All of wslafleur's Comments + Replies

Though I suspect there are mortality risks in being that isolated that are on the order of 1/30,000 a year too.

 

For some reason, I find this implication particularly irksome. First of all, it's borderline non sequitur speculative analysis. Second, it's broadcasting contempt for an elective lifestyle, which seems to be the whole motivation for including it. Unless you really think this sort of statistical prestidigitation supports the point you're trying to make(?)

Would you accept a similar argument based on how fucking dangerous people are to each oth... (read more)

1Timothy Underwood2mo
Yeah, but I read somewhere that loneliness kills. So actually risking being murdered by grass is safer, because you'll be less lonely. I think we agree though. Making decisions based on tiny probabilities is generally a bad approach. Also, there is no option that is actually safe. You are right that I have no idea about whether near complete isolation has a higher life expectancy than being normally social, and the claim needed to compare them to make logical sense in that way. I think the claim does still make sense if interpreted as 'whether it is positive or negative on net, deciding to be completely isolated has way bigger consequences, even in terms of direct mortality risk, than taking the covid vaccine' - and thus avoiding the vaccine should not be seen as a major advantage of being isolated.

Your comment seems like a related aside, which I guess you admitted in a follow-up comment? But anyway, it makes me curious what the axiomatic precepts are for trade. The perception of mutual benefit and a shared ability to communicate this fact?

Also OP doesn't clearly distinguish between broader forms of quid pro quo and trade, so I'm just sort of adopting the broadest possible definition I can imagine.

I'm trying to decide to what extent this applies to my lived experience, but finding it difficult to distinguish between maintaining a healthy tranquility and cultivating habitual impassivity. My intuition is that I've had both experiences, but the internal feedback for either is very similar. Both seem to involve putting a functional amount of distance between yourself and your emotional response, and - in my experience - the healthy habit does reinforce itself, just like the negative version. But then, sometimes, I find myself noticing the lack of an emo... (read more)

The latter, although I don't think the gruesome details (beyond that) are really topical. I suspect that oral supplementation of this nature is significantly less effective and, other than a little mechanical discomfort, I don't know why anyone would opt for an oblique approach. The desired bacterial translocation is pretty straight-forward and you can achieve it in a similarly direct manner.

If your desire for details extends beyond mere curiosity, I'll respond to a DM. Just trying to be courteous to other uses.

This is relatable. I'm was diagnosed ASPD as a child, but never had any follow-up treatment or therapy. One noteworthy aspect of my transition into adulthood is the sheer amount of deliberate practice that went into learning how to properly socialize. Standing on the other side of all that effort, I feel that I've become more empathic than half my neurotypical friends and family members, quicker to accurately and elaborately imagine (in a humanizing fashion) another person's perspective. People regard me as eloquent and charming to be around, confident and... (read more)

That's super useful. Thank-you, I'll definitely follow-up on this. I imagine it would be.

Facile to the extent that it doesn't acknowledge the nuance of withholding judgement. One does not have to pretend at virtue for demanding a higher standard of rigor before committing to one position or another. This is especially true nowadays, when it is quick and cheap to track down the strongest arguments for, or against, any position and exceedingly difficult to thoroughly debunk them; when misinformation is everywhere and having domain specific expertise doesn't protect a source from bias.

The sort of pretention you're describing is contemptible, but ... (read more)

Oh, yeah. I should probably amend that. It's basically steroids, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories (whichever flavor you can handle) and a strong recommendation that you increase your fiber intake. I mentioned having been given each of these in roughly equal portions, but then failed to include it as a part of the prognosis.

My experience with corticosteroids was hit-or-miss, and I had severe, acute depression as a side-effect (I have never experienced anything like depression before or after, so it was pretty blatant). In any case, I don't really see steroi... (read more)

I've had gastrointestinal issues all my life. They started when I was a newborn; doctors diagnosed me as 'withholding', which is a polite way of implying that somebody is causing their own indigestion by refusing to take a shit. My distraught parents consulted several doctors who reaffirmed the original 'diagnosis' and finally resorted to administering enemas after other approaches had failed.

Presumably driven to innovation, half-mad with pain, sometime during my toilet training I arrived at a hack solution on my own. Rather than sitting on the toilet, I a... (read more)

1Portia2mo
Mad respect. Hope you are okay now. It is bizarre how large an impact the microbiome has on human health. You have probably long tried this (in this case, feel free to ignore to hell and back), but for me, adding a probiotic with B. infantis in particular, supplementing psyllium (start low on that one) and consuming a lot of live, wild ferments (e.g. kimchi) made a huge difference.
1Steven Huang7mo
I'm very curious about your homebrew FMT.. I'm assuming this was via a capsule of some sort and you ingested it? Or did you perform a self colonoscopy?
6ChristianKl9mo
Have you seen https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i48nw33pW9kuXsFBw/being-a-donor-for-fecal-microbiota-transplants-fmt-do-good [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i48nw33pW9kuXsFBw/being-a-donor-for-fecal-microbiota-transplants-fmt-do-good] ?  If doing FMT once helped maybe doing it more frequently with even higher-quality material would help?
1theme_arrow9mo
Very interesting story. One question: you said that the prognosis is "many rounds of heavy-duty antibiotics to hopefully induce periods of remission," but my understanding was that UC was autoimmune, and that the standard treatment was steroids or other immune system modulators? That's certainly what the Mayo Clinic [https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/ulcerative-colitis/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20353331]says. Did the specialist mention any of these kinds of medications to you?

This is incorrect. The example only assumes that your only consideration was your spouse's view of how much you care about their experience. It makes no assumptions about what your spouse actually cares about.

Your claim, that for the majority of women that behavior isn't attractive, is just superfluous editorializing and I support Baisius's attempt to pressure you into more constructive discourse.

Does anybody know if there have been any sleep-deprivation studies that attempt to control for belief effects? I'm think about this sort of thing. The knock-on ramifications in either direction seem like they could be potentially significant. Among other things, belief effects could help to explain the swaths of contradictory studies around this topic.

This strikes me as deliberately obtuse. You advocate for externally recognizing a formula that basically amounts to what Razied is getting at, and pretending otherwise by saying he missed the point is, in my submission, obfuscation.

As you have noted, social interactions exist on a spectrum and it's unwise to disregard that context while discussing your proposal. However, I don't think there's any situation where formally acknowledging something to the effect of -

"I realize that, from now on, you will - naturally - be less inclined to invest your resources ... (read more)

These definitions of shame and guilt strike me as inherently dysfunctional because they seem to rely on direct external reference, rather than referencing some sort of internal 'Ideal Observer' which - in a healthy individual - should presumably be an amalgamate intuition, built on top of many disparate considerations and life experience.

2spkoc2y
The internal Ideal Observer is the amalgamated averaged out result of interactions with the world and other people alive and dead. Human beings don't come from the orangutan branch of the primate tree, we are fundamentally biologically not solitary creatures.  Our ecological niche depends on our ability to coordinate at a scale comparable to ants, but while maintaining the individual decision making autonomy of mammals. We're not a hive mind and we're not atomized individuals. We do and should constantly be balancing ourselves based on the feedback we get from physical reality and the social reality we live in. Is the Ideal Observer the thing doing that balancing? Sure. But then it becomes a very reduced sort of entity, kinda like science keeps reducing the space where the god of the gaps can hide. There's an inner utility function spitting out pleasure and pain based on stimuli, but I wouldn't call that me, there's a bit more flesh around me than just that nugget of calculation.