JhanicManifold
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User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
The first thing that worked for me are those bottles you fill with saline that you squeeze up your nose, I think they're called neti pots. The second thing is to eat ridiculously spicy food, which stimulates your mucus membranes for about 30 minutes, clearing stuff up. But both of these are just acute solutions, I don't know what the root cause is, and I don't think either of them directly solves it.
For an acute non-pharmaceutical intervention that is basically physiologically guaranteed to make you relax for about an hour at the very minimum, try either a 20-minute sauna or a very hot bath, like 105F to 115F, measured with an actual thermometer. Hot showers aren't the same at all, though they still have some effect. If you're insufficiently relaxed after the bath, stay longer next time and ensure that the water temperature isn't becoming too low as the bath progresses.
You could also try an elimination diet to make sure it's not some weird autoimmune thing, like only eat potatoes and a multivitamin for two weeks and see how you feel. It probably won't work, but there's a nontrivial chance that it does, and P(working)*reward_of_working - P(not working)*cost_of_not_working seems like it would be decently high for you.
Elizabeth's post on "luck based medicine" also would seem relevant here:
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Why the hell would a dictatorial régime do a false-flag revolution? They risk making people believe that protesting the government actually won't get you killed, so lots of normal people will join the false protests... Turning them into real protests. The number 1 rule for a dictator is to prevent the creation of common knowledge about how many people don't like you. Any appearance of large scale protests is incredibly dangerous to this end.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
And as a bonus to "why weren't we born into a Grabby civ at its peak", you can add "why am I not an 80kg blog of hydrogen somewhere in the middle of a star like the vast majority of matter in the universe?". This is all hitting up on the confusing and confused field of Anthropic Reasoning, all of whose results seem to depend quite a lot on the reference classes that we're considering. You also get hilarious results like Adam and Eve being able to hunt by just precommiting really hard to having sex (Adam says he will impregnate Eve and start all of humanity if a deer does not appear right this second in front of him, if he does impregnate her, then they are the first humans among trillions, an unbelievably unlikely position, therefore it must be the case that a deer appeared and he didn't impregnate Eve right then and there, which would merely make them the only humans to ever exist, a much less unlikely position).
I would seriously doubt any results we obtain from anthropic reasoning until the whole field gets cleared up of all this weirdness. The meditator in me would also protest that these results really depend on the existence of a "person" as an indivisible entity, which doesn't really exist...
Here are some fun lectures on anthropics by Nick Bostrom:
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Well, chips and chocolate can be vegan... Generally veganism comes with a concern for one's health, but they are distinctly different, just not eating animal products doesn't at all guarantee you won't be pudgy.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
Within the context of the discussion group, the person stating that they now felt less safe was essentially reinforcing the point that Bigotry Is Bad: "this bad thing is so bad that I feel less safe, which shows just how bad the bad thing is!". Your perfectly reasonable and true objection against their unwarranted update is then seen as an enemy argument. In an indirect way, you're arguing that the mass shooting wasn't literally the worst thing in the world, which is perceived as an attack on the in-group. There's also the female vs male styles of communication here, the person who wrote that they felt less safe was really communicating an emotion, whether or not their statement was actually true was much less important than what emotions it communicated, and the name of the game in emotional discussion is validation, you need to either make them feel heard, or respond at a similar emotional level. When your girlfriend says that she feels fat, you don't pull out data from your bluetooth scale that shows that she didn't actually get fat, you go kiss her and tell her that she's never been more attractive to you and that, in fact, you can barely restrain yourself from just taking her right now. Your fundamental faux-pas was that you responded factually to an emotional statement.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
You really need to click the ... in the bottom right of the video thumbnail and select "not interested", or "dont' recommend channel", I find that this fixes the annoying increase in weird recommendations after I watch a single video outside what I usually watch.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
ooh, this is a pretty exotic thing to see in the wild. From a first-person point-of-view, do you think that child porn increases or decreases your desire for real children and the probability of actually molesting a child? To me most of the morality of the situation condenses to that one question.
We're going to masturbate to children, real and fictional.1 You know we are, and you can't stop us.
This is true for sophisticated pedophiles who already know where to find this stuff, but making it really hard to get child porn still reduces the viewership on the margins, as dumb people or only mildly-pedophilic people won't have the knowledge and/or motivation to go seek it out.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
modafinil was generally for wakefulness?
Just like caffeine both keeps you awake and focuses/motivates you, modafinil also has quite significant effects on focus and motivation, it's sort of the intermediate step between caffeine and amphetamines. I wouldn't necessarily use it everyday, otherwise you get used to it, but it could really give you 2 days per week of great motivation.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
From what I know the testosterone measurement as a single number doesn't mean much without having a baseline number from when you felt a normal sex drive. You need to couple the amount of testosterone with the sensitivity of your receptors to its presence, so for you 380 might be a severely decreased state from normal, even if some other dude might stay year-round at 380 and have high sex drive with that amount.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
You have a few options, you could make a habit of going to your local library or cool coffee shop and work from there for the 2 hours you need in the morning, then get back home. Generally if you go in a space that you haven't trained yourself to associate with gaming, you won't game. You could also install something like the paid version of ColdTurkey to prevent you from gaming. Going on the pharmaceutical end, you could get hold of some modafinil and use that to focus, it's much milder than amphetamines and easier to get (I use indiamart and have some indian dude ship it to me).
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
Being an effective altruist basically makes him grey, no? He's certainly politically aligned with democrats, but so is Scott, and that doesn't make him blue tribe.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
That of the people who aren't confused by a term like "grey tribe", i.e. rationalist-adjacent people.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
From our own point of view it's clear that SBF is grey tribe, so we've been focusing on the Effective Altruism angle, but I don't think the mainstream knows of the grey tribe yet, and if the blue tribe has recognised him as one of their own (with him being a democratic donor and all), then it makes more sense that the media would be defending him.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
nah that was a trivial objection on his part, most of the value of the earth comes from the fact that we might colonize the universe, so he wanted to make sure that the "double" in "double or nothing" truly meant doubling the value of the earth, if the second earth appeared close-by to us, it wouldn't really be doubling the value since there's still only one universe to colonize. But if one is assured that the value can indeed double, then SBF was completely on-board with betting it all.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
You got injured doing goddamn Kegels?! How is that even possible?
Not injuring yourself in the gym is pretty easy:
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warm up with 5 to 10 minutes of cardio
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Don't do weights close to your one-rep max
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Slowly increase your total weekly volume to give your tendons time to adjust
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Don't improvise in the gym, instead have a pre-planned routine with exact weights on an excel sheet that you stick to
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If you're doing complicated movement patterns like squats and deadlifts, make sure your form is correct
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
Of course that direct access to every bank account's balance would very much help the fed do its job. Maybe you remember that there was talk of the fed having it's own cryptocurrency, where it could see everyone's balance and every transaction that was taking place, this would eliminate the huge measurement error in basically all the metrics that we care about. With a cryptocurrency we could compute local inflation rates in real time, and the fed's interest rate could be continuously set to achieve whatever outcome we want. The only teensy weensy little downside is that you let the government have complete access to all balances and transactions that occur.
Sure, the multiple simultaneous viruses likely won't reach literally everyone, but it would certainly be enough for the AI to get enough strategic advantage to be able to develop technologically and blow up the earth after that (say by rerouting a few asteroids to hit earth), which would be enough to kill everyone. The people currently in outer space would almost certainly quickly die from lack of food if the earth is destroyed, but their position is extremely well known anyway, and a single well-placed missile is all that's needed to kill them.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
Okay, but the Terminators themselves look silly. Why would a superintelligent AI build robot skeletons when it could just build drones to kill everyone?
Nah, a superintelligence would more probably build a virus (or multiple different ones, to make sure really no one survives) with a built-in clock, so that everyone gets infected without showing any symptoms, then suddenly everyone dies in the same day and no valuable infrastructure is destroyed. The fact that humans became aware of Skynet in the first place is the most unrealistic thing to me, surprise is the biggest advantage against an intelligent adversary, and a superintelligence who is carrying out a human-extinction plan would never reveal itself at all, and especially not in such a visible way as literal walking robots. In the real world we would all die without having any idea what happened.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
No, literally just free physical letters to everyone who requests it, like all banks do. Twitter should have more than enough money to do this for all US users.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
There will be no progress on bot problem though.
Ship physical pieces of paper to physical addresses with an authentication code for every user? Use the existing giftcard stands at Walmart to distribute them even cheaper? The bot problem is pretty easily fixed if the will is there.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
The really hard part is figuring out which 75% to fire. Twitter can certainly be run very lean if you clear all the deadwood and you keep everyone who actually has the implicit knowledge required to run the whole thing, but all the employees are trying to convince you that they're the ones who are very important, we'll have to see if Musk manages to correctly pick the people to keep. It doesn't help that social media companies are especially vulnerable to downtime. If your fishing company gets a 2-month period of downtime while they figure out how to slim down, no problem, you just lose 2 month's revenue, the fish will still be there waiting, but twitter's users will move on to other things after any sort of prolonged downtime.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
To be honest, your initial instinct of "only losers would spend so much effort at something that matters so little" was completely right. I myself don't spend all that effort on all my ideas to improve trivial things in games because the time and energy that would go into that is so much better spent improving other things in my life. I suppose you should have one, maybe two "useless" hobbies where you spend this much effort to improve things, but no more. Money matter a lot to a lot of people, so it's not surprising at all that you'd get crazy effort going into optimizing its generation, and it's also why there aren't many easy-to-think-about ideas for making lots of money, but there's loads of those for getting better at stuff nobody cares about.
JhanicManifold
2yr ago
If a good friend asked this of me in an apologetic way, emphasizing that they wouldn't ask if it wasn't important, sure, I'd call them whatever they want.
That sounds like the life goal of someone who has never explicitly thought about their life goals, but just read the question and interpreted it as something like "how much do you love your parents". A true life goal is supposed to actually guide your decisions, not just be something nice that you'd like to get. I think about my life goals at least weekly, when I take an hour-long evening walk to think about how my current short and medium term plans will achieve the ultimate goals of my life. I very, very much doubt that people are doing this sort of goal-oriented optimization with the goal of "making my parents proud", most people just don't have life goals that they're explicitly optimizing.
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