jp — LessWrong

Replying toQuick evidence review of bulking & cutting

jp2moReview for 2024 Review

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

I am happy to have contributed something that I believe was near the frontier of rationalist knowledge on this niche subject, and I think I did a reasonable job of it with the time and experience I had.

I still endorse personally that it works for me and achieves goals that I like.

I doubt the post should be winning any annual review votes. Unless someone really wanted to give encouragement for more things like this.

I would be interested in someone doing this again with a deep research tool.

Replying toQuick evidence review of bulking & cutting

jp2mo

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

Thank you!

jp9mo

First up, I thought this line was strikingly poetic for a technical topic, and would be above-average quality even for a human technical writer.

So you're absolutely right that it's a different kind of environment — but it's been engineered to work well for fungal metabolism. Nature grows molds on oranges; industry grows them in soup with bubbles and stainless steel.

Chat link. The second sentence is what struck me.

I'm enjoying being curious about the world around me with the benefit of being able to ask an endlessly patient expert. Go ahead and ask your favorite LLM how the citric acid in your gatorade is made.

jp9moQuick Take

I'm gonna try making a thread of interesting LLM conversations, maybe some fun prompts, images, or techniques.

jp1y

From personal introspection (importantly not what the question is asking), there's a difference between my ability to update towards two views:

"Oh the situation is different than I thought, and actually I should turn most of my attention towards this new thing"
1. I'm better at this when I have more energy
"I made a mistake and should stop doing X, or admit past fault"
1. I get worse at that one

On simple, questions of fact, that I've avoided tying into my ego in one way or another, I expect I'm better but I'm not sure.

Replying toQuick evidence review of bulking & cutting

jp2y

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

I would also expect extraneous details like, "got sick and fell of the wagon" or similar to add significant noise. And with only one data point each, it'd be hard to know the variance to use. I'm guess I'd trust this study more?

Replying toQuick evidence review of bulking & cutting

jp2y

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

To be clear I don't know what I'm doing really. I do think that it failed to get the precise thing I was looking for though.

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

Epistemic status: fairly fast non-comprehensive literature review by a non-expert
Content warning: I advise against reading this if you believe you have an eating disorder

My ideal body aesthetic would be to have defined muscles and low body fat. Maybe this is also true of you. Maybe you’ve heard of cycling between seasons of building muscle (bulking) and losing fat (cutting) as a way to achieve that aesthetic. Should you?

Theory

It is easier to add muscle when on a caloric surplus^[1] (more on that citation later). The theory is that it’s so much easier to build muscle this way, that you should spend several months intentionally eating more calories than you need, and accept that you’ll... (read 1023 more words →)

jp2y

🙇‍♂️

•••

jp2yQuick Take

"Cruxy" is a useful term to have in my vocabulary. I use it relatively loosely to refer to the type of thing I look for in a double crux. A consideration is more "cruxy" if it's closer to a but-for support for a proposition. Interestingly (mildly) this is very similar to the definition of "crucial," and in fact the etymologies are the same.

Replying toUgo Conti's Whistle-Controlled Synthesizer

jp2y

Ugo Conti's Whistle-Controlled Synthesizer

The California vibes in that video are immaculate. Even mentioning Windham Hill Records!

In favor of steelmanning

It's different than passing someone's Intellectual Turing Test

Epistemic status: Others have found my take here useful, but I haven’t engaged with the entire debate on the subject. Fairly confident that it’s useful to me, though see caveat.

Eliezer Yudkowsky recently disclaimed steelmanning on the Lex Fredman podcast. I haven't listened — I heard it second-hand. Here's a thorough roundup of people saying steelmanning is bad.

This post will argue that steelmanning is a useful tool.

Background

A bit of obvious background that is nevertheless worth saying: I am not omniscient. Other people know things and have models that will help me achieve my goals better. I want to steal from them like a greedy man. I want to... (read 614 more words →)

I have a classic rationality comment on the EA Forum that's reasonably popular. I thought I'd crosspost here. The context is "What are work practices that you’ve adopted that you now think are underrated?"

***

CEA (my employer) has long had the concept of "who owns this ball."^[1] I'm gonna have a hard time in this answer conveying exactly how much this has become a whole encompassing working philosophy for me.

Level 1: The alarm bells about dropped balls

If you are having a conversation and someone's like "we should do X"... Someone should really be the person owning the ball for doing (or not doing!) X.

If there's a "ball" (a task of some sort) that's sitting... (read more)

Against Complete Blackout Curtains For Sleep

Epistemic status: moderately confident that something like this is directionally true, but good data or arguments could change my mind. Note the lack of citations — this is based on memory.

Most rationalists I meet believe the following:

Sleep is very important
To get the best sleep, install blackout curtains strong enough to prevent any sunlight from coming in in the morning

I disagree with them. I believe point 2 is false for most people, and that natural light in the morning is helpful.

In my model of the world:

Your circadian rhythm figures out what time of day it is based on the amount of blue light hitting your pupils, and picks a time it thinks you

... (read 172 more words →)

Spot the problem with this statement:

The Galleri test did not detect DNA methylation patterns that are associated with cancer in your blood sample. In a clinical validation study, fewer than1% of individuals with this result were projected to have cancer.

Tag suggestion: "Air Quality". There's a bunch of things in a cluster of space around here, you could imagine one or more tags. Carbon dioxide, air particulate pollution, and aerosolized respiratory pathogens. The last one may seem a bit of an odd duck, but the techniques for dealing with it are often the same as the others.

Economic efficiency and a 5 year old bet

5 years ago, my then-boss and I realized we disagreed about something. He thought the oil and gas sector was clearly on the decline, and would be a bad place to put your money. I was a big fan of the efficient market hypothesis, and though, well, shouldn't that already be priced in?

He was confident and willing to give me good odds, but wanted to be clear he was talking over the very long term. So we agreed: 5 years term, 70% odds. If the O&G sector trailed the S&P 500 by more than 25%, I'd pay him ¢30, if it did better than that,... (read more)

Should I treat pain differently if it’s “all in my head?”

I sometimes suffer from RSI. I’ve heard several people I respect say that they think most RSI is a psychological phenomenon. My understanding of their view is that they think there’s a feedback loop where you notice your wrists hurting and then you are anxious about the pain, causing you to pay more attention to it, which causes more pain though some mechanism we don’t yet understand. For the purposes of this post, I’m interested in the hypothetical of if something like that story is true.

I have some stories for what I’d do differently:

Ask a doctor to prescribe some psychiatric drugs, like SSRIs if I thought it was related to anxiety

And some... (read more)

I'm really curious how places that are planning to be more supportive of remote work are going to handle *partially* remote teams.

Like, a meeting with 3/4 participants being in person is hard for the remote worker to participate in.

I've generally heard that remote work works best when it's full-remote. If so then everyone's getting a very attractive view of remote work but when the pandemic's over, under this model, remote work will not be as viable as it currently is.

PDFs are the preferred communication style for papers. HTML documents are the preferred communication style for most other public facing documents.[1]

PDFs are inferior to HTML in many ways: HTML can adapt to fit the viewport and fontsize requested by the user, while PDFs are basically fancy images in this regard. This makes PDFs basically useless on mobile, and generally terrible for casual browsing.

However HTML is not as good for deep study. You can't annotate it easily, and it's harder to bookmark your place on a webpage.

I'd really like to see something that allows you to combine the permanence and mark-ability of PDFs with the flexibility of HTML. I'm not sure how good the profit opportunity is, but boy does it seems great. And not that technically difficult to make the product.

[1] Google docs, slack posts, and a long tail of web-based tools are used internally to organizations.

[Talk] Paul Christiano on his alignment taxonomy

Paul Christiano makes an amazing tree of subproblems in alignment. I saw this talk live and enjoyed it.

Do Anki while Weightlifting

Many rationalists appear to be interested in weightlifting. I certainly have enjoyed having a gym habit. I have a recommendation for those who do:

Try studying Anki cards while resting between weightlifting sets.

The upside is high. Building the habit of studying Anki cards is hard, and if doing it at the gym causes it to stick, you can now remember things by choice not chance.

And the cost is pretty low. I rest for 90 seconds between sets, and do about 20 sets when I go to the gym. Assuming I get a minute in once the overheads are accounted for, that gives me 20 minutes of studying. I go through... (read more)

Are we living at the most influential time in history?

Will MacAskill has been posting several articles on the EA Forum. This one seems especially interesting for a LessWrong audience. In it Will approaches the title question by attempting to create an outside view prior, and then updates based on our inside view evidence. Great discussion follows in the comments.

Some thoughts on free time

I've had discussions recently about how to spend free time. I'm blessed with a job with relatively well-specified boundaries (I don't typically work on weekends or outside the hours I'm at the office), but I often still feel like I'm sucked into "unproductive" things in my free time. Here are some things I could want to do during my free time:

1 Maximize global utility directly

2 Maximize moment-to-moment hedonic happiness

3 Maximize long term hedonic happiness

4 Maximize mental recovery for later productivity

5 Use a virtue heuristic for doing things that seems "worthwhile"

6 Do whatever one feels like in the moment

7 Try to... (read more)

jp's Shortform

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

What is the evidence for productivity benefits of weightlifting?

jp, hereisonehand

[Mod Note: This question received an answer that seemed worth curating. See the answer by LW user hereisonehand for the curation notice]

I've been weightlifting for a while, and I've heard vaguely good things about it's effect on productivity, like a general increase in energy levels. A recent quick google search session came up empty. If someone looks into the literature and finds something interesting I'll pay a $50 prize.*

Assume the time horizon is <5 years. I'd prefer answers focus predominantly on productivity benefits. Effects on cardiovascular could be part of an analysis, but would not qualify on their own. If the evidence is for something clearly linked to productivity, like sleep, I'd... (read more)

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jp

What is the evidence for productivity benefits of weightlifting?

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

In favor of steelmanning

[Talk] Paul Christiano on his alignment taxonomy

jp

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

In favor of steelmanning

Against Complete Blackout Curtains For Sleep

Should I treat pain differently if it’s “all in my head?”

[Talk] Paul Christiano on his alignment taxonomy

Are we living at the most influential time in history?

jp's Shortform

jp

What is the evidence for productivity benefits of weightlifting?

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

In favor of steelmanning

[Talk] Paul Christiano on his alignment taxonomy

jp

Quick evidence review of bulking & cutting

In favor of steelmanning

Against Complete Blackout Curtains For Sleep

Should I treat pain differently if it’s “all in my head?”

[Talk] Paul Christiano on his alignment taxonomy

Are we living at the most influential time in history?

jp's Shortform

Theory

Background

Some thoughts on free time