There’s really two independent things, though.
a) How to not be single/how to get someone to date you. b) How to find the person(s) and build/maintain the kind of relationship(s) that you want for the rest of your life (/the forseeable future).
In my experience, (a) is much easier than (b). The articles address (b), not (a).
Just pulled myself away from some of his other stuff. So much good stuff. At some point I need to compare his take on AI with the lw articles. So much to read, so little time.
(that said, at least in the fields I’m familiar with, the sabbatical is supposed to be a working holiday and a chance to start a new project in your own field, instead of try something fairly different)
If you contribute to a charity that increases by one part in a trillion the probability of mankind surviving the next century and >>if conditional on this survival mankind will colonize the universe and create a trillion times a trillion sentient lifeforms then >>your donation will on average save a trillion lives.
Alternately, if you do work that increases by one part in a trillion the probability of mankind surviving the next century...
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I think there is a lot of value in intelligent charity, but it’s a mistake to assume that all careers have the same inherent non-monetary value to society (or to approximate the non-monetary value of all careers as zero). If I understand correctly, the underlying thinking is that the difference in salary between theoretical research and some sort of high-pay job (when multiplied by the value of donating that money to effective charities) outweighs the difference in non-monetary career value?
I find that actually scheduling my task on a calendar makes it a lot easier to trust myself. If it’s on the calendar, I’m going to see it again, which means that my various sub modules can shout at me if I don’t address it.
I’ll have to try the offline training though—hadn’t heard of doing that before.
Thank you for the advice—something I’ve already had in the works. My understanding is that typically diabetes-caused hypoglycemia is usually helped (and not harmed) by the consumption of simple sugars? One of the defining characteristics of my condition is that simple sugars make things worse, especially when I’m already experiencing the symptoms of hypoglycemia.
Agreed. “hypoglycemia” is really the symptom, not the cause.
What I have appears to be a genetic disorder (my father and his father had it) that doesn’t seem to be associated with any other health impacts. I recently realized that I should probably actually get the specifics pinned down, and that’s something I’m going to work on in the future.
My understanding (through my father, who had his hypoglycemia tested when he was younger) is that my pancreas overreacts, putting out more insulin than is necessary for any given blood sugar level. It’s particularly problematic when I consume simple sugars, as my pancreas drastically overshoots. The consequence is that, unless I eat slow-digesting foods every few hours, I feel cranky/exhausted/sad/impatient, get the shakes, and have general weakness in my muscles. If I continue to not eat, my emotional state stabilizes and I simply get really really tired. Not life threatening, but a serious interference with happiness/productivity.
But I will be looking more specifically into the causes, instead of my father’s interpretation of his own diagnoses from forty years ago.
Thanks for all the recipes!
I could probably stand to lose a few pounds, but not to much more than that—I wasn’t really aiming to change my weight with my diet. My BMR is 2025.04, apparently. My understanding, though, is that exercising can increase your metabolic rate even after you’re done? I’ve been working to implement a workout regime based on http://lesswrong.com/lw/juc/optimal_exercise/, and am lifting weights or doing interval cardio 4-6 days per week.
I don’t actually track how many calories I’m eating in a day—it would probably be a good thing to do.
I’ve definitely made the same mistake before. More than once. Which is why I felt confident enough on this to offer a correction.
I’m probably being overly anal here, but this something I work with on a professional basis. Preface: when I’m talking about ‘fitness’, I mean the (slightly simplified) biological definition of the term, which means “number of offspring you have before you die”
I think what the OP means is that conditions which allow rapid population growth are conditions which reduce the >natural selection pressure.
This doesn’t need to be true at all—see below.
An extreme version of this is the observation that if everyone survives and breeds, there is no fitness advantage to >any gene and the gene frequencies do not change.
Also not necessarily true (because “everyone survives and breeds” is very different from “everyone survives and has an identical number of offspring).
Selection occurs due to differences in relative fitness, which can be calculated as (personal fitness)/(average fitness of everyone). If everyone has 2 offspring, everyone has a relative fitness of 1. If we have a good year, and everyone has 3 offspring, we have the same relative fitness.
You and OP seem to be thinking about situations in which some sort of environmental limits on fitness have disappeared, and now everyone is limited by some trait for which there is less/no variation. That’s actually a really special situation. Certainly the statement “Some events reduce variation in relative fitness while also increasing average fitness” is true. But so is the statement “Some events increase variation in relative fitness while also increasing average fitness”. Any time conditions increase the fitness of above-average fitness individuals, average population growth increases and selection becomes STRONGER. This is something you would definitely expect in organisms for which individuals actively compete for patchy resources—in a good year, the alpha/owner/whatever of a given territory will get most of the increased value of said patch, and individuals who were without territory may not gain anything at all. (it really depends on the situation, though)
Anyways, average fitness and variation in fitness are two largely independent things. “Rapid population growth”, or even “nobody dies before breeding” doesn’t inherently mean less selection/slower evolution. Sometimes just the opposite (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_radiation)
Typically with the evolution of pathogens, we see a trade-off between the ability of a pathogen to spread (“virulence”) and the ability of the pathogen to keep the host alive (although there’s definitely a lot of variation depending on the life history of the pathogen and the behavior of the host). Overall pathogen fitness (for between-host dynamics—it gets more complicated if the pathogen is competing with other pathogens within the host) is based on (virulence) x (number of other hosts that infected host contacts). So increasing host lifespan and increasing virulence both increase pathogen fitness (but, again, usually increasing one decreases the other). This means that we often see pathogens falling into two syndromes:
a) Fast spreaders (“raiders”) - because they spread rapidly, there is less selection for them to keep their host in good condition (and so it’s better to sacrifice host health to increase spread rate). Alternately, because their host becomes ill rapidly, there is selection for them to be good at spreading. Example would be Ebola.
b) slow spreaders (“farmers”) - because they do not spread rapidly, there is selection for them to keep their host in good condition. Alternately, because their host is in good condition for a long time, there is less selection for them to be good at spreading. Extreme versions of this are pathogens that are largely/entirely transmitted vertically (mothers pass pathogen to offspring). Because the host’s fitness is a part/all of the pathogen’s fitness, there is strong selection for the pathogen to keep the host alive (and even to boost host fitness). A super interesting example of this can be found in the arthropod bacteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia, where some Wolbachia species have evolved into mutualistic relationships with hosts. (But because Wolbachia is only passed from mothers to children, many species change the sex ratio of offspring of infected individuals to be all female. Biology is awesome!)
Decreasing the number of people the host is in contact with is effectively decreasing virulence rate. Because the host (sick person) isn’t going to be in contact with too many potential hosts (other people), there’s a fairly low upper bound on how fit a super virulent/damaging pathogen can be—it’s much more effective for the pathogen to maintain host health as much as possible. Typically we expect this to lead to decreased health impacts on the host. Additionally, this would give hosts a longer time to get access to treatment.
tl;dr Decreasing contact rate is likely to lead to evolution of less virulent/harmful pathogens
Rapid population growth decreases the efficiency of purifying selection.
I don’t think that’s true, unless we’re thinking about “efficiency” in different ways.
In general we think of selection in terms of gene frequencies, not raw abundance. Which means that all that is relevant is relative fitness, and if your fitness advantage remains the same, doubling everyone’s reproduction rate doesn’t change the force of selection.
Unless you’re talking about the time until a deleterious, entirely recessive allele goes extinct? Since in that case drift is the only force that will push it from “very rare” to “non-existent”, increasing population size will decrease time to extinction of the deleterious recessive allele (drift is faster/stronger in smaller populations).
I probably should try adding soylent orange to my overall plan. Some part of me is uncomfortable with the idea of meal replacement shakes, but I don’t think that’s a rational feeling.
The only rational argument against it that I can think of is the same argument against repeating the same meal every day—the lack of diet diversity. RomeoStevens seems to have found no intermediate-term health issues on a mainly-soylent-orange diet, but additionally if I’m using soylent orange as only a part of my diet, I’m still going to have a decent mix of food sources.
Time to dust off the blender.
The Lactase is only there because of your lactose intolerance, right? It’s not important for any other reason?
Absolutely worth mentioning. They’re something I’m interested in looking into, but as you say the pricing is a fair bit higher, and at the moment I’d prefer to keep costs lower.
What I’m seeing is $85 for 6 packs of 2000 calories. Which means $14/day for a person consuming 2000 calories per day. I am a large male with an active metabolism who is attempting to exercise on a regular basis—I haven’t counted it up, but I’m probably closer to 3000 calories, which means $20/day. Still great compared to other prepared food options, but not the best option for me right now.
For other people, though, with slightly more expendable income and a desire to get a quick balanced diet in a non-shake form, this is probably a fantastic choice.
Thank you! Apparently this is fairly common knowledge (when I mentioned this to several friends they thought it was obvious). But I hadn’t been aware, and that could have been very unpleasant.
I’m going to switch “tuna” to “canned salmon” in my post, and I’m trying out canned salmon today. Interestingly, when on sale there’s not much difference in price between canned tuna and canned salmon, at least where I live.
Fantastic explanation, and now I have another book to read eventually. Thanks!
Swapped quick for fast. Thanks for pointing that out!
On whey protein—I was exposed to a lot of unverified health information by an ex. Much of that information came from a group of sources that take a conspiracy-theory approach to nutrition research (there’s a big food industry that controls what gets published, and a lack of evidence for or any evidence against fact X is because of the food industry!). This is not to say that the facts I was exposed to were wrong, but rather that I need to verify them. So according to her, whey protein was bad. A quick google search for “whey protein health concerns” turns up quite a bit, although it’s a mishmash of stuff. The mayo clinic has a list of side effects from using whey protein, and this article states that “increased whey protein added to the diet of rats increased tumors and cancers”. On the other hand, wikipedia mentions the potential value of whey protein in reducing risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. So the picture looks far from clear—I guess I have some more reading to do (unless someone else has already done the reading and can whey in?).
Thanks for the link on wheat stuff—because of the hypoglycemia, wheat has been a major building block of my meals. It’s nice to know that I can continue that. Same goes for your suggestions on meat—most of my meat intake is chicken breasts, which fit in the non-processed lean meat category.
I really should try weaning myself off caffeine, and see how I feel. I was 20 before I started drinking it, and I was able to perform in school and work settings just fine without. That said, I’d like to do some more reading about how caffeine actually works—do you have another link to suggest? (if nothing comes to mind, I’ll just spend some time with google).
Added Food and Western Disease to my reading list. Thanks!
Fantastic point. I’m blessed with fairly simple tastes when it comes to food, and I’m fine with some of my meals being fairly bland (pasta salad, for example, or spinach salads). But when it’s easy and healthy, there’s no reason not to make the food taste better.
Sidenote: the longevity article points out that garlic is linked to longer lifespans. So seasoning with garlic both increases flavor and health.
It seems like the relevance would be if the technologically supplied superstimulus replaced a function previously supplied solely through partner relationships. The following chain of examples involving video games doesn’t seem directly relevant, unless before the advent of video games, people played board games exclusively with their romantic partners.