I’m an aspiring EA / rationalist. My previous posts were intended in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way (but conveying ideas I take seriously) - future posts will endeavour to lay out my ideas more clearly/ in keeping with LW norms.
Dzoldzaya
Karma: 57
Thanks for this piece. I admit I have always had a bit of residual aversion to seed oils that I’ve struggled to shake.
Having said that, as you’re pushing so strongly against seed oils in favour of “processing” as a mechanism for poor health, I think I need to push back a bit.If you want to be healthier, we know ways you can change your diet that will help: Increase your overall diet “quality”. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats.
“Avoid processed food” works very well as a heuristic—far better than anything like the “nutrition pyramid”, avoiding saturated fats/sugars or calorie counting etc. But it also seems like something that should annoy people who like clear thinking and taxonomies.
As you note, “processing” includes hundreds of processes, most of which have no plausible mechanism by which they might harm human health. Articles describing the ultra-processed taxonomy often just list a litany of bad-sounding things without an explanation why they’re bad e.g. “mechanically separated meat”, “chemical modifications” and “industrial techniques”. Most of these are either benign when you think about it (we’d all prefer a strong man wearing a vest separating our meat with his bare hands, but come now...), or so vague as to be uninformative.
If ultra-processed foods are bad because they contain “hydrogenated oil, modified starch, protein isolate, and high-fructose corn syrup” or “various cosmetic additives for flavour enhancement and colour”, then it’s these products that are bad, not some mysterious processing!
If it is some technical part of the processing, like “hydrolysis, hydrogenation, extrusion, moulding, or pre-frying” that’s bad, surely we should just identify that rather than lumping everything together?
If it’s some emergent outcome of all these processes, like “hyper-palatability” or “energy density”, then that’s the problem, not the fact of being “processed”. If so we should all stop eating strawberries after they hit a certain deliciousness threshold, and avoid literally any edible oil (because all oil is identically energy-dense).
But, having said that, I still use this heuristic, and I’m pretty glad I trained myself out of preferring highly-processed food when I was less analytical.
Ah, thanks, okay, I get it now. That’s a very different proposition! Updated my post.
MoviePass users are selected for seeing a lot of movies. If MoviePass makes a business plan that models users as average people, it will lose a lot of money. Conditional on someone wanting to buy MoviePass, MoviePass probably should not want them as a customer.
I’m going to nitpick here and note that the marginal cost to the cinema of allowing in an extra customer is often close to zero, seeing as most films don’t sell out. It may even be positive, if they spend money on popcorn and drinks, and invite their friends who don’t have a pass.It seems from that article that the failure in the business model was partly that MoviePass was just badly managed, partly that people were abusing the system in various ways by scalping/ selling tickets/ getting hundreds of people using the same service.I checked my local cinema chain and they started running an ‘Unlimited’ service over a decade ago, and it’s still in use, so I think it remains a valid model.
Correction: I understand the MoviePass model now and the adverse selection argument makes more sense. Cinemas with a subscription model can work even with a high proportion of power users, but that’s because the externalities (popcorn, drinks, inviting friends) accrue to the cinema.
I presume the stated goal of schooling your child in this way is to set the grown-up’s mind at ease, rather than ensuring the child is left alone (which is probably the default outcome), and I expect both responses would suffice for this instrumental purpose.
I expect the grown-up would probably look confused, then question the child further. The well-rehearsed child would then explain the negative externalities that society has imposed upon itself by reducing these risks to near-zero, and how it is optimal for society to only reduce these risks until the marginal benefit of further risk reduction is equal to the marginal cost.
At this point, if your child has managed to make the case effectively, the grown-up would realise that the child is probably mature enough to make their own decisions whether to stay outside alone or not.
Technically true, but it’s a very unagentic way for a five-year old to respond to something they should have the capability to justify through argument.
I think we should be discouraging unjustified appeals to authority in our children, so...
”Rehearsing with my kids what they’d say if a grownup asks why they’re alone: “My parents said it’s ok for me to be hereThe socially optimal level of abduction/traffic accident risk is not zero”
Some good thoughts here.
My thinking is that participation in online communities is mostly incentivised through status and inclusion. Upvotes or informal status mechanisms enable someone to be perceived as a valued member of an online community that they identify with. But power and status are subtly different—moderators have the power to ban, admonish, censor, and sometimes signal-boost, but they don’t necessarily gain respect or status based on this—in fact, it’s often the opposite.
Creators acquire status based on the quality of their output (through formal (Karma) and informal (general reputation) mechanisms), but the power that this affords is usually quite indirect (extra upvoting power on LW and EA forums). This can potentially transform into real-world power over the moderators in the case of a coup or a protest, but I’d say that this attracts a different kind of person to moderation.
I’m not sure how useful the “duty vs. privilege” framing is, but the idea that some of these activities may be over- or under-incentivised is an important question. I’d have thought that moderation would be under-incentivised, which is why I’ve always been a bit fascinated by voluntary moderation. 4chan-type forums are the most bizarre example; it has always perplexed me that someone is taking this “responsible” social role to make sure that /pol stays “on-topic” despite the sub-forum being an anarchic cesspit, and probably getting influxes of hate from censored/ banned participants while doing so. But the existence of moderation suggests that there must be a type of person who genuinely enjoys the power that it affords.
Writing high-quality original posts is probably appropriately incentivized—there are enough people who like writing and it provides internal and external validation. Like with meta-analysis and replicating in academia, there are probably some curation tasks that are under-incentivized in most online spaces, but LW/ EA seem pretty good at that.
Forgive the unverified sources here, but total potato consumption seems to correlate quite strongly with obesity across Europe, so if there’s any causal effect behind the potato, it would have to explain why countries that eat potatoes as staples seem to have slightly higher obesity rates than other countries.
This response is incorrect. Firstly, Google Consumer Surveys is very different from MTurk. MTurk users are paid to pay attention to the task for a given amount of time, and they are not ‘paid ads’.
“People are incentivized to complete these as soon as possible and there is little penalty for inaccuracy.”
This is generally untrue for MTurk—when you run online surveys with MTurk:
1) You set exclusion criteria for people finishing too quickly
2) You set attention check questions that, when you fail, exclude a respondent
3) A respondent is also excluded for certain patterns of answers e.g. answering the same for all questions or sometimes for giving contradictory answers
4) The respondent is rated on their response quality, and they will lose reputation points (and potentially future employment opportunities) for giving an inaccurate response
You can apply these criteria more or less rigorously, but I’d assume that the study designers followed standard practice (see this doc), at least.
I’m not claiming that MTurk is a very good way of getting humans to respond attentively, of course. There are lots of studies looking at error rates: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.04459.pdf and there are obvious issues with exclusively looking at a population of ‘professional survey respondents’ for any given question.
So I’m not exactly sure how this survey causes me to update. Perhaps especially because they’re slightly rushing the answers, it’s genuinely interesting that so many people choose to respond to the (perceived) moderate complexity task (which they assume is: “calculate 110 − 100″), rather than either the simple task: “write out the number 5”.
“What is the empirical evidence for decomposition being a technique that improves forecasts?”
I might be misunderstanding here, but I’m fairly confident that the recent history of predicting sports outcomes and developing live betting odds very strongly supports decomposition as a technique (under some conditions).
It seems like the only rational way of predicting the outcome of a multi-stage sports event (like the FIFA World Cup, for example) is decomposing the chances of a team winning the World Cup into the chances of them winning each previous game. (And then adding a K-factor to adjust to recent results).
American capitalism “stealing” food is usually a process of lower-income, unskilled migrants moving to a country and adapting their cuisines to American tastes/ ingredients, which explains the wave of Italian (historically), Chinese, Mexican, Thai and Indian places far better than the quality of their respective cuisines. Not sure about Korean/ Japanese places (higher income), but (in Europe at least) they’re mostly run by people from Wenzhou, unless they’re high-end, which may be an interesting exception to the rule.
I’d guess you see very few restaurants from countries with low outmigration (East Africa) or higher-income migrants (Northern Europe).
In places in North America where they actually had a significant wave of French migrants, like Quebec, you see a lot of French cuisine.
This wouldn’t explain the “German restaurant phenomenon” you identify, but I think you’ll need some more evidence to back that up. I tried to get an estimate of this disparity by googling a few US cities, like: “chicago “german restaurant”“ and “chicago “French restaurant””. There seem to be 4 times as many results for French.
I’ll hazard a guess that there are more French restaurants in the US than restaurants of any other European cuisine except Italian.
A few points:
Europeans denigrate the American food they are exposed to, which is the “unsophisticated” stuff that they import the most of. It would be weird if they spent their time ripping into gumbo and fried rattlesnake.
Regular consumers of McDonalds in Europe are not the same people who also denigrate American food. The people who denigrate American cuisine are usually also a little sneering towards domestic consumers of McD.
Many consumers (in US and Europe) see McD cuisine as an inferior product, but it has obvious benefits beyond taste (convenience/ speed/ child-friendliness/ toilets/ wi-fi).
I was pretty surprised that Peru was so low, as I assumed it was generally recognised as an excellent cuisine. But a lot of the ordering seems to match my understanding of the world, so something strange must be going on with Peru.
It probably has to do with the sample “people who have tried the cuisine in that country”, but don’t know why that would apply to Peru. It would make sense that, say, Saudi/ Emirati cuisine are under-rated, as the majority of visitors probably just grab an overpriced meal at the airport or in a mall during a stopover.
Only China and Thailand have it lower than America, and I am guessing that opinion is mostly not about the food.
Small comment- I’m sure it is mostly about the food. Almost every time I’ve tried Indian cuisine with Chinese people, they make the same comments about the unfamiliar and strange spices.
The perceptions of hygiene/ racism might play a small role, but Chinese people do enjoy some Indian snacks (you get Manda Roti at some tourist locations), so it seems much more parsimonious to me that it’s mostly about the flavours.
20% of Gen Z Americans seem to identify as LGBT, so increasing LGBT rates could explain a lot of the variance- especially for women (where there’s less variance to explain and more LGBT). Correction: (But it does seem that the B (57%) is more common than the LGT (https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx), which might make it less explanatory—but there could be a reasonable proportion of bi young people avoiding hetero relationships).
Thanks for the positivity! Much appreciated.
I think the counterargument to your “added complexity” point would be that this complexity might be a good thing (returning to the ‘theatre/ fun’ point and the ‘mental practice’ point in the piece), so I would only consider it a cost if you’re trying to simplify your social interactions. I personally tell the truth almost all the time now, but this is partly just out of laziness- I struggle to harness the energy or creativity to weave and maintain interesting webs of deception (it was both easier and more fun to lie when I travelled more and didn’t have a full-time job). On the other hand, I also suspect that it’s mentally more difficult to be radically honest than to lean towards the ‘mostly honest’ part of the spectrum of honesty/ dishonesty.
I’m not sure if people who lie are more likely to believe falsehoods, actually. It seems plausible that liars could be better at detecting deception.
I deliberately wanted to avoid the ‘truly adverserial cases’ here- I find that the debate around honesty is too closely anchored to the premise that ‘lying is always bad’ (but what about the murderer at the door?) and I wanted to make the case there might be rational and fairly obvious reasons to lie.
Having said that, I do think honesty norms are generally good, especially with colleagues, close friends and partners- I’m probably more honest than the default in my culture, and would bring a child up with fairly strong honesty norms, at least until they were old enough to weigh up the trade-offs themselves.
But I also think that, when people lie, they should do so with a sense of playfulness, which probably inspired the tone for the post.
Not sure what your point is here...
I think your intuitions are generally correct, and as I say, it’s usually a good heuristic to avoid overly processed food. In the absence of other evidence, if you’re in a food market where everything is edible, you should probably opt for the less processed option. I also don’t disagree with it playing a role in national health guidelines.
But it’s a very imprecise heuristic, and I think LessWrong-ers with aspirations to understand the world more accurately should feel a bit uncomfortable with it, especially when benign and beneficial processes are lumped together with those with much clearer mechanisms for harm.