Hugo L

I think this could be partially explained by Joseph Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success"; he explains that a large chunk of our knowledge is not understanding-based, but rather culture-based, with optimisation for copying, conformity, and tradition-following in the absence of understanding of why something is done.

Examples in hunter-gatherer tribes include:

1. Bow-making. They know which branches and vines to use for the bow, and which arrows and tips work best, but not why, and there is no experimentation with other materials.
2. Poison use. E.g., arrow-tip, fis

I see you are wandering into the territory of barefoot shoes! If you want to do more reading around it, the term "barefoot shoe" should send you to the right places. Turns out our feet are actually quite excellent at being feet, and all we really need is some protection from sharp stuff + insulation +/- weatherproofing, and we're good. 

If you enjoy wide toebox shoes, you might even like zero drop shoes; I know that all my knee pains and sprained ankles disappeared like magic once I switched to feet-shaped, zero-drop, thin sole shoes. Sure, it was a bi... (read more)

I had seen your post on "loudly giving up" from 2023, and was about to draw upon my experience in the medical field to tell you that "actually, we don't just tell someone in the green shirt to call 911/999, but also tell them to inform you when they have or haven't done it; this is called closing the loop". Then I saw you discussed it explicitly here! Nice!

We use it a lot in medicine e.g., "get them cannulated, tell me when you're done or if you struggle", or "attach the defib pads, let me know when they're set up so we can do a pace check".

To add to your ... (read more)

it is best to focus on the 1-X fraction of the probability space that you control

Crewmate: "Captain, we are hurtling towards the iceberg!"

Captain: "What probability do you give that we will hit?"

Crew: "Our best engineers say 80% in the next 5 to 10 minutes, sir!"

Capt: "It's best to focus on the 20% likelihood we don't hit; you can probably do something about the worlds where that is true. Don't worry about the 80% worlds worlds where we are doomed; we're doomed anyway if that's the case!"

Crew: "But Captain, if I think about the 80%, I might be able to miti... (read more)

I disagree with your take.

Suffering is quite unlike shit in that once we get rid of shit, the shit you got rid of does not come back, crawling up the toilet. Suffering is not some "thing" you can get rid of, but rather a quirk of our neurophysiology. Get rid of the most immediate cause of suffering, and your brain adjusts its thresholds to seek the next worst thing; this is called upregulation.

Two related real-life examples: if you are walking in an uncomfortable shoe, you are aware of the uncomfortable shoe. Step on a bad thorn that pierces your shoe and ... (read more)

I really like that sazen is a great mix of the Polish word "Sążen" (i.e., fathom, in the measurement-of-depth context) and the Zen word Zazen (i.e., the Zen sitting meditation). I actually like that fathom also stands as an analogue of "undeestand". I'm not sure if you did this intentionally, but either way I really like this!

Ah, I think I wasn't clear on this in my original response: I encountered your post before I started my degree, but I found I couldn't fully implement your concept until I joined it with the two studies I outlined above. In other words, I wasn't paying attention to my learner's level, because it wasn't something I had conceptualised yet.

Your article itself helped me realise that modelling the listener is essential to convey worthwhile information, and that you need to identify their "sticking points" (or cruxes, or grieving points; similar concepts) in ord... (read more)

Out of all the LW posts I read in 2024, I think this one was the most beneficial to my daily life. As a review of this article, I think it might be useful to link it to the current literature on communicating information from one person (often a teacher) to the other (often a student); I think it "fills in the blank" where I previously struggled to implement Raemon's knowledge.

I'm currently doing a masters degree in education, as such I think a useful contextual addendum to this article - with the goal of improving the required skill of "Modelling Others" ... (read more)

“I taught you everything you know, but I haven’t taught you everything I know,” I say.

What a beautiful way of phrasing that. I will definitely be using this!

flesh-manning

I presume, in this phrasing, you meant flesh-manning to be equivalent to ITT. If not, I suspect I misunderstood.

Your thoughts will do what they can to distract you from your true underlying fear.

I see a clear link between this and the "Hostile Telepaths Problem", in that one might be fixating on this matter to hide from the inner problems (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5FAnfAStc7birapMx/the-hostile-telepaths-problem). Same with your suggestion; perhaps there is a link here, where one must respect one's unwillingness to engage with the "why" of fixating on "AI doomerism", but gently hypothesise around what it might be, as well as building power to escape one's addiction.

If your left arm was working before your stroke, the little voice that ought to tell you it might be time to reject the "left arm works fine" theory goes silent. The only one left is the poor apologist, who must tirelessly invent stranger and stranger excuses for why all the facts really fit the "left arm works fine" theory perfectly well.

How interesting... I wonder how much of this is the reason why some people with dementia confabulate so convincingly, and this is impenetrable to them; perhaps the region of the brain responsible for this paradigm shifting is no longer working, just as in the stroke patients who do not recognise their own arm.

I really like this post, it outlines the fact that we all self-deceive, and uses an excellent example from literature (often rationalist literature) to encourage us to consider this fact. It has made me kinder to myself when I find a self-deception, and the examples you gave have helped me gently tease apart why I might be performing occlumency.

One of my immediate initial responses to this idea was "doesn't this just discourage you from finding out areas of inefficiency? sounds like a bad idea to me!" but you tied in your reasoning to power and ability to ... (read more)