I don’t really get EA at an emotional level and this post helps give someone like me an… emotional intuition pump?… in a way that other EA posts do not do for me. I think it’s good that it is at the level of abstraction it is at.
Maxwell Peterson
Karma: 909
How long does it take to become Gaussian?
Activated Charcoal for Hangover Prevention: Way more than you wanted to know
The central limit theorem in terms of convolutions
Convolution as smoothing
“model scores” is a questionable concept
Examples of Measures
Finding the Central Limit Theorem in Bayes’ rule
An analysis of the Less Wrong D&D.Sci 4th Edition game
Frequentist practice incorporates prior information all the time
Netflix’s “Start-Up” and sincere work dramatization
Totally agree! I stumbled upon the SMTM link 6 months ago or so and it was a big view-changer for me. I’d previously thought calories-in-calories-out was the main thing to be focusing on but, uh, yeah, I was super wrong.
I do think you’re too critical of the high-palatability theory. The SMTM page finds the theory reasonable:
“Palatable human food is the most effective way to cause a normal rat to spontaneously overeat and become obese,” says neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet in The Hungry Brain, “and its fattening effect cannot be attributed solely to its fat or sugar content.”
Rodents eating diets that are only high in fat or only high in carbohydrates don’t gain nearly as much weight as rodents eating the cafeteria diet. And this isn’t limited to lab rats. Raccoons and monkeys quickly grow fat on human food as well.
We see a similar pattern of results in humans. With access to lots of calorie-dense, tasty foods, people reliably overeat and rapidly gain weight. But again, it’s not just the contents. For some reason, eating more fat or sugar by itself isn’t as fattening as the cafeteria diet. Why is “palatable human food” so much worse for your waistline than its fat and sugar alone would suggest?
So I wouldn’t call the SMTM link evidence that obesity being partially caused by high-palatability foods is obviously wrong. The gluttony theory of, like, self-control being the main important thing, or calories-in-calories-out being the main thing, I do think is obviously wrong; but I personally see the high-palatability theory as very different than the gluttony theory.
Cheap Model → Big Model design
A quibble: Amazon’s resume evaluator discriminated against women who went to women’s colleges, or were in women’s clubs. This is different from discriminating against women in general! I feel like this is an important difference. Women’s colleges, in particular, are not very high-rated, among all colleges. Knowing someone went to a women’s college means you also know they didn’t go to MIT, or Berkeley, or any of the many good state universities. I brought this up to a female friend who went to Columbia; she said Columbia had a women’s college, but that it was a bit of a meme at broader Columbia, for not being a very good school. Googling a bit now, I find there are either 31 or “less than 50” women’s colleges in the US, and that many are liberal arts colleges. If “women’s college” is a proxy variable for “liberal arts college”, that’s a good reason to ding people for listing a women’s college. Most women do not go to women’s colleges! And I’d bet almost none of the best STEM women went to a women’s college.
A prediction: if they included an explicit gender variable in the resume predictor, a candidate being female would carry much less of a penalty (if there was even a penalty) than a candidate having gone to a women’s college.
Another “prediction”, although it’s pushing the term “prediction”, since it can’t be evaluated: in a world where there were less than 50 men’s colleges in the US, and most were liberal arts, that world’s Amazon resume rater would penalize having gone to a men’s college.
Even at thirty years old I cannot handle getting up early; I rarely wake before nine-thirty. A year ago I briefly had to be awake at six-thirty for work. I felt terrible all day and could not think straight.
I’m 30 too and have struggled with this since forever and just started a month ago taking melatonin at 5pm as suggested on SlateStarCodex’s melatonin guide. I often wake up without an alarm now at 8:30a or so, but more strikingly, no longer feel tired until mid-afternoon like I used to.
Probably you have heard this already and possibly you are annoyed to hear it again but this part of the post was too familiar to me to not say anything!
Towards trying to feel consistently energized
[Question] For reducing caffeine dependence, does daily maximum matter more, or does total daily intake matter more?
I appreciated your comment on my post earlier today! Don’t leave!
I think the poker example is OK, and paragraphs like
“The second decision point was when the flop was dealt and you faced a bet. This time you decided to fold. Maybe that wasn’t the best play though. Maybe you should have called. Maybe you should have raised. Again, the goal of hand review is to figure this out.”
made sense to me. But the terminology in the dialogue was very tough: button, Rainbow, LAGgy, bdfs, AX, nut flush, nitty—I understood none of these. (I’ve played poker now and then, but never studied it). So keeping the example but translating it a bit further to more widely-used language (if possible) might be good.
YESSSSSSSSSS