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I think binary examples are deceptive in the reversed stupidity is not intelligence sense. Thinking through things from first principles is most important in areas that are new or rapidly changing where there are fewer references classes and experts to talk to. It's also helpful for areas where the consensus view is optimized for someone very unlike you.
If some some pre-modern hominids ate high animal diets, and some populations of humans did, and that continued through history, I wouldn't call that relatively recent. I'm not the same person making the claim that there is overwhelming evidence that saturated fats can't possibly be bad for you. I'm making a much more restricted claim.
I would have guessed high T is associated with lower neuroticism, but studies found weak or no effects afaict.
AFAIK, analysis of paleolithic diets is that there were a range of things depending on availability and some groups were indeed pretty high on animal protein. We don't have differential analysis of the resulting health, but I just wanted to point out that the trope of 'trad diets were low protein' is not super well supported. Trad diets were mostly lower fat does have some support, as raising very fatty, sedentary animals is more recent, and accelerated a bunch in the last hundred years. Although the connection between higher fat diets and negative health outcomes is then another inferential step that hasn't been strongly supported and is, AFAIK, somewhat genetically mediated (some people/groups do much better on high fat diets than others in terms of blood lipid profiles).
These can often be operationalized 'How much of the variance in the output do you predict is controlled by your proposed input?'
Our sensible Chesterton fences
His biased priors
Their inflexible ideological commitments
In addition to epistemic priors, there are also ontological priors and teleological priors to cross compare, each with their own problems. On top of which, people are even worse at comparing non epistemic priors than they are at comparing epistemic priors. As such, attempts to point out that these are an issue will be seen as a battle tactic: move the argument from a domain in which they have the upper hand (from their perspective) to unfamiliar territory in which you'll have an advantage, and resisted.
You may share the experience I've had that most attempts at discussion don't go anywhere. We mostly repeat our cached knowledge at each other. If two people who are earnestly trying to grok each other's positions drill down for long enough they'll get to a bit of ontology comparison, where it turns out they have different intuitions because they are using different conceptual metaphors for different moving parts of their model. But this takes so long that by the time it happens only a few bits of information get exchanged before one or both parties are too tired to continue. The workaround seems to be that if two people have a working relationship then, over time, they can accrue enough bits to get to real cruxes, and this can occasionally suggest novel research directions.
My main theory of change is therefore to find potentially productive pairings of people faster, and create the conditions under which they can speedrun getting to useful cruxes. Unfortunately, Eli Tyre tried this theory of change and reported that it mostly didn't work, after a bunch of good faith efforts from a bunch of people. I'm not sure what's next. I personally believe more progress could be made if people were trained in consciousness of abstraction (per Korzybski), but this is a sufficiently difficult ask as to fail people's priors on how much effort to spend on novel skills with unclear payoffs. And a theory of change that has a curiosity stopper that halts on "other people should do this thing that they clearly aren't going to do" is also not very useful.
Unclear. High fat and high carb diets have been directly compared and not found to be a smoking gun.
Correlation to increased consumption of hidden trans fats looks like a promising angle for figuring out some of the conflicting data.
I don't have a cite handy, but proportion of free acids was found to strongly increase with repeated heating of vegetable oils in cooking. There's a story here where pufa is more fragile, and incorporation of damaged fats into bodily tissue is not good. In particular, fat cells made up of damaged fats might mess with normal lipid balance processes. This is one possible story for why processed meats are so bad. We'd be doubling up on this process, feeding animals such that they have lots of damaged fats in their tissues (eg we feed pigs expired candy because it is cheap, and high BMI is desirable), killing and processing them such that it's even more damaged, and then eating it.
Overall, I'm bullish on the story that processing is bad, potentially through multiple mechanisms.
I'm bearish on pufa being bad in generality, if it were I don't think we'd see some of the strongest effects in nutrition science on reduced mortality from nuts and fish. I personally consume both raw on the processing is bad story.
CRPGs with a lot of open world dynamics might work, where the goal is for the person to identify the most important experiments to run in a limited time window in order to manmax certain stats.
Tracing out the chain of uncertainty. Lets say that I'm thinking about my business and come up with an idea. I'm uncertain how much to prioritize the idea vs the other swirling thoughts. If I thought it might cause my business to 2x revenue I'd obviously drop a lot and pursue it. Ok, how likely is that based on prior ideas? What reference class is the idea in? Under what world model is the business revenue particularly sensitive to the outputs of this idea? What's the most uncertain part of that model? How would I quickly test it? Who would already know the answer? etc.
My shorthand has been 'decision leverage.' But that might not hit the center of what you're aiming at here.
This is true, but we still wish to cooperate with the largest alliance that will have us/some subset of our values that are capable of attaining reflective equilibrium.
If conflict exists, one thing it can be useful for agents to do is misrepresent themselves as being weaker or stronger than they are.
Some data: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/odi.12341
Firstly, S. mutans does not colonize the epithelium. It lives almost exclusively on enamel. The total surface area in the mouth that it could realistically inhabit is exceptionally small, unless Lumina can live in places that S. mutans generally does not.
Big crux! Thanks for the investigative effort. Sounds mostly resolvable via assay of existing Lumina customer saliva.
An interesting twist: drinking ethanol doesn't just cause acute exposure but "The concentration of ethanol in the oral cavity increases immediately after an alcoholic beverage is consumed and then decreases. It was reported after intake of an alcoholic beverage that the concentration of ethanol remaining in the oral cavity decreases gradually, as ethanol flows back into saliva from the blood for a few hours after it is taken into the body [25,26]. Most previous studies of acetaldehyde production by oral bacteria, including our study [24], used ethanol concentrations as low as 11–22 mM (approximately 0.05–0.1%), which corresponds to the ethanol concentrations seen in saliva a few hours after alcohol consumption [20,22,26,27]. " From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8204988/
The relevant SNP is rs671, though 23 and me will already have it in your dashboard.
Thanks! This is much closer to the amount of ethanol you'd get eating 50 bananas a day. That's at least one sanity check it fails then, even under these ideal conditions since, as you noted, there is probably a larger bacteria population than what was measured there.
Now I'm wondering about sanity checks in the other direction though. Is ~.5 ml per hour of ethanol actually a realistic production?
If it's really more like 10^6 and not 10^7 that's five bananas worth and not something I would worry about. Isn't this resolvable via saliva assay?
My understanding is that the amount of ethanol we're taking about here on a daily basis constitutes something like the amount you'd get eating an extra piece of fruit or so. Though I don't know where I originally saw the estimate or if it is good. Does anyone want to do some fermi estimates?
Is there a short summary on the rejecting Knightian uncertainty bit?
Huge numbers of people are forced to resort to illegal methods of suicide creating legal, emotional, financial, and logistics problems for their loved ones, on top of the additional grief to the suicidee personally.
I agree my gloss on it is not a substantive engagement, but rather a reminder of what I consider a crucial consideration. Policies that elide horrific suffering are the norm. Part of the point is that suffering, being not available to external quantification, must be left up to the individual whenever possible. Many objections to utilitarianism involve its frequent attempts to obviate subjective effects when this isn't appropriate.
Not a new point but perennially worth noting: subcultures persist via failure. That is to say that subcultures that succeed obviate themselves. This is concretely noticeable in ways that, coming in as an outsider, a subculture about X will have a bunch of mysterious self sabotage behavior that actually keeps ¬X persistent.
I am ready to go ahead and say that, if we have to choose one extreme or the other, I choose ‘this is not allowed.’
Advocating for people to be tortured is bad. We should be willing to accept quite a lot of collateral damage to avoid torturing people.
didn't know that, I heard it via Bostrom. Thanks.
Hmm, good point this should probably have an epistemic status.
Thanks, this actually highlighted for me another aspect of it. Namely, if someone objects to a claim I did not make, if I respond it feels as though people might go with 'he was actually tacitly making that claim.' Calling out that I'm not making that claim explicitly should help here.
Sources are a shallow dive of google and reading a few abstracts, this is intended as trailheads for people, not firm recommendations. If I wanted them to be reccs I would want to estimate effect sizes and estimates of the quality of the related research.
Insulin insensitivity and weight gain Poor sleep Hypertension High cholesterol
Thoughts:
Interesting asymmetry: languages don't constrain parsers much (maybe a bit, very broadly conceived), but a parser does constrain language, or which sequences it can derive meaning from. Unless the parser can extend/modify itself?
Langan seems heavily influenced by Quine, which I think is a good place to start, as that seems to be about where philosophical progress petered out. In particular, Quine's assertion about scientific theories creating ontological commitments to the building blocks they are made from 'really existing' to which Langan's response seems to be 'okay, let's build a theory out of tautologies then.' This rhymes with Kant's approach, and then Langan goes farther by trying to really get at what 'a priori' as a construct is really about.
I'm not quite sure how this squares with Quine's indeterminacy. That any particular data is evidence not only for the hypothesis you posed (which corresponds to some of Langan's talk of binary yes-no questions as a conception of quantum mechanics) but also for a whole family of hypotheses, most of which you don't know about, that define all the other universes that the data you observed is consistent with.
I think cognitive understanding is overrated and physical changes to the CNS are underrated, as explanations for positive change from practices.
Was not linear for me afaict
I think western psychotherapies are predicated on incorrect models of human psychology. RCTs mostly can't capture the effects of serious practice over a long period of time, but of the ones that have tried, the most robust effect is lowered neuroticism, afaik. This was also my experience. It corresponded to a big positive shift subjectively, as well as expressions of shock from friends and family about the change.
I think you're ascribing to stupidity what can be attributed to malice on a plain reading of his words.
I hope these responses help people understand that the hostility to journalists is not based on hyperbole. They really are like this. They really are competing to wreck the commons for a few advertising dollars.
I don't mean to belabor the point as I think it's reasonable, but worth pointing out that these responses seem within the range of below average human performance.
I find looking directly at my own ignorance often uncomfortable but worthwhile.
I'm guessing you're referring to his revised four path model? It doesn't quite match my experience and he devotes quite a bit of time (as do other teachers I respect) on why attainments are a bit fraught. I had two experiences after several years of practice that caused large portions of previously inscrutable dharma material to click into place, and they roughly corresponded to how people were describing things in first and second path. The first one corresponded to (among other things) dramatically heightened access to meditative states, the second to a large decrease in suffering and percepts of how suffering is constructed. I go into more detail on the video interview on my blog.
Note I didn't say 'the claims of buddhism' as a whole.
Neuroticism and conscientiousness are somewhat correlated in the literature and indeed it was my experience that boosting conscientiousness boosted neuroticism somewhat. Being able to spin these dials feels useful. Being very outcome focused rather than input focused is also a recipe for a lot of stress that doesn't necessarily seem very correlated to good outcomes ime. Ofc we want some tracking of outputs as a feedback to inputs so there's a balance to strike there.
Have you investigated the methods of past people you admire who tried for positive impact?
Aduashanti/Jed McKenna/Chongyam Trungpa would all agree that real deal spirituality is highly uncomfortable. Waking up out of the shared dream state can be highly alienating, especially at first as you learn new ways to relate to others who are mostly paying attention to their own projections and not what is happening moment by moment. Projections that lead us in a circle back towards comfortable, familiar thoughts. Fortunately, it also gives us the tools for working effectively with those feelings of alienation and loneliness.
For people contemplating entering a period of serious practice what I typically ask about is whether they would be okay losing/destabilizing their job and primary relationships (romantic, friends, family). Not okay in the sense of it wouldn't suck emotionally, but they would be basically secure (financial runway, other friends/teachers to turn to for advice, mental health history and medications, etc.) and be able to make it through to the other side if it took up to 18 months.
I expect it to be dangerous in low openness environments with strong religious norms.
I've seen surveys report 10-35% experienced at least some unwanted effects. More severe effects harder to classify. Here 1.2% for adverse effects affecting functioning for more than 1 month: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8636531/
see also: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8693904/
This seems like claims about reality? TBC I think the claims about suffering in Buddhism are claims about how our mammalian nervous systems happen to be wired and ways you can improve it. I also think nihilistic readings of Buddhism are probably mistaken.
Q1: I think waking up out of social reality is a mini enlightenment, one many people have gone through (esp. those who exited a religious or quasi-religious community). A downside is that it is now more difficult to be fully bought in to any social reality, including much healthier ones.
My take on interacting more harmoniously with others was touched on by the representational flexibility stuff. It's a skill set that feels strongly related to empathy for me. E.g. providing safe trails of retreat for people when they aren't ready for too many degrees of freedom on a load bearing belief yet.
Q2: Not really. Reports of greater well being are almost universal past certain milestones. IIRC Jeffrey Martin's survey data set included 4-5 people who found the experience neutral and 4-5 who found it actively negative, but notably the active negative cases were all cases of people who had stumbled into such things on their own and hadn't had any guidance on working with the common failure modes. On being put in touch with others like them who gave them some advice, reportedly all of them were able to resolve the negative valence stuck points.
I do think serious meditation practice is more akin to drugs than something more psychologically innocuous like exercise or cold showers.
https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/vinaya-pitaka-1-bhikkhu-vibhanga/d/doc227270.html
Are we this obsessed with a low headline number?
Depends, is the governing body in question run by humans? Are said humans having their attention adversarially optimized against? Summary statistics are both necessary and the vector of rot.
there are big returns to being Crazy Prepared
This is stupendously true to a degree that is mostly obvious in retrospect, so the catch is that when you are young you are likely to wind up trying to get Crazy Prepared at the wrong things.
Such Sufferin
The claim seems to me to be that suffering is, in theory or practice, an irreplaceable type of computation. This is worth investigating, but my sense is that it is not strictly necessary, just something evolution hit upon that worked well early in the process and we now have path dependent lock in. Future generations, should they exist, may very well regard our attitude here as similar to thinking that we need infectious diseases and other naturalistic fallacies. Also a note that much of the engagement with these proposals are conflating between no suffering and no pain. No pain is in some ways simpler, but in the most important ways much more complicated/fraught and will take longer to figure out.
I mostly got this from Nozick's final book Invariances
A type of celief that resists updating is one that discourages you from talking about it with others.