Is there any 80,000/CFAR statement on Trump or are you just talking about the personal writings of individual people who happen to work in these organizations?
(Also, did you consistently think it was wrong for them to fervently espouse the AI-as-existential risk narrative?)
Perhaps that’s also a reason, but the role of insulin / leptin resistance in causing hunger pangs (contractions of the stomach) in situations when additional food is not actually required is pretty well established.
You’re missing the fact that tightly controlled feedback mechanisms govern appetite. That’s what allows maintaining weight in the real world. Magically add 20lbs (or an apple a day) to a healthy person and they’ll feel correspondingly less hungry.
impact on how much calories people spend simply moving their own bodies
Actually, it’s mostly going to be the metabolism of the tissue (extra fat tissue needs flood flow, temperature regulation, energy for cellular processes etc too), and that can be significant, although not as much as hunger regulation.
Yes, that is the ideal, and it’s true that the three consequences you mention are positive consequences (Assuming more effort makes you more likely to arrive at correct answers, which it usually does although I imagine there are diminishing returns past a certain point—you might notice a lot of very smart people putting a lot of effort into politics and still disagreeing.)
The thing is you must weigh information-gathering and evaluation concerning GMOs against every other possible action you could take with those resources.
Let’s focus on the goal which most plausibly requires understanding GMO
for my personal health and safety
Well, let me tell you how i went about researching my personal health and safety:
I researched which foods to eat in general (My conclusions—eat mostly vegetables, meat (try for organ meats and fish), fruits with an overall high fat, low carbohydrate macro-nutrient ratio, avoid vegetable/seed oil, grains. So, in one word, paleolithic. These conclusions are very controversial and I suspect I put in way more effort into researching it than was rationally justified.)
I researched the best way to exercise and learned the techniques (Conclusions: You need to run occasionally and you need to fain flexibility and technique for basic barbell exercises: squat, row, bench, overhead press, etc. I am pretty happy about the time I invested into researching these.)
I’ve put moderate effort into researching basic pesticide avoidance (there are lists of highest pesticide foods you can avoid buying), ethical meat sourcing, and ecologically sustainable fish sourcing. Ultimately I’ve put very little effort into this relative to the first two.)
I’ve skimmed examine.com for potentially helpful supplements (Conclusions: Fish oil, Vit D, Vit K2magnesium (ZMA, don’t use MgO it’s not bioavailable. I probably spent too much time on this.)
GMOs are pretty far down on this list of things which I think are probably important. I haven’t really gotten to them yet.
Do you see where the prioritization issue comes in here? And that’s when your personal health is the main goal. The chance that GMO is high on the priority list in the genre of public dietary health, is in my mind, pretty minuscule. If you narrow your specialization to “regulatory mechanisms concerning food”, then it’ll be worth studying GMOs as one of the branches in your knowledge tree, but probably not before you’ve studied broad stuff about regulatory mechanisms first. (as I understand it, GMOs are not a monolithic thing so it’s more interesting to study start with general stuff about how innovations in food are handled, etc).
You don’t necessarily need to agree with me about prioritization, but you should spend some time thinking about prioritization.
I suppose I ascribe a relatively high weight to “understand things” in my utility function
Of course, we all do. But there is a whole world of things, so, which things, and why? Information due to purely Intrinsic interest is malleable
yes.
We don’t want “are you rich, do you smoke” because the selection effect (we are rich because we were born upper middle class, and we’re not powerful because powerful people have better things to do than explore the internet until they land on odd forums).
Otherwise the value of an idea is judged by the types of people who happen to stumble upon them.
What we want is “After being exposed to the ideas, did you get richer”, “did you quite smoking”, etc. Before after.
why aren’t they leveraging their high IQs
IQ is just another selection effect confound to control for. Priors say there is absolutely no way rationality training will alter your IQ (and besides the IQ data is mostly from standardized test scores taken in high school anyhow) If high IQ people land up here that just means high IQ people crawl the internet more and stick around more.
First: check whether the issue is really important: With some exceptions (voting correctly, believing the correct afterlife and not getting sent to hell) If you aren’t in a position to interact with the evidence it’s probably not something you meaningfully have control over. (Most things for which it is important for you to personally understand have measurable consequences to you. Why do you need the right answer to the GMO question, what would you even do with the right answer?).
Then:
-Figure out exactly what the claims really are and try not to conflate different claims (GMOs will do what, exactly?)
-Consider the possibility that the entire premise is silly (“Is God one or trinity?” “Is she a witch?”) and the “consensus” is just wrong and the debate is insane. Generate some plausible third options.
-Check if the two hypotheses seem by your perception to be of roughly equal parsimony, internal logical consistency, and compliance with known evidence, and also check the third options you generated.
-Ask the basic “so, what evidence would you need to tell the difference” questions.
-all the things you mentioned (weigh expert opinions, eliminate bad arguments, eliminate experts who use bad arguments)
-look for concrete predictable things in that area, and adjacent to that area which differ according to the two hypotheses.
-If it’s a political issue, try to find out what people who might plausibly be expertish in the area yet don’t seem to be invested in debating the issue think about it.
-check what known superforcasters in the field think (people who have a track record of successful predictions in that area). Superforecasters need not actually be loudly engaging with the issue, just ask.
-check if people who have different types of knowledge tend to say different things (e.g. economists vs. sociologists)
-What sorts of knowledge would you need to have to answer the question vs. what sorts of knowledge do the experts in question actually have? (You might think medical doctors are qualified to talk about the effectiveness and safety of various treatments, for example, but they aren’t. You want a medical researcher for that. The only difference between a medical doctor and a witch doctor is that one was trained by a curriculum developed by medical researchers and the other wasn’t.)
-check for founder effects or cultural effects biasing beliefs (Again, economists vs sociologists. Also, if theologians believe in god at higher rate than biologists it might not be because of different knowledge)
What else? I mean it’s a big question, you’ve asked after a fairly big chunk of “rationality” there.
Do you have an opinion concerning whether this is better characterized as “non-response to the benefits of exercise due to pathology” vs. “immunity to the harmful effects of a sedentary lifestyle”?
Basically, is being a non-responder good or bad? Eyeballing that graph it does look like untrained non-responders might be a bit fitter than responders—but of course the first thing we should assume is ceiling effect.
(And of course there’s many 3rd options—orchid/dandelion trade offs and such)
Agreed.
(By the way, I never was suggesting that religion caused people to not desire earthly longevity. I was saying that the fact that nearly all human religions often feature immorality suggest that nearly all humans find it difficult to understand and accept true-death and wish for immortality on some level.
Furthermore I was saying that if someone happily believes in an afterlife, we should probably count them as desiring immortality even if they claim to desire an earthly death. I’m disagreeing with the idea that we should take claims of wishing to die at face value—I think that most who would turn down an eternal life (assuming good health, companionship, purpose, and so on) are either mistaken about what they prefer, or mistaken about the universe.
With many exceptions, of course.)
http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/07/who-wants-to-live-forever.html
Desire to live indefinitely is not that uncommon in the general population in the first place, this is a transhumanist forum so there is a self-selection effect from the outset (LWers beliefs about AI are way weirder than the immortality thing), and almost every single person here has been exposed to explicit arguments for wanting immortality, moreover, in a setting where not wanting immortality is low status. Isn’t this kind of like asking why church members are more likely to believe in God?
While that might be true, I don’t think that people on LW are radically different on that count.
Yes, neither do I. I’m not even personally different on that count. Aside from the forum-specific ideologies, Lesswrongers being unusual is a more extreme case of internet forum users being unusual, which is in turn a more extreme case of extremely literate people being unusual, and so on.
Is belief in the supernatural (crystal healing, ghosts, “something higher”, that sort of thing) actually lower? I’d be very surprised if this turned out to be a cultural or demographic thing, rather than a human thing. I think that, absent some sort of active cultural intervention preventing it, a psychologically typical human will believe in spirits and magic. I know I would.
I think atheists, being psychologically typical humans, still retain certain implicit beliefs about this sort of thing. Ideas about how our matter goes on to circulate through the ecosystem, or the notion that we’re all made of star-stuff and are generally one with the universe, are powerful and comforting to many.
The embrace of impermanence is so often accomplished by manufacturing a different sort of permanence to cling to.
Yeah, in general, I’m sure part of it is that humans can’t easily conceptualize true death in the first place (but that’s even further grounds for not taking them seriously when they say they want to die). Just like part of it is our instinctive animism/anthropomorphism. I certainly don’t want to minimize the role of “cognitive illusions” in the whole thing.
But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these beliefs depict the universe as fairly utopian—the afterlife often resolves misunderstandings, rebalances moral scales, makes room for further growth… and earthly suffering is generally given higher purpose. Remember—a true human utopia doesn’t give its members all they think they desire, or eliminate the sort of suffering which serves a deeper human value, fiction is replete with failed utopias along those lines. Despite all the terrible things, we could be in a utopia right now if only we have sufficiently optimistic beliefs about what happens outside the narrow window of our worldly experiences. Is it a coincidence that religions often have precisely these optimistic beliefs?
Anyway, I doubt you need to get into “what does the mouse expect” to explain that particular result: Very young children also lack the theory of mind to understand that not everyone has the same information as they do. If the mouse had simply left the room and the alligator ate the mouse’s friend squirrel, they might say the mouse was sad and angry (not realizing that the mouse was gone from the room and wouldn’t know about what the alligator did).
.
I disagree with the idea that the desire to die is normal for humans.
The vast majority of humanity, spanning hunter-gatherers to information economy techies, believe in some form of consciousness which continues after the physical body as passed away. They believe this to the point that, if you disabuse them of this notion, they’ll enter a spiritual crisis and begin to feel that life is meaningless. The older people get, the more enthusiastically they believe this.
If the collective fantasy common to our entire species doesn’t reflect an extremely powerful human wish to live longer than we currently do, I don’t know what does.
When the average person says they want to die at 80, what they really mean that they want to leave this world for another at 80. They don’t want to continue things as they are, or re-live their youth—they want to move on to a different sort of existence.
But practically speaking, I think you might be right that getting someone interested in something worldly would encourage them to stay on in this world longer, and in the end that might be better than trying to explain that death means really death (once we actually have the option to stop true death which doesn’t seem like a long shot, which realistically we really don’t yet).
I’d speculate that if you did an identical breeding experiment with octopuses (as in, the breeding criteria of non-aggressively interaction with human hand) you’d breed for curious, bold, or playful octopuses which tend to approach novel stimuli … but not friendly in the sense of affectionate.
It’s not that they’re asocial, I think they sometimes lay eggs cooperatively and obviously seek each other out for mating… but primarily octopuses see others of their species as predators or prey. (I mean, cats do eat each other but only in bounded contexts, like infanticide, not hunting.)
Your culture is bounded by lexography, not geography
and it simultaneously attracts and bestows the various qualities that it has defined as “intelligence”.
Bulletproof vests have anecdotally saved police officers from car accidents as well.
Seems like the sort of thing you might successfully convince new teen drivers to do despite the weird factor (since they’re the highest risk demographic).
Edit: If the hats aren’t extremely uncomfortable, might also be good fall protection for the elderly...
Of course, I live on the great lakes and my family eats a lots of fish… It probably doesn’t matter for me but not sure what to feed my little sister now, especially considering what you said about half-life. Attempts at guidelines keep waving around “moderation” in response to mixed messages from research, but even if by coincidence the effects are ∩ shaped and not linear I doubt vague ideas about moderation are going to hit approximately optimal.
Cross fingers and hope the good list is accurate, I guess?
Blah. My current fish information factored in mercury but not PCB. I’ve been thinking atlantic salmon was fine. Now googling “PCB mercury”. Is the first result pretty much accurate or is there more to the story? (And any estimates for the magnitude of effect / whether it is worth worrying about?)
There’s a large class of viable pharmaceuticals which don’t see the light of day because their unpatentability causes companies not to fund the clinical trials which would be necessary to clear regulatory approval.