JhanicManifold
No bio...
User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I think that's a great point, but the difference is that steroids are much more effective than adderall at their respective jobs. Steroids can essentially take people in the bottom quintile of muscle building potential and take them to the level of the top 0.1% natural athletes, and they take people in the top quintile and make them completely superhuman, they are freakishly effective. If something of this magnitude existed in the realm of productivity, it wouldn't matter that the best people left google, because the drug is doing so much of the work that those who take it become the best because of it.
JhanicManifold
7mo ago
look on the bright side, she's gonna go through the same thing when you ignore her in a year after you've gotten jacked as fuck from the motivation this rejection brought you. (speaking from personal experience)
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
Dharma
Wow, super interesting to see how the Hindu use of the word seems to differs from the use of the word in western meditation circles, which might be more like "Ultimate Truth", or "Behaviors in harmony with the Ultimate Truth", where Ultimate Truth is understood to be the truth of No-Self, achieved by enlightened beings. So there "Dharma" means something like "the set of knowledge and behaviors that lead to Enlightenment, as well as the knowledge gained from Enlightenment"
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
This probably has to do with sleep quality, the 4 main things that I've noticed make a noticeable difference for me are
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stopping caffeine
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magnesium supplements before sleep
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Some form of bed cooling system (I use the bedjet 3). If you're hot or sweating or cold while you sleep, this will make a massive difference
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A weird vibrating ankle bracelet called the Apollo Neuro that works kind of by magic (see this)
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
"Any man who must say, 'I am the king' is no true king"
There is no way to not appear weak when complaining that the mother of your child went clubbing with Usher, the war was already lost when that dude decided to make someone like Keke the mother of his child. This sort of thing can only be enforced through the cultivation of respect, never becoming explicit, otherwise it's like your boss explicitly demanding you call him "sir", or a PhD reminding you to call him "doctor". Just unbelievably cringy and weak. Your gf/wife is just supposed to know, without you telling her, that sending nude photos to other dudes is a big no-no. If she doesn't understand that automatically, there's no fixing her without sacrificing significant amounts of your own authority and generally ruining the relationship.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Hmm, somehow I doubt that. It's not like all schoolgirls I pass by giggle, but it's happened like 3 times over the past month (I probably pass by more schoolgirls than you because I take the subway). But then I'm curious, what things did you notice in your case?
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Everything depends on the dose and your general experience with drugs, if you're used to having your consciousness significantly altered outside your control, then you probably wouldn't have a problem with mushrooms either. I don't drink and never did any drugs before I tried psilocybin alone for meditation purposes, and I had to start very slowly. If you're someone who feels the need to control everything, be very careful and start slow. The entirety of the difficulty of psychedelics is in not trying to control things you can't control. Weird unfamiliar and maybe unpleasant things will happen, and you can't control any of it (the lack of control scales with dose, culminating in no control whatsoever at 5g or more), but if you try you'll make everything worse.
The way to minimize bad experiences is to start with 0.8g the first time, then 1.6g the second, then 2.4g and 3.2g, all weights in dried mushrooms. Leaving about a week between each dose, done in darkness (sensitivity to light increases dramatically), in bed possibly with headphones listening to classical music, with locked doors, close access to a bathroom, plenty of drinking water (you will pee a lot during the trip, and must not forget to drink water), and in a good mood with clear intentions for why you're doing this and what you aim to get out of this.
edit: some more specific details: the psilocybin content of dried mushrooms varies dramatically, even within a single mushroom between the stem and the cap. So if possible get a large quantity (like 14g) of dried mushrooms and grind them in a coffee grinder to homogenize them. Then buy a milligram scale from amazon and carefully weigh out your dose and put it in boiling water to make a tea out of it, all the psilocybin will dissolve in the water and you won't need to actually eat the mushrooms. This way also avoids the nausea that some people get at the beginning of the trip.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
The monthly price of not being morbidly obese seems that it will come to about 500$/month
Much less if you're willing to buy from chinese sources, who sell it for around 7$/mg, which comes out to like 60$/month for the typical high dose of 2mg/week.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
semaglutide 2.4mg weekly injections that make you waaay less hungry. Currently the hottest thing in obesity treatment.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
oh, I was a bit confused by those questions, I answered yes for the physics ones because I took grad courses in those subjects. Was the expectation that rats would say they "know how to design nanotechnology" from just reading the sequences or something?
yes, you will have to lie for those conversations, or say stuff like "only pain will come out of this discussion, I don't want to know your past, and you don't want to know mine". Also increase your SMV so that no one would actually expect you to be a virgin. Go to the gym, get good clothes, haircut, etc. etc.
Or:
Her: "Do you have a girlfriend?"
You: "well, it kind of depends on your definition... but I don't kiss-and-tell smirk "
You haven't exactly said you did or didn't have a girlfriend, and now you're letting her imagine wild scenarios on her own. Mystery is always more useful than just saying the truth.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
There are a bunch of things to mention here, I'll just write a summary of common sport science knowledge that I think would help you, apologies if I say some stuff you already know.
There's no problem with not going to the gym, I don't like it either and workout at home too, though I've spend a few thousand dollars on a power-rack, bench, barbell, 45lb plates, hex bar (for hex deadlifts) and adjustable dumbells (The powerblock EXP series).
The current scientific knowledge on optimizing muscle growth states that muscle growth mainly depends on 2 key variables under your control: daily protein intake and weekly workout volume. I'll go into each of these before mentioning other stuff.
Protein Intake:
Daily protein intake should be around 1g/lb of body weight, that amount basically guarantees that your protein is taken care of, it's probably slightly excessive and you could get away with 0.8 to 0.9 g/lb, but 1g/lb is the main recommended number for bodybuilding to just be able to check that box for sure. If you haven't been eating this amount of protein, but more like 0.4 or 0.5 g/lb, you've been seriously hampering yourself, and you're gonna get essentially a second phase of noobie gains when you start eating correct amounts of protein. Physiologically, large muscles are a luxury. When the body gets protein, it first uses it for critical systems like the heart, brain, organs, blood, stomach lining, etc. any protein it spares for muscle building has to come after all of that, so doubling your protein from 0.5g/lb to 1.0g/lb can take you from 0 muscle gain (because all protein is gobbled up by other systems), to great muscle gain. Protein is really fucking important. The total grams of protein per day is what matters most, but a secondary factor is protein timing: because your body can't store proteins like it can store fats and carbs, any muscle protein synthesis has to take the protein that's currently swimming in your blood, so it's best to consume your protein separated into roughly 3 or 4 meals throughout the day, with one high protein meal preferably right after workouts.
weekly workout volume:
Here "volume" refers to the number of working sets performed per muscle group, per week. Why don't I mention reps? Because as far as current science knows, anything between 5 and 30 reps is pretty much equivalently good for muscle building, as long as 1. you do the same number of sets and 2. you go to either complete failure or just shy of failure in both cases (leaving 1 or 2 reps in the tank, so to speak). There's a bit of complexity, but in general for bodybuilding people choose the 12-15 rep range, in general 5 reps and lower is for strength, and is more injury prone due to higher strain on connective tissue. And higher reps than 15 aren't too ideal because your cardio capacity could get in the way, preventing you from exhausting the muscle correctly.
So the main thing that will determine your muscle growth (assuming adequate protein) will be the total number of weekly sets per muscle. To give you ball-park numbers, 6 sets/muscle/week will cause ok muscle growth in noobies, but is just enough to maintain current muscle mass in intermediates. 10 sets per week is a good number for MEV (Minimum Effective Volume), you'll probably grow quite well if you do that much. 20 sets per week is quite high, it's most useful for advanced people, and you wouldn't want to do that amount for more than a few weeks at a time before scaling back, since the fatigue will pile on quickly. A secondary but important variable to the total number of sets is the number of workouts per week. So 10 sets of chest all done on monday is inferior to 5 sets on monday and 5 sets on Thursday. Working out every body part twice a week yields an important boost over just once a week, though going to 3x week isn't that much better. I personally workout 6 days per week, with a Push-Pull-Legs-Push-Pull-Legs split, so I workout every body part twice a week.
This is what I suspect is hampering your progress. If your volume has been below 6 sets/muscle/week, and you haven't been working out too consistently... then you've essentially just been working with a volume barely able to maintain your current muscle mass, especially if you haven't been eating adequate protein.
What weight to use:
It's still not what most lifters would consider to be a lot of weight. But if I do lower amounts on the barbell, it doesn't give me the correct muscle fatigue, but I can't physically lift any more. Unsure how to proceed.
The choice of weight to use is subordinate to the choice of rep range, so if you decide that you want to work in the 12-15 rep range, you would then choose the weight that allows you to do the exercise for 12 reps before you physically can't do any more. It doesn't matter if you're benching the bar alone, if this is what you can bench for 12 reps before you can't anymore, then this is the weight you should start at. Muscle growth doesn't come from the weight itself, it comes from the fact of getting close to failure. If you test your max reps with the heaviest weights you have, and you can do more than 20 reps, it's time to buy some heavier weights.
Progressive overload & Phasic structure of training:
The third crucial factor is progressive overload: the gradual increase of training variables over time, generally either increasing weight lifted for equal reps and sets, or increasing numbers of sets. You can either pre-plan the weight increases, or you can sort of "work by ear" by just doing as many reps as you can with a weight, and increase your weight when you notice it's become much easier and you hit the top of your rep range. If you started benching 135 x 12 reps, then eventually got to 135 x 15 reps after a few months, it's time to increase weight again until you can only do 12 reps with the new weight.
Another useful concept is that of the mesocycle, which imposes a phasic structure on your training on the order of around 6 to 10 weeks. The long-term pattern should be something like 8 weeks mesocycle -> 1 week deload -> another meso -> 1 week deload, etc. The deload weeks you either take completely off from training in order to recover from systemic fatigue, or you do 50% of your usual weight. Within a mesocycle, you increase the weight (or the sets) every week. The beginning weight of the mesocycle should be fairly comfortable, you might start at 100 lbs x 12 reps, then work up to 135 lbs x 12 reps over the course of 8 weeks. Take a week off, then start a new mesocycle at 110 lbs x 12 reps, working up to 145 lbs x 12 reps this time. Each meso starts and ends at higher weights than the previous ones, but the start of the next meso is easier than the end of the last one.
Cycling in this way is really more useful for intermediates and above, there's no problem if that seems too complicated, just working close to failure every workout and taking scheduled weeks off every 2 months is plenty good enough for most people.
Phasic structure of Dieting
If your goal is muscle building, then being in a calorie surplus greatly, greatly helps. Losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time can work if you're a beginner, but even there it's significantly more efficient to split your time between bulking and cutting phases, essentially because maintaining muscle during cuts is easier than building the muscle at maintenance. So in Bulking phases you should aim for roughly 300 to 500 calories surplus, this is enough to heavily promote muscle building, and a very significant part of the weight you gain will be muscle. Follow this up with a cutting phase where you aim to lose 0.5% to 1% of your weight per week in fat (while working out to maintain your muscle).
For how to compute macros, here's how you do it: start with your total number of calories per day for your goal, say you weigh 140 lbs, you're bulking and your aim is 3000 cal/day. You know you'll eat 140g of protein per day, so that's taken care of and you only have 3000 - 4 * 140 = 2440 calories remaining since proteins have 4 cal/g, next you take care of your fat, which you should keep at 0.4g/lb to maintain good hormonal function, any more than that doesn't help too much, so now we have 2440 - 9 * 0.4 * 140 = 1,936 calories remaining, which all goes into 484g of carbs. Carbohydrates promote muscle gain to a much larger extend than fat because they replenish the glycogen stores inside the muscle itself, which promotes the whole chemical cascade that signals for muscle growth, that's why they're preferable to fats.
Sources:
Best youtube channel for this stuff: https://youtube.com/@RenaissancePeriodization
Second best: https://youtube.com/@JeffNippard
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Being an effective altruist basically makes him grey, no? He's certainly politically aligned with democrats, but so is Scott, and that doesn't make him blue tribe.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
That of the people who aren't confused by a term like "grey tribe", i.e. rationalist-adjacent people.
Either ghost writer or publishing your own books on amazon, it takes almost zero initial capital (just paying someone 50$ per book to make you a professional cover if you're not confident in your abilities). There are some channels on youtube that specialize in this stuff, the niche has gotten pretty saturated because of it, but if you're a decent writer you can still make money that would be good for the third world.
JhanicManifold
7mo ago
This part never usually pans out lol.
Oh it did for me, I still remember her reaction when she saw me for the first time in like 6 months: * looks at me, does a double take, eyes widen, face becomes fully red, furtive looks the whole evening *. I actually feel a little bit guilty about just how good revenge feels.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.
As someone currently using semaglutide, and having lost 40 lbs with it after around 10 years of trying to lose the weight, you are severely underestimating the variance in the willpower required for people to lose weight. Of-fucking-course the healthiest choice is to never have been fat in the first place, just like it's better to never start smoking cigarettes, but once you're addicted and fat, it makes no sense at all to insist on trying (and failing) to do it without help. Semaglutide helps you make better choices and dig yourself out of the hole, sure, it might not be healthy by itself (just like nicotine patches), but it sure as shit is healthier than having a 45lb plate strapped to your back all the time.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
This would heavily penalize the True Nerds, the sort who win math Olympiads, build particle accelerators in garages and hack the NSA at 15. By and large these nerds don't give a flying fuck about writing ability when they're that young (I know I certainly didn't), they don't even really try to play the game of maximizing admissions probability by volunteering or something, their life is entirely consumed by their passion and they just kind of hope that colleges will make a place for them. So under your system geniuses would no longer go to Harvard.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
For machine learning in particular and scientific computing more generally, you have the following extremely useful libraries, all in python, because that's the most common language here:
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Numpy, short for Numerical Python. This is a very deep library that does everything from numerical derivatives, integrals, matrix multiplication, everything in linear algebra, sorting arrays of numbers, and even simple linear regression. The main workhorse here is the "ndarray" datatype that numpy defines, which allows you to create an object which stores a multi-dimensional array of numbers very efficiently.
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Scipy, short for Scientific Python. This is an extension of numpy, which includes optimisation routines, solving differential equations, algebraic equations, etc. Less overwhelmingly used than numpy, but still very common
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Scikit-learn. This is the library to use if you want off-the-shelf classical machine learning algorithms, so anything outside of deep-learning stuff. Decision trees, linear/logistic regression, clustering, nearest neighbors, or whatever, this does basically all of it.
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matplotlib. This is the most common visualisation library to make graphs or charts. Endlessly customizable, and hence kind of a pain to use, but it's the most common and very useful.
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Pytorch. Now we're getting into deep learning and GPU computing. Pytorch essentially does much of the same job as Numpy, but it also automatically interfaces with your GPU, so that all your matrix multiplies are run much, much faster. This is the library you use to define your deep learning models, and the one you use to write your training code.
And so on and so on. There are other libraries like Pandas for data analysis, and all the huggingface libraries for deep learning, which get you even more abstraction, so that you can use transformers without even knowing. I don't think there is any more pleasant way of getting to know these libraries than reading a few textbooks and then inevitably drudging through their documentations when the need arises.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I'd be super happy to be convinced of the contrary! (Given that the existence of mesa-optimisers are a big reason for my fears of existential risk) But do you mean to imply that gpt-4 is explicitly optimising for next-word prediction internally? And what about a gpt-4 variant that was only trained for 20% of the time that the real gpt-4 was? To the degree that LLMs have anything like "internal goals", they should change over the course of training, and no LLM is trained anywhere close to completion, so I find it hard to believe that the outer objective is being faithfully transfered.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I've had the same "I can do it myself" mentality for years, and I did have intermittent successes before starting semaglutide. I can stick to a diet perfectly for roughly a month at a time and lose 10 lbs, the problem always comes when life gets stressful and suddenly my mental energy assigned to the diet starts to decline, if It's crunch time and I have an important presentation tomorrow, I can't also be really fucking hungry because I'm in a 1000cal/day deficit, I'll just throw the diet out the window for the stressful time period.
Semaglutide takes care of all that, and I don't need to have zero stress in order for me to stick to the diet, that now happens more or less effortlessly. I still need to have enough mental space to prep my diet foods at regular intervals so I don't eat out instead of eating my home-cooked stuff, but that's a much lower bar than tolerating hunger.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Do you think the COVID vaccine will literally take 5 years off most people's lives? There have been semaglutide studies going up to like 24 months without adverse effects for weight loss, and weaker stuff in the same GLP-1 class like liraglutide has been used for years. We might find negative effects later on, but In general, stuff that doesn't have massive negative effects in the medium term won't suddenly get massive negative effects in the long term.
And regardless of this, if any negative effects happen in 30 years, I fully expect future AI medicine to make them completely trivial.
Semaglutide works really, really fucking well.
Within the context of the discussion group, the person stating that they now felt less safe was essentially reinforcing the point that Bigotry Is Bad: "this bad thing is so bad that I feel less safe, which shows just how bad the bad thing is!". Your perfectly reasonable and true objection against their unwarranted update is then seen as an enemy argument. In an indirect way, you're arguing that the mass shooting wasn't literally the worst thing in the world, which is perceived as an attack on the in-group. There's also the female vs male styles of communication here, the person who wrote that they felt less safe was really communicating an emotion, whether or not their statement was actually true was much less important than what emotions it communicated, and the name of the game in emotional discussion is validation, you need to either make them feel heard, or respond at a similar emotional level. When your girlfriend says that she feels fat, you don't pull out data from your bluetooth scale that shows that she didn't actually get fat, you go kiss her and tell her that she's never been more attractive to you and that, in fact, you can barely restrain yourself from just taking her right now. Your fundamental faux-pas was that you responded factually to an emotional statement.
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