JhanicManifold
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User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Of course that direct access to every bank account's balance would very much help the fed do its job. Maybe you remember that there was talk of the fed having it's own cryptocurrency, where it could see everyone's balance and every transaction that was taking place, this would eliminate the huge measurement error in basically all the metrics that we care about. With a cryptocurrency we could compute local inflation rates in real time, and the fed's interest rate could be continuously set to achieve whatever outcome we want. The only teensy weensy little downside is that you let the government have complete access to all balances and transactions that occur.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
You got injured doing goddamn Kegels?! How is that even possible?
Not injuring yourself in the gym is pretty easy:
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warm up with 5 to 10 minutes of cardio
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Don't do weights close to your one-rep max
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Slowly increase your total weekly volume to give your tendons time to adjust
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Don't improvise in the gym, instead have a pre-planned routine with exact weights on an excel sheet that you stick to
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If you're doing complicated movement patterns like squats and deadlifts, make sure your form is correct
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
nah that was a trivial objection on his part, most of the value of the earth comes from the fact that we might colonize the universe, so he wanted to make sure that the "double" in "double or nothing" truly meant doubling the value of the earth, if the second earth appeared close-by to us, it wouldn't really be doubling the value since there's still only one universe to colonize. But if one is assured that the value can indeed double, then SBF was completely on-board with betting it all.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
From our own point of view it's clear that SBF is grey tribe, so we've been focusing on the Effective Altruism angle, but I don't think the mainstream knows of the grey tribe yet, and if the blue tribe has recognised him as one of their own (with him being a democratic donor and all), then it makes more sense that the media would be defending him.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
That of the people who aren't confused by a term like "grey tribe", i.e. rationalist-adjacent people.
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
You have a few options, you could make a habit of going to your local library or cool coffee shop and work from there for the 2 hours you need in the morning, then get back home. Generally if you go in a space that you haven't trained yourself to associate with gaming, you won't game. You could also install something like the paid version of ColdTurkey to prevent you from gaming. Going on the pharmaceutical end, you could get hold of some modafinil and use that to focus, it's much milder than amphetamines and easier to get (I use indiamart and have some indian dude ship it to me).
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
From what I know the testosterone measurement as a single number doesn't mean much without having a baseline number from when you felt a normal sex drive. You need to couple the amount of testosterone with the sensitivity of your receptors to its presence, so for you 380 might be a severely decreased state from normal, even if some other dude might stay year-round at 380 and have high sex drive with that amount.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
modafinil was generally for wakefulness?
Just like caffeine both keeps you awake and focuses/motivates you, modafinil also has quite significant effects on focus and motivation, it's sort of the intermediate step between caffeine and amphetamines. I wouldn't necessarily use it everyday, otherwise you get used to it, but it could really give you 2 days per week of great motivation.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
ooh, this is a pretty exotic thing to see in the wild. From a first-person point-of-view, do you think that child porn increases or decreases your desire for real children and the probability of actually molesting a child? To me most of the morality of the situation condenses to that one question.
We're going to masturbate to children, real and fictional.1 You know we are, and you can't stop us.
This is true for sophisticated pedophiles who already know where to find this stuff, but making it really hard to get child porn still reduces the viewership on the margins, as dumb people or only mildly-pedophilic people won't have the knowledge and/or motivation to go seek it out.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
You really need to click the ... in the bottom right of the video thumbnail and select "not interested", or "dont' recommend channel", I find that this fixes the annoying increase in weird recommendations after I watch a single video outside what I usually watch.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Within the context of the discussion group, the person stating that they now felt less safe was essentially reinforcing the point that Bigotry Is Bad: "this bad thing is so bad that I feel less safe, which shows just how bad the bad thing is!". Your perfectly reasonable and true objection against their unwarranted update is then seen as an enemy argument. In an indirect way, you're arguing that the mass shooting wasn't literally the worst thing in the world, which is perceived as an attack on the in-group. There's also the female vs male styles of communication here, the person who wrote that they felt less safe was really communicating an emotion, whether or not their statement was actually true was much less important than what emotions it communicated, and the name of the game in emotional discussion is validation, you need to either make them feel heard, or respond at a similar emotional level. When your girlfriend says that she feels fat, you don't pull out data from your bluetooth scale that shows that she didn't actually get fat, you go kiss her and tell her that she's never been more attractive to you and that, in fact, you can barely restrain yourself from just taking her right now. Your fundamental faux-pas was that you responded factually to an emotional statement.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Well, chips and chocolate can be vegan... Generally veganism comes with a concern for one's health, but they are distinctly different, just not eating animal products doesn't at all guarantee you won't be pudgy.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
And as a bonus to "why weren't we born into a Grabby civ at its peak", you can add "why am I not an 80kg blog of hydrogen somewhere in the middle of a star like the vast majority of matter in the universe?". This is all hitting up on the confusing and confused field of Anthropic Reasoning, all of whose results seem to depend quite a lot on the reference classes that we're considering. You also get hilarious results like Adam and Eve being able to hunt by just precommiting really hard to having sex (Adam says he will impregnate Eve and start all of humanity if a deer does not appear right this second in front of him, if he does impregnate her, then they are the first humans among trillions, an unbelievably unlikely position, therefore it must be the case that a deer appeared and he didn't impregnate Eve right then and there, which would merely make them the only humans to ever exist, a much less unlikely position).
I would seriously doubt any results we obtain from anthropic reasoning until the whole field gets cleared up of all this weirdness. The meditator in me would also protest that these results really depend on the existence of a "person" as an indivisible entity, which doesn't really exist...
Here are some fun lectures on anthropics by Nick Bostrom:
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Why the hell would a dictatorial régime do a false-flag revolution? They risk making people believe that protesting the government actually won't get you killed, so lots of normal people will join the false protests... Turning them into real protests. The number 1 rule for a dictator is to prevent the creation of common knowledge about how many people don't like you. Any appearance of large scale protests is incredibly dangerous to this end.
For an acute non-pharmaceutical intervention that is basically physiologically guaranteed to make you relax for about an hour at the very minimum, try either a 20-minute sauna or a very hot bath, like 105F to 115F, measured with an actual thermometer. Hot showers aren't the same at all, though they still have some effect. If you're insufficiently relaxed after the bath, stay longer next time and ensure that the water temperature isn't becoming too low as the bath progresses.
You could also try an elimination diet to make sure it's not some weird autoimmune thing, like only eat potatoes and a multivitamin for two weeks and see how you feel. It probably won't work, but there's a nontrivial chance that it does, and P(working)*reward_of_working - P(not working)*cost_of_not_working seems like it would be decently high for you.
Elizabeth's post on "luck based medicine" also would seem relevant here:
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
The first thing that worked for me are those bottles you fill with saline that you squeeze up your nose, I think they're called neti pots. The second thing is to eat ridiculously spicy food, which stimulates your mucus membranes for about 30 minutes, clearing stuff up. But both of these are just acute solutions, I don't know what the root cause is, and I don't think either of them directly solves it.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
That sounds like the life goal of someone who has never explicitly thought about their life goals, but just read the question and interpreted it as something like "how much do you love your parents". A true life goal is supposed to actually guide your decisions, not just be something nice that you'd like to get. I think about my life goals at least weekly, when I take an hour-long evening walk to think about how my current short and medium term plans will achieve the ultimate goals of my life. I very, very much doubt that people are doing this sort of goal-oriented optimization with the goal of "making my parents proud", most people just don't have life goals that they're explicitly optimizing.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Hustler university is not the way that the Tate brothers initially made their money. The way they became millionaires was basically to get a bunch of romanian girlfriends at the same time and slowly convince them to start doing onlyfans and camming stuff, managing them and taking a cut of the profits. Like, literally their initial business model depended on their ability to be so sexually attractive to young women that they'd be willing to give them a cut from their camming revenue. All the stuff like hustler university and their chains of local gambling houses in Romania came after they made their money from porn. In one interview I remember watching a few years ago Tristan Tate mentioned that at one point they had like 30 girls living at the same time in their mansion doing porn camshows... all of them apparently sexually exclusive with one of the Tate brothers. So the allegations wouldn't be completely outside of their wheelhouse, though this might also be caused by some ex-girlfriend bad blood, I can only imagine the levels of drama that would be going on in a house with 30 girls and 2 guys...
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I think you need to clarify much more what you mean by "belief" before your thesis becomes well-formed, because most beliefs our brains have are of the form "There is a white metallic water bottle 12 inches to the right of my hand", "there is a chair under my butt", "my wife will come home in 40 minutes", "the cursor will move if I move the mouse", etc. These are all beliefs about the state of the world, and people most definitely have them: you wouldn't be able to function in the world without millions of these beliefs. But these sorts of boring, useful factual beliefs are not internally labelled "beliefs" in your mind, what I think you're more interested in are "beliefs as a signaling tool", rather than "beliefs as expectations about the state of the world". Human brains probably carefully separate the part that deal with "beliefs" needed to signal tribal membership from the part that needs to actually plan their days, like "sure I told Bob that 2+2=5 to prove my group membership, but two 1$ bananas still sum to 2$ on my groceries receipt".
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I have to say that doing a heavy set of 450 lbs deadlifts for 5 reps with heavy metal blasting through my headphones is really pleasant to me, the burning muscles and the exhaustion are obviously not pleasant in themselves, but lifting heavy shit sort of makes me aggressive in a way that's pleasant. The feeling of having pumped muscles, like my skin is about to explode around my biceps, is also quite pleasant.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
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
how exactly are you defining a "set"? Is it when you do x reps (where x is anything between 5 and 30) in one sitting, continually, and you've gone close to complete failure at the end of x reps?
Exactly correct, it's basically doing repetitions with correct, reasonably slow form until you can't do anymore (or get within 1 or 2 repetitions of that). Generally you'd then take around 2 or 3 minutes of rest before doing another set.
If you're saying I want to do 6 sets per muscle per week, and I want to try to fully exhaust that muscle in 12 reps, does that mean that I should be expecting to do 72 reps per muscle per week?
Yup, 6 sets is a decent start, but you should really aim for 10 sets/week. And thinking in terms of "reps per muscle" isn't too accurate, the last few reps within a set have an outsized effect on muscle growth, the fundamental unit here is really sets rather than reps. A decent simplification is that the more exposure to a state close to complete failure your muscles get, the more growth stimulus. Going all the way to complete failure is only recommended on the last set of your exercises for a give muscle for the day, because going to failure exhausts you quite a bit for future sets. So if you're going 3 sets of bench press, go just shy of failure on the first 2, then all out on the last one. And here "failure" means "you literally can't lift the bar anymore, even with a gun your head", not "it hurts pretty bad". That's also partly why I mention 12 reps instead of 20 reps, going to failure in 12 reps is quite a bit less painful than going to failure in 20 reps, or heaven forbid 25 reps, which is truly a hellish feeling, yet the set of 12 to failure and the one of 25 to failure yield pretty much the same growth.
Can they be all the same (like for example, could I do bench presses for all 72 chest reps in a week)?
Certainly, though at some point you might want some extra variety and add in some chest flys if you have the equipment, but that's details with effect sizes well below any of the other factors we're talking about. The bench press is pretty much the king of chest exercises. If you have a barbell, I'd also recommend something called a Pendlay Row as your main back exercise
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Well, Hex Deadlifts pretty much solve that problem for you, once I switched over to them, it quickly became apparent just how unnatural the standard barbell deadlift is for the human body, whereas people pretty much instinctively know how to hex deadlift with close to perfect form. I strongly recommend them if you're not competing in powerlifting (where they arbitrarily chose the deadlift as once of the 3 core lifts).
Sure, the multiple simultaneous viruses likely won't reach literally everyone, but it would certainly be enough for the AI to get enough strategic advantage to be able to develop technologically and blow up the earth after that (say by rerouting a few asteroids to hit earth), which would be enough to kill everyone. The people currently in outer space would almost certainly quickly die from lack of food if the earth is destroyed, but their position is extremely well known anyway, and a single well-placed missile is all that's needed to kill them.
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