Shouldn’t you ask when the respondent thinks the Singularity will occur before mentioning the year 2100, to avoid anchoring?
jferguson
- 9 Dec 2011 20:36 UTC; 6 points) 's comment on [POLL] Year survey by (
What are some examples of plausible (not necessarily likely or expected) experiences that would lower your degree of belief in your religion?
Websites about atheism are a different group of people than websites about rationality. There’s overlap, to be sure, but the people who are “passionate” about being irreligious don’t tend to gravitate here; my view of a typical LWer is that they may go through a phase of thinking lack of religion is worth spending a lot of time discussing, but then they move past it because it’s not a very difficult question. LWers talk about their atheism, but usually only when provoked.
I strongly disagree with this interpretation of those overfeeding studies. From what I can tell (though I couldn’t access every study SMTM cites), “overfeeding” is usually defined relative to the output of one of the typical BMR/TDEE estimation formulas given a person’s parameters, not based on actual measurement of a subject’s TDEE. Those formulas are fine for a baseline guess, but even the most accurate ones are going to be substantially off in either direction for a fair number of people! Some of the difference is unaccounted-for NEAT, some of it is differences in absorption efficiency, some of it is probably other factors we don’t understand yet. Given the known reality of interpersonal variation in what your actual calories in and out are relative to their naive estimates, some subjects not gaining weight while “overfeeding” is exactly what you’d expect to see.
A fun fact: my estimated “effective TDEE” is (averaged over months) pretty consistently around 3300 cal/day for the past 18 months—rarely more than +/- 100 cal/day off in either direction—whereas the best formula I could find (using my body fat %, as actually-measured by a DEXA scan) says it should be something more like 2600-2800 cal/day. This is based on weighing my body daily and recording the caloric intake from actually-everything I eat, almost always weighing food when necessary rather than coming up with estimates.
Probably not. The methods used to get the desired phenotype are obviously not something that was happening before humans, but the desired phenotypes are pretty much always analogous to something that could have happened without human intervention (resistance to some environmental condition, different nutritional content, etc.), but didn’t because they don’t improve fitness in nature. Genetic engineering is pretty damn impressive, but it’s not magic—drought resistance and increased vitamin A content and those sorts of things have an opportunity cost to the plant (not spending energy on things that would increase the plant’s chances of reproduction in nature), meaning they’re probably going to be less fit than their wild counterpart without human intervention, so those genes are very unlikely to be expressed more in nature. And, if it is something that improves fitness in nature, it was most likely going to happen sooner or later anyway. (That could still be bad, but I’ll wait until I hear specifics before I worry about it.)
One good reason to fear GMOs is that they could promote monoculture to some extent (compared to not using GMOs but still using modern industrial farming), which introduces a big risk of famines, though monoculture was already pretty much the norm before GMOs came around so focusing on GMOs probably isn’t a good way to reduce the risks associated with monoculture. Or, at least as far as I know, though I admit I haven’t studied this very much. That’s my current impression, and I don’t predict I’ll turn out to be wrong.
~55% of natural science college professors believe in some kind of ESP, as do ~35% of psychology college professors.
I can’t really form a coherent response to that.
I would add “writing it down” to the decreasing activation cost list, or at least working it into “Very clear, straightforward instructions”. For me, things generally get done much faster when I put them in my planner, or even just in a text file on my desktop, than when they’re left to float around in my head. Whether that’s because the task is made into clear and straightforward instructions, or because it creates a sense of urgency (“Oh man, it’s written down, I gotta do it”), or just because it exists as a thing in the world rather than an idea, I don’t know, but it’s definitely a result.
Also, this article convinced me to finally stop procrastinating on setting up a LW account after a few months of readership. Hello!
Are these works of psychology and neuroscience really illustrating that human emotion governs decision making?
Yes, they are. It sounds to me like your friend is exactly right. The claim that humans mostly use their subconscious minds in decision-making isn’t controversial.
Could you clarify what you mean by “the Bayesian point of view”? What does your conception of those words in that order have to say about human cognition?
A PSA for those who might like to have less body fat: a number of observational and experimental studies find that the energy density of your diet (as in, calories per gram) is a very, very good predictor of ad libitum caloric intake. I doubt that an increase in the caloric density of our diets fully explains the obesity epidemic—there’s probably something to the “hyperpalatability” idea (though hyperpalatable foods are almost always very energy dense too), habitual nicotine and THC intake trends probably matter, I’d buy that some contaminants even if not lithium are causing people to be hungrier or less physically active, etc etc—but I find it implausible it’s not an important one, and even better, it’s one that you can calculate very easily for most of what you eat and then control with less effort than you’d have to expend for almost any other type of “diet”.
This is consistent with e.g. the potato diet being anecdotally weirdly effective at causing weight loss (~1 cal/gram which is pretty low), and also consistent with most of the generic conventional wisdom around diet like “eat more fruits and veggies and lean meats and less dessert and fast food”, and IMO makes lots of intuitive sense—satiety is complicated, but having a lot of stuff in your stomach is clearly pretty important, so, just put a lot of stuff in your stomach that doesn’t actually have many calories, lol.
Related to this, I assume? (Don’t click that until after you take the survey.)
> A question I have here is, why not try for low calories per litre instead of (or as well as) low calories per gram?
I think calories per gram is usually what people study due to some combination of:
- this is the way somebody chose to measure “energy density” early on and it stuck for whatever reasons things stick
- in cooking and/or conducting experiments, mass is pretty much always easier to measure than volume (even with liquids, in my opinion...)
- we see this metric work pretty well—better than basically any other known single factor, is my impression—to predict satiety response, ad libitum caloric itake, diet adherence, and long-term weight changes in various experiments
I do know of a single-meal study that looked at how volumetric energy density (comparing potato chips vs. popcorn, which have similar energy per mass) predicted ad libitum caloric intake, and found that it does seem to independently matter. I don’t know of any other similar studies, though I won’t claim to be up to date on the literature.
>Plus at some point things leave the stomach and I don’t know what triggers that.
”gastric emptying” is the key term used in studies of this question (I haven’t really studied this myself)
>How does this whole thing work with fluids? Presumably they leave your stomach quite fast, so per-calorie they should contribute less to satiety than solids?
Right, that’s the usual finding. Drinking lots of water before or with meals does seem to promote satiety and lower ad libitum caloric intake, so water itself certainly counts for something, but liquids are generally nowhere near as filling per mass as solid foods, which agrees with the conventional wisdom around not drinking calories.
I predict that the lesson behind this exchange will turn out to be “Don’t argue with people who think consciousness is fundamental”.
I’m not generally one to get over-excited about peoples’ bad reasons for being creationists, but the leap from “Evolution due to natural selection doesn’t provide obvious explanations for every single thing that every living thing ever does or has” to “The King James Version of the Bible as generally remembered and interpreted by Protestants is exactly right” is always staggering when I can tease it out of people explicitly.
As far as non-kinesthetic responses to awful arguments go, I guess I would call it a general feeling of discomfort. Like, “Someone’s brain really just output that series of words, and I’m very upset to live in a universe where that’s the case.” Sort of like the discomfort of watching someone you can’t help who’s in a bad situation.
Long ago, I used to worry about situations where I do awkward things (and was pretty awkward), but then I remembered everybody else is too busy worrying about themselves looking awkward to really care about my awkwardness. I stopped being strongly awkward after that, and of course I’m much happier—it was probably the one “turning point” in my life where I went from anxious/unhappy to calm/happy. (It was at about the age of 12, IIRC)
This sounds exactly like Read It Later. I don’t know what the differences are between the two, but it’s an alternative if you’re looking for something like this. Anyway, my experience with this sort of thing is that I never feel like reading all the momentarily-interesting things I discover when I come back to them later. I think that by putting it off, you place reading about an interesting idea into the “this is something you want to put off for later” mind category and it never gets read, or at least that’s what it felt like in my experience.
Basically, yeah. Intelligence, maturity, realism, various things you’d associate with wisdom.
A lot of us probably just call it akrasia and shrug (me included). I don’t know any convincing reason for eating meat that doesn’t make one immoral by usual modern standards.
Not ironically, there are ancient posts from Elizier and Robin concerning exactly this: “I Don’t Know.” and “You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion”
Kegels may help. Kegels might help everything, really.
The surface of Earth is actually a relatively flat disc accelerating through space “upward” at a rate of 9.8 m/s^2, not a globe. The north pole is at about the center of the disc, while Antarctica is the “pizza crust” on the outside. The rest of the universe is moving and accelerating such that all the observations seen today by amateur astronomers are produced. The true nature of the sun, moon, stars, other planets, etc. is not yet well-understood by science. A conspiracy involving NASA and other space agencies, all astronauts, and probably at least some professional astronomers is a necessary element. I’m pretty confident this isn’t true, much more due to the conspiracy element than the astronomy element, but I don’t immediately dismiss it where I imagine most LW-ers would, so let’s say 1%.
The Flat Earth Society has more on this, if you’re interested. It would probably benefit from a typical, interested LW participant. (This belief isn’t the FES orthodoxy, but it’s heavily based on a spate of discussion I had on the FES forums several years ago.)
Edit: On reflection, 1% is too high. Instead, let’s say “Just the barest inkling more plausible than something immediately and rigorously disprovable with household items and a free rainy afternoon.”