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> A question I have here is, why not try for low calories per litre instead of (or as well as) low calories per gram?
I think calories per gram is usually what people study due to some combination of:
- this is the way somebody chose to measure "energy density" early on and it stuck for whatever reasons things stick
- in cooking and/or conducting experiments, mass is pretty much always easier to measure than volume (even with liquids, in my opinion...)
- we see this metric work pretty well -- better than basically any other known single factor, is my impression -- to predict satiety response, ad libitum caloric itake, diet adherence, and long-term weight changes in various experiments
I do know of a single-meal study that looked at how volumetric energy density (comparing potato chips vs. popcorn, which have similar energy per mass) predicted ad libitum caloric intake, and found that it does seem to independently matter. I don't know of any other similar studies, though I won't claim to be up to date on the literature.
>Plus at some point things leave the stomach and I don't know what triggers that.
"gastric emptying" is the key term used in studies of this question (I haven't really studied this myself)
>How does this whole thing work with fluids? Presumably they leave your stomach quite fast, so per-calorie they should contribute less to satiety than solids?
Right, that's the usual finding. Drinking lots of water before or with meals does seem to promote satiety and lower ad libitum caloric intake, so water itself certainly counts for something, but liquids are generally nowhere near as filling per mass as solid foods, which agrees with the conventional wisdom around not drinking calories.
Reported numbers vary quite a bit (perhaps in part because the physical activity intensity of training or warfighting also varies), but you might be interested to know that soldiers in training or active duty might hit something like 4000-5000 kcal/day in energy expenditure, maybe thousands more for outlier people and/or circumstances.
A PSA for those who might like to have less body fat: a number of observational and experimental studies find that the energy density of your diet (as in, calories per gram) is a very, very good predictor of ad libitum caloric intake. I doubt that an increase in the caloric density of our diets fully explains the obesity epidemic -- there's probably something to the "hyperpalatability" idea (though hyperpalatable foods are almost always very energy dense too), habitual nicotine and THC intake trends probably matter, I'd buy that some contaminants even if not lithium are causing people to be hungrier or less physically active, etc etc -- but I find it implausible it's not an important one, and even better, it's one that you can calculate very easily for most of what you eat and then control with less effort than you'd have to expend for almost any other type of "diet".
This is consistent with e.g. the potato diet being anecdotally weirdly effective at causing weight loss (~1 cal/gram which is pretty low), and also consistent with most of the generic conventional wisdom around diet like "eat more fruits and veggies and lean meats and less dessert and fast food", and IMO makes lots of intuitive sense -- satiety is complicated, but having a lot of stuff in your stomach is clearly pretty important, so, just put a lot of stuff in your stomach that doesn't actually have many calories, lol.
I strongly disagree with this interpretation of those overfeeding studies. From what I can tell (though I couldn't access every study SMTM cites), "overfeeding" is usually defined relative to the output of one of the typical BMR/TDEE estimation formulas given a person's parameters, not based on actual measurement of a subject's TDEE. Those formulas are fine for a baseline guess, but even the most accurate ones are going to be substantially off in either direction for a fair number of people! Some of the difference is unaccounted-for NEAT, some of it is differences in absorption efficiency, some of it is probably other factors we don't understand yet. Given the known reality of interpersonal variation in what your actual calories in and out are relative to their naive estimates, some subjects not gaining weight while "overfeeding" is exactly what you'd expect to see.
A fun fact: my estimated "effective TDEE" is (averaged over months) pretty consistently around 3300 cal/day for the past 18 months -- rarely more than +/- 100 cal/day off in either direction -- whereas the best formula I could find (using my body fat %, as actually-measured by a DEXA scan) says it should be something more like 2600-2800 cal/day. This is based on weighing my body daily and recording the caloric intake from actually-everything I eat, almost always weighing food when necessary rather than coming up with estimates.
Related to this, I assume? (Don't click that until after you take the survey.)
For a brief period of time, maybe a month or two ago, the favicon for the site was "< X" (less than, then a red X). I liked it more than any variant of "LW" I've seen so far, but whoever actually decides must not have, and unfortunately it wasn't around long enough that many people who you'd hope would get it would get it.
I'd be the first to buy three LW shirts and a bumper sticker if they were ever made.
Shouldn't you ask when the respondent thinks the Singularity will occur before mentioning the year 2100, to avoid anchoring?
I don't think it's accurate to say LW focuses on atheism. Consider: this is the only post whose title involves atheism or any religion on the first page of the discussion section (40 posts, for me).
I predict that the lesson behind this exchange will turn out to be "Don't argue with people who think consciousness is fundamental".
Going off this post of his, it sounds like people who take a daily multivitamin should have dramatically lower morbidity for at least some diseases that aren't already typically associated with nutrient deficiency. Studies on that subject already exist, and I can predict what they'll have to say, though I can't look for them right now.
For "1 is useless because not-3", Cox's theorem might be persuasive.
Are these works of psychology and neuroscience really illustrating that human emotion governs decision making?
Yes, they are. It sounds to me like your friend is exactly right. The claim that humans mostly use their subconscious minds in decision-making isn't controversial.
Could you clarify what you mean by "the Bayesian point of view"? What does your conception of those words in that order have to say about human cognition?
Long ago, I used to worry about situations where I do awkward things (and was pretty awkward), but then I remembered everybody else is too busy worrying about themselves looking awkward to really care about my awkwardness. I stopped being strongly awkward after that, and of course I'm much happier--it was probably the one "turning point" in my life where I went from anxious/unhappy to calm/happy. (It was at about the age of 12, IIRC)
I can't figure out which post you've recently made that's relevant to this. Could you link it?
Probably not. The methods used to get the desired phenotype are obviously not something that was happening before humans, but the desired phenotypes are pretty much always analogous to something that could have happened without human intervention (resistance to some environmental condition, different nutritional content, etc.), but didn't because they don't improve fitness in nature. Genetic engineering is pretty damn impressive, but it's not magic--drought resistance and increased vitamin A content and those sorts of things have an opportunity cost to the plant (not spending energy on things that would increase the plant's chances of reproduction in nature), meaning they're probably going to be less fit than their wild counterpart without human intervention, so those genes are very unlikely to be expressed more in nature. And, if it is something that improves fitness in nature, it was most likely going to happen sooner or later anyway. (That could still be bad, but I'll wait until I hear specifics before I worry about it.)
One good reason to fear GMOs is that they could promote monoculture to some extent (compared to not using GMOs but still using modern industrial farming), which introduces a big risk of famines, though monoculture was already pretty much the norm before GMOs came around so focusing on GMOs probably isn't a good way to reduce the risks associated with monoculture. Or, at least as far as I know, though I admit I haven't studied this very much. That's my current impression, and I don't predict I'll turn out to be wrong.
What are some examples of plausible (not necessarily likely or expected) experiences that would lower your degree of belief in your religion?
I have a pretty poor work ethic for boring things--college is fun and I like doing most of the work, but I couldn't bear adding and subtracting meaningless numbers for hours. That may or may not be typical of college students, but college probably signals something more like (general work ethic) x (interest + talent in specific field), while this would signal (general work ethic) x (tolerance for repetitive, boring tasks), which would have its own uses but doesn't necessarily apply to many jobs that usually require degrees.
Less funny; it kills the joke. Lever is pronounced like "never" in American English. Better late than never, etc.
There was a fair amount of stuff in there that I "knew" I wanted to read (some LW sequences stuff among them). I've found a bit more success by putting things I actually want to read in my top-level bookmarks, right at the front, because then it causes clutter which I want to reduce (by reading and removing them). The difference may just be in that I'm less likely to bookmark something with this system in the first place, but it feels like it works.
This sounds exactly like Read It Later. I don't know what the differences are between the two, but it's an alternative if you're looking for something like this. Anyway, my experience with this sort of thing is that I never feel like reading all the momentarily-interesting things I discover when I come back to them later. I think that by putting it off, you place reading about an interesting idea into the "this is something you want to put off for later" mind category and it never gets read, or at least that's what it felt like in my experience.
Not quite. I'm saying that the purpose of disagreeing and trying to convince people of things, from an evolutionary sense, is usually to signal to others (or yourself) that you are wise. It's dressing like a winner: smart people actually do sometimes disagree with others because they have some wise, compelling reason to believe otherwise, so openly and aggressively disagreeing is an easy way to signal "I'm smart!". Smart people themselves often get caught up in this (If you've read HP:MoR, Dumbledore represents what I'm saying pretty well).
My point wasn't to say that, if you argue from your own authority instead of facts, you'll be more successful (even if a dogmatically religious person may be more receptive to that). My point was that the actual purpose of aggressively trying to convince someone they're wrong isn't to convince them they're wrong, but instead to try to convince everyone else involved that you're wise, even if you aren't aware of your underlying motives. Think of it this way: how often does trying to convince a typical person that they're wrong, using facts and reasoning and observations, actually work? Basically never, in my experience, unless you're working with a reasonably rational person who's mutually perceived as a part of your group.
Basically, yeah. Intelligence, maturity, realism, various things you'd associate with wisdom.
How do I get my points across to a theist? Well, I don't. You'll never change anyone's mind by "convincing" them unless they're already a very good rationalist, and even then, it's not really guaranteed to work.
"Convincing" is more often about signaling, whether to yourself or people besides the one you're trying to convince. If your goal is to change someone's mind, try to make them think they already agree with you. I'm not aware of an effective way to do this for theists or "spiritual" people or new-agers or anyone else in that category.
I know 1024 slices of Wonder bread isn't 1024 times as useful to a regular hungry person as one slice of Wonder bread. The first slice is the one which the util is defined as, then all the additional utils would be like "something else" that gives exactly as much enjoyment, or just that exact amount of enjoyment but 1023 more times.
Well, imagine if a util were like ten years of constant joy. In that case, I'd rather have n = 1. Similarly, if a util is like finding a penny, I really don't care what n is, but I may as well go with a pretty large one so that if I do "win", I actually notice it. I chose n = 10 because a 10% chance for 1024 slices of Wonder bread on an empty stomach sounds much better than a sure shot for one slice of Wonder bread when I'm hungry (I'd barely even notice that), and also much better than a tiny chance for some ridiculously high number of utilons (I almost certainly won't be able to enjoy it). n = 9 and n = 11 would also be okay choices; I didn't arrive at 10 analytically.
Depends on what a util is. The probability of an event is a pretty well-defined concept, but what a util means to me is free-floating without something to compare it to. If one util is a slice of Wonder bread on an empty stomach for a well-nourished person, then let's go with n = 10.
Your use of "pointlessness" makes me think of something. Saying that someone's life has a point (purpose) usually means they have some long-term goal that they work toward, which implies thinking about future possibilities and developing abstractions like "purpose". Not to say that the animals most people eat can't think into the future, but if they do live "in the moment" to a much greater extent than humans, doesn't that greatly reduce the cruelty argument? I think a sufficiently unintelligent human would be happy to sit and eat all day (as some are wont to do already, of their own volition), to say nothing of what a chicken might like. I'm not implying they're in paradise, but if a chicken's daily list of desires is "eat stand sit eat groom stand eat sit stand sleep", it doesn't sound like they'd even be experiencing a "dull, aching pointlessness", because that is precisely what they want and would be doing otherwise.
I suppose my question is, do cows, chickens, pigs, etc. have long-term notions of contentment like humans do?
A lot of us probably just call it akrasia and shrug (me included). I don't know any convincing reason for eating meat that doesn't make one immoral by usual modern standards.
I have to wonder what a spammer's motivation is in spamming here. Isn't LW's usual readership exactly the people who are unlikely to think "Oh, this looks legitimate, I should buy a Silver Pandora Necklace!"?
Not ironically, there are ancient posts from Elizier and Robin concerning exactly this: "I Don't Know." and "You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion"
I think it's an important skill in general to be able to estimate things, though I might just think that because I got a 9/10 on that test.
Good estimation may not always be useful in the real world if you're giving someone else an estimate on how long something will take (wide estimates are perceived as bad estimates by most, as many of the comments on that blog show intentionally or unintentionally), but it is fun, and I've seen it be personally useful before.
I interpreted it as "the length of the coastline as represented on a high-detail world map", which got me a good estimate.
Kegels may help. Kegels might help everything, really.
Websites about atheism are a different group of people than websites about rationality. There's overlap, to be sure, but the people who are "passionate" about being irreligious don't tend to gravitate here; my view of a typical LWer is that they may go through a phase of thinking lack of religion is worth spending a lot of time discussing, but then they move past it because it's not a very difficult question. LWers talk about their atheism, but usually only when provoked.
Would they really? I'm not a parent, but I at least like to think I'd spend extra money teaching my kids useful things that are also status signals, like economics or calculus or writing (real writing, not "don't split infinitives"). Basically anything you could easily get tutoring for is a better use of time and money than grammar education.
The traditional response to this on the FES website is that airplanes aren't actually flying from one side of the disk to the other. They might go around the periphery to some extent, but outside the disk is probably either a lot of nothing or a very, very large, cold field of ice. So, that would make a trip from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn take much, much longer than a spherical-ish Earth would predict.
That's why I assign such a low probability to this--that, and the motion of the stars in the Northern and Southern hemispheres working exactly the way they would if the Earth were approximately spherical. If this disk Earth were the case, the stars in the Southern hemisphere would be rotating in the same direction as the stars in the Northern hemisphere, just with a wider radius of rotation, and there would be no axis that the stars rotate about near the south pole; and though I haven't personally observed this effect, I'm pretty confident that astronomers would have noticed this. (This whole objection got explained away by different "star clouds" in different hemispheres.)
Well, that and the conspiracy.
My initial probability given was probably too low.
I'm not generally one to get over-excited about peoples' bad reasons for being creationists, but the leap from "Evolution due to natural selection doesn't provide obvious explanations for every single thing that every living thing ever does or has" to "The King James Version of the Bible as generally remembered and interpreted by Protestants is exactly right" is always staggering when I can tease it out of people explicitly.
As far as non-kinesthetic responses to awful arguments go, I guess I would call it a general feeling of discomfort. Like, "Someone's brain really just output that series of words, and I'm very upset to live in a universe where that's the case." Sort of like the discomfort of watching someone you can't help who's in a bad situation.
For many ambitious people, I'd guess that their ambition isn't because they want to achieve some other goals, but because they actually enjoy "being ambitious"--they want to do everything very well because they feel good about being the best or near the best. Not to label myself "ambitious" and lump myself in with people who work far harder, but as an example, I'm a university student studying engineering. I could have coasted through my various math classes getting Bs and stopped right at the minimum requirements to graduate, but I didn't. Maybe to a short-sighted economist I'm being irrational, because either way I'll graduate with the same degree and employers will see me basically the same and I probably won't seriously increase my future income/status with my extra math knowledge, but I just like being good at math. The reason for that desire is probably complicated, but it's a real reason.
Doesn't the anthropic principle already deal with the FTA? Not that it's wrong to have more than one way to go about an argument, but in my experience, every somewhat-reasonable religious person (i.e. anyone you might be able to get through to) who has the anthropic principle explained to them says "Hmm, I suppose you're right, that's not a very good way to prove the existence of the Protestant Christian God exactly as presented in the King James Version of the Bible".
You could also say that humans have utility functions, but they can change quickly over time because of trivial things. Which, I admit, would be near-indistinguishable from not having utility functions at all (in the long-term), but saying that you have a utility function and a set of preferences at one instant in time seems true enough to allow for decision theory analysis.
In terms of what's written down on paper, I don't think it was mentioned at all, which implies legality. But, practically speaking, are governments really ever okay with part of their territory claiming they don't have to pay taxes anymore? I suspect people in the southern states were aware of the answer.
My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.
This is curious.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the dominant view nowadays that human's special kind of consciousness is largely a result of language, because we're able to formalize (and build on) notions and have an internal dialogue and all those other useful things? Does anyone else think this guy's experiences could at least point away from language as the root of sapience? Or am I just looking too much into that sentence?
Agreed. If we could define a friendly AI now, then by point 3 we would also already be able to define a perfectly functional and just state (even if putting it into practice hadn't happened yet).
The linked article, second image. Though, I don't know the credibility of the study it was based on.
and I'm exposed to it constantly
Have you noticed which specific situations make you think about Christianity and cause the discomfort? Is it any reference to the religion, or something more specific, like during discussions of morality?
~55% of natural science college professors believe in some kind of ESP, as do ~35% of psychology college professors.
I can't really form a coherent response to that.
Why not just enforce keeping meetup posts in the discussion area? I've always imagined that "casual" LW readers, who are pretty unlikely to go to a meetup and probably don't even have an account here, tend to only read the front page, while people who actually post and have LW occupy a decent amount of their day are pretty likely to read the discussions too, and also are the kind of people who would care about a meetup. This does make it so that casual readers are less likely to be transformed into LW junkies, but I'm curious if the arrow of causality actually ever points that way in practice (attend meetup -> start participating in discussion area).
Are there any specific examples of people only casually reading LW, then attending a meetup, then starting to participate much more? Or is everyone who cares about meetups already a regular participant in discussions?
What do you think a meaningful probability, if one can be assigned, would be for the first strong AI to exhibit both of those traits? (Not trying to "grill" you; I can't even imagine a good order of magnitude to put on that probability)
Do you believe that there's truly no chance a powerful AI wouldn't immediately dominate human society? Or restated: will a strong AI, if created, necessarily be unfriendly and also able to take control of human society (likely meaning exponentially self-improving)?
I agree, at least with the first and last examples of more-likely. 1% is probably too high.
How about "Just the barest inkling above not immediately dismissed" instead of a specific number.