I’ve paid the 3 dollars because it is such a small amount. The marvelously awful Harry Potter puns alone made it a bargain.
Kutta
Karma: 1,512
Begin with movement. Excitement. Humor. Surprise. Insight. Explosions.
I know I am a total nitpicker here but I think there is such a thing as too short a sentence.
A popular answer to that nowadays is something like “creativity”.
You can draw a lot of motivation from peer pressure; the trick is to expose yourself to specific kinds of peer pressure that propel you towards some desirable goal.
In regards to art, once I made a considerable effort to like extreme metal, because a respected art-geek friend recommended me to do so. He’s a professional poker player with little to no social engagement in art circles, and thus his tastes have remarkably social-pressure-free origins. I figured that’d make his social pressure on me more valuable. Currently, on reflection, I believe that some extreme metal is extremely good, and I also enjoy such music immensely, and the fact that I could manage to reach this state only via peer pressure doesn’t matter that much.
“Try to minimize information cascades regarding art recommendations” seems to be a good heuristic in general. Another would be: “value the recommendations of people who have complex boundaries of liked-disliked art”. Someone who likes some classical music, but not most, and also likes some extreme metal, but not most, maybe considers the actual music more carefully than someone who likes most music from one genre but completely dismisses certain other genres.
The points overestimating complexity (especially point 1) about brain proteins) seem to be attempts to reduce high-level complexity to low-level complexity instead of low-level simplicity.
You want to destroy PhilGoetz’s life?
OP argued that self-deception occurs even if your brain remains unbroken. I would characterize “not breaking my brain” as allowing my prior belief about the book’s biasedness to make a difference in my posterior confidence of the book’s thesis. In that case the book might be arbitrarily convincing; but I might start with an arbitrarily high confidence that the book is biased, and then it boils down to an ordinary Bayesian tug o’ war, and Yvain’s comment applies.
On the other hand, I’d view a brain-breaking book as a “press X to self-modify to devout Y-believer” button. If I know the book is such, I decide not to read it. If I’m ignorant of the book’s nature, and I read it, then I’m screwed.
I stopped eating wheat two years ago (no relapse since then). I’ve found that the following technique makes the switch tremendously easier:
Eat a cup of whipping cream before meals.
Explanation: the easiest way to make wheat-craving go away is to already consume enough calories without wheat; I suspect that much of wheat-craving is the result of overestimating the caloric value of a wheat-free diet. Also, low-carbers often has to push themselves to eat slightly more than what they’d otherwise eat because they tend to be more sated than what is common among high-carb people. Moreover, a barrier to major diet change is that time expenditure on food preparation and purchase will inevitably go up for a while after a change. People with scarce free time fall back to old diet patterns because they often find themselves urgently needing calories and grab whatever is most convenient.
Whipping cream is cheap, very dense in high-quality calories, contains almost no health-controversial nutrients, it is very filling, packed in easily measurable and quantifiable units, reasonably palatable (especially if you make an effort to seek out the tastiest available one) and requires zero preparation. Three 175 g cups of 20% fat whipping cream is roughly 1000 calories, which could easily crowd out wheat urges. Even if you dislike the idea of eating whipping cream by the spoon in the long term, it is perfectly able to help you bridge the critical newly wheat-free period, in which period you gradually grow accustomed enough to your new diet so that you can eat diet-compliant sophisticated foods without a significant hit on free time.
Did you click on the listen icons on the right side, those that activate the Hungarian parser? I’m Hungarian and Google’s “Erdős” and “Szilárd” are basically indistinguishable from common speech versions, while “Csíkszentmihályi” has only one minor flaw, namely that it leaves a bit too much space between Csík and szent.
I’d also like to do some service in favor of poor Csíkszentmihályi.
Approximations by Google Translate (click on the “listen” icon on the right):
Modus Tollens (Latin) Modus Ponens (Latin) Hofstadter (German) Jaynes (English) Deutsch (German)
I’m quite impressed by the quality of Google Translate; the pronunciations match well what I envision based on my modest Latin and German knowledge.
I’m not sure about “Parfit”’s linguistic origins. As a random shot at it, here is a French version with silent “t”.
… and then it segues into a full-blown recap episode, the kind that betimes makes anime audiences scream with anguish.
No wonder wizards have been pulling off international cooperation since the dark ages!
I always imagined that wizards are pretty much detached from the muggle world and their technological level and standards of living have been roughly constant for at least hundreds of years. And meanwhile their level of societal organization progressed gradually.
UTC+2
Deus Ex: A Deepness In The Methods Of Rationality
Sounds fun...
If you have some basic understanding of how physics works, then the heating of the plate’s wrong side should strike you as extremely inplausible—a lot more so than hypotheses about deliberate manipulation of experiment settings. A physical theory should be some kind of quantitative guide about updating probablities, and being such it should be able to give you very low probabilites for a class of hypotheses. The teacher’s trick drew attention to the fact that the students markedly did not use physics to generate quantitative answers. So, per my reading, the focal point of the experiment wasn’t suspending trust in people.
Agreed; I’d personally like if a planned schedule for major grants was disclosed regularly, maybe annually.
Anyway, I donated 500 USD.
Paleo
I’m a pseudo-paleo dieter since 2009. Outlining my diet considerations in a nutshell:
There is a tangled hierarchy of data when it comes to nutrition. On the top there are the large-scale longitudinal epidemological studies, which tell us about health effects directly; however, they are by far most prone to bias. Then come smaller clinic trials and placebo controlled studies, and after that are “dietary arguments”, like paleo. Higher tier data can disprove lower tier data, but because analysis of higher tier data is often very biased (see e.g. Campbell’s take on the China study), we have to reach back to more trustworthy lower tier data to filter out absurd results (e.g. if a small clinic study finds that substance X is toxic in specific ways in dose Y, then we’re compelled to question a longitudinal study’s result that prolonged consumption of X in dose ~Y correlates with longer lifespan.).
As to the paleo argument, a stronger version of it posits that a diet is optimal if it closely resembles the diet that was consumed for the longest evolutionary time.
I mostly reject this argument.
First, there are “new” foods that happen to be okay because their specific composition and nutritional profile contains nothing obviously harmful. Take butter: it is just a mixture of fatty acids which mixture doesn’t fundamentally differ from actual animal fat. Take oat: it is grain that happens to be okay because its proteins are positively harmless compared to wheat’s gluten and lectin, the former inducing inflammation and possibly leaky gut and the latter messing up one’s fat metabolism (plus there are phytates that demineralize teeth and make minerals from food biologically unavailable). Arguments for irreducibility of diet (for example: “whole pieces of food and whole diets have effects irreducible to the effects of constituents”) sometimes apply but more often does not; a specific fatty acid in butter or tallow is just the same thing, for instance. If a food has benign constituents that are known to interact in non-harmful ways, it really is a strong indicator that that food is benign.
Second, evolutionary pressure is not constant, and it was most likely much greater in the 10k years since agriculture than in the 10k years before it. This is of course in the same class of arguments as paleo itself; you cannot just consider yourself fully evolved to deal with whatever food; you have to also discount this argument with the prior information you have.
I accept though a Weak Paleo Heuristic: “closely scrutinize foods that are literally evolutionarily unprecedented in terms of types of constituent macronutrients or the ratios and amounts of those nutritients”. This heuristic aims a lot more specifically at industrial, 20th century foods than the standard paleo argument. It picks out trans fat, vegetable oil and refined sugar, which are indeed rather bad. It ignores wheat though, and wheat’s significant disadvantages are as of now quite clearly and forcefully established (see e.g. this).
I singled out the types of foods to my diet that are least likely to be harmful or lifespan-reducing. I kept eggs, high-fat dairy, most meats and fish, coconut oil, cocoa, oat, vegetables, most fruits except for the very very sugary ones, and kept some benign starchy food in moderated amounts, like lentils, peas and potatoes, and I occasionally eat rice. I minimized (eliminated when possible) wheat, simple sugar and n-6 fatty acids.. I’m also on a carefully constructed regimen of supplements, of which the most important are probably Vitamin D3 and fish oil, the others being only of interest to life extension aficionados.
My interpretation of this data is that my current diet works well for me
Do you have a comprehensive blood test? If you only have a subjective account of your well-being, that is extremely limited data. A lot of humans get by subjectively well on bad food until their late 40s, when they rapidly start deteriorating. A lot of sneaky deficiencies and disorders can be discovered with a simple blood test, and it also allows you to make a reasonably good estimate of your cardiovascular risks, although the interpretation of blood lipids is also prone to great amount of bullcrap as of now (e.g. last time I got a warning on my total cholesterol because my HDL was too high).
My personal subjective well-being did not radically change when I switched to my pseudo-paleo. My blood profile is hard data however: I have gone to a risk level lower than the 5th percentile. If you want to optimize well-being, you should still at least try some diet modifications. Wheat elimination and Vitamin D supplementation (2000-5000 IU per day on average, optimal amount is calibrated with blood testing) are the two single modifications that are most often reported having dramatic effects.
Yes, hunter-gatherers are adapted to a different diet, but fire was first used to cook food 2 million years ago, and appears widespread by 100 kiloyears (ky) ago, with noticeable adaptations in humans (from smaller teeth to resistance to air pollution). Lactose tolerance demonstrates the ability of human biology to adapt to new diets. (...) Am I really supposed to believe that there aren’t genes floating around that wheat (domesticated 10ky ago) is good for?
To reiterate my point about dietary arguments, this is the sort of thing you usually cannot do with evolutionary arguments. The most what you said here should do is to slightly reduce the amount of plausible harm done by agricultural (not industrial!) foods.
I’d personally welcome if there was a way to pay for your fiction.
I praise Yvain for this.