptop, having a second charger is still useful. I have a makeshift standing desk with my laptop on top of my dresser. With a second charger set up like this, I can shift from standing to sitting on my schedule, not my laptop’s battery’s.

Motte/​bailey doc­trine is of­ten a byproduct of dis­tributed argumentation

Three-Mon­key Mind’s Shortform

• Three-Monkey MindFeb 28, 2020, 8:22 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Open & Wel­come Thread—Fe­bru­ary 2020

  Also, I find myself vexed with thoughts […] How do professional or amatuer traders deal with this?

  Habituation, meditation, and/​or alcohol.

• Three-Monkey MindJan 13, 2020, 12:09 AM

  8 points

  on: How has the cost of cloth­ing in­su­la­tion changed since 1970 in the USA?

  Subjective experience:

  • Polyester (elastane, etc.) clothes are much more common these days. Back in the 80s, people wore way more cotton shirts to the gym. Nowadays, most people wear some sort of sweat-wicking heat-venting material. They’re also cheaper; Under Armour used to run about $50. Nowadays, UA shirts tend to run about ³⁄₅ that.

  • Remember back when wool was only for itchy sweaters? Nowadays, merino wool, which is less itchy for most people, is used for shirts and undershirts and even socks and underpants. The great thing about wool shirts is that you can wear them for almost a week and they won’t stink; this isn’t something you can do with cotton and especially not polyester.

  • There are a lot more stretchy materials out there, as well as stretchy materials (polyester) woven into less-stretchy materials (cotton) to give the stiffer materials a bit more give. This makes slim-fitting clothing less restrictive, if nothing else.

  • There are nylon pants that don’t look out of place at the office. Outlier’s Futureworks pants made out of F.Cloth (click on “Fabric” on the tabs) are better than cotton chinos in at least some respects; you can spill coffee on them and likely all of it will bead up and just run off, not staining anything or even getting wet. (They’ll eventually wet out if you’re walking around in the rain, though.)

  • You can car camp in the rain, forget your rain gear, and everything’ll turn out mostly OK.

  While the price of insulation is a superlatively objective metric, it entirely misses advancements in anything other than insulation effectiveness. The big changes have all been in finding new points that balance the different tradeoffs between stretchiness/​durability/​stink trapping/​cost/​water resistance/​stain resistance/​warmth/​air permeability.

• Three-Monkey MindJan 10, 2020, 2:08 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Sub­script­ing Ty­po­graphic Con­ven­tion For Ci­ta­tions/​Dates/​Sources/​Ev­i­den­tials: A Proposal

  But if passages aren’t dense with that or other uses, then you wouldn’t need to use subscripting much, by definition....

  Agreed.

  Perhaps you meant, “assuming that it remains a unique convention, most readers will have to pay a one-time cost of comprehension/​dislike as overhead, and only then can gain from it[…]

  Agreed so far…

  […] so you’ll need them to read a lot of it to pay off, and such passages may be quite rare”?

  You’ll need a bunch in a single passage. If you don’t need to disambiguate a large hairball of differently-timed people (like in My Best and Worst Mistake), then you probably shouldn’t bother in general. Put another way, you’re going to want to have a dense, if localized, cluster of people-times that need disambiguating for this to be a better idea than using parentheticals.

  Because it brings out the contrast: one is based on first-hand experience & observation, and the other is later socially-performative kvetching for an audience such as family or female acquaintances. The medium is the message, in this case.

  I’m struggling to see how this is an improvement over “on FB” or “on Facebook” for either the reader or the writer, assuming you don’t want to bury-but-still-mention the medium/​audience.

  I waffled on whether to make it ‘FB’ or ‘Facebook’. I thought “FB” as an abbreviation was sufficiently widely known at this point to make it natural. But maybe not, if even LWers are thrown by it.

  Not without context or some other way to reduce the universe of things “FB” might refer to. “My wife complained on FB” is probably enough of a determiner most of the time for most people (unless I’m really underslept), but an “FB” subscript isn’t immediately obvious to people who aren’t used to that sort of thing.

• Three-Monkey MindJan 9, 2020, 7:19 PM

  1 point

  on: Sub­script­ing Ty­po­graphic Con­ven­tion For Ci­ta­tions/​Dates/​Sources/​Ev­i­den­tials: A Proposal

  This seems like a solid improvement over X!Y notation. X!Y seems to not fit my brain in the same way that XのY seems to not fit my brain, and mentally substituting “’s” for “の” helps only partially.

  Does it do enough good to be worth using despite the considerable hit to weirdness points? That I don’t know.

  A better question, I think, would be this: “When is it worth it to use this one weird trick to boost the clarity of a work?”

  It seems worth it in nerdy circles (i.e. among people who’re already familiar with subscripting) for passages that are dense with jumping around in time as in your chosen example, but I’d expect these sorts of passages to be rare, regardless of the expected readership.

  Also, it’s unclear why “on Facebook” deserves to be compressed into an evidential. At the very least, “FB” isn’t immediately obvious what it refers to, whereas a date is easier to figure out from context.