I am sympathetic to the general thrust of your comment, and I agree with many of your specific points. But I think you let your rhetoric get away from you in a couple of places, and I think those places are important to get right. For instance:
He who wants to throw a stone, first tell me how much sugar and salt did you eat this week. You realize that shit is killing you slowly, don’t you?
Everything is killing me slowly.
Too much salt is killing me slowly. But too little salt would also kill me slowly. So would too little sugar. Or was it too little fat? Or was that last week’s consensus, and this week’s discredited lie perpetrated by a corrupt and untrustworthy academy, distorted by perverse incentives? Too little sunlight will be the end of me (Vitamin D!); but then again, I also shouldn’t spend too much time in the sun (skin cancer!). Red meat is literally the devil, and alcohol is terrible even in small amounts, but look at those people over there
who spend their lives eating nothing but red meat and washing it down with red wine, and live into the triple-digit ages!
The point is, optimal nutrition is not obvious (if for no other reason but that the effects of individual genetic variation are so great and vary so widely). The outside view shows that basically anything we are, currently, given as the “established view” in nutrition, could in fact be total nonsense.
What you seem to be saying, in this aside, is something like “we are all sinners, i.e. we are all slaves to our evolutionary past; we all make terrible mistakes, by doing things that obviously no longer make any sense, in today’s world; let us therefore not judge any among us, for erring thus”.
But that’s not true. Some of us don’t make the obvious mistakes. (We might do things that turn out to be mistakes, but that’s a very different matter!) And so we are entirely justified in “throwing stones”—in judging those people who do make the obvious mistakes—people who do things that are manifestly self-destructive in the modern world.
This has serious implications for what the optimal strategy is.
If your view is right, then there seem to be two tiers of people:
The sinners (i.e., basically all of us), who are all trying to do what makes sense, and yet look: she dates bad guys, he eats too much sugar…
The saints (i.e., people who have managed to overcome their biases and do the right thing)—but becoming a saint is difficult, and perhaps it’s not clear how to do it, and in the meantime we’re basically all still sinners.
If my view is right, then there are three tiers of people:
Idiots.
Normal people who are capable of exercising common sense, and so avoid the obvious mistakes (such as “date that guy even though he beat his last five girlfriends regularly”, or “eat Domino’s pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day”), but do not have any kind of privileged access to the truth of tricky subjects like “What Is The True Nutrition”.
(hypothetical) Unusually competent / intelligent / rational people, who can figure out the right thing to do basically all the time (certainly at a rate much greater than genpop). (Do such people exist? Well, we’d all like to become one of them, and perhaps that’s what we’re trying to do here at Less Wrong…)
On the latter view, you can get pretty darn far just by not being an idiot and exercising common sense, and generally applying the strategy of “do what seems to make sense, upon a reasonable amount of reflection”. On the former view, that doesn’t seem to get you very far, and you have to have Exceptional Rationality Techniques™ to get anywhere.
It seems to me that figuring out which of these views is closer to reality is rather important.
I am sympathetic to the general thrust of your comment, and I agree with many of your specific points. But I think you let your rhetoric get away from you in a couple of places, and I think those places are important to get right. For instance:
Everything is killing me slowly.
Too much salt is killing me slowly. But too little salt would also kill me slowly. So would too little sugar. Or was it too little fat? Or was that last week’s consensus, and this week’s discredited lie perpetrated by a corrupt and untrustworthy academy, distorted by perverse incentives? Too little sunlight will be the end of me (Vitamin D!); but then again, I also shouldn’t spend too much time in the sun (skin cancer!). Red meat is literally the devil, and alcohol is terrible even in small amounts, but look at those people over there who spend their lives eating nothing but red meat and washing it down with red wine, and live into the triple-digit ages!
The point is, optimal nutrition is not obvious (if for no other reason but that the effects of individual genetic variation are so great and vary so widely). The outside view shows that basically anything we are, currently, given as the “established view” in nutrition, could in fact be total nonsense.
What you seem to be saying, in this aside, is something like “we are all sinners, i.e. we are all slaves to our evolutionary past; we all make terrible mistakes, by doing things that obviously no longer make any sense, in today’s world; let us therefore not judge any among us, for erring thus”.
But that’s not true. Some of us don’t make the obvious mistakes. (We might do things that turn out to be mistakes, but that’s a very different matter!) And so we are entirely justified in “throwing stones”—in judging those people who do make the obvious mistakes—people who do things that are manifestly self-destructive in the modern world.
This has serious implications for what the optimal strategy is.
If your view is right, then there seem to be two tiers of people:
The sinners (i.e., basically all of us), who are all trying to do what makes sense, and yet look: she dates bad guys, he eats too much sugar…
The saints (i.e., people who have managed to overcome their biases and do the right thing)—but becoming a saint is difficult, and perhaps it’s not clear how to do it, and in the meantime we’re basically all still sinners.
If my view is right, then there are three tiers of people:
Idiots.
Normal people who are capable of exercising common sense, and so avoid the obvious mistakes (such as “date that guy even though he beat his last five girlfriends regularly”, or “eat Domino’s pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day”), but do not have any kind of privileged access to the truth of tricky subjects like “What Is The True Nutrition”.
(hypothetical) Unusually competent / intelligent / rational people, who can figure out the right thing to do basically all the time (certainly at a rate much greater than genpop). (Do such people exist? Well, we’d all like to become one of them, and perhaps that’s what we’re trying to do here at Less Wrong…)
On the latter view, you can get pretty darn far just by not being an idiot and exercising common sense, and generally applying the strategy of “do what seems to make sense, upon a reasonable amount of reflection”. On the former view, that doesn’t seem to get you very far, and you have to have Exceptional Rationality Techniques™ to get anywhere.
It seems to me that figuring out which of these views is closer to reality is rather important.