What goals do you have your breakfast fulfilling? Inexpensive? Weight gain/loss? Taste?
Does the type/kind of breakfast have a larger or smaller impact your later mental state?
I think that actually thinking about breakfast for a little time would actually prove beneficial depending on your goals. I don’t think you’ll require a large amount of time, but you can spend a few minutes thinking about it. Those few minutes could have net positive or negative impact on your future self that day.
edit moved, originally posted it as a top level comment and not as a reply. Sorry
Have you considered making a FAI on a computer that includes a cereal port?
Simplified nutrition problems are usually given for examples of constrained optimization, and there’s no reason in principle you can’t use the techniques to decide what to have for breakfast. To this extent, once you’ve examined the evidence on various nutritional philosophies and perhaps self-experimented with your diet a bit, it’s a matter of deciding on the end goals your breakfast is in support of, as Hurt said. Because the evidence on nutrition can be somewhat scrambled, performing these tasks with eggcellence is easier said than done.
Perhaps you’re also asking the wrong question—should you, in fact, have formal meals such as breakfast? There are some who advocate eating as hungry, and not at set times. Food for thought.
Good factors to consider would be what’s available, what is least costly (depending on your budget), and what provides optimal nutrition. Combining multiple food groups is probably a good idea.
Enjoyment and ease of preparation/consumption are also relevant.
Breakfast bars are convenient and are marketed as being nutritious, but they are also relatively expensive and most people enjoy them less than eggs and bacon. They are also arguably less healthful than, for example, fresh fruits and vegetables, but many people would not find fruits and vegetables filling enough to constitute an entire breakfast.
This is a good illustration of why we shouldn’t always hold off on proposing solutions. Have some Cornflakes and spend your time thinking about something more important.
I think in the abstract form it’s a good question for consideration, in the sense that it gets asked on a daily basis by all of us and the answer is important to our health and productivity. Surely spending some time thinking about it could be helpful.
The fact that frequently something demands an answer now is a good reason to decide a working answer to take action with—but that does not imply that you can’t later revisit it and consider it more abstractly when you do have the time and distance from the pressing situation. Whether your past choice was right or wrong is worth knowing, as well as how to act in the future.
Think of a split-second decision to grab a candy bar versus taking a few minutes to fry up an egg—or even e.g. studying vegan cooking. We can rate these as relatively better or worse later on by various criteria, even if there wasn’t much room for debate on the matter at the time.
This is true. However, since this is a problem which is literally encountered on a daily basis, I think a more general version of it might be important enough to merit the use of this technique. For instance, if the grandparent were reformulated as “please help me come up with an algorithm for what I should eat for breakfast in the future”, then by devising a good one we could ensure that the questioner would no longer need to spend time thinking about his/her breakfast choices for the rest of their life while still being confident that they weren’t suffering undesirable opportunity costs present in the “always eat Cornflakes” strategy.
A good question, as it breaks the rules by blatantly proposing a solution (i.e. eat some cornflakes and quit pondering the question) right after raising a good point (some problems cannot afford to wait very long for solutions).
It only breaks the rules of the game after identifying this problem as one for which holding off on proposing solutions was not a worthwhile endeavor. Plus, the fairly whimsical nature of the solution was probably amusing to some, which may account for some of the upvotes; I know I smiled when I read it.
I can’t decide what to eat for breakfast.
What goals do you have your breakfast fulfilling? Inexpensive? Weight gain/loss? Taste?
Does the type/kind of breakfast have a larger or smaller impact your later mental state?
I think that actually thinking about breakfast for a little time would actually prove beneficial depending on your goals. I don’t think you’ll require a large amount of time, but you can spend a few minutes thinking about it. Those few minutes could have net positive or negative impact on your future self that day.
edit moved, originally posted it as a top level comment and not as a reply. Sorry
Have you considered making a FAI on a computer that includes a cereal port?
Simplified nutrition problems are usually given for examples of constrained optimization, and there’s no reason in principle you can’t use the techniques to decide what to have for breakfast. To this extent, once you’ve examined the evidence on various nutritional philosophies and perhaps self-experimented with your diet a bit, it’s a matter of deciding on the end goals your breakfast is in support of, as Hurt said. Because the evidence on nutrition can be somewhat scrambled, performing these tasks with eggcellence is easier said than done.
Perhaps you’re also asking the wrong question—should you, in fact, have formal meals such as breakfast? There are some who advocate eating as hungry, and not at set times. Food for thought.
The first sentence came across as a proposed solution, so I’m downvoting on principle even though I like the comment because it is funny.
Good factors to consider would be what’s available, what is least costly (depending on your budget), and what provides optimal nutrition. Combining multiple food groups is probably a good idea.
Enjoyment and ease of preparation/consumption are also relevant.
Breakfast bars are convenient and are marketed as being nutritious, but they are also relatively expensive and most people enjoy them less than eggs and bacon. They are also arguably less healthful than, for example, fresh fruits and vegetables, but many people would not find fruits and vegetables filling enough to constitute an entire breakfast.
This is a good illustration of why we shouldn’t always hold off on proposing solutions. Have some Cornflakes and spend your time thinking about something more important.
I think in the abstract form it’s a good question for consideration, in the sense that it gets asked on a daily basis by all of us and the answer is important to our health and productivity. Surely spending some time thinking about it could be helpful.
The fact that frequently something demands an answer now is a good reason to decide a working answer to take action with—but that does not imply that you can’t later revisit it and consider it more abstractly when you do have the time and distance from the pressing situation. Whether your past choice was right or wrong is worth knowing, as well as how to act in the future.
Think of a split-second decision to grab a candy bar versus taking a few minutes to fry up an egg—or even e.g. studying vegan cooking. We can rate these as relatively better or worse later on by various criteria, even if there wasn’t much room for debate on the matter at the time.
This is true. However, since this is a problem which is literally encountered on a daily basis, I think a more general version of it might be important enough to merit the use of this technique. For instance, if the grandparent were reformulated as “please help me come up with an algorithm for what I should eat for breakfast in the future”, then by devising a good one we could ensure that the questioner would no longer need to spend time thinking about his/her breakfast choices for the rest of their life while still being confident that they weren’t suffering undesirable opportunity costs present in the “always eat Cornflakes” strategy.
Why is this at positive karma?
A good question, as it breaks the rules by blatantly proposing a solution (i.e. eat some cornflakes and quit pondering the question) right after raising a good point (some problems cannot afford to wait very long for solutions).
It only breaks the rules of the game after identifying this problem as one for which holding off on proposing solutions was not a worthwhile endeavor. Plus, the fairly whimsical nature of the solution was probably amusing to some, which may account for some of the upvotes; I know I smiled when I read it.