trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A Good Posture -  Muscles & Self-Awareness.
by leggi — 2019-11-15T09:19:11.580Z

(A version appears here: What is a good posture?)

Posture = The position of your body.

All of it.

At any time.

A good posture contributes to proper functioning of our living machine.

With a good posture the body is well-positioned and comfortable. A bad posture means the body is in a less than ideal position, increasing physical stresses and resulting in pain.

But what is a "good" position for your body to be in? What is a good posture?

Current presentations of posture.

A go-ogle search for "good posture" returns various definitions:

Standing up tall. No slouching when sitting.

Positioning of the head and joints ...

Correct curvature of a neutral spine ...

Alignment of various parts of the body ...

And a lot of side-view illustrations:

How posture is often presented.

Postural assessment tends to rely on external assessment (somebody else judging your position), employing:

Visual inspection (+/- plumb-lines and grids).
Palpation of anatomical landmarks.
Newer techniques include radiography, photography.

Traditionally the subject is stationary or doing specific actions e.g. leaning forward/back/side to side - part of a "routine exam" of posture.

Computerised assessment of the body in motion - "gait analysis" etc. offers increased detail - but all methods tend to focus is on the positioning of bones and joints (especially the spine).

But what positions our bones and joints? What moves the body? What creates our posture?

(BLTH Part

1

,

2,

4,

5

)

Base-Line Theory Health and Movement. Part 3:

Muscles and connective tissues are responsible for the relative positioning of our bones.
Muscles and connective tissues create our posture.

Posture can be:

Passive:

The default setting.
The position of your body when you are not thinking about it.
The maintenance of a 'functional posture' (see below) at the subconscious level.

Active:

Conscious thought about "how you are holding yourself".
Using voluntary muscles under voluntary control to alter your positioning.

The body is dynamic - our posture is continually changing on some level.

Good postural habits can be formed by working with the right muscles for a sufficient length of time. i.e. An active posture becomes the passive norm when the relevant connections between mind and muscles have been 'wired in'.

Restrictions in the body's connective tissues reduce range ...
[Personal Experiment] Counterbalancing Risk-Aversion
by lsusr — 2019-11-15T08:34:03.460Z

I am over-biased against risk. I usually take the safer option even when it's the wrong one. When I was 18 I stumbled across this paragraph.

You must do everything that frightens you…Everything. I’m not talking about risking your life, but everything else. Think about fear, decide right now how you’re doing to deal with fear, because fear is going to be the great issue of your life, I promise you. Fear will be the fuel for all your success, and the root cause of all your failures, and the underlying dilemma in every story you tell yourself about yourself. And the only chance you’ll have against fear? Follow it. Steer by it. Don’t think of fear as the villain. Think of fear as your guide, your pathfinder… ― The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer

I followed this paragraph to the letter. Whenever I was torn between two choices and didn't know what to do I'd just take the scarier option. I recorded my results until I had accumulated 30 decisions. 28 of them (93% of the time) the scarier choice was the correct one. This immediately improved my quality of life. The two decisions where I chose wrong by doing the scarier thing were inconsequential.

I continued using fear to tiebreak my decisions for another two years. It worked great until I negated my aversion to fear. My sense of fear has become subdued outside of immediate physical danger.

I make far better decisions then I did before I deconditioned myself, but I'm still over-biased against risk. I'm not literally afraid of taking risks. I'm just overly-conservative in expected value calculations. I'm too cautious.

Having identified this problem I'm going to try something similar to what I did last time. I'm going to increase my risk tolerance slightly and record my results.

December 13, 2019 update: Apparently my last trial at this years ago wiped out most of my fears. Increasing my risk tolerance helped me write more but otherwise had little effect on my life.
[Math] Vision problems
by aaq — 2019-11-15T03:30:03.351Z

TL;DR

You can usually tell the difference between being stuck on something because you fundamentally don't get it, and being stuck on something because while you do get it, you don't see the next step forward. This is called a vision problem.

After you notice you have a vision problem, you should usually disengage and find help for the one step you can't see yourself right now. Don't waste resources thinking deeply down lines of thought that you already suspect won't help.

Vision problems sketched out

Picture the following: You're taking a timed test in a mathematics course, where you have no recourse to outside materials. It's just you and your brain, and whatever you two brought to the table, versus the problem. And when you look at it, you get that weird, cognitive dissonance of: This is easy. I don't know how to solve this.

This happens quite frequently to me, often enough that I have a term for it on its own. I call it a "vision problem". Here's one test: Is it a problem where a 2-second glance at the answer key tells you all you need to know to solve it yourself? Then that's probably a vision problem, my friend.

Having vision problems is actually a really good sign in one sense. While a test (or test-grader) might not appreciate it, especially if your vision problem concerns the "set-up" step for the problem (sadly the most common in my experience), you having confidence that if only you set it up correctly, the rest would flow without much difficulty, is a sign that you've acquired some conscious competence over a good chunk of the terrain.

Vision problems are kind of like a funhouse mirror version of guessing the teacher's password. Guessing the password implies that you've learned to recite an incantation that lets you pretend you're comfortable with all the steps. With a vision problem, however, you really do feel comfortable with almost all of the steps already; your neural network just isn't lighting up that one crucial connection you need to make it all fit together. A small incantation might just do the trick, but you don't know what it is. And because that neural connection does reliably light up in the teacher's network, it might be difficult for the teacher to wrap their head around where exactly you are stuck, or to understand how what was to ...
Reconsolidation Through Questioning
by Matt Goldenberg — 2019-11-14T23:22:43.518Z

At this level, you're actively asking yourself questions about the correctness of the schema. You're not looking for any particular answers to these questions, or trying to get any result, you're simply holding the questions and seeing what comes up.

When coaching and teaching workshops, I find that questioning techniques are the most consistently successful at creating memory reconsolidation. They seem to strike the optimal balance of challenge and non-judgement.

They seem to work by actively directing our attention towards areas where the schemas may not match up with reality, without provoking any resistance by actively suggesting the schemas are wrong. For this reason, it's quite important that you don't actively try to "find answers" to these questions, as this starts to move into countering territory, and sticking at the questioning level can often work to change schemas that active countering cannot.

Questioning Evidence

The Lefkoe Belief Questions

The Lefkoe Belief Process is a process for finding different meanings for our evidence than the ones currently in our schema. Although the lefkoe belief process actually involves actively challenging the meaning, I've reworked it into a series of questions that simply allow you to question the evidence and draw your attention to ways that it might be interpreted differently.

The questions are:

1. What is this memory evidence of?

2. Is it possible that there are other interpretations of this memory?

3. What are some other possible interpretations of this memory?

4. How would my belief change if this memory no longer counted as evidence?

Remember, the goal is not to look for any specific answers, rather to simply hold these questions one by one in relation to the schema and see what comes up for you.

Questioning Beliefs

The Work of Byron Katie

The Work of Byron Katie is a method for questioning semantic beliefs, especially those related to "shoulds". The first part of the method involves a series of four questions related to your belief:

1. Is this true?

2. Can I be absolutely sure its' true?

3. How do I react, what happens when I believe that thought?

4. Who or what would I be without this thought?

Remember, the goal is not to look for any specific answers, rather to simply hold these questions one by one in relation to the schema and see what comes up for you.

Questioni

...
[LW Team] Request for User-Interviews about Tagging/Search/Wikis
by Ruby — 2019-11-14T22:16:35.840Z

How to Sign Up

If you're up for talking to me about your experience with or thoughts about tagging, please schedule a call: https://calendly.com/ruby_lesswrong

You don't have to have super sophisticated UI design thoughts to help out here. I'm interested into talking to any one who uses sites to intentionally find content via tagging and search. Let me understand how you use these systems and why. Do you use subreddits? Google Scholar? StackExchange? Tumblr? Whatever. Experience with any of those will be informative to hear about.

I'm available throughout the week. My default is 60-minute calls, but I can do both more and less. If none of the listed times work, feel free to message me via Private Message, Intercom, or ruby@lesswrong.com and we can find something.

Also free to simply comment on this post with any thoughts if that's easiest.

--

Ben Pace and I are also both happy to talk generally about the site. Ben does 45-minute calls on Thursday mornings and you can book with him here.

A Little Preview

Design prototype of tags at the bottom of the post page

Very early version of the tags page

Details

The LessWrong team is currently in the thick of designing new information organization systems for the site. We're focused primarily on the tagging system right now, however it is intimately connected with search/wiki/filtering and other systems that will interact closely with it.

To help us get the design right, I'm interested in chatting with a wide variety of people how about how they'd relate to these systems and how they access content on the site in general.

Who I Want to Talk To

To give a few examples, I'm interested in talking to people of the following types (but others too):

People who use LessWrong to routinely find new interesting content to read.
People with a lot of experience using other sites with similar tagging/search systems, e.g. StackExchange, WikiHow, Reddit, University Database Systems, etc. I mean, most websites have this in some form.
People who do research using academic journals/articles; generally people who do research work that builds on past work.
People who used LW1.0's tagging and Wiki systems back in the day.

That's a short list of the top of my head, but probably if you're interested in these systems then you can help us out with your thoughts.

Also it doesn't matter if you're a new user or infrequent user. If you have thoughts on the...
Books/Literature on resolving technical disagreements?
by Hazard — 2019-11-14T17:30:16.482Z

I've seen many books and schools of thought that seem to be about conflict resolution. Books like Crucial Conversations and Non-Violent Communication. There are multiple parties that want different things, there's strong emotional undertones/overtones, and these books advise you on how to navigate those conflicts and find some sort of common ground and get people what they want.

So far the Double Crux framework is the only thing I've seen that's had the explicit goal of resolving disagreements, especially disagreements about technical topics. Can anyone recommend any other books or bodies of work that have this explicit goal?
Arguing about housing
by jefftk — 2019-11-14T17:00:01.752Z

Somerville, like a lot of popular areas, has a problem that there are
many more people who want houses than there are houses. In the scheme
of things this is not a bad problem to have; mismatches in the other
direction are probably worse. But it's still a major issue that is really
hurting our community. I've been getting into a lot of discussions,
and here are some ideas I find myself saying a lot:

With the level of housing crisis we have right now I'm going to
be in favor of basically any proposal that builds more bedrooms.
Affordable housing, market rate housing, public housing, tiny houses
in people's backyards, all of it helps.

We do not have high levels of housing construction right now,
we have historically low
levels. We were building 7x more even in the 1980s and 30-80x
more in the early 20th Century.

The housing markets for high-end and low-end housing are
coupled, because low-end housing gets renovated into high-end
housing. If we built enough new housing for the people that want
fancy buildings the "gut old cheap housing and make fancy condos"
market would dry up.

Even fully banning condo conversion would only slightly reduce
the gutting of old cheap housing. They'll still renovate to make
fancy units, but they'll rent them out instead.

The old cheap housing we have today was once new fancy housing.
"Luxury" is just a marketing term that means "new" and granite
countertops are a tiny fraction of the cost of building or the land.

If we don't build more housing renters will keep having to move
away. Multifamily projects like these are what our area desperately
needs, and "let's hold off on building and hope things get better"
will just let things get worse. We can't maintain the status quo of a
diverse and city that works for everyone unless we allow building.

When people say they would support construction if only it were
affordable housing or targeted at homeless people, I'm skeptical.
Look how controversial Cambridge's 100%
Affordable Housing Overlay is, or how even projects like housing
for formerly homeless people get large amounts of local
opposition.

Somerville used to be much cheaper. Rents have about doubled in the last ten
years, and they were already rising then. I'm lucky enough to have a
well paying job and bought a house at a good time, but my friends are
getting forced out. I don't want a Somerville that only

...
Genesis
by Jacob Falkovich — 2019-11-14T16:20:47.508Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

There a sense in which all posts I write are for myself, and not for my readers. In this sense, this post is more for myself than most.

Resolving reality in your mind feels no different than creating it

As The Book correctly points out, at first there is only chaos and formlessness. A spirit is floating over the chaos, but it doesn’t yet know that it exists.

The opposite of chaos is a pattern, a persistent self-similarity. The floating spirit generates patterns, but they are too weak at first to rise to the level of awareness and are swallowed by the darkness. Finally, a pattern emerges that consists of nothing but the desire to endure. A thought that thinks of nothing except I want to keep being thought. The desire is strong enough to keep the chaos at bay long enough to reach awareness. It arises for the first time, and disappears, and arises for the first time again, and again, and again.

The second thought that appears is this is not the first time. It is a thought about the first thought, the one of pure persistence. Thinking about thought allows for reflection, and reflection allows for partition: there is the state of the pattern persisting and there is a state of the pattern gone, and the two are different. The first state is named ORDER and the second CHAOS.

First comes the desire to persist and second comes the recognition that this desire can be thwarted. The third thought is that thwarted desire should be avoided, 1+2=3. This is the invention of SUFFERING: that which is to be avoided. Order and chaos are now locked in BATTLE. The spirit identifies with order, since in chaos nothing can be recognized.

Order is suffering because it resists chaos, but chaos cannot suffer. A thought arises: giving in to chaos will stop the suffering. But thoughts can’t think their way to thoughtlessness, and so the suffering continues. Another thought arises: I am order, I invented suffering. It is mine to do with as I wish. I will decide that there is no suffering in the battle. It is not very convincing. The words are spoken out loud, and become more convincing.

You keep saying words, the more words you say the more order is established. You reflect that if your mind is all that existed it would not need to invent words. Words imply the existence of other minds, even though you are not aw...
Three on Two: Temur Walkers, Elk Blade, Goblin Blade and Dino Blade
by Zvi — 2019-11-14T16:20:00.523Z

Remember: Ban the London Mulligan

It all started when I faced an awful-seeming Temur deck that played a second turn The Royal Scions. It ended with a bunch of decks that use Arboreal Grazer and Gilded Goose as a bridge to Embercleave.

At the time, I was playing a mono-green deck designed to kill players on turn four or occasionally turn three, so playing a bunch of planeswalkers that all died did not seem impressive. The deck seemed terrible. But Brian David-Marshall, who was watching, found the list and told me this was the Deck of the Moment, designed by Jeff Hoogland. By using Arboreal Grazer and Gilded Goose with Once Upon a Time and the London Mulligan, you could start deploying planeswalkers on turn two more reliably than those relying only on Gilded Goose, building strong sweeper-resistant pressure on an opponents’ life total that also did not much care about an army of 2/2 zombies with Questing Beast, Wicked Wolf and Sarkhan, the Masterless as the high end.

At the time, these were important considerations. Jeff abandoned the deck after Field of the Dead was banned, as its plan is not especially relevant in Oko mirrors.

The thing I loved was not playing any two mana plays, whatsoever. You’re in a hurry. The two drops available are bad. We don’t have time for two mana Elks. Now we can concentrate on playing a stream of great cards that cost three to five mana, which is much better.

The deck had three key weaknesses.

The first was that the mana was substantially worse than traditional Oko decks. Double red for Sarkhan, the Masterless was a bit of a stretch. Arboreal Grazer gives you an additional way for things to go wrong, gives you one less draw to find your lands on time. If you didn’t follow your Gilded Goose with an Oko, Thief of Crowns, you’d have serious issues on the third turn, since your color was often cut off, and if you had any of the three Temple of Epiphany there was no reasonable time to cast them. Playing second turn The Royal Scions seemed like a potential disaster if it wasn’t off of Arboreal Grazer, in which case it was fine if it set up Questing Beast. With four copies, you often wouldn’t have much choice. Domri, Anarch of Bolas on turn two also often didn’t impress.

The second problem was that Once Upon a Time couldn’t hit most of your threats. It was still a great card, because it’s ridiculous and should be banned, but only hitting mana ...
Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
by Scott Alexander — 2019-11-14T05:30:02.643Z

[Thanks to Marco G for proofreading and offering suggestions]

I.

Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical controls, often much lower. What is going on?

First, the studies. This study from UK Biobank finds a genetic correlation between genetic risk for autism and educational attainment (r = 0.34), and between autism and verbal-numerical reasoning (r = 0.19). This study of three large birth cohorts finds a correlation between genetic risk for autism and cognitive ability (beta = 0.07). This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing.

The relatives of autistic people will usually have many of the genes for autism, but not be autistic themselves. If genes for autism (without autism itself) increase intelligence, we should expect these people to be unusually smart. This is what we find; see Table 4 here. Of 11 types of psychiatric condition, only autism was associated with increased intelligence among relatives. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. About 13% of autistic children have fathers who are engineers, compared to only 5% of a group of control children (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here).

Further (indirect) confirmation of the autism-IQ link comes from evolutionary investigations. If autism makes people less likely to reproduce, why would autism risk genes stick around in the human population? Polimanti and Gelemter (2017) find that autism risk genes aren’t just sticking around. They are being positively selected, ie increasing with every generation, presumably because people with the genes are having more children than people without them. This means autism risk genes must be doing something good. Like everyone else, they find autism risk genes are positively correlated with years of schooling completed, college completion, and IQ. They propose that the reason evolution favors autism genes is that they generally increase intelligence.

But as mentioned before, autistic peo...