Who are your favorite "hidden rationalists"?

Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight might never have heard of Less Wrong, but they do exemplary Bayesian reasoning at length and in depth, on lot of current topics. They're especially great at branching from current topics of interest into discussions of rational analysis.

patio11 on Hacker News. He has a blog which is occasionally updated with really long articles, often about marketing. I don't always read them, especially the whole way through, but his advice seems good and actionable.

Mr.Money Mustache on finance and positive psychology. Specialties are doing the math of everyday life, and understanding the concept of the hedonic treadmill.

Highly recommend kazerad, for Scott-level insights about human behavior. Here's his analysis of 4chan's anonymous culture. Here's another insightful essay of his. And a post on memetics. And these aren't necessarily the best posts I've read by him, just the three I happened to find first.

By the way, I'm really averse to the label "hidden rationalists". It's like complimenting people by saying "secretly a member of our ingroup, but just doesn't know it yet". Which simultaneously presupposes the person would want to be a member of our ingroup, and also that all worthwhile people are secretly members of our ingroup and just don't know it yet.

Doug McGuff (author of Body By Science) reminds me of Staffan Lindeberg (author of Food and Western Disease).

McGuff updates away from "common wisdom" of exercise, usually in a direction that makes things better.

• McGuff is an opponent of large amounts of moderate-intensity cardio, arguing that it has extremely poor return-on-investment (too much time, energy, effort) and causes too much injury. His recommendation to do minimal amounts of high-intensity exercise line up nicely with Romeo Steven's recommendations and recent research.

• McGuff focuses on recovery, recommending to err on the side of too much recovery, rather than too little. I'll take exception to his recommended recovery intervals (ACSM and Romeo Stevens both recommend exercising 2–3 times a week, rather than once a week), but he's definitely erring on the right side; overtraining will waste your time, make you weak, and injure you, whereas undertraining just means you don't achieve results quite as quickly.

• McGuff separates exercise (an activity designed to produce a physiological response) and physical activity (moving your body). This is in line with the scientific community (this very distinction is made in chapter one of ACSM's Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription). In particular, since exercise is optimizing for a desirable physiological response under the constraint of not getting injured, it should come as no surprise that exercise is by far the most efficient way of achieving a desirable physioligical response and doesn't injure you. When the weather permits, I play ultimate frisbee several hours a week, and it's fun, but I've had numerous (minor) injuries and hold no illusions that I couldn't achieve approximately equivalent results with 12 minutes a week of Tabata sprints.

• McGuff advocates for using machines over free weights because, even though the latter will produce slightly better outcomes, it's difficult to hold proper form as your muscles approach failure, and bad form with free weights is a recipe for getting injured.

• McGuff is big on having genetics as an input to your exercise function. In particular, a routine that's optimal for the genetically gifted isn't going to be good for anyone else; if I tried exercising as much as Michael Phelps, my body would break because I'm not an outlier freak whose body can handle that much physical stress. This is in opposition to a (bad) common argument that goes "X has physique Y, which I desire. If I follow the same exercise program as X, I'll obtain physique Y. However, no matter what routine I do, I'll never have Triple H's body because my bones aren't thick enough.) McGuff like an anecdote about out-of-shape people swimming because they want the long, lean body of a swimmer, even though elite swimmers have long, lean bodies because anyone with a different body type doesn't become an elite swimmer.

However, I feel McGuff sometimes ignores or cherrypicks evidence to reach his preconceived notions of what optimal exercise ought to look like. Most notably, he advocates for one set to failure, whereas the consensus amongst people who look closely at the evidence recommend 4 sets at a weight, number of reps, and cadence such that you can barely finish the last set.

Similarly for Lindeberg in nutrition:

• Most popular nutrition literature reads something like "X is good for you because it has a lot of Y!" Lindeberg's book reads a lot like "foods from class X are problematic because they contain Y which causes Z." (Foods from the class legumes are problematic because they contain phytic acid which is problematic because it binds to metals, meaning that you don't absorb the iron or magnesium you've eaten. Plants really didn't evolve to be good things to eat (fruit excepted).)

• Lindeberg argues that micronutrient:calorie ratios, not macronutrient ratios, are important. (He's well-known for his study of Kitavans, an indigenous population known to not suffer from western disease. They have a very high-carbohydrate diet. Lindeberg also notes that the Inuit, who are also basically devoid of western disease, derive a few percent of their calories from carbohydrates.)

• Lindeberg isn't overconfident. Nutrition is hard to study: we can't really placebo food, we can only usually measure biomarkers (which don't quite equal health outcomes), and doing controlled intervention studies is hard (you need to get a large group of people to adhere to a diet long enough to see far-down-the-road health outcomes), so there aren't nearly enough of them. It's also nonobvious how to "slice" food: is it that meat an unhealthy class of food, is it mostly harmless and just processed meat that's bad? Should we be comparing high carb/low carb or processed/unprocessed or GMO/natural or paleo/modern or…?

Ultimately, Lindeberg does recommend a paleo diet (which bears a passing relationship to mainstream paleo), but, on account of there not being enough good evidence, despite writing a book with >2k references, I remember not being entirely convinced he presented enough evidence to justify his recommendations.

Ultimately, what makes McGuff and Lindeberg hidden rationalists is not that they present the best arguments, although they do a better job than most. What makes them hidden rationalists is they present good arguments that lend themselves to updating. McGuff outlines a bunch of exercise principles, most of which I still use, but I made small changes when Romeo Stevens posted Optimal Exercise. Lindeberg outlines nutrition principles, which back up the paleo diet, most of which I abide by, even though I eat soylent, which is about the least-paleo thing there is.

This becomes remarkable when you compare it to the "normal" situation, which is, near as I can tell, amalgamating a mishmash heuristic from articles written by morons who have no clue what they're talking about (the prototypical example being a friend who started working out based on recommendations from bodybuilding forums.) You can certainly update in this case (I can tell friend he's exercising too frequently and he goes to the gym less often), but it's not nearly as good as being able to update intelligently: it's the difference between looking at a gallup poll and scientific evidence to determine whether global warming is true. (Actually, that methodology is better; if I'm reading random idiots on the internet, I'm subject to a massive confirmation bias. Also, only reading the 10% of literature on exercise that falls outside of Sturgeon's law saves a lot of time.)

Also, I endorse Staffan Lindeberg as a hidden rationalist and wholeheartedly recommend his book. >2k references! (To compare, OP's Body By Science has about a tenth as many. Which is exceptional—Lindeberg is just really exceptional.)

This is basically another blog recommendations thread, right? OK, here are some decent rational-ish blogs outside the LW-sphere then. I'm too lazy to write out descriptions. Try one of these tricks to find top blog posts: reddit, Hacker News.

http://waitbutwhy.com/

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/

http://www.erasmatazz.com/

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/

My old physics professor: http://nebula.deanza.edu/~newton/HowtoStudyPhysics.htm

These Youtube stars coined the term "nerdfighter", which seems vaguely similar to being an effective altruist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerdfighteria

I read this bestselling book on quitting smoking earlier today and it was actually kinda CFAR-ish. (But that might just be because I see personal development stuff in terms of CFAR's ontology after having attended their workshops.)

Doug McGuff, MD, fitness guru and author of the exercise book with the highest citation-to-page ratio of any I've seen.

I had a curious skim through this guy's blog. Soon happened upon this interview with Joe Mercola. I get that people sometimes do questionable things they wouldn't otherwise do for publicity, but this is pretty out there. For those unfamiliar with the good Dr Mercola, he's second only to Mehmet Oz in damage done to public understanding of the scientific basis of medicine. That's no flaw in McGuff's own work, but I'm a little dubious of a physician who's willing to associate with antivaxxers in a public professional context, from an ethical standpoint if nothing else. He may have good reasons for this, but it does trigger my quack-heuristic.

Ray Dalio. Businessman, founded Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. He is one of the richest people in the world.

From descriptions of Bridgewater, he seems to run it very much in line with most LessWrong principles.

In fact, if you want an instrumentally-rational and (slightly) business-oriented version of LessWrong, Ray Dalio's principles are it. You can read here, I highly recommend it: http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgewater-Associates-Ray-Dalio-Principles.pdf .

He is also trying to spread his take on how the economy works, in his video The Economic Machine. See it here: www.economicprinciples.org.

All in all, a fascinating person.

I would highly recommend Arnold Kling, both for his excellent blog, and his most recent book, which has been occasionally discussed on this site. Not everything he writes is necessarily "lesswrongish", mind you, but most of it is.

A few that have already been mentioned (doug hubbard and nate silver being among the top). In addition:

Simon Wardley (amazing empirical models on business strategy)

Examine.com (amazing empirical work on supplements)

Charles Munger (probably one of the most rational businessmen operating today)

Cal Newport (Awesome work on mastery)

Scott Young (Great work on learning)

Kevin Hillstrom (retail strategy)

Billy Murphy (his article on expected value is incredible)

Avi Deitcher (More awesome business startegy)

Eugine Wei (design and startup culture)

It's rarely updated these days, but Quiet Babylon has some very rewarding material. I particularly suggest the 'sequence' on architects and cyborgs.

John Medina's "Brain Rules". I also recommend/give all future* parents his "Brain Rules for Baby". I have not yet had time to read his other works, but these two make me want to.

*Also to parents of small kids. And to anyone thinking about having children.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Doug Hubbard.

So this thread is devoted to outing everyone's secret identities?

/r/IAMA will also teach you not to trust an elaborate story just because you can't think of any reason someone would lie about it. Turns out people still lie about it. Perhaps they have their reasons, which we'll never know, or perhaps they're just creative writing students looking to test their skills.

Either way, there are reasons proof of identity is now required for every AMA. A long, storied history of reasons.

Geek feminists

Nice Guys™ regard women as being moral guardians: that women should choose the nicest men for sex in order to reward them for doing the right thing.

Eric S. Raymond, esr.ibiblio.org and http://www.catb.org/esr/

Favorite:

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/utility-of-math/