JhanicManifold
No bio...
User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Wow, unless you have a weird definition of "drink", then those are truly massive amounts of alcohol. Like Huberman would say, this is called "alcohol use disorder".
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
When so diminished, it looks like mere letters on a screen, dead words; but it would be presumptuous of a diminished subhuman to make a decision to sabotage the plan of the master who is temporarily absent. Think of your better moments: they are not gone completely. Although not everything, much can be salvaged.
Genuinely great post, man, thanks for writing it.
tirzepatide; basically you only need to wait a little for it to become commodified as tens of millions of fatasses conjure a market.
OP doesn't even need to wait, I got semaglutide from this chinese source for roughly 7USD per 2mg, and it's worked wonders for the past 2 months.
A few reasons:
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I'm curious how AI will turn out.
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I think I can use my talents to help the world (again related to AI).
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I want to experience my first child being born at some point.
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I want to get married and experience that.
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I want to see how deeply meditation will take me towards seeing past the veil of experience.
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I want to experience the final Unified Theory Of Physics being created and know enough math to understand it.
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I want to make more friends and have more fun with them
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have more sex
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I want to see just how good my body can look if I really dedicate myself to working out and eating well
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eat more and different good food around the world
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and finally I want to be around in case we do get an amazing transhuman future to see all the crazy shit that will undoubtedly be there
But I'll say what I usually do when a friend comes to me with thoughts of suicide. Once killing yourself is on the table, crazy shit becomes warranted. Like trying steroids to drive off depression (you can buy testosterone gel/patches on indiamart.com). If you really, really feel like dying on a particular day, I would urge you to do a hit of 5-meo-dmt (again from an indian source), it's basically death in a drug (and very very different from the n,n-dmt you might have heard about), you feel your consciousness dissolving into an indescribable state for around 15 minutes before coming back. If you do try it with a large enough dose, I suspect that you'll find that a single Death per day is enough.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
recently I've quite enjoyed a punk rock band called The viagra boys
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
The current throw-money-at-transformers paradigm seems to favor big players. Maybe do a spread trade where you short robotics stuff and go long Google/Microsoft/Nvidia ? General AI hype would seem to drive both types of stock up, but by shorting robotics you'd bet on LLMs getting better much faster than robotics is improving.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
But if we are ever going to develop anything remotely approaching general AI, such a program has to exist, because general AI, by definition, doesn't exist without it.
General AI only requires the existence of an agent capable of creating the music-transcription program, not that the program itself actually exists. The fact that this very specific program doesn't exist yet is not very good evidence that we aren't approaching AGI. If you imagine an AI's intelligence as growing from the equivalent of a one-year-old infant to a 25-year-old programmer's over the course of a year, you don't get a smooth increase in the number of different useful programs the AI is capable of writing over the course of this year, you instead get basically zero useful programs until some critical point, and then an explosion as it becomes capable of coding all human programs.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
So, party until the lights go out? How do I deal with my AI-driven existential crisis?
Pretty much, yeah. That and develop an absurdist sense of humor. I also started hardcore meditation in 2016 partly to deal with this eventuality, and I'm glad I did. To quiet my "do something!" Inner sense I'm also devoting about an hour everyday during evening walks trying to think of possible alignment ideas, just in case my brain decides to come up with something particularly novel that I think might have a shot.
So far most of my hope is that Boxing and interpretability techniques for LLMs end up enabling us to control a weakly superhuman AI that is nevertheless strong enough to produce AI safety work that can be independently verified.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Have you tried those springy strips that stick to your nose to open it during the night? I don't think I have sleep apnea, but I do notice higher quality sleep if my breathing is better.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
A very substantial flat decrease in tax rate for all couples with at least one child (maybe with some soft cutoff for the age of the parents so we don't lose revenu from people in their 40s and 50s). The average child per mother in western countries has actually increased since the 80s, it's just that women aren't having that first child anymore at the same rates, so encouraging the first child should be sufficient.
I've had some success with this on university discord servers, there are people on there who appear less woke than I appear, but I seem to get more people interacting with me, and therefore I get more woke people hanging themselves with the rope I give them. I think that any forum with real names requires this sort of caution if we're gonna talk politics, anything less than this might carry an unacceptable chance of a bad outcome.
that firing white people to bring in a minority is still racism, but still believes in critical race theory and think that Jonathan Haidt and John McWhorter are idiots that are worth mocking immediately.
I think that this is a mostly empty category at this point.
What are some diplomatic skills I can develop to argue in such a way that a) I do not put myself in a position where I get easily accused (with onlookers being persuaded of those accusations), b) attention of onlookers remains on the bailey (not motte, the accusations), c) I politely reveal the idiocy of the positions of my woke interlocutors?
You have to hide your arguments with the language style and concerns of the woke, absolutely never show any type of anger, show complete apparent sincerity and good-will, and never actually admit to holding some positions like being pro-gun or anti-abortion, but merely say that you have some close family members (or friends) who hold those positions, and that after talking with them you didn't think their arguments were as stupid as you expected (you were not convinced by them, of course, but merely impressed by the arguments). Couch everything in a desire to simply make the woke's arguments better by seeing how they stand up to scrutiny. At the end of every exchange where you "try to make the woke arguments better", you have to end up saying that the woke are right, and just hope that the spectators see that the arguments against are really much better than those for the woke, even if you appeared to concede to wokeness in the end.
Another argumentative weapon is to have the "how do we convince conservatives?" frame, where you show people the anti-woke arguments in an attempt to see how the woke POV would address them, for the purpose of convincing conservatives. Couch everything in compassion, conservatives are people too, despite their "horrible viewpoints", and we should aim to rebuke their arguments. The goal is not to be explicitly anti-woke, but just to expose people to anti-woke arguments which they've never seen.
All that said... arguing about politics in public under your real name is almost never worth it.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I should really make a giant "Nerd's Guide to Getting Ripped & Shredded" as a post that we could always link for these questions, rehashing everything every wednesday seems like a bit of a waste of time.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Well, social opportunities that aren't full of social climbers. If he goes to the sort of parties thrown by Musk, Rogan, etc., then any single young woman there is immediately under suspicion of being a gold digger or worse.
yet being inexplicably popular
Now that clip is incredibly unfair and completely misreads the relationship between Rogan and Lex. Lex does ask extraordinarily predictable questions, and is just incredibly naive at times, but I don't believe for a second that he isn't genuine. He's a very un-cynical and charitable guy. To my eyes Rogan gave him his favorite watch as a gesture of love to a friend he likes, it seems like Glennwald and Beattie are too old and cynical to even recognize a mental state of friendly-love. They're completely stumped by the gesture and have to interpret it through their bizzare worldview where everything is a political machination.
edit: okay after looking a bit more into his "MIT credentials", it does seem like Lex was some wannabe social climber dude. My opinion of him is dropped significantly
edit2: out of curiosity I went to read his phd thesis from Drexel University, since it's kind of related to my field. To be frank, his thesis is shit. He basically applied standard ML methods to the problem of identifying internet users from their click patterns and other info. His approach is basically what you'd immediately come up with once the problem of "use ML to identify users from browser data" presented itself, there isn't a non-trivial idea in there that I can see. I'm honestly somewhat baffled that you can get a PhD with a thesis like that...
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I'd guess a combination of high standards on his part, social ackwardness, lack of time to go out due to working on stuff, and a strong desire not to be in a relationship with the kind of woman who'd want to date him for his fame and money. Lex seems to hold a very Romantic and idealistic view of relationships and love, and he wants to find someone with the same point of view who isn't a gold digger, and there are probably incredibly few social opportunities for him to meet someone like that.
I have a very large google sheets document where I compute macros per weight for a bunch of my most common homemade foods (like protein bars, chili, hamburgers, fried chicken, etc.), like the picture shows. Some variety does need to be sacrificed, but I arrived at a combination of 5 or 6 recipes that I like and that fit my macros pretty well.
/images/16756394291295397.webp
edit: also, I get cheap whey here and cheap casein protein here, direct import from india from indiamart would be even cheaper, but that's a bit too much hassle for me right now
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Those for whom forgiving Hitler would be a real act of forgiveness, should of course aim to forgive him while still acknowledging that his actions were evil. I just very much doubt that many people have the required emotional hatred of Hitler to make the forgiveness meaningful. Any "forgiveness" that I could give Hitler wouldn't mean very much because I don't feel his atrocities with much emotional force, I'd have to watch a few holocaust survivor interviews, read Man's Search For Meaning and watch Schindler's List again in order to really feel his atrocities, and then maybe forgiving him would mean anything.
True Forgiveness is really hard. I recently discovered the youtube channel "Soft White Underbelly" and I watched this interview of a prostitute on Skid Row. The black mark she has on the side of her face is a cover-up tattoo of the name of her former pimp, who forced her to tattoo his name on her face when she was 13 years old. By any metric what Hitler did was much worse than what this one pimp did to this one girl, but I spent 30 full minutes yesterday during meditation trying to forgive the pimp this one act, and I couldn't do it.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
The ones I've watched always seemed dubious, it might just be the one channel I landed on. A guy makes a beautiful swimming pool in the jungle using only a knife and a bucket... hmm. At the least it seems like they always pick a spot with the softest, loosest, most diggable dirt in the whole world. There's never half of two brick walls buried four inches down.
You've found the copycats, the original Primitive Technology dude is extremely impressive and realistic. The swimming pool videos are obviously fake and done with modern machinery, the dude I linked is making bricks, vases, kilns, hatchets, etc. which are much more realistic for a single guy alone in the jungle.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Well, Hex Deadlifts pretty much solve that problem for you, once I switched over to them, it quickly became apparent just how unnatural the standard barbell deadlift is for the human body, whereas people pretty much instinctively know how to hex deadlift with close to perfect form. I strongly recommend them if you're not competing in powerlifting (where they arbitrarily chose the deadlift as once of the 3 core lifts).
how exactly are you defining a "set"? Is it when you do x reps (where x is anything between 5 and 30) in one sitting, continually, and you've gone close to complete failure at the end of x reps?
Exactly correct, it's basically doing repetitions with correct, reasonably slow form until you can't do anymore (or get within 1 or 2 repetitions of that). Generally you'd then take around 2 or 3 minutes of rest before doing another set.
If you're saying I want to do 6 sets per muscle per week, and I want to try to fully exhaust that muscle in 12 reps, does that mean that I should be expecting to do 72 reps per muscle per week?
Yup, 6 sets is a decent start, but you should really aim for 10 sets/week. And thinking in terms of "reps per muscle" isn't too accurate, the last few reps within a set have an outsized effect on muscle growth, the fundamental unit here is really sets rather than reps. A decent simplification is that the more exposure to a state close to complete failure your muscles get, the more growth stimulus. Going all the way to complete failure is only recommended on the last set of your exercises for a give muscle for the day, because going to failure exhausts you quite a bit for future sets. So if you're going 3 sets of bench press, go just shy of failure on the first 2, then all out on the last one. And here "failure" means "you literally can't lift the bar anymore, even with a gun your head", not "it hurts pretty bad". That's also partly why I mention 12 reps instead of 20 reps, going to failure in 12 reps is quite a bit less painful than going to failure in 20 reps, or heaven forbid 25 reps, which is truly a hellish feeling, yet the set of 12 to failure and the one of 25 to failure yield pretty much the same growth.
Can they be all the same (like for example, could I do bench presses for all 72 chest reps in a week)?
Certainly, though at some point you might want some extra variety and add in some chest flys if you have the equipment, but that's details with effect sizes well below any of the other factors we're talking about. The bench press is pretty much the king of chest exercises. If you have a barbell, I'd also recommend something called a Pendlay Row as your main back exercise
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
There are a bunch of things to mention here, I'll just write a summary of common sport science knowledge that I think would help you, apologies if I say some stuff you already know.
There's no problem with not going to the gym, I don't like it either and workout at home too, though I've spend a few thousand dollars on a power-rack, bench, barbell, 45lb plates, hex bar (for hex deadlifts) and adjustable dumbells (The powerblock EXP series).
The current scientific knowledge on optimizing muscle growth states that muscle growth mainly depends on 2 key variables under your control: daily protein intake and weekly workout volume. I'll go into each of these before mentioning other stuff.
Protein Intake:
Daily protein intake should be around 1g/lb of body weight, that amount basically guarantees that your protein is taken care of, it's probably slightly excessive and you could get away with 0.8 to 0.9 g/lb, but 1g/lb is the main recommended number for bodybuilding to just be able to check that box for sure. If you haven't been eating this amount of protein, but more like 0.4 or 0.5 g/lb, you've been seriously hampering yourself, and you're gonna get essentially a second phase of noobie gains when you start eating correct amounts of protein. Physiologically, large muscles are a luxury. When the body gets protein, it first uses it for critical systems like the heart, brain, organs, blood, stomach lining, etc. any protein it spares for muscle building has to come after all of that, so doubling your protein from 0.5g/lb to 1.0g/lb can take you from 0 muscle gain (because all protein is gobbled up by other systems), to great muscle gain. Protein is really fucking important. The total grams of protein per day is what matters most, but a secondary factor is protein timing: because your body can't store proteins like it can store fats and carbs, any muscle protein synthesis has to take the protein that's currently swimming in your blood, so it's best to consume your protein separated into roughly 3 or 4 meals throughout the day, with one high protein meal preferably right after workouts.
weekly workout volume:
Here "volume" refers to the number of working sets performed per muscle group, per week. Why don't I mention reps? Because as far as current science knows, anything between 5 and 30 reps is pretty much equivalently good for muscle building, as long as 1. you do the same number of sets and 2. you go to either complete failure or just shy of failure in both cases (leaving 1 or 2 reps in the tank, so to speak). There's a bit of complexity, but in general for bodybuilding people choose the 12-15 rep range, in general 5 reps and lower is for strength, and is more injury prone due to higher strain on connective tissue. And higher reps than 15 aren't too ideal because your cardio capacity could get in the way, preventing you from exhausting the muscle correctly.
So the main thing that will determine your muscle growth (assuming adequate protein) will be the total number of weekly sets per muscle. To give you ball-park numbers, 6 sets/muscle/week will cause ok muscle growth in noobies, but is just enough to maintain current muscle mass in intermediates. 10 sets per week is a good number for MEV (Minimum Effective Volume), you'll probably grow quite well if you do that much. 20 sets per week is quite high, it's most useful for advanced people, and you wouldn't want to do that amount for more than a few weeks at a time before scaling back, since the fatigue will pile on quickly. A secondary but important variable to the total number of sets is the number of workouts per week. So 10 sets of chest all done on monday is inferior to 5 sets on monday and 5 sets on Thursday. Working out every body part twice a week yields an important boost over just once a week, though going to 3x week isn't that much better. I personally workout 6 days per week, with a Push-Pull-Legs-Push-Pull-Legs split, so I workout every body part twice a week.
This is what I suspect is hampering your progress. If your volume has been below 6 sets/muscle/week, and you haven't been working out too consistently... then you've essentially just been working with a volume barely able to maintain your current muscle mass, especially if you haven't been eating adequate protein.
What weight to use:
It's still not what most lifters would consider to be a lot of weight. But if I do lower amounts on the barbell, it doesn't give me the correct muscle fatigue, but I can't physically lift any more. Unsure how to proceed.
The choice of weight to use is subordinate to the choice of rep range, so if you decide that you want to work in the 12-15 rep range, you would then choose the weight that allows you to do the exercise for 12 reps before you physically can't do any more. It doesn't matter if you're benching the bar alone, if this is what you can bench for 12 reps before you can't anymore, then this is the weight you should start at. Muscle growth doesn't come from the weight itself, it comes from the fact of getting close to failure. If you test your max reps with the heaviest weights you have, and you can do more than 20 reps, it's time to buy some heavier weights.
Progressive overload & Phasic structure of training:
The third crucial factor is progressive overload: the gradual increase of training variables over time, generally either increasing weight lifted for equal reps and sets, or increasing numbers of sets. You can either pre-plan the weight increases, or you can sort of "work by ear" by just doing as many reps as you can with a weight, and increase your weight when you notice it's become much easier and you hit the top of your rep range. If you started benching 135 x 12 reps, then eventually got to 135 x 15 reps after a few months, it's time to increase weight again until you can only do 12 reps with the new weight.
Another useful concept is that of the mesocycle, which imposes a phasic structure on your training on the order of around 6 to 10 weeks. The long-term pattern should be something like 8 weeks mesocycle -> 1 week deload -> another meso -> 1 week deload, etc. The deload weeks you either take completely off from training in order to recover from systemic fatigue, or you do 50% of your usual weight. Within a mesocycle, you increase the weight (or the sets) every week. The beginning weight of the mesocycle should be fairly comfortable, you might start at 100 lbs x 12 reps, then work up to 135 lbs x 12 reps over the course of 8 weeks. Take a week off, then start a new mesocycle at 110 lbs x 12 reps, working up to 145 lbs x 12 reps this time. Each meso starts and ends at higher weights than the previous ones, but the start of the next meso is easier than the end of the last one.
Cycling in this way is really more useful for intermediates and above, there's no problem if that seems too complicated, just working close to failure every workout and taking scheduled weeks off every 2 months is plenty good enough for most people.
Phasic structure of Dieting
If your goal is muscle building, then being in a calorie surplus greatly, greatly helps. Losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time can work if you're a beginner, but even there it's significantly more efficient to split your time between bulking and cutting phases, essentially because maintaining muscle during cuts is easier than building the muscle at maintenance. So in Bulking phases you should aim for roughly 300 to 500 calories surplus, this is enough to heavily promote muscle building, and a very significant part of the weight you gain will be muscle. Follow this up with a cutting phase where you aim to lose 0.5% to 1% of your weight per week in fat (while working out to maintain your muscle).
For how to compute macros, here's how you do it: start with your total number of calories per day for your goal, say you weigh 140 lbs, you're bulking and your aim is 3000 cal/day. You know you'll eat 140g of protein per day, so that's taken care of and you only have 3000 - 4 * 140 = 2440 calories remaining since proteins have 4 cal/g, next you take care of your fat, which you should keep at 0.4g/lb to maintain good hormonal function, any more than that doesn't help too much, so now we have 2440 - 9 * 0.4 * 140 = 1,936 calories remaining, which all goes into 484g of carbs. Carbohydrates promote muscle gain to a much larger extend than fat because they replenish the glycogen stores inside the muscle itself, which promotes the whole chemical cascade that signals for muscle growth, that's why they're preferable to fats.
Sources:
Best youtube channel for this stuff: https://youtube.com/@RenaissancePeriodization
Second best: https://youtube.com/@JeffNippard
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I have to say that doing a heavy set of 450 lbs deadlifts for 5 reps with heavy metal blasting through my headphones is really pleasant to me, the burning muscles and the exhaustion are obviously not pleasant in themselves, but lifting heavy shit sort of makes me aggressive in a way that's pleasant. The feeling of having pumped muscles, like my skin is about to explode around my biceps, is also quite pleasant.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I think you need to clarify much more what you mean by "belief" before your thesis becomes well-formed, because most beliefs our brains have are of the form "There is a white metallic water bottle 12 inches to the right of my hand", "there is a chair under my butt", "my wife will come home in 40 minutes", "the cursor will move if I move the mouse", etc. These are all beliefs about the state of the world, and people most definitely have them: you wouldn't be able to function in the world without millions of these beliefs. But these sorts of boring, useful factual beliefs are not internally labelled "beliefs" in your mind, what I think you're more interested in are "beliefs as a signaling tool", rather than "beliefs as expectations about the state of the world". Human brains probably carefully separate the part that deal with "beliefs" needed to signal tribal membership from the part that needs to actually plan their days, like "sure I told Bob that 2+2=5 to prove my group membership, but two 1$ bananas still sum to 2$ on my groceries receipt".
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Hustler university is not the way that the Tate brothers initially made their money. The way they became millionaires was basically to get a bunch of romanian girlfriends at the same time and slowly convince them to start doing onlyfans and camming stuff, managing them and taking a cut of the profits. Like, literally their initial business model depended on their ability to be so sexually attractive to young women that they'd be willing to give them a cut from their camming revenue. All the stuff like hustler university and their chains of local gambling houses in Romania came after they made their money from porn. In one interview I remember watching a few years ago Tristan Tate mentioned that at one point they had like 30 girls living at the same time in their mansion doing porn camshows... all of them apparently sexually exclusive with one of the Tate brothers. So the allegations wouldn't be completely outside of their wheelhouse, though this might also be caused by some ex-girlfriend bad blood, I can only imagine the levels of drama that would be going on in a house with 30 girls and 2 guys...
Unfortunately, yes, small amounts of alcohol have a detectable effect on brain white and gray matter volume:
Here "one unit" means 10ml of ethanol, slivovitz has 50% abv, so you're drinking 350ml ethanol per 14 days = 2.5 alcohol units per day. The paper I linked has a bunch of interesting figures (fig 3 in particular is nice), and they provide this useful comparison:
Going from 0 to 1 daily units doesn't have any measurable effect in that study, but going from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 does. So with your 2.5 units/day, it's equivalent to an aging-related decrease in brain volume of around 3.75 years. Not world-ending in any sense, but still not nothing.
(I'm slightly confused by the study, since presumably the effects should depend on how long you've been drinking alcohol, and not just provide a flat decrease in brain matter, but I'm not seeing any such effect reported in the paper)
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