Morgenland
23d ago
Do you have a major problem with your weight or is it a minor one? If your BMI is in a range 25-28 then I think that's fine, maybe even healthier in the long run than aggressive diet.
Morgenland
1mo ago
Thank you.
Morgenland
5mo ago
It would be great to see this post in the Friday Fun thread instead of Wellness Wednesday, but I assume this was your initial purpose and I should put the blame on your sleeplessness.
Morgenland
1mo ago
You are right, by writing 'posts' I meant post and comments, but it's not clear. So I get the notifications only for posts and not for comments?
Morgenland
2mo ago
Thank you very much, that's an interesting reply. Yeah, maybe some variations in brain receptors are responsible for variations in caffeine sensitivity, I haven't studied the topic much.
Could please expand a little bit on your meditation for wakefulness? I have good results from meditation, albeit not for wakefulness yet. If I understood you correctly: you observe your inner state in the morning and try to identify the state of drowsiness until it fades away gradually or you apply some other practices?
I usually try to hyperventilate a bit before work, but unless I force it strongly, the effect is only slight, so I'm looking for some other ways.
Morgenland
2mo ago
Have you ever used smelling salts to stimulate wakefulness? I am afraid I am naturally very drowsy person, caffeine does very little to me (apparently I have an efficient liver) and I was wondering if using ammonium salts may be a useful option. Are there any big 'no-nos' of using smelling salts? Do you have any good or bad experience? Or maybe you know any good hacks for some nice adrenaline flush in the morning?
Morgenland
2mo ago
If you struggle with anxiety, I strongly recommend lavender oil as a short-lived solution. Scott Alexander wrote about the potential calming effects of lavender. I just take one or two drops of lavender oil and inhale it using the simplest aromatherapy chimney. It is very potent and calms me significantly even for a longer periods of time. I am extremely neurotic, I was probably around 95th percentile and now maybe around 80th and it helped me significantly.
Morgenland
3mo ago
Now I see your point better! I would suspect that many people nurture the grandiose thoughts of self-importance and would even dream of the government taking interest in their usual life. Though sometimes cloud services can suck and while iCloud is smooth, my institution uses Outlook and I'm struck with OneDrive, which is sometimes so slow, that I usually carry around external HD to not get frustrated every couple hours or so.
Though I must admit, that I don't know many people of the type you're writing about, since in general I don't know that many people.
Morgenland
7mo ago
This is an interesting way of characterizing it and I feel similarly. I think about this in the following terms: usually I oscillate between 'lower states' and 'higher states' of mind, and when I work on a difficult task, I get bored or tired or stressed out quite fast, and then I have to stay for a while in the 'lower state' of my mind. People, who I find energetic tend to go into these 'higher states' more easily and concerning Elon, I don't know, maybe he even sleeps in such a state or goes into the flow as soon as he opens his eyes.
That's great that you have found something that helps you! I also read somewhere that putting white noise in the background can help (so this is in the direction of hyper-stimulation), so you can give it a try, but I haven't checked that myself yet. Edit: Oh, but you have a fan, so you already got that.
Morgenland
2mo ago
I sometimes too dwell upon this aspect of EA. Your argument is similar to the Utility monster argument. If the goal is to minimize suffering then maybe some neurotics in rich western countries suffer more than Africans, for whom malaria is a tamed aspect of life. But never tried to make it precise.
Morgenland
3mo ago
there must be an individual difference in response.
From my subjective experience, an individual difference is everything when it comes down to psychoactive substances. People tend to differ much more neurologically then physically, which is unpleasant truth for many. But we cannot see this on the first sight, so this thought rarely comes through our minds. For my part, I get almost no pleasure or kick from drinking alcohol. And I come from heavily-drinking culture, so this is a huge social burden. I have drunk hundreds times and most of the time I get instantly sleepy and then heavily depressed. And I know people who are extremely aggressive and psychotic when drunk, so the response is indeed deeply varied.
Sure, but 2014 was precisely the year when the threshold was set, so I find your comment very misleading. This information is very plainly written in the link you have given and in the link I have given above.
During the 2014 summit, all NATO members agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDPs on defense by 2025. In 2017, only four nations met the threshold: The United States (3.6%), Greece (2.4%), the United Kingdom (2.1%), and Poland (2.0%). However, by 2021, ten countries were meeting the percentage target.
In this link you can find all the military spending of Poland as a percentage of GDP between 2014 and 2023. As you can easily see, from 2014 onward, Poland has been seriously trying to meet the spending target.
Morgenland
5mo ago
I'm going to write something stupid and I hope no one will take it too seriously, but I cannot resist the temptation to point out certain dark irony in your comment. Taking into account that autists emulate social behavior and AGPs emulate women, it is hardly surprising that the people who are combination of both are simultaneously the masters of emulating software (hehe).
Morgenland
5mo ago
I would suspect the same about pedophilia, though this is such a strong taboo topic, that there is probably not enough data to investigate the question reliably. Anecdotally however, there are well documented brilliant pedophiles, for example, you can take a look into interesting story of Nobel recipient, Daniel Gajdusek on wikipedia.
He was one of the pioneers in the field of prion diseases, and he in fact did a lot to explain the transmission mechanism of kuru disease, but his sexual motivation and his scientific life are intertwined in an incredible way.
Morgenland
6mo ago
I would go with "urban", in Europe it would count as urban for sure, since there are not so many cities with skyscrapers' districts. And sharing walls as well as having common frontage is a distinct feature of a town.
Morgenland
7mo ago
It's not easy to see it at the first glance, but the supposed coalition will still be quite conservative. A center-right party named 'the Third Way' openly proclaims Catholic morality and values and it seems that without them the parliamentary majority cannot be reached.
I will try to give you at least three reasons to motivate you:
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If you have a major problem with your weight, then there is a positive side of it, since you can make a notable change without a big effort. Any intervention that you will undertake is very likely to result in a significant drop of BMI, for example walking a couple of miles twice a week.
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Body fat isn't only some passive, excessive weight, but physiologically active organ, that messes up with your hormonal regulation. If you decrease the amount of body fat, it is very likely that you will feel better in general, have more energy, better sleep etc.
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If you have a major weight problem, there is a lot of things and movements that are difficult to do. I think that it's worth to fight for this freedom of movement, movement is one of the primary human joys. You can try to stick with small goals, like walking certain distance. Your aim is not some utilitarian objective but being able to enjoy life a little more in general.
If young hang up around rationalist community, you may have heard about potato diet, which is said to not involve much willpower and gives overall positive results. Why not to try, even just for a couple days and just for fun? If you want to read more, like half of Slime Mold Time Mold blog is about it. They explicitly write about weight gain in response to medication here.
I disagree with this. The human body is a replicant writ large based on a very tiny amount of informational DNA. Most of that matter is replaced regularly, you replace it a bit faster with the right stuff and...poof, you have a new person.
No, this is not true. This is what many people think, that all the information is in the DNA, but that's not exactly right. There is a whole, extremely complicated process of gene expression above that. Part of information is encoded in the environment, maternal hormones help orchestrate the development of different tissues and organs in the growing fetus. They play a role in the development of the nervous system, reproductive organs, and other essential structures. The brain of the fetus is differentiated with respected to gender as early as in the twelfth week and after that there is no way to undo the changes.
Most of the large-scale gene expression happens in embryo and when we are young. Changing the DNA in reproductive organs doesn't make them vanish or change, there is no biological process that taps into this.
A virus can do it. They can kill you, they can certainly change you instead.
It is extremely easy to kill a human, and unbelievably difficult to apply some very sophisticated changes (we need highly specialized surgeons and something can still go wrong). Wolbachia bacterium can feminize some species of insects and this is the limit of complexity that it can handle.
I hope you know something about this, because I would like to learn more. Loosely related, this funny youtube video is the best introduction to evolutionary developmental biology for a layman I know.
Morgenland
3mo ago
I think you are taking a bit different take here, but I haven't seen my argument considered by you or anyone else here. Why do people encrypt their personal notes, self-host their e-mail servers and use VPN with Tor? Because their can. Similarly, why people climb Mount Everest? Because it's there. Himalayan mountaineering is one of the deadliest activity one can think of and yet, there is no shortage of people who want to give it a try.
As far as I observed, many people concerned with privacy, usually do so on a superficial level, while their deeper motivation resolves around the temptation to do something single-handedly. Many programmers possess only a limited understanding of unix systems, operating systems architecture in general, cryptographic algorithms and other more obscure topics. They are usually happy using Windows with VS code. Do they miss something in their day-to-day life, do their actions lack utility? Not at all.
But I'm talking here about a different type of people: hackers, tweakers, geeks who just build complicated projects for their own joy, because it's in their nature to take the road less traveled. You are right that it takes a certain kind of person to take pleasure in tens of hours of setting and adjusting systems that have a high chance of being abandoned after a couple of uses, but isn't that what FOSS is all about? The famous: "Linux is free if your time is worth nothing" points to the fact, that exploring software consumes tons of hours. Is it useful? I don't know man, this is exploratory behavior, some people think that there is some utility in exploring and learning new things. Of course one should be able to find a difference between a hobby and mental issues.
I don't buy into falling prey to conspiracy theories. Maybe you know people, who are so involved into distrustful political stances or are stuck in the views of the society taken out of the '80s and 90's movies like 12 Monkeys or Fight Club, but usually it's just an excuse for DIY. Here you have a link to a blog of a person, who self-hosted her blog server as a unikernel. A cumbersome way of doing it to say the least! And she in fact mentions hacker attacks as a reason in her blog post, but it may as well have something to do with the fact that she has worked on MirrageOS, a framework for creating unikernels. This is the pattern I find among the bloggers I follow: not the distrustful schizos, but rather hackers constantly experimenting with new tooling.
Morgenland
4mo ago
Those territories has been now longer under the jurisdiction of Poland (78 years), than a part of modern Germany (united in 1871), so calling them the true East Germany is a bit of overstatement.
In some sense all of modern fantasy is just a knockoff of LOTR. In fact, I share the conviction that Tolkien invented the whole genre of fantasy, among other things by creating a unified imagery of elves and dwarves that was assimilated in more or less unchanged form into almost all later fantasy works.
Morgenland
1mo ago
I have a bit embarrassing question to ask: what is the functionality of following users for? I thought that if I followed some users, I would get the notifications of their posts, but apparently it doesn't work that way (or at least not for me). Would someone be so kind and explain it to me?
Morgenland
2mo ago
I agree with you on most points. I'm only considering theoretical possibility of a nearly ideal sex change. But I have my doubts, when you mention 'extremely high-quality surgeries'. Seriously, FtM cannot have real penis and MtF cannot have real vagina. I know that some may wonder on the latter case, but you cannot place nerve endings where there are none. The elasticity of female vagina is remarkable and cannot be reproduced during the surgery.
However, I think that on the level of sexual response it may be sufficient for many trans-people, so I don't deny that many of them will find the sex reassignment surgery helpful or sufficient.
Yeah, I guess that by 'moxie' Cochran meant some sort of emergent quality, that combines all the factors impacting your social status. Nonetheless, energy is probably one of these factors. I was imprecise, but being 'energetic' is also kind of imprecise description. What kind of energy, kinetic energy? We have some intuitive understanding, but we lack any precise characterization. And that's why I find this factor overlooked, because we have quite precise measurement of IQ but it's difficult to compare 'being energetic' statistically.
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