LessWrong 2.0 Reader

in a zero marginal cost world

nit: inference is not zero marginal cost. statement seems to be importing intuitions from traditional software which do not necessarily transfer. let me know if I misunderstood or am confused.

Agree-vote: I generally tend to choose work over sleep when I feel particularly inspired to work.

Disagree-vote: I generally tend to choose to sleep over work when even when I feel particularly inspired to work.

Any other reaction, new answer or comment, or no reaction of any kind: Neither of the two descriptions above fit.

I considered making four options to capture the dimension of whether you endorse your behaviour or not but decided against it. Feel free to supplement this information.

An example where a lack of processing has caused visible nutritional issues is nixtamalization; adopting maize as a staple without also processing it causes clear nutritional deficiencies.

Mostly because humans evolved to eat processed food. Cooking is an ancient art, from notably before our current species; food is often heavily processed to make it edible (don't skip over what it takes to eat the fruit of the olive); and local populations do adapt to available food supply.

It seems pretty straightforward to me but maybe I'm missing something in what you're saying or thinking about it differently.

Our bodies evolved to digest and utilize foods consisting of certain combinations/ratios of component parts.

Processed food typically refers to food that has been changed to have certain parts taken out of it, and/or isolated parts of other foods added to it (or more complex versions of that). Digesting sugar has very different impacts depending on what it's digested alongside with. Generally the more processed something is, the more it differs from the way that our bodies are optimized for.

To me "generally avoid processed foods" would be kinda like saying "generally avoid breathing in gasses/particulates that are different from typical earth atmosphere near sea level".

It makes sense to generally avoid inputs to our machinery to the extent that those inputs differ from those which our machinery is optimized to receive, unless we have specific good reasons.

Why should that not be the default, why should the default be requiring specific good reasons to filter out inputs to our machinery that our machinery wasn't optimized for?

re: second diagram in the "Bayesian Belief States For A Hidden Markov Model" section, shouldn't the transition probabilities for the top left model be 85/7.5/7.5 instead of 90/5/5?

I noticed this same editing style in a children's show about 20 years ago (when I last watched TV regularly). Every second there was a new cut -- the camera never stayed focused on any one subject for long. It was highly distracting to me, such that I couldn't even watch without feeling ill, and yet this was a highly popular and award-winning television show. I had to wonder at the time: What is this doing to children's developing brains?

Firms are actually better than governments at internalizing costs across time. Asset values incorporate the potential future flows. For example, consider a retiring farmer. You might think that they have an incentive to run the soil dry in their last season since they won't be using it in the future, but this would hurt the sale value of the farm. An elected representative who's term limit is coming up wouldn't have the same incentives.

Of course, firms incentives are very misaligned in important ways. The question is: Can we rely on government to improve these incentives.

How can saturated fats, the main ingredients in breast milk and animal products, be bad for humans (an apex predator)? Was eating animals really giving our hunter gatherer ancestors heart attacks left and right?

I think there's a few issues with this reasoning.

For one thing, evolution wasn't really optimizing for the health of people around the age where people usually start having heart attacks. There wasn't a lot of selection pressure to make tradeoffs ensuring the health of people 20+ years after sexual maturity.

Another point is that animal sources of food represented a relatively small percentage of what we ate throughout our evolutionary history. We mostly ate plants, things like fruits and tubers. Of the groups who's diets consisted of mostly meat, there is evidence of health issues resulting.

The nutritional profile of breast milk is intended for a human who is growing extremely quickly, not for long term consumption by an adult. Very different nutritional needs.

Similarly for seed oils, through them we're eating such a ridiculous amounts of PUFA; something that would be quite impossible in the ancestral environment. How can our bodies possibly be adapted to cope with that?

I believe mainstream nutrition advises against consuming refined oils, including seed oils . I may be missing a point you're making.

Have you considered antidepressants? I recommend trying them out to see if they help. In my experience, antidepressants can have non-trivial positive effects that can be hard-to-put-into-words, except you can notice the shift in how you think and behave and relate to things, and this shift is one that you might find beneficial.

I also think that slowing down and taking care of yourself can be good -- it can help build a generalized skill of noticing the things you didn't notice before that led to the breaking point you describe.

Here's an anecdote that might be interesting to you: There's a core mental shift I made over the past few months that I haven't tried to elicit and describe to others until now, but in essence it involves a sort of understanding that the sort of self-sacrifice that usually is involved in working as hard as possible leads to globally unwanted outcomes, not just locally unwanted outcomes. (Of course, we can talk about hypothetical isolated thought experiments and my feelings might change, but I'm talking about a holistic relating to the world here.)

Here's one argument for this, although I don't think this captures the entire source of my feelings about this: When parts of someone is in conflict, and they regularly are rejecting a part of them that wants something (creature comforts) to privilege the desires of another part of them that wants another thing (work more), I expect that their effectiveness in navigating and affecting reality is lowered in comparison to one where they take the time to integrate the desires and beliefs of the parts of them that are in conflict. In extreme circumstances, it makes sense for someone to 'override' other parts (which is how I model the flight-fight-fawn-freeze response, for example), but this seems unsustainable and potentially detrimental when it comes to navigating a reality where sense-making is extremely important.