I had put an admittedly lame joke here asking if they went with their co-Canadian musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and pulled their catalog from Spotify over the Joe Rogan thing.
And it disappeared.
Did I violate some Substack taboo and it was deleted?
I don't remember receiving a notification email for such a post, so maybe it just never posted. Then again this is one of the no-politics-allowed open threads and maybe that violated the rule.
I did get the notification with your joke in it, if that helps. Freddie's guess is a good one - otherwise, perhaps it's just the universe gracing you with a teachable moment.
What are three foods such that, when any two of them are paired together they taste good (e.g. strawberries and chocolate) but when all three are put together are bad?
That may be your opinion, but Reese's peanut butter cups are practically an industry unto themselves so I don't think it counts.
Fruit plus peanut butter is a weird combination, but if we narrow it down specifically to apples, then apples plus peanut butter is pretty damn good. On the other hand, chocolate plus apples doesn't work great.
Listen, I got introduced to Reese's peanut butter cups when shops over here started selling them and yes. They are indeed very tasty. So much so, I have to discipline myself not to gorge like a pig in a trough with them.
I don't have a third ingredient to go with this, but cheddar cheese + marmalade was something I saw, went "no way this can work" but yes, it does. Weirdly, it does! Marmalade shouldn't be too sugary and the cheddar should be on the sharp side for best combination.
Although I suppose cheddar + apple + marmalade might be it? Cheese and apples go well, cheese and marmalade works, but apple and marmalade makes my tastebuds go "no", for some reason.
Oh my god, so, at this point I've given up on trying to give an answer that satisfies most people (I swear I dreamed a true one a couple weeks ago but I can't remember what it was), but everyone should read this email that was posted on The Incompatible Food Triad's official site:
> That this thought experiment merits a web page is really quite astounding. That I decided to write you an e-mail telling you that is even more astounding. And that I don't drink myself stupid following this exchange will be the most astounding non-event in the history of mankind. I am baffled, shattered, and destroyed by the mind-numbing pointlessness of The Incompatible Food Triad experiment. It makes me ill. I promise you, sir, I will never again be the same after witnessing the sheer mind-blowing uselessness of that puzzle. My life as I know it, is over. I once was lost, but then I was found, and then I found your website linked to Wikipedia and now I am lost again, irretrievably lost in a dark maze, a pitch dark maze with the Minotaur of Bafflement hunting me down. I shall not escape him, I shall not escape my doom. No, good sir, instead I fall - far and away, even from myself I fall until I slam forcefully into the cold steel floor of my own mind, crippled and alone, dead to all sensation. I am gone, sir, and I shall never return.
Oddly, I really dislike salted caramel, and it's such a big craze it's in *everything*. Something in me just goes "salt = savoury, caramel = sweet, not together!"
I also don't like the combo that much. I like slightly salty caramel but not salted caramel where the salt is an added flavor. That it's a big craze also turns me off to it. I had a similar response to bacon when it become a meme to think it was some godly food. But really, not everything is made better with bacon (especially beverages) and most often you end up only tasting the bacon or the other food so the bacon is a waste.
I think you may be missing that *all three* pairs have to work well, not just the two pairs of neighboring ingredients. Are you alternating bites of fish tacos and apple pie? Or how do ham and coconut work together?
Maybe something with miracle berries, or other things that mess with your sense of taste so combining all three tastes bitter? Not sure what the combo would be though
Walnut honey shrimp w/ bacon bits sounds really tasty to me. Maybe I'm just hungry right now. Or a pork belly / shrimp shumai with honey on the side for a dip.
From the exact wording you gave (taste good/are bad), there's technically "two things that go well with mushrooms + death caps" (reports say that death caps taste good, but the name is descriptive of what happens to you if you eat them).
Sugar + meat + [cake ingredients] might work, insofar as there are sweet meat dishes, sweet cakes and meat loaf but I haven't heard of sweet meat loaf (haven't tried, though, so could be wrong).
A sweet meat cake, you say? Have I got the recipe for you! This guy does old recipes on TikTok, reblogged on Tumblr, and he's hilarious. Often they work out great, some of them are just as terrible as the description leads you to expect, and then there are the "this shouldn't work but it does" ones like this:
I can think of an analogous situation, which is sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and gold. Each pair is stable but together they have a reaction.... Another would be an "overdose", where each ingredient pair is fine but all three together "cross the line" and become bad in some way. What would be the food equivalent? No clue -- can't think of any food reactions that even take three arguments!
Is there a combination of two foods that gains an orange-juice-like acidity, but are not acidic on their own? Then you could do something like mint + neutral thing + neutral thing, which would cause the "brushing your teeth then drinking orange juice" effect.
The toothpaste+orange juice effect is mostly driven by the detergent in the toothpaste, not the mint.
Almost all toothpastes contain a small amount of mild detergent (sodium laureth sulfate or similar). This does nothing for your teeth and is only there for cosmetic reasons: people expect cleaning products to foam up, so the detergent is added to make the toothpaste foamy. The actual active ingredients are a mild abrasive (usually silica gel or baking soda) to help mechanically scrub the plaque off your teeth and a fluoride salt (usually sodium fluoride or stannous fluoride) that acts as an antiseptic and as a remineralizing agent to repair minor chemical damage to your tooth enamel.
The other thing the detergent does is strip the natural oils off your tongue, which affects how your taste buds respond until the oils replenish. Specifically, your taste buds no long respond well to "sweet", so the sour and bitter flavors in orange juice have nothing to balance them out.
You can actually counter this by replacing the oils on your tongue exogenously after brushing: eat something fatty (e.g. scrambled eggs, bacon, or buttered toast) or just put a little bit of butter or edible oil on your tongue and orange juice will taste normal again.
Pastrami, Cheese, and Matzoh. I'm sure the taste of all three would be fine, but the Matzoh would make me feel bad about breaking kosher by eating the meat and dairy at the same time.
I think chocolate and jalapenos or chocolate and chili peppers might be two-thirds of a solution. Could we go with the threads below and use peanut butter as the third option? Thai food uses peanuts or peanut butter and chili peppers, and we know both go with chocolate. Can you mix the three (chocolate, peanuts/peanut butter, chili peppers) and make a valid recipe?
I'm married to someone who swears that eggs cooked with canned tomatoes get an annoying tinny aftertaste. I think I can detect it too, but it doesn't bother me so much. No problem whatsoever with eggs + fresh tomatoes.
Canned tomatoes seem to be tomatoes + citric acid + calcium chloride. If any of these chemicals work OK with eggs (I don't exactly have this in my cupboard to check), we have our triad.
I often get that tinny taste with canned tomatoes so it may not be the eggs that contribute to it. Tomatoes are very acidic which reacts with the can lining or the pan they are cooked with.
Aha! I remembered my answer from my dream! Strawberries, peanut butter/sauce, and fish.
Strawberries + peanut butter = PB&J
Peanut sauce + fish = maafe (West African peanut stew)
Strawberries + fish is pretty common in the modern culinary world
But those are two completely different ways of preparing fish! The strawberries serve to accentuate the lightness of the fish, sort of a sweet/tart contrast to the umami. But fish in peanut stew is a much earthier, heavier kind of dish. I'm not sure how you'd combine the two.
A group of ~10 friends and I (who have little to no experience with psychedelics or any recreational drugs) are planning on taking Psilocybin together this summer. Does anyone know of any interesting experiments we can perform, or be a part of? Thanks!
If anybody is doing psychedelics for the first time, make sure there is 1 or more tripsitters everyone trusts around who can make sure that things don't go off the rails/anyone who needs to be calmed down can be.
Otherwise, I would just put a lot of thought into set and setting. Make sure everyone there is comfortable with everyone else there. If you're somewhere rural and you have a lot of land at your disposal, being in nature (camping, hiking) can be a good use of this time. If that's not the case, you can probably plan some sort of movie night. Certain concerts might be appropriate but maybe not for beginners.
10+ is a lot of people for this -- my own experience is that I start getting nervous when there are more than ~4. But then again, everyone's different.
I recommend against movie night. Distracts from everything you could be experiencing.
Nature is a better idea. If you're stuck inside, and you want a social experience (rather than blindfolds) consider getting some topographical maps. They are highly conducive to hallucinations. Or enjoy great music together.
#1 piece of advice: agree with everyone that anything and everything you say is supportive of each other, and should never be interpreted with any judgement or criticism. It's crazy how hard communication can be when you're not sure what someone is saying in saying something. Turns out every sentence can be interpreted a dozen ways. Commit to 100% being there to support each other.
Note that one of the best parts is the afterglow. The peek can be a fun but difficult ride. The after glow is just creative and joyful.
Definitely ^this. Also remember that during the initial phase you may feel like your autonomic nervous system isn't working. That's frequently a cause of panic in first-timers. If you're worried that you're going to stop breathing, force yourself to take some deep breaths, and and stand up and move around. Stretching and breathing at the same time will reintegrate your consciousness to your autonomic systems, and silence the false alarms you're getting.
OK, here are some tripping things I've learned (having tripped between 125 - 150 times, 2/3rds LSD, 1/3rd Psilocybe, 2 times on mescaline)...
First off some of my very worst trips and the very best trips were on magic mushrooms. They don't call them magic for nothing! Treat them with ritual respect, and they'll generally be good to you. In fact many people, myself included, have felt that they have their own intelligence and awareness, and they can use us for their own ends. But even my worst trips were profoundly educational.
For reliability, I stick to my old friend LSD. LSD is for when I want to go out and party and dance and do things socially, LSD can be a wonderful adjunct to a great night out. Mushrooms are for magical experiences...
Many people recommend being out in nature while on Psilocybe. There are some caveats to that dictum.
OUTDOORS - NATURE:
1. Places not go near: graveyards, burial grounds, and ritual spaces. Whether it's a delusion or not, anywhere were there's been a lot of outpouring of emotion, especially negative emotion, can be at the very least be very unsettling — and worse yet, you don't want to have what we used to call "critters" follow you home. (Unless, you know someone who is familiar with ritual magic, they can be hard to get rid off, and they seem to feed off fear.) Likewise sacred grounds aren't a wise place to go, because the people who performed rituals at those sacred grounds probably had an us vs them, initiate vs uninitiated, view of the world. They can VERY if unsettling if you're one of the them or the uninitiated.
2. If you feel uncomfortable (restless or nauseous or fearful or angry), it may not be the drug, but it may be the place. Move on to another location. Not all people will be sensitive to places in the same way, but respect everyone's need to move on.
3. Someone mentioned staying away from water. I realized I've had mixed experiences with water. Flowing water can be fun to play in, but be careful not to get "hypnotized" by the ripples and flow. You may end up someplace far away from your companions. I can't really explain this. At the same time flowing water can be tremendously sensuous. Still bodies of water can be tremendously peaceful to stare at and meditate on. But there's a reason that the pre-enlightenment cultures believed that there were water spirits. This entities may not necessarily be friendly. So don't focus in one place on the water. Move your eyes lightly over the water — that is unless you want to attract the notice of the water entity.
4. Hug some trees. Spend some time trying to feel the sap flow up their xylem. Spend some time contemplating the roots under your feet. Send out your love to them. If you've had a large enough dose, you may be aware that trees have a sort of slow consciousness. And for the most part they can be friendly. But if you're going to commune with nature, stay away from a forest that's been recently logged or thinned. Those trees may not be so friendly. And, as with bodies of water, there's a reason the ancients believed in tree spirits.
5. Do not bring dogs with you. Some dogs seem to be OK with tripping humans, others get freaked out by the signals that tripping humans send. Also don't let your pets lick your hands or face. You'll be excreting a certain level of psilocin (or LSD) from your pores. Pets (dogs and cats at least) seem to be more sensitive to it than humans are, and they can have good trips or they can have bad trips. Best not to let them trip at all.
6. Familiar landmarks may no longer be familiar. Trust your instincts to bring you home. When in doubt, sing yourself home.
7. Don't spend too much time in the shadows. While redwoods can have high spiritual impact, they can also be oppressive. Get out in the sunlight.
8. Nighttime hikes are a different story. Remember, you'll hear animal (?) calls you never heard before. Don't follow an interesting call off the trail. Trust me on this.
9. Bring lots of water and/or fruit juice and fruit. Most people find things like cheese, animal foods, foods with a lot fat in them to be very unappetizing while high.
10. Go for a run. You'll never feel more attuned to your body.
11. Although it's dreadfully illegal, driving home form your hike (while still tripping) can be a memorable experience. Remember, you've got the same or better reflexes than you have while straight. The main trouble is you'll think you're speeding when you're not. Also, you may have trouble identifying landmarks, especially at night.
OUTDOOR - URBAN:
1. Urban environments present their own challenges and rewards. I'd wouldn't use mushrooms in an urban setting unless I were experienced dealing with the unexpected. LSD is a little tamer for the urban tripping experience.
2. Remember, no one will know you're tripping if you don't tell them or as long as you don't do anything stupid. Caveat on the no one will know you're tripping: people with mental illness will likely be aware that there's something different about you. You might have some very interesting conversations with people who are "crazy".
3. Stay away from gang-bangers and drunks. Angry people are hyper aware of you watching them and they take eye contact as a challenge. Also remember your pupils will be dilated and that may be a false signal to those types of people you're threatening.
4. Stay away from bars. First of you can't get drunk (or at least I never could). And people on alcohol are stupid and unpredictable.
5. Music festivals can be very fun for the tripper. But again the crowds may be upsetting to the uninitiated. But if it's music you can dance to, you can have a fantastic time. Drink plenty of water!
6. Remember, a Merry Prankster attitude can help you through the worst situations. As Ken Kesey said: "Maintain!"
INDOOR:
1. First things to do after the first rush: get up and move around. Stretch. Reacquaint yourself with your body.
2. Fun things to try: rolling dice, playing with mirror magic.
3. Things to stay away from: Ouija boards, tarot cards, I-Ching. Don't turn on the TV! Don't order pizza. It may sound like a good idea at the time, but most people find pizza absolutely revolting when the come face to face with it while tripping.
4. Some music can be tremendously fascinating, even spiritual. I'd stay away from things like Death Metal or pop music, though.
5. Don't let your pets lick you. And remember, not all pets can deal with tripping humans.
6. If you begin feeling cooped up, go out for a walk. Remember, no one you encounter will know you're tripping unless you tell them or do something stupid. Items 2 and 3 in the previous section apply, though.
I'm not who you were replying to, but the Outdoors paragraph 1 on "critters" is fascinating. Can you expand on this a little? Do people see similar sorts of critters? What do you mean that they seem to feed off fear?
a.k.a, haints, spooks, energy feeders. Either real or imagined they can pretty damn scary because they'll create a fear feedback loop in the tripper—usually through some sort of (real or imagined?) poltergeist activities and the (irrational?) perception that there's an invisible presence next to the tripper. Whether the psilocybe open a pathway to that part of our brains that is connected to our superstitions and primal fears (innate? or acquired culturally as children?)—or whether they're real entities—I cannot say. And once they've made you a target, they're damn hard to get rid of—even in a sober state.
A rational materialist will use the explanation that they're having unpleasant flashbacks. Those of a less materialist mindset will believe they're being haunted. Again, I don't take a position on this, but having had one follow me home (in a post-trip sober state), I can say it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. A ritual magic practitioner, who was the one who used the term "critter", was able to "banish" it. But the tools of ritual magic involve an element of self-hypnosis. So, who knows?
But I'd advise against even the most rational materialist of trippers from visiting graveyards, ritual spaces, or places where a lot of negative emotions were vented. Also I'd recommend staying away from oracular tools. Some friends attracted a critter while playing with a Ouija board while tripping on mushrooms. Afterwords they had repeated poltergeist phenomena in their Boston apartment. Luckily their lease was month to month, and they moved out. Of course, I don't know if the critter stayed around for the next tenant, but it didn't follow them to their next apartment.
Like I said, there's are reason these are called MAGIC mushrooms. Shit like that never happened to me on LSD. ;-)
> 8. Nighttime hikes are a different story. Remember, you'll hear animal (?) calls you never heard before. Don't follow an interesting call off the trail. Trust me on this.
I found that the nausea was associated with the fact that taste and smell like shit. Disguising the flavor and smell in cream of mushroom soup seemed to be the fix for me and my friends. See my comment above.
Lemon juice seems to mask the mushroom flavor. It's an amazing hack in case you're doing truffles, which are generally consumed as tea (and mushroom tea tastes exactly as it sounds).
Make sure y'all take a tiny dose first to see what the effects would be on each of you. Then slowly warm up to higher doses. Do not take a powerful dose as your first time!
Go into nature and explore. Avoid stupid ideas like swimming. KEEP YOUR PHONES ON AND ANSWER THEM, OR AT LEAST ATTEMPT TO. If you can have one person - physically with you, or at least in the general area - who's sober, with a car and can go look for someone's stupid ass, that's an excellent backup. If you feel overwhelmed just find a nice spot and chill there, there's nothing wrong with being too bombed to move and you should wait it out and enjoy the sights.
Expect you will split up into smaller groups whether you plan to or not. Some of you will want to be left alone at times - let them separate but keep them in line of sight.
Interesting things to try - looking at yourself in the mirror in low light for a while. Doing some bodywork, light stretching. Face painting. Meditation, if you can. Play and cuddle with pets, if there are any. Put on some music, lay down on the grass and watch the stars. You can try playing instruments or drawing but you might be too out of it to do either.
Avoid everything with a screen, screens are difficult to use and honestly kind of annoying.
Everyone is so much more cavalier about this than I was. I wouldn't even try the tiniest dose except in my own home with my completely sober husband watching over me. The idea of going out into nature to use hallucinogens, especially for the first time (and there's never been a second time for me), would have been terrifying.
What can I say, we were young, adventurous and nothing bad happened.
Realistically not much bad can happen anyway, other than getting scared shitless. Having a sober person is not necessary but a good idea, a person who's at least somewhat experienced with psychedelics (and a bit chill with the dose so they don't get shot into high orbit) can substitute in most cases. I've tripsat some overwhelmed people while being on psychedelics myself, the responsibility kinda keeps you collected.
Oh, and I almost forgot: mirror magic! Stare at you face in the mirror for a couple of minutes and watch yourself transform. Another interesting experiment, is have everyone -- by themselves -- transform themselves into their spirit animal (or animal of their choice) in front of mirror, and see if other people see you that way when you return to the group. This may not be practical for a group of ten people, because bathroom mirrors may be in short supply. ;-)
> give everyone 3 dice. See if you can predict and/or control the rolls.
What could possibly be the goal of this? Are you purposely trying to create false insights? Surely you can't actually believe they'll succeed. Though they may temporarily fool themselves into believing they have.
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Isaac Asimov
I'm just curious if anyone can reproduce this little experiment.
But seriously: four people tripping on Psilocybe. Each of us had three dice. We started calling what we then rolled. By the kitchen clock (which I checked a little way into this weird experience), we were rolling for at least 20 minutes (give or take a couple of minutes) and we were rolling the dice and getting what we called. Nobody counted the rolls, of course, because we were too distracted laughing our asses off at this gross violation of probability. Three missed calls during the whole session.
(a) The easiest "rational" explanation is that we were hallucinating, and the calls of what were calling, queued everyone in the group to see what we'd called.
(b) The less "rational" explanation, is that the Psilocybe gave us psychokinetic abilities.
(c) Or possibly the Psilocybe gave us a subliminal understanding of how the dice lay in our hands, and they gave us us enough subtle muscle control to throw the dice precisely like we wanted.
Subjectively: three of us reported that that we perceived threads of "energy" unwinding from from the tips of our fingers that followed the dice to the the surface of the kitchen table. And we thought we were controlling the rolls of the dice via those energy thread. The fourth person didn't see this. She said she felt like the muscles in her palms and in her fingers were precise mechanical instruments and that she was "programming" the trajectory and spine of the dice as she threw her 3 dice.
Two years later, I recreated this experience one-on-one with a friend who I introduced to mushrooms. No miscast die.
So, either we were all hallucinating the same experience and sharing the same consensual reality, or the Psilocybe gave us some sort of physical hyperaware attunement to our the muscles in our hands, or psychokinesis is possible in certain situations. If it were the first explanation, that raises questions about the nature of reality.
So, everyone. The next time you dose with magic mushrooms, try some magic and report back.
One recommendation I would make. If any of those 10 people feel nervous or unsure about it on the day of, I advise either a microdose or no dose. Psychedelics have a tendency to take whatever emotion you are feeling and turn those up, so if you're feeling nervous that will only be exacerbated, and it will kill the vibe for everyone else.
Depends how nervous I reckon. It makes sense to have some apprehension about it. In fact I'd say it's appropriate.
I'd encourage people towards a half dose or else unfortunately ask them to leave. An inexperienced, nervous sober person can really being everything down for everyone else if they're not careful
Thanks all for the advice! We are planning on largely following the recommendations set forth in "The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide": we will be in a remote location with nature available and plenty of tripsitters/guides to keep everyone safe and try to ensure the best experience possible.
Some good experiments for tripping your first time are:
- How is an apple crunchy but a banana squishy?
- Does the pattern on that tree still look the same if I glance away then look back?
- How does breathing through my nose feel vs. through my mouth?
I'm not trying to be condescending with that! First trips are a big event; you'll be looking at the world in a way that didn't seem possible. I'd just enjoy your trip for the first time :)
I had written a big post but accidentally hit cancel! The most important part I wrote was about tripsitting so I'll repeat that:
I used to regularly run LSD trips for groups of 10 - 15 people and more often than not I was the trip sitter. The trip sitter doesn't have to be a sober person, I used to take half dose or one tab depending on the group and my tolerance. The main 'role' is to be a responsible, go-to person.
You don't want people feeling incredibly anxious and letting it build up all alone. You also don't want people going through a challenge to impinge on others in the group. The trip sitter becomes the dedicated person for that, so they need to be trusted and even better if they're liked, so people will feel comfortable coming to them.
When someone came to say hi to me (I usually sat in a dedicated room so people could find me.) I'd usually gauge how they're going with a bit of convo and offer them a drink of water or sometimes tea; hydration is important but you won't feel thirsty. Often this change in setting to a safe space could be enough. If someone's trip was heading down a bad path, you try and ground them and remind them of their reality. A good line is "{Name}, it's {time} on {day} the {date}. {X} many hours ago you took a psychedelic drug, shrooms. It will wear off in {y} hours. It's normal that it can be confronting like this, but remember that this will pass. Right now though I want you to take ten deep breaths with me. Try concentrating on how it feels here" (and then I'd touch their upper stomach, touch can be important for grounding but be gentle). Afterwards, I'd say "How did that feel?" and maybe do it again. Afterwards, it's crucial to not make a big deal of it. You don't want them to sense anxiety from you, or feel 'watched'. I'd often then try and change their setting by saying "I'd like to do this, would you like to join me?" (sometimes people, now calm just want to leave and they should feel comfortable doing that):
- Putting on music. I liked bonobo, or tame impala. classical can be confronting for someone vulnerable. Something they probably haven't heard before is great because you avoid associations.
- Eating some fruit.
- Smoking, if you're into that
- Going to look at a view
- Putting on a meditation tape (there are some especially for psychedelics)
- Doing some yoga or stretching (if they have some experience with that, or if they particularly focused on the body in the breathing exercise)
- Pointing out a pattern in the wall (this can be fun to laugh at)
Generally I'd steer them away from activities that are fun, but not great for someone vulnerable. Like:
- Looking into a mirror
- Going for a public walk
- Doing nangs or other drugs
This is a very basic run through of trip sitting, but sometimes it's enough. The most common thing people get wrong with trip sitting is acting like a parent. You want to be calm and grounding.
Oh and lastly, time of day is very important. Night is more profound and mystical but potentially more confronting. Day time is cool, especially when there aren't people about. Afternoons are the worst imo, you feel like you spend your whole trip waiting for night.
Really good point on not sounding like a parent - people on psychedelics are super impressionable, their mirror neurons are working overtime and they catch on each other's vibe very quickly. The person doing the trip sitting should keep calm and optimistic, and avoid letting the bad tripper's negative emotions overflow into them. Do not act _concerned_, it's all in their head, just give them nice comfortable space, talk to them and they'll fix their trip on their own eventually.
(this is also general life advice for dealing with upset kids and upset adults)
Interesting. Much of this is the old Leary/Alpert set and setting advice. I suppose it is sensible, but I'm not sure how profound the trip will be in such a controlled indoor setting. I was always more of the Kesey/Merry Prankster philosophy of going out and doing something. But even in those situations, there was always an experienced leader (even if that leader was as high or higher than the others in the group). ;-)
Our house was right next to the town belt so we tended to have little adventures through there. They were my favourite part, but not for everyone especially when experimenting with new dosages.
The indoor setting wasn't too controlled: people could go do what they want in various rooms. The main thing was having a space you could retreat to.
Regardless though, I used to be a cautious Leary fan in those days so I probably did run these sessions with some of teachings.
Repeating my request for a 'Practically-a-book-review' of Random Critical Analysis' excellent work on healthcare costs, in case last time it got buried in the deluge of posts these things get and did not get Scott's attention. Will not repeat again.
While we're suggesting book reviews, I would love to see one on the Dictator's Handbook. It would add a lot to your insights on Moloch. You wrote there (I think) that dictators can do as they like. That book dissects the incentives dictators actually face, which are quite constraining, and describes why democracies have better incentives for public policy outcomes (i.e., more people fed and educated, major problems solved, etc).
AI displacing people as wealth-creator is only half of the equation and honestly less likely to reach dangerous levels first. The other half is that a robot army is much easier to code for loyalty than for upholding democratic values (and the people building the robots don't precisely have a huge incentive to do the latter), which immediately makes whoever has the keys to the robots a latent dictator *regardless* of whether the economy can work with just the robots.
*I'm assuming here that you can keep it loyal i.e. a weak form of the alignment problem, but frankly if you can't the result is generally worse because "entire population slaughtered" is unusual even for people losing wars in antiquity let alone any kind of internal governmental policy.
I've deleted most of my comment here because this is the no-politics thread, but I just want to point out that there are lots of ways for "democratic values" to have horrific results.
Scott has gone into at least some of those incentives in his series of Anti-Reactionary essays, including the Anti-Reactionary FAQ itself. Relevant excerpts from said FAQ:
"But some of my smarter readers may notice that “your power can only be removed by killing you” does not actually make you more secure. It just makes security a lot more important than if insecurity meant you’d be voted out and forced to retire to your country villa.
Let’s review how Elizabeth I came to the throne. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had won the 15th century Wars of the Roses, killing all other contenders and seizing the English throne. He survived several rebellions, including the Cornish Rebellion of 1497, and lived to pass the throne to Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII, who passed the throne to his son Edward VI, who after surviving the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion, named Elizabeth’s cousin Lady Jane Grey as heir to the throne. Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary, raised an army, captured Lady Jane, and eventually executed her, seizing the throne for herself. An influential nobleman, Thomas Wyatt, raised another army trying to depose Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne. He was defeated and executed, and Elizabeth was thrown in the Tower of London as a traitor. Eventually Mary changed her mind and restored Elizabeth’s place on the line of succession before dying, but Elizabeth’s somethingth cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, also made a bid for the throne, got the support of the French, but was executed before she could do further damage.
Actual monarchies are less like the Reactionaries’ idealized view in which revolt is unthinkable, and more like the Greek story of Damocles – in which a courtier remarks how nice it must be to be the king, and the king forces him to sit on the throne with a sword suspended above his head by a single thread. The king’s lesson – that monarchs are well aware of how tenuous their survival is – is one Reactionaries would do well to learn."
"Remember, all of the longest and most traditional monarchies in history – the Bourbons, the Romanovs, the Qing – were deposed in popular revolts, usually with poor consequences for their personal health. However paranoid and oppressive they were, clearly it would have been in their self-interest to be more so. If monarchy were for some reason to be revived, no doubt its next standard-bearers would not make the same “mistake” as their hapless predecessors."
Nice. The Handbook just formalizes some specifics: need to direct large state budgets and corrupt programs to the 1000-10,000 or so people who keep you in power.
I'd second the dictators handbook. It IMO makes some pretty strong predictions about how AI would tend to destabilize democracies, if you extend their arguments from gold / oil in very straightforward ways. CGPGrey made an excellent summary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
(1) His data and arguments should be heard and understood by more people. ACX is higher profile than RCA, so a simple summary shared here would be good.
(2) RCA presents this as a choice - Americans use more health care. But RCA doesn't look into who makes this choice. Is it really what most Americans want? Or is it concentrated among a few people - from "frequent fliers" in the ambulance to end of life care.
(3) Cost disease could exist in multiple countries. Even if the US isn't unusually bad in health care, that doesn't mean that there isn't tons of wasted money. See also: why didn't anyone move faster on vaccines (e.g. through challenge trials)?
(4) This is/ought gap is unusually large in this sort of analysis. RCA looks at health care trends between countries, but doesn't discuss how much health care should be used.
On 2), our readings of RCA are extremely different. The biggest point I took away from RCA's work was that healthcare spending ISN'T a 'choice' that is unique to America or to some Americans. Most societies, at similar levels of income, make very similar 'choices' about the level of healthcare spending that they want. Some of the most convincing graphs were those of other countries following the same fitted slope that the US followed as their incomes increased. This means that societies tend to converge to similar levels of spending given similar levels of income, and the healthcare system that different countries choose simply doesn't matter as much as most people seem to believe.
On 3), agree that large wastage probably exists, and that further efficiency could obviously always exist, but if the diagnosis is that the US isn't uniquely bad, then the prescription must not start with 'look at how well these other countries' systems perform', and instead be - 'this is what the US doesn't do well enough and this is how it can do better'. This framing would take it away from universal single payer type conversations to challenge trials, reducing FDA bureaucracy etc.
(4) RCA is not attempting to do an is/ought analysis. I think (3) is what they are trying to do, and need to do, given my sense of where political debate in the US is ( I could be very off about this, I'm from India)
It's practically impossible to keep up with the torrent of pseudo-scientific garbage and effectively pointless anyway. Your friend is likely not open to a reasoned scientific debate if they're reading stuff like this.
I agree that it takes a lot of time and resources to debunk all of this stuff (and there are few incentives to do it for people who can do it). But I disagree that it is effectively pointless. Sure, writing detailed reports on one million proofs of Riemann Hypothesis may be a waste of time, but here lives are at stake. I've seen my friend adjust his position slightly in response to new information (for example, Scott's ivermectin post). Sure, he probably wouldn't have a 180 degrees change. But there are people who are more on the fence (they are usually the ones who are reading without commenting on social media) and a carefully written response in a dispassionate non-condenscending tone would go a long way for them.
(I have to admit that this opinion is based on my observations of people and common sense; I don't have data to back it up, so maybe I'm wrong and my frustration with people who share your position is wrong. But I find the stuff that Scott has written about the importance of debate and persuasion (e.g. here https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) resonate deeply with my core values. Even if few people respond to rational persuasion I would like us to try more).
The trouble with rational persuasion about this issue is that people who are antivax have received so much anger and even outright abuse (eg Darwin Awards). They have had drilled into them that the opposing position is that people who do not get vaccinated are dumb, selfish pieces of shit -- so now they can't get vaxxed without feeling like they are buying into the idea that they are dumb, selfish pieces of shit.
Take it from someone who has played this game at multiple times and in multiple arenas: there are ways to change a motivated person's mind, but reasoned debate isn't one of them. And there are ways to convince a neutral audience to support you over the other side, but they won't be your friends afterwards.
If this person is your friend, then the best you can do is let them know that you disagree, let them know that you have good reason to think that you have the right of it, and then leave it alone.
Rational persuasion is useful IRL and in certain small and tightly-knit internet communities. It is useless and naïve on any kind of ad-based social media.
Instead of presenting what you consider compelling evidence of your position, tell him what you would consider compelling evidence of his position and ask him what sort of evidence would convince him that he's wrong. Commit to a standard of evidence in advance, then exchange the evidence.
Well, you can't expect people to change their minds immediately, but there's a way to play the long game with tactics like my suggestion, and change minds as long as you give people time to adapt their views:
You seem to assume that everything he posts links to is by default wrong. Have you considered the possibility that you might be the one in the wrong here?
The second article tries to make sense of COVID statistics. I don't have time to review it, but one would think they are doing a job that you would want them to do. Would you rather blindly trust that every number made publicly available says what it's claimed to say? Don't you want to see someone explain the numbers? Do you think that questioning published numbers is somehow wrong?
Even though I would also be suspicious of some of the authors of the first paper, it does attempt to do an important analysis, which I'm not competent to review. Don't you think that mechanisms of action and risks of mRNA vaccines should be analyzed?
It's interesting that parts of the wikipedia page of one of the authors of that paper, Stephanie Seneff, read like The Onion:
"According to food columnist Ari LeVaux, Seneff's work in this area has made her "a controversial figure in the scientific community" and she has received "heated objections from experts in most every field she's delved into"."
I don't know anything about her research, but it looks like someone really wanted to do a hit job on her. So desperate that they were quoting a food columnist.
Really reviewing papers is hard, and very few people regularly do this to already published papers. (These are awesome people who are really rare.) Yelling at authors for publishing a paper with a conclusion you don't like is easy. If it's the first you're looking for, I'm sure you're out of luck.
Exactly, I don't have the knowledge to judge these papers. That's why an expert opinion would be helpful, even a short one. In math there is a database of paper reviews, which occasionally contains a polite "Unfortunately, the proof of Theorem 7.2 assumes a bound on the Lipschitz constant which is not justified in the reviewer's opinion", which tells me that all results in the paper are wrong and saves me a ton of time. I was hoping to find some similar collection of reviews for controversial medical papers like this.
Ah, I misunderstood you. Really sorry about that! I blame the responses you got, one of which I initially started replying to, before realizing that this was pointless.
The math database sounds very useful. Would you mind sharing a link to it?
If something like that math database existed for this kind of papers, I assume Scott would know, or someone would tell him. Instead, he apparently has to go to Twitter and Google to find this kind of information. I am afraid we can safely assume that it either does not exist or is not used enough to be useful.
The database is https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/. Unfortunately, it requires institutional access :-(, but there should be ways to go around that.
Yes, I'm less convinced by the statistical analysis in the second paper (It's easy to cut these numbers either way) but the first paper comes to an alarming and apparently well reasoned conclusion. I believe another paper was linked recently that said (paraphrasing) 'if COVID vaccines caused an increased incidence of cancer then we would already be seeing the signal'. If there have been more mRNA COVID vaccine associated cancers reported in the last year than all other vaccine associated cancers in the last twenty years put together then I'd say we're seeing a signal.
I hope not. it terrifies me what this is going to do to the vaccination debate if any of these fears turn out to be well founded. The biggest mass vaccination campaign since small pox turning out to be both dangerous and ineffective will suppress all other vaccine rates for a generation. That would end up killing far more people than COVID in the long tail.
I'm hoping that even if all kinds of bad things about COVID vaccines turn out to be true, this won't do much about other vaccinations rates.
The big problems with COVID vaccines are 1) that they are new - so new that the data on them is neither complete nor reliable, and that there is no way of knowing what they will do in the long term, and 2) that they are being politicized by people who are known to lie and who can be easily imagined hiding or misrepresenting relevant information (remember when we were told not to wear masks, because the authorities were worried there won't be enough for medical personnel?). These two problems make it really hard to quantify risk. None of this applies to the other vaccines, which have been around for a while.
From looking at the numbers, it seems that most people who are refusing to get the COVID vaccine either have no objections to other vaccines (and are fully vaccinated with everything else), and so it's hard to see where their objections to other vaccines would come from, or already have medical or religious problems with other vaccines as well.
> "If there have been more mRNA COVID vaccine associated cancers reported in the last year than all other vaccine associated cancers in the last twenty years put together then I'd say we're seeing a signal."
Nope. All the OTHER vaccines are only given to tiny little kids, one year's cohort at a time - and tiny little kids don't tend to get cancer! The COVID vaccine was initially given to all people over 65 (who get LOTS of cancer!) and following that was given to essentially the entire population over the course of a year. The entire population is MORE PEOPLE than the population of kids at vaccine-receiving age for any given regular vaccine. So the combination of:
(a) we're treating >20 times as many people in a year
(b) we're treating people in groups who were at greater risk of cancer to start with (eg: people who've been smoking for 40 years)
(c) this virus is BRAND NEW, hence seems especially scary
...means we should expect the number of vaccine-associated cancers reported to be *quite a large multiple* of that seen for other vaccines, or even that seen for all other vaccines combined.
I've been thinking about etiquette versus ethics recently.
Etiquette is a bit like ethics -- there's a list of things that you should do and a list of things that you shouldn't, and people who obey them are liked while people who disobey them are shunned. What's the difference? Well, ethics attempts to make some kind of claim to being objective about what's good and bad, while etiquette is acknowledged to be at least partially arbitrary.
But that's not the full story. A lot of etiquette is about not offending people (don't call your boss a big fatty). Other bits aren't necessarily about not offending people, but once the rule is established people feel disrespected if you don't obey the rule in their presence.
A lot of etiquette is about class signalling, too, which is why dining with the Queen requires a lot more attention to etiquette than eating at McDonald's. This has some value too, because if you can signal "Yes, I am a well-raised member of the upper class" then people are more likely to feel that they can safely invite you into their houses without worrying you'll abscond with their silverware.
A lot of etiquette, though, has dissolved over the past seventy years or so, because it was "old-fashioned" and "stuffy" and "stupid, pointless and arbitrary". Some of the old rules have disappeared entirely (e.g. don't wear a hat in an elevator in an apartment building), but other etiquette rules somehow made the jump into being ethical ones. Increasingly, the question of whether you should do or say something that might offend someone is treated as a moral question rather than one of etiquette.
I'm a big fan of etiquette myself for the same reason. Social relationships are all about signaling respect and mutually understood obligations. Etiquette makes people comfortable by making them *legible*. Having something like a script also saves an incredible amount of mental load. If you come to my house, I know a good way to welcome you is to offer you a beverage. This simple action also carries a lot of other signals with it, e.g. "I value your presence", "I am a conscientious person", "I want you to feel comfortable here", etc. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country where they were unsure of the etiquette knows how exhausting it is to simply interact with anyone. This is why people are generally pretty committed to etiquette even if they say it's not that important to them; etiquette tells us in shorthand who is likely to hold up their end of the social deal, and who isn't.
Yep, and something like this is also in large part the purpose of small talk. People need ways to effortlessly communicate messages like "I'm a normal sane well-adjusted person" and "everything is okay between us".
I don't think that holds for your other example either. In the case of "fish", using a different word such as "pescado" may be counterproductive if your objective is being understood by general English-speakers, but not if, for example, your objective is to be misunderstood, or understood only by the Spanish speakers in the kitchen and not the English-speakers in the dining room, or carefully drawing a distinction between the living animal and the foodstuff derived from it in a context where you have the opportunity to define your terms, or conveying a sense of otherness in a science-fiction novel where the use of "ribi" shows a strong Russian influence in 22nd-century slang.
I don't think there's a generally justifiable normative judgment that using the word "fish" for fish is good, and using other words for it is bad.
Efficiency can motivate both. You should use "fish" so you're understood by more people without requiring further rounds of clarification, and you should stick to the fork rule because that's how restaurants and other hosts will arrange your cutlery and prepare the meal. Of course you could rearrange your cutlery however you like, but that's less efficient.
The reason to use the word "fish" is that calling them something else will leave people confused, which probably undermines whatever goal you have related to talking about fish.
With forks on the other hand, my goal is to put food into my mouth and both tools do a perfectly serviceable job. Why should I follow the established rule?
I agree that's a weaker case, but if you're eating somewhere that observes these customs, and know which fork they intend for what purpose, I would just be a team-player and go along with the local custom.
Hmm, I'd be unsurprised to find a (sub-)culture where making a joking insult to a newly-met friend (or mother) of a friend is standard operating procedure.
The way that I've always construed it, etiquette is just a bunch of patterns we can follow to put certain matters out of mind. For example, in a dinner party there's a lot of specific behaviors that, without etiquette, you would have to consider. By being able to safely fall-back to "following etiquette", you can instead focus on having a good time and socializing.
The specifics don't really matter. Maybe it's polite in some places to slurp loudly as you eat, but in other places it is polite to be tidy and quiet. Maybe it's polite in some places to help the host with the dishes, but in other places you mustn't lift a finger. Whatever the rules are, they just provide a framework which people can fall back onto to be easily comfortable without having to consider their every action.
Obviously it doesn't end up being this easy in practice, especially if you're not living in a homogeneous monoculture, but I've always understood this "mutual ease of comfort by falling back to agreed-upon procedure" to the the point of etiquette.
Grammatical rules seem to be partially arbitrary. They are some part logical necessity (you need to have a distinction between subject and verb) and some part arbitrary convention (i before e except after c). Both affect your ability to communicate well.
A certain amount of etiquette has side effects. Consider getting your feet bound, like a proper Chinese lady of a certain era. That had pretty major side effects, but plenty of less drastic "polite" behaviour also has side effects some people strongly dislike.
That seems reasonable to me to dislike, particularly when the side effects disproportionately affect one group more than another. Some huge number of "traditional" rules for proper behaviour for women and girls are now considered to be in this category, at least by a fair number of people.
i.e. the demise of various rules of etiquette is not all about those rules being "old fashioned" and "stuffy" - there are often much stronger reasons.
I think there is some stronger condition than “affect one group disproportionally” considering that etiquette still, and probably always will, disproportionately affect the rich
In a lot of cultures, those of high status show off their high status by adopting fashions that make it difficult or impossible for them to do any physical work.
This certainly affects the rich more than those who can't afford not to work.
But I'm on the fence about whether it harms them.
Whereas foot binding, and even preventing female children from exercising freely (various clothing regimens), seem like pretty obvious harms.
And I think a lot of the recent mass dumping of significant etiquette was motivated by perceived harm to those following it, often gendered harm.
A lot of people aren't just annoyed or distracted by bad proofreading, they're *offended*. They take bad proofreading as an indication that the writer doesn't respect them enough.
Didn't realize this consciously, but yeah, I guess I am also using this strategy unconsciously.
It's as if there are also r/K memetic strategies, and if I see something that seems like an r-meme (something that its author spent little time on, because they optimize for quantity not quality of their output), I do not want to spend more than five seconds responding to it.
I remind myself that odds are the "proofreading" was done for them by a defective software program, which like as not introduced some of the errors. Worse, the writer has probably spent their life reading the output of similar defective spelling and grammar correction programs, and has internalized a rather different pattern for "normal" writing than those of us who learned to write without computer assistance.
Also, of course, some quantity of my colleagues are using English as a second language, or grew up with a different dialect of English, which they are using correctly. And there are also dyslexics scattered among the population, who rarely identify themselves explicitly.
But I still react emotionally to sloppy writing, particularly when it's produced by some business (advertisements, instruction manuals), or a person in a high stakes situation (resumes, covering letters, etc.)
I'm not sure whether I'm offended, though, as much as somewhat contemptuous.
I suck at writing. It's like pulling teeth sometimes. (And yet to communicate I must write.) My grammar and spelling also stink. When I was younger I had two distinct vocabularies, one written and one spoken, (the connection between spelling and pronunciation is weak in this one, in voice of yoda) Over time they have become closer, as I've learned to pronounce written words the same as everyone else.
Please forgive me for my past and future transgressions, it is not out of any lack of respect, but only my own shortcomings.
Writing errors let you infer partial information about the author's education, tribe, and effort level, and so do accents and speech mannerisms. I like my narrators to have an old fashioned Received Pronunciation like Stephen Fry, David Attenborough, and Simon Prebble (https://youtu.be/nI6-vaWuzN8?t=24443), but I'm not going to go around hating everyone who doesn't speak that way, and the same goes for writing.
I haven't thought about this very long, but perhaps the distinction is that ethical rules have higher stakes than etiquette rules? i.e. if breaking the rule carries a risk of injury or property damage, then it's an ethical rule, but if it mostly causes social friction, it's etiquette.
On this theory, some instances of "giving offense" are moving from the etiquette category to the moral category because of a general perception that e.g. racial slurs help prop up cultural systems that cause major harms.
I think the crucial difference is that etiquette is indeed arbitrary. You could easily flip the order in which forks are laid out next to the plate for that's just an arbitrary convention but you can't say "Let's all agree it's ok to murder each other" because that's not just arbitrary convention. Murder is legit bad.
That's true of some etiquette, but some seems purposeful. Refraining from interrupting people isn't an arbitrary convention; it makes conversations smoother. Performing introductions when you meet new people helps people keep track of each other. Chewing with your mouth closed would be statistically more pleasant for other people even if it wasn't specifically expected.
When you join a club, they often tell you "etiquette" that is clearly conventions for making their activities run smoothly. Things on this table can be freely used, but ask before using anything on that table. After shuffling, allow your opponent to cut the deck. Don't ask someone their secret identity.
Following the arbitrary rules is a signal that you will also follow the important ones.
It is not 100% reliable, and of course people are happy to point out an exception. But if you meet a person who ignores all the arbitrary rules, you should not be surprised if one day they hurt you... by breaking a rule they also call arbitrary but which matters to you.
Problem is that calling a rule "arbitrary" is a little bit subjective, and sometimes you have a motivation to push that line. Following the arbitrary rules signals your ability to resist this temptation.
I see your point; in fact, that's exactly the argument I used with my son who used to exhaust us with questions like "Why can't I just eat my food directly out of my plate with my mouth like a dog?" Nevertheless, I think it's still important to keep track of which rules are arbitrary and which aren't. For example, I find that it's very common to conflate prejudice against a different culture (due to irrational dislike of arbitrary rules different from one's own) and valid ethical concern for certain cruel cultural practices.
Keeping track of this distinction between ethics and etiquette can help us avoid irrational dislike of those who were trained to use a different set of etiquette rules, while at the same time ensuring we don't excuse obviously unethical behaviour as "just a different culture".
However, is the prejudice irrational? Hypothetically, two cultures might differ in the arbitrary rules and still have the same ethical rules. But in real life, how often is this the case? Perhaps it is good that the differences in etiquette remind us about possible differences in morality.
It is nice to imagine people around the world as having the same moral values, only different etiquette. I suspect this might lead to an unpleasant surprise.
The differences in morality are probably much smaller than the differences in etiquette. Morality is constrained by "the society should not fall apart", while the etiquette can get more creative. On the other hand, even small differences in morality (e.g. the exact rules when it is okay to kill someone) can be quite shocking.
Hmm, etiquette to me means mostly being polite; the please, thankyou, holding doors, saying excuse me, that might be called social lubricant. Knowing which fork to me is silly, and if caught in some multiple fork situation, observe the people around you.
When I use to get the newspaper, I would sometimes read the "Miss Manners" column. That is what I would call perfect etiquette. Be polite and courteous. When in Rome...
Ethics is about personal behavior, what you do, and not so much how you do it. And though it overlaps with how you treat other people, it's a different thing to me.
I think the word etiquette can lead you into seeing too much of a separation between the formal and the moral. It even sounds ridiculously prissy and pedantic. But nearly all etiquette used to have moral significance, and once it loses that it falls into disuse. The introduction of the idea of the gentleman into English society in the 16th century came with a lot of new rules, but at its heart it was about making rich young men less violent. If it had just been "let's copy what fashionable Italians are doing" the rules would just have been a passing fashion. And just as the formal dies without a moral core, new morality seems to always come with new rules and language attached, as current political and moral developments demonstrate. Etiquette is always either a part of a living morality or it's dying, and that the word is generally only applied to rules in the present that are dying obscures the fact that a lot of what we would describe as etiquette in the past was at the time inseparable from morality.
Is Scott's advance deal with Substack still ongoing? I seem to remember reading that it would last a year and ACX recently passed its first birthday, but looking back, I don't see anything that explicitly gave a duration. I ask because last year I decided I wasn't going to subscribe but that I'd reevaluate the decision when it switched over to more of the money going to Scott.
Focalin or Dexedrine might be worth trying. If you respond better to Vyvanse than to Ritalin or Modafinil, that suggests you do better with d-isomer-only amphetamines.
Dexedrine is almost the same thing as Vyvanse: pure d-amphetemine salts with no l-amphetemines. The difference is Vyvanse is bound to a lysine molecule that your body needs to metabolize away before the amphetamine becomes active. This means it takes longer to kick in, but is smoother in terms of rushes and crashes and is thought to have less abuse potential. Depending on your situation, having something that kicks in quickly may be beneficial, especially if your doctor feels comfortable prescribing IR pills so you can time your afternoon dose for when you need a particular boost.
Focalin is to Ritalin as Dexedrine is to Adderall: the d-isomer-only form of methylphenidate, with pretty much the same advantages over Ritalin that Dexedrine or Vyvanse has over Adderall. Amphetamine is usually preferred over methylphenidate for adult ADHD, but if you're unsatisfied with Vyvanse if might be worth a try to see if you respond better to Focalin.
What worked better than amphetamines for me was getting adequate cardio on a daily basis. The necessary amount was on the order of 2 miles walking or 4 miles by bike each and every day.
What have you found to be the different effect of Vyvanse vs Adderall? I am currently taking Adderall XR and find that it doesn't help me to concentrate/act but sometimes those actions are not productive (like writing comments on ACX...).
Piracetam, phenylpiracetam, and/or noopept. The first you take multiple times a day, the second and third can be taken as needed but no more than a few times per week. Works wonders even for people who don't have ADHD.
Do people have strong feelings about testosterone replacement therapy? It sits on the edge between 'legit hormone replacement for guys who actual health issues' and 'lifestyle improvement' for some. There seems to be a decent amount of evidence that exogenous testosterone is not great for one's liver or cardiovascular system as we age, so I (as a prospective lifestyle user) have some concerns there. My impression is also that the hyperconservative American medical bureaucracy has cracked down on lifestyle prescriptions quite a bit too. Are lots of middle aged and older guys doing optional TRT for the rest of their lives? Is that medically possible/reasonably safe? (I have the same questions/concerns about HGH too).
It's kind of interesting how broad a category 'medicine' is- much of it is heart attacks and broken bones, of course, but in a rich country much of it is vaguely cyberpunk body modification for those aging. Hip or shoulder replacement, plastic surgery, TRT as mentioned, surgeries like ACL replacement or for SLAP tears that aren't emergencies but are really geared more towards preserving athleticism for those getting older.... We are slowly creeping towards our Gibsonesque future
it seems like testosterone is associated with greater mortality. Women live longer than men. Under the Choson dynasty, eunuchs lived absurdly long: "The average lifespan of eunuchs was 70.0 ± 1.76 years, which was 14.4–19.1 years longer than the lifespan of non-castrated men of similar socio-economic status." (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(12)00712-9.pdf). And this isn't just a case of selecting on people not dying in childhood because these eunuchs were castrated before puberty.
Because of this, I personally would avoid taking testosterone supplements unless they were very clearly on the "legit hormone replacement for guys who actual health issues" side. All the other cyberpunk stuff you mention seems good to me because it is about helping people to stay active as they age, which seems like a healthy thing.
I have this vague memory that orchiectomy extends lifespan even as an adult. Is that really true? If true, is it a result of a generalized health effect, maybe like the body adopting less risky "masculine" strategies, or is it more a question of trans women committing suicide less if they can get orchi?
I doubt the "not committing suicide" thing is any sizeable proportion. Its not an especially common surgery (though getting more popular). If you go to r/orchiectomy it's mostly men dealing with testicular cancer, some trans women, and a few people who are cutting their balls off to match their wives libidos.
More likely I think being a trans woman with an orchiectomy just leaves you in a great place cancer risk wise.
Not a doctor, just an aging guy strugling with weight control, weight-lifting recovery, and long-term health. From what I've been able to figure out, there's a *huge* difference between replacement to get to physiologically typical levels of testosterone and getting to supernormal levels. I didn't end up going for it because I was above normal for my age, but I would have had no qualms going for replacement to get to physiologically typical levels.
The liver toxicity issues in particular are dependant on the form of the testosterone, specifically the methyltestosterone pills that used to be popular with illicit lifestyle users. Modern prescription exogenous testosterone treatments (creams, gels, injections, and a new form or oral testosterone that's in the pipeline) should be fine in this respect.
It's also important to distinguish between health effects of testosterone replacement (boosting low or low-normal natural testosterone levels to the middle-to-upper part of the normal male physiological testosterone range) and super-physiological supplemtation (boosting levels to significantly above the normal range, usually to enhance recovery and gains from strength training). The long-term health risks are a lot more strongly associated with the latter than the former. As I understand it, there's a lot of stuff that suggests the former is net-beneficial to long term when it's indicated, since the health benefits of improved mood and energy levels (facilitating more physical activity) seem to be bigger than any harm from testosterone supplementation.
One alternative to direct testosterone supplementation is Clomid, a female fertility drug that's often prescribed off-label to treat low testosterone in men. It works by modulating estrogen receptors in a way that makes your body think it needs to make more follicle-simulating hormone (which triggers ovulation in women and endogenous testosterone production in men). Clomid is cheaper, easier to administer (daily pill), has fewer short-to-medium term side effects, and is not a controlled substance (testosterone treatments are Schedule III controlled).
The last in particular vis a considerable advantage for you if "prospective lifestyle user" implies you're considering obtaining your testosterone supplements outside of normal medical channels: in this case, clomid would not (as far as I know -- I'm a random person on the internet and as such you should not rely on me for legal advice) expose you to criminal liability the way exogenous testosterone products would. It's also a lot easier to obtain: you can just order it online from your favorite grey-market drug reimportation website that doesn't demand prescription info (e.g. inhousepharmacy.vu).
Thanks. When I say 'lifestyle', I mean that a legit/non-sketchy MD to bless a TRT treatment and oversee my bloodwork & overall health during the process. I don't think I'd ever do anything off the books.
>super-physiological supplemtation (boosting levels to significantly above the normal range, usually to enhance recovery and gains from strength training). The long-term health risks are a lot more strongly associated with the latter than the former
I wonder if men with naturally occurring levels of high testosterone are at a higher risk of poor health outcomes. Or if it's just from supplementation alone- and if so, why that is. Does your body just reach a natural homeostasis (for lack of a better term) as to how much test it 'should' have?
It also makes me wonder if you could trick your endocrine system into naturally more producing more test, without any exogenous products. Maybe something vaguely homeopathic where you naturally suppress your test, or increase your estrogen, to see if the endocrine system overreacts to get you back to what it thinks is 'normal'
It's good! I'm flying back tomorrow! I built my career there and it will always be dear to me but I need change and a doctorate so I'm leaving.
1) Washington State in general is super beautiful if you don't mind cloud cover 9 months-ish of the year. If you love the outdoors, congrats you're home. But seriously- bike to the San Juans in July, take ferries!!!!!!! subsidized and beloved!!!, climbing is super good + oregon nearby, mountain biking is great, Leavenworth skiing, trail running etc. I did my undergrad in Bellingham and the COL was so cheap and having the Chuckanuts nearby was very REI Disney
2) Rationalist community- I think it's good? My old college roommate was invited to one of Aella's parties in May and Scott was there as well as a lot of Bay area people and Brooklyn people. But they all seemed to fly in so I don't actually know? I pretty much worked straight from 2017 to now in life science startups and had good friends from high school send me Scott's stuff
3) OUTDOORS You can go outside most times of the year and be like "Wow, I am not in a hellfire or polar vortex". I grew up in Austin (hellfire) and Ireland (similar climate) moved to WA from Boston (polar vortex) so that is invaluable to me. We do get some of the fire season air quality issues. My friends who take up diving win that game.
4) Transit: You kind of definitely need a car? Like I was just DD to Caroline's party and then was just surprised the people were cool. You can get away with ubering everywhere if you make 300k at Google ML but yeah you need a car.
5) Community- I think if you pursue your interests, you'll find people. I have lots of friends who are friends with their google coworkers for instance. A lot of young people which I love. A lot of rich young people buying houses that you'll definitely need a car to get to. I actively avoid home ownership.
6) Education: Super educated populace and some of my best friends are grad students/postdocs. And then a lot of software engineers who love learning/are curious.
7) Jobs: There's so many jobs and no one left to hire. I made a killing in life science startups by geniunely wanting to learn and being helpful and working hard. Google is better than Microsoft is better than Amazon in terms of how they treat engineers.
7.5) Politics are strange. One of my coworkers started the UW postdoc union and has a socialist commune? Is very into Kshama Sawant. At the same job, another of my coworkers was a burning man libertarian in immunology who loves Matt Ridley, follows Bret Weinstein, but is super smart and cool and I secretly love her dearly.
8) Water. Overchlorinated- but apparently there's a way to join a municipal water taste testing team? It was in one of the infamous voter guides.
9) COL- Rent can be high but I've paid anywhere from $700 to 1200 for studios and have always lived alone in small places. Roommates make it super cheap- idk it all depends
10) Dating- weird? Similar to SF. Gender ratio more dudes to women- I don't really know. I dated women and men using tinder/hinge 2019 and 2020 but honestly just used the apps to spam people science or history facts when I was doing flow cytometry super late at night. I didn't take it seriously and was more focused on science and friendships so I can't say.
11) Social scene- young people, nerdy, outdoorsy etc- I have a climbing group of women I see weekly for instance
11/10 would recommend PLUS NO INCOME TAX the climate really lends itself to late night outdoor adventures with super nerdy friends on like the burke gilman at 1 AM who you'll learn from and talk about the economics of cam girls and developing countries with
4) You can get away without a car if you're okay with staying within the city and plan around the public transit. The light rail is great. Buses vary. (the 10 is never on time) One Bus Away helps but not always. I carefully picked my apartment to be near a light rail station and it's been great for helping get around. (then covid hit and I barely even go downtown these days) If you want to get out to all that nature then yeah, you need a car.
9) COL is very much big city COL. It's fine if you're making big bucks as an engineer but I don't know how the baristas do it. Of course I also live in hyper-gentrification land so what the hell do I know.
My studio at UW is still going for $750 a month- studio with one bath- shared kitchens though. Would just bike to SLU every day to lab and work provided all our food so didn't have to deal with cooking.
I forgot to mention- no bugs- bed bugs, roaches, fire ants etc. Except some mosquitoes in the height of summer outside. And some giant house spiders but spiders are great and my friends.
Austin on the other hand is fire ants everywhere, roaches, scorpions, had a few random tarantulas show up occasionally in my childhood home.
Other quirks: The water is very soft. Thunderstorms are rare, and there are basically no fireflies. WA is the most expensive state for liquor, and even without sales tax, OR is the 2nd most expensive. Vancouver, CA is just as far away as Portland, OR, but that matters less with covid-19 border controls. Stellar's jays look cooler than normal blue jays, but don't sound as nice. Ferries are awesome.
Semi-stunned no one has mentioned Seattle's restaurants, which are hugely varied and often spectacular at many different price points. I'd be afraid of living anywhere that didn't have multiple Sichuan restaurants, multiple French bakeries, multiple Japanese-style French bakeries, multiple Hawaiian, multiple Taiwanese dessert places, multiple Ethiopian family joints, multiple Irish pubs, way too many pho places, ultra-specific regional Indian food, cutting-edge frou-frou fancy pants nonsense, and so on and so forth.
My best friend moved to suburban Indiana, and after visiting him, I honestly don't know how the fuck people live there! I was terribly depressed by the total lack of variety and quality on day 2.
If you come to Seattle, consult Yelp frequently and stay out of the national chain restaurants.
Edit to add: I suggest using Yelp because being small and local doesn't *automatically* make something good. Seattle's International District has mediocre dim sum, great dim sum, and truly spectacular dim sum in a two block radius, plus even more dim sum six blocks away and even more-more dim sum tucked away in other neighborhood and the city limits.
With that much small local dim sum competition, there's no reason to ever go into a P.F. Chang's for potstickers.
Why is George Koval such a hard sell for your dad? Does he not believe in the other atomic spies? Maybe you should show him the FBI files: https://vault.fbi.gov/george-abramovich-koval
I live in Bryan/College Station, TX these days, but spent six months in Austin when I was working fully remotely. Interestingly, I've noticed that when I make my snobby pourover coffee in the Chemex, the Bryan water takes *much* longer to trickle through the grounds than the Austin water. It's true that the Bryan water actually tastes really bad, while Austin water is fine, so there must be some differences, but I'm surprised that these differences can possibly affect the interaction with the coffee grounds.
The difference might also be due to other factors, e.g. relative humidity. And are you using 'the same' coffee beans/grounds? I've noticed big differences among varieties along exactly this dimension (even holding other things, that I've thought of, (probably) constant).
Yes - last spring when I was occasionally traveling between the two residences, I would bring the grinder with me without changing its setting, and bring the same bag of beans, grind 50 g of beans, and heat the water with the same kettle to the same set temperature, and make it with another filter from the same box, in the same Chemex beaker. I didn't actually time the pour (I suppose if I was a true coffee snob I should always be timing my pours) but it seemed pretty clear that at my habitual rate of pouring, I could pour the whole 750 ml in Austin, while in Bryan I would have to pause a couple times to make sure it didn't overflow.
Relative humidity would be something that makes sense as the differentiating factor, but I would guess that most of the time the two towns would be very similar humidity, and on the times that they're different, it wouldn't be too systematic which is higher.
I was thinking that there might be different relative humidities due to the different indoor environments where you were (e.g. the ventilation, HVAC systems, etc.), not as much as because of the different locations.
You might be right that the water itself is the culprit, I just wouldn't think anything in municipal water would affect the rate at which water drains thru ground coffee. (I wouldn't be that surprised to learn I was wrong about this tho!)
I didn't notice any differences between Tampa (Florida) and NYC, and the tap water is _very_ different between them! I have noticed significant differences between different coffees but also between different (indoor) humidities in at least one place (NYC).
Two notable differences between Austin and Seattle Water (assuming you are comparing water from the main community water systems and not private wells): Seattle water is very soft whereas Austin water is moderately hard. Some claim that hardness improves taste, tho this is subjective and hard to prove. The other difference is that Austin uses chloramines for disinfection whereas Seattle uses free chlorine. In theory, the water with chloramine (Austin) should have much less of a chlorine taste.
Presumably both these features could impact coffee making, but I haven't looked in that.
I have had covid and hit that cytokine storm hard with full spectrum Cbd cannabis oil back in March ( that’s all I had that had an effective profile for limiting cytokines )
Something I find interesting: What's the worst part of your personality, in the sense that you judge yourself for it, but also with the restriction that it's not something that's actually causing anybody any harm?
Mine is something like "sitting around waiting for people to give me things", wish a dash of "rich people are genies". There's a story where Bill Gates' caddy for a golf game got along with him pretty well, and then found out later that Gates paid his student loans off (I don't know if the story is true). I sit around thinking about stuff like that happening to me fairly constantly.
What's worse is this is so deeply ingrained in me that my actual practical situation doesn't affect it at all. I'm not bad off right now; I'm doing well. But I'll still wake up from daydreams where a random very rich person decided to give me a Volvo or something, for no reason. It makes me feel leechy.
I doubt anyone else does this exact thing, but I do think there must be other examples of "thing about my personality I think is bad, even though it's not actually hurting anyone" and I'd be interested to hear them if anyone wants to share.
My wife and I were given a free baby grand. It was a weird bay area thing. It was also a beautiful piano, very *very* old, and had real ivory keys, much to our surprise.
And of course, it was also a bad experience.
We spent a total of ~ $1200 for two tunings and three moves. The first move was to get the piano. The second was to move it to a new place, but it was fragile, and it broke. The third move was after the junking services failed to junk it three times, leaving us with a topless broken piano in our house, whereupon we called the original movers and asked them to please move it to the junkyard.
It would be hilarious if a billionaire gave you a Volvo. This is extremely ungrateful, but how does a billionaire land on liking you enough to give you a gift, but not so much that they give you a nicer car? That would be like a normal income person deciding to give someone a specific amount of change for a dollar
This is sort off the answer right now for old (pre-1996) cars. If a multimillionaire gave me a new car in the daydream, it would probably be a Honda Odyssey.
I mean, I wouldn’t appreciate it if a billionaire gave me a ‘really nice’ car, because I wouldn’t be able to afford maintenance, repairs, insurance, etc. You want to give a gift that while nice isn’t a liability. The ideal gift car from that perspective is nice, gets great mileage, has plenty of cargo room, etc., loaded with features, but relatively boring (so the insurance is low) and common (so parts, dealerships, and mechanics are widely available and cheap). I can see where a billionaire might land on “Volvo” although a smarter move might be Subaru or Honda.
I have pre-decided that I don't care at all about your boring new haircut/boring kids/boring job/boring sports fixation/boring dead uncle; and that I won't pretend to care.
I know it's inconsiderate, but after decades of being assaulted with peoples inane god damn fixation with telling me about relatives who I've never met and don't care about (and who they barely care about!) I can't do it anymore.
I just can't respect the cultural folkways of people that try to talk to me about nascar. I'll happily listen to any amount of talk about V8s, but if you try to tell me about how great your preferred going-in-a-circle driver is, I should be allowed to talk to you for an equal amount of time about eg. competitive paint drying.
This sounds less like you believe this is a personal flaw than that you actually believe you’ve made a rational decision. If you were actually working to overcome this and be more interested in others’ interests, that’s one thing, but this sounds like the opposite.
You've kind of missed the point of this whole comment chain- this sounds more like some weird countersignaling about how you've made a rational decision to a jerk who doesn't care about the personal lives of others.
I was going to say laziness as well. My laziness only seems to occur when internal motivation is needed. External motivation (like family) gets me to do stuff (like mow the lawn, take out the trash etc. I have become obsessed with straightening up the house since I had a kid).
Complete inability to self-direct and instead latching on to the latest thing shiny and/or directed by other people who seem to know what they're doing.
Strangely enough it's working out okay, but I'd like to have more agency.
My theory is that most people are like this, and that people who aren't are disproportionately represented in media and among media creators. I don't think they'd need the cult-y ~*innovator*~ subgenre of motivational hucksters if being a Self Motivated Self Starter Who Excels In A Rapidly Evolving Environment was something people were actually good at.
Or maybe I'm rationalizing; I struggle with this too. It's not so much a _complete_ inability to self direct as the inability to self direct on something that takes longer than a couple of weeks, then onto another shiny thing. In some sense it's not a terrible strategy - it leads to being broadly capable (I can do a lot of stuff), but rarely deeply capable (only thing I'm especially good at is programming). Would be nice to be able to set long term goals and have any expectation I'll even mildly want to follow through six months from now.
This seems to describe me well, too. In my case it seems not to be strictly about time, but rather something like the number of interruptions. Like, if you would let me work on one project with no distraction whatsoever, I could probably work on it for weeks.
But if I work on something, and then I have to stop and do something else instead, it is incredibly hard to return to the original thing again. It's like a part of my brain is saying "what's the point? you will not be allowed to finish this anyway". The part of my brain refuses to accept that you can still finish something even if you are interrupted 100 times, as long as you get back to it 100 times.
Having a job and kids, of course all my projects are interrupted quickly, and I rarely complete anything. In the past, my most productive time was weekends.
yes, 100% this thing. Dated a woman who like to make bids for affection every time she walked by, it was... debilitating. I often find if I don't get distracted, I end up hyperfocusing to a pathological degree, and then feel too bad to work on it, and end up burning myself out it on in that way.
Too much self-direction and coming up with bizarre new ideas apropos of nothing which no one else seems to care about and not having the work ethic or people skills to actually accomplish those ideas.
I've been thinking about this for a few hours, and I think it's my struggle to maintain an appropriate level of conceptual zoom; I'm thinking/talking about house repairs, or something at work, and more often than not I veer off to something like cosmology or etymology; those who choose to be my friends like it, but it definitely means there are frequently times when I spend a lot of intellectual energy on a topic that doesn't get me closer to my goal on that particular topic.
It's by far the earliest thing I ever hated about myself, and while I have made improvements in how I handle being a coward, the fact remains that I am one. I have had to come to grips with the fact that, in an emergency, I will not be the person helping others to safety, nor will I be the one running towards danger even to save my wife and children. I will be the one who is already fleeing out the door before I have time to actually form a thought about what I should be doing instead.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and my efforts to change mean that I would do the right thing if the time came. But events in the past few years have only confirmed to me that, at my core, I am still a coward.
Courage of the sort you describe is overrated in the popular imagination.
Incoming humblebrag, I suppose - I have actually racked up a couple instances of minor physical heroism, but it happened only because my reflexes for that kind of thing seem to be very strong and take over from rationality. 'This needs to be done and it needs to be done now and I'm going to block out sober considerations of risk' is kind of bad thinking, actually. Real courage would entail full vivid cognizance of what might happen to me and then doing it anyway.
Meanwhile, I still suffer from less dramatic but doubtless more corrosive kinds of fear. Various shades of Fomo, certainly, which often leads me to flail around a given problem space and refuse to commit to a decision. Fear of alienation. Fear of failure. Strong fear of disapproval from the handful of people I care about. Micro-failures of confidence that interfere with learning difficult things because I allocate mental resources to being afraid that my efforts are fraudulent and fruitless instead of focusing to the greatest possible extent on the material at hand.
If you're better on those measures, then count your blessings - you're probably ahead in the game.
"Mine is something like "sitting around waiting for people to give me things", wish a dash of "rich people are genies". There's a story where Bill Gates' caddy for a golf game got along with him pretty well, and then found out later that Gates paid his student loans off (I don't know if the story is true). I sit around thinking about stuff like that happening to me fairly constantly."
I do as well. From a young age I dreamed of finding buried treasure. There is a part of me that desperately wants money to just fall on me out of the sky. I spend way to much time thinking about what I would do if I had a billion dollars, with no actual plan to earn a billion dollars. Just wishing that the money would just appear, by any plausible method.
I have really intense dreams and nightmares two or three times a week. They leave my drained when I wake up, and I'm not as productive during the later day (which makes me stressed, which probably degrades my sleep, vicious circle style). I've had this problem for years. How do I decrease the intensity of my dreams?
Most googling tells me to meditate, and be mindful, and to stress less: I think I'm already doing this as far as possible (and notably the dreams remain a problem when I'm really relaxed, like during a relaxing vacation). The obvious parts of my sleep hygiene are also optimized as far as possible (darkness, no sounds, regular times, avoid screen time before bed, don't spend time in bed when not sleeping, etc.). I don't drink alcohol.
Sleep apnea might be the issue but it seems to be lots of time and effort to investigate it and not much to do to fix it. Is it worth looking into? How do I start: I can just record myself sleeping and check the breathing, right?
Cannabis is often mentioned. Does anyone know a good procedure here? I'm guessing I want to take some CBD oil just before sleep, starting small and increasing the dose?
I'm thinking about experimenting with sleep supplements: zink, chamomile, Melatonin, the entire kitchen sink. Suggestions for good places to start are taken with gratitude.
I've had this problem for a long time. No diet changes recently. I would like to think that I eat reasonably healthy (but I guess everyone does, right?).
My sleep quality with 300 micrograms of melatonin is better than if I tried shifting my normal sleeping time without it, but worse than if I just went to bed whenever I felt tired. It gets me shallow sleep with hourly or two-hourly awakenings, when the alternative is no sleep at all. Shallow sleep does invite more vivid dreams, so if melatonin doesn't knock you out cold, I imagine it does not help against the nightmares.
"Sleep apnea might be the issue but it seems to be lots of time and effort to investigate it and not much to do to fix it. Is it worth looking into? How do I start: I can just record myself sleeping and check the breathing, right?"
Several apps are supposed to be able to detect sleep apnea, I do not know if they are effective but it may be worth a try?
Obstructive sleep apnea is a common problem that can cause A myriad of long-term effects including increase in mortality. It is reliably treated with CPAP with documented improvements in daytime awareness and cognition. Mild OSA can sometimes be treated with mouth guards that hold the jaw in such a way that minimizes the change in position of the jaw during sleep relaxation.
If OSA is a possibility in your situation you should absolutely get it evaluated.
But CPAP seems like a huge hassle, I'm not sure it will be possible for me to go trough it. But apnea is so bad that it's worth it I guess. Has anyone done CPAP and can reassure me that it's not super hard?
Have not done it personally, but a friend without apnea decided to try CPAP just to see if it improved his sleep quality. He reports it did and has been sticking with it, even though he probably does not have actual apnea. So can't be that hard! Apparently you can score quite a discount on a used machine online, and apparently BiPAP is more comfortable than CPAP. I think the cost of keeping your eyes open for a good deal and trying it out are quite low. The noise can take some getting used to for a partner.
Otherwise SnoreLab is an app I've used; I think if you don't upgrade to the paid version they eventually offer you 50% off and its a reasonable price. Picking up a fitbit or OURA or something that can monitor your sleep is also a small cost in the grand scheme of things, though obviously take their specific numbers with a grain of salt.
One thing you might want to try- that sounds absolutely ridiculous- is mouth taping. Literally just get a role of medical tape and put a small piece over your lips (I used about a 3cm by 3cm square in the center of my lips). I did it for about a year, and am considering starting again. Though anecdotally I've heard it can make grinding worse.
I sleep with a CPAP and its absolutely not a hassle for me. Took about a week to get used to it, which didn't even impact my ability to fall asleep. Just in the way that any new part of a sleep routine would be a little weird.
Totally changed my life as far as making me more alert and happy during the day.
A lot of people (including myself) can get by with a nose-only mask that is minimal hassle and easy to adjust to. In terms of initial testing, beyond looking at snoring, you could also get a recording pulse oximeter and see if your breathing stops long enough to affect your o2 saturation. If you're willing to spend $150, there are a few companies that can do at-home apnea testing (e.g. easybreathe).
If you just want to jump in, and skip all that, (THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE) you could buy a used machine from craigslist for a few hundred dollars and give it a shot. Assuming you buy a data-capable machine that records your breathing data to an SD card, there are open source programs (sleepyhead, oscar) that will track your AHI and then you can adjust pressures, etc, on your own.
I'm in kind of worst-of-both-worlds on CPAP. I have the apnea, and I can cook up home experiments with a pulse ox monitor (that records levels overnight) that show that the CPAP raises my oxygen when I sleep. And I fall asleep far less often in the late afternoon. But it doesn't fill me with amazing morning energy, like some people report. Summary: medically called-for, but not totally life-changing, and fairly annoying to use.
My dreams are quite vivid and bizarre, and fairly often frightening. Although they're fortunately not as distressing as yours appear to be, I've often wished that I could somehow make them less vivid.
When I'm aware that I'm dreaming, I find dreams much less frightening and draining (although I have discovered that I *can* experience physical pain even in dreams.)
I certainly can't achieve lucidity reliably--only around once per week so far. But the method of intending to have lucid dreams and doing periodic "reality checks" during the day has been at least somewhat effective for me.
There are many online resources (including a subreddit) devoted to advice on lucid dreaming that I've found helpful.
I tried it but I couldn't really get a grip of it and it felt kind of derealizationary to always "reality check" when wake. I guess it might be worth the effort since my issue is so severe.
I’ll also note that I ocxasionally use lucid dreaming techniques to manage my nightmares, and have found it reasonably effective. That said, it tends to be infrequent enough for me that I don’t stick with a regimen; I use it for a couple days and the novelty seems to make it effective, and then both the efficacy and the nightmares tend to fade for me.
I hope this isn't too obvious but: my nightmares were a much bigger problem when I was working a late shift and so would eat right before bed. Now I avoid eating within about three hours of going to bed and it is much better.
I don’t recommend marijuana or its derivatives for this; the two most devoted cannabis users I know complain of seriously disturbed sleep and nightmares. Of course, they believe that the cannabis helps, but I note that they just keep using it and they just keep complaining of chronic anxiety about sleep and terrible sleep.
Like many people who self-medicate with recreational drugs, I think there’s a good bit of self-deception going on about how much their problems are caused by the supposed coping mechanisms for those problems.
Magnesium supplementation is known to often produce much more intense dreams, so I expect a diet high in magnesium, or if blood serum levels of magnesium are really high, it might have the same effect. Maybe something worth checking in your diet and/or blood tests.
> Sleep apnea might be the issue but it seems to be lots of time and effort to investigate it and not much to do to fix it.
You can visit a doctor (I forgot what is the name of specialization, perhaps ask your general practitioner), they will give you a small device that you will put on your finger and turn on when you go sleep. The next day you return the device to the doctor, they will print the logs and tell you whether you have sleep apnea and how serious it is.
If you have sleep apnea, you may want to try this: https://www.velumount.de/de -- literally a piece of wire that you put in your mouth before you go sleep; it will keep your breathing pathways open during the night. The training is quite unpleasant, but when you get used to it (like, after a week), it is super convenient. It makes no sound, requires no power source, it's just a stupid piece of wire. (Doesn't work for everyone, you may want to check with the measuring device again.)
Lucid dreaming forums recommended vitamin B6 to induce lucid dreaming and I can confirm from personal experience that it works. Taking >25mg of vitamin B6 right before bed will cause lucid dreaming. Since you want the opposite of that you might want to check the dose on your vitamins and reduce the B6 or take it first thing in the morning instead of the evening.
Eating a lot of bell peppers (which are very high in B6) at dinner can also cause lucid dreaming for me.
It's not hard to do a quick check of whether you have sleep apnea. Put your phone by your pillow and do an audio recording of your night breathing. Display recording as a graph of sound volume, and scroll through looking for irregularities. You're looking for periods of no breathing sounds at all for 30+ seconds, following by gasping sounds. Serious sleep apnea involves having several of these periods per hour -- you're not looking for a needle in a haystack. Patches of loud snoring are a good place to look -- listen to audio for periods where there's in interruption of the big snore spikes. Or have your significant other give a listen.
Huh, are people using disinfectant spray at the gym more often now than they were before the pandemic? It always struck me as a weird thing people did at the gym, but they always have.
Thankfully, these days I'm wearing a mask, so I can avoid the worst of that, as well as the spray deodorants in the locker room (which feel like they should be banned, but there's probably a more careful take).
I never saw it happen at the gym pre-coronavirus but now (at the two gyms I've been to), it's supposed to be mandatory before and after using equipment.
Interesting! I'm fairly confident that the gym I went to ten years ago had signs everywhere saying "remember to spray and wipe down your bench/mat after use". I was in California then and moved to suburban Texas a few years later. I can't recall whether I've ever seen anyone spray a bench/mat in Texas or not - it just didn't particularly stick out to me as a behavior to notice. (My gym requires everyone to have a towel they put down on the bench/mat.)
Why is it weird? Forget about COVID, people with nonideal personal hygeine habits walk around with assorted strains of E. coli on their hands, and who needs that shit (literally)?
Very true. But I don't know that it's more relevant at the gym than on the subway or every time you open a door. Maybe it's just easier to deal with there, and the fact that sweat is involved makes it feel that much more of an issue.
Don't really follow that argument. It's surely far more important for the surgeon to wash his hands before work than the cook, but if the surgeon doesn't that's no argument that the cook needn't.
Its rather easy to ride a subway without touching anything with your hands than to use the gym. Maybe you could use a treadmill without touching anything but most equipment requires you to touch something.
I agree with this when it comes to COVID, but wondering if you considered other medical issues like MRSA? (totally possible the disinfectant doesn't help with that either but it seems like a condition that should really be avoided).
As long as its done for a real reason. If people are dying from MRSA in gyms and spraying stops it then fine. But otherwise don't do things just for the sake of doing something as it will likely have unintended consequences.
I'm trying to improve my scheduling/productivity/todo-list whatever. I'm getting confused trying to figure out which activities would be "best" to do.
For example, I think it sounds pretty obvious that I should first schedule whatever activity would provide me the most benefit, and after that schedule whatever activity would provide me the second most benefit, etc.
But then I think of things like exercising: I think that getting 1% stronger is just never going to be the best thing I can do in a given day, but if I _never_ do it, then I never get stronger.
Another example is something like learning first aid. I should learn first aid, but it just never seems to be enough of a priority compared to other tasks.
Ideally, I'm hoping that someone somewhere has created some sort of formula, where I can just plug in some numbers, and the formula will tell me which activities I should perform, how often, and for what amount of time. Is there some self-help book that deals with topics like this? I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel.
(If you're not interested in self improvement, just pretend that I asked this question about which EA causes to donate to.)
You could integrate the benefit over an arbitrary amount of time. Being 1% stronger tomorrow is probably not that important, being 1% stronger and healthier for the next ten years is kind of a huge deal - while the benefit of most other stuff you can do will fall off quickly.
You have a limited amount of time and energy and an unlimited amount of useful things to do. It's possible you'll never learn first aid and that's a valid tradeoff against whatever else you're doing in your life.
>You could integrate the benefit over an arbitrary amount of time. Being 1% stronger tomorrow is probably not that important, being 1% stronger and healthier for the next ten years is kind of a huge deal - while the benefit of most other stuff you can do will fall off quickly.
Oh, that's a good way to think about it. I think I intuitively realized this, since I still try to exercise every day, but it's good to be able to think about costs/benefits in mathematical terms, since then I can apply the same reasoning to other things too.
>You have a limited amount of time and energy and an unlimited amount of useful things to do. It's possible you'll never learn first aid and that's a valid tradeoff against whatever else you're doing in your life.
I was thinking about that in terms of P(injury) * cost of injury. I might never need first aid, but if I do need it, I might _really_ need it.
Also, there are more ephemeral benefits. For instance, knowing first aid can be a signal of competence and status. (Note to self: Find ways to subtly drop hints that I know first aid, during conversations.)
In terms of fitness, its not a matter of just being 1% stronger for the next ten years. Rather, the gains are going to be additive -- so more like 1.01^X, where X is the number of consecutive weeks you're going to the gym. Obviously the gains will become asymptotic at some point, but it certainly wouldn't be outrageous to add 50-100% strength over the first year if you're consistent.
Perhaps you are mis-measuring "best" in your own mind. I can see two ways that may be happening. One is conscious, and the other unconsciously. Some part of you may be determining that "best" is what you actually find yourself doing instead of exercising or whatever you want to be doing instead. We allow our brains to "trick" us into doing the things we really want to do. Some part of your brain is valuing those activities much higher than exercise or whatever. Alternately, you may be correctly valuing what else you spend your time on, but you just don't like the results. For instance, I want to do a variety of things that are not related to my job, but I find myself spending a lot more of my time working than I would want. The reality is that my job is important to me and my family, and I am likely correctly valuing my time towards work - because it pays for our bills and our standard of living, and the amount of work I do is likely well in line with the requirements of the job.
In either case, I think a good option for you may be to actually evaluate the pros and cons of what you do and what you think you want to do. Be brutally honest with yourself, hold nothing back from consideration. Allow yourself to judge the value of fun or recreation (or whatever you end up doing that you feel isn't productive), and not just the practical end results of your approach. I did something like this with exercise, and one of my conclusions was that I hated the time I spent actively exercising when I did it solely for the sake of improving my strength and health. On the other hand, I really enjoyed exercise when I could combine it with something I enjoyed and it was a byproduct of that enjoyment (playing sports, riding bikes with family, etc.). So, knowing that I really loathed going to the gym, I stopped fighting myself about that type of exercise and instead try to find ways to be active that feels less like a chore and/or less pointless.
One piece that seems to be missing from your decision making is what YOU think is best based on personal or emotional criteria. I don't think there is a completely rational answer to your question and you need to explicitly define your values and priorities. I am partial to the writing of Cal Newport and you may find his concept of the Deep Life interesting. Here is a short summary of how he breaks down his goals and priorities: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/04/20/cultivating-a-deep-life/
Often times, when it comes to habits or productivity, it's more important to do anything than to do the most important thing. You have to get the ball rolling first then decide where it needs to go.
Ah. To restate: poly includes people who insist on multiple partners, but also people who might simply prefer that but would do monogamy with a partner who insisted on it?
Yes - and my sense is that this is quite common. And not necessarily easy to distinguish from "polysaturated at one" (that means doesn’t have time to have more than one partner).
Important background note - some people instinctively find mono/poly to be an identity issue ie you *are* one or the other. Others instinctively think it is more a consequence of cultural factors and deliberate lifestyle choice. This often causes confusion when people talk from opposite sides of this instinct. The are endless Reddit threads arguing about this.
My working hypothesis is that a lot of people are (naturally) ambiamorous and they tend to default to the second category above. Of course in a monogamous society those people happily act monogamously.
I’d love to know the rough percentages of poly/mono/ambi!
Your identify frame is good, I think. Not that I'm dating, but if I were I think I would have trouble trusting that someone who called themselves poly would *mean it* if they said they were willing to settle down just with me. But if they said something like, "Well, my last relationship was open but that's not a thing for me", then I wouldn't be as worried. If it's one of the nouns you assign to yourself that's a big deal. If it's important enough to them that they identify that way, then after a while they'd probably resent me and give me the ultimatum. After all, to them, monogamy is old-fashioned or silly or choose your own somewhat derogatory or condescending adjective.
But then, in real life I've encountered this twice (that I know of), each time with a wife with small kids giving a husband an ultimatum. In one case the husband said yes and the marriage lasted another three years before it broke up, in the other the husband said no and the marriage ended immediately. Being an old-fashioned married guy, that leaves me with pretty negative associations.
Desperate? ( I kid, I kid.) That's an unusual thing to be agnostic about, though. Personally I'm in the "Not buying it" camp when it comes to poly, so I'm probably projecting my own feelings here.
That whole thread was kind of interesting. Most of the guys were poly libertine types and most of the women were monogamous Christians, with the obvious exception of Aella the Empress of Whore Island. I wonder if there's some survivorship bias on display.
Did anyone shoot their shot? I filled out Aella's survey for the hell of it. Expecting a call any minute now. Put me in coach, I'm ready.
Anyone know anyone at Lancaster University that is interested in EA/rationalism? Was thinking about starting an EA society here but would like to do it with someone, not just on my own.
Is anyone else into cold water swimming? I live on the Mediterranean and I have continued swimming this winter and it is very satisfying. I've dug into what I can find online, and it seems like there are some health benefits. But I get a ringing in my ears when my body temperature drops too much. Does anyone know what would cause this? I am swimming breast stroke with head above water, so it is not from the cold in the ears. It definitely comes with the hypothermia. Do you think mild to moderate hypothermia is bad?
I suspect that vasoconstriction is causing reduced blood flow to your inner ear, and the ringing could be a sign that your cochlear cells aren't getting enough oxygen. As someone who lost most of their hearing from what was possibly an ischemic stroke near the auditory nerve, let me tell you: do NOT take this lightly. Inner ear damage can never be fixed.
I have a pretty good memory, but I’m significantly worse at remembering people’s names. Characters from books? Fine! Only actual people. It’s super lame.
I’ve asked people I know for techniques, and I try to practice things like repeating their name three times in the first minute and associating it with something, but with my small sample it doesn’t seem to have helped.
Any ideas for what I should try next? I feel awful about not remembering people’s names, and it’s a modest handicap socially and at work.
If you have the opportunity to introduce them to someone else by name shortly after meeting them, do so - I find linking people I don't know with people I do helps scaffold the knowledge
A technique is to visualize something that has to do with the name combined with their face. Say you meet a man with thick eyebrows that is named Peter. Then you imagine a tiny Peter Pan jumping on his eyebrows. Or a woman with a big chin named Rose. Then you imagine a rose growing on her chin.
I find I can't remember someone's name until I've seen it written down. So it might help to get their business card, their email, Facebook or something?
That helps some of the time, for sure. But sometimes I'm in a context where people wouldn't even offer each other business cards (such as an Orthodox Shabbat dinner) and even though we play name games I cannot for the life of me retain them.
Since you can remember the names of characters from stories: Write your own simple story that admits many characters, or a set of stories, and when you meet someone, embed them into the story by name
I find having a roster on hand super helpful (I use this for teaching). A lot of the time I can figure out their name by process of elimination, and being able to check it as often as I want helps me both reinforce it and feel more comfortable
Let's give two scenarios: a man is willing to spend $10,000 purely for the purpose of making himself more dateable. He has a net worth of greater than $500,000 but less than a million
A man is willing to spend $100,000 for the purpose of making himself more dateable. He has a net worth of between 5 and ten million.
The answer would depend on your weaknesses and strengths.
What specifically is unattractive about you: fat? bad body posture? unpleasant voice? no idea how to talk to people? aggressive? a doormat? just no idea how to find potential dates? no idea how to ask them out? feel generally unworthy? -- you obviously need to fix the problem you have, not the problem you don't have.
Strenghts: if I tell you what to do, will you actually do it? or do you need a personal trainer who will make sure you are doing every day all the necessary things? can I just give you the right book and tell you to read it and come back to me for more advice when you are done? -- this may determine how expensive the treatment will be. (The cheaper it is, the more things you can fix. On the other hand, maybe there is some training camp that would fix several things at once, such as make you eat better *and* exercise.)
If you don't know, maybe the first money could be spent to find out. Not sure how exactly to do that, maybe just pay some people to give you a honest opinion? (*Some* people, because not everyone is honest, and different people pay attention to different things.)
I've got physical training / diet stuff covered. I lift weights intensively 3/ week and I eat like a health freak. I'm not at my ideal weight / shape yet (I'd like to be heavier with lower bodyfat %), but I'm happy with my rate of progress. I have some speech issues which I can force away when I pay attention, I add too many filler words and occasionally stutter in casual conversation but I have good reason to believe I'm a significantly above average public speaker / debater, so I may need to work on that but I've got the material on hand at least. I'm on the spectrum and in any situation where I am meeting people I don't know I'm tense and uncomfortable. In some situations I can take that discomfort and use it for energy (debate, vocal performance), but as of yet I just hate dating. Being in a relationship is great, dating sucks.
If you tell me what to do I might do it if it makes sense.
As far as I know I'm not off-putting or repugnant, I just seem to need more oomph factor for attracting people and then keeping them interested. I'm not trying to buy myself up to basic adequacy, I'm trying to figure out how arbitrage money for hotness (I am also doing things that don't require money but I figure why not use a tool that's available).
Thanks for the data. Yes, when the low-hanging fruit is picked, it is less obvious what to do next.
With regards to speech, there is Toastmasters, but when I tried it, it seemed like an enormous waste of time. (People listen to you making speech and give you feedback, but in turn you are expected to listen to others and give them feedback, and that is the huge waste of time.) One possibility could be to join and try to complete everything at the highest possible speed. Another possibility is to pay someone for giving you the same kind of feedback.
With regards to tension and discomfort, maybe try practicing loving-kindness? The idea is that many of our thoughts about others are just projections (we expect other people to feel what we feel). So maybe practice having loving thoughts, and maybe that will translate to you expecting the same from the others, and then there is no reason to be tense. You might do some bullshit thing like looking at your date and thinking "my mind keeps sending you waves of warm love" and who knows, it might stimulate some mirror neurons in your brain to feel loved. Also it might send some unconscious signals that the other person will pick.
Another psychological trick is imagining that you are someone else, like someone who wouldn't have a problem in given situation. A specific person, or Superman, or a giant robot.
Also, a standard advice is to spend more time listening than talking. Being actually listened to is a rare opportunity, your date may appreciate it. Don't make it an interrogation; just answer all their questions briefly, and ask "what about you?", and then ask followup questions.
Sorry, these are not the ideas how to spend money. What others said, like clothes, perfume, hair, shoes. Maybe some CBT therapy about comfort when talking.
1.) Buy good clothes, perfume, get your hair done, etc and get them tailored for your style. If you're ignorant of how to dress then purchase the services of a style consultant. They're not that expensive.
2.) Exercise to get in shape. Ideally muscular and toned but at the very least athletically decent and not overweight.
3.) Aesthetic surgery. Fix your nose, get your acne or prominent warts taken off, tighten your skin, etc.
4.) Social familiarity. Go out to some classes, perhaps get a psychologist, make sure you're comfortable handling a situation. There are also dating coaches who are not toxic types you can employ.
If you don't think clothes and matter then look at Matt Yglesias (before he lost weight) or DJ Khaled. Both of them were basically obese. But while they're not winning any sexiest man alive awards they still look a lot better than the average person. Why? They spend a lot of money on looking good because it's a part of their profession. It really is something you can do almost instantly.
1) Is solid advice. It's something I've known matters, but the across the board emphasis on a fashion upgrade in the advice I've seen here makes me realize I've been leaving lots of gains on the table.
2) I'm good here. I'm not looking for "toned" as my aesthetic, I'm going more for a power-lifter physique, but I think that'll work well.
3) I got braces as a child, and I don't think I'll change anything for now. A few years down the line I might get more hair put on my head as the treatments get more advanced.
4) As you hint a bit, this area is a bit of a grifter's paradise. I'd happily give money for good advice, and training on social skills etc., but it's not trivial to recognize quality.
Overall, thanks for the advice, good to get more perspectives.
The best improvement money can buy is soap and a decent haircut. After that clean clothes that fit well and are at least somewhat stylish. You can probably do these steps for under $100, but certainly under $500.
After that it's a matter of how far away from datable you think you (or the person in question) are and how much you're willing to spend.
No amount of money can turn you into a different person, but there are a lot of other steps you can take at various levels of money to improve your external appearance. Clothing and accessories (jewelry, cars, housing) that show good taste and wealth could help, as could a dating coach/personal trainer/cool friend to give specific advice on how to improve in different areas.
Seconding Mr. Doolittle's suggestions for low-hanging fruit in terms of clothes and grooming.
Next, consider taking up a couple interesting hobbies. These should be things that genuinely interest you, are also likely to be interesting to many of the sort of people you're interested in dating, and ideally should be both at least somewhat social (gets you out meeting and interacting with new people on a regular basis) and at least somewhat physically active (gets you some physical activity "for free" to improve your physical fitness).
The primary goal here is to make you more interesting to prospective partners, with secondary goals of giving you opportunities to expand your social circles (both broadening your horizons and exposing you to potential partners) and practicing casual-friendly social interactions to improve your social skills. Even if you meet your dating partners through other channels, having a hobby your date finds interesting (either a hobby she shares or an activity she might be interested in trying) is going to give you more stuff to talk about on a first or second date and may offer up attractive activities to do together on a third or subsequent date (e.g. offer to take her stargazing or paragliding or rock climbing or whatever).
I'd guess two such hobbies would be fairly close to optimal. Much more than that and you risk spreading yourself too thin to really get into any of them, but doing more than one potentially doubles the benefits in terms of social horizons and potential partners who might find it interesting, as well as mitigating the risk of coming off as having excessively narrow+deep interests (which tends to be unappealing to neurotypicals, who make up a very large majority of the population).
Note also that it's critical that these be activities you genuinely enjoy, and it's okay to try out several in succession to find ones you can get into. If you're just going through the motions to try to become more interesting, it's not going to have much of the desired effect, and it's going to be a tedious and expensive time sink.
I'm in a bit of an unfortunate situation with regards to my hobbies. My "get out of the house" hobbies include lifting weights, tabletop rpgs, boardgames, and shooting rifles, which all skew pretty heavily male. They're tied into my current friend and family interactions, so it'd be difficult to swap one out. It's good advice generally though, thanks for your input. Money can translate into leisure can translate into hobbies can translate into new social connections.
Depends on your sex, but assuming you're a man looking for a woman, my advice would be:
1. Hire a consultant for a few hours to educate you on how to dress, and help you assemble a basic flexible wardrobe that can be mixed in various ways. Big department stores will sometimes have a line on this. Cost you a a few $hundred for the time and a few $hundred to assemble the wardrobe. Don't skimp on the quality.
2. Figure out how to optimize your posture and walk. Sometimes that can be done by doing a little club martial arts or gymnastics, both of which care very much about posture and movement. Or maybe train a little in modern dance, which also does.
3. Put yourself in some kind of volunteer modest leadership position, and learn how to look people in the eye, smile, be witty and graceful, patient, confident but not shrill or arrogant, how to listen with your full attention but also make definite decisions with the seat of your pants and without whining or fussing over spreadsheets full of bar graphs.
4. Pre-sample your local entertainment options. Frequent a modest number of local restaurants, cultural and outdoor attractions, sights, et cetera, in a range of time and money costs, so you have a definite idea of what they're like. That way when you ask a woman for a date, you don't just say something lame like "Uh...wanna go out sometimes? We could...I dunno..get coffee and talk or walk or...like, whatever you want!" Instead you'll say "Hey! The planetarium is having a show on supernovae this Saturday, and I think it will be great. Would you like to join me?" or "Gee, it's pretty late, would you like to get dinner? I know a pretty good Mexican place over on 4th street with quite reasonable prices." Crisp, friendly, not pushy but also definite.
If you do all these things I think you can earn quite modestly, be fat and have a hook nose and scars, and you will still do very well with most women, who tend to be attracted to confidence, decision, grace, wit, carriage, and courtesy.
1) Everyone agrees, clothes are one of the best ways to turn $ into value. I have a few outfits that are solid, but they haven't been tailored in a while and the rest of my wardrobe is lacking. I'd have to find the right consultant, failing that I have family whose aesthetic judgement I'd trust.
2) I'll consider this reinforcement for my existing emphasis on fixing these issues. In my case it's mostly been improving ergonomics, stretches and lifting weights, but my posture is much better than in the past. Not really a money in / hotness out situation though, it's self discipline.
3) I know plenty of people in leadership positions that aren't good at these things, and for the rest of the pattern it seems like causation could easily flow the other direction. That said it's not wrong to say that running a project would make a dude hotter.
4) Good point. Getting good on casual leisure could pay dividends.
The last bit is a bit "draw the rest of the owl," lol. Just be confident, decisive, graceful, witty, and courteous. I'm working on it, but I think that money is at most a very small assist on most of these.
There are plenty of dress/style consultants out there. This is how Hollywood movie stars look so good even in their 70s and after a lifetime of drugs and dissipation. You might try the big department or clothings stores for leads, and I would look for someone who is in the business full-time, i.e. who earns a living at it.
Yes, getting a leadership position doesn't *guarantee* you will develop those personality qualities, any more than reading a textbook gauarantees you'll master algebra. But it gives you the opportunity and experience to develop those characteristics, if you have it in you, and if you put in the work.
As you point out in the last paragraph, you can't very well simply demand of yourself "be witty and graceful, decisive but patient with people" -- because those are abstract statements, and your limbic system has no idea how to translate those abstractions to concrete neural wiring changes.
However, if you put yourself in a position where you are called upon to be witty, graceful, decisive but patient with people, et cetera, and you regularly reflect on your performance, you will teach your brain how to do the job willy nilly. There was a fad in the 70s related to a book by Timothy Gallwey called "Inner Tennis" which made the relatively obvious point that the brain can learn *without* explicit instructions -- provided you (1) put it in a situation that tests its abilities, and (2) give it immediate and clear feedback of whether it's doing what it's supposed to do.
That's the purpose of putting yourself in a position of modest volunteer leadership: it necessarily challenges your ability to exhibit those characteristics, and if you try to do so, and promptly reflect on your successes and failure, you will get better at it -- without having to write out and consciously execute some silly pop-psych checklist that purports to functionally implement "witty and graceful."
I don't know what "draw the rest of the owl" means, sorry. Not familiar with that turn of phrase.
I fully agree that money is a modest assist to the process of burnishing one's sexual attractivity -- if what you're looking for is to attract the kind of women who evaluate a man based on his personality and character. That's the good news. It doesn't take a big pile of cash to be the kind of man whom all the women in a room of that nature instinctively evaluate the moment he walks in, and after he speaks a few sentences, because he exudes confidence, grace, and the power of self-command.
On the other hand, if one is simply interested in attracting gold-diggers, women who will value you strictly for the cash stipend you can provide, then the task is far simpler, although it requires much more money: just buy a flash car, expensive anything, and be seen to spend freely. You will attract that kind of woman in no time flat.
Theoretically free. You can increase your mate value by sharing resources. This doesn't mean you need more resources, just that you're willing to share the resources you have.
I would prefer more specific advice. Interpreted broadly your post covers everything from the default of paying for dinner to sugar-daddyism, which I have no interest in.
Fair enough. I was definitely not thinking sugar-daddyism. I recognize that is absolutely not what you were looking for.
More along the lines of share what you can with those close to you. It's a vague recommendation because it has a vague execution. Ive seen people bring treats in for their department at work, not necessarily the whole office. Buy a round for your friends at the bar. Avoid things that look irresponsible with your resources when doing it though. Don't buy a round for the whole bar. (Or do, may show that you have an ass tonne of resources)
As mentioned by other commenters, *effort* in physical presentation matters to most heterosexual women. Deliberate personal grooming and clean, properly-fitting clothing go a long way, and many/most women will *very* cheerfully overlook a less-than-athletic body if the man seems to be thoughtfully making the best of what he has.
As other people mentioned, you can hire a style consultant to help steer you away from big turn-offs, but you don't want them to stuff you into clothes that are too trendy/expensive/pretentious.
So before you hire anyone, try to notice what *you* think looks good on other men with a similar body type to yours (both IRL and celebrities).
It might come down to some simple principles like "patterned collared shirts look more 'finished' than plain t-shirts," or, "that kind of sweater gives an impression of buff confidence," in which case you might not need a stylist to accumulate those things. But even if you do decide to work with a stylist, you'll probably be happier with their suggestions if you give them a sense of what you find appealing.
Next, you said your hobbies skew traditionally male. Is there any way you can *sincerely* interest yourself in activities that skew female? Partnered dancing comes first to mind: a beginner's class in ballroom/Latin/swing dancing might see you meeting (and physically interacting with) a lot of women. Depending on your locale, there might be local groups of people your age that meet at dance venues and are in dire need of you. Male partners are usually in HUGE demand, even if they're not especially skilled.
If your immediate reaction is "hell no I hate loud music and I'm horrifically, irredeemably uncoordinated," then you and I have similar feelings on the topic!
But if you can kinda-maybe picture yourself giggling through some steps with a woman, partnered dancing might be a great entry point and a way to build up some muscle memory confidence.
Next, do a little research on tips for dating profiles, update yours, and then have some objective female friends and/or strangers give their honest impression of your online dating profile(s). A lot of guys seem to think that putting any thought or effort into a dating profile comes across as "thirsty," but trust me: an effort to be charming really, *really* matters. Clever copy and thoughtfully good photos (NO DRIVER SEAT CAR SELFIES!) can make a *hugely* positive first impression.
Once you get a pretty good dating profile put together, consider paying for some of the premium membership tiers on dating sites / apps. Increased visibility and access to matches / messaging might help quite a lot.
Last, just some general unsolicited advice:
Be consciously aware that stupid random chance is a huge component of finding a partner.
While you can maximize your dating pool by working to be as appealing as possible, meeting a woman with whom you have mutual physical attraction and intellectual compatibility who shares some of your interests and has similar life goals and who's *also* single and *also* seeking and *also* lives in your region comes down to...whether or not that woman is online the same time you are. Sometimes she won't be!
Or she might be the first person who messages you!
In other words, by all means put some effort into being more datable, but don't get too discouraged if it doesn't instantly "work." Your very compatible future partner might be getting over a break-up right now and won't be ready to meet you for another three months. That's no reflection on you.
Hire a dating coach. This is a big glib but I think they can give you all the answers that other people in this thread have but customized to you.
Unfortunately the thing I found that made me more datable/attractive to women was being in a happy fulfilling relationship. I think that I subconsciously behaved more confident and self assured which people find attractive. I am a conventionally handsome man but not movie star hot so I don't how this would apply so someone who is not somewhat conventionally attractive (sounds like you are in shape which is like 75% of being conventionally attractive).
Being a person other people want to be around generally goes a long way to being datable once physical looks are covered. You should ask yourself honestly if people like being around you. This does not mean you have to be the life of the party. But do people (men or women) enjoy your company and want you around them? If the answer is no or just a small group of people then I would take a serious look at what behaviors you are doing that turn people off. If you have close friends they may have opinions on this. If you have close friends who have significant others who you are close with that is a great place to get advice or input.
The general consensus for building any skill is "practice", so spending a large amount of money going on a bunch of practice dates would probably make sense. Anecdotally, I'm polyamorous and I've definitely noticed my skills "levelled up" a lot from dating tons of people, but I doubt you need to go anywhere near that far (If you're open to it, spending a few months polyamorous will probably significantly accelerate this process, but that might be a bit too weird :))
Note that by this I just mean find a dating pool where you have success, and date a lot. Being open about it being a short-term fling should be fine. The main thing is to pay attention to what seems to go well, what seems to produce awkward silences, and just get over that nervousness that comes from not having a ton of experience.
In particular, since it's short term, you've got a lot more room to "be yourself", consequences are lower, and if you're sufficiently weird/confident you can just straight-up ask for feedback. It also gives you a lot more leeway to explore dating circles you might usually brush off because there's a lack of long-term chemistry: it's a lot easier to put up with someone for a handful of dates than a full relationship, which expands your available pool. And you might learn some new things about your likes, dislikes, and assumptions :)
What is your favorite niche strategy game or RPG and why? For this purpose we'll count Paradox games as niche but not Total War. But generally on the level of Slithering/Iceberg/Illwinter is what I am thinking about.
Currently I'm pretty into Shadows Of Forbidden Gods, an actual game inspired by infamous kickstarter vaporware That Which Sleeps. Basically playing an elder god trying to conquer the world. The UI is eh and it is still in early access but the concept is cool and some of the gods have great themeing.
Previously I was playing Star Dynasties, mostly so I could finally get a turn 3 win. The game is supposed to take 50-200 turns. The game needs at least 3-4 DLC or 2 major expansions to really have some meat on the, pretty good, bones.
I also spent quite a bit of time on Fields Of Glory 2, a classical turn based ancient world battle system. They released a Medieval sequel relatively recently but I haven't bought it yet. Their unit definition system is quite good and for a turn based game it feels very accurate to classical warfare. Basically if Total War is too arcadey, even the older games. For instance the limited value of flanking and the overly flexible freedom of movement of cavalry. I got into it because you can load the battles of the grand strategy-esque Field Of Glory: Empires into the original Field of Glory 2 to play them out instead of autoresolve.
For RPGs I am still a huge Grim Dawn fan, basically Diablo with many more options.
Currently most hyped for the release of Distant Worlds 2 and cautiously optimistic about Victoria 3.
Do really old games count if they were niche even at the time? Alien Legacy (publisher: Sierra Online) was a fantastic space strategy game hybridized with an RPG-ish story. It was a bit buggy though and had a tendency to crash more and more often as you got towards the end of a playthrough. I would love it if it ever got re-released on GoG or something, but I suspect it is way too obscure.
Escape Velocity is a 1996 Mac Shareware game of space trading/piracy with lot of RPG elements (questing, an elaborate ship-upgrading system). It's kind of a cult classic. The company that made it no longer exists and won't mind if you download it from Abandonia.
I played a very similar style game many years ago. I always forget the name, maybe Starport GE. There's a mess of late 90s to mid 2000s games in that genre that are all quite fun. Lot of people got their start with Escape Velocity.
If you liked Escape Velocity, there's a spiritual successor named Endless Sky. It's actively maintained, free (both as in beer and as in Freedom), and definitely runs on your computer.
I get the feeling you’re looking for video games, but on the off chance you aren’t, “Quoridor” is an excellent strategy board game. Much like Go or Othello it manages to have a pretty interesting and deep strategy despite only having about 3 rules.
Kohan (Immortal Sovereigns and Ahriman's Gift) are company-based lower-micromanagement RTS games with a Persian flavor. Yeah, it's an RTS, but in some ways it blurs the lines.
Master of Orion (the 1993 original) is amazing, and there's a modern open-source Java re-implementation which was pretty much Done Right, called Remnants of the Precursors. https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors
Ever want to play in a galaxy of 10,000 stars with 49 opponents of varying AI strength? You can!
MoO and Ray's remake do nothing for me personally but damn Kohan was so cool. Back when I was working on an opensource Majesty inspired game I got pretty into Kohan because it had some cool mechanics I wanted to repurpose.
Battle Realms. It was an RTS with a fairly unique unit production mechanic. Peasant huts constantly spawn peasants, who are the basic workers. To produce swordsman or archers or whatever you would build the appropriate building and then have a peasant train there. So peasants trained at a dojo become swordsmen, while peasants trained at a archery range become archers. But then you could further train the already trained soldiers, so by sending the swordsman to an alchemy lab you'd get a cannoneer, and sending an archer to the dojo would get you a ninja guy or whatever. It was fun to mix and match to see what units you could get.
It also featured four unique factions with crazy abilities (including werewolves). It was a great little game, very flavorful and had a lot of depth.
There's a "remastered" version available on Steam called Battle Realms: Zen Edition. I don't think they did much with the graphics, just made it compatible with modern OS's and such.
Fantastic world, writing, sense of humor, very enjoyable gameplay, huge map (you'll need to take notes about coordinates of everything). Don't think I've ever seen the like.
Crazy good names of characters and places. Try this on your tongue: Dytra al-Desti, Ma-Eshira, Shal-Shellan, Tan-Iricid, Sha-Yesh. Do you want to play it yet, just to be immersed in a world that's all named like this?
One of the most striking things about this world is that many subplots are about big things. This is not your "bring this note to X who lives in Y and he will give you Z to unlock W" RPG. Helping fix a race's identity problem, restoring the flow of energy that gives sight to creatures of a certain race living in a certain place (without this energy they are blind), preventing an invasion of really unpleasant aliens planning to use one of the sentient races on this planet as food. These are all subplots. (There's more.)
Do save often if you want to try it. There are all kinds of ways to die, though the only bug that causes it to crash that I know of is at the very end, in the fight with the boss (at a point where it doesn't matter).
I'm also very fond of "Betrayal at Krondor" (1993). Good writing (I think they had Raymond Feist assist them), good music, very clean gameplay. The combat engine was so good that they tried to reuse it in another game (which, IMHO, came out mind-numbingly boring). I'm also fond of the sequel, "The Return to Krondor", for its story, but it really does not have such a great feel compared to the first game.
Played Twilight Struggle recently and it's pretty good. Very flavorful, the card mechanics make for very interesting decisions, and the Defcon system is a neat way to reflect the cold war brinksmanship where both sides don't actually want to start ww3. Get the digital version, so you don't have to fiddle with dozens of tiny tokens.
I really like TS, but it's worth warning that it's got some rough edges which can make it feel less strategic than it is. To some degree if you don't know what you're doing it can feel random and arbitrary at times between the war cards, coups, and realignment rolls.
(... also that whole mechanic where if your opponent intentionally triggers WW3 on your turn, you lose because it's your turn)
Defcon Suicide is the one mechanic I hate about TS, but the digital version will actually warn you if you try to play a card that has a risk of you losing by Defcon. They thought of everything!
It takes a little time to get a handle on the tools you have, but since your objective is almost always "win control of battleground countries" I didn't have much trouble with getting lost.
Oh man, I backed That Which Sleeps, just for enough to get a copy and regular updates that became less and less regular :(
As for niche games the nichiest (??) is probably one particular mod of Starcraft 2 called Probe vs. Zealot 2, it's a 11 vs. 1 RTS where a bunch of probes run for their lives and collect resources for long enough to survive and eventually kill the zealot. Very fun asymmetrical game, never found anything else that quite scratches that itch.
Sins of a Solar Empire, in particular with the Distant Stars mod. The game is stretched in a weird tension between a proper 4X and a Warcraft 3-like hero RTS (with capital ships acting as heroes). Some interesting parts of the design:
- you can micro battles - often you should micro battles - but the AI is smart enough to use most abilities in a reasonably good way
- the game has explicit ANTI micro features, such as "shield mitigation" - ships getting focus fired receive a capped damage reduction, so the usual strategy of queueing a list of targets to focus is suboptimal; unit AI takes it into account and distributes fire
- the tech tree is super long, and the Distant Stars mod adds 4x the levels to each technology; this means you can spec into whatever combination of econ and units you fancy, and still not be maxed out late game
- a unique supply system lets you permanently buy bigger army caps in exchange for an income % debuff - making tall and wide gameplay both somewhat viable (you need more army to protect a bigger area)
After Entrenchment, but before the Rebellion expansion (which IMO ruined a lot of what made it unique), the game was centered around starbases - huge, customizable defensive structures that went from speedbumps to self-sufficient bastions requiring a late game deathball to contest. It was reasonably easy to retreat as long as you decided to do so ASAP. This turned the game into basically trench warfare in space, which got really interesting when there were multiple fronts to cover and you had to allocate your forces wisely, depending on what enemy factions were doing.
I think I enjoy SoaSE because it took away all the small-scale parts of RTS games - no running around with your marines so the zerglings won't eat them - while allowing direct control of units for pivotal battles, keeping your attention on empire management otherwise. It was an ambitious mess of a game, and it succeeded in exactly the parts of Stellaris's gameplay that Stellaris fails at.
Its very simple compared to contemporary games but I liked that. I wish someone would make a remake that was a bit more complex but kept the original feeling. CIV is of course similar but kind of goes in a different direction.
So the recent classified thread made me think about my skills and how applicable/useful they are. I am not currently looking for a job, but I might be sometime in the next 5ish years, and I'm sort of curious about how easy such a job search might be and what I might do in the meantime to make it easier.
I have a masters degree in a biological science and I currently work as a data scientist/statistician/coder in a research lab. I work almost exclusively in R, although I have some experience in python.
My work is basically taking the data from collection/entry and doing all the QAQC/organization, conducting the statistical analyses, generating figures for publication, and co-authoring manuscripts/reports.
I consider myself to be fluent in R to the point that, the limits on what I can do with it are basically how well I understand the goal. If I know what it is we are trying to accomplish, I can do it in R (with the major limitation that I haven't learned Shiny/dashboards/apps yet, although I'm planning on tackling that soonish). My experience with Python leads me to believe that I would probably be at a similar level of fluency in less than a month if it was my primary work language over that period.
I consider myself to be mostly in the "data science" sphere, but when I see job postings under that phrase, they cover an _enormous_ range of skills and experience levels. Some of them seem border line trivial and some of them seem to be completely beyond my set of skills (for example, the data scientist position Scott linked seems solidly outside my skills to the point that, if that was the norm for the job title, I would most definitely not consider myself a data scientist).
Is the skill set of "statistical coder" generally useful outside of academia? What skills should I be attempting to gain if I wanted to make myself more attractive to the private sector?
How familiar are you with job hunting? I ask because job advertisements habitually claim more things as "requirements" than are actually requirements, and this was totally not apparent to my on my first and second job search (it became clearer by the third one, which is all I've done so far outside of academia).
That said, I think that "statistical coder" might present itself a little thing if you don't have familiarity with more tools for living on multiple computers: I'm referring to git, or to containerization (docker, kubernetes if you can), or to having done anything the cloud (e.g. AzureML). It sounds like you find that aspect of programming easy, and I think the payoff of learning a little bit about a lot of technologies could be large.
A hypothetical future job hunt would be my first real job hunt post-academia, and while I've had a whole bunch of jobs within academia, none of them really required much hunting, they all kind of fell into my lap. In short: not very familiar at all.
I have a little bit of experience with git (I created a small R library for internal use that I published on github for labmates to easily be able to download it and keep up-to-date with any changes). As for containerization etc., my only experience is in using VMs/LXCs on a home server, and I haven't gotten around to trying docker yet. I do a lot of that kind of home tinkering (all my python experience is from home automation projects for example), but none of it is from official training/duties.
It sounds like working on ways to get experience in those kinds of things that are more outwardly legible would probably be useful though.
I also have a biological science master's, and I'd basically like to do what you're doing, but don't have any opportunities to gain skills on the computer side. Do you have any suggestions?
I taught myself R during my masters by forcing myself to do all my analyses and everything with the language, even when it would have been faster/easier to use either excel or a commercial stats package like JMP or something. I had previously tried to take classes in R and hadn't had much luck. For me personally, learning was much easier when I had a concrete and well defined goal that I was trying to achieve and to force myself to accomplish that goal using the tool I wanted to learn.
I realize that's not super useful advice since, if you don't already have such a task/goal, it's hard to find one. Barring that, I'd say see if the online/free classes work better for you than they did for me. Everything I've learned after my degree was on the job, and has always followed that same paradigm: we are trying to do something new, and I need to figure out how to do it in R.
For what it's worth, I'd say you put your finger on it in the the start of your 4th paragraph. What might be more attractive to future employers is a larger breadth (or if in biology greater depth) of familiarity with the science that lies behind the data, so you can understand the goals faster and more accurately.
For example, let's say I want to hire a data analyst for some massive clinical trial. If someone puts on their CV that they've *been* involved in the evaluation of clinical data -- even if it's just volunteering to do some small-scale work for an urgent care -- that's going to pique my interest more than a slight delta in the coding skills -- because I'm more concerned about clear communication among the team than sheer raw speed of any one team-member. Usually when biggish projects tank it's from crappy intra-team communication, not because one person or another was too slow at his job, so that's a big concern for higher-level managers when building a team.
While this seems very true to me, it's sort of bad news for me depending on how strictly hiring managers follow it. While I consider myself a quick study who can pick up new contexts quickly, my existing domain expertise is relatively narrow and has very very limited applications in the private sector.
Recently I started playing games made in the era of MSDOS. Partially because of nostalgia, partially because I was seeking inspiration for game development tutorials and it seemed to me that earlier games should be easier to imitate. Old games are often more difficult to play (every game a different UI), but were developed with nicer set of incentives (no micropayments, no DRM) and felt more diverse (first-person shooter was a genre, not a checkbox in the list of features). Anyway...
These are the games that I really enjoyed so far: Abuse; Bomberman / Dyna Blaster; Eye of the Beholder; Heretic; Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom; Legend of Kyrandia; WarCraft.
I was surprisingly disappointed by Populous, specifically Populous II. From my childhood I remembered it as an interesting and difficult game. But the problem is that there is a rather simple optimal strategy, and once you find it, all levels (well, at least the first 20 of them, I didn't play further) are quite easy and boring. Furthermore, the scoring is stupid, because it *penalizes* you for *winning quickly*. The goal at each level is to kill all enemy units, but the points are awarded for total units produced and total units killed (I think), so if you destroy your opponent quickly, you get few XP, but if the game stretches for long period of time in balance and then you succeed to win, you get many XP.
Legend of Kyrandia was a great series, especially the second one (Hand of Fate). I've not played the Populous games but it sounds like they might have been going for some early form of dynamic difficulty? If the XP is used to level up in some permanent way rather than just being your score, then finishing a level too fast means you're too good at the game, so making you under leveled for the next stage by giving you less XP could keep the game interesting. Since you found it annoying, and it sounds like things stayed too easy regardless they obviously didn't do a good job even if that was the intent, but that is part of the price you pay for playing old games. Some aspects of game-dev really have come a long way over the years.
In Populous 2 the concept of XP means simultaneously two things: how powerful spells you get, and how far you have progressed in the game. So the analogy would be... imagine that if you win a map too fast, you need to play it again several times (until you collect enough XP). On one hand you are under-leveled, but on the other hand you are stuck at map 1, which you have already proved you can complete quite easily. And you only proceed to map 2 when you gain *exactly* the same power as someone else would get for completing the map 1 really really slowly. The power and the map mean the same thing. This is a bad design decision. Especially when the ultimate strategy can be executed using the cheapest spells, so you do not even need more power to win. Later the things get more difficult, but you would need to win about a hundred (literally) easy levels first. I somehow didn't mind doing this as a kid, but now I just said no.
Games get easier once you know the optimal stratedy. Like, WarCraft is also now easier for me. The difference is that Populous punishes me for winning too easily; and punishes me not by making the game more difficult, but just by making it slower.
Some games were great for their time but had specific design decisions that would be patched out very quickly these days. Back then it wasn't that simple.
A math coprocessor is a good thing to have. I was writing graphics, math intensive - for the time - code in the late 80’s. Things became so much easier when I could target machines that had one.
Everyone always says "make a Pong clone". Terrible advice unless maybe you are planning to make an indie platformer? Perhaps all the advice was coming from that genre of developer so it made sense in the bubble?
Do you write game development tutorials?
On the second topic, games were more diverse because there were fewer, they were cheaper, and mega-corps hadn't got into it yet. We probably can't go back to when games seemed more diverse, well outside of a small hobbyist community maybe? But for commercial games no.
For tutorials, click on the link after my name. (Yeah, the blog title is stupid and non-obvious, I will change it later.) I wrote first two articles months ago, then I procrastinated with the next parts.
I assume a commercial company will usually do a research which type of games sells best, and produce more of that. If many companies do this, they will get similar results, assuming the research is solid. The hobbyists are free to do whatever they want, and no boss will judge them.
The games I have listed -- Abuse; Bomberman / Dyna Blaster; Eye of the Beholder; Heretic; Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom; Legend of Kyrandia; WarCraft -- are all hugely different, there is practically no similarity. But I guess if I keep playing more MSDOS games, at some moment it will become repetitive.
Does anyone know of good resources on the forgiveness of others, in particular the practical side (what it means, how to do it)? I'm most familiar with certain Christian and Buddhist teachings, but anything would help. Thanks!
(To clarify, this could be anything related to that bit in the Lord's Prayer where it says "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us".)
C. S. Lewis wrote an essay ("On Forgiveness") about the subject that you can find in the essay collection *The Weight of Glory*. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find it online anywhere, and it's not in my personal collection so I can't transcribe the most relevant passages. I'm sure you could find it at a library.
The essay collection *God in the Dock* has been put online by a kindly pirate, and I know that one of the essays in it is very relevant to the practical aspect of forgiveness: "The Trouble With X". It's not specifically about forgiveness, but I found reading it made it much easier for me to forgive others.
Hm. From the description, that seems more like instructions on how to de-escalate a war, but I'm looking for something more like how post-apocalyptic survivors can do environmental remediation when the entire landscape has been nuked. But I'll keep it in mind, thanks!
From the Bible, I think the most interesting passage on forgiveness is a parable Jesus tells in Matthew 18:21-35 - it relates a story of a man who is forgiven an absurd debt (like millions of dollars), who then turns around and shakes down someone who owes him the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars and throws him in prison when he doesn't pay.
The story ends with the master (the one owed millions) finding out and imprisoning the man saying: "You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?".
Ultimately, this is the Christian perspective on forgiveness - we are to forgive others not for a pragmatic reason, not because they "deserve it", but because God has forgiven us.
I've more or less been sold on the idea being a good one. But I don't know how to get there from here. How do I achieve a state where I don't feel the parties in question so much as owe me an apology? (Assume I'm already praying for grace as hard as my shriveled little toxic-waste-dump-site of an atheist heart will allow.)
Forgiveness is very, very difficult. I have no advice for you, but I can give you a quote from a novel, dealing with Satanism in contemporary (as it was in 1891) Paris, “Là-Bas” by the 19th century French fin de siècle (and ultimately Catholic revert) novelist J-K Huysmans. If you're not familiar with Gilles de Rais and his crimes, look it up here (content warning because the crimes are horrible, even by modern standards):
“He divulged every detail. The account was so formidable, so atrocious, that beneath their golden caps the bishops blanched. These priests, tempered in the fires of confessional, these judges who in that time of demonomania and murder had never heard more terrifying confessions, these prelates whom no depravity had ever astonished, made the sign of the Cross, and Jean de Malestroit rose and for very shame veiled the face of the Christ.
Then all lowered their heads, and without a word they listened. The Marshal, bathed in sweat, his face downcast, looked now at the crucifix whose invisible head and bristling crown of thorns gave their shapes to the veil.
He finished his narrative and broke down completely. Till now he had stood erect, speaking as if in a daze, recounting to himself, aloud, the memory of his ineradicable crimes. But at the end of the story his forces abandoned him. He fell on his knees and, shaken by terrific sobs, he cried, “O God, O my Redeemer, I beseech mercy and pardon!” Then the ferocious and haughty baron, the first of his caste no doubt, humiliated himself. He turned toward the people and said, weeping, “Ye, the parents of those whom I have so cruelly put to death, give, ah give me, the succour of your pious prayers!”
Then in its white splendour the soul of the Middle Ages burst forth radiant.
Jean de Malestroit left his seat and raised the accused, who was beating the flagstones with his despairing forehead. The judge in de Malestroit disappeared, the priest alone remained. He embraced the sinner who was repenting and lamenting his fault.
A shudder overran the audience when Jean de Malestroit, with Gilles's head on his breast, said to him, “Pray that the just and rightful wrath of the Most High be averted, weep that your tears may wash out the blood lust from your being!”
And with one accord everybody in the room knelt down and prayed for the assassin. When the orisons were hushed there was an instant of wild terror and commotion. Driven beyond human limits of horror and pity, the crowd tossed and surged. The judges of the Tribunal, silent, enervated, reconquered themselves.
…“Tell us, Durtal, how the people acted when Gilles de Rais was conducted to the stake.”
“Yes, tell us,” said Carhaix, his great eyes made watery by the smoke of his pipe.
“Well, you know, as a consequence of unheard-of crimes, the Marshal de Rais was condemned to be hanged and burned alive. After the sentence was passed, when he was brought back to his dungeon, he addressed a last appeal to the Bishop, Jean de Malestroit, beseeching the Bishop to intercede for him with the fathers and mothers of the children Gilles had so ferociously violated and put to death, to be present when he suffered.
“The people whose hearts he had lacerated wept with pity. They now saw in this demoniac noble only a poor man who lamented his crimes and was about to confront the Divine Wrath. The day of execution, by nine o'clock they were marching through the city in processional. They chanted psalms in the streets and took vows in the churches to fast three days in order to help assure the repose of the Marshal's soul.”
“Pretty far, as you see, from American lynch law,” said Des Hermies.”
And I've quoted this before, Let me give you another quote, this time from Chesterton’s “The Chief Mourner of Marne”, The Secret of Father Brown, 1927 (emphasis mine):
“But, hang it all,” cried Mallow, “you don’t expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing like this?”
“No,” said the priest; “but we have to be able to pardon it.”
He stood up abruptly and looked round at them.
“We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction,” he said. “We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, <strong>to console those who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real crimes; mean as St. Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came.”
“The dawn,” repeated Mallow doubtfully. “You mean hope – for him?”
“Yes,” replied the other. “Let me ask you one question. You are great ladies and men of honour and secure of yourselves; you would never, you can tell yourselves, stoop to such squalid reason as that. But tell me this. If any of you had so stooped, which of you, years afterwards, when you were old and rich and safe, would have been driven by conscience or confessor to tell such a story of yourself? You say you could not commit so base a crime. Could you confess so base a crime?” The others gathered their possessions together and drifted by twos and threes out of the room in silence. And Father Brown, also in silence, went back to the melancholy castle of Marne.”
For myself, I've found "The Screwtape Letters" very useful because it helps burst my bubble of self-righteousness. It's hard to point at the mote in another's eye when you have been made very aware of the beam in your own.
That is very old-fashioned, which works for the period of the stories (1920s-30s). Usually you'd expect him to wear a biretta, but that is strictly speaking choir dress:
Yeah. I guess it’s the new one. Mark Williams is the actor. He wears the brimmed one. Always tooling around his little community on his bicycle solving the murders that happen so often in that peaceful looking area.
Hm. Superficially, I could reject those stories because no one involved in my thing has even acknowledged that there might be something wrong with what they did. But I know that's not the real point. :-/ Similarly with pointing out that I expect that I could muster more forgiveness if Certain People were inexorably going to be burned alive. ... Although, hm again.
Maybe I could use one of those old-timey instructional books with Thirty-Three Illustrative Examples of Christian Forgiveness for the Edification of Young Minds, or something like that. :-)
I've dug up my copy of "The Screwtape Letters", and will try reading it with that attitude in mind. Thanks!
The "so-much-as-an-apology" comment makes me think there's disagreement about whether there's anything to *forgive* as such, as opposed to accept? Are you trying to approximate the "forgive them, for they know not what they do"? (Not that I have useful advice to offer, sorry.)
Well, so far, one of the useful bits I've gotten from perusing Christian theology is that the "trespass" in the Lord's Prayer is literally "debt", and "forgiveness" should be taken in that context. That seems to match up with my own internal perceptions of things, insofar as what I'm trying to do is "let go", "move on", and "wrap up unfinished business". And the other big thing is that it provides a useful boundary condition around how to treat people after forgiveness (e.g., the question of forgiving vs. forgetting), which seems to intuitively make sense to me, at least from this distance.
I think I've largely achieved acceptance, in the sense that I've accepted that Things Happened, and now the question is what to do with what I have left, how to proceed from where I am. Did you have some other sense in mind? Not that there's anything wrong with other senses of the word, just that if you do, that means I didn't understand what you said. :-)
In Buddhist terms, I'd say I have a large tangle of attachments, in the sense that when the world behaves in particular ways, I am compelled to respond in certain other ways. I would like to remove those attachments, but the techniques which I have learned so far have proven ineffective, at least to the degree that I had learned them. A different, more visceral approach seems called for.
As Deiseach said it's very difficult. Two comments I'd make:
The first is that humility is key - as in the parable, our forgiveness is rooted in an understanding of our own failings, and if you don't *really* believe that "there, but for the grace of God, go I", it's to be very hard. Of course, cultivating true humility is also *very difficult*, it's a lifetime practice of self-awareness and recognizing our own flaws and suppressing the desire to make excuses for them.
So the other suggestion I'd make, is it's okay for your emotions to lag behind. I've seen this advice given in the context of love (and marriage):
Q: How do I love someone who I don't feel like loving at the moment? (e.g. "bitch eating crackers moment")
A: Ask yourself "how would I act, if I did feel like loving them", and then act like that. Do this long enough and your emotions will catch up.
I think the same can apply to forgiveness. Convince yourself to act like you've forgiven them and eventually you will have forgiven them. Some would argue this is "fake", but I'd argue it's a case of not letting your emotions master you, and reversing negative feedback loops.
Indeed. I read a little story once, I can't seem to find the source. But it has been useful to me whenever I have tried to be better than I am.
A young priest was assigned to a small village, but was afraid to take the position because he was hideously ugly, due to deformities at birth. When he consulted with his superior, he was given a mask depicting a beautiful face. "Wear this every day: put it on as soon as you wake up, and let it be the last thing you take off before sleep. Do this without fail and you will do well."
The priest arrived at the village, and the villagers marveled to see him wearing a mask. For months the village was filled with rumors as to what he was hiding under his mask, but he was never seen without it, and would remove it for no one. After time they grew accustomed to it, and after a few years they did not notice it, except when a stranger came to town and remarked on it. Overall the village was happy with their new priest, who performed his job well.
Decades past, but still the priest wore his mask each day. Eventually he died. As they laid him out before burial, the doctor could not help but to remove the mask and finally see what lay beneath. Just about everyone in the village came to the funeral, not only because he was a great priest and a friend to all, but to have their curiosity satisfied. As each went by the coffin they saw the same thing: his face was just as beautiful as the mask that hid it. All those years of wearing it, and his face had grown to fit it.
Humility, huh? The type of reluctance I feel when I contemplate this, seems like a good indicator that it's something I need to work on for its own sake, anyway. *wry grin*
Is forgiveness primarily about emotions (anger, resentment), or about treating the person as being given a clean slate? Religion-adjacent perspectives seem to conflate these, whereas I think that it's usually worthwhile to treat them separately.
For myself, I'm primarily concerned with my own emotions. I mentioned to someone else (above?) that one of the useful things I've found digging through Christian theology (Catholic, in this case) was pointing out the connection between "forgiveness" and "debt". Specifically, that forgiving someone's monetary debt doesn't mean that you're going to turn around and loan them more money as if the original debt never happened, but that true forgiveness means that you don't go around holding a grudge either, so it's not a question of "never again" either.
I'm sort of coming to the conclusion that the effectiveness of looking online for useful bits of theology is actually inversely proportional to how much English-language stuff there is online from that denomination, and how modern and flashy the websites are. For the more American types of Protestantism, it's been difficult to impossible for me to find anything that's not superficial. For some of the older forms, and for Catholicism, I've managed to come up with some useful stuff. And some of the best stuff has come from Orthodox websites, especially the ones that look like the Internet did back in 1997.
Of course, not giving them a clean slate doesn't necessarily mean "never again". But it's on them to demonstrate that their trustworthiness has improved, which is something that Christianity also acknowledges, with concepts like "penance". But, when they use the same word for everything, like priests forgiving sins on behalf of God, and humans forgiving each others for their own sake, it seems too easy to get mixed up.
Yeah, it can get very confusing, especially when the religion continues to use traditional terms after their secular meaning has shifted, or uses terms that are English translations of Latin translations of Greek or Hebrew originals, or when multiple denominations use the same technical terms to refer to different things. (Grrr.)
Most of the responses below accept the need for forgiveness. I think, contrarily, that focusing on the necessity of forgiveness misses something important.
If you take a step (or two) back you may see that underneath the blaming of somebody for something (such that they need to be forgiven) is invariably anger. That itself is much easier to work on - a simple emotion, an energy.
The big turnaround here is to realise that this thing, this anger, is MY stuff and therefore my responsibility. While there is a sense that another human being has the power to take my attention and blame such that I flail around struggling to find a way to forgive THEM, I'm mostly doomed to suffering.
I generally find that I blame other people for things (including my anger) when I lack understanding. If I want an end to the interminable effort to find forgiveness, I think the best place to start is right at the beginning, at my lack of understanding. Can I make the effort to put myself in the other persons position, and run through all the relevant events from their perspective? If I can do that - if I have the courage to do that - I usually find that the need to blame evaporates and therefore there is no need to forgive.
Another way of looking at it is that we must decide what one hopes to gain from forgiving another and decide if it's worth it, or not. Usually, the gain is relational. The object of forgiveness is often a friend, spouse, parent, sibling and so on, and forgiveness allows the redemption of the said relationship, and all the social benefits that go along with such things. More abstractly, a Good Life, happiness, community, and so on is the purpose of trying to salvage relationships through forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not necessary to achieve a Good Life overall though. Sometimes, walking away from certain relationship works just fine. Divorce is the archetype of such a decision. I won't suggest this is a good first-bid, esp. when children are involved. Usually, even when employment is involved, this is not always possible. But it is an option. It's also not an emotionally easy option, but over time, it can work out fine. Plenty of people who're estranged from siblings, parents and so on have no problems leading a Good Life, and being happy, productive and go on to have good (other) relationships of their own.
Speaking from experience, over time, forgiveness can even come after apathy arrives (but the point of no return, in relational terms, is usually crossed by that point).
I would've never considered estrangement as an option except for a psychologist who gave me the idea (after ~4 years of being in therapy). She didn't suggest this to me outright but talked to me about the power I had vs. the power the other person had, and what could they possibly do if I were to assert myself, and that I could choose to engage or disengage whenever I wanted. I reasoned through induction and decided that disengaging permanently was in my best interest - that way, I could just avoid all the unpleasantness of reengaging. It was cowardly, but ultimately, I was happier and healthier for it.
But, anger can also be useful. It's your brain sending you a signal that something has gone wrong, and that you might want make adjustments to your behavior and/or attitudes. Of course, if it persists once you think that appropriate adjustments have been made, or aren't required in this situation, then the signal may be faulty.
Huh. I'm coming at this from the other direction: the anger has proven so difficult to handle (hello, PTSD!) that I'm trying to go around and cut the threads that are feeding it. And forgiveness seemed like the place to start, for a number of reasons. Do you think this attempt is doomed without dealing with the anger first?
As for the blame, that has been my normal approach throughout my life, which I think I'd gotten pretty good at. But it failed when encountering actual malevolence. And also when encountering the willful blindness and hypocrisy and cowardice that enables that malevolence. And the irony is that I've more-or-less forgiven the malevolent person, using exactly those techniques you describe - knowing them as well as I did, I have come to see that it was somewhat inevitable. Whereas finding out from mutual acquaintances that I wasn't the first person to undergo this was extremely helpful, but also at the same time infuriating when put in the context of other people's behavior.
Does anyone know of a through-the-wall heat pump whose capacity is suited for a 100-square-foot bedroom? I can't find any that small. Even one suited for 200 sq ft would be fine.
Has anybody had really bad experience with SAM-e? I have no family history of bipolar/mania and started taking SAM-e (initially 200 mg and then 400mg) with no side effects other than mild bloating but no positive effects also. 10th day, I ended up laughing in short bursts for an entire hour. I was not happy but really scared since I couldn't control couldn't control my laughter. I also had the urge to slap my head and legs but that was somewhat controllable. I discontinued SAM-e immediately.
Q1. Both my SO and I felt sick a few days ago (she was initially worse but recovered within a day. I was initially less-worse but had lingering fatigue for longer). She was COVID-negative, I didn't test. On a scale of 1-10, our symptoms were a 2. Normally, I'd chalk it up to allergies or common-cold, but the simultaneous onset is suspicious. Should we test again to be sure? Is it even likely to be COVID? We're 3x vaccinated and young-ish (late 30's/early 40's).
Q2. We're mostly acting like life was under Delta until pre-Omicron case-levels return. Hopefully in another 2-3 weeks. Purely based on hospitalization or death probabilities, this is not rational - we should go out and be normal. But we worry about long-covid. Should we be less worried about long-covid than we are right now? If paxlovid were more available+accessible, I'd lower my guard easily. I'd like to hear arguments why I should lower my guard anyway (or waiting until cases go back to pre-Omicron levels is just fine).
Pure anecdata, but several people around me have been hit by a flu-like virus that tests covid-negative; I wonder if we're seeing the thing we saw last spring when places reopened, which is that the population immunity to all the other respiratory stuff is lower than normal so other things are going around.
Round here there is a nasty respiratory infection going, so that my doctor's practice is only doing phone consultations (they seem a bit overwhelmed with covid and then this). I had a bout of something myself, did two different antigen tests which came out negative, so it probably was/is this bug.
Two of my vaxxed coworkers got omicron and didn't miss (remote) work. They were just a little sniffly. Omicron really is mild.
OTOH, it's winter, and colds are going around too. My oldest and my wife both had a quick one a week ago and tested negative in home tests on consecutive days. If you have tests to hand you might as well, but if it would take more effort than a quick run to the pharmacy I would skip it. IMO, worth a moderate effort but not a major one.
This is truly one of the downsides of remote work. In person, we got to take snow days, really-bad-weather-days, its-really-sunny-i'm-off-to-hike-days, i-may-have-cold-days.... now it's just work-work-work every day.
The problem is not just peer pressure, it's the pace around me. I could take some time off here and there, but the train keeps running around me and if I slow down, then I'll have to catch up by running twice as fast to make up, which sucks worse.
What's the cure for this, short of learning French and moving to France?
Well, I don't know about an old farmhouse, but you're right about living in the French countryside. And I have so far failed miserably in my attempts to learn French. Hence my comment.
I had a similar problem which I solved by changing jobs. Suddenly the pace is much slower and the salary even a little higher. Same country (not France).
The pace is the actual problem, remote work is just an excuse. I could have called my manager and said "I am feeling sick, I can't focus on the work, so I am taking a day off". But I was the only developer on the project, had firm deadlines (despite the company talking a lot about how "agile" it was), so taking a day off would only mean more work during the following days.
Q1: I think it's useful to get a PCR, mostly as protection in case you get develop Long Covid. Currently studies of Long Covid will not accept as subjects people who do not have a positive PCR test on record. Seems likely to me that in the future insurance companies might decline to pay for treatment of Long Covid if the patient cannot prove they had Covid in the past.
Q2. I do not think you and your significant other will be candidates for Paxlovid even if there is an ample supply. It is approved for use in patients at high risk, and for them it decreases chance of hospitalization (or death -- can't remember which) by 90%. Makes no difference in the outcomes for people who are not high risk. And it's not a drug that they can give you if you have Covid for a while and then get quite sick -- it has to be started within 5 days of onset of symptoms.
Throwing money at Fermat's Last Theorem. Setting up a conference instead of offering a prize.
"Then, quite suddenly, at the peak of his influence, Mr. Vaughn’s world fell apart. The reason was an audit of his foundation by the Internal Revenue Service.
It ran from 1988 to 1992 and accused the charity of major improprieties. In the interview, Mr. Vaughn called the audit “very unpleasant” and “extremely traumatic.” Ultimately, he said, the tax agency threatened to impose $15 million in fines and to incarcerate him and his wife, who was on the foundation’s board.
According to Mr. Vaughn, the root problem was the ignorance of the I.R.S. auditor, who felt that mathematical research was “a boondoggle.” In the end, Mr. Vaughn added, “We won every one of the charges,” but the Vaughns had nonetheless come to a turning point. The foundation decided to end its funding of basic mathematics."
Is there any point of using resources to create a omicron shot , when the r is so high ? At such a rate of transmission wouldn’t the entire population have had it anyway by the time it’s available ?
At least in the UK cases have fallen and levelled out at a pretty high level, and only about ~30% of the UK has had omicron (the same thing happened after our initial delta wave in July). If an omicron shot can increase immunity against omicron to 90% or so it could substantially reduce the level of cases
Given its wide spread, my guess would be that Omicron is going to be the source of the next Variant Of Concern. So a vaccine based on Omicron would, presumably (though not surely), do better against this hypothetical new variant, than would vaccines based on older variants. Not to mention the benefit of having more people be more resistant to the new variant. So in that sense, I think we should definitely develop several Omicron vaccines, and switch vaccine production to them. There are no guarantees, but I think the odds are that this will give us a leg up when (probably not if) the next major SARS-CoV-2 variant shows up.
Maybe a detailed cost-benefit analysis would indicate that the amount of resources the world should spend on an Omicron vaccine is so small that trying would literally be worse than not trying, but I wouldn't bet that way. I think covid-19 has shown us that the world was not prepared for a major epidemic, and so we could use some practice in developing and rolling out vaccines to new viruses.
" I just finished reading C. A. Soper's : "The Evolution Of A Life Worth Living". It is basically a description of his theory that much of what we are is modulated by our knowing that we can kill ourselves. I am very impressed with Soper's ideas. The short quotes from the book below reminded me of Albert Camus describing how Sisyphus who was punished by the Greek gods for his many indiscretions by making him push a giant rock up a hill and when with great difficulty he finally makes it to the top the rock falls to the bottom and he starts all over again....forever. Interestingly Camus suggested that Sisyphus was content with the endless rock pushing as it is the "process" rather than the "completion" of the project that is most satisfying! Soper's description sounds familiar as he suggests : "Our daily pursuits are the end, the point, both the ‘this’ and the ‘it’ in the question that perhaps we all ask ourselves at times — “Is this it?” The answer is — Yes. This is it." Or the Nietzsche quote rings true: "He who has a why to live can bear most any how" Sounds like Sisyphus! I found the book fascinating. Here's the full quotes:
"For sure, some human activities also have some direct fitness value: we may still eat for nutrition, drink for hydration, copulate for conception. But these tasks, once basic biological routines, have been re-purposed. They have been turned primarily to recreational use. We not only have recreational sex; we have recreational eating, drinking, exercising, caring, and all the rest. Human satisfactions link to ancient animal instincts, but the links are indirect. They are evolutionary homologues, not equivalents — in the same way that, say, cats and dolphins both have tails: same origin, different purpose. Or perhaps as a better analogy, it is like the way the Land Rover was devised as a utility vehicle for farmers, but has morphed into a plaything. A modern Land Rover could still be useful on a farm if the need arose, but nowadays it is mainly driven for fun. So, our reasons for living don’t fall out of hifalutin existential philosophy. They are assembled on the ground, from what look to be regular workaday activities. Walk the dog… sort the recycling… go to church… drop by on Granddad…. It feels like just one thing after another. But these kinds of deeds are extraordinary in the context of life on earth because, strictly speaking, they are rarely vital for bodily subsistence. It is not out of direct fitness needs that we, say, prefer our coffee black, choose underwear of a particular style, and listen to Radio WXYZ. From a biological perspective, our lives look irrational. For any other animal, much of what we concern ourselves with would be an unfathomable waste of energy. Normally in nature, the rational thing to do, unless there is a pressing reason to do otherwise, is nothing. Left to its own devices, an animal’s default action is inaction — avoiding unnecessary disturbance. Hence penguins huddle, squirrels hibernate, and well-fed lions lounge. But we humans need purposeful goings-on in our lives — daily projects that feel worthwhile."
"Our daily pursuits are the end, the point, both the ‘this’ and the ‘it’ in the question that perhaps we all ask ourselves at times — “Is this it?” The answer is — Yes. This is it. And it needs to be good. Purpose in life is not an optional extra, a psychological cherry to pop on the cake after our more basic requirements have been sorted. It is not, in other words, the last item on a pyramid of needs of the sort famously proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow. Rather, a good enough reason to live has to be in place before we human beings will even take on the task of satisfying our other needs. Without a point to our lives, wherever on a supposed hierarchy we may be, we are exposed to the danger of willful death; or, if not that, then becoming overwhelmed by keepers (internal suicide stoppers), as our emergency defenses against self-destruction take over. Late in life, Maslow came to doubt his own theory. It is quite possible, he observed, for people seemingly to want for nothing and still be pathologically purposeless. At the other extreme, Victor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, gives first-hand testimony as to how humans can endure unimaginable privation. He explains with one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Last open thread I suggested Scott questions about dreams if he has another readership survey because I believe frequency of remembering dreams and having lucid dreams might correlate with other measured traits.
Dreams are fascinating. Some think they contain symbolism. Others think they are random imaginations whose meaning is only a feeling imposed upon that randomness.
Nobody knows anything for a fact about dreams, which is why i think Scott should explore whether dreams and dreamers correlate with other traits.
This was my comment from last week: I think if Scott conducts another big survey of his readers, he should include questions about dreams to see how they correlate with other traits. For instance:
How often do you remember your dreams?
-Every single day.
-Every few days.
-Maybe once a week.
-Once a month.
-Twice a year.
-Never.
Among my friends, the rate of dream remembering varies widely, and I wonder what it means about personality, neuro-typicalness, etc. Ask the same question about lucid dreams.
I have this hypothesis that lucid dreaming probably correlates with "spectrum stuff" for this reason: As, Nietzsche says, we live as we dream, we invent the people we meet--and immediately forget.
To paraphrase that quote, we auto-impose a narrative on everything we experience, whether asleep or awake, without realizing we are imposing the narrative as opposed to the narrative being some objective portion of reality. Not an original concept, at least not today, but what I find interesting are those moments when we step outside of that sense of narrative and become aware, painfully, that it is our own construction.
The lucid dream offers the perfect analog to what it feels like to step outside our own narrative. In a normal dream, (probably) random things happen, yet our minds tell us a story is going on. All those people who appear, those random settings, those random objects... all of them get put into the plaster and our minds decode them as if they were decodable hieroglyphics, even though they are random, meaningless stuff, probably. We wake, the plaster breaks, the objects fall out, and our wide-awake brains realize suddenly that they were random objects all along, that the dream, in fact, meant nothing.
I know only from Tyler Cowen's ten-year-old TED talk that supposedly people on the autistic spectrum do not tend to think in as much of a narrative fashion as others. So does Nietzsche's quote not hold true for them?
So the testable prediction is this: Those on the autistic spectrum should have more lucid dreams than average because they are more likely to "not buy into" the auto-narrative of their own nocturnal dreams.
Another idea is to test some of the classic symbolism in dreams. I won't go into what they are, but many have claimed dreams about X mean Y. How much has that been tested?
The most remarkable thing to me is it shows there is a part of my mind that can come up with a script that can surprise the part of my mind that I think of as ‘me’.
Paraphrasing William James: Your friend opens his mouth to speak in a dream and you have no idea what he will say.
Happy St. Brigid's Day to you all! One of the Three Patron Saints of Ireland along with Ss. Patrick and Columcille, today marks the (Irish) start of Spring.
I wonder why people like authors of that EEG study never explain why only intelligence is supposed to be damaged, but not body mass or height. And also why school bullying (which, of course cannot be solved by throwing money at it) obviously is out of question (p.s. i violated rules, oops)
Nature has a new meta analysis coming out against circumcision. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41443-021-00502-y It was an adversarial collaboration from SSC that cemented my belief that I should circumcize my future children. The bayenian in me wants to update my belief based on this new information, but if course it is paywalled. Has anyone read it, and is it a well constructed study? Is there new information that I should be considering that wasn't in the adversarial collaboration?
Can you link the adversarial collaboration? I'd love to see someone/s theoretically rational arguing for non-medical circumcision in the modern world effectively. Outside of religious beliefs or something. Roughly 65% are not circumcised and outside of the very weird American prudist culture it is almost entirely Muslim and Jewish populations and some Christians.
Payment oddity: My renewal came up and Substack said my card (Capital One Visa) was declined. So I gave current info for the same card and (Substack says) it got declined again. Gave up and paid the $100 by AmEx instead. But...why couldn't I pay with Visa? And why does *Substack* think payment was declined when the credit card's own app isn't aware of any declined payment attempts?
Is it just me having this issue? Is Capital One, or possibly Visa, secretly shadowbanning Substack or certain substacks? Or did Substack's payment processor merely have a random hiccup that somehow happened to hit me (twice) and it's all good again?
A popular streamer is outlining the kind of character/diplomacy mechanics he'd like to see integrated into warfare like planning the campaign, getting important characters to commit to joining a war, distributing gains, and picked CBs/wargoals.
His video is about CK3 but I would be interested in thoughts about this or similar systems in strategy games generally.
I've only played CK2, but I like most of what he proposes. But then, I also like most of the things he says were tried and discarded, so I'm a highly noncentral player. So I agree with his final conclusion, that this will never happen. And probably should never happen if Paradox is to remain solvent.
But definitely, for a character-centered game like CK2 or CK3, the bit where vassal-liege relationships simply reduce to a known percentage of troops that will always be available on demand is unsatisfying. And if commanders of dubious loyalty, or mutual hostility, always fight to the best of their tactical skill and ability once put in command, that's definitely wrong.
Alice regularly invited Bob to do something together. Bob usually (but not always) agrees, and they usually both enjoy the activity, but Bob doesn't ever invite Alice back. Should Alice continue inviting Bob?
I can think of situations where the answer is clearly (to me) "yes": for example, if Bob is a teenager and Alice is his mother. Are there situations where the answer is "no"? My intuition is that if Alice and Bob are friends then Bob is violating etiquette (and etiquette violations should be punished in some way), but it's unclear to me if this is a universally-accepted part of friendship etiquette.
This seems like a situation where a conversation is more in order than an end to the invitations. Agreed it's violating etiquette, but also some people are just worse at this than others. There's usually a friend who does more of the work, either because of natural inclination or just a pattern they've fallen into, and if it's bothersome it can often be addressed just by bringing it up.
I thought about your suggestion, and realized that the prospect of explicitly talking about etiquette seems to me to itself violate etiquette, except in certain circumscribed situations (e.g. "mother and child" or "recent immigrant"). Hm.
Alice and Bob might be in a subculture where meta-talk of etiquette is accepted or even praised; plenty of relationship advice suggests a conversation starting with "when you do X, I feel Y", which is the same conversation from a slightly different angle. (I agree that saying the exact words "that's rude" is pretty aggressive, but as I say, you can get where you're going indirectly.)
I have reason elsewhere to dig out what George Bernard Shaw said about the Easter Rising in one of his appendices to "John Bull's Other Island", and though our opinions diverge on the matter, he makes me laugh because he has as little regard for the English as the Irish:
"From a battery planted at Trinity College (the Irish equivalent of Oxford University), and from a warship in the river Liffey, a bombardment was poured on the centre of the city which reduced more than a square mile of it to such a condition that when, in the following year, I was taken through Arras and Ypres to shew me what the German artillery had done to these cities in two and a half years, I laughed and said, “You should see what the British artillery did to my native city in a week.” It would not be true to say that not one stone was left upon another; for the marksmanship was so bad that the Post Office itself was left standing amid a waste of rubbish heaps; and enough scraps of wall were left for the British Army, which needed recruits, to cover with appeals to the Irish to remember Belgium lest the fate of Louvain should befall their own hearths and homes."
I do like the bit about the marksmanship of the British Army 😁 Okay, while I'm at it, another ding at the English, in regard to his character Broadbent in the play:
"Much as I like him, I object to be governed by him, or entangled in his political destiny. I therefore propose to give him a piece of my mind here, as an Irishman, full of the instinctive pity for those of my fellow-creatures who are only English."
" ‘When I say that I am an Irishman I mean that I was born in Ireland, and that my native language is the English of Swift and not the unspeakable jargon of the mid-XIX century London newspapers. My extraction is the extraction of most Englishmen, that is, I have no trace in me of the commercially imported North Spanish stream that passes for aboriginal Irish, I am a genuine typical Irishman of the Danish, Norman, Cromwellian and (of course) Scotch invasions. I am violently and arrogantly Protestant by family tradition; but let no English government therefore count on my allegiance. I am English enough to be an inveterate Republican and Home Ruler. It is true that my grandfather was an Orangeman; but then his sister was an abbess; and his uncle, I am proud to say, was hanged as a rebel. When I look round me on the hybrid cosmopolitans, slum poisoned or square pampered, who call themselves Englishmen today, and see them bullied by the Irish Protestant garrison as no Bengalee now lets himself be bullied by an Englishman; when I see the Irishman everywhere standing clearheaded, sane, hardily callous to the boyish sentimentalities, susceptibilities, and credulities that make the Englishman the dupe of every charlatan and the idolator of every numbskull, I perceive that Ireland is the only spot on earth which still produces the ideal Englishman of history. [...] England cannot do without its Irish and its Scots today because it cannot do without at least a little sanity."
"Think of the famous meeting between the Duke of Wellington, that intensely Irish Irishman, and Nelson, that intensely English Englishman. Wellington’s contemptuous disgust at Nelson’s theatricality as a professed hero, patriot, and rhapsode, a theatricality which in an Irishman would have been an insufferably vulgar affectation, was quite natural and inevitable. Wellington’s formula for that kind of thing was a wellknown Irish one: “Sir: dont be a damned fool.” It is the formula of all Irishmen for all Englishmen to this day. It is the formula of Larry Doyle for Tom Broadbent in my play, in spite of Doyle’s affection for Tom. Nelson’s genius, instead of producing intellectual keenness and scrupulousness, produced mere delirium. He was drunk with glory, exalted by his fervent faith in the sound British patriotism of the Almighty, nerved by the vulgarest anti-foreign prejudice, and apparently unchastened by any reflections on the fact that he had never had to fight a technically capable and properly equipped enemy except on land, where he had never been successful. Compare Wellington, who had to fight Napoleon’s armies, Napoleon’s marshals, and finally Napoleon himself, without one moment of illusion as to the human material he had to command, without one gush of the “Kiss me, Hardy" emotion which enabled Nelson to idolise his crews and his staff, without forgetting even in his dreams that the normal British officer of that time was an incapable amateur (as he still is) and the normal British soldier a never-do-well (he is now a depressed and respectable young man). No wonder Wellington became an accomplished comedian in the art of anti-climax scandalising the unfortunate Croker"
- Out of almost 20,000 studies considered for inclusion, they only meta-analyzed 34. They excluded interrupted time series studies, and studies informed by SIR model projections.
- The kind of study they did include, "counterfactual difference-in-difference" studies, uninformed by epidemiological modeling, seem especially like "endogeneity" of policy should be a concern, but they barely address that. (E.g. lockdown stringency is likely a response to severity of covid threat. If I see that people on chemo don't have less cancer than people not on chemo, I don't conclude that chemo doesn't work, I conclude that cancer is *why* people get chemo.)
- Their meta-analysis itself didn't compare "lockdown" vs. "no lockdown," it compared "lockdown" vs. "Sweden in spring 2020" (which banned large social gatherings; cf. their p. 14). Yet the language of their abstract obfuscated that ("this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects"; p. 2).
I reached out to the authors; relevant part of the exchange so far:
DB:
"... I'll mention two more general concerns. 1. Since your comparisons aren't of "lockdown" vs. "no lockdown", but of "more lockdown" vs. "Sweden in spring 2020" (which "[banned] large social gatherings early in the pandemic"; p. 14), the language in your abstract should make that clear (as opposed to saying "this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects"; p. 2). 2. The discussion section could do more to address potential endogeneity of NPIs, which especially seems an issue in "counterfactual difference-in-differences" studies uninformed by SIR modeling: lockdown e.g. stringency is likely a response to severity of the threat of covid. (If I determined statistically that people on chemotherapy don't have lower mortality rates than people not on chemotherapy, I wouldn't conclude that chemotherapy doesn't help reduce cancer mortality.)"
JH:
"Thank you for your suggestions.
Regarding 1. That’s a valuable input, and I will add it to our bucket list for an updated version.
Regarding 2. Did you see the brief discussion of causality on p. 15? Do you think, we should put more effort into this (I’ve thought about pointing out that most studies cover first wave, were countries closed down early without knowing how widespread the virus was because of limited testing)."
DB:
"Thanks! The Sweden thing also reminded me—it could be worth mentioning the idea that covid is mostly driven by superspreader events ... if it is, it could be plausible that Sweden's level of lockdown, banning large gatherings, was enough, with more than that being more superfluous.
Ah, I do see the mention on p. 15 now! Hmm I think: since assuming no NPI endogeneity seems like a key premise, it couldn't hurt to expand the explanation and evaluation of it and of (Sebhatu et al., 2020); e.g. I see (Bjørnskov, 2021) spends a couple paragraphs on it; and the limited testing is an interesting point (though there was hospital data). At least though I would mention the NPIs-endogenous-vs.-not question again, prominently in the discussion section, since it is a key premise for interpreting the statistics."
Recently while showering I was asking myself if all the changesbif the past years in my thinking, interacting and dealing towards and with other humans might actually be not only a result of me getting older or me being a parent since so and so long now. I was thinking about evolution of higher social animals and about the advantage for a group or tribe of having a longer term memory for all kinds of good and bad things like poisoness and delicious food, dangerous things like tsunamis, regions with rare but regular events like earthquakes asf. And I was thinking that I are less and less interested in technical details of a certain narrow problem but more and more in broad social problems, group thinking, long time effects asf. I find myself telling our kids stories and experiences pretty often in these days and started to do that at my employer as well. Surely, I've got pretty recognizable grey hair the past years and start to feel more and more like the silverback gorilla in the tribe. At the same time I see my other capabilities slightly degrade - guess the missing daily training is the main cause.
But what if evolution had blue-printed a second brain re-wiring (after the great teenage brain reconstruction) in a human life to re-configure the brain of (the rare surviving) elderly to help their group beeing cautious of e.g. poisones food, dangerous situations and even black swan like once-in-a-lifetime events. Science and rationalist community only learned in recent years how hard it is to teach individual and even more groups the most important lessons for surviving the daily dangerous live. It turns out more and more that we humans learn best by listening just to good, convincing stories told by gray hair grandparents like survivers calmly talking from their armchairs about all the thing they have seen in their long lives. As a kid I loved listening to stories of my grandfather about him living through the great depression, the second world war, multiple currency reforms and so forth. More and more I see myself sitting in the armchair one or two of my kids around me telling stories about my live to them and they love it.
Wondering if this might be programmed into both my kids brains (to love listening to stories and remembering so many details and facts over decades) and my brain - to tell about my past life and the small and large events, my views, learnings - and being less and less interested in nerdy, technical thing's I was obsessed about between 5 an 35 roughly.
Have you ever been a cog in an absurd, dysfunctional bureaucratic workplace?
I want to write a few paragraphs of comical fiction that describe how someone came to be in a job where, due to a series of bizarre bureaucratic technicalities, they essentially get paid massive amounts of money to do....whatever it is they want to do, with near-zero oversight or accountability, and zero risk of getting exposed.
Below is the bones of what i've come up with. I'm trying to balance absurdity with *some* realism, and welcome any input based on your experience with bureaucracy.
----
Scientist Len works for defence contractor, gets seconded to government laboratory to work on special sensitive project. Government pays Contractor who pays Len.
Len arrives at Gov Lab, finds out the Project Lead has gone AWOL and cannot be replaced due to internal hiring freeze. Left to work on project with one other person who is only there to calibrate and maintain equipment.
Without a Project Lead, Len reports to the Branch Manager, who knows that the project exists but is firewalled out of the details as per Gov policy. She wants Len to send her fortnightly updates, but content limited to the status of the project and whether or not a completion date is known. All technical reporting is to remain within the immediate project team.
Time passes and Len’s old Contractor Co. gets acquired by a big international company, EngTech. Len’s old boss gets absorbed and promoted into EngTech and still signs off on his payslips, but is too busy to inquire into Len’s work.
Len and his colleague in the lab decide they need a specialised component to advance the project, but the manufacturer says it will be 12 months until the component is fully developed from prototype. He informs the Branch Manager of the schedule update.
Several months later the Branch Manager is embroiled in a scandal from decades ago and is dismissed. The Board of Inquiry attempt to reach EngTech for information about Len’s project, but with Len’s former boss on vacation they resort to interviewing Len directly about the scope and schedule. Len convinces them the project is crucial and really just getting off the ground. He also points out that the Project Lead vacancy is not an issue and it can remain unfilled as a cost-saving measure.
Len goes on this way for years, with no technical oversight, a stream of lab assistants for colleagues, and a revolving-door of Managers far enough removed from the details as not to know or care about progress.
This study seems to indicate something quite odd. Synthesized spike protein in blood serum for up to 4 months post vaccine . Wtf . When has the vaccine antigen been found to be in circulation for so long with typical vaccines ? What could this mean ?
Tegan and Sara have a Substack now, which delights me no end
Amazing. Definitely not the usual suspects.
I discovered that when I tried to go to Bryndenbfish's substack, which no longer exists even though his wordpress still links to there.
Heartthrob is an excellent album
hell yeah
I had put an admittedly lame joke here asking if they went with their co-Canadian musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and pulled their catalog from Spotify over the Joe Rogan thing.
And it disappeared.
Did I violate some Substack taboo and it was deleted?
Did I enter a fugue state and delete it myself?
Am I misremembering what I did?
Hmmm…
I don't remember receiving a notification email for such a post, so maybe it just never posted. Then again this is one of the no-politics-allowed open threads and maybe that violated the rule.
Are the gas lamps dimmer today? [joke]
I did get the notification with your joke in it, if that helps. Freddie's guess is a good one - otherwise, perhaps it's just the universe gracing you with a teachable moment.
Yeah seems most likely. That universe thing is pretty funny though. Thanks for the chuckle.
A food riddle a friend told me:
What are three foods such that, when any two of them are paired together they taste good (e.g. strawberries and chocolate) but when all three are put together are bad?
Chocolate + fruit + peanut butter sound like it would be bad. Can't say for sure, though.
Chocolate + peanut butter isn't very tasty though
I disagree strongly about this.
That may be your opinion, but Reese's peanut butter cups are practically an industry unto themselves so I don't think it counts.
Fruit plus peanut butter is a weird combination, but if we narrow it down specifically to apples, then apples plus peanut butter is pretty damn good. On the other hand, chocolate plus apples doesn't work great.
Fruit + peanut butter = some variety of pb & j. Definitely an ok combo for most Americans. Chocolate + fruit is a standard go-to for chocolatiers.
But now I think a raspberry peanut butter cup would totally work.
Theo Chocolate in Seattle makes this exact product and it is great.
Chocolate and apples work great when you're doing a chocolate fondue.
Listen, I got introduced to Reese's peanut butter cups when shops over here started selling them and yes. They are indeed very tasty. So much so, I have to discipline myself not to gorge like a pig in a trough with them.
I don't have a third ingredient to go with this, but cheddar cheese + marmalade was something I saw, went "no way this can work" but yes, it does. Weirdly, it does! Marmalade shouldn't be too sugary and the cheddar should be on the sharp side for best combination.
Although I suppose cheddar + apple + marmalade might be it? Cheese and apples go well, cheese and marmalade works, but apple and marmalade makes my tastebuds go "no", for some reason.
http://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2018/5/10/how-to-get-your-head-around-an-unbelievable-fact?rq=cheese
Trader Joe's also has very good chocolate peanut butter cups.
Obviously this is subjective, but I'm quite fond of chocolate + fruit + peanut butter, especially if that fruit is strawberries
Huh not sure it would be bad... I'm thinking a tangy/tart fruit... strawberry, maybe pineapple? Chocolate, nuts and dried fruit, is goto trail food.
Oh my god, so, at this point I've given up on trying to give an answer that satisfies most people (I swear I dreamed a true one a couple weeks ago but I can't remember what it was), but everyone should read this email that was posted on The Incompatible Food Triad's official site:
> That this thought experiment merits a web page is really quite astounding. That I decided to write you an e-mail telling you that is even more astounding. And that I don't drink myself stupid following this exchange will be the most astounding non-event in the history of mankind. I am baffled, shattered, and destroyed by the mind-numbing pointlessness of The Incompatible Food Triad experiment. It makes me ill. I promise you, sir, I will never again be the same after witnessing the sheer mind-blowing uselessness of that puzzle. My life as I know it, is over. I once was lost, but then I was found, and then I found your website linked to Wikipedia and now I am lost again, irretrievably lost in a dark maze, a pitch dark maze with the Minotaur of Bafflement hunting me down. I shall not escape him, I shall not escape my doom. No, good sir, instead I fall - far and away, even from myself I fall until I slam forcefully into the cold steel floor of my own mind, crippled and alone, dead to all sensation. I am gone, sir, and I shall never return.
The best answer I’ve seen is a shot of tequila and a shot of tequila and a shot of tequila.
Salt; caramel; rhubarb, if you allow listing ‘salt’ as a food
Salted caramel: very popular
Savory rhubarb dishes: excellent
Caramel rhubarb crumble/cobbler: godly
Salted caramel rhubarb: probably doesn’t work, for the same reasons that you wouldn’t add caramel into your gratin or casserole
Salted caramel rhubarb sounds really tasty to me. Like big flakes of salt on caramel coated rhubarb. That's good!
Oddly, I really dislike salted caramel, and it's such a big craze it's in *everything*. Something in me just goes "salt = savoury, caramel = sweet, not together!"
I also don't like the combo that much. I like slightly salty caramel but not salted caramel where the salt is an added flavor. That it's a big craze also turns me off to it. I had a similar response to bacon when it become a meme to think it was some godly food. But really, not everything is made better with bacon (especially beverages) and most often you end up only tasting the bacon or the other food so the bacon is a waste.
Fish tacos, cheddar cheese, apple pie
More generally: ham, pineapple, coconut
Whoops, sorry, never mind: https://www.cookstr.com/Asian-Recipes/Coconut-Ham-Curry-with-Pineapple
I think you may be missing that *all three* pairs have to work well, not just the two pairs of neighboring ingredients. Are you alternating bites of fish tacos and apple pie? Or how do ham and coconut work together?
Yeah, you’re right - this is surprisingly difficult!
Do you have two different accounts you're posting from? The pfp is showing up differently for me, and the profile url is different.
Oh, I posted from my phone and then also from my laptop
This is cheating but: fish + sticks + cake
My friend: Fish Cake Sticks.
Fish cake cut into sticks, then fried. 's good.
Damn
Maybe something with miracle berries, or other things that mess with your sense of taste so combining all three tastes bitter? Not sure what the combo would be though
Pork + shrimp: dim sum classics
Pork + honey: yum
Shrimp + honey: a bit more exotic, but it's a thing
Pork + shrimp + honey: I don't want to think about this.
Walnut honey shrimp w/ bacon bits sounds really tasty to me. Maybe I'm just hungry right now. Or a pork belly / shrimp shumai with honey on the side for a dip.
From the exact wording you gave (taste good/are bad), there's technically "two things that go well with mushrooms + death caps" (reports say that death caps taste good, but the name is descriptive of what happens to you if you eat them).
Sugar + meat + [cake ingredients] might work, insofar as there are sweet meat dishes, sweet cakes and meat loaf but I haven't heard of sweet meat loaf (haven't tried, though, so could be wrong).
meat loaf often has sugar in it unfortunately. especially in the sauce that goes with it.
A sweet meat cake, you say? Have I got the recipe for you! This guy does old recipes on TikTok, reblogged on Tumblr, and he's hilarious. Often they work out great, some of them are just as terrible as the description leads you to expect, and then there are the "this shouldn't work but it does" ones like this:
Pork Cake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXOMHgU4Udk&list=PL3l9tyCdeo_MPdiV478ZHzT_3WtYb_tR-&index=5
And of course mincemeat used to be made with real meat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRH5DODIgE0&list=PLIkaZtzr9JDlIt5p8zYpgHVVk09xfuwHO&index=32
I have to include the recipe for Roughage Loaf from 1892 which is about as you'd expect it to be:
https://itzroseblossom.tumblr.com/post/664582667409440768/i-just-love-this-guy
I can think of an analogous situation, which is sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and gold. Each pair is stable but together they have a reaction.... Another would be an "overdose", where each ingredient pair is fine but all three together "cross the line" and become bad in some way. What would be the food equivalent? No clue -- can't think of any food reactions that even take three arguments!
Is there a combination of two foods that gains an orange-juice-like acidity, but are not acidic on their own? Then you could do something like mint + neutral thing + neutral thing, which would cause the "brushing your teeth then drinking orange juice" effect.
The toothpaste+orange juice effect is mostly driven by the detergent in the toothpaste, not the mint.
Almost all toothpastes contain a small amount of mild detergent (sodium laureth sulfate or similar). This does nothing for your teeth and is only there for cosmetic reasons: people expect cleaning products to foam up, so the detergent is added to make the toothpaste foamy. The actual active ingredients are a mild abrasive (usually silica gel or baking soda) to help mechanically scrub the plaque off your teeth and a fluoride salt (usually sodium fluoride or stannous fluoride) that acts as an antiseptic and as a remineralizing agent to repair minor chemical damage to your tooth enamel.
The other thing the detergent does is strip the natural oils off your tongue, which affects how your taste buds respond until the oils replenish. Specifically, your taste buds no long respond well to "sweet", so the sour and bitter flavors in orange juice have nothing to balance them out.
You can actually counter this by replacing the oils on your tongue exogenously after brushing: eat something fatty (e.g. scrambled eggs, bacon, or buttered toast) or just put a little bit of butter or edible oil on your tongue and orange juice will taste normal again.
Interesting. Well, there goes that idea.
This riddle is pretty good is you extend it to other domains, too. Sex, for instance, but I'm not going there.
But how about: pleasing half of the people + pleasing the other half of the people + doing it all the time
Pastrami, Cheese, and Matzoh. I'm sure the taste of all three would be fine, but the Matzoh would make me feel bad about breaking kosher by eating the meat and dairy at the same time.
+1
So if this is the riddle, what's the answer?
There isnt one. Or at least its a personal answer and not a universal one. This is less of a riddle and more of a question to chew on at a dinner party. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-incompatible-food-triad-is-the-most-delicious-philosophical-problem-of-our-time
One combo I can think of that might have this property is chocolate, cream cheese, and jalapenos.
You can make jalapeno poppers with cream cheese, and there are jalapeno cream cheese spreads.
There are a number of desserts that combine chocolate and cream cheese.
There are a chocolate bars with peppers (including jalapenos) for spice lovers.
I can't think of a way to combine the three, though, hence why it might meet the criteria.
Jalapeno chocolate on a cheese cake?
I'd give that a try, at least.
I think chocolate and jalapenos or chocolate and chili peppers might be two-thirds of a solution. Could we go with the threads below and use peanut butter as the third option? Thai food uses peanuts or peanut butter and chili peppers, and we know both go with chocolate. Can you mix the three (chocolate, peanuts/peanut butter, chili peppers) and make a valid recipe?
I'm married to someone who swears that eggs cooked with canned tomatoes get an annoying tinny aftertaste. I think I can detect it too, but it doesn't bother me so much. No problem whatsoever with eggs + fresh tomatoes.
Canned tomatoes seem to be tomatoes + citric acid + calcium chloride. If any of these chemicals work OK with eggs (I don't exactly have this in my cupboard to check), we have our triad.
I often get that tinny taste with canned tomatoes so it may not be the eggs that contribute to it. Tomatoes are very acidic which reacts with the can lining or the pan they are cooked with.
Aha! I remembered my answer from my dream! Strawberries, peanut butter/sauce, and fish.
Strawberries + peanut butter = PB&J
Peanut sauce + fish = maafe (West African peanut stew)
Strawberries + fish is pretty common in the modern culinary world
But those are two completely different ways of preparing fish! The strawberries serve to accentuate the lightness of the fish, sort of a sweet/tart contrast to the umami. But fish in peanut stew is a much earthier, heavier kind of dish. I'm not sure how you'd combine the two.
This seems plausible, but since peanut sauce sometimes goes on sushi and strawberry slices sometimes go on sushi, it might still work?
Peanut strawberry sushi sounds terrible to me
I think you’ve won: this is the best solution I’ve heard yet
A group of ~10 friends and I (who have little to no experience with psychedelics or any recreational drugs) are planning on taking Psilocybin together this summer. Does anyone know of any interesting experiments we can perform, or be a part of? Thanks!
If anybody is doing psychedelics for the first time, make sure there is 1 or more tripsitters everyone trusts around who can make sure that things don't go off the rails/anyone who needs to be calmed down can be.
Otherwise, I would just put a lot of thought into set and setting. Make sure everyone there is comfortable with everyone else there. If you're somewhere rural and you have a lot of land at your disposal, being in nature (camping, hiking) can be a good use of this time. If that's not the case, you can probably plan some sort of movie night. Certain concerts might be appropriate but maybe not for beginners.
10+ is a lot of people for this -- my own experience is that I start getting nervous when there are more than ~4. But then again, everyone's different.
I recommend against movie night. Distracts from everything you could be experiencing.
Nature is a better idea. If you're stuck inside, and you want a social experience (rather than blindfolds) consider getting some topographical maps. They are highly conducive to hallucinations. Or enjoy great music together.
#1 piece of advice: agree with everyone that anything and everything you say is supportive of each other, and should never be interpreted with any judgement or criticism. It's crazy how hard communication can be when you're not sure what someone is saying in saying something. Turns out every sentence can be interpreted a dozen ways. Commit to 100% being there to support each other.
Note that one of the best parts is the afterglow. The peek can be a fun but difficult ride. The after glow is just creative and joyful.
^ this.
Definitely ^this. Also remember that during the initial phase you may feel like your autonomic nervous system isn't working. That's frequently a cause of panic in first-timers. If you're worried that you're going to stop breathing, force yourself to take some deep breaths, and and stand up and move around. Stretching and breathing at the same time will reintegrate your consciousness to your autonomic systems, and silence the false alarms you're getting.
Also remember not to fight the high. The only way through is acceptance. Let it wash over you.
OK, here are some tripping things I've learned (having tripped between 125 - 150 times, 2/3rds LSD, 1/3rd Psilocybe, 2 times on mescaline)...
First off some of my very worst trips and the very best trips were on magic mushrooms. They don't call them magic for nothing! Treat them with ritual respect, and they'll generally be good to you. In fact many people, myself included, have felt that they have their own intelligence and awareness, and they can use us for their own ends. But even my worst trips were profoundly educational.
For reliability, I stick to my old friend LSD. LSD is for when I want to go out and party and dance and do things socially, LSD can be a wonderful adjunct to a great night out. Mushrooms are for magical experiences...
Many people recommend being out in nature while on Psilocybe. There are some caveats to that dictum.
OUTDOORS - NATURE:
1. Places not go near: graveyards, burial grounds, and ritual spaces. Whether it's a delusion or not, anywhere were there's been a lot of outpouring of emotion, especially negative emotion, can be at the very least be very unsettling — and worse yet, you don't want to have what we used to call "critters" follow you home. (Unless, you know someone who is familiar with ritual magic, they can be hard to get rid off, and they seem to feed off fear.) Likewise sacred grounds aren't a wise place to go, because the people who performed rituals at those sacred grounds probably had an us vs them, initiate vs uninitiated, view of the world. They can VERY if unsettling if you're one of the them or the uninitiated.
2. If you feel uncomfortable (restless or nauseous or fearful or angry), it may not be the drug, but it may be the place. Move on to another location. Not all people will be sensitive to places in the same way, but respect everyone's need to move on.
3. Someone mentioned staying away from water. I realized I've had mixed experiences with water. Flowing water can be fun to play in, but be careful not to get "hypnotized" by the ripples and flow. You may end up someplace far away from your companions. I can't really explain this. At the same time flowing water can be tremendously sensuous. Still bodies of water can be tremendously peaceful to stare at and meditate on. But there's a reason that the pre-enlightenment cultures believed that there were water spirits. This entities may not necessarily be friendly. So don't focus in one place on the water. Move your eyes lightly over the water — that is unless you want to attract the notice of the water entity.
4. Hug some trees. Spend some time trying to feel the sap flow up their xylem. Spend some time contemplating the roots under your feet. Send out your love to them. If you've had a large enough dose, you may be aware that trees have a sort of slow consciousness. And for the most part they can be friendly. But if you're going to commune with nature, stay away from a forest that's been recently logged or thinned. Those trees may not be so friendly. And, as with bodies of water, there's a reason the ancients believed in tree spirits.
5. Do not bring dogs with you. Some dogs seem to be OK with tripping humans, others get freaked out by the signals that tripping humans send. Also don't let your pets lick your hands or face. You'll be excreting a certain level of psilocin (or LSD) from your pores. Pets (dogs and cats at least) seem to be more sensitive to it than humans are, and they can have good trips or they can have bad trips. Best not to let them trip at all.
6. Familiar landmarks may no longer be familiar. Trust your instincts to bring you home. When in doubt, sing yourself home.
7. Don't spend too much time in the shadows. While redwoods can have high spiritual impact, they can also be oppressive. Get out in the sunlight.
8. Nighttime hikes are a different story. Remember, you'll hear animal (?) calls you never heard before. Don't follow an interesting call off the trail. Trust me on this.
9. Bring lots of water and/or fruit juice and fruit. Most people find things like cheese, animal foods, foods with a lot fat in them to be very unappetizing while high.
10. Go for a run. You'll never feel more attuned to your body.
11. Although it's dreadfully illegal, driving home form your hike (while still tripping) can be a memorable experience. Remember, you've got the same or better reflexes than you have while straight. The main trouble is you'll think you're speeding when you're not. Also, you may have trouble identifying landmarks, especially at night.
OUTDOOR - URBAN:
1. Urban environments present their own challenges and rewards. I'd wouldn't use mushrooms in an urban setting unless I were experienced dealing with the unexpected. LSD is a little tamer for the urban tripping experience.
2. Remember, no one will know you're tripping if you don't tell them or as long as you don't do anything stupid. Caveat on the no one will know you're tripping: people with mental illness will likely be aware that there's something different about you. You might have some very interesting conversations with people who are "crazy".
3. Stay away from gang-bangers and drunks. Angry people are hyper aware of you watching them and they take eye contact as a challenge. Also remember your pupils will be dilated and that may be a false signal to those types of people you're threatening.
4. Stay away from bars. First of you can't get drunk (or at least I never could). And people on alcohol are stupid and unpredictable.
5. Music festivals can be very fun for the tripper. But again the crowds may be upsetting to the uninitiated. But if it's music you can dance to, you can have a fantastic time. Drink plenty of water!
6. Remember, a Merry Prankster attitude can help you through the worst situations. As Ken Kesey said: "Maintain!"
INDOOR:
1. First things to do after the first rush: get up and move around. Stretch. Reacquaint yourself with your body.
2. Fun things to try: rolling dice, playing with mirror magic.
3. Things to stay away from: Ouija boards, tarot cards, I-Ching. Don't turn on the TV! Don't order pizza. It may sound like a good idea at the time, but most people find pizza absolutely revolting when the come face to face with it while tripping.
4. Some music can be tremendously fascinating, even spiritual. I'd stay away from things like Death Metal or pop music, though.
5. Don't let your pets lick you. And remember, not all pets can deal with tripping humans.
6. If you begin feeling cooped up, go out for a walk. Remember, no one you encounter will know you're tripping unless you tell them or do something stupid. Items 2 and 3 in the previous section apply, though.
Finally, have a great time!
I'm not who you were replying to, but the Outdoors paragraph 1 on "critters" is fascinating. Can you expand on this a little? Do people see similar sorts of critters? What do you mean that they seem to feed off fear?
a.k.a, haints, spooks, energy feeders. Either real or imagined they can pretty damn scary because they'll create a fear feedback loop in the tripper—usually through some sort of (real or imagined?) poltergeist activities and the (irrational?) perception that there's an invisible presence next to the tripper. Whether the psilocybe open a pathway to that part of our brains that is connected to our superstitions and primal fears (innate? or acquired culturally as children?)—or whether they're real entities—I cannot say. And once they've made you a target, they're damn hard to get rid of—even in a sober state.
A rational materialist will use the explanation that they're having unpleasant flashbacks. Those of a less materialist mindset will believe they're being haunted. Again, I don't take a position on this, but having had one follow me home (in a post-trip sober state), I can say it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. A ritual magic practitioner, who was the one who used the term "critter", was able to "banish" it. But the tools of ritual magic involve an element of self-hypnosis. So, who knows?
But I'd advise against even the most rational materialist of trippers from visiting graveyards, ritual spaces, or places where a lot of negative emotions were vented. Also I'd recommend staying away from oracular tools. Some friends attracted a critter while playing with a Ouija board while tripping on mushrooms. Afterwords they had repeated poltergeist phenomena in their Boston apartment. Luckily their lease was month to month, and they moved out. Of course, I don't know if the critter stayed around for the next tenant, but it didn't follow them to their next apartment.
Like I said, there's are reason these are called MAGIC mushrooms. Shit like that never happened to me on LSD. ;-)
> 8. Nighttime hikes are a different story. Remember, you'll hear animal (?) calls you never heard before. Don't follow an interesting call off the trail. Trust me on this.
Solid advice even for the sober!
Have antinausia meds handy. Take them ahead of time. Ginger tea works well.
Mushrooms make one's guts try to turn inside out, especially the first time. Real ruins them mood.
I found that the nausea was associated with the fact that taste and smell like shit. Disguising the flavor and smell in cream of mushroom soup seemed to be the fix for me and my friends. See my comment above.
Lemon juice seems to mask the mushroom flavor. It's an amazing hack in case you're doing truffles, which are generally consumed as tea (and mushroom tea tastes exactly as it sounds).
Make sure y'all take a tiny dose first to see what the effects would be on each of you. Then slowly warm up to higher doses. Do not take a powerful dose as your first time!
Took 7g my first time and went to every (H.S.) class except drafting. Good luck drafting a 40 degree rotation of that widget while tripping balls.
I was assuming they were going to consume mushrooms. Dosage is difficult estimate with 'shrooms. I just eat a couple, and go for it! Wheeeeeeee! ;-)
You do not need experiments to make it interesting. Simple things are awesome: puppies, streams, music . . .
Go into nature and explore. Avoid stupid ideas like swimming. KEEP YOUR PHONES ON AND ANSWER THEM, OR AT LEAST ATTEMPT TO. If you can have one person - physically with you, or at least in the general area - who's sober, with a car and can go look for someone's stupid ass, that's an excellent backup. If you feel overwhelmed just find a nice spot and chill there, there's nothing wrong with being too bombed to move and you should wait it out and enjoy the sights.
Expect you will split up into smaller groups whether you plan to or not. Some of you will want to be left alone at times - let them separate but keep them in line of sight.
Interesting things to try - looking at yourself in the mirror in low light for a while. Doing some bodywork, light stretching. Face painting. Meditation, if you can. Play and cuddle with pets, if there are any. Put on some music, lay down on the grass and watch the stars. You can try playing instruments or drawing but you might be too out of it to do either.
Avoid everything with a screen, screens are difficult to use and honestly kind of annoying.
Everyone is so much more cavalier about this than I was. I wouldn't even try the tiniest dose except in my own home with my completely sober husband watching over me. The idea of going out into nature to use hallucinogens, especially for the first time (and there's never been a second time for me), would have been terrifying.
What can I say, we were young, adventurous and nothing bad happened.
Realistically not much bad can happen anyway, other than getting scared shitless. Having a sober person is not necessary but a good idea, a person who's at least somewhat experienced with psychedelics (and a bit chill with the dose so they don't get shot into high orbit) can substitute in most cases. I've tripsat some overwhelmed people while being on psychedelics myself, the responsibility kinda keeps you collected.
Oh weird - I would have thought KEEP YOUR PHONES OUT OF REACH is the better strategy, but I guess it depends on whether the group expects to split up.
The worst that can happen with a phone is you'll call an ex and tell her you love her after all, or something.
If you get lost then the whole group will have a terrifying trip trying to search for you while everyone's barely functional.
Once you get past the feeling like a sack of jello stage, give everyone 3 dice. See if you can predict and/or control the rolls.
Also if you want to disguise the taste of the mushrooms, break up the dried stalks and caps as small pieces into cream of mushroom soup.
Oh, and I almost forgot: mirror magic! Stare at you face in the mirror for a couple of minutes and watch yourself transform. Another interesting experiment, is have everyone -- by themselves -- transform themselves into their spirit animal (or animal of their choice) in front of mirror, and see if other people see you that way when you return to the group. This may not be practical for a group of ten people, because bathroom mirrors may be in short supply. ;-)
I have a number of friends with animal nicknames that came out of sessions!
> give everyone 3 dice. See if you can predict and/or control the rolls.
What could possibly be the goal of this? Are you purposely trying to create false insights? Surely you can't actually believe they'll succeed. Though they may temporarily fool themselves into believing they have.
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Isaac Asimov
I'm just curious if anyone can reproduce this little experiment.
But seriously: four people tripping on Psilocybe. Each of us had three dice. We started calling what we then rolled. By the kitchen clock (which I checked a little way into this weird experience), we were rolling for at least 20 minutes (give or take a couple of minutes) and we were rolling the dice and getting what we called. Nobody counted the rolls, of course, because we were too distracted laughing our asses off at this gross violation of probability. Three missed calls during the whole session.
(a) The easiest "rational" explanation is that we were hallucinating, and the calls of what were calling, queued everyone in the group to see what we'd called.
(b) The less "rational" explanation, is that the Psilocybe gave us psychokinetic abilities.
(c) Or possibly the Psilocybe gave us a subliminal understanding of how the dice lay in our hands, and they gave us us enough subtle muscle control to throw the dice precisely like we wanted.
Subjectively: three of us reported that that we perceived threads of "energy" unwinding from from the tips of our fingers that followed the dice to the the surface of the kitchen table. And we thought we were controlling the rolls of the dice via those energy thread. The fourth person didn't see this. She said she felt like the muscles in her palms and in her fingers were precise mechanical instruments and that she was "programming" the trajectory and spine of the dice as she threw her 3 dice.
Two years later, I recreated this experience one-on-one with a friend who I introduced to mushrooms. No miscast die.
So, either we were all hallucinating the same experience and sharing the same consensual reality, or the Psilocybe gave us some sort of physical hyperaware attunement to our the muscles in our hands, or psychokinesis is possible in certain situations. If it were the first explanation, that raises questions about the nature of reality.
So, everyone. The next time you dose with magic mushrooms, try some magic and report back.
One recommendation I would make. If any of those 10 people feel nervous or unsure about it on the day of, I advise either a microdose or no dose. Psychedelics have a tendency to take whatever emotion you are feeling and turn those up, so if you're feeling nervous that will only be exacerbated, and it will kill the vibe for everyone else.
Depends how nervous I reckon. It makes sense to have some apprehension about it. In fact I'd say it's appropriate.
I'd encourage people towards a half dose or else unfortunately ask them to leave. An inexperienced, nervous sober person can really being everything down for everyone else if they're not careful
Thanks all for the advice! We are planning on largely following the recommendations set forth in "The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide": we will be in a remote location with nature available and plenty of tripsitters/guides to keep everyone safe and try to ensure the best experience possible.
Some good experiments for tripping your first time are:
- How is an apple crunchy but a banana squishy?
- Does the pattern on that tree still look the same if I glance away then look back?
- How does breathing through my nose feel vs. through my mouth?
I'm not trying to be condescending with that! First trips are a big event; you'll be looking at the world in a way that didn't seem possible. I'd just enjoy your trip for the first time :)
I had written a big post but accidentally hit cancel! The most important part I wrote was about tripsitting so I'll repeat that:
I used to regularly run LSD trips for groups of 10 - 15 people and more often than not I was the trip sitter. The trip sitter doesn't have to be a sober person, I used to take half dose or one tab depending on the group and my tolerance. The main 'role' is to be a responsible, go-to person.
You don't want people feeling incredibly anxious and letting it build up all alone. You also don't want people going through a challenge to impinge on others in the group. The trip sitter becomes the dedicated person for that, so they need to be trusted and even better if they're liked, so people will feel comfortable coming to them.
When someone came to say hi to me (I usually sat in a dedicated room so people could find me.) I'd usually gauge how they're going with a bit of convo and offer them a drink of water or sometimes tea; hydration is important but you won't feel thirsty. Often this change in setting to a safe space could be enough. If someone's trip was heading down a bad path, you try and ground them and remind them of their reality. A good line is "{Name}, it's {time} on {day} the {date}. {X} many hours ago you took a psychedelic drug, shrooms. It will wear off in {y} hours. It's normal that it can be confronting like this, but remember that this will pass. Right now though I want you to take ten deep breaths with me. Try concentrating on how it feels here" (and then I'd touch their upper stomach, touch can be important for grounding but be gentle). Afterwards, I'd say "How did that feel?" and maybe do it again. Afterwards, it's crucial to not make a big deal of it. You don't want them to sense anxiety from you, or feel 'watched'. I'd often then try and change their setting by saying "I'd like to do this, would you like to join me?" (sometimes people, now calm just want to leave and they should feel comfortable doing that):
- Putting on music. I liked bonobo, or tame impala. classical can be confronting for someone vulnerable. Something they probably haven't heard before is great because you avoid associations.
- Eating some fruit.
- Smoking, if you're into that
- Going to look at a view
- Putting on a meditation tape (there are some especially for psychedelics)
- Doing some yoga or stretching (if they have some experience with that, or if they particularly focused on the body in the breathing exercise)
- Pointing out a pattern in the wall (this can be fun to laugh at)
Generally I'd steer them away from activities that are fun, but not great for someone vulnerable. Like:
- Looking into a mirror
- Going for a public walk
- Doing nangs or other drugs
This is a very basic run through of trip sitting, but sometimes it's enough. The most common thing people get wrong with trip sitting is acting like a parent. You want to be calm and grounding.
I used to recommend people read this first: http://www.luminist.org/archives/session.htm but I see you're using the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide which is great.
Oh and lastly, time of day is very important. Night is more profound and mystical but potentially more confronting. Day time is cool, especially when there aren't people about. Afternoons are the worst imo, you feel like you spend your whole trip waiting for night.
Have fun! I'm happy to answer any questions.
This is all excellent advice.
Really good point on not sounding like a parent - people on psychedelics are super impressionable, their mirror neurons are working overtime and they catch on each other's vibe very quickly. The person doing the trip sitting should keep calm and optimistic, and avoid letting the bad tripper's negative emotions overflow into them. Do not act _concerned_, it's all in their head, just give them nice comfortable space, talk to them and they'll fix their trip on their own eventually.
(this is also general life advice for dealing with upset kids and upset adults)
Interesting. Much of this is the old Leary/Alpert set and setting advice. I suppose it is sensible, but I'm not sure how profound the trip will be in such a controlled indoor setting. I was always more of the Kesey/Merry Prankster philosophy of going out and doing something. But even in those situations, there was always an experienced leader (even if that leader was as high or higher than the others in the group). ;-)
Our house was right next to the town belt so we tended to have little adventures through there. They were my favourite part, but not for everyone especially when experimenting with new dosages.
The indoor setting wasn't too controlled: people could go do what they want in various rooms. The main thing was having a space you could retreat to.
Regardless though, I used to be a cautious Leary fan in those days so I probably did run these sessions with some of teachings.
I tried to submit my paragraph for the ACX++ Grants on Friday the 28th (around early afternoon) but the Google form was no longer accepting responses. A few other folks reported the same issue: MTSnowbug, Daniel Golliher, Steve Scott and possibly Larry Baum (see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/resubmit-and-summarize-your-proposals/comments#comment-4746702)
Did anyone else have this problem? Did we misread the instructions? Can we get a clarification and/or ruling from Scott? Thanks so much.
Repeating my request for a 'Practically-a-book-review' of Random Critical Analysis' excellent work on healthcare costs, in case last time it got buried in the deluge of posts these things get and did not get Scott's attention. Will not repeat again.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/
I agree this would be useful. I don't have a strong opinion on it or a good idea where to start, but I'll keep it in mind.
While we're suggesting book reviews, I would love to see one on the Dictator's Handbook. It would add a lot to your insights on Moloch. You wrote there (I think) that dictators can do as they like. That book dissects the incentives dictators actually face, which are quite constraining, and describes why democracies have better incentives for public policy outcomes (i.e., more people fed and educated, major problems solved, etc).
AI displacing people as wealth-creator is only half of the equation and honestly less likely to reach dangerous levels first. The other half is that a robot army is much easier to code for loyalty than for upholding democratic values (and the people building the robots don't precisely have a huge incentive to do the latter), which immediately makes whoever has the keys to the robots a latent dictator *regardless* of whether the economy can work with just the robots.
*I'm assuming here that you can keep it loyal i.e. a weak form of the alignment problem, but frankly if you can't the result is generally worse because "entire population slaughtered" is unusual even for people losing wars in antiquity let alone any kind of internal governmental policy.
I've deleted most of my comment here because this is the no-politics thread, but I just want to point out that there are lots of ways for "democratic values" to have horrific results.
It’s good to see you back. Are you doing okay?
I posted an update in the original thread.
I can't call my situation "okay" with a straight face, but it's not unfixably-bad either.
Scott has gone into at least some of those incentives in his series of Anti-Reactionary essays, including the Anti-Reactionary FAQ itself. Relevant excerpts from said FAQ:
"But some of my smarter readers may notice that “your power can only be removed by killing you” does not actually make you more secure. It just makes security a lot more important than if insecurity meant you’d be voted out and forced to retire to your country villa.
Let’s review how Elizabeth I came to the throne. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had won the 15th century Wars of the Roses, killing all other contenders and seizing the English throne. He survived several rebellions, including the Cornish Rebellion of 1497, and lived to pass the throne to Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII, who passed the throne to his son Edward VI, who after surviving the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion, named Elizabeth’s cousin Lady Jane Grey as heir to the throne. Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary, raised an army, captured Lady Jane, and eventually executed her, seizing the throne for herself. An influential nobleman, Thomas Wyatt, raised another army trying to depose Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne. He was defeated and executed, and Elizabeth was thrown in the Tower of London as a traitor. Eventually Mary changed her mind and restored Elizabeth’s place on the line of succession before dying, but Elizabeth’s somethingth cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, also made a bid for the throne, got the support of the French, but was executed before she could do further damage.
Actual monarchies are less like the Reactionaries’ idealized view in which revolt is unthinkable, and more like the Greek story of Damocles – in which a courtier remarks how nice it must be to be the king, and the king forces him to sit on the throne with a sword suspended above his head by a single thread. The king’s lesson – that monarchs are well aware of how tenuous their survival is – is one Reactionaries would do well to learn."
"Remember, all of the longest and most traditional monarchies in history – the Bourbons, the Romanovs, the Qing – were deposed in popular revolts, usually with poor consequences for their personal health. However paranoid and oppressive they were, clearly it would have been in their self-interest to be more so. If monarchy were for some reason to be revived, no doubt its next standard-bearers would not make the same “mistake” as their hapless predecessors."
Nice. The Handbook just formalizes some specifics: need to direct large state budgets and corrupt programs to the 1000-10,000 or so people who keep you in power.
I hope all this counts as "not politics."
I'd second the dictators handbook. It IMO makes some pretty strong predictions about how AI would tend to destabilize democracies, if you extend their arguments from gold / oil in very straightforward ways. CGPGrey made an excellent summary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Would you be interested in someone else doing a 'Practically-a-book-review' of this?
I have read it, feel like I understand it well enough to summarize / explain it, and have some thoughts.
Are you asking me? I have also read it and feel like I understand it. What are your thoughts?
(1) His data and arguments should be heard and understood by more people. ACX is higher profile than RCA, so a simple summary shared here would be good.
(2) RCA presents this as a choice - Americans use more health care. But RCA doesn't look into who makes this choice. Is it really what most Americans want? Or is it concentrated among a few people - from "frequent fliers" in the ambulance to end of life care.
(3) Cost disease could exist in multiple countries. Even if the US isn't unusually bad in health care, that doesn't mean that there isn't tons of wasted money. See also: why didn't anyone move faster on vaccines (e.g. through challenge trials)?
(4) This is/ought gap is unusually large in this sort of analysis. RCA looks at health care trends between countries, but doesn't discuss how much health care should be used.
On 1), obviously, agree.
On 2), our readings of RCA are extremely different. The biggest point I took away from RCA's work was that healthcare spending ISN'T a 'choice' that is unique to America or to some Americans. Most societies, at similar levels of income, make very similar 'choices' about the level of healthcare spending that they want. Some of the most convincing graphs were those of other countries following the same fitted slope that the US followed as their incomes increased. This means that societies tend to converge to similar levels of spending given similar levels of income, and the healthcare system that different countries choose simply doesn't matter as much as most people seem to believe.
On 3), agree that large wastage probably exists, and that further efficiency could obviously always exist, but if the diagnosis is that the US isn't uniquely bad, then the prescription must not start with 'look at how well these other countries' systems perform', and instead be - 'this is what the US doesn't do well enough and this is how it can do better'. This framing would take it away from universal single payer type conversations to challenge trials, reducing FDA bureaucracy etc.
(4) RCA is not attempting to do an is/ought analysis. I think (3) is what they are trying to do, and need to do, given my sense of where political debate in the US is ( I could be very off about this, I'm from India)
Yes!
A friend of mine frequently posts links to antivaccination essays and papers on facebook, e.g.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357994624_Innate_Immune_Suppression_by_SARS-CoV-2_mRNA_Vaccinations_The_role_of_G-quadruplexes_exosomes_and_microRNAs
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357778435_Official_mortality_data_for_England_suggest_systematic_miscategorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination
Is there a go-to place for detailed responses to things like this? (in general, but also these two, in particular).
It's practically impossible to keep up with the torrent of pseudo-scientific garbage and effectively pointless anyway. Your friend is likely not open to a reasoned scientific debate if they're reading stuff like this.
Here's the only credentialed author on the first one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Seneff
I agree that it takes a lot of time and resources to debunk all of this stuff (and there are few incentives to do it for people who can do it). But I disagree that it is effectively pointless. Sure, writing detailed reports on one million proofs of Riemann Hypothesis may be a waste of time, but here lives are at stake. I've seen my friend adjust his position slightly in response to new information (for example, Scott's ivermectin post). Sure, he probably wouldn't have a 180 degrees change. But there are people who are more on the fence (they are usually the ones who are reading without commenting on social media) and a carefully written response in a dispassionate non-condenscending tone would go a long way for them.
(I have to admit that this opinion is based on my observations of people and common sense; I don't have data to back it up, so maybe I'm wrong and my frustration with people who share your position is wrong. But I find the stuff that Scott has written about the importance of debate and persuasion (e.g. here https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) resonate deeply with my core values. Even if few people respond to rational persuasion I would like us to try more).
The trouble with rational persuasion about this issue is that people who are antivax have received so much anger and even outright abuse (eg Darwin Awards). They have had drilled into them that the opposing position is that people who do not get vaccinated are dumb, selfish pieces of shit -- so now they can't get vaxxed without feeling like they are buying into the idea that they are dumb, selfish pieces of shit.
Take it from someone who has played this game at multiple times and in multiple arenas: there are ways to change a motivated person's mind, but reasoned debate isn't one of them. And there are ways to convince a neutral audience to support you over the other side, but they won't be your friends afterwards.
If this person is your friend, then the best you can do is let them know that you disagree, let them know that you have good reason to think that you have the right of it, and then leave it alone.
Rational persuasion is useful IRL and in certain small and tightly-knit internet communities. It is useless and naïve on any kind of ad-based social media.
Instead of presenting what you consider compelling evidence of your position, tell him what you would consider compelling evidence of his position and ask him what sort of evidence would convince him that he's wrong. Commit to a standard of evidence in advance, then exchange the evidence.
Thanks, it's always good for this slightly battered soul to have a laugh.
Well, you can't expect people to change their minds immediately, but there's a way to play the long game with tactics like my suggestion, and change minds as long as you give people time to adapt their views:
https://old.reddit.com/r/quityourbullshit/comments/gnlw32/getting_second_hand_embarrassment_on_this_one/frbtbbu/
That should work, but I know someone who committed to a standard of evidence, had that happen, and still stuck to their belief.
Yes, it can happen. Minds typically don't change instantly, you created a crack that will hopefully widen over time.
You seem to assume that everything he posts links to is by default wrong. Have you considered the possibility that you might be the one in the wrong here?
The second article tries to make sense of COVID statistics. I don't have time to review it, but one would think they are doing a job that you would want them to do. Would you rather blindly trust that every number made publicly available says what it's claimed to say? Don't you want to see someone explain the numbers? Do you think that questioning published numbers is somehow wrong?
Even though I would also be suspicious of some of the authors of the first paper, it does attempt to do an important analysis, which I'm not competent to review. Don't you think that mechanisms of action and risks of mRNA vaccines should be analyzed?
It's interesting that parts of the wikipedia page of one of the authors of that paper, Stephanie Seneff, read like The Onion:
"According to food columnist Ari LeVaux, Seneff's work in this area has made her "a controversial figure in the scientific community" and she has received "heated objections from experts in most every field she's delved into"."
I don't know anything about her research, but it looks like someone really wanted to do a hit job on her. So desperate that they were quoting a food columnist.
Really reviewing papers is hard, and very few people regularly do this to already published papers. (These are awesome people who are really rare.) Yelling at authors for publishing a paper with a conclusion you don't like is easy. If it's the first you're looking for, I'm sure you're out of luck.
Exactly, I don't have the knowledge to judge these papers. That's why an expert opinion would be helpful, even a short one. In math there is a database of paper reviews, which occasionally contains a polite "Unfortunately, the proof of Theorem 7.2 assumes a bound on the Lipschitz constant which is not justified in the reviewer's opinion", which tells me that all results in the paper are wrong and saves me a ton of time. I was hoping to find some similar collection of reviews for controversial medical papers like this.
Ah, I misunderstood you. Really sorry about that! I blame the responses you got, one of which I initially started replying to, before realizing that this was pointless.
The math database sounds very useful. Would you mind sharing a link to it?
If something like that math database existed for this kind of papers, I assume Scott would know, or someone would tell him. Instead, he apparently has to go to Twitter and Google to find this kind of information. I am afraid we can safely assume that it either does not exist or is not used enough to be useful.
The database is https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/. Unfortunately, it requires institutional access :-(, but there should be ways to go around that.
Thank you! AMS maintaining this is obviously what's making it possible, given the role AMS plays for mathematicians.
Yes, I'm less convinced by the statistical analysis in the second paper (It's easy to cut these numbers either way) but the first paper comes to an alarming and apparently well reasoned conclusion. I believe another paper was linked recently that said (paraphrasing) 'if COVID vaccines caused an increased incidence of cancer then we would already be seeing the signal'. If there have been more mRNA COVID vaccine associated cancers reported in the last year than all other vaccine associated cancers in the last twenty years put together then I'd say we're seeing a signal.
I hope not. it terrifies me what this is going to do to the vaccination debate if any of these fears turn out to be well founded. The biggest mass vaccination campaign since small pox turning out to be both dangerous and ineffective will suppress all other vaccine rates for a generation. That would end up killing far more people than COVID in the long tail.
I'm hoping that even if all kinds of bad things about COVID vaccines turn out to be true, this won't do much about other vaccinations rates.
The big problems with COVID vaccines are 1) that they are new - so new that the data on them is neither complete nor reliable, and that there is no way of knowing what they will do in the long term, and 2) that they are being politicized by people who are known to lie and who can be easily imagined hiding or misrepresenting relevant information (remember when we were told not to wear masks, because the authorities were worried there won't be enough for medical personnel?). These two problems make it really hard to quantify risk. None of this applies to the other vaccines, which have been around for a while.
From looking at the numbers, it seems that most people who are refusing to get the COVID vaccine either have no objections to other vaccines (and are fully vaccinated with everything else), and so it's hard to see where their objections to other vaccines would come from, or already have medical or religious problems with other vaccines as well.
> "If there have been more mRNA COVID vaccine associated cancers reported in the last year than all other vaccine associated cancers in the last twenty years put together then I'd say we're seeing a signal."
Nope. All the OTHER vaccines are only given to tiny little kids, one year's cohort at a time - and tiny little kids don't tend to get cancer! The COVID vaccine was initially given to all people over 65 (who get LOTS of cancer!) and following that was given to essentially the entire population over the course of a year. The entire population is MORE PEOPLE than the population of kids at vaccine-receiving age for any given regular vaccine. So the combination of:
(a) we're treating >20 times as many people in a year
(b) we're treating people in groups who were at greater risk of cancer to start with (eg: people who've been smoking for 40 years)
(c) this virus is BRAND NEW, hence seems especially scary
...means we should expect the number of vaccine-associated cancers reported to be *quite a large multiple* of that seen for other vaccines, or even that seen for all other vaccines combined.
Facebook is a toilet. Don't be surprised when all people do is shit in it.
I've been thinking about etiquette versus ethics recently.
Etiquette is a bit like ethics -- there's a list of things that you should do and a list of things that you shouldn't, and people who obey them are liked while people who disobey them are shunned. What's the difference? Well, ethics attempts to make some kind of claim to being objective about what's good and bad, while etiquette is acknowledged to be at least partially arbitrary.
But that's not the full story. A lot of etiquette is about not offending people (don't call your boss a big fatty). Other bits aren't necessarily about not offending people, but once the rule is established people feel disrespected if you don't obey the rule in their presence.
A lot of etiquette is about class signalling, too, which is why dining with the Queen requires a lot more attention to etiquette than eating at McDonald's. This has some value too, because if you can signal "Yes, I am a well-raised member of the upper class" then people are more likely to feel that they can safely invite you into their houses without worrying you'll abscond with their silverware.
A lot of etiquette, though, has dissolved over the past seventy years or so, because it was "old-fashioned" and "stuffy" and "stupid, pointless and arbitrary". Some of the old rules have disappeared entirely (e.g. don't wear a hat in an elevator in an apartment building), but other etiquette rules somehow made the jump into being ethical ones. Increasingly, the question of whether you should do or say something that might offend someone is treated as a moral question rather than one of etiquette.
I'm a big fan of etiquette myself for the same reason. Social relationships are all about signaling respect and mutually understood obligations. Etiquette makes people comfortable by making them *legible*. Having something like a script also saves an incredible amount of mental load. If you come to my house, I know a good way to welcome you is to offer you a beverage. This simple action also carries a lot of other signals with it, e.g. "I value your presence", "I am a conscientious person", "I want you to feel comfortable here", etc. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country where they were unsure of the etiquette knows how exhausting it is to simply interact with anyone. This is why people are generally pretty committed to etiquette even if they say it's not that important to them; etiquette tells us in shorthand who is likely to hold up their end of the social deal, and who isn't.
Yep, and something like this is also in large part the purpose of small talk. People need ways to effortlessly communicate messages like "I'm a normal sane well-adjusted person" and "everything is okay between us".
I mean that etiquette as a whole is partially arbitrary.
Which fork you use for the fish course versus the dessert is pretty arbitrary.
Not saying "By golly, you're a fat one, aren't you?" when introduced to your host's mother is not arbitrary.
Both are rules of etiquette.
Well, the fork rule is of course arbitrary, but once it's established as the standard rule, it's the one you should follow.
A bit like how English words are completely arbitrary, but you should use the word "fish" for fish.
Why should you follow it?
I don't think that holds for your other example either. In the case of "fish", using a different word such as "pescado" may be counterproductive if your objective is being understood by general English-speakers, but not if, for example, your objective is to be misunderstood, or understood only by the Spanish speakers in the kitchen and not the English-speakers in the dining room, or carefully drawing a distinction between the living animal and the foodstuff derived from it in a context where you have the opportunity to define your terms, or conveying a sense of otherness in a science-fiction novel where the use of "ribi" shows a strong Russian influence in 22nd-century slang.
I don't think there's a generally justifiable normative judgment that using the word "fish" for fish is good, and using other words for it is bad.
Efficiency can motivate both. You should use "fish" so you're understood by more people without requiring further rounds of clarification, and you should stick to the fork rule because that's how restaurants and other hosts will arrange your cutlery and prepare the meal. Of course you could rearrange your cutlery however you like, but that's less efficient.
If you're objective is to be misunderstood, you're being a jerk, which is directly conflicting with the goals of "etiquette".
The reason to use the word "fish" is that calling them something else will leave people confused, which probably undermines whatever goal you have related to talking about fish.
With forks on the other hand, my goal is to put food into my mouth and both tools do a perfectly serviceable job. Why should I follow the established rule?
I agree that's a weaker case, but if you're eating somewhere that observes these customs, and know which fork they intend for what purpose, I would just be a team-player and go along with the local custom.
Hmm, I'd be unsurprised to find a (sub-)culture where making a joking insult to a newly-met friend (or mother) of a friend is standard operating procedure.
The way that I've always construed it, etiquette is just a bunch of patterns we can follow to put certain matters out of mind. For example, in a dinner party there's a lot of specific behaviors that, without etiquette, you would have to consider. By being able to safely fall-back to "following etiquette", you can instead focus on having a good time and socializing.
The specifics don't really matter. Maybe it's polite in some places to slurp loudly as you eat, but in other places it is polite to be tidy and quiet. Maybe it's polite in some places to help the host with the dishes, but in other places you mustn't lift a finger. Whatever the rules are, they just provide a framework which people can fall back onto to be easily comfortable without having to consider their every action.
Obviously it doesn't end up being this easy in practice, especially if you're not living in a homogeneous monoculture, but I've always understood this "mutual ease of comfort by falling back to agreed-upon procedure" to the the point of etiquette.
Grammatical rules seem to be partially arbitrary. They are some part logical necessity (you need to have a distinction between subject and verb) and some part arbitrary convention (i before e except after c). Both affect your ability to communicate well.
A certain amount of etiquette has side effects. Consider getting your feet bound, like a proper Chinese lady of a certain era. That had pretty major side effects, but plenty of less drastic "polite" behaviour also has side effects some people strongly dislike.
That seems reasonable to me to dislike, particularly when the side effects disproportionately affect one group more than another. Some huge number of "traditional" rules for proper behaviour for women and girls are now considered to be in this category, at least by a fair number of people.
i.e. the demise of various rules of etiquette is not all about those rules being "old fashioned" and "stuffy" - there are often much stronger reasons.
I think there is some stronger condition than “affect one group disproportionally” considering that etiquette still, and probably always will, disproportionately affect the rich
In a lot of cultures, those of high status show off their high status by adopting fashions that make it difficult or impossible for them to do any physical work.
This certainly affects the rich more than those who can't afford not to work.
But I'm on the fence about whether it harms them.
Whereas foot binding, and even preventing female children from exercising freely (various clothing regimens), seem like pretty obvious harms.
And I think a lot of the recent mass dumping of significant etiquette was motivated by perceived harm to those following it, often gendered harm.
A lot of people aren't just annoyed or distracted by bad proofreading, they're *offended*. They take bad proofreading as an indication that the writer doesn't respect them enough.
Or themselves. If you don't take your shit seriously, why would I bother with it?
Didn't realize this consciously, but yeah, I guess I am also using this strategy unconsciously.
It's as if there are also r/K memetic strategies, and if I see something that seems like an r-meme (something that its author spent little time on, because they optimize for quantity not quality of their output), I do not want to spend more than five seconds responding to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
I remind myself that odds are the "proofreading" was done for them by a defective software program, which like as not introduced some of the errors. Worse, the writer has probably spent their life reading the output of similar defective spelling and grammar correction programs, and has internalized a rather different pattern for "normal" writing than those of us who learned to write without computer assistance.
Also, of course, some quantity of my colleagues are using English as a second language, or grew up with a different dialect of English, which they are using correctly. And there are also dyslexics scattered among the population, who rarely identify themselves explicitly.
But I still react emotionally to sloppy writing, particularly when it's produced by some business (advertisements, instruction manuals), or a person in a high stakes situation (resumes, covering letters, etc.)
I'm not sure whether I'm offended, though, as much as somewhat contemptuous.
I suck at writing. It's like pulling teeth sometimes. (And yet to communicate I must write.) My grammar and spelling also stink. When I was younger I had two distinct vocabularies, one written and one spoken, (the connection between spelling and pronunciation is weak in this one, in voice of yoda) Over time they have become closer, as I've learned to pronounce written words the same as everyone else.
Please forgive me for my past and future transgressions, it is not out of any lack of respect, but only my own shortcomings.
Writing errors let you infer partial information about the author's education, tribe, and effort level, and so do accents and speech mannerisms. I like my narrators to have an old fashioned Received Pronunciation like Stephen Fry, David Attenborough, and Simon Prebble (https://youtu.be/nI6-vaWuzN8?t=24443), but I'm not going to go around hating everyone who doesn't speak that way, and the same goes for writing.
I haven't thought about this very long, but perhaps the distinction is that ethical rules have higher stakes than etiquette rules? i.e. if breaking the rule carries a risk of injury or property damage, then it's an ethical rule, but if it mostly causes social friction, it's etiquette.
On this theory, some instances of "giving offense" are moving from the etiquette category to the moral category because of a general perception that e.g. racial slurs help prop up cultural systems that cause major harms.
I think the crucial difference is that etiquette is indeed arbitrary. You could easily flip the order in which forks are laid out next to the plate for that's just an arbitrary convention but you can't say "Let's all agree it's ok to murder each other" because that's not just arbitrary convention. Murder is legit bad.
That's true of some etiquette, but some seems purposeful. Refraining from interrupting people isn't an arbitrary convention; it makes conversations smoother. Performing introductions when you meet new people helps people keep track of each other. Chewing with your mouth closed would be statistically more pleasant for other people even if it wasn't specifically expected.
When you join a club, they often tell you "etiquette" that is clearly conventions for making their activities run smoothly. Things on this table can be freely used, but ask before using anything on that table. After shuffling, allow your opponent to cut the deck. Don't ask someone their secret identity.
Following the arbitrary rules is a signal that you will also follow the important ones.
It is not 100% reliable, and of course people are happy to point out an exception. But if you meet a person who ignores all the arbitrary rules, you should not be surprised if one day they hurt you... by breaking a rule they also call arbitrary but which matters to you.
Problem is that calling a rule "arbitrary" is a little bit subjective, and sometimes you have a motivation to push that line. Following the arbitrary rules signals your ability to resist this temptation.
I see your point; in fact, that's exactly the argument I used with my son who used to exhaust us with questions like "Why can't I just eat my food directly out of my plate with my mouth like a dog?" Nevertheless, I think it's still important to keep track of which rules are arbitrary and which aren't. For example, I find that it's very common to conflate prejudice against a different culture (due to irrational dislike of arbitrary rules different from one's own) and valid ethical concern for certain cruel cultural practices.
Keeping track of this distinction between ethics and etiquette can help us avoid irrational dislike of those who were trained to use a different set of etiquette rules, while at the same time ensuring we don't excuse obviously unethical behaviour as "just a different culture".
Yes.
However, is the prejudice irrational? Hypothetically, two cultures might differ in the arbitrary rules and still have the same ethical rules. But in real life, how often is this the case? Perhaps it is good that the differences in etiquette remind us about possible differences in morality.
It is nice to imagine people around the world as having the same moral values, only different etiquette. I suspect this might lead to an unpleasant surprise.
The differences in morality are probably much smaller than the differences in etiquette. Morality is constrained by "the society should not fall apart", while the etiquette can get more creative. On the other hand, even small differences in morality (e.g. the exact rules when it is okay to kill someone) can be quite shocking.
Hmm, etiquette to me means mostly being polite; the please, thankyou, holding doors, saying excuse me, that might be called social lubricant. Knowing which fork to me is silly, and if caught in some multiple fork situation, observe the people around you.
When I use to get the newspaper, I would sometimes read the "Miss Manners" column. That is what I would call perfect etiquette. Be polite and courteous. When in Rome...
Ethics is about personal behavior, what you do, and not so much how you do it. And though it overlaps with how you treat other people, it's a different thing to me.
I think the word etiquette can lead you into seeing too much of a separation between the formal and the moral. It even sounds ridiculously prissy and pedantic. But nearly all etiquette used to have moral significance, and once it loses that it falls into disuse. The introduction of the idea of the gentleman into English society in the 16th century came with a lot of new rules, but at its heart it was about making rich young men less violent. If it had just been "let's copy what fashionable Italians are doing" the rules would just have been a passing fashion. And just as the formal dies without a moral core, new morality seems to always come with new rules and language attached, as current political and moral developments demonstrate. Etiquette is always either a part of a living morality or it's dying, and that the word is generally only applied to rules in the present that are dying obscures the fact that a lot of what we would describe as etiquette in the past was at the time inseparable from morality.
Is Scott's advance deal with Substack still ongoing? I seem to remember reading that it would last a year and ACX recently passed its first birthday, but looking back, I don't see anything that explicitly gave a duration. I ask because last year I decided I wasn't going to subscribe but that I'd reevaluate the decision when it switched over to more of the money going to Scott.
No, it is over. I now take home ~85% of subscription money, just like other Substackers.
I'm taking Vyvanse for my ADHD, which works pretty well. Previously tried Modafinil, Ritalin and Adderall, which worked much worse.
Is there anything better than Vyvanse currently on the market, in terms of helping out with concentrating and getting work done?
Have you read https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines ?
Focalin or Dexedrine might be worth trying. If you respond better to Vyvanse than to Ritalin or Modafinil, that suggests you do better with d-isomer-only amphetamines.
Dexedrine is almost the same thing as Vyvanse: pure d-amphetemine salts with no l-amphetemines. The difference is Vyvanse is bound to a lysine molecule that your body needs to metabolize away before the amphetamine becomes active. This means it takes longer to kick in, but is smoother in terms of rushes and crashes and is thought to have less abuse potential. Depending on your situation, having something that kicks in quickly may be beneficial, especially if your doctor feels comfortable prescribing IR pills so you can time your afternoon dose for when you need a particular boost.
Focalin is to Ritalin as Dexedrine is to Adderall: the d-isomer-only form of methylphenidate, with pretty much the same advantages over Ritalin that Dexedrine or Vyvanse has over Adderall. Amphetamine is usually preferred over methylphenidate for adult ADHD, but if you're unsatisfied with Vyvanse if might be worth a try to see if you respond better to Focalin.
What worked better than amphetamines for me was getting adequate cardio on a daily basis. The necessary amount was on the order of 2 miles walking or 4 miles by bike each and every day.
What have you found to be the different effect of Vyvanse vs Adderall? I am currently taking Adderall XR and find that it doesn't help me to concentrate/act but sometimes those actions are not productive (like writing comments on ACX...).
Piracetam, phenylpiracetam, and/or noopept. The first you take multiple times a day, the second and third can be taken as needed but no more than a few times per week. Works wonders even for people who don't have ADHD.
Do people have strong feelings about testosterone replacement therapy? It sits on the edge between 'legit hormone replacement for guys who actual health issues' and 'lifestyle improvement' for some. There seems to be a decent amount of evidence that exogenous testosterone is not great for one's liver or cardiovascular system as we age, so I (as a prospective lifestyle user) have some concerns there. My impression is also that the hyperconservative American medical bureaucracy has cracked down on lifestyle prescriptions quite a bit too. Are lots of middle aged and older guys doing optional TRT for the rest of their lives? Is that medically possible/reasonably safe? (I have the same questions/concerns about HGH too).
It's kind of interesting how broad a category 'medicine' is- much of it is heart attacks and broken bones, of course, but in a rich country much of it is vaguely cyberpunk body modification for those aging. Hip or shoulder replacement, plastic surgery, TRT as mentioned, surgeries like ACL replacement or for SLAP tears that aren't emergencies but are really geared more towards preserving athleticism for those getting older.... We are slowly creeping towards our Gibsonesque future
Just my 2c, not a doctor, etc etc:
it seems like testosterone is associated with greater mortality. Women live longer than men. Under the Choson dynasty, eunuchs lived absurdly long: "The average lifespan of eunuchs was 70.0 ± 1.76 years, which was 14.4–19.1 years longer than the lifespan of non-castrated men of similar socio-economic status." (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(12)00712-9.pdf). And this isn't just a case of selecting on people not dying in childhood because these eunuchs were castrated before puberty.
Because of this, I personally would avoid taking testosterone supplements unless they were very clearly on the "legit hormone replacement for guys who actual health issues" side. All the other cyberpunk stuff you mention seems good to me because it is about helping people to stay active as they age, which seems like a healthy thing.
I have this vague memory that orchiectomy extends lifespan even as an adult. Is that really true? If true, is it a result of a generalized health effect, maybe like the body adopting less risky "masculine" strategies, or is it more a question of trans women committing suicide less if they can get orchi?
Trans woman with an orchi here.
I doubt the "not committing suicide" thing is any sizeable proportion. Its not an especially common surgery (though getting more popular). If you go to r/orchiectomy it's mostly men dealing with testicular cancer, some trans women, and a few people who are cutting their balls off to match their wives libidos.
More likely I think being a trans woman with an orchiectomy just leaves you in a great place cancer risk wise.
Thanks!
"a few people who are cutting their balls off to match their wives libidos."
That seems extreme. Have their wives forbidden wanking?
Not a doctor, just an aging guy strugling with weight control, weight-lifting recovery, and long-term health. From what I've been able to figure out, there's a *huge* difference between replacement to get to physiologically typical levels of testosterone and getting to supernormal levels. I didn't end up going for it because I was above normal for my age, but I would have had no qualms going for replacement to get to physiologically typical levels.
The liver toxicity issues in particular are dependant on the form of the testosterone, specifically the methyltestosterone pills that used to be popular with illicit lifestyle users. Modern prescription exogenous testosterone treatments (creams, gels, injections, and a new form or oral testosterone that's in the pipeline) should be fine in this respect.
It's also important to distinguish between health effects of testosterone replacement (boosting low or low-normal natural testosterone levels to the middle-to-upper part of the normal male physiological testosterone range) and super-physiological supplemtation (boosting levels to significantly above the normal range, usually to enhance recovery and gains from strength training). The long-term health risks are a lot more strongly associated with the latter than the former. As I understand it, there's a lot of stuff that suggests the former is net-beneficial to long term when it's indicated, since the health benefits of improved mood and energy levels (facilitating more physical activity) seem to be bigger than any harm from testosterone supplementation.
One alternative to direct testosterone supplementation is Clomid, a female fertility drug that's often prescribed off-label to treat low testosterone in men. It works by modulating estrogen receptors in a way that makes your body think it needs to make more follicle-simulating hormone (which triggers ovulation in women and endogenous testosterone production in men). Clomid is cheaper, easier to administer (daily pill), has fewer short-to-medium term side effects, and is not a controlled substance (testosterone treatments are Schedule III controlled).
The last in particular vis a considerable advantage for you if "prospective lifestyle user" implies you're considering obtaining your testosterone supplements outside of normal medical channels: in this case, clomid would not (as far as I know -- I'm a random person on the internet and as such you should not rely on me for legal advice) expose you to criminal liability the way exogenous testosterone products would. It's also a lot easier to obtain: you can just order it online from your favorite grey-market drug reimportation website that doesn't demand prescription info (e.g. inhousepharmacy.vu).
Thanks. When I say 'lifestyle', I mean that a legit/non-sketchy MD to bless a TRT treatment and oversee my bloodwork & overall health during the process. I don't think I'd ever do anything off the books.
>super-physiological supplemtation (boosting levels to significantly above the normal range, usually to enhance recovery and gains from strength training). The long-term health risks are a lot more strongly associated with the latter than the former
I wonder if men with naturally occurring levels of high testosterone are at a higher risk of poor health outcomes. Or if it's just from supplementation alone- and if so, why that is. Does your body just reach a natural homeostasis (for lack of a better term) as to how much test it 'should' have?
It also makes me wonder if you could trick your endocrine system into naturally more producing more test, without any exogenous products. Maybe something vaguely homeopathic where you naturally suppress your test, or increase your estrogen, to see if the endocrine system overreacts to get you back to what it thinks is 'normal'
Non-sequitur but I'm in Austin this weekend and the water tastes so much better than Seattle
Also I'm trying to tell my Dad about George Koval and the Dayton Project and he doesn't believe me but we'll get there
If you wind up heading down to San Antonio, I would not recommend trying the water there.
Are you from Seattle? I might be moving there. What’s it like?
It's good! I'm flying back tomorrow! I built my career there and it will always be dear to me but I need change and a doctorate so I'm leaving.
1) Washington State in general is super beautiful if you don't mind cloud cover 9 months-ish of the year. If you love the outdoors, congrats you're home. But seriously- bike to the San Juans in July, take ferries!!!!!!! subsidized and beloved!!!, climbing is super good + oregon nearby, mountain biking is great, Leavenworth skiing, trail running etc. I did my undergrad in Bellingham and the COL was so cheap and having the Chuckanuts nearby was very REI Disney
2) Rationalist community- I think it's good? My old college roommate was invited to one of Aella's parties in May and Scott was there as well as a lot of Bay area people and Brooklyn people. But they all seemed to fly in so I don't actually know? I pretty much worked straight from 2017 to now in life science startups and had good friends from high school send me Scott's stuff
3) OUTDOORS You can go outside most times of the year and be like "Wow, I am not in a hellfire or polar vortex". I grew up in Austin (hellfire) and Ireland (similar climate) moved to WA from Boston (polar vortex) so that is invaluable to me. We do get some of the fire season air quality issues. My friends who take up diving win that game.
4) Transit: You kind of definitely need a car? Like I was just DD to Caroline's party and then was just surprised the people were cool. You can get away with ubering everywhere if you make 300k at Google ML but yeah you need a car.
5) Community- I think if you pursue your interests, you'll find people. I have lots of friends who are friends with their google coworkers for instance. A lot of young people which I love. A lot of rich young people buying houses that you'll definitely need a car to get to. I actively avoid home ownership.
6) Education: Super educated populace and some of my best friends are grad students/postdocs. And then a lot of software engineers who love learning/are curious.
7) Jobs: There's so many jobs and no one left to hire. I made a killing in life science startups by geniunely wanting to learn and being helpful and working hard. Google is better than Microsoft is better than Amazon in terms of how they treat engineers.
7.5) Politics are strange. One of my coworkers started the UW postdoc union and has a socialist commune? Is very into Kshama Sawant. At the same job, another of my coworkers was a burning man libertarian in immunology who loves Matt Ridley, follows Bret Weinstein, but is super smart and cool and I secretly love her dearly.
8) Water. Overchlorinated- but apparently there's a way to join a municipal water taste testing team? It was in one of the infamous voter guides.
9) COL- Rent can be high but I've paid anywhere from $700 to 1200 for studios and have always lived alone in small places. Roommates make it super cheap- idk it all depends
10) Dating- weird? Similar to SF. Gender ratio more dudes to women- I don't really know. I dated women and men using tinder/hinge 2019 and 2020 but honestly just used the apps to spam people science or history facts when I was doing flow cytometry super late at night. I didn't take it seriously and was more focused on science and friendships so I can't say.
11) Social scene- young people, nerdy, outdoorsy etc- I have a climbing group of women I see weekly for instance
11/10 would recommend PLUS NO INCOME TAX the climate really lends itself to late night outdoor adventures with super nerdy friends on like the burke gilman at 1 AM who you'll learn from and talk about the economics of cam girls and developing countries with
4) You can get away without a car if you're okay with staying within the city and plan around the public transit. The light rail is great. Buses vary. (the 10 is never on time) One Bus Away helps but not always. I carefully picked my apartment to be near a light rail station and it's been great for helping get around. (then covid hit and I barely even go downtown these days) If you want to get out to all that nature then yeah, you need a car.
9) COL is very much big city COL. It's fine if you're making big bucks as an engineer but I don't know how the baristas do it. Of course I also live in hyper-gentrification land so what the hell do I know.
Yeah, I live really abnormally so my COL insight should probably be ignored.
I avoid "let's get drinks and season ski passes and an airbnb cabin" friends
Roommates.
My studio at UW is still going for $750 a month- studio with one bath- shared kitchens though. Would just bike to SLU every day to lab and work provided all our food so didn't have to deal with cooking.
What does REI Disney mean? Might be a generational thing. I even remember Mad Magazine.
It was just my ad hoc amalgamation to convey if REI made Disney movies, it would use that setting- sorry!
Thanks. Kind of what I thought. We’re laughing at the clever word use here in Minnesota
I forgot to mention- no bugs- bed bugs, roaches, fire ants etc. Except some mosquitoes in the height of summer outside. And some giant house spiders but spiders are great and my friends.
Austin on the other hand is fire ants everywhere, roaches, scorpions, had a few random tarantulas show up occasionally in my childhood home.
Other quirks: The water is very soft. Thunderstorms are rare, and there are basically no fireflies. WA is the most expensive state for liquor, and even without sales tax, OR is the 2nd most expensive. Vancouver, CA is just as far away as Portland, OR, but that matters less with covid-19 border controls. Stellar's jays look cooler than normal blue jays, but don't sound as nice. Ferries are awesome.
Semi-stunned no one has mentioned Seattle's restaurants, which are hugely varied and often spectacular at many different price points. I'd be afraid of living anywhere that didn't have multiple Sichuan restaurants, multiple French bakeries, multiple Japanese-style French bakeries, multiple Hawaiian, multiple Taiwanese dessert places, multiple Ethiopian family joints, multiple Irish pubs, way too many pho places, ultra-specific regional Indian food, cutting-edge frou-frou fancy pants nonsense, and so on and so forth.
My best friend moved to suburban Indiana, and after visiting him, I honestly don't know how the fuck people live there! I was terribly depressed by the total lack of variety and quality on day 2.
If you come to Seattle, consult Yelp frequently and stay out of the national chain restaurants.
Edit to add: I suggest using Yelp because being small and local doesn't *automatically* make something good. Seattle's International District has mediocre dim sum, great dim sum, and truly spectacular dim sum in a two block radius, plus even more dim sum six blocks away and even more-more dim sum tucked away in other neighborhood and the city limits.
With that much small local dim sum competition, there's no reason to ever go into a P.F. Chang's for potstickers.
Why is George Koval such a hard sell for your dad? Does he not believe in the other atomic spies? Maybe you should show him the FBI files: https://vault.fbi.gov/george-abramovich-koval
I live in Bryan/College Station, TX these days, but spent six months in Austin when I was working fully remotely. Interestingly, I've noticed that when I make my snobby pourover coffee in the Chemex, the Bryan water takes *much* longer to trickle through the grounds than the Austin water. It's true that the Bryan water actually tastes really bad, while Austin water is fine, so there must be some differences, but I'm surprised that these differences can possibly affect the interaction with the coffee grounds.
The difference might also be due to other factors, e.g. relative humidity. And are you using 'the same' coffee beans/grounds? I've noticed big differences among varieties along exactly this dimension (even holding other things, that I've thought of, (probably) constant).
Yes - last spring when I was occasionally traveling between the two residences, I would bring the grinder with me without changing its setting, and bring the same bag of beans, grind 50 g of beans, and heat the water with the same kettle to the same set temperature, and make it with another filter from the same box, in the same Chemex beaker. I didn't actually time the pour (I suppose if I was a true coffee snob I should always be timing my pours) but it seemed pretty clear that at my habitual rate of pouring, I could pour the whole 750 ml in Austin, while in Bryan I would have to pause a couple times to make sure it didn't overflow.
Relative humidity would be something that makes sense as the differentiating factor, but I would guess that most of the time the two towns would be very similar humidity, and on the times that they're different, it wouldn't be too systematic which is higher.
I was thinking that there might be different relative humidities due to the different indoor environments where you were (e.g. the ventilation, HVAC systems, etc.), not as much as because of the different locations.
You might be right that the water itself is the culprit, I just wouldn't think anything in municipal water would affect the rate at which water drains thru ground coffee. (I wouldn't be that surprised to learn I was wrong about this tho!)
I didn't notice any differences between Tampa (Florida) and NYC, and the tap water is _very_ different between them! I have noticed significant differences between different coffees but also between different (indoor) humidities in at least one place (NYC).
I am generally of the opinion that Austin has the best tasting tap water I have ever had.
Two notable differences between Austin and Seattle Water (assuming you are comparing water from the main community water systems and not private wells): Seattle water is very soft whereas Austin water is moderately hard. Some claim that hardness improves taste, tho this is subjective and hard to prove. The other difference is that Austin uses chloramines for disinfection whereas Seattle uses free chlorine. In theory, the water with chloramine (Austin) should have much less of a chlorine taste.
Presumably both these features could impact coffee making, but I haven't looked in that.
I have had covid and hit that cytokine storm hard with full spectrum Cbd cannabis oil back in March ( that’s all I had that had an effective profile for limiting cytokines )
So thrilled the science
Has got around to confirm it . https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi6110?fbclid=IwAR3Zm0yde9e_mwPze13kob6INf-zZ9J-QTSBSoJYHzibv4OJM-cE_yoab4c&
Something I find interesting: What's the worst part of your personality, in the sense that you judge yourself for it, but also with the restriction that it's not something that's actually causing anybody any harm?
Mine is something like "sitting around waiting for people to give me things", wish a dash of "rich people are genies". There's a story where Bill Gates' caddy for a golf game got along with him pretty well, and then found out later that Gates paid his student loans off (I don't know if the story is true). I sit around thinking about stuff like that happening to me fairly constantly.
What's worse is this is so deeply ingrained in me that my actual practical situation doesn't affect it at all. I'm not bad off right now; I'm doing well. But I'll still wake up from daydreams where a random very rich person decided to give me a Volvo or something, for no reason. It makes me feel leechy.
I doubt anyone else does this exact thing, but I do think there must be other examples of "thing about my personality I think is bad, even though it's not actually hurting anyone" and I'd be interested to hear them if anyone wants to share.
That is a weird joke. What was it?
My wife and I were given a free baby grand. It was a weird bay area thing. It was also a beautiful piano, very *very* old, and had real ivory keys, much to our surprise.
And of course, it was also a bad experience.
We spent a total of ~ $1200 for two tunings and three moves. The first move was to get the piano. The second was to move it to a new place, but it was fragile, and it broke. The third move was after the junking services failed to junk it three times, leaving us with a topless broken piano in our house, whereupon we called the original movers and asked them to please move it to the junkyard.
Would not recommend the free piano.
It would be hilarious if a billionaire gave you a Volvo. This is extremely ungrateful, but how does a billionaire land on liking you enough to give you a gift, but not so much that they give you a nicer car? That would be like a normal income person deciding to give someone a specific amount of change for a dollar
Maybe Volvos are what Contrarian likes best. I was thrilled when a multimillionaire gave me a paperback book.
This is sort off the answer right now for old (pre-1996) cars. If a multimillionaire gave me a new car in the daydream, it would probably be a Honda Odyssey.
I admire your practicality and honesty with this automotive wishes.
I mean, I wouldn’t appreciate it if a billionaire gave me a ‘really nice’ car, because I wouldn’t be able to afford maintenance, repairs, insurance, etc. You want to give a gift that while nice isn’t a liability. The ideal gift car from that perspective is nice, gets great mileage, has plenty of cargo room, etc., loaded with features, but relatively boring (so the insurance is low) and common (so parts, dealerships, and mechanics are widely available and cheap). I can see where a billionaire might land on “Volvo” although a smarter move might be Subaru or Honda.
Yeah, it would be, except not at all, because the real world doesn't operate based on relative percentages of wealth. A car is a car.
I have pre-decided that I don't care at all about your boring new haircut/boring kids/boring job/boring sports fixation/boring dead uncle; and that I won't pretend to care.
I know it's inconsiderate, but after decades of being assaulted with peoples inane god damn fixation with telling me about relatives who I've never met and don't care about (and who they barely care about!) I can't do it anymore.
I just can't respect the cultural folkways of people that try to talk to me about nascar. I'll happily listen to any amount of talk about V8s, but if you try to tell me about how great your preferred going-in-a-circle driver is, I should be allowed to talk to you for an equal amount of time about eg. competitive paint drying.
This sounds less like you believe this is a personal flaw than that you actually believe you’ve made a rational decision. If you were actually working to overcome this and be more interested in others’ interests, that’s one thing, but this sounds like the opposite.
You've kind of missed the point of this whole comment chain- this sounds more like some weird countersignaling about how you've made a rational decision to a jerk who doesn't care about the personal lives of others.
IT's not rational, is the thing. The rational thing to do would be the check out/smile/node procedure.
The personal flaw is a lack of patience.
I know I should be more considerate with people, but I can't muster up the will to actually do it.
Lazyness.
I have this one too, but since I support a family I can't classify it under "doesn't hurt anybody".
I was going to say laziness as well. My laziness only seems to occur when internal motivation is needed. External motivation (like family) gets me to do stuff (like mow the lawn, take out the trash etc. I have become obsessed with straightening up the house since I had a kid).
Complete inability to self-direct and instead latching on to the latest thing shiny and/or directed by other people who seem to know what they're doing.
Strangely enough it's working out okay, but I'd like to have more agency.
My theory is that most people are like this, and that people who aren't are disproportionately represented in media and among media creators. I don't think they'd need the cult-y ~*innovator*~ subgenre of motivational hucksters if being a Self Motivated Self Starter Who Excels In A Rapidly Evolving Environment was something people were actually good at.
Or maybe I'm rationalizing; I struggle with this too. It's not so much a _complete_ inability to self direct as the inability to self direct on something that takes longer than a couple of weeks, then onto another shiny thing. In some sense it's not a terrible strategy - it leads to being broadly capable (I can do a lot of stuff), but rarely deeply capable (only thing I'm especially good at is programming). Would be nice to be able to set long term goals and have any expectation I'll even mildly want to follow through six months from now.
This seems to describe me well, too. In my case it seems not to be strictly about time, but rather something like the number of interruptions. Like, if you would let me work on one project with no distraction whatsoever, I could probably work on it for weeks.
But if I work on something, and then I have to stop and do something else instead, it is incredibly hard to return to the original thing again. It's like a part of my brain is saying "what's the point? you will not be allowed to finish this anyway". The part of my brain refuses to accept that you can still finish something even if you are interrupted 100 times, as long as you get back to it 100 times.
Having a job and kids, of course all my projects are interrupted quickly, and I rarely complete anything. In the past, my most productive time was weekends.
yes, 100% this thing. Dated a woman who like to make bids for affection every time she walked by, it was... debilitating. I often find if I don't get distracted, I end up hyperfocusing to a pathological degree, and then feel too bad to work on it, and end up burning myself out it on in that way.
Too much self-direction and coming up with bizarre new ideas apropos of nothing which no one else seems to care about and not having the work ethic or people skills to actually accomplish those ideas.
I've been thinking about this for a few hours, and I think it's my struggle to maintain an appropriate level of conceptual zoom; I'm thinking/talking about house repairs, or something at work, and more often than not I veer off to something like cosmology or etymology; those who choose to be my friends like it, but it definitely means there are frequently times when I spend a lot of intellectual energy on a topic that doesn't get me closer to my goal on that particular topic.
I am a coward.
It's by far the earliest thing I ever hated about myself, and while I have made improvements in how I handle being a coward, the fact remains that I am one. I have had to come to grips with the fact that, in an emergency, I will not be the person helping others to safety, nor will I be the one running towards danger even to save my wife and children. I will be the one who is already fleeing out the door before I have time to actually form a thought about what I should be doing instead.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and my efforts to change mean that I would do the right thing if the time came. But events in the past few years have only confirmed to me that, at my core, I am still a coward.
Courage of the sort you describe is overrated in the popular imagination.
Incoming humblebrag, I suppose - I have actually racked up a couple instances of minor physical heroism, but it happened only because my reflexes for that kind of thing seem to be very strong and take over from rationality. 'This needs to be done and it needs to be done now and I'm going to block out sober considerations of risk' is kind of bad thinking, actually. Real courage would entail full vivid cognizance of what might happen to me and then doing it anyway.
Meanwhile, I still suffer from less dramatic but doubtless more corrosive kinds of fear. Various shades of Fomo, certainly, which often leads me to flail around a given problem space and refuse to commit to a decision. Fear of alienation. Fear of failure. Strong fear of disapproval from the handful of people I care about. Micro-failures of confidence that interfere with learning difficult things because I allocate mental resources to being afraid that my efforts are fraudulent and fruitless instead of focusing to the greatest possible extent on the material at hand.
If you're better on those measures, then count your blessings - you're probably ahead in the game.
"Mine is something like "sitting around waiting for people to give me things", wish a dash of "rich people are genies". There's a story where Bill Gates' caddy for a golf game got along with him pretty well, and then found out later that Gates paid his student loans off (I don't know if the story is true). I sit around thinking about stuff like that happening to me fairly constantly."
I do as well. From a young age I dreamed of finding buried treasure. There is a part of me that desperately wants money to just fall on me out of the sky. I spend way to much time thinking about what I would do if I had a billion dollars, with no actual plan to earn a billion dollars. Just wishing that the money would just appear, by any plausible method.
I aim higher! I'm hoping for aliens to give me superpowers.
I have really intense dreams and nightmares two or three times a week. They leave my drained when I wake up, and I'm not as productive during the later day (which makes me stressed, which probably degrades my sleep, vicious circle style). I've had this problem for years. How do I decrease the intensity of my dreams?
Most googling tells me to meditate, and be mindful, and to stress less: I think I'm already doing this as far as possible (and notably the dreams remain a problem when I'm really relaxed, like during a relaxing vacation). The obvious parts of my sleep hygiene are also optimized as far as possible (darkness, no sounds, regular times, avoid screen time before bed, don't spend time in bed when not sleeping, etc.). I don't drink alcohol.
I found this reddit thread which matches my situation but it's light on the specifics: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/f7p60z/how_to_treat_persistent_nightmares/
Sleep apnea might be the issue but it seems to be lots of time and effort to investigate it and not much to do to fix it. Is it worth looking into? How do I start: I can just record myself sleeping and check the breathing, right?
Cannabis is often mentioned. Does anyone know a good procedure here? I'm guessing I want to take some CBD oil just before sleep, starting small and increasing the dose?
I'm thinking about experimenting with sleep supplements: zink, chamomile, Melatonin, the entire kitchen sink. Suggestions for good places to start are taken with gratitude.
How's your GI health?/Any changes in diet/nutrition/whatever lately
Mainly asking because of the being totally drained after/brain does lots of cool stuff with other organ systems to clear inflammatory molecules
I've had this problem for a long time. No diet changes recently. I would like to think that I eat reasonably healthy (but I guess everyone does, right?).
Just a note: avoid melatonin at all cost, it makes dreams much more intense. The exact opposite of what you need!
Is that true? Scott's guide notes "weird dreams" as a side effect of too high doses, but is it common at reasonable doses as well? https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/#5_I_try_to_use_melatonin_for_sleep_and_it_does_put_me_to_sleep_but_it_just_gives_me_weird_dreams_and_makes_me_wake_up_very_early
Personal data point: it does for me, especially for dreams that I have after waking up and going back to sleep again.
Did you take reasonable (<0.3 mg) doses?
1.9mg doses, which is what's sold pretty much everywhere.
2mg is normal, but it's not reasonable.
Try smaller doses. At the very least, try cutting the pills in half.
Here's 0.3mg:
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Extension-Melatonin-300-Capsules/dp/B000X9QZZ2
My sleep quality with 300 micrograms of melatonin is better than if I tried shifting my normal sleeping time without it, but worse than if I just went to bed whenever I felt tired. It gets me shallow sleep with hourly or two-hourly awakenings, when the alternative is no sleep at all. Shallow sleep does invite more vivid dreams, so if melatonin doesn't knock you out cold, I imagine it does not help against the nightmares.
"Sleep apnea might be the issue but it seems to be lots of time and effort to investigate it and not much to do to fix it. Is it worth looking into? How do I start: I can just record myself sleeping and check the breathing, right?"
Several apps are supposed to be able to detect sleep apnea, I do not know if they are effective but it may be worth a try?
Will do. I'm just afraid that I will discover sleep apnea and then be unable to find a solution to it. But knowing is better than guessing I guess?
Obstructive sleep apnea is a common problem that can cause A myriad of long-term effects including increase in mortality. It is reliably treated with CPAP with documented improvements in daytime awareness and cognition. Mild OSA can sometimes be treated with mouth guards that hold the jaw in such a way that minimizes the change in position of the jaw during sleep relaxation.
If OSA is a possibility in your situation you should absolutely get it evaluated.
But CPAP seems like a huge hassle, I'm not sure it will be possible for me to go trough it. But apnea is so bad that it's worth it I guess. Has anyone done CPAP and can reassure me that it's not super hard?
Have not done it personally, but a friend without apnea decided to try CPAP just to see if it improved his sleep quality. He reports it did and has been sticking with it, even though he probably does not have actual apnea. So can't be that hard! Apparently you can score quite a discount on a used machine online, and apparently BiPAP is more comfortable than CPAP. I think the cost of keeping your eyes open for a good deal and trying it out are quite low. The noise can take some getting used to for a partner.
Otherwise SnoreLab is an app I've used; I think if you don't upgrade to the paid version they eventually offer you 50% off and its a reasonable price. Picking up a fitbit or OURA or something that can monitor your sleep is also a small cost in the grand scheme of things, though obviously take their specific numbers with a grain of salt.
One thing you might want to try- that sounds absolutely ridiculous- is mouth taping. Literally just get a role of medical tape and put a small piece over your lips (I used about a 3cm by 3cm square in the center of my lips). I did it for about a year, and am considering starting again. Though anecdotally I've heard it can make grinding worse.
Thank you! This motivates me a lot. I will go down this route and see what I find.
I sleep with a CPAP and its absolutely not a hassle for me. Took about a week to get used to it, which didn't even impact my ability to fall asleep. Just in the way that any new part of a sleep routine would be a little weird.
Totally changed my life as far as making me more alert and happy during the day.
My wife uses one. Seems fine. She takes it with us whenever we go on vacations, so it's certainly not something she looks for excuses to skip.
A lot of people (including myself) can get by with a nose-only mask that is minimal hassle and easy to adjust to. In terms of initial testing, beyond looking at snoring, you could also get a recording pulse oximeter and see if your breathing stops long enough to affect your o2 saturation. If you're willing to spend $150, there are a few companies that can do at-home apnea testing (e.g. easybreathe).
If you just want to jump in, and skip all that, (THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE) you could buy a used machine from craigslist for a few hundred dollars and give it a shot. Assuming you buy a data-capable machine that records your breathing data to an SD card, there are open source programs (sleepyhead, oscar) that will track your AHI and then you can adjust pressures, etc, on your own.
I'm in kind of worst-of-both-worlds on CPAP. I have the apnea, and I can cook up home experiments with a pulse ox monitor (that records levels overnight) that show that the CPAP raises my oxygen when I sleep. And I fall asleep far less often in the late afternoon. But it doesn't fill me with amazing morning energy, like some people report. Summary: medically called-for, but not totally life-changing, and fairly annoying to use.
Have you ever tried lucid dreaming?
My dreams are quite vivid and bizarre, and fairly often frightening. Although they're fortunately not as distressing as yours appear to be, I've often wished that I could somehow make them less vivid.
When I'm aware that I'm dreaming, I find dreams much less frightening and draining (although I have discovered that I *can* experience physical pain even in dreams.)
I certainly can't achieve lucidity reliably--only around once per week so far. But the method of intending to have lucid dreams and doing periodic "reality checks" during the day has been at least somewhat effective for me.
There are many online resources (including a subreddit) devoted to advice on lucid dreaming that I've found helpful.
I tried it but I couldn't really get a grip of it and it felt kind of derealizationary to always "reality check" when wake. I guess it might be worth the effort since my issue is so severe.
I’ll also note that I ocxasionally use lucid dreaming techniques to manage my nightmares, and have found it reasonably effective. That said, it tends to be infrequent enough for me that I don’t stick with a regimen; I use it for a couple days and the novelty seems to make it effective, and then both the efficacy and the nightmares tend to fade for me.
You might also want to look up image rehearsal therapy.
Thanks! I will!
I hope this isn't too obvious but: my nightmares were a much bigger problem when I was working a late shift and so would eat right before bed. Now I avoid eating within about three hours of going to bed and it is much better.
I feel like I'm already doing this with my general attention to sleep hygiene, but I will try to be extra careful for a period.
I don’t recommend marijuana or its derivatives for this; the two most devoted cannabis users I know complain of seriously disturbed sleep and nightmares. Of course, they believe that the cannabis helps, but I note that they just keep using it and they just keep complaining of chronic anxiety about sleep and terrible sleep.
Like many people who self-medicate with recreational drugs, I think there’s a good bit of self-deception going on about how much their problems are caused by the supposed coping mechanisms for those problems.
Thanks, this is really useful.
Magnesium supplementation is known to often produce much more intense dreams, so I expect a diet high in magnesium, or if blood serum levels of magnesium are really high, it might have the same effect. Maybe something worth checking in your diet and/or blood tests.
> Sleep apnea might be the issue but it seems to be lots of time and effort to investigate it and not much to do to fix it.
You can visit a doctor (I forgot what is the name of specialization, perhaps ask your general practitioner), they will give you a small device that you will put on your finger and turn on when you go sleep. The next day you return the device to the doctor, they will print the logs and tell you whether you have sleep apnea and how serious it is.
If you have sleep apnea, you may want to try this: https://www.velumount.de/de -- literally a piece of wire that you put in your mouth before you go sleep; it will keep your breathing pathways open during the night. The training is quite unpleasant, but when you get used to it (like, after a week), it is super convenient. It makes no sound, requires no power source, it's just a stupid piece of wire. (Doesn't work for everyone, you may want to check with the measuring device again.)
Thanks, this is really helpful. Small finger device doesn't sound complicated nor scary.
Lucid dreaming forums recommended vitamin B6 to induce lucid dreaming and I can confirm from personal experience that it works. Taking >25mg of vitamin B6 right before bed will cause lucid dreaming. Since you want the opposite of that you might want to check the dose on your vitamins and reduce the B6 or take it first thing in the morning instead of the evening.
Eating a lot of bell peppers (which are very high in B6) at dinner can also cause lucid dreaming for me.
It's not hard to do a quick check of whether you have sleep apnea. Put your phone by your pillow and do an audio recording of your night breathing. Display recording as a graph of sound volume, and scroll through looking for irregularities. You're looking for periods of no breathing sounds at all for 30+ seconds, following by gasping sounds. Serious sleep apnea involves having several of these periods per hour -- you're not looking for a needle in a haystack. Patches of loud snoring are a good place to look -- listen to audio for periods where there's in interruption of the big snore spikes. Or have your significant other give a listen.
A warning if you go to the gym
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/law-of-unintended-consequences-series
Thanks. I knew it was pointless in terms of coronavirus transmission but I'd been doing it anyway. Will skip it when I go back to the gym.
Huh, are people using disinfectant spray at the gym more often now than they were before the pandemic? It always struck me as a weird thing people did at the gym, but they always have.
Thankfully, these days I'm wearing a mask, so I can avoid the worst of that, as well as the spray deodorants in the locker room (which feel like they should be banned, but there's probably a more careful take).
I never saw it happen at the gym pre-coronavirus but now (at the two gyms I've been to), it's supposed to be mandatory before and after using equipment.
This is in the UK fwiw.
Interesting! I'm fairly confident that the gym I went to ten years ago had signs everywhere saying "remember to spray and wipe down your bench/mat after use". I was in California then and moved to suburban Texas a few years later. I can't recall whether I've ever seen anyone spray a bench/mat in Texas or not - it just didn't particularly stick out to me as a behavior to notice. (My gym requires everyone to have a towel they put down on the bench/mat.)
Why is it weird? Forget about COVID, people with nonideal personal hygeine habits walk around with assorted strains of E. coli on their hands, and who needs that shit (literally)?
Very true. But I don't know that it's more relevant at the gym than on the subway or every time you open a door. Maybe it's just easier to deal with there, and the fact that sweat is involved makes it feel that much more of an issue.
Don't really follow that argument. It's surely far more important for the surgeon to wash his hands before work than the cook, but if the surgeon doesn't that's no argument that the cook needn't.
Its rather easy to ride a subway without touching anything with your hands than to use the gym. Maybe you could use a treadmill without touching anything but most equipment requires you to touch something.
I agree with this when it comes to COVID, but wondering if you considered other medical issues like MRSA? (totally possible the disinfectant doesn't help with that either but it seems like a condition that should really be avoided).
As long as its done for a real reason. If people are dying from MRSA in gyms and spraying stops it then fine. But otherwise don't do things just for the sake of doing something as it will likely have unintended consequences.
I'm trying to improve my scheduling/productivity/todo-list whatever. I'm getting confused trying to figure out which activities would be "best" to do.
For example, I think it sounds pretty obvious that I should first schedule whatever activity would provide me the most benefit, and after that schedule whatever activity would provide me the second most benefit, etc.
But then I think of things like exercising: I think that getting 1% stronger is just never going to be the best thing I can do in a given day, but if I _never_ do it, then I never get stronger.
Another example is something like learning first aid. I should learn first aid, but it just never seems to be enough of a priority compared to other tasks.
Ideally, I'm hoping that someone somewhere has created some sort of formula, where I can just plug in some numbers, and the formula will tell me which activities I should perform, how often, and for what amount of time. Is there some self-help book that deals with topics like this? I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel.
(If you're not interested in self improvement, just pretend that I asked this question about which EA causes to donate to.)
You could integrate the benefit over an arbitrary amount of time. Being 1% stronger tomorrow is probably not that important, being 1% stronger and healthier for the next ten years is kind of a huge deal - while the benefit of most other stuff you can do will fall off quickly.
You have a limited amount of time and energy and an unlimited amount of useful things to do. It's possible you'll never learn first aid and that's a valid tradeoff against whatever else you're doing in your life.
>You could integrate the benefit over an arbitrary amount of time. Being 1% stronger tomorrow is probably not that important, being 1% stronger and healthier for the next ten years is kind of a huge deal - while the benefit of most other stuff you can do will fall off quickly.
Oh, that's a good way to think about it. I think I intuitively realized this, since I still try to exercise every day, but it's good to be able to think about costs/benefits in mathematical terms, since then I can apply the same reasoning to other things too.
>You have a limited amount of time and energy and an unlimited amount of useful things to do. It's possible you'll never learn first aid and that's a valid tradeoff against whatever else you're doing in your life.
I was thinking about that in terms of P(injury) * cost of injury. I might never need first aid, but if I do need it, I might _really_ need it.
Also, there are more ephemeral benefits. For instance, knowing first aid can be a signal of competence and status. (Note to self: Find ways to subtly drop hints that I know first aid, during conversations.)
In terms of fitness, its not a matter of just being 1% stronger for the next ten years. Rather, the gains are going to be additive -- so more like 1.01^X, where X is the number of consecutive weeks you're going to the gym. Obviously the gains will become asymptotic at some point, but it certainly wouldn't be outrageous to add 50-100% strength over the first year if you're consistent.
Perhaps you are mis-measuring "best" in your own mind. I can see two ways that may be happening. One is conscious, and the other unconsciously. Some part of you may be determining that "best" is what you actually find yourself doing instead of exercising or whatever you want to be doing instead. We allow our brains to "trick" us into doing the things we really want to do. Some part of your brain is valuing those activities much higher than exercise or whatever. Alternately, you may be correctly valuing what else you spend your time on, but you just don't like the results. For instance, I want to do a variety of things that are not related to my job, but I find myself spending a lot more of my time working than I would want. The reality is that my job is important to me and my family, and I am likely correctly valuing my time towards work - because it pays for our bills and our standard of living, and the amount of work I do is likely well in line with the requirements of the job.
In either case, I think a good option for you may be to actually evaluate the pros and cons of what you do and what you think you want to do. Be brutally honest with yourself, hold nothing back from consideration. Allow yourself to judge the value of fun or recreation (or whatever you end up doing that you feel isn't productive), and not just the practical end results of your approach. I did something like this with exercise, and one of my conclusions was that I hated the time I spent actively exercising when I did it solely for the sake of improving my strength and health. On the other hand, I really enjoyed exercise when I could combine it with something I enjoyed and it was a byproduct of that enjoyment (playing sports, riding bikes with family, etc.). So, knowing that I really loathed going to the gym, I stopped fighting myself about that type of exercise and instead try to find ways to be active that feels less like a chore and/or less pointless.
One piece that seems to be missing from your decision making is what YOU think is best based on personal or emotional criteria. I don't think there is a completely rational answer to your question and you need to explicitly define your values and priorities. I am partial to the writing of Cal Newport and you may find his concept of the Deep Life interesting. Here is a short summary of how he breaks down his goals and priorities: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/04/20/cultivating-a-deep-life/
Often times, when it comes to habits or productivity, it's more important to do anything than to do the most important thing. You have to get the ball rolling first then decide where it needs to go.
Has anyone looked into psychological attachment theory (for infants) and knows if it's legit or not? Or something more nuanced?
if ACX keeps referencing the unofficial ACX fan bulletin does it become an official ACX fan bulletin
What is this unofficial ACX fan bulletin
Data Secrets Lox, created after SCC went down but before ACX was created. There's a link in the last paragraph of the post.
And it can also be found under 'Bulletin Board'.
I guess its unofficial only because Scott doesn't control it?
Right. Scott doesn't control or moderate it, so people can't hang stuff written there and not commented on by the mods around Scott's neck.
Those dating profiles got me thinking: is there an equivalent to 'bisexual', but for mono/poly?
It's unclear to me what that would be. Prefering to date two people? Being fine with anything?
I was going with the 'fine with anything'
I think poly is inclusive of someone that's willing to be monogamous.
Not necessarily. I know a guy whose wife gave him a poly or divorce ultimatum.
Inclusive, not exclusively. Poly folks have all kinds of possible arrangements, with different levels of flexibility in those arrangements.
Ah. To restate: poly includes people who insist on multiple partners, but also people who might simply prefer that but would do monogamy with a partner who insisted on it?
"ambiamorous" is what I came up with, and a Google search turns up other people using it in this way (though not that many -- only ~28k results.)
That's a great word!
Yes - and my sense is that this is quite common. And not necessarily easy to distinguish from "polysaturated at one" (that means doesn’t have time to have more than one partner).
Important background note - some people instinctively find mono/poly to be an identity issue ie you *are* one or the other. Others instinctively think it is more a consequence of cultural factors and deliberate lifestyle choice. This often causes confusion when people talk from opposite sides of this instinct. The are endless Reddit threads arguing about this.
My working hypothesis is that a lot of people are (naturally) ambiamorous and they tend to default to the second category above. Of course in a monogamous society those people happily act monogamously.
I’d love to know the rough percentages of poly/mono/ambi!
Your identify frame is good, I think. Not that I'm dating, but if I were I think I would have trouble trusting that someone who called themselves poly would *mean it* if they said they were willing to settle down just with me. But if they said something like, "Well, my last relationship was open but that's not a thing for me", then I wouldn't be as worried. If it's one of the nouns you assign to yourself that's a big deal. If it's important enough to them that they identify that way, then after a while they'd probably resent me and give me the ultimatum. After all, to them, monogamy is old-fashioned or silly or choose your own somewhat derogatory or condescending adjective.
But then, in real life I've encountered this twice (that I know of), each time with a wife with small kids giving a husband an ultimatum. In one case the husband said yes and the marriage lasted another three years before it broke up, in the other the husband said no and the marriage ended immediately. Being an old-fashioned married guy, that leaves me with pretty negative associations.
Desperate? ( I kid, I kid.) That's an unusual thing to be agnostic about, though. Personally I'm in the "Not buying it" camp when it comes to poly, so I'm probably projecting my own feelings here.
That whole thread was kind of interesting. Most of the guys were poly libertine types and most of the women were monogamous Christians, with the obvious exception of Aella the Empress of Whore Island. I wonder if there's some survivorship bias on display.
Did anyone shoot their shot? I filled out Aella's survey for the hell of it. Expecting a call any minute now. Put me in coach, I'm ready.
Anyone know anyone at Lancaster University that is interested in EA/rationalism? Was thinking about starting an EA society here but would like to do it with someone, not just on my own.
Is anyone else into cold water swimming? I live on the Mediterranean and I have continued swimming this winter and it is very satisfying. I've dug into what I can find online, and it seems like there are some health benefits. But I get a ringing in my ears when my body temperature drops too much. Does anyone know what would cause this? I am swimming breast stroke with head above water, so it is not from the cold in the ears. It definitely comes with the hypothermia. Do you think mild to moderate hypothermia is bad?
I suspect that vasoconstriction is causing reduced blood flow to your inner ear, and the ringing could be a sign that your cochlear cells aren't getting enough oxygen. As someone who lost most of their hearing from what was possibly an ischemic stroke near the auditory nerve, let me tell you: do NOT take this lightly. Inner ear damage can never be fixed.
I'm into surfing which sometimes happens in cold water, and you might want to consider getting a pair of earplugs https://www.ucihealth.org/medical-services/ear-nose-throat-ent/hearing-ear-disorders/surfers-ear
Not sure if the ringing is related to that
I have a pretty good memory, but I’m significantly worse at remembering people’s names. Characters from books? Fine! Only actual people. It’s super lame.
I’ve asked people I know for techniques, and I try to practice things like repeating their name three times in the first minute and associating it with something, but with my small sample it doesn’t seem to have helped.
Any ideas for what I should try next? I feel awful about not remembering people’s names, and it’s a modest handicap socially and at work.
If you have the opportunity to introduce them to someone else by name shortly after meeting them, do so - I find linking people I don't know with people I do helps scaffold the knowledge
I have exactly the same problem. Luckily I'm a mathematician so I can lean on the common cliché to avoid some of the bad consequences...
A technique is to visualize something that has to do with the name combined with their face. Say you meet a man with thick eyebrows that is named Peter. Then you imagine a tiny Peter Pan jumping on his eyebrows. Or a woman with a big chin named Rose. Then you imagine a rose growing on her chin.
I find I can't remember someone's name until I've seen it written down. So it might help to get their business card, their email, Facebook or something?
That helps some of the time, for sure. But sometimes I'm in a context where people wouldn't even offer each other business cards (such as an Orthodox Shabbat dinner) and even though we play name games I cannot for the life of me retain them.
Since you can remember the names of characters from stories: Write your own simple story that admits many characters, or a set of stories, and when you meet someone, embed them into the story by name
I find having a roster on hand super helpful (I use this for teaching). A lot of the time I can figure out their name by process of elimination, and being able to check it as often as I want helps me both reinforce it and feel more comfortable
When introduced to someone, repeat their name. Teacher's trick.
I already do that. I'm just really terrible with names.
As I said, I already try that and I'm still rubbish :(
What is the best way to use money to increase how datable you are?
What order of magnitude of money are you talking about?
Let's give two scenarios: a man is willing to spend $10,000 purely for the purpose of making himself more dateable. He has a net worth of greater than $500,000 but less than a million
A man is willing to spend $100,000 for the purpose of making himself more dateable. He has a net worth of between 5 and ten million.
The answer would depend on your weaknesses and strengths.
What specifically is unattractive about you: fat? bad body posture? unpleasant voice? no idea how to talk to people? aggressive? a doormat? just no idea how to find potential dates? no idea how to ask them out? feel generally unworthy? -- you obviously need to fix the problem you have, not the problem you don't have.
Strenghts: if I tell you what to do, will you actually do it? or do you need a personal trainer who will make sure you are doing every day all the necessary things? can I just give you the right book and tell you to read it and come back to me for more advice when you are done? -- this may determine how expensive the treatment will be. (The cheaper it is, the more things you can fix. On the other hand, maybe there is some training camp that would fix several things at once, such as make you eat better *and* exercise.)
If you don't know, maybe the first money could be spent to find out. Not sure how exactly to do that, maybe just pay some people to give you a honest opinion? (*Some* people, because not everyone is honest, and different people pay attention to different things.)
I've got physical training / diet stuff covered. I lift weights intensively 3/ week and I eat like a health freak. I'm not at my ideal weight / shape yet (I'd like to be heavier with lower bodyfat %), but I'm happy with my rate of progress. I have some speech issues which I can force away when I pay attention, I add too many filler words and occasionally stutter in casual conversation but I have good reason to believe I'm a significantly above average public speaker / debater, so I may need to work on that but I've got the material on hand at least. I'm on the spectrum and in any situation where I am meeting people I don't know I'm tense and uncomfortable. In some situations I can take that discomfort and use it for energy (debate, vocal performance), but as of yet I just hate dating. Being in a relationship is great, dating sucks.
If you tell me what to do I might do it if it makes sense.
As far as I know I'm not off-putting or repugnant, I just seem to need more oomph factor for attracting people and then keeping them interested. I'm not trying to buy myself up to basic adequacy, I'm trying to figure out how arbitrage money for hotness (I am also doing things that don't require money but I figure why not use a tool that's available).
Thanks for the data. Yes, when the low-hanging fruit is picked, it is less obvious what to do next.
With regards to speech, there is Toastmasters, but when I tried it, it seemed like an enormous waste of time. (People listen to you making speech and give you feedback, but in turn you are expected to listen to others and give them feedback, and that is the huge waste of time.) One possibility could be to join and try to complete everything at the highest possible speed. Another possibility is to pay someone for giving you the same kind of feedback.
With regards to tension and discomfort, maybe try practicing loving-kindness? The idea is that many of our thoughts about others are just projections (we expect other people to feel what we feel). So maybe practice having loving thoughts, and maybe that will translate to you expecting the same from the others, and then there is no reason to be tense. You might do some bullshit thing like looking at your date and thinking "my mind keeps sending you waves of warm love" and who knows, it might stimulate some mirror neurons in your brain to feel loved. Also it might send some unconscious signals that the other person will pick.
Another psychological trick is imagining that you are someone else, like someone who wouldn't have a problem in given situation. A specific person, or Superman, or a giant robot.
Also, a standard advice is to spend more time listening than talking. Being actually listened to is a rare opportunity, your date may appreciate it. Don't make it an interrogation; just answer all their questions briefly, and ask "what about you?", and then ask followup questions.
Sorry, these are not the ideas how to spend money. What others said, like clothes, perfume, hair, shoes. Maybe some CBT therapy about comfort when talking.
I'd say, in order of ROI plus certainty:
1.) Buy good clothes, perfume, get your hair done, etc and get them tailored for your style. If you're ignorant of how to dress then purchase the services of a style consultant. They're not that expensive.
2.) Exercise to get in shape. Ideally muscular and toned but at the very least athletically decent and not overweight.
3.) Aesthetic surgery. Fix your nose, get your acne or prominent warts taken off, tighten your skin, etc.
4.) Social familiarity. Go out to some classes, perhaps get a psychologist, make sure you're comfortable handling a situation. There are also dating coaches who are not toxic types you can employ.
If you don't think clothes and matter then look at Matt Yglesias (before he lost weight) or DJ Khaled. Both of them were basically obese. But while they're not winning any sexiest man alive awards they still look a lot better than the average person. Why? They spend a lot of money on looking good because it's a part of their profession. It really is something you can do almost instantly.
1) Is solid advice. It's something I've known matters, but the across the board emphasis on a fashion upgrade in the advice I've seen here makes me realize I've been leaving lots of gains on the table.
2) I'm good here. I'm not looking for "toned" as my aesthetic, I'm going more for a power-lifter physique, but I think that'll work well.
3) I got braces as a child, and I don't think I'll change anything for now. A few years down the line I might get more hair put on my head as the treatments get more advanced.
4) As you hint a bit, this area is a bit of a grifter's paradise. I'd happily give money for good advice, and training on social skills etc., but it's not trivial to recognize quality.
Overall, thanks for the advice, good to get more perspectives.
The best improvement money can buy is soap and a decent haircut. After that clean clothes that fit well and are at least somewhat stylish. You can probably do these steps for under $100, but certainly under $500.
After that it's a matter of how far away from datable you think you (or the person in question) are and how much you're willing to spend.
No amount of money can turn you into a different person, but there are a lot of other steps you can take at various levels of money to improve your external appearance. Clothing and accessories (jewelry, cars, housing) that show good taste and wealth could help, as could a dating coach/personal trainer/cool friend to give specific advice on how to improve in different areas.
Seconding Mr. Doolittle's suggestions for low-hanging fruit in terms of clothes and grooming.
Next, consider taking up a couple interesting hobbies. These should be things that genuinely interest you, are also likely to be interesting to many of the sort of people you're interested in dating, and ideally should be both at least somewhat social (gets you out meeting and interacting with new people on a regular basis) and at least somewhat physically active (gets you some physical activity "for free" to improve your physical fitness).
The primary goal here is to make you more interesting to prospective partners, with secondary goals of giving you opportunities to expand your social circles (both broadening your horizons and exposing you to potential partners) and practicing casual-friendly social interactions to improve your social skills. Even if you meet your dating partners through other channels, having a hobby your date finds interesting (either a hobby she shares or an activity she might be interested in trying) is going to give you more stuff to talk about on a first or second date and may offer up attractive activities to do together on a third or subsequent date (e.g. offer to take her stargazing or paragliding or rock climbing or whatever).
I'd guess two such hobbies would be fairly close to optimal. Much more than that and you risk spreading yourself too thin to really get into any of them, but doing more than one potentially doubles the benefits in terms of social horizons and potential partners who might find it interesting, as well as mitigating the risk of coming off as having excessively narrow+deep interests (which tends to be unappealing to neurotypicals, who make up a very large majority of the population).
Note also that it's critical that these be activities you genuinely enjoy, and it's okay to try out several in succession to find ones you can get into. If you're just going through the motions to try to become more interesting, it's not going to have much of the desired effect, and it's going to be a tedious and expensive time sink.
I'm in a bit of an unfortunate situation with regards to my hobbies. My "get out of the house" hobbies include lifting weights, tabletop rpgs, boardgames, and shooting rifles, which all skew pretty heavily male. They're tied into my current friend and family interactions, so it'd be difficult to swap one out. It's good advice generally though, thanks for your input. Money can translate into leisure can translate into hobbies can translate into new social connections.
Depends on your sex, but assuming you're a man looking for a woman, my advice would be:
1. Hire a consultant for a few hours to educate you on how to dress, and help you assemble a basic flexible wardrobe that can be mixed in various ways. Big department stores will sometimes have a line on this. Cost you a a few $hundred for the time and a few $hundred to assemble the wardrobe. Don't skimp on the quality.
2. Figure out how to optimize your posture and walk. Sometimes that can be done by doing a little club martial arts or gymnastics, both of which care very much about posture and movement. Or maybe train a little in modern dance, which also does.
3. Put yourself in some kind of volunteer modest leadership position, and learn how to look people in the eye, smile, be witty and graceful, patient, confident but not shrill or arrogant, how to listen with your full attention but also make definite decisions with the seat of your pants and without whining or fussing over spreadsheets full of bar graphs.
4. Pre-sample your local entertainment options. Frequent a modest number of local restaurants, cultural and outdoor attractions, sights, et cetera, in a range of time and money costs, so you have a definite idea of what they're like. That way when you ask a woman for a date, you don't just say something lame like "Uh...wanna go out sometimes? We could...I dunno..get coffee and talk or walk or...like, whatever you want!" Instead you'll say "Hey! The planetarium is having a show on supernovae this Saturday, and I think it will be great. Would you like to join me?" or "Gee, it's pretty late, would you like to get dinner? I know a pretty good Mexican place over on 4th street with quite reasonable prices." Crisp, friendly, not pushy but also definite.
If you do all these things I think you can earn quite modestly, be fat and have a hook nose and scars, and you will still do very well with most women, who tend to be attracted to confidence, decision, grace, wit, carriage, and courtesy.
1) Everyone agrees, clothes are one of the best ways to turn $ into value. I have a few outfits that are solid, but they haven't been tailored in a while and the rest of my wardrobe is lacking. I'd have to find the right consultant, failing that I have family whose aesthetic judgement I'd trust.
2) I'll consider this reinforcement for my existing emphasis on fixing these issues. In my case it's mostly been improving ergonomics, stretches and lifting weights, but my posture is much better than in the past. Not really a money in / hotness out situation though, it's self discipline.
3) I know plenty of people in leadership positions that aren't good at these things, and for the rest of the pattern it seems like causation could easily flow the other direction. That said it's not wrong to say that running a project would make a dude hotter.
4) Good point. Getting good on casual leisure could pay dividends.
The last bit is a bit "draw the rest of the owl," lol. Just be confident, decisive, graceful, witty, and courteous. I'm working on it, but I think that money is at most a very small assist on most of these.
There are plenty of dress/style consultants out there. This is how Hollywood movie stars look so good even in their 70s and after a lifetime of drugs and dissipation. You might try the big department or clothings stores for leads, and I would look for someone who is in the business full-time, i.e. who earns a living at it.
Yes, getting a leadership position doesn't *guarantee* you will develop those personality qualities, any more than reading a textbook gauarantees you'll master algebra. But it gives you the opportunity and experience to develop those characteristics, if you have it in you, and if you put in the work.
As you point out in the last paragraph, you can't very well simply demand of yourself "be witty and graceful, decisive but patient with people" -- because those are abstract statements, and your limbic system has no idea how to translate those abstractions to concrete neural wiring changes.
However, if you put yourself in a position where you are called upon to be witty, graceful, decisive but patient with people, et cetera, and you regularly reflect on your performance, you will teach your brain how to do the job willy nilly. There was a fad in the 70s related to a book by Timothy Gallwey called "Inner Tennis" which made the relatively obvious point that the brain can learn *without* explicit instructions -- provided you (1) put it in a situation that tests its abilities, and (2) give it immediate and clear feedback of whether it's doing what it's supposed to do.
That's the purpose of putting yourself in a position of modest volunteer leadership: it necessarily challenges your ability to exhibit those characteristics, and if you try to do so, and promptly reflect on your successes and failure, you will get better at it -- without having to write out and consciously execute some silly pop-psych checklist that purports to functionally implement "witty and graceful."
I don't know what "draw the rest of the owl" means, sorry. Not familiar with that turn of phrase.
I fully agree that money is a modest assist to the process of burnishing one's sexual attractivity -- if what you're looking for is to attract the kind of women who evaluate a man based on his personality and character. That's the good news. It doesn't take a big pile of cash to be the kind of man whom all the women in a room of that nature instinctively evaluate the moment he walks in, and after he speaks a few sentences, because he exudes confidence, grace, and the power of self-command.
On the other hand, if one is simply interested in attracting gold-diggers, women who will value you strictly for the cash stipend you can provide, then the task is far simpler, although it requires much more money: just buy a flash car, expensive anything, and be seen to spend freely. You will attract that kind of woman in no time flat.
Theoretically free. You can increase your mate value by sharing resources. This doesn't mean you need more resources, just that you're willing to share the resources you have.
I would prefer more specific advice. Interpreted broadly your post covers everything from the default of paying for dinner to sugar-daddyism, which I have no interest in.
Fair enough. I was definitely not thinking sugar-daddyism. I recognize that is absolutely not what you were looking for.
More along the lines of share what you can with those close to you. It's a vague recommendation because it has a vague execution. Ive seen people bring treats in for their department at work, not necessarily the whole office. Buy a round for your friends at the bar. Avoid things that look irresponsible with your resources when doing it though. Don't buy a round for the whole bar. (Or do, may show that you have an ass tonne of resources)
Chiming in as a woman attracted to men.
As mentioned by other commenters, *effort* in physical presentation matters to most heterosexual women. Deliberate personal grooming and clean, properly-fitting clothing go a long way, and many/most women will *very* cheerfully overlook a less-than-athletic body if the man seems to be thoughtfully making the best of what he has.
As other people mentioned, you can hire a style consultant to help steer you away from big turn-offs, but you don't want them to stuff you into clothes that are too trendy/expensive/pretentious.
So before you hire anyone, try to notice what *you* think looks good on other men with a similar body type to yours (both IRL and celebrities).
It might come down to some simple principles like "patterned collared shirts look more 'finished' than plain t-shirts," or, "that kind of sweater gives an impression of buff confidence," in which case you might not need a stylist to accumulate those things. But even if you do decide to work with a stylist, you'll probably be happier with their suggestions if you give them a sense of what you find appealing.
Next, you said your hobbies skew traditionally male. Is there any way you can *sincerely* interest yourself in activities that skew female? Partnered dancing comes first to mind: a beginner's class in ballroom/Latin/swing dancing might see you meeting (and physically interacting with) a lot of women. Depending on your locale, there might be local groups of people your age that meet at dance venues and are in dire need of you. Male partners are usually in HUGE demand, even if they're not especially skilled.
If your immediate reaction is "hell no I hate loud music and I'm horrifically, irredeemably uncoordinated," then you and I have similar feelings on the topic!
But if you can kinda-maybe picture yourself giggling through some steps with a woman, partnered dancing might be a great entry point and a way to build up some muscle memory confidence.
Next, do a little research on tips for dating profiles, update yours, and then have some objective female friends and/or strangers give their honest impression of your online dating profile(s). A lot of guys seem to think that putting any thought or effort into a dating profile comes across as "thirsty," but trust me: an effort to be charming really, *really* matters. Clever copy and thoughtfully good photos (NO DRIVER SEAT CAR SELFIES!) can make a *hugely* positive first impression.
Once you get a pretty good dating profile put together, consider paying for some of the premium membership tiers on dating sites / apps. Increased visibility and access to matches / messaging might help quite a lot.
Last, just some general unsolicited advice:
Be consciously aware that stupid random chance is a huge component of finding a partner.
While you can maximize your dating pool by working to be as appealing as possible, meeting a woman with whom you have mutual physical attraction and intellectual compatibility who shares some of your interests and has similar life goals and who's *also* single and *also* seeking and *also* lives in your region comes down to...whether or not that woman is online the same time you are. Sometimes she won't be!
Or she might be the first person who messages you!
In other words, by all means put some effort into being more datable, but don't get too discouraged if it doesn't instantly "work." Your very compatible future partner might be getting over a break-up right now and won't be ready to meet you for another three months. That's no reflection on you.
Hire a dating coach. This is a big glib but I think they can give you all the answers that other people in this thread have but customized to you.
Unfortunately the thing I found that made me more datable/attractive to women was being in a happy fulfilling relationship. I think that I subconsciously behaved more confident and self assured which people find attractive. I am a conventionally handsome man but not movie star hot so I don't how this would apply so someone who is not somewhat conventionally attractive (sounds like you are in shape which is like 75% of being conventionally attractive).
Being a person other people want to be around generally goes a long way to being datable once physical looks are covered. You should ask yourself honestly if people like being around you. This does not mean you have to be the life of the party. But do people (men or women) enjoy your company and want you around them? If the answer is no or just a small group of people then I would take a serious look at what behaviors you are doing that turn people off. If you have close friends they may have opinions on this. If you have close friends who have significant others who you are close with that is a great place to get advice or input.
The general consensus for building any skill is "practice", so spending a large amount of money going on a bunch of practice dates would probably make sense. Anecdotally, I'm polyamorous and I've definitely noticed my skills "levelled up" a lot from dating tons of people, but I doubt you need to go anywhere near that far (If you're open to it, spending a few months polyamorous will probably significantly accelerate this process, but that might be a bit too weird :))
Note that by this I just mean find a dating pool where you have success, and date a lot. Being open about it being a short-term fling should be fine. The main thing is to pay attention to what seems to go well, what seems to produce awkward silences, and just get over that nervousness that comes from not having a ton of experience.
In particular, since it's short term, you've got a lot more room to "be yourself", consequences are lower, and if you're sufficiently weird/confident you can just straight-up ask for feedback. It also gives you a lot more leeway to explore dating circles you might usually brush off because there's a lack of long-term chemistry: it's a lot easier to put up with someone for a handful of dates than a full relationship, which expands your available pool. And you might learn some new things about your likes, dislikes, and assumptions :)
What is your favorite niche strategy game or RPG and why? For this purpose we'll count Paradox games as niche but not Total War. But generally on the level of Slithering/Iceberg/Illwinter is what I am thinking about.
Currently I'm pretty into Shadows Of Forbidden Gods, an actual game inspired by infamous kickstarter vaporware That Which Sleeps. Basically playing an elder god trying to conquer the world. The UI is eh and it is still in early access but the concept is cool and some of the gods have great themeing.
Previously I was playing Star Dynasties, mostly so I could finally get a turn 3 win. The game is supposed to take 50-200 turns. The game needs at least 3-4 DLC or 2 major expansions to really have some meat on the, pretty good, bones.
I also spent quite a bit of time on Fields Of Glory 2, a classical turn based ancient world battle system. They released a Medieval sequel relatively recently but I haven't bought it yet. Their unit definition system is quite good and for a turn based game it feels very accurate to classical warfare. Basically if Total War is too arcadey, even the older games. For instance the limited value of flanking and the overly flexible freedom of movement of cavalry. I got into it because you can load the battles of the grand strategy-esque Field Of Glory: Empires into the original Field of Glory 2 to play them out instead of autoresolve.
For RPGs I am still a huge Grim Dawn fan, basically Diablo with many more options.
Currently most hyped for the release of Distant Worlds 2 and cautiously optimistic about Victoria 3.
Do really old games count if they were niche even at the time? Alien Legacy (publisher: Sierra Online) was a fantastic space strategy game hybridized with an RPG-ish story. It was a bit buggy though and had a tendency to crash more and more often as you got towards the end of a playthrough. I would love it if it ever got re-released on GoG or something, but I suspect it is way too obscure.
Escape Velocity is a 1996 Mac Shareware game of space trading/piracy with lot of RPG elements (questing, an elaborate ship-upgrading system). It's kind of a cult classic. The company that made it no longer exists and won't mind if you download it from Abandonia.
I played a very similar style game many years ago. I always forget the name, maybe Starport GE. There's a mess of late 90s to mid 2000s games in that genre that are all quite fun. Lot of people got their start with Escape Velocity.
I remember that one! Ambrosia Software. They also did Maelstrom, the pretty Asteroids clone. :-)
If you liked Escape Velocity, there's a spiritual successor named Endless Sky. It's actively maintained, free (both as in beer and as in Freedom), and definitely runs on your computer.
I get the feeling you’re looking for video games, but on the off chance you aren’t, “Quoridor” is an excellent strategy board game. Much like Go or Othello it manages to have a pretty interesting and deep strategy despite only having about 3 rules.
Kohan (Immortal Sovereigns and Ahriman's Gift) are company-based lower-micromanagement RTS games with a Persian flavor. Yeah, it's an RTS, but in some ways it blurs the lines.
Master of Orion (the 1993 original) is amazing, and there's a modern open-source Java re-implementation which was pretty much Done Right, called Remnants of the Precursors. https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors
Ever want to play in a galaxy of 10,000 stars with 49 opponents of varying AI strength? You can!
MoO and Ray's remake do nothing for me personally but damn Kohan was so cool. Back when I was working on an opensource Majesty inspired game I got pretty into Kohan because it had some cool mechanics I wanted to repurpose.
Battle Realms. It was an RTS with a fairly unique unit production mechanic. Peasant huts constantly spawn peasants, who are the basic workers. To produce swordsman or archers or whatever you would build the appropriate building and then have a peasant train there. So peasants trained at a dojo become swordsmen, while peasants trained at a archery range become archers. But then you could further train the already trained soldiers, so by sending the swordsman to an alchemy lab you'd get a cannoneer, and sending an archer to the dojo would get you a ninja guy or whatever. It was fun to mix and match to see what units you could get.
It also featured four unique factions with crazy abilities (including werewolves). It was a great little game, very flavorful and had a lot of depth.
That sounds pretty cool. I played tons of RTS games but never that one. The combination mechanics vaguely reminds me of Hinterland.
There's a "remastered" version available on Steam called Battle Realms: Zen Edition. I don't think they did much with the graphics, just made it compatible with modern OS's and such.
This is my favorite super-old RPG:
"SkyRealms of Jorune: Alien Logic" (1994)
Fantastic world, writing, sense of humor, very enjoyable gameplay, huge map (you'll need to take notes about coordinates of everything). Don't think I've ever seen the like.
Crazy good names of characters and places. Try this on your tongue: Dytra al-Desti, Ma-Eshira, Shal-Shellan, Tan-Iricid, Sha-Yesh. Do you want to play it yet, just to be immersed in a world that's all named like this?
One of the most striking things about this world is that many subplots are about big things. This is not your "bring this note to X who lives in Y and he will give you Z to unlock W" RPG. Helping fix a race's identity problem, restoring the flow of energy that gives sight to creatures of a certain race living in a certain place (without this energy they are blind), preventing an invasion of really unpleasant aliens planning to use one of the sentient races on this planet as food. These are all subplots. (There's more.)
There's a walkthrough: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564988-skyrealms-of-jorune-alien-logic/faqs/48902 . Scroll this down to "Amusing Quotes" (it's not terribly spoily).
Do save often if you want to try it. There are all kinds of ways to die, though the only bug that causes it to crash that I know of is at the very end, in the fight with the boss (at a point where it doesn't matter).
I'm also very fond of "Betrayal at Krondor" (1993). Good writing (I think they had Raymond Feist assist them), good music, very clean gameplay. The combat engine was so good that they tried to reuse it in another game (which, IMHO, came out mind-numbingly boring). I'm also fond of the sequel, "The Return to Krondor", for its story, but it really does not have such a great feel compared to the first game.
Played Twilight Struggle recently and it's pretty good. Very flavorful, the card mechanics make for very interesting decisions, and the Defcon system is a neat way to reflect the cold war brinksmanship where both sides don't actually want to start ww3. Get the digital version, so you don't have to fiddle with dozens of tiny tokens.
I really like TS, but it's worth warning that it's got some rough edges which can make it feel less strategic than it is. To some degree if you don't know what you're doing it can feel random and arbitrary at times between the war cards, coups, and realignment rolls.
(... also that whole mechanic where if your opponent intentionally triggers WW3 on your turn, you lose because it's your turn)
Defcon Suicide is the one mechanic I hate about TS, but the digital version will actually warn you if you try to play a card that has a risk of you losing by Defcon. They thought of everything!
It takes a little time to get a handle on the tools you have, but since your objective is almost always "win control of battleground countries" I didn't have much trouble with getting lost.
The Eador series is surprisingly good for how well it fits the niche category.
Eador is pretty interesting conceptually. The actual gameplay is a bit repetitive but I had fun for a 100 hours or so.
Oh man, I backed That Which Sleeps, just for enough to get a copy and regular updates that became less and less regular :(
As for niche games the nichiest (??) is probably one particular mod of Starcraft 2 called Probe vs. Zealot 2, it's a 11 vs. 1 RTS where a bunch of probes run for their lives and collect resources for long enough to survive and eventually kill the zealot. Very fun asymmetrical game, never found anything else that quite scratches that itch.
Saxton Hale mode in TF2
Have you played any of the Shadow Behind The Throne games? Basically a guy wanted something like TWS so he had it himself.
Sins of a Solar Empire, in particular with the Distant Stars mod. The game is stretched in a weird tension between a proper 4X and a Warcraft 3-like hero RTS (with capital ships acting as heroes). Some interesting parts of the design:
- you can micro battles - often you should micro battles - but the AI is smart enough to use most abilities in a reasonably good way
- the game has explicit ANTI micro features, such as "shield mitigation" - ships getting focus fired receive a capped damage reduction, so the usual strategy of queueing a list of targets to focus is suboptimal; unit AI takes it into account and distributes fire
- the tech tree is super long, and the Distant Stars mod adds 4x the levels to each technology; this means you can spec into whatever combination of econ and units you fancy, and still not be maxed out late game
- a unique supply system lets you permanently buy bigger army caps in exchange for an income % debuff - making tall and wide gameplay both somewhat viable (you need more army to protect a bigger area)
After Entrenchment, but before the Rebellion expansion (which IMO ruined a lot of what made it unique), the game was centered around starbases - huge, customizable defensive structures that went from speedbumps to self-sufficient bastions requiring a late game deathball to contest. It was reasonably easy to retreat as long as you decided to do so ASAP. This turned the game into basically trench warfare in space, which got really interesting when there were multiple fronts to cover and you had to allocate your forces wisely, depending on what enemy factions were doing.
I think I enjoy SoaSE because it took away all the small-scale parts of RTS games - no running around with your marines so the zerglings won't eat them - while allowing direct control of units for pivotal battles, keeping your attention on empire management otherwise. It was an ambitious mess of a game, and it succeeded in exactly the parts of Stellaris's gameplay that Stellaris fails at.
I really enjoyed that game too
SoaSE was so good. Got my copy somewhere maybe. Unless it was on the now closed Gamestop app...
As a kid I played Deadlock all the time. https://www.gog.com/en/game/deadlock_planetary_conquest
Its very simple compared to contemporary games but I liked that. I wish someone would make a remake that was a bit more complex but kept the original feeling. CIV is of course similar but kind of goes in a different direction.
So the recent classified thread made me think about my skills and how applicable/useful they are. I am not currently looking for a job, but I might be sometime in the next 5ish years, and I'm sort of curious about how easy such a job search might be and what I might do in the meantime to make it easier.
I have a masters degree in a biological science and I currently work as a data scientist/statistician/coder in a research lab. I work almost exclusively in R, although I have some experience in python.
My work is basically taking the data from collection/entry and doing all the QAQC/organization, conducting the statistical analyses, generating figures for publication, and co-authoring manuscripts/reports.
I consider myself to be fluent in R to the point that, the limits on what I can do with it are basically how well I understand the goal. If I know what it is we are trying to accomplish, I can do it in R (with the major limitation that I haven't learned Shiny/dashboards/apps yet, although I'm planning on tackling that soonish). My experience with Python leads me to believe that I would probably be at a similar level of fluency in less than a month if it was my primary work language over that period.
I consider myself to be mostly in the "data science" sphere, but when I see job postings under that phrase, they cover an _enormous_ range of skills and experience levels. Some of them seem border line trivial and some of them seem to be completely beyond my set of skills (for example, the data scientist position Scott linked seems solidly outside my skills to the point that, if that was the norm for the job title, I would most definitely not consider myself a data scientist).
Is the skill set of "statistical coder" generally useful outside of academia? What skills should I be attempting to gain if I wanted to make myself more attractive to the private sector?
How familiar are you with job hunting? I ask because job advertisements habitually claim more things as "requirements" than are actually requirements, and this was totally not apparent to my on my first and second job search (it became clearer by the third one, which is all I've done so far outside of academia).
That said, I think that "statistical coder" might present itself a little thing if you don't have familiarity with more tools for living on multiple computers: I'm referring to git, or to containerization (docker, kubernetes if you can), or to having done anything the cloud (e.g. AzureML). It sounds like you find that aspect of programming easy, and I think the payoff of learning a little bit about a lot of technologies could be large.
A hypothetical future job hunt would be my first real job hunt post-academia, and while I've had a whole bunch of jobs within academia, none of them really required much hunting, they all kind of fell into my lap. In short: not very familiar at all.
I have a little bit of experience with git (I created a small R library for internal use that I published on github for labmates to easily be able to download it and keep up-to-date with any changes). As for containerization etc., my only experience is in using VMs/LXCs on a home server, and I haven't gotten around to trying docker yet. I do a lot of that kind of home tinkering (all my python experience is from home automation projects for example), but none of it is from official training/duties.
It sounds like working on ways to get experience in those kinds of things that are more outwardly legible would probably be useful though.
Thanks for the reply
I also have a biological science master's, and I'd basically like to do what you're doing, but don't have any opportunities to gain skills on the computer side. Do you have any suggestions?
I taught myself R during my masters by forcing myself to do all my analyses and everything with the language, even when it would have been faster/easier to use either excel or a commercial stats package like JMP or something. I had previously tried to take classes in R and hadn't had much luck. For me personally, learning was much easier when I had a concrete and well defined goal that I was trying to achieve and to force myself to accomplish that goal using the tool I wanted to learn.
I realize that's not super useful advice since, if you don't already have such a task/goal, it's hard to find one. Barring that, I'd say see if the online/free classes work better for you than they did for me. Everything I've learned after my degree was on the job, and has always followed that same paradigm: we are trying to do something new, and I need to figure out how to do it in R.
For what it's worth, I'd say you put your finger on it in the the start of your 4th paragraph. What might be more attractive to future employers is a larger breadth (or if in biology greater depth) of familiarity with the science that lies behind the data, so you can understand the goals faster and more accurately.
For example, let's say I want to hire a data analyst for some massive clinical trial. If someone puts on their CV that they've *been* involved in the evaluation of clinical data -- even if it's just volunteering to do some small-scale work for an urgent care -- that's going to pique my interest more than a slight delta in the coding skills -- because I'm more concerned about clear communication among the team than sheer raw speed of any one team-member. Usually when biggish projects tank it's from crappy intra-team communication, not because one person or another was too slow at his job, so that's a big concern for higher-level managers when building a team.
While this seems very true to me, it's sort of bad news for me depending on how strictly hiring managers follow it. While I consider myself a quick study who can pick up new contexts quickly, my existing domain expertise is relatively narrow and has very very limited applications in the private sector.
Recently I started playing games made in the era of MSDOS. Partially because of nostalgia, partially because I was seeking inspiration for game development tutorials and it seemed to me that earlier games should be easier to imitate. Old games are often more difficult to play (every game a different UI), but were developed with nicer set of incentives (no micropayments, no DRM) and felt more diverse (first-person shooter was a genre, not a checkbox in the list of features). Anyway...
These are the games that I really enjoyed so far: Abuse; Bomberman / Dyna Blaster; Eye of the Beholder; Heretic; Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom; Legend of Kyrandia; WarCraft.
I was surprisingly disappointed by Populous, specifically Populous II. From my childhood I remembered it as an interesting and difficult game. But the problem is that there is a rather simple optimal strategy, and once you find it, all levels (well, at least the first 20 of them, I didn't play further) are quite easy and boring. Furthermore, the scoring is stupid, because it *penalizes* you for *winning quickly*. The goal at each level is to kill all enemy units, but the points are awarded for total units produced and total units killed (I think), so if you destroy your opponent quickly, you get few XP, but if the game stretches for long period of time in balance and then you succeed to win, you get many XP.
Legend of Kyrandia was a great series, especially the second one (Hand of Fate). I've not played the Populous games but it sounds like they might have been going for some early form of dynamic difficulty? If the XP is used to level up in some permanent way rather than just being your score, then finishing a level too fast means you're too good at the game, so making you under leveled for the next stage by giving you less XP could keep the game interesting. Since you found it annoying, and it sounds like things stayed too easy regardless they obviously didn't do a good job even if that was the intent, but that is part of the price you pay for playing old games. Some aspects of game-dev really have come a long way over the years.
In Populous 2 the concept of XP means simultaneously two things: how powerful spells you get, and how far you have progressed in the game. So the analogy would be... imagine that if you win a map too fast, you need to play it again several times (until you collect enough XP). On one hand you are under-leveled, but on the other hand you are stuck at map 1, which you have already proved you can complete quite easily. And you only proceed to map 2 when you gain *exactly* the same power as someone else would get for completing the map 1 really really slowly. The power and the map mean the same thing. This is a bad design decision. Especially when the ultimate strategy can be executed using the cheapest spells, so you do not even need more power to win. Later the things get more difficult, but you would need to win about a hundred (literally) easy levels first. I somehow didn't mind doing this as a kid, but now I just said no.
Games get easier once you know the optimal stratedy. Like, WarCraft is also now easier for me. The difference is that Populous punishes me for winning too easily; and punishes me not by making the game more difficult, but just by making it slower.
Some games were great for their time but had specific design decisions that would be patched out very quickly these days. Back then it wasn't that simple.
A math coprocessor is a good thing to have. I was writing graphics, math intensive - for the time - code in the late 80’s. Things became so much easier when I could target machines that had one.
Ok, it just sounds like flat out bad game design then.
I'm interested to see what you think of NetHack when/if you get around to it.
Everyone always says "make a Pong clone". Terrible advice unless maybe you are planning to make an indie platformer? Perhaps all the advice was coming from that genre of developer so it made sense in the bubble?
Do you write game development tutorials?
On the second topic, games were more diverse because there were fewer, they were cheaper, and mega-corps hadn't got into it yet. We probably can't go back to when games seemed more diverse, well outside of a small hobbyist community maybe? But for commercial games no.
For tutorials, click on the link after my name. (Yeah, the blog title is stupid and non-obvious, I will change it later.) I wrote first two articles months ago, then I procrastinated with the next parts.
I assume a commercial company will usually do a research which type of games sells best, and produce more of that. If many companies do this, they will get similar results, assuming the research is solid. The hobbyists are free to do whatever they want, and no boss will judge them.
The games I have listed -- Abuse; Bomberman / Dyna Blaster; Eye of the Beholder; Heretic; Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom; Legend of Kyrandia; WarCraft -- are all hugely different, there is practically no similarity. But I guess if I keep playing more MSDOS games, at some moment it will become repetitive.
Just wanted to share this tech-inspired banger of a song that hits just a liiiiitle too hard sometimes: https://open.spotify.com/track/25z6kpmIwkCUqk2IORrJ5v?si=17571eb43a234b68
Well that was some weird shit.
Oddly enjoyable though.
Does anyone know of good resources on the forgiveness of others, in particular the practical side (what it means, how to do it)? I'm most familiar with certain Christian and Buddhist teachings, but anything would help. Thanks!
(To clarify, this could be anything related to that bit in the Lord's Prayer where it says "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us".)
C. S. Lewis wrote an essay ("On Forgiveness") about the subject that you can find in the essay collection *The Weight of Glory*. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find it online anywhere, and it's not in my personal collection so I can't transcribe the most relevant passages. I'm sure you could find it at a library.
The essay collection *God in the Dock* has been put online by a kindly pirate, and I know that one of the essays in it is very relevant to the practical aspect of forgiveness: "The Trouble With X". It's not specifically about forgiveness, but I found reading it made it much easier for me to forgive others.
http://www.orcuttchristian.org/Lewis%20CS%20-%20God_in_the_Dock.pdf
Thanks! I'll try to find that first one. I looked at the second one, and maybe it'll help. Lewis is generally hit-or-miss for me, I'm afraid. :-/
There is a book called Dance of Anger that might be worth a read. Very short so not much of a loss if it doesn’t help.
Don't fixate on the title saying it's a woman's guide - it helps men just fine.
Hm. From the description, that seems more like instructions on how to de-escalate a war, but I'm looking for something more like how post-apocalyptic survivors can do environmental remediation when the entire landscape has been nuked. But I'll keep it in mind, thanks!
From the Bible, I think the most interesting passage on forgiveness is a parable Jesus tells in Matthew 18:21-35 - it relates a story of a man who is forgiven an absurd debt (like millions of dollars), who then turns around and shakes down someone who owes him the equivalent of a couple hundred dollars and throws him in prison when he doesn't pay.
The story ends with the master (the one owed millions) finding out and imprisoning the man saying: "You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?".
Ultimately, this is the Christian perspective on forgiveness - we are to forgive others not for a pragmatic reason, not because they "deserve it", but because God has forgiven us.
Very clever handle, retsam!
But how exactly do we *DO* that??? :-(
I've more or less been sold on the idea being a good one. But I don't know how to get there from here. How do I achieve a state where I don't feel the parties in question so much as owe me an apology? (Assume I'm already praying for grace as hard as my shriveled little toxic-waste-dump-site of an atheist heart will allow.)
Forgiveness is very, very difficult. I have no advice for you, but I can give you a quote from a novel, dealing with Satanism in contemporary (as it was in 1891) Paris, “Là-Bas” by the 19th century French fin de siècle (and ultimately Catholic revert) novelist J-K Huysmans. If you're not familiar with Gilles de Rais and his crimes, look it up here (content warning because the crimes are horrible, even by modern standards):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_de_Rais
“He divulged every detail. The account was so formidable, so atrocious, that beneath their golden caps the bishops blanched. These priests, tempered in the fires of confessional, these judges who in that time of demonomania and murder had never heard more terrifying confessions, these prelates whom no depravity had ever astonished, made the sign of the Cross, and Jean de Malestroit rose and for very shame veiled the face of the Christ.
Then all lowered their heads, and without a word they listened. The Marshal, bathed in sweat, his face downcast, looked now at the crucifix whose invisible head and bristling crown of thorns gave their shapes to the veil.
He finished his narrative and broke down completely. Till now he had stood erect, speaking as if in a daze, recounting to himself, aloud, the memory of his ineradicable crimes. But at the end of the story his forces abandoned him. He fell on his knees and, shaken by terrific sobs, he cried, “O God, O my Redeemer, I beseech mercy and pardon!” Then the ferocious and haughty baron, the first of his caste no doubt, humiliated himself. He turned toward the people and said, weeping, “Ye, the parents of those whom I have so cruelly put to death, give, ah give me, the succour of your pious prayers!”
Then in its white splendour the soul of the Middle Ages burst forth radiant.
Jean de Malestroit left his seat and raised the accused, who was beating the flagstones with his despairing forehead. The judge in de Malestroit disappeared, the priest alone remained. He embraced the sinner who was repenting and lamenting his fault.
A shudder overran the audience when Jean de Malestroit, with Gilles's head on his breast, said to him, “Pray that the just and rightful wrath of the Most High be averted, weep that your tears may wash out the blood lust from your being!”
And with one accord everybody in the room knelt down and prayed for the assassin. When the orisons were hushed there was an instant of wild terror and commotion. Driven beyond human limits of horror and pity, the crowd tossed and surged. The judges of the Tribunal, silent, enervated, reconquered themselves.
…“Tell us, Durtal, how the people acted when Gilles de Rais was conducted to the stake.”
“Yes, tell us,” said Carhaix, his great eyes made watery by the smoke of his pipe.
“Well, you know, as a consequence of unheard-of crimes, the Marshal de Rais was condemned to be hanged and burned alive. After the sentence was passed, when he was brought back to his dungeon, he addressed a last appeal to the Bishop, Jean de Malestroit, beseeching the Bishop to intercede for him with the fathers and mothers of the children Gilles had so ferociously violated and put to death, to be present when he suffered.
“The people whose hearts he had lacerated wept with pity. They now saw in this demoniac noble only a poor man who lamented his crimes and was about to confront the Divine Wrath. The day of execution, by nine o'clock they were marching through the city in processional. They chanted psalms in the streets and took vows in the churches to fast three days in order to help assure the repose of the Marshal's soul.”
“Pretty far, as you see, from American lynch law,” said Des Hermies.”
And I've quoted this before, Let me give you another quote, this time from Chesterton’s “The Chief Mourner of Marne”, The Secret of Father Brown, 1927 (emphasis mine):
“But, hang it all,” cried Mallow, “you don’t expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing like this?”
“No,” said the priest; “but we have to be able to pardon it.”
He stood up abruptly and looked round at them.
“We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction,” he said. “We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, <strong>to console those who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real crimes; mean as St. Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came.”
“The dawn,” repeated Mallow doubtfully. “You mean hope – for him?”
“Yes,” replied the other. “Let me ask you one question. You are great ladies and men of honour and secure of yourselves; you would never, you can tell yourselves, stoop to such squalid reason as that. But tell me this. If any of you had so stooped, which of you, years afterwards, when you were old and rich and safe, would have been driven by conscience or confessor to tell such a story of yourself? You say you could not commit so base a crime. Could you confess so base a crime?” The others gathered their possessions together and drifted by twos and threes out of the room in silence. And Father Brown, also in silence, went back to the melancholy castle of Marne.”
For myself, I've found "The Screwtape Letters" very useful because it helps burst my bubble of self-righteousness. It's hard to point at the mote in another's eye when you have been made very aware of the beam in your own.
We watch “Father Brown Mysteries” on PBS. I think they’re produced by BBC.
It took a couple episodes to gather that he was Catholic not Anglican. I think his hat confused me.
Is this the new one (apparently they did a new version in 2013 which is still running?) So you were confused by the saturno?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappello_romano
That is very old-fashioned, which works for the period of the stories (1920s-30s). Usually you'd expect him to wear a biretta, but that is strictly speaking choir dress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biretta
Yeah. I guess it’s the new one. Mark Williams is the actor. He wears the brimmed one. Always tooling around his little community on his bicycle solving the murders that happen so often in that peaceful looking area.
Hm. Superficially, I could reject those stories because no one involved in my thing has even acknowledged that there might be something wrong with what they did. But I know that's not the real point. :-/ Similarly with pointing out that I expect that I could muster more forgiveness if Certain People were inexorably going to be burned alive. ... Although, hm again.
Maybe I could use one of those old-timey instructional books with Thirty-Three Illustrative Examples of Christian Forgiveness for the Edification of Young Minds, or something like that. :-)
I've dug up my copy of "The Screwtape Letters", and will try reading it with that attitude in mind. Thanks!
The "so-much-as-an-apology" comment makes me think there's disagreement about whether there's anything to *forgive* as such, as opposed to accept? Are you trying to approximate the "forgive them, for they know not what they do"? (Not that I have useful advice to offer, sorry.)
Well, so far, one of the useful bits I've gotten from perusing Christian theology is that the "trespass" in the Lord's Prayer is literally "debt", and "forgiveness" should be taken in that context. That seems to match up with my own internal perceptions of things, insofar as what I'm trying to do is "let go", "move on", and "wrap up unfinished business". And the other big thing is that it provides a useful boundary condition around how to treat people after forgiveness (e.g., the question of forgiving vs. forgetting), which seems to intuitively make sense to me, at least from this distance.
I think I've largely achieved acceptance, in the sense that I've accepted that Things Happened, and now the question is what to do with what I have left, how to proceed from where I am. Did you have some other sense in mind? Not that there's anything wrong with other senses of the word, just that if you do, that means I didn't understand what you said. :-)
In Buddhist terms, I'd say I have a large tangle of attachments, in the sense that when the world behaves in particular ways, I am compelled to respond in certain other ways. I would like to remove those attachments, but the techniques which I have learned so far have proven ineffective, at least to the degree that I had learned them. A different, more visceral approach seems called for.
As Deiseach said it's very difficult. Two comments I'd make:
The first is that humility is key - as in the parable, our forgiveness is rooted in an understanding of our own failings, and if you don't *really* believe that "there, but for the grace of God, go I", it's to be very hard. Of course, cultivating true humility is also *very difficult*, it's a lifetime practice of self-awareness and recognizing our own flaws and suppressing the desire to make excuses for them.
So the other suggestion I'd make, is it's okay for your emotions to lag behind. I've seen this advice given in the context of love (and marriage):
Q: How do I love someone who I don't feel like loving at the moment? (e.g. "bitch eating crackers moment")
A: Ask yourself "how would I act, if I did feel like loving them", and then act like that. Do this long enough and your emotions will catch up.
I think the same can apply to forgiveness. Convince yourself to act like you've forgiven them and eventually you will have forgiven them. Some would argue this is "fake", but I'd argue it's a case of not letting your emotions master you, and reversing negative feedback loops.
Indeed. I read a little story once, I can't seem to find the source. But it has been useful to me whenever I have tried to be better than I am.
A young priest was assigned to a small village, but was afraid to take the position because he was hideously ugly, due to deformities at birth. When he consulted with his superior, he was given a mask depicting a beautiful face. "Wear this every day: put it on as soon as you wake up, and let it be the last thing you take off before sleep. Do this without fail and you will do well."
The priest arrived at the village, and the villagers marveled to see him wearing a mask. For months the village was filled with rumors as to what he was hiding under his mask, but he was never seen without it, and would remove it for no one. After time they grew accustomed to it, and after a few years they did not notice it, except when a stranger came to town and remarked on it. Overall the village was happy with their new priest, who performed his job well.
Decades past, but still the priest wore his mask each day. Eventually he died. As they laid him out before burial, the doctor could not help but to remove the mask and finally see what lay beneath. Just about everyone in the village came to the funeral, not only because he was a great priest and a friend to all, but to have their curiosity satisfied. As each went by the coffin they saw the same thing: his face was just as beautiful as the mask that hid it. All those years of wearing it, and his face had grown to fit it.
Humility, huh? The type of reluctance I feel when I contemplate this, seems like a good indicator that it's something I need to work on for its own sake, anyway. *wry grin*
Is forgiveness primarily about emotions (anger, resentment), or about treating the person as being given a clean slate? Religion-adjacent perspectives seem to conflate these, whereas I think that it's usually worthwhile to treat them separately.
For myself, I'm primarily concerned with my own emotions. I mentioned to someone else (above?) that one of the useful things I've found digging through Christian theology (Catholic, in this case) was pointing out the connection between "forgiveness" and "debt". Specifically, that forgiving someone's monetary debt doesn't mean that you're going to turn around and loan them more money as if the original debt never happened, but that true forgiveness means that you don't go around holding a grudge either, so it's not a question of "never again" either.
I'm sort of coming to the conclusion that the effectiveness of looking online for useful bits of theology is actually inversely proportional to how much English-language stuff there is online from that denomination, and how modern and flashy the websites are. For the more American types of Protestantism, it's been difficult to impossible for me to find anything that's not superficial. For some of the older forms, and for Catholicism, I've managed to come up with some useful stuff. And some of the best stuff has come from Orthodox websites, especially the ones that look like the Internet did back in 1997.
Of course, not giving them a clean slate doesn't necessarily mean "never again". But it's on them to demonstrate that their trustworthiness has improved, which is something that Christianity also acknowledges, with concepts like "penance". But, when they use the same word for everything, like priests forgiving sins on behalf of God, and humans forgiving each others for their own sake, it seems too easy to get mixed up.
Yeah, it can get very confusing, especially when the religion continues to use traditional terms after their secular meaning has shifted, or uses terms that are English translations of Latin translations of Greek or Hebrew originals, or when multiple denominations use the same technical terms to refer to different things. (Grrr.)
Most of the responses below accept the need for forgiveness. I think, contrarily, that focusing on the necessity of forgiveness misses something important.
If you take a step (or two) back you may see that underneath the blaming of somebody for something (such that they need to be forgiven) is invariably anger. That itself is much easier to work on - a simple emotion, an energy.
The big turnaround here is to realise that this thing, this anger, is MY stuff and therefore my responsibility. While there is a sense that another human being has the power to take my attention and blame such that I flail around struggling to find a way to forgive THEM, I'm mostly doomed to suffering.
I generally find that I blame other people for things (including my anger) when I lack understanding. If I want an end to the interminable effort to find forgiveness, I think the best place to start is right at the beginning, at my lack of understanding. Can I make the effort to put myself in the other persons position, and run through all the relevant events from their perspective? If I can do that - if I have the courage to do that - I usually find that the need to blame evaporates and therefore there is no need to forgive.
Another way of looking at it is that we must decide what one hopes to gain from forgiving another and decide if it's worth it, or not. Usually, the gain is relational. The object of forgiveness is often a friend, spouse, parent, sibling and so on, and forgiveness allows the redemption of the said relationship, and all the social benefits that go along with such things. More abstractly, a Good Life, happiness, community, and so on is the purpose of trying to salvage relationships through forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not necessary to achieve a Good Life overall though. Sometimes, walking away from certain relationship works just fine. Divorce is the archetype of such a decision. I won't suggest this is a good first-bid, esp. when children are involved. Usually, even when employment is involved, this is not always possible. But it is an option. It's also not an emotionally easy option, but over time, it can work out fine. Plenty of people who're estranged from siblings, parents and so on have no problems leading a Good Life, and being happy, productive and go on to have good (other) relationships of their own.
Speaking from experience, over time, forgiveness can even come after apathy arrives (but the point of no return, in relational terms, is usually crossed by that point).
I would've never considered estrangement as an option except for a psychologist who gave me the idea (after ~4 years of being in therapy). She didn't suggest this to me outright but talked to me about the power I had vs. the power the other person had, and what could they possibly do if I were to assert myself, and that I could choose to engage or disengage whenever I wanted. I reasoned through induction and decided that disengaging permanently was in my best interest - that way, I could just avoid all the unpleasantness of reengaging. It was cowardly, but ultimately, I was happier and healthier for it.
But, anger can also be useful. It's your brain sending you a signal that something has gone wrong, and that you might want make adjustments to your behavior and/or attitudes. Of course, if it persists once you think that appropriate adjustments have been made, or aren't required in this situation, then the signal may be faulty.
Huh. I'm coming at this from the other direction: the anger has proven so difficult to handle (hello, PTSD!) that I'm trying to go around and cut the threads that are feeding it. And forgiveness seemed like the place to start, for a number of reasons. Do you think this attempt is doomed without dealing with the anger first?
As for the blame, that has been my normal approach throughout my life, which I think I'd gotten pretty good at. But it failed when encountering actual malevolence. And also when encountering the willful blindness and hypocrisy and cowardice that enables that malevolence. And the irony is that I've more-or-less forgiven the malevolent person, using exactly those techniques you describe - knowing them as well as I did, I have come to see that it was somewhat inevitable. Whereas finding out from mutual acquaintances that I wasn't the first person to undergo this was extremely helpful, but also at the same time infuriating when put in the context of other people's behavior.
On 'how to do it', try the book Bonds That Make Us Free?
For some reason on mobile (iphone, safari) I’m not getting an “expand comment” option, they’re just being forcibly truncated
Does anyone know of a through-the-wall heat pump whose capacity is suited for a 100-square-foot bedroom? I can't find any that small. Even one suited for 200 sq ft would be fine.
Has anybody had really bad experience with SAM-e? I have no family history of bipolar/mania and started taking SAM-e (initially 200 mg and then 400mg) with no side effects other than mild bloating but no positive effects also. 10th day, I ended up laughing in short bursts for an entire hour. I was not happy but really scared since I couldn't control couldn't control my laughter. I also had the urge to slap my head and legs but that was somewhat controllable. I discontinued SAM-e immediately.
Two questions:
Q1. Both my SO and I felt sick a few days ago (she was initially worse but recovered within a day. I was initially less-worse but had lingering fatigue for longer). She was COVID-negative, I didn't test. On a scale of 1-10, our symptoms were a 2. Normally, I'd chalk it up to allergies or common-cold, but the simultaneous onset is suspicious. Should we test again to be sure? Is it even likely to be COVID? We're 3x vaccinated and young-ish (late 30's/early 40's).
Q2. We're mostly acting like life was under Delta until pre-Omicron case-levels return. Hopefully in another 2-3 weeks. Purely based on hospitalization or death probabilities, this is not rational - we should go out and be normal. But we worry about long-covid. Should we be less worried about long-covid than we are right now? If paxlovid were more available+accessible, I'd lower my guard easily. I'd like to hear arguments why I should lower my guard anyway (or waiting until cases go back to pre-Omicron levels is just fine).
Pure anecdata, but several people around me have been hit by a flu-like virus that tests covid-negative; I wonder if we're seeing the thing we saw last spring when places reopened, which is that the population immunity to all the other respiratory stuff is lower than normal so other things are going around.
I hope that's all there is to it. OTOH it would've been nice if we'd gotten over it (I mean COVID) with de minimis symptoms. Sigh.
Round here there is a nasty respiratory infection going, so that my doctor's practice is only doing phone consultations (they seem a bit overwhelmed with covid and then this). I had a bout of something myself, did two different antigen tests which came out negative, so it probably was/is this bug.
Two of my vaxxed coworkers got omicron and didn't miss (remote) work. They were just a little sniffly. Omicron really is mild.
OTOH, it's winter, and colds are going around too. My oldest and my wife both had a quick one a week ago and tested negative in home tests on consecutive days. If you have tests to hand you might as well, but if it would take more effort than a quick run to the pharmacy I would skip it. IMO, worth a moderate effort but not a major one.
This is truly one of the downsides of remote work. In person, we got to take snow days, really-bad-weather-days, its-really-sunny-i'm-off-to-hike-days, i-may-have-cold-days.... now it's just work-work-work every day.
The problem is not just peer pressure, it's the pace around me. I could take some time off here and there, but the train keeps running around me and if I slow down, then I'll have to catch up by running twice as fast to make up, which sucks worse.
What's the cure for this, short of learning French and moving to France?
Yep. Learning French and moving to France might be a good answer.
Or even moving to France without learning French.
Works for me.
Really? Don't you live in the countryside in an old farmhouse? Or am I thinking of someone else?
Well, I don't know about an old farmhouse, but you're right about living in the French countryside. And I have so far failed miserably in my attempts to learn French. Hence my comment.
Did I misunderstand the original comment?
I had a similar problem which I solved by changing jobs. Suddenly the pace is much slower and the salary even a little higher. Same country (not France).
The pace is the actual problem, remote work is just an excuse. I could have called my manager and said "I am feeling sick, I can't focus on the work, so I am taking a day off". But I was the only developer on the project, had firm deadlines (despite the company talking a lot about how "agile" it was), so taking a day off would only mean more work during the following days.
Q1: I think it's useful to get a PCR, mostly as protection in case you get develop Long Covid. Currently studies of Long Covid will not accept as subjects people who do not have a positive PCR test on record. Seems likely to me that in the future insurance companies might decline to pay for treatment of Long Covid if the patient cannot prove they had Covid in the past.
Q2. I do not think you and your significant other will be candidates for Paxlovid even if there is an ample supply. It is approved for use in patients at high risk, and for them it decreases chance of hospitalization (or death -- can't remember which) by 90%. Makes no difference in the outcomes for people who are not high risk. And it's not a drug that they can give you if you have Covid for a while and then get quite sick -- it has to be started within 5 days of onset of symptoms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/science/james-vaughn-fermat-theorem.html
Throwing money at Fermat's Last Theorem. Setting up a conference instead of offering a prize.
"Then, quite suddenly, at the peak of his influence, Mr. Vaughn’s world fell apart. The reason was an audit of his foundation by the Internal Revenue Service.
It ran from 1988 to 1992 and accused the charity of major improprieties. In the interview, Mr. Vaughn called the audit “very unpleasant” and “extremely traumatic.” Ultimately, he said, the tax agency threatened to impose $15 million in fines and to incarcerate him and his wife, who was on the foundation’s board.
According to Mr. Vaughn, the root problem was the ignorance of the I.R.S. auditor, who felt that mathematical research was “a boondoggle.” In the end, Mr. Vaughn added, “We won every one of the charges,” but the Vaughns had nonetheless come to a turning point. The foundation decided to end its funding of basic mathematics."
Is there any point of using resources to create a omicron shot , when the r is so high ? At such a rate of transmission wouldn’t the entire population have had it anyway by the time it’s available ?
At least in the UK cases have fallen and levelled out at a pretty high level, and only about ~30% of the UK has had omicron (the same thing happened after our initial delta wave in July). If an omicron shot can increase immunity against omicron to 90% or so it could substantially reduce the level of cases
Given its wide spread, my guess would be that Omicron is going to be the source of the next Variant Of Concern. So a vaccine based on Omicron would, presumably (though not surely), do better against this hypothetical new variant, than would vaccines based on older variants. Not to mention the benefit of having more people be more resistant to the new variant. So in that sense, I think we should definitely develop several Omicron vaccines, and switch vaccine production to them. There are no guarantees, but I think the odds are that this will give us a leg up when (probably not if) the next major SARS-CoV-2 variant shows up.
Maybe a detailed cost-benefit analysis would indicate that the amount of resources the world should spend on an Omicron vaccine is so small that trying would literally be worse than not trying, but I wouldn't bet that way. I think covid-19 has shown us that the world was not prepared for a major epidemic, and so we could use some practice in developing and rolling out vaccines to new viruses.
" I just finished reading C. A. Soper's : "The Evolution Of A Life Worth Living". It is basically a description of his theory that much of what we are is modulated by our knowing that we can kill ourselves. I am very impressed with Soper's ideas. The short quotes from the book below reminded me of Albert Camus describing how Sisyphus who was punished by the Greek gods for his many indiscretions by making him push a giant rock up a hill and when with great difficulty he finally makes it to the top the rock falls to the bottom and he starts all over again....forever. Interestingly Camus suggested that Sisyphus was content with the endless rock pushing as it is the "process" rather than the "completion" of the project that is most satisfying! Soper's description sounds familiar as he suggests : "Our daily pursuits are the end, the point, both the ‘this’ and the ‘it’ in the question that perhaps we all ask ourselves at times — “Is this it?” The answer is — Yes. This is it." Or the Nietzsche quote rings true: "He who has a why to live can bear most any how" Sounds like Sisyphus! I found the book fascinating. Here's the full quotes:
"For sure, some human activities also have some direct fitness value: we may still eat for nutrition, drink for hydration, copulate for conception. But these tasks, once basic biological routines, have been re-purposed. They have been turned primarily to recreational use. We not only have recreational sex; we have recreational eating, drinking, exercising, caring, and all the rest. Human satisfactions link to ancient animal instincts, but the links are indirect. They are evolutionary homologues, not equivalents — in the same way that, say, cats and dolphins both have tails: same origin, different purpose. Or perhaps as a better analogy, it is like the way the Land Rover was devised as a utility vehicle for farmers, but has morphed into a plaything. A modern Land Rover could still be useful on a farm if the need arose, but nowadays it is mainly driven for fun. So, our reasons for living don’t fall out of hifalutin existential philosophy. They are assembled on the ground, from what look to be regular workaday activities. Walk the dog… sort the recycling… go to church… drop by on Granddad…. It feels like just one thing after another. But these kinds of deeds are extraordinary in the context of life on earth because, strictly speaking, they are rarely vital for bodily subsistence. It is not out of direct fitness needs that we, say, prefer our coffee black, choose underwear of a particular style, and listen to Radio WXYZ. From a biological perspective, our lives look irrational. For any other animal, much of what we concern ourselves with would be an unfathomable waste of energy. Normally in nature, the rational thing to do, unless there is a pressing reason to do otherwise, is nothing. Left to its own devices, an animal’s default action is inaction — avoiding unnecessary disturbance. Hence penguins huddle, squirrels hibernate, and well-fed lions lounge. But we humans need purposeful goings-on in our lives — daily projects that feel worthwhile."
"Our daily pursuits are the end, the point, both the ‘this’ and the ‘it’ in the question that perhaps we all ask ourselves at times — “Is this it?” The answer is — Yes. This is it. And it needs to be good. Purpose in life is not an optional extra, a psychological cherry to pop on the cake after our more basic requirements have been sorted. It is not, in other words, the last item on a pyramid of needs of the sort famously proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow. Rather, a good enough reason to live has to be in place before we human beings will even take on the task of satisfying our other needs. Without a point to our lives, wherever on a supposed hierarchy we may be, we are exposed to the danger of willful death; or, if not that, then becoming overwhelmed by keepers (internal suicide stoppers), as our emergency defenses against self-destruction take over. Late in life, Maslow came to doubt his own theory. It is quite possible, he observed, for people seemingly to want for nothing and still be pathologically purposeless. At the other extreme, Victor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, gives first-hand testimony as to how humans can endure unimaginable privation. He explains with one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
A Hindu coworker told me that from his religious \ philosophical perspective it’s the work itself that is important.
Focus on that and don’t fret to much about the result.
I don’t know if this is a universal Vedic idea but it seems like there is some overlap with what you are taking about here.
Last open thread I suggested Scott questions about dreams if he has another readership survey because I believe frequency of remembering dreams and having lucid dreams might correlate with other measured traits.
Dreams are fascinating. Some think they contain symbolism. Others think they are random imaginations whose meaning is only a feeling imposed upon that randomness.
Nobody knows anything for a fact about dreams, which is why i think Scott should explore whether dreams and dreamers correlate with other traits.
This was my comment from last week: I think if Scott conducts another big survey of his readers, he should include questions about dreams to see how they correlate with other traits. For instance:
How often do you remember your dreams?
-Every single day.
-Every few days.
-Maybe once a week.
-Once a month.
-Twice a year.
-Never.
Among my friends, the rate of dream remembering varies widely, and I wonder what it means about personality, neuro-typicalness, etc. Ask the same question about lucid dreams.
I have this hypothesis that lucid dreaming probably correlates with "spectrum stuff" for this reason: As, Nietzsche says, we live as we dream, we invent the people we meet--and immediately forget.
To paraphrase that quote, we auto-impose a narrative on everything we experience, whether asleep or awake, without realizing we are imposing the narrative as opposed to the narrative being some objective portion of reality. Not an original concept, at least not today, but what I find interesting are those moments when we step outside of that sense of narrative and become aware, painfully, that it is our own construction.
The lucid dream offers the perfect analog to what it feels like to step outside our own narrative. In a normal dream, (probably) random things happen, yet our minds tell us a story is going on. All those people who appear, those random settings, those random objects... all of them get put into the plaster and our minds decode them as if they were decodable hieroglyphics, even though they are random, meaningless stuff, probably. We wake, the plaster breaks, the objects fall out, and our wide-awake brains realize suddenly that they were random objects all along, that the dream, in fact, meant nothing.
I know only from Tyler Cowen's ten-year-old TED talk that supposedly people on the autistic spectrum do not tend to think in as much of a narrative fashion as others. So does Nietzsche's quote not hold true for them?
So the testable prediction is this: Those on the autistic spectrum should have more lucid dreams than average because they are more likely to "not buy into" the auto-narrative of their own nocturnal dreams.
Another idea is to test some of the classic symbolism in dreams. I won't go into what they are, but many have claimed dreams about X mean Y. How much has that been tested?
The most remarkable thing to me is it shows there is a part of my mind that can come up with a script that can surprise the part of my mind that I think of as ‘me’.
Paraphrasing William James: Your friend opens his mouth to speak in a dream and you have no idea what he will say.
I’d like to meet the script writer some day.
Happy St. Brigid's Day to you all! One of the Three Patron Saints of Ireland along with Ss. Patrick and Columcille, today marks the (Irish) start of Spring.
https://blogs.transparent.com/irish/la-fheile-bride-la-%E2%80%98le-bride-1-feabhra/
For those of you of a different disposition, it is also Imbolc - your ewes should be coming into milk now for the lambing season 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbolc
Anois teach an Earraigh: https://www.irishpage.com/poems/spring.html
Gabhaim Molta Bríde: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dNRPcPpeI4
St. Brigid's day is more interesting to me than Groundhog's Day, which is based on some sort of regional legend in a small town in Pennsylvania.
"Or if dating isn’t your style, how about a nice calculus textbook?"
I don't know which prospect terrifies me more - human relationships or mathematics!
I wonder why people like authors of that EEG study never explain why only intelligence is supposed to be damaged, but not body mass or height. And also why school bullying (which, of course cannot be solved by throwing money at it) obviously is out of question (p.s. i violated rules, oops)
Nature has a new meta analysis coming out against circumcision. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41443-021-00502-y It was an adversarial collaboration from SSC that cemented my belief that I should circumcize my future children. The bayenian in me wants to update my belief based on this new information, but if course it is paywalled. Has anyone read it, and is it a well constructed study? Is there new information that I should be considering that wasn't in the adversarial collaboration?
Can you link the adversarial collaboration? I'd love to see someone/s theoretically rational arguing for non-medical circumcision in the modern world effectively. Outside of religious beliefs or something. Roughly 65% are not circumcised and outside of the very weird American prudist culture it is almost entirely Muslim and Jewish populations and some Christians.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/10/acc-is-infant-circumcision-ethical/
I didn´t, but in cases of paywalled papers I recommend asking authors nicely via e-mail whether they would be willing to sent it to you
Are there any rationalist-compatible podcasts that focus on health, being an informed consumer of medical info, that sort of thing?
Payment oddity: My renewal came up and Substack said my card (Capital One Visa) was declined. So I gave current info for the same card and (Substack says) it got declined again. Gave up and paid the $100 by AmEx instead. But...why couldn't I pay with Visa? And why does *Substack* think payment was declined when the credit card's own app isn't aware of any declined payment attempts?
Is it just me having this issue? Is Capital One, or possibly Visa, secretly shadowbanning Substack or certain substacks? Or did Substack's payment processor merely have a random hiccup that somehow happened to hit me (twice) and it's all good again?
It might be Scott making sure that people pay for a subscription only if they really, really want to..
What's with the "give gift" link after some of the comments?
I know a lot of people here play Paradox games. What do you guys think of the ideas discussed in this video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jltPHYJOZo&t=18s
A popular streamer is outlining the kind of character/diplomacy mechanics he'd like to see integrated into warfare like planning the campaign, getting important characters to commit to joining a war, distributing gains, and picked CBs/wargoals.
His video is about CK3 but I would be interested in thoughts about this or similar systems in strategy games generally.
I've only played CK2, but I like most of what he proposes. But then, I also like most of the things he says were tried and discarded, so I'm a highly noncentral player. So I agree with his final conclusion, that this will never happen. And probably should never happen if Paradox is to remain solvent.
But definitely, for a character-centered game like CK2 or CK3, the bit where vassal-liege relationships simply reduce to a known percentage of troops that will always be available on demand is unsatisfying. And if commanders of dubious loyalty, or mutual hostility, always fight to the best of their tactical skill and ability once put in command, that's definitely wrong.
Should never happen because the market for more complex games is too small?
Yes, pretty much.
Alice regularly invited Bob to do something together. Bob usually (but not always) agrees, and they usually both enjoy the activity, but Bob doesn't ever invite Alice back. Should Alice continue inviting Bob?
I can think of situations where the answer is clearly (to me) "yes": for example, if Bob is a teenager and Alice is his mother. Are there situations where the answer is "no"? My intuition is that if Alice and Bob are friends then Bob is violating etiquette (and etiquette violations should be punished in some way), but it's unclear to me if this is a universally-accepted part of friendship etiquette.
This seems like a situation where a conversation is more in order than an end to the invitations. Agreed it's violating etiquette, but also some people are just worse at this than others. There's usually a friend who does more of the work, either because of natural inclination or just a pattern they've fallen into, and if it's bothersome it can often be addressed just by bringing it up.
I thought about your suggestion, and realized that the prospect of explicitly talking about etiquette seems to me to itself violate etiquette, except in certain circumscribed situations (e.g. "mother and child" or "recent immigrant"). Hm.
Alice and Bob might be in a subculture where meta-talk of etiquette is accepted or even praised; plenty of relationship advice suggests a conversation starting with "when you do X, I feel Y", which is the same conversation from a slightly different angle. (I agree that saying the exact words "that's rude" is pretty aggressive, but as I say, you can get where you're going indirectly.)
I have reason elsewhere to dig out what George Bernard Shaw said about the Easter Rising in one of his appendices to "John Bull's Other Island", and though our opinions diverge on the matter, he makes me laugh because he has as little regard for the English as the Irish:
http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/authors/classic/Shaw_GB/John-Bull1.htm
"From a battery planted at Trinity College (the Irish equivalent of Oxford University), and from a warship in the river Liffey, a bombardment was poured on the centre of the city which reduced more than a square mile of it to such a condition that when, in the following year, I was taken through Arras and Ypres to shew me what the German artillery had done to these cities in two and a half years, I laughed and said, “You should see what the British artillery did to my native city in a week.” It would not be true to say that not one stone was left upon another; for the marksmanship was so bad that the Post Office itself was left standing amid a waste of rubbish heaps; and enough scraps of wall were left for the British Army, which needed recruits, to cover with appeals to the Irish to remember Belgium lest the fate of Louvain should befall their own hearths and homes."
I do like the bit about the marksmanship of the British Army 😁 Okay, while I'm at it, another ding at the English, in regard to his character Broadbent in the play:
"Much as I like him, I object to be governed by him, or entangled in his political destiny. I therefore propose to give him a piece of my mind here, as an Irishman, full of the instinctive pity for those of my fellow-creatures who are only English."
" ‘When I say that I am an Irishman I mean that I was born in Ireland, and that my native language is the English of Swift and not the unspeakable jargon of the mid-XIX century London newspapers. My extraction is the extraction of most Englishmen, that is, I have no trace in me of the commercially imported North Spanish stream that passes for aboriginal Irish, I am a genuine typical Irishman of the Danish, Norman, Cromwellian and (of course) Scotch invasions. I am violently and arrogantly Protestant by family tradition; but let no English government therefore count on my allegiance. I am English enough to be an inveterate Republican and Home Ruler. It is true that my grandfather was an Orangeman; but then his sister was an abbess; and his uncle, I am proud to say, was hanged as a rebel. When I look round me on the hybrid cosmopolitans, slum poisoned or square pampered, who call themselves Englishmen today, and see them bullied by the Irish Protestant garrison as no Bengalee now lets himself be bullied by an Englishman; when I see the Irishman everywhere standing clearheaded, sane, hardily callous to the boyish sentimentalities, susceptibilities, and credulities that make the Englishman the dupe of every charlatan and the idolator of every numbskull, I perceive that Ireland is the only spot on earth which still produces the ideal Englishman of history. [...] England cannot do without its Irish and its Scots today because it cannot do without at least a little sanity."
"Think of the famous meeting between the Duke of Wellington, that intensely Irish Irishman, and Nelson, that intensely English Englishman. Wellington’s contemptuous disgust at Nelson’s theatricality as a professed hero, patriot, and rhapsode, a theatricality which in an Irishman would have been an insufferably vulgar affectation, was quite natural and inevitable. Wellington’s formula for that kind of thing was a wellknown Irish one: “Sir: dont be a damned fool.” It is the formula of all Irishmen for all Englishmen to this day. It is the formula of Larry Doyle for Tom Broadbent in my play, in spite of Doyle’s affection for Tom. Nelson’s genius, instead of producing intellectual keenness and scrupulousness, produced mere delirium. He was drunk with glory, exalted by his fervent faith in the sound British patriotism of the Almighty, nerved by the vulgarest anti-foreign prejudice, and apparently unchastened by any reflections on the fact that he had never had to fight a technically capable and properly equipped enemy except on land, where he had never been successful. Compare Wellington, who had to fight Napoleon’s armies, Napoleon’s marshals, and finally Napoleon himself, without one moment of illusion as to the human material he had to command, without one gush of the “Kiss me, Hardy" emotion which enabled Nelson to idolise his crews and his staff, without forgetting even in his dreams that the normal British officer of that time was an incapable amateur (as he still is) and the normal British soldier a never-do-well (he is now a depressed and respectable young man). No wonder Wellington became an accomplished comedian in the art of anti-climax scandalising the unfortunate Croker"
I heard said so often and denied , yet here it is . https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
Concerns I have:
- Out of almost 20,000 studies considered for inclusion, they only meta-analyzed 34. They excluded interrupted time series studies, and studies informed by SIR model projections.
- The kind of study they did include, "counterfactual difference-in-difference" studies, uninformed by epidemiological modeling, seem especially like "endogeneity" of policy should be a concern, but they barely address that. (E.g. lockdown stringency is likely a response to severity of covid threat. If I see that people on chemo don't have less cancer than people not on chemo, I don't conclude that chemo doesn't work, I conclude that cancer is *why* people get chemo.)
- Their meta-analysis itself didn't compare "lockdown" vs. "no lockdown," it compared "lockdown" vs. "Sweden in spring 2020" (which banned large social gatherings; cf. their p. 14). Yet the language of their abstract obfuscated that ("this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects"; p. 2).
I reached out to the authors; relevant part of the exchange so far:
DB:
"... I'll mention two more general concerns. 1. Since your comparisons aren't of "lockdown" vs. "no lockdown", but of "more lockdown" vs. "Sweden in spring 2020" (which "[banned] large social gatherings early in the pandemic"; p. 14), the language in your abstract should make that clear (as opposed to saying "this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects"; p. 2). 2. The discussion section could do more to address potential endogeneity of NPIs, which especially seems an issue in "counterfactual difference-in-differences" studies uninformed by SIR modeling: lockdown e.g. stringency is likely a response to severity of the threat of covid. (If I determined statistically that people on chemotherapy don't have lower mortality rates than people not on chemotherapy, I wouldn't conclude that chemotherapy doesn't help reduce cancer mortality.)"
JH:
"Thank you for your suggestions.
Regarding 1. That’s a valuable input, and I will add it to our bucket list for an updated version.
Regarding 2. Did you see the brief discussion of causality on p. 15? Do you think, we should put more effort into this (I’ve thought about pointing out that most studies cover first wave, were countries closed down early without knowing how widespread the virus was because of limited testing)."
DB:
"Thanks! The Sweden thing also reminded me—it could be worth mentioning the idea that covid is mostly driven by superspreader events ... if it is, it could be plausible that Sweden's level of lockdown, banning large gatherings, was enough, with more than that being more superfluous.
Ah, I do see the mention on p. 15 now! Hmm I think: since assuming no NPI endogeneity seems like a key premise, it couldn't hurt to expand the explanation and evaluation of it and of (Sebhatu et al., 2020); e.g. I see (Bjørnskov, 2021) spends a couple paragraphs on it; and the limited testing is an interesting point (though there was hospital data). At least though I would mention the NPIs-endogenous-vs.-not question again, prominently in the discussion section, since it is a key premise for interpreting the statistics."
Does anyone know what method Scott used to calculate gematria values for Unsong? I have 30 tabs open and I'm still getting misses.
Recently while showering I was asking myself if all the changesbif the past years in my thinking, interacting and dealing towards and with other humans might actually be not only a result of me getting older or me being a parent since so and so long now. I was thinking about evolution of higher social animals and about the advantage for a group or tribe of having a longer term memory for all kinds of good and bad things like poisoness and delicious food, dangerous things like tsunamis, regions with rare but regular events like earthquakes asf. And I was thinking that I are less and less interested in technical details of a certain narrow problem but more and more in broad social problems, group thinking, long time effects asf. I find myself telling our kids stories and experiences pretty often in these days and started to do that at my employer as well. Surely, I've got pretty recognizable grey hair the past years and start to feel more and more like the silverback gorilla in the tribe. At the same time I see my other capabilities slightly degrade - guess the missing daily training is the main cause.
But what if evolution had blue-printed a second brain re-wiring (after the great teenage brain reconstruction) in a human life to re-configure the brain of (the rare surviving) elderly to help their group beeing cautious of e.g. poisones food, dangerous situations and even black swan like once-in-a-lifetime events. Science and rationalist community only learned in recent years how hard it is to teach individual and even more groups the most important lessons for surviving the daily dangerous live. It turns out more and more that we humans learn best by listening just to good, convincing stories told by gray hair grandparents like survivers calmly talking from their armchairs about all the thing they have seen in their long lives. As a kid I loved listening to stories of my grandfather about him living through the great depression, the second world war, multiple currency reforms and so forth. More and more I see myself sitting in the armchair one or two of my kids around me telling stories about my live to them and they love it.
Wondering if this might be programmed into both my kids brains (to love listening to stories and remembering so many details and facts over decades) and my brain - to tell about my past life and the small and large events, my views, learnings - and being less and less interested in nerdy, technical thing's I was obsessed about between 5 an 35 roughly.
What do you think?
Have you ever been a cog in an absurd, dysfunctional bureaucratic workplace?
I want to write a few paragraphs of comical fiction that describe how someone came to be in a job where, due to a series of bizarre bureaucratic technicalities, they essentially get paid massive amounts of money to do....whatever it is they want to do, with near-zero oversight or accountability, and zero risk of getting exposed.
Below is the bones of what i've come up with. I'm trying to balance absurdity with *some* realism, and welcome any input based on your experience with bureaucracy.
----
Scientist Len works for defence contractor, gets seconded to government laboratory to work on special sensitive project. Government pays Contractor who pays Len.
Len arrives at Gov Lab, finds out the Project Lead has gone AWOL and cannot be replaced due to internal hiring freeze. Left to work on project with one other person who is only there to calibrate and maintain equipment.
Without a Project Lead, Len reports to the Branch Manager, who knows that the project exists but is firewalled out of the details as per Gov policy. She wants Len to send her fortnightly updates, but content limited to the status of the project and whether or not a completion date is known. All technical reporting is to remain within the immediate project team.
Time passes and Len’s old Contractor Co. gets acquired by a big international company, EngTech. Len’s old boss gets absorbed and promoted into EngTech and still signs off on his payslips, but is too busy to inquire into Len’s work.
Len and his colleague in the lab decide they need a specialised component to advance the project, but the manufacturer says it will be 12 months until the component is fully developed from prototype. He informs the Branch Manager of the schedule update.
Several months later the Branch Manager is embroiled in a scandal from decades ago and is dismissed. The Board of Inquiry attempt to reach EngTech for information about Len’s project, but with Len’s former boss on vacation they resort to interviewing Len directly about the scope and schedule. Len convinces them the project is crucial and really just getting off the ground. He also points out that the Project Lead vacancy is not an issue and it can remain unfilled as a cost-saving measure.
Len goes on this way for years, with no technical oversight, a stream of lab assistants for colleagues, and a revolving-door of Managers far enough removed from the details as not to know or care about progress.
Should the vaccinated be concerned about this study
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/10/2056/htm?fbclid=IwAR0SSl9oaJGc75eH5gW5jaj48WtmRyUUW0EvTpDgPimZ3mfDQxqzei8r0VQ
This study seems to indicate something quite odd. Synthesized spike protein in blood serum for up to 4 months post vaccine . Wtf . When has the vaccine antigen been found to be in circulation for so long with typical vaccines ? What could this mean ?
https://www.jimmunol.org/content/early/2021/10/11/jimmunol.2100637