I mean statement like:
“
my fat cells work differently than those of every thin person in the world”(this quote is fake, see MakoYass’s comment below)The metabolically privileged don’t believe in metabolic privilege, since they are able to lose weight by trying! harder! to diet and exercise, and the diet and exercise actually work the way they’re supposed to… I remember the nine-month period in my life where that was true.
If he did, has he ever published a post-mortem about it?
A recent post by Jacobian linked Eliezer’s post about the Shangri-La diet. While I was trying to DuckDuckGo for some updates, I only found more statements in the same spirit. If there is a post-mortem somewhere, it would be a useful case-study for me on changing one’s mind. If there is not, that information would be useful for me to update how much I trust Eliezer’s factual statements.
He still seems to believe that:
In response to:
he posted:
(Source)
Thanks to interstice who suggested I check Eliezer’s twitter.
I think EY was right to post that. I do not see why he should apologize. If you listen to Stephen Guyenet on ratspeak discussing the neuroscience of weight, Yud’s comments are consistent with our current knowledge. Caplan’s were more inconsistent because he modeled eating behavior as a pure function of conscientiousness, ignoring the lipostat hormone function.
As regards the shangri la diet, I can’t speak. Stephen Guyenets comments suggest that reducing food reward is important to changing the lipostat, and that is my weight management strategy (I eat high protein and unrewarding food like soylent only).
Guyenet’s episode http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-189-stephan-guyenet-on-what-causes-obesity.html
People do have different metabolism, though. And they do to such an extent that some struggle to maintain an ideal weight more than others. Do you disagree?
As a data point in the opposite direction from the stereotype than Eliezer (the stereotype being that everyone tends to put on weight unless they strive not to), I have never needed, nor tried, to “lose weight”. My weight stays at 120 to 125 pounds (giving a BMI of about 20) without my doing anything to make it so, any more than I do anything to regulate my body temperature. It has done so for my entire adult life of more than 40 years, during which I have never been short of the means to eat whatever I want. My body obviously does regulate my weight and temperature, but by mechanisms I know nothing about. Any explanation of why people put on weight must also account for the people who do not.
In fact, surely people only speak of “losing weight” who are failing to do so. If they ever reached their target weight they would be talking about maintaining it, but I only see that mentioned as something you will have to do once you have “lost weight” in a tomorrow that is presumed never to arrive. The entire discourse is predicated on the assumption of failure.
Yeah, my weight is uncannily stable as well. I don’t think I’ve been more than 400g away from 60.0kg in the past like 8 years, during which time I have made no effort to regulate my diet or exercise whatsoever. I’ve been a PhD student cooking for myself extremely poorly and also a tech employee getting unlimited free nutella crumpets at work. I’ve been a person who never exercises, to running twice a week, to a pandemic shut-in, to experimenting with strength training. I went vegan during that time. Nothing has moved my weight more than half a kilo, and not in a predictable direction.
If my body decided, by whatever mechanism this is, that it was going to weigh 120kg, I doubt there’s anything I could practically do about it.
Edit to update: I recently started taking some ADHD medication and, due to noticeably reduced appetite, lost like a kilo over a month and a half. So I guess that this medication acts directly on the mechanism that keeps my weight stable. I’m now making a little effort to get extra calories when I don’t feel like eating, which I expect to put me back at 60. But, n=1, if your weight is extremely stable, amphetamines may be able to reduce it.
Note to people that this can change dramatically with age. Many people have no trouble with their weight until some time in the 30s or early 40s.
I’m similar. There have been one or two occasions in my life when I did feel like I was starting to put on a weight in a way that felt uncomfortable. But then I just stopped doing the thing that was causing it, and apart from that I’ve never needed to think about losing weight.
Same here.
I’ve heard of a couple of possible mechanisms for metabolic privilege—brown fat and resting activity (the latter is basically fidgeting). I’m also someone who can maintain weight fairly easily.
It’s hard to say he’s wrong. In any case why should you assign general ‘trust’ values to people?
Are you serious about the second part? Estimating the credibility of people you read?
There’s a subtle point in the second part that is very plausible.
I’m afraid I still don’t follow. But I like the blog.
Some very trustworthy people are only trustworthy in a specific and relatively narrow domain.
Consider the news and journalism and popular media more generally. Have you encountered wildly inaccurate claims or descriptions about something you already knew a lot about? That’s a very common experience for all kinds of experts!
But almost all experts are only experts – ‘trustworthy’ – in a specific and relatively narrow domain. But where do they get most of their beliefs about everything else? The same not-that-accurate sources that everyone else uses.
Gell-Mann Amnesia is forgetting how inaccurately those same sources handle the subjects on which you are an expert and failing to generalize that those same sources are probably about as accurate for everything else too.
Physicists are ‘notorious’ for acting as-if they had resolved all of the important unsolved issues in other sciences. One lesson is that expertise is very much bounded, limited, and generally not particularly ‘global’.
In other words, don’t (bother) assigning “general ‘trust’ values to people”.
Actual bounded experts who are ignorant on other subjects
Wholly ignorant people who purport to be experts on subjects you’re ignorant of
These are two different things. Gell-Mann amnesia seems to address the latter. You’re referring to the former when you warn against assigning general trust values. Assigning general trust values would actual prevent Gell-Mann amnesia. Correct?
If we there was a practical and efficient way to assign general trust values (and regularly re-computer them too!), and we used them, then yes, that might prevent Gell-Mann amnesia.
I’m not against general trust values – maybe it could be practical and useful. But I don’t think there’s any current way to do this that’s accurate enough to be worth doing.
It seems reasonable to be skeptical about general trust values because it seems strictly better to instead trust individuals on specific topics.
I don’t feel like a general trust value is a useful way to think of anyone, even total strangers. I might have something like a general distribution of trust over some set of topics (for arbitrary people), or maybe a few different distributions for different groups, and definitely distributions for specific people. I guess you could consider a distribution to also be a ‘value’. I was implicitly considering ‘a value’ to be more like a single (real) number.
I admit that I’m not sure how true it is that anyone does already use general trust values in some sense.
It is quite a frustrating process to watch.
He has asked for help numerous times but without giving much detail on what he has tried. For example, he said he had tried “paleo”. But paleo is a very vague term. People suggest things and he advises that he already tried them without giving details on exactly what he did.
He has not published blood tests or other diagnostics etc as far as I can tell, so it is very difficult to know what the problem which he calls “metabolic disprivilege” is. Do his close relatives have particular weight problems? What are the genetic tests showing in terms of genes known to inhibit fat mobilization? Does blood sugar go down when dieting? We do not know this. I would expect rationality would dictate a rapid exploration of this problem but I do not see it.
As many (like me) who have lost a lot of weight will have experienced, the scope for self deception and for the lower brain to hoodwink you is huge. People typically believe that while dieting they are less productive. I also believed this but by chance it turned out I have been collecting metrics on my productivity for another reason, and was able to find out that my productivity (on mentally hard things) went up substantially. But we don’t know how he measured his productivity, if at all, and whether his claimed reduction while on the diet is real or not.
We also don’t know whether his expectations about how much productive hard mental work you can actually do are realistic. I get the impression that he feels that if he cannot concentrate really hard on difficult things for 12+ hours per day, something is wrong. But very few, if any, people can do this. (not doing routine things, but e.g. learning new difficult things or trying to prove hard theorems etc).
I agree that some people find it easier than others to lose weight. And there are some rare people who have extreme difficulty or who are exceptionally prone to obesity. This has been mentioned as far back as Dr Atkins’ original book. People who have more difficulty than most—like me* - in losing weight constitute about 20% of the community. The hard cases are quite rare. So some good quality evidence is needed to conclude that a given person is one such.
*My weight problems are IMHO partly a result of high (measured) endogenous levels of the hormone cortisol − 60% above the top of the normal range—possibly a result of some things that happened when I was very young, which increases appetite, increases insulin levels thereby inhibiting fat mobilization, and increases fat storage and makes it harder to maintain lean body mass on a diet. So I am not unsympathetic to those who struggle. Nonetheless, whatever challenges you have, a rational approach to a solution is best.
Lots of things like this were explored, just not in public, for the usual medical-privacy reasons. During the period in which he was posting bounties on Facebook for things like blood tests to try, he was also working with a smaller group of doctors and community members (including myself) with greater information access. There are interesting takeaways about metabolism and diet from that project, which could be written up some day, but I’m not aware of anything which would warrant a retraction.
This sounds like you aren’t aware that Eliezer has successfully lost basically all of his excess weight, at least as of January this year?
Yes.
I am also aware that he stated that during the period of weight loss his productivity plummeted. That is, the weight loss was at an unacceptable cost.
See my post from yesterday where I describe how he lost the weight.
What? What community? My impression is that, if people try to lose weight, the expected result is for them to become more unhealthy due to weight fluctuation. It’s not that they’ll “have difficulty losing weight,” rather their weight will go up and down in a way that harms their health or their expected lifespans. I thought I read statements by Scott—an actual doctor, we think—supporting this. Are you actually disputing the premise? If so, where’d you get the data?