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
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.
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!
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.
I think this is great—the monetary incentive yesterday inspired me to write a new post and post a draft from a year ago, and tonight inspired me to write a post I’ve had in my head for months. (In the spirit of Goodhart’s Law, I’m waiting till 2:01am CST to post it, so that it will show up in the list of Sunday posts). Cheers!
Very very good. The full power of science fiction—taking the concept of the redaction machines and finding this many interesting consequences of them, and fitting them into the story—really good
You don’t need to call tails to explore whether tails is possible, though—the information gain of a coin flip is the same whether you call heads or tails
This was excellent. Got goosebumps multiple times while reading. Also, starting, blindly sure it was a real story, then realizing in the middle that it was fiction, gave an odd interesting feeling I’m not sure I’ve had before.
Edit: and just realized that the step of accepting Sarah as real mirrors the child protagonist’s realization at the beginning that other people are real. Arrrgh that’s so cool
Downvoted: I think there should be more to this comment. Currently it just reads as “the author is ignorant”. If the post is wrong, which parts? Maybe the author is ignorant! But I think you should make that case more fully. Not saying you need to write a counter-essay or anything, but from your comment, I can’t even tell what you disagree with.
One thing I like about LessWrong is that it’s a place where people who don’t work in a particular domain can post their reasoning about a topic, and whether or not their post is good or bad is judged on its merits, not on whether or not they have domain experience.
(At the object level: I remember early on my friend arguing to me that new variants couldn’t be more deadly, because “more deadly means less contagious”. So I think the author of this post is arguing against a real misconception, and I generally agree with the post).
I wasn’t going to buy it, but this post and the comments here convinced me to. Just finished the audiobook and I really liked it! In particular, packaging all the ideas, many of which are in The Sequences, into one thing called “scout mindset”, feels really useful in how I frame my own goals for how I think and act. Previously I had had injunctions like “value truth above all” kicking around in my head, but that particular injunction always felt a bit uncomfortable—“truth above all” brought to mind someone who nitpicks passing comments in chill social situations, and so on. The goal “Embody scout mindset” feels much more right as a guiding principle for me to live by.
Yup, I aim to sleep around 11:30p or midnight . The guide has “Take melatonin 9 hours after wake and 7 before sleep, eg 5 PM”, so I just went with that.
I am 3 chapters into Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis. The text is good (and available free & legitimately from that link), but where this book really shines for me so far are the problems. They are excellent, and have you using a programming languge of your choice to do computational statistics by chapter 2. I already have ideas on ways I can use the concepts at work. I had previously read through Jaynes’s Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, and I love it and it changed the way I think, but for practical value, Bayesian Data Analysis wins.
I think this is a clever and interesting application of GPT. I’ve downvoted the post. Blunting feeling by filtering it through a robot is… nasty. I’m most opposed to the idea that this should be implemented on the receiver’s side. A machine to shield cheating partners from having to read a “fuck you” is a negative; I don’t want it in the world.
An implementation that only allows optional translations on the sender’s side is better, but still not something I like; RamblinDash’s comment covers the issues there well.
You quote Guyenet quoting a Brian Wansink study. Wansink studies probably shouldn’t be taken as evidence for much, as he resigned in 2018 after a scientific misconduct investigation against him. I’m just sort of skimming this post and this one but apparently people found 150 mistakes across just 4 of his papers? And some of his published effect sizes are absurd, e.g. “You have a messy kitchen, a cluttered desk, you end up eating 44 percent more snacks than if the same kitchen is clear”, and “[Women who have visible cereal boxes in their kitchen are] about 21 pounds heavier than the neighbor next door that doesn’t have any cereal visible at all.”
The quoted effect sizes sound waaay too big, so seeing them along with the misconduct investigation and resignation makes me feel like the Hershey’s Kiss study of his (that Guyenet quotes) would not replicate.
Love this post! So linear and so many examples made it so easy to read! Also I was vaguely annoyed at the term Outside View but didn’t know why or whether I was right or anything? This expansion of it into parts makes a lot of sense.
I like this idea, selfishly, having two posts in the frontpage-[0-50]-uncommented category last week myself.
Love this! Definitely belongs on LessWrong. High-quality sci-fi, that relates to social dynamics? Very relevant! I’ve been away from the site for a while, tiring of the content, but am glad I scrolled and saw this today.
YESSSSSSSSSS