A summary of the diet/nutrition literature which sorts the well-established points from the chaff would be extremely useful. Is there already a comprehensive online user-friendly treatment, written by extremely rational thinker(s) who have done thorough research? I would be surprised. The area is a minefield of cleverly disguised bad research.
How will people be able to tell that you’ve done the job well?
My feeling is that there is generally very impressive rationality on the market in fields of endeavour where you will quickly get a clear answer on whether you were right, and so it’s hard for rationalists to show off their skills there. But when you start to compete outside of those fields, no-one can tell that you’re doing better.
Is that a fixable problem? Maybe, though I agree it seems hard. One way to show you’re more right than others (at least to other rationalists) might be to explicitly describe contradicting evidence and ways in which you could be wrong.
The problem, though, is that what the rationalists will probably conclude is “there’s no solid evidence, and it seems likely that any advice works well for a subset of the population and hurts other subsets of the population. You should quantify yourself and experiment.”
Which is advice that people are going to have a hard time taking. Giving up specialization of labor is rather hard and rarely worth it.
Now, they might find a few gems- like “you should figure out diaphragmatic breathing”- but it’ll be hard to separate those from fads or overbroad advice (“this diet agrees with my evolutionary views, thus I suspect it’s good for everyone”).
I think even this would be pretty useful; it basically means ‘we don’t know anything of use; average person should ignore this field for at least 10 years’.
A summary of the diet/nutrition literature which sorts the well-established points from the chaff would be extremely useful. Is there already a comprehensive online user-friendly treatment, written by extremely rational thinker(s) who have done thorough research? I would be surprised. The area is a minefield of cleverly disguised bad research.
How will people be able to tell that you’ve done the job well?
My feeling is that there is generally very impressive rationality on the market in fields of endeavour where you will quickly get a clear answer on whether you were right, and so it’s hard for rationalists to show off their skills there. But when you start to compete outside of those fields, no-one can tell that you’re doing better.
Excellent point.
Is that a fixable problem? Maybe, though I agree it seems hard. One way to show you’re more right than others (at least to other rationalists) might be to explicitly describe contradicting evidence and ways in which you could be wrong.
The problem, though, is that what the rationalists will probably conclude is “there’s no solid evidence, and it seems likely that any advice works well for a subset of the population and hurts other subsets of the population. You should quantify yourself and experiment.”
Which is advice that people are going to have a hard time taking. Giving up specialization of labor is rather hard and rarely worth it.
Now, they might find a few gems- like “you should figure out diaphragmatic breathing”- but it’ll be hard to separate those from fads or overbroad advice (“this diet agrees with my evolutionary views, thus I suspect it’s good for everyone”).
I think even this would be pretty useful; it basically means ‘we don’t know anything of use; average person should ignore this field for at least 10 years’.