LessWrong 2.0 Reader

This is shockingly similar to what I'm going through.  And the fries that fucked me up the other night are indeed fried in canola oil. I'm cautiously optimistic but I know how complicated these things can be -_-. Will report back!

Someone on a subreddit said "free testosterone" is what matters and they usually just measure uh "regular testosterone" in blood or something. I have no idea if that's true. Know what those studies measured?

Wildly guessing here, but my intuition is that estrogen would have a greater impact on neuroticism than testosterone. Although I can't even say which direction.

Like what exactly? That seems unlikely to me. I suppose we will have results from the ongoing gender transitions soon.

I only linked the U-shaped study to mention that someone had said something vaguely similar. Notice my words "people have posited a U-shaped curve...". Study indeed seems like garbage. Perhaps i should've said that explicitly.

But it still doesn't really prove the causality - lots of things presumably influence intelligence, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them influence T as well.

Yes so the experiment is that a million people are starting up in taking hormones/blockers now. I don't think proper results are in but what I have myself observed seems like strong evidence that blocking T preserves or raises intelligence on the margin.

I would consider adding salt to something to be making that thing less healthy. If adding salt is essential to making something edible, I think it would be healthier to opt for something that doesn't require added salt. That's speaking generally though, someone might not be getting enough sodium, but typically there is adequate sodium in a diet of whole foods.

We often combine foods to make nutrients more accessible, like adding oil to greens with fat-soluble vitamins.

I would disagree that adding refined oil to greens would be healthy overall.

Not sure how much oil we're talking, but a tablespoon of oil has more calories than an entire pound of greens. Even if the oil increases the availability of vitamins, I am very sceptical that it would be healthier than greens or other whole plants with an equivalent caloric content to the added oil. I believe it's also the case that fats from whole foods can offer similar bioavailability effects.

At the same time, as far as I'm aware some kinds of vinegar might sometimes be a healthy addition to a meal, despite it's processing being undoubtedly contrary to the general guidelines I'm defending, so even if I don't agree about the oil I think the point still stands.

I do think you're offering some valid points that confound my idea of simple guidelines somewhat, but I still don't think they're very significant exceptions to my main point.

Appreciate the dialogue:)

It is a fiction.

Is this an independent reinvention of the law of attraction? There doesn't seem to be anything special about "stop having a disease by forgetting about it" compared to the general "be in a universe by adopting a mental state compatible with that universe." That said, becoming completely convinced I'm a billionaire seems more psychologically involved than forgetting I have some disease, and the ratio of universes where I'm a billionaire versus I've deluded myself into thinking I'm a billionaire seems less favorable as well.

Anyway, this doesn't seem like a good solution since even for every "me" that gets into a better universe, another just gets booted into the worse one. As far as the interests of the whole cohort go it'd be a waste of effort.

Wegener’s theory of continental drift was decades ahead of its time. He published in the 1920s, but plate tectonics didn’t take over until the 1960s.  His theory was wrong in important ways, but still.

Practicing grammar and correcting grammar on the fly seem to be two different things. 

If you want to improve, then I would prompt GPT-4 with something like "I'm a student looking to improve my writing and grammar ability, here's an essay I wrote. Given that writing, please teach me about grammar."

Do you have a specific verse where you feel like Lucretius praised him on this subject? I only see that he praises him relative to other elementaists before tearing him and the rest apart for what he sees as erroneous thinking regarding their prior assertions around the nature of matter, saying:

"Yet when it comes to fundamentals, there they meet their doom. These men were giants; when they stumble, they have far to fall:"

(Book 1, lines 740-741)

I agree that he likely was a precursor to the later thinking in suggesting a compository model of life starting from pieces which combined to forms later on, but the lack of the source material makes it hard to truly assign credit.

It's kind of like how the Greeks claimed atomism originated with the much earlier Mochus of Sidon, but we credit Democritus because we don't have proof of Mochus at all but we do have the former's writings. We don't even so much credit Leucippus, Democritus's teacher, as much as his student for the same reasons, similar to how we refer to "Plato's theory of forms" and not "Socrates' theory of forms."

In any case, Lucretius oozes praise for Epicurus, comparing him to a god among men, and while he does say Empedocles was far above his contemporaries saying the same things he was, he doesn't seem overly deferential to his positions as much as criticizing the shortcomings in the nuances of their theories with a special focus on theories of matter. I don't think there's much direct influence on Lucretius's thinking around proto-evolution, even if there's arguably plausible influence on Epicurus's which in turn informed Lucretius.