Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: Probably other people have written in this well-attested frame before but I've been thinking about this for actual decades now and I have more to say.) Here's one riddle in two guises: "Why is it sometimes so hard for me to get through my to-do list?" and "Why aren't flammable substances always on fire?" The answer, in both cases, is "there's an activation energy to overcome". From chemistry, we know that in order for a reaction to take place, it's not enough for the products to be energetically favored over the reactants - the reactants must also overcome the activation energy in order to react. In simpler terms, even if a reaction "wants to take place", the molecules must be sufficiently shaken up - which usually means heat, pressure, or both - to overcome the fact that molecules want to stay apart; "wants to take place" means that (for whatever reason, in some meaningful and technical sense) the...

(Epistemic status: Prescriptive, borne of long experience. Your milage will vary. For JM.) Anyone still up for getting your hedons and utilons separately? Because that's what you get to do when you spend effort on your food. I know it's fashionable these days to aspire to the kind of transhumanism that involves the right blend of peptides and stimulants and nutrient slurry that makes your tragic meat chassis 23% more efficient at converting macronutrients into prompts, but face it: for now, morale is a binding constraint, and if you think that you need not care much about what you eat, you're probably inadequately embodied and trying to figure out why you feel kinda terrible so often. Putting more effort into a dish, moreover, often lets you trade off among effort, monetary cost, and enjoyment much more efficiently than limiting yourself to the three points on the tradeoff surface of "amateurishly throw something together", "beg a housemate for help", an...

(If you're reading this right as it's been posted, or precisely some whole number of years afterwards, take a deep breath before you start reading. Hold it for as long as you can. If you finish reading before you must breathe, make a wish, and it will come true (Epistemic status: lol.).)   Why must a counterfactual be breathed into being? The link between air and human volition by way of breath, speech, and the soul is well-attested; Latin roots have inextricably linked the breath to the soul and the soul to one's hopes.  "While there's breath there's hope", as Latin would have it, and even  the world "aspiration" is quite literally to "breathe for" something.  But I think that the link goes deeper than that. Today is 11/11, for one, which is where our first case study starts. The custom of holding your breath at 11:11pm on any given day to make a wish is one of those strange bits of folk ritual that seem to have come from nowhere, righ...

Bet you forgot about this! Am I doing Inkhaven proper? As ever, no. Will I likely end up around Lighthaven a few times anyway? I am no longer in the same state, so no. Am I doing a kitbashed budget Inkhaven again? Yes, and this time, I am going to make a point of both using no LLM infill from the start and of trying to get a friend to do it with me. The story is the same as ever: starting today, for the next 30 days I'm going to write something of at least 500 words, just to keep in shape. The topics will be anything and everything I feel like writing about, and the quality will be comparable to my past Budget Inkhavens as best I can manage. Once a week, I'll post a digest to LessWrong, and at the end, I'll finish up with a postmortem. Have I come all that far since I started writing again? Only one way to find out. 

(Epistemic status: A combination of consumer report and hobbyist pharmacology; n = ~3 where uncited. Not professional medical advice; moderately strong supplement advice in the tradition of luck-based medicine and trying all those vaguely-promising things which are cheap and safe to try. With thanks to JM, who coined the term.)   Anxiety and stress are, in general, undesirable things to experience. Not only are they unpleasant in and of themselves, but they also tend to reinforce themselves past a certain point: you're anxious about an upcoming test, or you're in the middle of a competition, and you're past the point where it's driving you to prepare more or study harder or be quicker on the draw, and ended up at the point where you're freezing up and second-guessing your decisions and getting far too deep into your own head rather than do anything actually helpful. There's a trade-off, though: much in the same way that many have noted that pain is so core to hu...

(For SS, née SR. Happy 30th.) Memory is a fickle, fragile thing. There are things you can experience, tiny things, the brief little events of everyday life, and almost no one else shares those experiences. There are places you can have gone, and never be able to return to, because they have inherently changed: their significance is changed or gone, and will never return, or maybe it's you who's changed too much. And even if you share those memories with someone else - even if someone else was there - they will remember that time differently, from within a different point of view, if they even remember it at all. At SS's request, here are a few things I remember. I wonder how she remembers them. I remember summer days in the early-to-mid 2010's with SS. I remember the sense of freedom and exploration, biking to a small local store, a farm-stand sort of place, just the two of us. I remember richly spiced Amish friendship bread sticky with brown sugar and cinnamon and tart...