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FYR

You probably need to be a bit more explicit in tieing your title to your text.  I'd guess you're just pointing out that these labels ("materialist" and "idealist") are both ridiculous when taken to the extreme, and that all sane people use different models for different decisions.  Oh, and that all cognition is about models and abstractions, which are always wrong (but often useful).

If I'm wrong in that, please use more words :)

As to your questions about the moon, I don't thing "observable" has ever meant only and exactly "directly viewable by the person doing the writing".  It means "inferrable from observations and experiences that are causally linked in simple/justifiable ways".

How do cancer vaccines work?

It only makes sense to two-box if you believe that your decision is causally isolated from history in every way that Omega can discern.

Right.  That's why CDT is broken.  I suspect from the "disagree" score that people didn't realize that I do, in fact, assert that causality is upstream of agent decisions (including Omega, for that matter) and that "free will" is an illusion.

In what sense are these two viewpoints in tension?

This seems more a question of "observable by whom" vs "observable in principle."

Correlation to increased consumption of hidden trans fats looks like a promising angle for figuring out some of the conflicting data.

I don't have a cite handy, but proportion of free acids was found to strongly increase with repeated heating of vegetable oils in cooking. There's a story here where pufa is more fragile, and incorporation of damaged fats into bodily tissue is not good. In particular, fat cells made up of damaged fats might mess with normal lipid balance processes. This is one possible story for why processed meats are so bad. We'd be doubling up on this process, feeding animals such that they have lots of damaged fats in their tissues (eg we feed pigs expired candy because it is cheap, and high BMI is desirable), killing and processing them such that it's even more damaged, and then eating it.

Overall, I'm bullish on the story that processing is bad, potentially through multiple mechanisms.

I'm bearish on pufa being bad in generality, if it were I don't think we'd see some of the strongest effects in nutrition science on reduced mortality from nuts and fish. I personally consume both raw on the processing is bad story.

Just thought I'd add a second follow-up comment.

You'd have a much better idea of what made FHI successful than I would. At the same time, I would bet that in order to make this new project successful - and be its own thing - it'd likely have to break at least one assumption behind what made old FHI work well.

Then much later, when we ran the AI Alignment Prize here on LW, I also noticed that the prize by itself wasn't too important; the interactions between newcomers and old-timers were a big part of what drove the thing.

Could you provide more detail?

If this was true, how could we tell? In other words, is this a testable hypothesis?

What reason do we have to believe this might be true? Because we're in a world where it looks like we're going to develop superintelligence, so it would be a useful world to simulate?

Your reasoning is invalid, because in order to talk about updating your beliefs in this context, you need a metaphysical framework which knows how to deal with anthropic probabilities (e.g. it should be able to answer puzzles in the vein of the anthropic trilemma [LW · GW] according to some coherent, well-defined mathematical rules). IBP is such a framework, but you haven't proposed any alternative, not to mention an argument for why that alternative is superior.