Yet More "Stupid" Questions

Yes, Extremely strong - it's among the extremely few statements which are uncontroversial in nutrition.

google scholar -> vegetables health -->

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/70/3/475s.full

--> assorted references

Edit: I think it's more accurate to say that vegetable deprivation is extremely harmful. It's not like eating additional vegetables leads to additional health!

Psychologically speaking, it is helpful to think of eating vegetables as the default state which we actively deviate from, not a thing which we actively do to stay healthy. That's why I like words such as "sedentism" - it makes you feel like you are actively harming your body rather than passively allowing it to be harmed, similar to "alcoholism".

I would like to add that it's important to be clear what is meant by "vegetables". The word can mean very different things in different contexts.

Scientifically (in botany, biology or nutrition), "vegetable" means "plant" - all food not derived from an animal. But in colloquial usage, "vegetable" means a small and badly defined subset of that. Wikipedia describes this kind of vegetables as plant food that is not "fruits, grains, or nuts". (Wikipedia also notes a third "culinary" usage, where "vegetable" means "any edible part of a plant with a savory flavor"; I'm not sure what that even means - presumably the usage of "savory" is not the colloquial one!)

In colloquial use, "vegetables" are opposed to "fruits" and distinct from "nuts", "berries" and "grains". Of course, many such "vegetables" are also botanical fruits (like tomatoes), and so are all berries and nuts; grains are the seeds of fruits.

Many (most? nearly all?) of the benefits that can be obtained from eating colloquial!vegetables can also be obtained from at least some other plant food. There's a huge difference between a diet of only animal food, and a diet that contains everything except colloquial!Vegetables which are "not fruit".

The evidence that eating vegetables independent of their micronutrient content is weak AFAIK. Most micronutrients have denser sources than veggies available. We also don't see indigenous populations pursue the rather calorie poor greens that are usually advocated. Instead it's mostly tubers, fruits, nuts and seeds that complement animal products.

I don't know if accounting is underrated, and I don't know if anyone has made accounting look awesome and exciting on its own. But conditional on finding scam-busting interesting, which I guess a lot of skeptics do, there are several books on auditing, how companies cook the books, how to detect unethical accounting practices through various statistical techniques, etc. In fact most of the techniques are subtle because they tend to bend the rules just a little bit more than auditing professionals prefer. The rules can already be legally bent significantly because of how many different ways there are to operate a business.

I suspect that accounting is sufficiently well-optimized that a rationalist take on it would be a waste of time. Most of the questionable decisions made in the field are due to overlaps with the madness-inducing world of tax law or the simple fact that the future is uncertain and assessing an object's value other than through a cash sale is expensive. But double-entry bookkeeping and assets-liabilities=equity aren't ever going to change.

So a priori, the very fact that two smart people, Robin and Eliezer, take opposite sides of an issue should make us reluctant to assign any strong probabilities... I think :P

Suppose experts' opinions were assigned by coin flip with a weighted coin, where the weight of the coin is the probability that makes best use of available information.

If we go to the first expert and they hold opinion Heads, what do we think the weighting of the coin is? 2/3. But then another expert comes along with opinion Tails, and so our probability goes back to 1/2. Last, we meet another expert with opinion Heads. But jaded as we are, we only update our probability to 3/5 - or 0.6 rather than 0.66666.

So, sure. :P Although this sort of model makes less sense once you start evaluating the rhyme and reason behind the experts' opinions rather than just taking them as opaque data points.

When any speedup of 10% takes a constant amount n of computations, you get, for the computational speed f, the approximating differential equation f' [increase in speed over time] = 0.1f [10% increase] / n/f [time needed for that increase].

This diverges in finite time. Where are you getting exponential growth from?

An AI as smart as all the world's AI scientists would make progress faster than them (not saying how much faster or if it would foom) because

A it would be perfectly coordinated. If every AI researcher knew what every other was thinking about AI ideas would be tested and examined faster. Communication would be not a problem, whiteboards unnecessary

B I'm not sure if you meant smartness as Intelligence or as optimization power but an AI that had the combined intelligence of all the AI researchers would have MORE optimization power because this intelligence would not be held back by emotions, sleep, or human biases (except those accidentally built-in to the AI)

C Faster iteration: All the AI scientists can't actually test and run a change in the code of an AI because there's both no code and they don't have the supercomputer. Once you have an AI running on a computer it can implement good ideas or test ideas for goodness far faster and more empirically.

D It can do actual empiricism on AI mind, as opposed to what AI researchers now can do.

See also what Randaly said. For similar reasons as Robin Hanson's Emu Hell, a digital computer-bound mind will just be better at a lot of tasks than ones running in meat.

As I previously pointed out, an AGI that was just as "smart" as all the world's AI researchers combined would make AI progress at the same slow rate they are making AI progress, with no explosion.

Human neurons run at ~100 hertz; computer run at a few gigahertz. An AGI would be millions of times faster by default.

Having that AI make itself 10% "smarter" (which would take a long time--it's only as smart as the world's AI researchers) would only result in self-improvement progress that was 10% faster.

This seems wrong to me- can you justify this?

Symptoms of vitamin C deficiency: Slow healing of injuries, small mouth sores that don't heal, malaise, lethargy.

Symptoms of vitamin D deficiency: Fragile bones, muscle weakness or twitching.

Symptoms of iron deficiency: Anemia, weakness, sometimes pica (a desire to eat ice cubes, clay, or some other non-food item). They test for this when you donate blood, so you don't have to involve a doctor to find out if you're deficient in iron.

Other deficiencies are much less common (at least I don't know anyone who's had them).

If you think that you might have an issue get blood testing. Afterwards you know if you lack some nutrient that the test investigates.

Short response: Check out the Cochrane Library on mental health. (Browse by Topics in the left-hand side, Expand, then click on Mental Health - as of just now there are 406 entries.)

Evaluating healthcare interventions is hard. The gold standard is a randomised controlled trial (RCT), published in a peer reviewed journal. But there are all sorts of problems with single trials, some of which you allude to here. It's a really great idea to do a systematic review of all published trials and combine the good ones to get the best evidence available.

Doing this well is really hard - you need specialist expertise in the specific area to correctly interpret the primary literature (the RCTs), and specialist skills in systematic reviewing (as with RCTs themselves, there are many obvious and subtle issues about how to do them well). And it takes ages.

Luckily, there's an international collaboration of people, called the Cochrane Collaboration who get together to do this sort of thing, and have been beavering away for 20 years.

Unless you have significant resources, you are unlikely to do better on any topic than the latest available Cochrane Review. And if you do have significant resources, you're likely to do well to start with it.

When a health issue pops up for me or someone I care about, I jump straight for the Cochrane review (and also any relevant guidelines and protocols, but that's a tier down the evidence quality pyramid), and it's like I'm getting a well thought-through briefing from the world's experts on what we currently know about what works and what doesn't.

I love it.

As a postscript, there is a whole field of healthcare informatics that looks at how to find good academic papers on a particular issue - I once ran a whole course on the topic (and related ones). The shortcut answer is 'use Cochrane'; the long spadework answer is 'search Medline'.

Good luck.

On the more personal question of what to do here to get the best treatment:

You care more about your condition than any medic, and so are motivated to spend more time on it. However, a general practitioner will have much more experience than you in diagnosing and treating mental health issues in the general population, and a specialist in mental health will know more about their area specifically than you can realistically hope to. (Unless you have a very rare condition, have the background chops to be a doctor, and put in an awful lot of work - which some people do.)

My guess is that you can almost certainly learn enough to be very helpful in decision-making about your condition. I wouldn't bother with the primary literature though - go for Cochrane Reviews and NICE Guidelines (here's the ones for mental health), and recent textbooks.

(NICE is a UK health body that basically takes the sort of information you get from Cochrane Reviews about what works and does some clever sums to work out what makes sense to do in yielding the highest number of QALYs given a fixed budget for healthcare.)

It's not always an easy ride - some clinicians have a morbid fear of patients who have 'consulted Dr Google' - and not without good reason.

But if you go along seeing yourself as an informed patient trying to engage in shared decision-making, most are happy about it in my experience. (Though my experience is limited to the UK.) If they're threatened by you mentioning this sort of evidence, I'd take it as a clear sign to change (if you possibly can).

It also puts you right on the sharp end of the distinction between what's true of a population and what's true for you.

If you haven't picked it up already, Feeling Good is a very good introduction to CBT. Also, according to its introduction, studies have shown that reading the book and doing the homework is surprisingly effective at treating depression on its own, in many cases. But maybe you already are up to speed on that stuff.

What's you goal? Do you want to help a specific person or do you want to gather general knowledge.

A clinical trial can tell you whether a treatment works for the average person. It however can't tell you whether it works for a specific person.

When it comes to helping a specific person with a serious issue the correct solution is often about trying multiple approaches. If you try 9 things and one works you win.

When it comes to therapist, it's important to have good chemistry with the therapist. If you don't fell comfortable with a certain therapist they probably won't be able to help you even if the practice a technique with has studies to back it up.

My personal readings on.. pretty much this exact subject .. is that there are a handful of effective drugs for specific - easily identifiable - problems and a larger number of drugs that mostly just calm you the heck down, and that misdiagnosis is a really major problem for both effective treatment and the development of treatments.

If you are bi-polar, then any doctor or shrink worth his salt is going to diagnose that correctly, and lithium will help. If you have a problem with a less clear cut set of symptoms? You are going to wind up with a diagnosis. Some diagnosis. Which may, or may not, be even remotely right, but now it is in your medical file, and all further symptoms are read through that filter. It is very rare that a diagnosis gets revised. This in turn makes developing treatments for mental issues a lot harder. When you are trying to develop a cure for a cancer or an infection, the group you test your drugs on will not in fact instead be suffering from fracking lupus. If you are testing a drug or other treatment for any given mental problem? Yhea, if you are really lucky, then half your test group has the actual problem you wish to treat.

For what goal? Longevity, weight loss, muscle gain, ethics?

Some low-hanging fruit:

Avoid artificially concentrated sugars. Don't drink soda or eat candy. Trans fats are almost certainly bad as well, (but are slowly being replaced in most foods). Don't drink too much alcohol. (Also, don't smoke)

The field of nutrition is a mess, but I think the above claims are genuinely noncontroversial, and can lead to larger improvements than any other general or exotic nutritional advice.

The cortisol drop I got from using soylent orange probably swamps the actual nutritional impact on my health.

This is probably not a great forum to take nutritional advice from - LW many have human rationality down better than most but the domains of food and methods of thinking are far apart. For what to do, I would either do the research or trust nutritionists that aren't selling anything. Alternatively, find healthy people or populations and ask them what they do.

1) Greens with good nutrient contents, such as kale, spinach, asparagus, or the delicious butter lettuce (but not iceberg lettuce, yuck).
2) Sulfur-containing vegetables such as onion, broccoli and cabbage (the Proper recipe for cabbage is to slice it into thin strips and saute it in sesame oil - try it).
3) Variety is good. Eat bell peppers! And some carrots! Have you ever in your life tasted fennel? How many different colors of "green" beans to they sell at your local market?

Per the vegetables question: what should I eat?

• Large amounts of vegetables. In particular the kind that is more like broccoli and less like potato in terms of your best estimate of macro-nutrient content.
• Minimal amounts of carbohydrate that are not in the aforementioned vegetable form. Avoid grains, sugar and probably artificial sweeteners too. Note that many kinds of fruit count as 'sugar source' and so are far less healthy than I was told in school. Some fruits like berries tend to be lower on the sugar side so are worth looking in to.
• Plenty of protein and fat. Saturated fat is basically ok (again, in contrast to what I was taught in school). Do be sure to include enough Omega-3 either via fish or supplementation. Avoid trans-fats (like from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) like the plague. This means the kind of fat typically found in snack foods.
• Beware soy, gluten and dairy. Response to these foods varies greatly among individuals and various levels of allergy or intolerance are possible, including at a level not dramatic enough to be noticed. Response to these substances can be tested empirically either through self experiment or medical tests. In the case of soy it is usually worth avoiding regardless of any intolerance since it messes with hormone levels.
• When changing your diet remember to eat enough food. When changing from a diet high in energy dense carbohydrate sources (like bread) to a healthier diet a common mistake is to underestimate how much of the new food is required to supply the same amount of energy. Starvation makes compliance with new dietary practices unlikely.

From this post I got the idea of doing the same, and I created a menu of easy to prepare food that I can eat every day, and that meets all the FDA requirements (except for potassium; I don't think it's possible to get that much from natural sources) and that still lets me lose weight. So far it seems to be working; eating like that most days, I am (slowly) losing weight, and I feel fine.

What vegetables should you eat?

Dark green ones seem to have more nutritional content in general, but yellow, orange, & red vegetables are typically good sources of Vitamin A & some other pigment-like compounds that might not be in large amounts in the green ones.

Can you say more about what you mean by "possible" here?

Or you could just take the usual option of pirating it: it's on Libgen.info (no surprise there), and it's even available through Google - the first two hits for "good and real" filetype:pdf are the book (as is the fifth hit for just "good and real"!).

As books go, you could not ask for getting it to be any easier.

Probably an obvious point: epistemically that's an error, but politically it's probably an indispensable tactic. Say you do an honest and perfectly reliable utilitarian analysis, and find that chimpanzees really should not be used in research; the real substantial medical advances are not worth their suffering. But frustratingly the powers that be don't care about chimps as much as they should. Your only hope is to convince them that chimp-using research is nearly useless to humans, so that even their undersized compassion for chimps will convince them to shut the research down.

I have a kind of romantic suspicion that nearly all politically active people are like this, that if you could somehow get them alone and sit them down and ask them what they really think, they'd go, "Yes, congratulations Einstein, you figured it out. Of course if we succeed then it's likely the lives of [some group] will get a lot worse, but, well, omelets and eggs." And then they swear you in and give you a membership card, because if you've gotten this far, then you can also see that they're justified.

I'd call it scope insensitivity, and if I was feeling snippy, I'd call it motivated scope insensitivity.

See also "sacred values", though I'm not sure that they're a bias.

Halo effect?

lukeprog has a post that touches on this.

Would the light lose energy as it traveled upward (Does differently-shaped space redshift it)

Yes. You do lose energy moving light uphill, even if you have perfect emitters and collectors.

Is the answer the same if instead of gravity you used another force? (Say Earth was positively charged, and you converted negatively charged mass to energy, and back)

I don't think you can do that. Photons have no electric charge.

Say Earth was positively charged, and you converted negatively charged mass to energy, and back

Electric charge is conserved, so you can't convert only negatively charged matter to energy. You'd need some positively charged matter as well (ideally the corresponding antimatter).

My guess is that you'd lose some of the energy as heat every time you tried to convert it into mass.

No to all of these. The grand claims of that article are overblown hype (as is so often the case with New Scientist), and credit Chaitin with too much, to the exclusion of other mathematicians before him.

Anyone interested in Chaitin's work could read his own technical book "Algorithmic Information Theory", but might also read the criticism of him in Torkel Franzén's "Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to its Use and Abuse" (book, not online, but reviewed here). The business in the original article of the hierarchy of Omegas is nothing more than the already well-known concept of degrees of unsolvability, which dates back to 1944.

Short answer to your questions: No. They aren't related.

Pedantic answer to your questions: Yes.

If you knew the value of Chaitin's Omega you could calculate the incalculable. You would know the results of computations that should take an infinite amount of time to calculate. You could summon the proofs of any conjecture. You could simulate AIXI. You would have the knowledge of a demigod. Being a demigod has strong bearing on the subjects you bring up, and many others.

Chaitin's Omega and LW's Omega share the same name (I suspect) because they both refer to something superhuman. They are different sort of superhumans, however.

Löb's theorem and Chaitin's constant are in the same family of weirdness, so I think it is likely relevant, but not for a 'new' reason, if that makes sense.

I can't comment on your question, but I have to say that that article is exceptional in managing to tell math research as an engaging story.

Bears

Google to the rescue.

TL;DR: something hotter than the source will radiate back more than it absorbs.

Which specific arrangement do you have in mind, and why would it break thermodynamics?

The thermodynamics police. (e.g. Detective Lieutenant Noether)

This is impossible to answer unless you give more information about your proposed set-up. At any rate, if you have any closed arrangement of heated objects, the radiation will always cause the objects to reach thermal equilibrium (same temperature) eventually. There is no way around this.

Are you describing an idea for an energy trap-type thing? It sounds like it would require perfect reflectors, which I don't think actually exist. Most perpetual motion ideas tend to break because reality does not consist of spherical cows, or because energy is radiated out of the system and can't be recaptured, is lost due to friction, etc.

(Apologies if I've completely misunderstood what you're proposing.)

We don't need clever arrangements of reflectors for perpetual motion machines. Things like souls, angels, demons, disembodied minds, etc. are all perpetual motion machines. So if they actually exist, all we would have to do is capture them and harness them for unlimited energy, like Shang Tsungs soulnado to solve our energy problems.

Universal Product Code.

International Article Numbers).

I don't know how widely they're used, and they're generally not as consumer-visible as ISBNs for books. The iPad I recently bought has a UPC barcode on the box, but not on the machine itself, and I've never had occasion to use a UPC or EAN to look something up.

No. You should follow an established curriculum because the textbooks are written that way, such as where mathematical techniques are introduced.

Memorizing enables fast recall. If you have to know it, you'll have to memorize it even if you can derive it. And there is very little to memorize in physics. You have to know that metals are ductile, but that's not a lot of information; you're not going to check it by going back to quantum mechanics. In principle, you could use QM to derive a quantitative version, but it's computationally intractable.

In the direct relation between quantum and classical mechanics, QM is simply more complicated: you generally start with the classical laws and modify them, so they are a prerequisite. I think that there is a recent QM textbook by quantum computing researchers that get to quantum weirdness with very few prerequisites. This sounds like a good place to start, but if you want to cover the whole thing, you'll need classical mechanics.

You don't get to memorize less this way. You learn from simpler to harder, not from smaller to larger. If you already know all the relevant math (linear algebra, complex analysis, partial differential equations), it might be interesting to start from, say, QM and then derive CM from it. But wait, shouldn't you start even smaller, with QFT, or at least with the Standard Model of Particle Physics, then proceed to peel off QCD and QED, then extract a Hilbert space from the Fock space and do QM, then construct CM and E&M... But that's not enough, what about gravity? Better learn GR, then derive SR from it, and Newtonian gravity as well.

I suppose it's not impossible, but the amount of math you would have to learn before you finally derive that F=ma is rather significant. In some parallel world, where every physicist learns a lot of math first, it might even make sense. But if you want to get some useful results early, and not spend 4 years learning math before you even think about physics, then you should probably start with classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics.

What happens if you eschew the use of "dimension" altogether and simply talk about world histories, or chains of events?

Block universe perhaps?

I explicitly think of the goals of driving as 1) don't die, 2) get to destination. I do this because it helps me remember not to do dangerous things, and to not feel as bad about making wrong turns (because I feel like I'm doing badly at 2 but well at 1, rather than just plain driving badly). I don't visualize what dying in a car accident would be like or anything like that, though.

I think seriously about death of humans kind of often lately, but that's probably because of some circumstantial stuff lately. During more normal times, I think I don't think about death of real people very often, but do think about death in fiction sometimes.

(I also get the sense that I'm less horrified by death than is normal in this community.)

Quite often, in the conquerer's mind. Three shall be the sons of Peverell...

Daily, as it is part of standard Stoic practice (specifically, the technique of negative visualization, which I employ during before-sleep meditation).

Many many times per day in the abstract sense of living things that stop since I am surrounded by them EVERYWHERE and often kill them myself.

Still multiple times per day, in the context of understanding that my remaining time is limited and unpredictable and I need to make good use of it.

Every two or three days in the context of "existing is WEIRD, and soon enough I will no longer exist just like 25 years ago."

It doesn't distress me, except when dealing with immediate effects of the deaths of people or other organisms that are dear to me, or could be easily prevented from being worse than they are.

At least once every day, as a motivational tool. I even created a spreadsheet that tells me how many days are left for me to live, and what percentage of life is already behind me (based on the projection from a bunch of actuarial tables).

Not very often. Usually less than twice per week. [happens to notice mare-of-night's comment] Oh, yeah, sure; except when driving.

I think more often about what happens before legal death.

I used to dream I died about twice or three times a week, for years. But that was more than a decade ago.

I do think about how unbelievable it is that I'm still the only freaking sane monkey out of 190 million around me who signed up for cryonics.

Not often. Only when I hear about someone dying or someone's life being in danger, or if I'm arguing against someone with a pro-death view.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ko/a_case_study_of_motivated_continuation/

It seems to be about flinching away from thoughts.

If you don't get an answer here, I suggest trying again in the open thread-- this thread is old enough that there probably aren't many people following it.

Here's Kiplinger's top ten towns for cheapskates, though I'm not sure how useful this is for you (I'm on disability and living in one of those towns. I believe Saint Louis was one of them as well, and I think we have some LWers from thereabouts.).

If transportation is an issue, though, you might try finding a way to optimize for a bigger city where public transit is actually a thing. It depends on your abilities and the amount of your fixed income.

On further thought, since I'm in a low-density area, rather than looking for a place first it might be better to first improve my local mobility by getting a bicycle. Then I could see what possibilities it opens up, and either look for housing next or upgrade to a moped, motorcycle or car. I still don't really know where to start, though.

Edit: I tried looking for relevant ebooks on Amazon. I've found three, and from the reviews, none of them have what I'm looking for; not The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cycling (1999), Bicycling Magazine's New Cyclist Handbook (2005) or The Big Book of Bicycling (2010).

Edit 2: Every Woman's Guide to Cycling seems to have decent reviews; maybe I'll try it.

You figure out what's valuable to you (climate, nature, demographics, culture, etc.) and then filter places to live until you get a short list.

cold water

Why cold water? Typically hot works better.

(cold is recommended for fresh blood because it washes it away without triggering chemical changes that cause it to stain (AFAIK))

Sometimes a stain might be set and you won't be able to get rid of it, but I love Carbona Stain Devils. They make different formulas for different types of stain -- one for blood and dairy stains, one for ink and crayon stains, and so on.

notice and think to yourself "I am sad" or "I just got annoyed because someone corrected me even though they were right" when these things happen

I find it hard to give a useful answer as my comparison is biased by suffering serious depression/anxiety for the last few years. I am happier/less anxious than I have been in the ast due to some combination of medication, therapy and lifestyle changes, but I am still significantly below where I visualise I should be.

You might also be interested in some of the studies described by Daniel Kahneman in thinking fast and thinking slow on how people assess their life satisfaction when framed in certain ways, and the difference between experiencing and remembering self.

I'm usually quite happy, but last years was swamp by unhappiness due to multiple destructive earthquakes hitting my town.

If you read this, please respond, to avoid bias as much as possible.

I don't like this sort of request. You're forcing obligations on anyone who reads this thread. You can do better in this respect if you rot13 the question or make it an external link. Even with that I'm uncertain about this.

Anyways, I can't think of three vegans for whom I can usefully comment on their reasons.

The 'logic of the larder' would sway literally no one I know, not just vegans. It's usually a question of not contributing to factory farming, not some abstract thing about suffering in general, and in some cases a diet that worked after health issues and they kept to it.

One person from a group of four people I know who eat vegan sees the need for ending natural suffering in nature; the other do not regard "natural" occuring suffering a problem. So, no.

No. But that's hardly unique to vegans; if you pull five random people off the street and find something each of them objects to, chances are they'll be objecting for confused emotional reasons.

I do know one person who's allergic to dairy products and finds that meat upsets her stomach, and uses "vegan" as shorthand, but that's probably not what you're going for.

I know one vegetarian (my sister) and I believe she does know her objection. When we were young (10-11) she stopped eating meat after visiting a farm. As far as I know, she's never eaten meat since then. She says she just had the insight that animals were "real" and didn't want to eat them anymore.

...really know what their True Rejection ... is?

I don't drink Bud Light. Can I really know what my True Rejection of Bud Light is? Probably not. Woe me!

Good questions. I have put them to one vegetarian I know. The reason this person stopped eating meat is that she is now "weirded out" by the thought of eating an animal, even though she still likes the taste and misses it. Her replies to all your counterfactuals would be "no" because it's her personal preference, not a quest for animal rights or against animal suffering, so her logic is self-consistent.

Yes.

Also,

I have yet to meet a handful of vegans who really can describe what would have to be true of the world for them to eat meat and consider that others eating meat is ok.

I don't think I know any vegans whose rejection isn't based on personal preference who consider meat consumption okay, exactly, but I think they weight their reasons for not eating meat lower than their reasons for not making a big deal about it.

The only relevant personal anecdote I have is an ex-vegan friend who started eating meat when she realized that a medicine she used was animal-sourced, that she wasn't going to stop taking it(it wasn't life-saving, but it was useful), and that to avoid eating meat at that point would be grossly hypocritical.

Also, a pundit I'm fond of has commented to some extent on this topic: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2007/12/why-i-eat-meat/2378/ and http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/12/the-end-of-an-era/4434/ encompass it pretty well.

Do you believe that the first vegan/vegetarian you can think of really know what their True Rejection of animal eating is?

I don't believe in the concept of "True Rejections" in the sense you are advocating it here.

Most vegan I know don't follow that paradigm because of a cognitive moral argument but because of something they would call compassion for animals. Compassion happens to be an emotion and no logical argument.

Many vegans I know also think that being a vegan is healthier and like the feeling that the change to that diet brought them.

The first one I can think of definitely knows her reasoning: she doesn't like the taste of meat (though she is more of a vegetarian). For her to eat meat, it basically has to be overly processed to the point where it really doesn't taste like meat anymore (e.g. she will eat hot dogs and pepperoni occasionally).

For the 'true' vegans I know, I'm pretty sure they don't know what their reasoning is, and the only thing that would need to change for them to consider eating meat OK would be for it to stop being trendy for them to be vegan. At least, they've never been able to clearly articulate a position to me.

I've never met a vegan AFAICR, let alone three.

Seconding Nornagest's answer, insofar as I can think of three vegans. Aren't the questions of who the three are and why they're the first three to come to mind relevant to what you want to learn?

I know no vegans. Sorry.

Being further along the psychopathy spectrum isn't all sunshine and daisies and rationality.

Instrumental learning is also interesting. “Instrumental learning involves learning to commit specific behavioral responses in order to gain reward or avoid punishment.” [ibid, pg 51]. Psychopaths have issues with specific forms of this, particularly passive avoidance and response reversal. In passive avoidance, the subject must learn to avoid responding to thing that will give them punishments, while response reversal is when the subject must stop responding to a stimulus that was once a reward but now punishes. The impairment of the first has been repeatedly demonstrated, while Blair uses the example of a card game developed by Joe Newman to demonstrate the second. In that game, participants must decide whether to play a card or not. At first, playing is always rewarding, but as the game goes on the probability of playing being rewarding decreases, and eventually it will be primarily punishing. While most non-psychopaths do learn to stop playing once punishment becomes too likely, psychopaths do not, to the point of losing all of their points.

http://verbosestoic.wordpress.com/fearlessly-amoral-psychopaths-autistics-and-learning-with-emotion/

Basically, I fear you are committing a sort of "straw-spock argument" about rationality, where you assume in the absence of evidence that someone with more muted empathy must be pursuing their goals more rationally.

The closest thing that we have in real life to the 'rational agent' concept in game theory and artificial intelligence are psychopaths. Taking this idea further, it's easy to see why a rational superintelligence would become a UFAI - it is a psychopath.

This doesn't quite seem right and here is why; my utility function considers others people's utility function, therefore by acting rationally and maximizing my utility function leaves room for empathy of others. You only get psychopathy if the utility function of the rational agent, is psychopathic, most people's utility functions are not.

It's not just lack of empathy that makes psychopaths act as they do, but also what looks to me like a particularly strong drive for domination. They simply get more emotional rewards out of exerting power over other people, in ways that range from winning socially acceptable status contests to torturing and butchering other humans. Without this drive for domination, they wouldn't be half as dangerous.

Just pointing out that it's the presence rather than the absence of a feature that causes one to be actively evil, not just selfish and calculating. Merely self-interested rational agents would stop at callously pursuing whatever their, er, utility function tells them to. They wouldn't go that extra mile to satisfy a purely emotional need. To exhibit psychopathic behavior -- to play mind games with people, to break laws and to engage in power contests even when you don't have anything rational to gain, just for the thrill of it -- well, you need to be able to feel the thrill of it. An extra feature.

As for programming emotion into an AI, I wouldn't know about that. I have the vague intuition that emotions are a bit of a kludge-y solution to morality; our emotional system is mildly good some of the time, but not great and not all of the time, at getting morality right. A different emotional system, designed from scratch and checked for coherence, might perform better, though I don't have the qualifications needed to express an opinion one way or the other.

The closest thing that we have in real life to the 'rational agent' concept in game theory and artificial intelligence are psychopaths.

Maybe corporations, nation-states, and other institutional actors come even closer? It sure would be nice to be able to add some "artificial empathy" to Nestlé et al.

Is it too meta to say "asking questions like this in a place where they're likely to be answered correctly"?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/

Speaking about suicide methods in a detailed fact-based way would be a classic example. There's evidence that it increases the number of suicides that happen. There are media guides for journalists who argue against that practice.

Stupid question, is this even allowed on LW? I remember reading somewhere that stuff like this have been purged before.

My Little Pony apparently. Though the sanity destruction seems to be for a very specific subset of the populace.

The idea that some ideas are far too dangerous to be spoken about is a pretty dangerous one

.

Well, there's the AI box experiment. Those transcripts could be kept hidden because private, personal things were spoken of, but then people who have done the experiment could tell us that that was the reason for secrecy. Eliazer seems to believe that humanity will be more likely to create and be harmed by a boxed AI if the transcripts are revealed.

This is kind of a hard question to answer without crossing the lines that should not be crossed, though. You can really only get an answer about ideas that shouldn't be spoken of only under certain conditions, or ones that can be referred to in a more general sense (like the AI box).

Gehgu naq iveghr ner trahvaryl ba gur fvqr bs cbyvgvpny pbeerpgarff.

Gur havirefr ybirf lbh naq jnagf lbh gb orpbzr n tbbq crefba ntnva.

Gurer vf n cbvag gb nyy guvf fhssrevat.