LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Thanks 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.

You'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?!

A 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.

Good 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.

Feels 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. 

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!

Based 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.

The 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.

I'd definitely call any assumption about which forms preferred explanations should take as a "prior". Maybe I have a more flexible concept of what counts as Bayesian than you, in that sense? Priors don't need to be free parameters, the process has to start somewhere. But if you already have some data and then acquire some more data, obviously the previous data will still affect your conclusions.