I agree that low carb diets are an effective means of weight loss relative to low fat diets for people in the aggregate. I do not agree that they are in the aggregate better for reducing mortality than DASH, and I think my personal health is optimized by eating whole grains, fruits, vegetables, low fat dairy, and lean protein and avoiding all else.
aceofspades
Karma: −70
Stop Using LessWrong: A Practical Interpretation of the 2012 Survey Results
The reason I rejected the utility function and why I rejected this argument is that I judged them useless.
What would you recommend people do, in general? I think this is a question that is actually valuable. At the least I would benefit from considering other people’s answers to this question.
This pattern-matches exactly to everything else conspiracy theory related I have ever read, and by that I mean it misinterprets the relative incentives. You speak of organizations that apparently face financial loss if they turn out to be wrong, but you provide no convincing reason for why they would lose funding if they revised their positions due to new evidence. You also don’t mention the huge profits an organization would surely make if it provided compelling evidence for how to actually lower the risk of the largest cause of death in the United States. In particular:
-I’m not going to read a book rather than reading the results of randomized, controlled trials or meta-analyses of many such studies.
-You say you “could point to studies.” Then do it.
This line of discussion says nothing on the object level. The words “altruistic” and “selfish” in this conversation have ceased to mean anything that anyone could use to meaningfully alter his or her real world behavior.
It doesn’t seem to me that this post actually makes any coherent argument. It spends a fair amount of words using seemingly metaphysical terms without actually saying anything. But that’s not even the important thing.
Is this post supposed to increase my happiness or lifespan, or even that of someone else?
If this is article is actually correct, representative, etc. then the only thing it says to me is that the entire field of self-help is completely worthless, so I am going to actually operate under that assumption and just do what I want.
By listing those “suggestions,” you are causing people at least one person to try to use them even though they are in my judgment largely worthless or at least not worth the time and effort required to try to adopt them (this judgment means little compared to actual evidence of their relative effectiveness, but since I haven’t seen any it will have to suffice as a prior). I have also seen no plausible argument here that this type of bias actually causes unhappiness, and so I therefore care nothing about it.
So the normal chain of events here would just be that I argue those are still all subgoals of increasing happiness and we would go back and forth about that. But this is just arguing by definition, so I won’t continue along that line.
To the extent I understand the first paragraph in terms of what it actually says at the level of real-world experience, I have never seen evidence supporting its truth. The second paragraph seems to say what I intended the second paragraph of my previous comment to mean. So really it doesn’t seem that we disagree about anything important.
This is reaching the point of just arguing about definitions, so I reject this line of discussion as well.
Would you mind linking to this research that shows low carb diets lower cardiac risk factors? All I really know about the matter is that in the aggregate people who actually study diet generally conclude that Atkins-like diets are not optimal for health. In particular, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, the American Heart Association, and the World Health Organization all seem to conclude that saturated fats directly increase cardiovascular risk.
You’re also arguing against anything said by these organizations when discussing highly processed carbs. DASH specifically recommends making at least half of grains consumed whole, and the implication seems to be that the ideal would be eating no refined grains.
I have decided that maximizing the integral of happiness with respect to time is my selfish supergoal and that maximizing the double integral of happiness with respect to time and with respect to number of people is my altruistic supergoal. All other goals are only relevant insofar as they affect the supergoals. I have yet to be convinced this is a bad system, though previous experience suggests I probably will make modifications at some point. I also need to decide what weight to place on the selfish/altruistic components.
But despite my finding such an abstract way of characterizing my actions interesting, the actual determining of the weights and the actual function I’m maximizing are just determined by what I actually end up doing. In fact constructing this abstract system does not seem to convincingly help me further its purported goal, and I therefore cease all serious conversation about it.
I have read this post and have not been persuaded that people who follow these steps will lead longer or happier lives (or will cause others to live longer or happier lives). I therefore will make no conscious effort to pay much of any regard to this post, though it is plausible it will have at least a small unconscious effect. I am posting this to fight groupthink and sampling biases, though this post actually does very little against them.
Maybe I should be more clear.
The anecdotes of a few people on this site mean very little to me in regards to the efficacy of a particular diet. There doesn’t seem to be any experimental evidence with a reasonable sample size to suggest that Paleo diets actually lead to weight loss (there is evidence that DASH leads to weight loss). The paleo diet is relatively high in saturated fat (and there is a scientific consensus that high saturated fat intake causes heart disease) while DASH is not. Omitting grain and dairy eliminates the sources of some nutrients and I would hypothesize that a significant percent of people switching to a paleo diet don’t actually compensate for that loss by getting those nutrients from other sources.
It just doesn’t make sense to advocate for a paleo diet when there is no evidence of it performing better in the aggregate than diets which are supported by the scientific consensus. If I’m mistaken please link me to some good quality studies.
You say that paleo-inspired diets “have helped many other people in the community.” What percent of people in this community have benefited from those diets how much, and how does this compare with other diets, e.g. DASH?
I don’t think it’s necessary for each individual to be aware of their own irrationality or try to become more rational or what have you. You don’t have to have any formal study in physics to be great at pool, and you don’t need formal study in rationality to do well in life or even science specifically. Any flaws in the ability of some individuals to act “rationally” won’t matter in the aggregate because just a small number of people can profit heavily from the economic rent this will leave (in proportion to how much it actually matters) and in the process fix this efficiency.
I don’t think it’s quite necessary for people to even be consciously aware of Occam’s Razor. The right predictions will eventually win out because there will exist an economic profit somewhere which will be exploited. If you can think of an area which is overrun with market inefficiencies due to something related to this post, please let me know and I will be sure to grab whatever I can of the economic profits while they last.
I just operate under the assumption that I will never actually encounter a situation where 2+2 does not equal 4, and therefore do not spend time worrying about such a hypothetical situation. This assumption has never failed me before.
In order to dissolve the disagreement: I think the first sentence of my original comment here was ill-posed. It makes sense to me because it serves as a convenient pointer for the type of “religion” espoused by a significant proportion of people which involves “belief” and “faith” and does not actually contain any differences in anticipated experience from a non-religious position. However, given only the original sentence it does not mean much. And even with elaboration it is pretty much going to be tautological. As to my second post I expect that contemplating that particular “counterfactual” is going to be along the lines of considering the “counterfactual” under which 2+2=5 which I do not anticipate being a particularly enlightening discussion based on what I’ve already read on the subject.
Do you disagree with any matters of fact that I have asserted or implied? When you try to have a discussion like you are trying to have, about “logical necessity” and so on, you are just arguing about words. What do you predict about the world that is different from what I predict?