JustinCEO Topic

I agree!

Yes and it’s funny that you mention that, because as I was looking for examples for one of my posts (before turning to ChatGPT to generate them), I came across stuff about using “I feel” language, which actually can involve a similar sort of “translation” process as my examples, but is regarded as less confrontational. E.g.

What Are "I Feel" Statements?.

fixed thanks.

Continuing the discussion from Food Packaging Grammar Error:

I had a correct intuition of what part of the sentence had the issue but didn’t identify the error.

I did not read them as giving you the option. Typically, when microwave meals bring up stirring, that is an instruction. A failure to stir can lead to uneven temperature of the meal.

Continuing the discussion from Curiosity – Roe vs. Wade Overturned:

One relevant idea is that when people are super motivated and care a ton, that can cause them to engage in activities (aggressive lobbying, pressure campaigns, donations, influencing judicial picks) that can be worth more in terms of setting policy than the votes of a ton of people with more moderate views.

Another thing worth thinking about is imagining what the policy outcome would be in a very democratic setting. Imagine, for instance, a direct popular vote on some issue, as in a referendum or ballot initiative. To the extent a way of deciding a policy departs from that approach, it’s somewhat less democratic and provides an opportunity for people who care more to exert greater influence than a bunch of votes. (To be clear, I’m not saying we should be deciding everything by direct popular vote or criticizing representative democracy per se. I think the Founding Fathers were rightly very wary of that sort of approach. But representative democracy has some issues too.)

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I wrote some more comments on some ideas in a Stoicism book. I also wrote a microblog post about ChatGPT.

I’m dealing with technical issues with my blog. One is random crashing. Another is trying to figure out how to get some reasonable loading or navigation set up for my microblog. I actually had a programmer friend help me some with the latter but we haven’t made much progress yet.

I had to reinstall ghost and mysql but my blog seems fixed now. I also turned my microblog page into a regular index page until I can figure out how to get it more like how I want.

Continuing the discussion from MC does subconscious analysis:

This comment reminded me of this post in a meditation topic:

I struggled with the idea of a certain conception of self as being illusionary. One objection I had was that it seemed anti-individualist – like denying that individual minds exist. Another is that, even if the common conception of the self was inaccurate in some way, it seemed like a useful concept, so I didn’t see the point of rejecting it.

The tendency of people to alienate themselves from parts of their minds and try to get those parts to go along with what the conscious mind wants to do actually addresses both of these objections.

Trying to suppress parts of your mind is engaging in a sort of inner mental tyranny that seems incompatible with the principles of individualism, resolving disagreements through persuasion, etc. Rand said that the smallest minority on earth is the individual, but maybe the smallest minority on earth is actually the dissenting voice within an individual mind.

Drawing the line of what constitutes the “self” in an incorrect way such that it includes the conscious mind but excludes the subconscious is what enables this sort of tyranny to occur. So that is a “cash value” of correcting the illusory conception of the self – you lose your justification for suppressing part of yourself. It’s a lot harder to justify such suppression if you recognize that that part of yourself is “you”!

On a somewhat related tangent, I think a major motivation people have for wanting to exclude their subconscious or unconscious mind from what counts as the self is that they have a lot of dark stuff in their unconscious and they’d rather not take ownership of that. That might be another post though.

You didn’t post this note on your blog. You have lots of stuff on your blog where you don’t give credit for stuff that isn’t your own idea.

It also shows that you aren’t interested in promoting CF. That’s problematic given your context.

Maybe you should do negative visualizations about what it’d be like if you were banned from CF, if ET stopped writing anything, if ET died, if ET deleted all his websites, etc. You don’t seem very appreciative of being on this forum even though most forums would have permabanned you with no appeal. You haven’t used this opportunity to do problem solving regarding how you mistreated ET nor used it engage with CF articles. Your posts are mostly about you.

I think there’s also a reasonably high risk that visibly taking ownership of bad parts of oneself will result in mistreatment by others, who might see it as some sort of fundamental irreversible badness because they have misconceptions about the mind.

Without intending any implication that this addresses the general points you are raising, I think you raise a fair point and have added a note on my Mini Habits post.

I’m mildly surprised at the word “lots”. If you had said “some”, that would be unsurprising, because I know that I’m not very good at tracking where I got some idea from, so I would not be surprised if I was not giving proper credit sometimes. I also think I don’t actually understand what appropriate credit would consist of in many cases, or have some disagreements about that, or something. OTOH, lots of my posts are very quote heavy and just have some comments on quotes, and others are basically homework, so those seem like contexts where this issue should not come up a lot. So that’s why I was mildly surprised.

Yeah. I think part of that is due to some embarrassment about being unable to post outside of this thread due to my past behavior. I don’t think that’s a good reason at all, but I think that is part of what’s going on.

Just to make sure I understand everything you’re saying, you specifically mean the context of being on probation at CF, yes?

I thought this was a good suggestion so i tried it and found it helpful for gaining perspective (as is often the case with negative visualization). I would not like any of these things to happen. I haven’t generally been demonstrating that in my actions.

That’s true.

True. I psyched myself out of either resolving the mistreatment issue or learning CF by convincing myself they seemed really hard. I also wasn’t sure where to start. With the mistreatment issue, I think I focused heavily on how badly the discussion went in order to discourage myself from pursuing it further. With learning CF, I keep having vague plans to pursue it but never actually doing anything.

One thing I think that’s worth mentioning is that I’m not even sure I could have calmly replied to this message a year ago. I actually have made a ton of progress in emotional stability and resilience, and that seems like a prerequisite to any resolution of the mistreatment discussion getting anywhere. That is how I have thought about it, at any rate. And I have cognitive/emotional management tools that I didn’t have before (if not fully automated, at least semi-automated, such that my conscious mind can detect when a problem is arising and reach for one of my relevant concepts before I say anything really dumb or get too riled up). That said, this forum is not a space for me to work on my emotional issues, and there’s not much value for others in my endlessly working on those emotional issues without solving any outstanding problems.

I still don’t have an idea of how to proceed in resolving the mistreatment issue satisfactorily. I do think I need to work on it, though. And I think it’s a less daunting project than working on CF, and I don’t think I’d be able to learn much CF with the mistreatment issue unresolved in the background anyways, so I should probably focus on the mistreatment for now. As a first step, I’m going to make at least brainstorming ways to make progress on that issue one of my daily to-dos for a week and see how that goes.

Continuing this discussion

Regarding outstanding disagreements, I am not sure. I wound up conceding a lot and agreeing with or persuading myself of various points as I went along.

I’ve been intimidated from jumping back in to try to sort things out. I imagine something going wrong no matter what approach I take, so that’s discouraging. The basic issue is I lack any confidence to judge whether I’m on the right track on my own, and I need to be able to figure stuff out essentially on my own in order to make much progress on the issue. That’s why I gave up.

I had the idea of reading to the first part of the thread that I still disagree with and just starting with that to get the ball rolling. But what if it’s a total unimportant tangent? I had the idea that I should try to take an imperfectionist attitude to the situation, but it’s hard for me to take the attitude of e.g. “Care less about doing it right. Care more about doing it at all.” given that I already made serious mistakes in the discussion that had lasting consequences. So I’m still feeling pretty stuck but maybe even writing this out and reviewing it will cause me to have some sort of helpful realization.

Well one idea is to find like 3 or 5 things that I still disagree with, then talk about the one I think is the most important first some, but note the other disagreements I found. That way, if I am going off on an irrelevant tangent, it’s easy to get feedback and switch to another more fruitful point.

Is it not? I’m not aware of any reason to rule it out. Do you have a better place to work out emotional issues?

Also, are you here because you’re trying to be valuable to others? Do you think there’s value for others in you being stuck for a long time?

Are you scared of the possibility of being banned from CF? (or otherwise emotionally attached to the idea?)
I ask because, if you have some emotional reaction to that sort of possibility it seems possible that it could bias your thinking. Some part of you might want to agree just to avoid the fear, which could make it harder to think critically. I think that’s a realistic example of how emotional issues are relevant to discuss.

I sometimes have this problem too (or something that seems similar). I specifically find it discouraging because it adds substantially more mental load as I often end up trying to think ahead about how to stop the things that I imagine might go wrong, which can distract me from what I’m actually trying to say.

When I get into a mindset where I expect there to be major problems with anything I say, I might use negative visualisation to think through the worst things I think could reasonably happen (as I did earlier before visiting the forum today). This can help, as the worst things my subconscious can imagine are not all reasonable once I start thinking about them consciously and can criticise them with stuff like the context. The ones that remain as possible once I visualise them are not really bad. It typically comes down to something like “some of my ideas are criticised and I’ll want to find out if I’m wrong which will take up some time”. This only really becomes a problem when I try to rigidly plan ahead how much or what I’m going to read/write, which is a mistake I sometimes make out of habit.

I’ll reply more later but just quickly now.

I think it is not. It’s a forum for discussing Elliot’s philosophy.

Don’t see that that matters. It’s my responsibility to find or create a suitable place. By analogy, if one needs a place to live, one cannot morally just show up on someone’s doorstep or at a public park.

Please stop posting with incorrect paragraph formatting.

No and no.

Yes. I think a big part of the fear is what the ban would say about me morally, if that makes sense. I also would not like the practical consequences, but I think that part is likely fairly obvious.

In my case, a plausible-worst-case scenario actually already happened, so negative visualization isn’t useful for making such fears seem unreasonable.

I’m soliciting opinions on whether or not this is a reasonable format to approach the Gaslighting discussion, explore outstanding disagreements, and try to reach a conclusion. The specific point doesn’t matter too much, though comments are welcome on that. I’m more asking about the format. I expect this will be a multi-hundred-hour project and want to come up with a decent system. “Post” means I’m quoting from a post (isn’t necessarily a whole post), “Comment” means I’m adding a comment in my summary, and the meaning of the other labels should hopefully be apparent. My idea is I’ll go through the discussion organizing points of disagreement in this style, and then pick what seem like the important ones and paste this as a discussion starter, and then any discussion will proceed in a “normal” back-and-forth format (like a typical forum discussion). If I don’t get any criticism or suggestions for improvement very soon, I plan on just moving forward with this as an initial method.

Point of Disagreement: Clarity of DisplayLink Discussion (minor disagreements, possibly a tangent).

  • Context: I criticized another poster’s post as not engaging with mine.
  • Post, JustinCEO: i felt like i was pretty clear about the importance of DisplayLink in my analysis of potential product purchase. mentioned it by name a few times.
    • Post, Elliot Temple: You were not clear originally or in your followup. You have not explained what DisplayLink is or why it matters. And you did not emphasize it or compare it to any alternatives. In your second post you linked to info about it as a “btw” not at something emphasized, and the info you linked is terrible as a relevant summary, so I still have no idea what DisplayLink is, why it matters, or how it fits into this discussion.
      • Comment: I think the thought I had was that I made it clear that it was an important criteria to me, and so therefore I didn’t need to go into these other details. But assuming that I wanted/expected substantive engagement with my post, which I did, I would need to explain these things.
      • Question: Was I unclear? Did I fail to explain what DisplayLink is or why it matters? Did I fail to emphasize it or fail to compare it to alternatives?
        • Post, JustinCEO (Original Post in thread): My iMac is performing badly. I have a MacBook Air which performs way way better. I’d like to use the MacBook Air as my primary computer until I replace my iMac, which might not happen for as long as a year depending on what I decide to replace it with. I’m used to having multiple monitors and want that setup. However, the MacBook Air only supports 1 external display natively. You can use DisplayLink adapters to support extra displays. I have 3 external monitors I’d like to use with MacBook Air. So I’d need a DisplayLink adapter that supports 2 adapters + use my MacBook Air’s native 1 monitor out support in order to support 3 monitors.
          • Comment: I introduced the name of DisplayLink and implied that it was a solution to the MacBook AIr’s lack of support for more than 1 native display externally, but did not explain how it works, or why it was important, or emphasize it, or compare it to alternatives.
        • Post, JustinCEO (follow-up referred to by Elliot): Keep in mind a key aspect for me is the support for DisplayLink for outputting to multiple monitors despite lack of sufficient native ports on my current machine. It’s not just a bare USB 3.0 hub. I agree that at that price point, absent DisplayLink, I’d be looking into TBolt hubs over USB hubs (tho the really nice TBolt hubs - CalDigit mb? - actually go for more IIRC)
          • Comment: I did not explain how it works or compare it to alternatives. I do think that, here at least, I did at least give a strong indication of why it matters and give it some emphasis. Particularly the part “a key aspect for me is the support for DisplayLink for outputting to multiple monitors despite lack of sufficient native ports on my current machine”.
  • Conclusion: Mostly concede Elliot’s points, but maintain minor, tentative disagreement about whether my followup addressed why DisplayLink matters and gave it emphasis.

A couple of points on the above:

  1. I like being able to nest stuff deeply, which is one reason I like this outline type format.
  2. I considered using MindNode, but I think just working with text will be faster and produce a more readable result, especially on more complicated points (whereas a tree might get kind of large).

I wrote a lot, it’s kind of disorganized, but here are my thoughts about both apps.

Sugarmate:

Ok, first about Sugarmate, which is free, and usable with Dexcom G6 or G7. The app has a lot of things that you can set up yourself - graph height, goal/normal blood sugar level, which stats show up, color scheme, etc.

The graph shows you your blood sugar levels, and also lets you add log items as food, medications, exercise, or notes. If you log your exercise in Apple, Sugarmate can get that automatically on the graph, but everything else you have to log yourself.

The graph is accurate and easy to read, and you can easily put your finger on the graph at any point to get the precise number. All your logged items show up on the graph as small icons, and if you tap them, the thing you logged comes up, so you can see/read it. You can log your meals as words or pictures or both. You can also put in numeric values for macros, but I skip that.

The graph is a continuous scroll, so if you want to see previous days, you have to scroll back. There is nowhere to get a full day view or compare previous days to each other, and no way to see previous reactions to meals, etc, besides just scrolling back until you find them.

I recommend Sugarmate if you want to be able to log notes, like, reactions, how you are feeling, etc. And also if you just want a simple/easy way to see your data. I would recommend trying it in any case (if you are using Dexcom), since it’s free anyway, so no reason not to try it.

Levels:

So, Levels has some features that Sugarmate does not have, but it is also missing what I would consider some really basic features and I found it buggy to use. It also has some features and gamification that I dislike, but that is my own personal preference, and I know some other people disagree with me and like those features. So the following is all in my opinion:

Features I like:

  • you can see a snapshot comparison of your previous days. This lets you see the full days, and you can compare and see how you are doing at minimizing spikes
  • searchable meal database with scores. This puts all your meals in one place, gives them each a 1-10 score, and lets you search by specific foods or order them by score. So you can search every time you ate “orange”, say, and see what scores you had an what else you ate with it. This was actually my favorite feature in Levels, and the one thing that I miss from using it. BUT it had problems that actually made it not that useful in many situations, which I will address below.

Problems with meal scores:

  • The meals are done algorithmically. The graph includes 2 hours after the last thing that you ate, and the score is based on your blood sugar at that time compared to the baseline from before you ate. One problem with this is that sometimes my meal reaction lasts longer than 2 hours, so the meal score & graph won’t actually show the full reaction, and the score won’t take it into account. (You can force it to include longer that 2 hours by adding another meal or a note, and it will include 2 hours from the LAST thing, but that is extra work that you have to remember each time, so it makes it less useful as a database that just tracks things for you.)
  • The score is based on how much your blood sugar raised from your baseline, and your baseline is based (I think) on the 30 minutes before the meal. So if your blood sugar just finished coming down from a different meal, it will set your baseline too high, and give you too high of a score for a meal that wasn’t actually good.
  • Another issue is that since it includes 2 hours from the last thing you ate or put in as a notes, any time you doing anything (including adding notes), it will extend your “meal” time by another 2 hours. So, say you eat something at noon, then at 1:30pm you make a note that you feel tired, then you exercise at 3pm, then you have a snack at 4:30pm, then you eat dinner at 6pm. You will end up with a “meal” that goes from noon - 8pm, which is pretty useless. You can get around this by not ever using notes, which takes away basic functionality, and also by either waiting a full 2 hours between meals & snacks, or fudging the time you record it so that it is 2 hours. Another thing people do is they don’t record any “keto” type snacks, or other things that they know don’t affect their blood sugar, so that it doesn’t extend the window.

So even though I liked the meal feature in theory, these problems made it not very useful to me, and frustrating to try to use. It was too much work to try to keep things 2 hours apart, even for things that I had a short reaction to where I was back down to baseline in less than an hour, or to have to add fake notes to extend the window if the reaction went longer. There was also no quick way to get from the meal to the full context, so sometimes the score or graph was really misleading, but there was no way to note that or see that. (Like, you can’t easily see that the baseline was based on a high blood sugar from a previous meal.)

Missing basic functionality:

  • You can’t log notes about your reactions without messing up your meal scores. There is no way to log a note where they don’t interpret it as something that affects your blood sugar, as opposed to a symptom. This is actually a really big deal, because one of the things I wanted to use this for was logging my reactions to high or low blood sugar. The app seems like it is made just to give you algorithmic scores, but not to let you put down your own stuff and figure out your own reactions, outside of what the algorithm does. Not being able to add in notes means that even if I were continuing to use Levels, I would also want to continue using Sugarmate at the same time, so that I could see my data, including my notes, all in one place.
  • The graph only has 2 very faint horizontal lines going across it (at 70 & 110), so it is hard to read it by eye yourself. There are no other numbers on the y axis. It also only has the time every 3 hours on the x-axis, with no vertical lines, so it is hard to read in that way too. I found the sugarmate graph easier to read. Having actual numbers on your graph axis seems like basic functionality to me.

Gamification:

  • they give you scores for each day and scores for the meals. I can see the point of the meal scores, because it helps you sort your meals, and see when you had good vs bad reactions to meals, find ones where you had lower reactions. I don’t really like the day scores though, and I think that can of thing can encourage unhealthy behavior in people who are just optimizing for a better score at the expense of their actual health. It is easy to get a good score if you just don’t eat any carbs, or if you just fast all day, but that’s not actually best for everyone.
  • they also give you points for other things, like sleep and exercise. You get a checkmark & points if you sleep at least 7 hours, and there is nowhere to turn that off. It will also give you “tips” telling you to sleep more. I think they mean to try to “encourage” people to sleep more, but as someone who gets insomnia, it just felt annoying that the app kept reminding me that I wasn’t sleeping enough when I was trying to sleep over 7 hours a night. Like, if I just had a bad night and wasn’t able to sleep, it’s kind of annoying to also have an app tell me I need to prioritize my sleep more and not give me my daily “points”.

other stuff:

  • app hard to navigate, hard to find things, plus they keep changing it
  • buggy: my meal photos would sometimes just disappear. this was especially problematic because I will log meals with photo only then go back and add words later to make it searchable. But I can’t do this when they photo disappears!
  • buggy: sometimes the app would take too long to respond to touch. no other apps on my phone were having this problem
  • graph doesn’t let you define your own normal range - they use their own default of 70-110, which I don’t think is appropriate for everyone. It’s also harder to read than the sugar mate app.
  • the app seems to really be pushing low carb/keto. the scores are really against your blood sugar going up much at all, and I’m not sure how evidence based that really is. I read the blog articles they have, and I couldn’t find anything in their sources that actually justified how much they seem to be pushing keeping your blood sugar in that range.
  • the app gives you “tips” based on what you enter in your logs, which I sometimes found annoying. A lot of them were giving you ideas for food swaps, which I can see some people liking. But I usually just got stuff that wasn’t relevant to me, e.g., more than once I got tips about cutting sugar or eating “glucose-friendly” desserts, based on a log item I made with a dessert-like name, even though the actual thing I ate had no sweetener.

I know a lot of people really seem to love Levels, but I don’t think it was suited to me. I didn’t like the scores and gamifications, and the app made it hard for me to actually use it to get basic information about my own reactions to meals. If I was happy just using their scores and algorithms, and wasn’t trying to figure stuff out on my own, then maybe I would have liked it more. I still don’t like their algorithms sometimes though, and the fact that you can’t correct it and tell it when to end a meal if it is ending too soon or too late. And the app doesn’t offer customization, so it isn’t very useable if you don’t want what they are pushing, in my opinion.

To their credit, their customer service is good, they are a convenient way to get a CGM, and they will refund your membership fee if you don’t want to continue with them.

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My guess is this is because I didn’t leave an extra line break before “I ask because”. I hadn’t noticed that I’d been missing it habitually and will pay more attention to it going forward. If there’s something else wrong I’m not aware of it.

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Silent Spring