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Eliezer Yudkowsky (Eliezer_Yudkowsky) · 2006-11-22T20:00:00.000Z · comments (47)
There are also people who's job it is to be a lot on the telephone and thus are well-reached by telephone even if they are younger.
dzoldzaya on Thoughts on seed oilThanks for this piece. I admit I have always had a bit of residual aversion to seed oils that I've struggled to shake.
Having said that, as you're pushing so strongly against seed oils in favour of "processing" as a mechanism for poor health, I think I need to push back a bit.
If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats.
"Avoid processed food" works very well as a heuristic - far better than anything like the "nutrition pyramid", avoiding saturated fats/sugars or calorie counting etc. But it also seems like something that should annoy people who like clear thinking and taxonomies.
As you note, "processing" includes hundreds of processes, most of which have no plausible mechanism by which they might harm human health. Articles describing the ultra-processed taxonomy often just list a litany of bad-sounding things without an explanation why they're bad e.g. "mechanically separated meat", "chemical modifications" and "industrial techniques". Most of these are either benign when you think about it (we'd all prefer a strong man wearing a vest separating our meat with his bare hands, but come now...), or so vague as to be uninformative.
If ultra-processed foods are bad because they contain "hydrogenated oil, modified starch, protein isolate, and high-fructose corn syrup" or "various cosmetic additives for flavour enhancement and colour", then it's these products that are bad, not some mysterious processing!
If it is some technical part of the processing, like "hydrolysis, hydrogenation, extrusion, moulding, or pre-frying" that's bad, surely we should just identify that rather than lumping everything together?
If it's some emergent outcome of all these processes, like "hyper-palatability" or "energy density", then that's the problem, not the fact of being "processed". If so we should all stop eating strawberries after they hit a certain deliciousness threshold, and avoid literally any edible oil (because all oil is identically energy-dense).
But, having said that, I still use this heuristic, and I'm pretty glad I trained myself out of preferring highly-processed food when I was less analytical.
Good question! I would find it plausible that it would have changed, except maybe if the people you'd call would be in their fifties or older.
cousin_it on AI Regulation is UnsafeYou're saying governments can't address existential risk, because they only care about what happens within their borders and term limits. And therefore we should entrust existential risk to firms, which only care about their own profit in the next quarter?!
morpheus on Job Search AdviceA piece of advice I frequently hear: always make sure you call somebody in the company you're applying for.
Is this still up-to-date advice? Or is messaging someone over LinkedIn or similar more appropriate? Mostly asking because I got the impression that the internet changed the norms to no one doing phone calls anymore.
nathan-young on Motivation gaps: Why so much EA criticism is hostile and lazyGood article.
It's an asymmetry worth pointing out.
It seems related to some concept of "low interest rate phenomenon in ideas". Sometimes in a low interest rate environment, people fund all sorts of stuff, because they want any return and credit is cheap. Later much of this looks bunk. Likewise, much EA behaviour around the plentiful money and status of the FTX era looks profligate by todays standards. In the same way I wonder what ideas are held up by some vague consensus rather than being good ideas.
nathan-young on Motivation gaps: Why so much EA criticism is hostile and lazyFeels like there is something off about the following graph. Ie these people could write better critiques. Many care a lot. Émile spends a lot of time on their work for instance. I don't think effort really catches what's going on.
I think it's a mix of effort status and norms. In our community it's high status to bend over backwards to write a critique (not that we always succeed). For Émile, as an example, I don't think this is the case. Perhaps, they gain status by articles that are widely shared and link ideas they dislike to a broader worldview.
anand-baburajan on Open Thread Spring 2024
I like his UI. In fact, I shared about CQ2 with Andy in February since his notes site was the only other place where I had seen the sliding pane design. He said CQ2 is neat!
kaj_sotala on My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious termsBased on the link, it seems you follow the Theravada tradition.
For what it's worth, I don't really follow any one tradition, though Culadasa does indeed have a Theravada background.
cubefox on Priors and PrejudiceThe problem with calling parts of a learning algorithm a prior that are not free variables, is that then anything (every part of any learning algorithm) would count as a prior. So even the Bayesian conditionalization rule itself. But that's not what Bayesians consider part of a prior.