LessWrong 2.0 Reader

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.

I'm hoping to collaborate with some software engineers who can help me build an alignment research assistant. Some (a little bit outdated) info here: Accelerating Alignment. The goal is to augment alignment researchers using AI systems. A relevant talk I gave. Relevant survey post [LW · GW].

What I have in mind also relates to this post [LW · GW] by Abram Demski and this post [LW · GW] by John Wentworth (with a top comment by me).

Send me a DM if you (or any good engineer) are reading this.

It is better than nothing I suppose but if they are keeping the safeties and restrictions on then it will not teach you whether it is fine to open it up.

Also, the US did consider the possibility of waging a preemptive nuclear war on the USSR to prevent it from getting nukes. (von Neumann advocated for this I think?) If the US was more of a warmonger, they might have done it, and then there would have been a more unambiguous world takeover.

If you have the memories of every single human up to that point, then you don't know which of them you are.

This depends on the mechanism of attaining all these memories.  In that world, it COULD be that you still know which memories are privileged, or at least which ones include meeting God and being in position to be asked the question. 

I mean, I'm with you fundamentally: it's not obvious that ANYTHING is truly objective - other people can report experiences, but that's mediated by your perceptions as well. In most cases, one can avoid the confusion by specifying predicting WHAT experiences will happen to WHICH observer.

I would pay to see this live at a bar or one of those county fair (we had a GLaDOS cover band once so it's not out of the question)

Governments are not social welfare maximizers

Most people making up governments, and society in general, care at least somewhat about social welfare.  This is why we get to have nice things and not descend into chaos.

Elected governments have the most moral authority to take actions that effect everyone, ideally a diverse group of nations as mentioned in Daniel Kokotajlo [LW · GW]'s maximal proposal comment.

Who is pushing for totalitarianism? I dispute that AI safety people are pushing for totalitarianism.

If you have recommendations, post them! I doubt the author tried to filter the subjects very much by "book subjects" it's just what people seem to have found good ones so far.