My apologies. I looked for rules, but couldn’t find any.
“If you’ve come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation.” seemed to indicate that this is where I should start.
OrphanWilde
Karma: 2,859
3.) It is painfully and obviously wrong. We don’t burn food, our metabolic processes are vastly different than the measuring techniques used in the lab.
But that doesn’t mean that it can’t also be right.
I put together a spreadsheet because I thought that calories were clearly stupid; I went around online and found formulas for calculating my caloric requirements. I put in my initial weight, and created two columns; one for my measured weight, and one for my predicted weight. And then I tracked everything I ate, over a three month period, as well as my body weight, and (using an electronic scale), my fat percentage.
And, much to my surprise, calorie consumption predicted body weight.
So, even if the assumptions behind calories have some clear holes in them, they nonetheless (for this sample size of one extremely skeptical individual) have at least -some- predictive value.
It is weak evidence, bordering on if not outright in anecdotal, which is why I was careful to indicate that the predictive value is limited. And my body fat percentages probably were not precise—it’s an electronic scale—but they were at least consistent, which was enough for my accuracy purposes. And yes, I measured my weight consistently; I measured once in the morning when I got up for work, once in the evening while preparing for bed, and averaged these values.
I will also add that I follow a relatively well-balanced diet, and wouldn’t expect the results to hold as well if, for example, I consumed significantly fewer carbohydrates.
I started out an extreme skeptic. But I tested the theory instead of rejecting it. Well, to be completely accurate, I rejected it, and mocked some people who held to calories, and then later decided I should test my hypothesis instead of relying strictly on my intuition on how food works, and was entirely taken aback by the results.
As for your link, I’m not arguing for a position I think is a good one; if anything, my bias going into the experiment was expecting it to fail miserable. I’m defending one which I initially opposed, and still think is probably bad, but nonetheless works at least some of the time.
That’s the special relativity interval; it’s used to determine the potential relationships between two events by determining if light could have passed from point 0 to 1 in the time between two events in two (potentially) different locations. It can be considered a lower bound on the amount of time that can pass between two events before they can be considered to be causally related, or an upper bound on the amount of space that separates two events, or, more generally, the boundary relationship between the two.
Or, to be more concise, it’s a boundary test; it’s not describing a fundamental law of the universe, although it can be used to test if the laws of the universe are being followed.
Which leads to the question—what boundary is it testing, and why does that boundary matter?
Strictly speaking, as Eliezer points out, we could do away with time entirely; it doesn’t add much to the equation. I prefer not to, even if it implies even weirder things I haven’t mentioned yet, such as that the particles five minutes from now are in fact completely different particles than the particles now. (Not that it makes any substantive difference; the fifth dimension thing already suggests, even in a normal time framework, we’re constantly exchanging particles with directions we’re only indirectly aware of. And also, all the particles are effectively the same, anyways.)
That aside, within a timeful universe, change must have at least two reference points, and what that boundary is testing is the relationship between two reference points. It doesn’t actually matter what line you use to define those reference points, however.
If you rotated the universe ninety degrees, and used z as your reference line, z would be your special value. If you rotated it forty five degrees, and used zt as your reference line, zt would be your special value. (Any orthogonal directions will do, for these purposes, they don’t have to be orthogonal to the directions as we understand them now.)
Within the theory here, consciousness makes your reference line special, because consciousness is produced by variance in that reference line, and hence must measure change along that reference line. The direction the patterns propagate doesn’t really matter. Z makes as good a line for time as T, which is just as good as ZT, which is just as good as some direction rotated twelve degrees on one plane, seven degrees on the next, and so on.
Which is to say, we make time special, or rather the conditions which led to our existence did.
Not directly, but a proof that gravity propagates through time as easily as through space should go some of the way towards demonstrating that it is a normal spacial dimension, and I’ve considered a test for that -
Gravity should, according to the ideas here, affect objects both in the past, and in the future. So if you have a large enough object to reliably detect its gravitational force, and a mechanism to stop it very suddenly, then, if you position yourself orthogonal to its resting place respective to its line of motion, at the moment the object stops, the center of gravity of its gravitational field should be further behind its line of motion than its current center of mass.
A direct test… I’ll have to ponder that one.
I would suggest leading with a scenario in which this bias is relevant.
I/e, “Bob hates his boss; Bob’s boss is always criticizing employees, and never says anything positive about their performance. Bob’s boss believes the evidence supports this policy, because every time bad performance has been criticized, performance has improved—and every time praise has been offered for good performance, performance has shown no improvement, or sometimes even gotten worse.”
(I recommend you write something better than this, though. This particular example reads like something horrible out of an HR handbook written by an eldritch god who trying to pass as human. Extra eldritch god points for a continuing narrative in which Bob’s boss manages to do everything precisely wrong.)
Aretae—http://aretae.blogspot.com/
I’m reserving judgment on my own participation (as a matter of cultural integration, as I haven’t been here long enough to ascertain the culture or my compatibility thereto), so I’ll refrain from listing my own blog.
I believe that’s what he was trying to address by discussing the “random component”—he omits the opposing nonrandom and controllable component. The only situation I was able to find to match this bias was in the workplace, where working harder can compensate for random components to a limited extent, but not sufficiently to erase variability altogether.
Which I guess is what should be emphasized—the distinction between the random and the nonrandom component, and their apparent convergence.
The effect should continue past the point that gravity arrives from the current position—it will be very minute, as distance in time is related to distance in space by the speed of light (where the C in the interval formula comes from—C in m/s, time in s, very short periods of time are very “far away”), but if I’m correct, and gravity propagates through time as well as space, it should be there.
We stop the object very suddenly because otherwise gravity from the future will counter out gravity from the past—for each position in the past, for an object moving in a straight relativistic line, there will be an equidistant position in the future which balances out the gravity from the position in the past. That is, in your model, imagine that gravity is being emitted from every position the particle moving in the line is at, or was ever at, or ever will be at; at the origin, the total gravitic force exerted on some arbitrary point some distance away is centered at the origin. If the particle stops at the origin, the gravity will be distributed only from the side of the origin the particle passed through.
A second, potentially simpler test to visualize is simply that an object in motion, because some of its gravitic force (from the past and from the future) is consumed by vector mathematics (it’s pulling in orthogonal directions to the point of consideration, and these orthogonal directions cancel out), exhibits less apparent gravitational force on another particle than one at rest. (Respective to the point of measurement.)
Drawing a little picture: . …..................> (A single particle in motion; breaking time into frames for visualization purposes; the first and the last period, being equidistant and with complimentary vectors, cancel out all but the downward force; the same gravitational force is exerted as in the below picture, but some of it cancels itself out)
versus, over the same time frame: . . The second particle configuration should result in greater apparent gravity, because none of the gravity vectors cancel out.
As for interpreting it, imagine that gravity is a particle (this isn’t necessary, indeed, no particles are necessary in this explanation, but it helps to visualize it). Now imagine a particle of mass M1 moving in a stable orbit. The gravitic particles emitted from M will vary in position over time according to the current position of M1, and indeed will take on a wavelike form. According to my model, this wavelike from -is- light; the variations in the positions of the gravitic particles create varying accelerations in particle M2, another mass particle some distance away, resulting in variable acceleration; insufficient or disoriented acceleration on particle M2 will merely result in it moving in a sinelike wave, propagating the motion forward; sufficient acceleration of the proper orientation may give it enough energy to jump to another stable orbit.
There are two remedies: Thinking about the ideas, and reading other people’s thoughts about the ideas.
I generally recommend the former first, followed by the second, followed by the first again—don’t read too much without giving yourself time to think the ideas through for yourself.
My general rule with new ideas is to get the summary first and think it through—my personal goal is to have (at least) one criticism, (at least) one supporting argument, and (at least) one derived idea before I read other people’s thoughts on the matter.
Most people seem to have a problem with #3, egoist or otherwise.
I guess it depends on whether your purpose is to help people, to be seen as helping people (signaling), or to alleviate guilt.
Or fourth option, which I personally espouse, to make your personal living environment as pleasant as possible. Even ineffectual donations can serve this fourth purpose; sometimes supporting values which are important to you is as important as serving those values.
I’m not sure, it seems obvious to me—words have connotations for those familiar with them that go beyond their literal meanings, and I tend to go with the hypothesis that language defines our thought process. (I’d call it cognitive linguistics, because that’s the sensible thing to call it, but I think that somebody else already defined that phrase to refer to something less sensible.)
But I have one caveat. Less biased doesn’t necessarily mean either better or more rational. Our decision making processes aren’t optimized, nor should they be, for laboratory environments.
Suggestion:
I consider tipping to be a part of the expense of dining—bad service bothers me, but not tipping also bothers me, as I don’t feel like I’ve paid for my meal.
So I’ve come up with a compromise with myself, which I think will be helpful for anybody else in the same boat:
If I get bad service, I won’t tip (or tip less, depending on how bad the service is). But I -will- set aside what I -would- have tipped, which will be added to the tip the next time I receive good service.
Double bonus: When I get bad service at very nice restaurants, the waiter at the Steak and Shake I more regularly eat at (it’s my favored place to eat) is going to get an absurdly large tip, which amuses me to no end.
When I was younger, and had gotten seriously into jogging, I tried making it harder by carrying weights. Not being one to bandy about, I took 100 lbs of hand weights for a jog around the block. I got about halfway before I had to sit down, and I could barely walk them back to my house.
A few years and five dozen pounds later, I was -incapable- of jogging, then at my most overweight; I went straight into a high-intensity interval jogging training, and within three weeks had developed shin splints and knee issues (my legs, lungs and heart could do it, if barely; my bones and joints could not keep up), neither of which I’d ever had a problem with before. I had jogged before (and got into incredible shape doing so), and I’m picking it up again since losing forty pounds (by dieting), but I think it’s misleading to suggest that endurance training is always a good idea starting off. Your muscles are one thing, but it’s very easy to strain your bones and joints, which don’t always let you know you’re hurting yourself until it is too late. In my case, it was necessary to lose weight before I could get fit. (No, they’re not the same thing.)
I will also add that losing forty pounds made jogging considerably more pleasant; the last time I picked it up, I had already been in shape. Having tried it both ways, my experience is this: sixty extra pounds on your frame turns an enjoyable activity into torture, and for me at least, resulted in lasting injury. Health benefits don’t matter much if you can’t keep doing it.
I view Romeo’s comments on strength training as an alternate mode to my own path, dieting. And I suspect, based on personal experience, that he’s more correct in his assessment that cardio is something that is best picked up after you’re already started down the road to good health than you are in your belief that it should be the primary focus, provided you’re in poor enough shape to begin with.
And if you disagree, I’ll ask you to repeat my original exercise experiment: Take a hundred pounds with you, and just try to walk around the block, just once. Or try taking 50 lbs of weights with you the next time you jog. Tell me that’s a program you could stick to.
Because most the people I see who push cardio as the best word in fitness have never really been there.
It really puts the difficulty of getting into shape when you’re already seriously overweight into perspective. My arms and shoulders bore the brunt of it, but by the time I got back, every muscle in my legs were screaming, and I had full-body nausea. If it hadn’t been raining out, I probably would have had heat exhaustion to boot.
The point was less about the weights, which I decided later were a horrible idea, and I have no idea what made me think they were a good idea to begin with. The point behind that suggestion is that the weights show you how much extra body weight affects your ability to engage in cardio exercise. If you haven’t been fifty pounds overweight, the effects aren’t necessarily obvious.
I switched to zero-impact exercise, but had already hurt myself, and had significant trouble until I gave up on exercise and switched to the strategy of diet-first, exercise-later, which has worked better for me.
Thank you! I tend to remember ideas better than their names. (And linguistic relativity is a horrible name for that idea, IMHO.)
A quick glance around the internet suggests that Sapir and Whorf’s versions of the theory—that language affects thought, but doesn’t strictly determine it—enjoys moderate empirical support and continuing professional support. The stronger variants, broadly linguistic determinism, seem to be largely discredited.
My joint issues have largely vanished since I lost weight, although I am taking yoga back up. (Yoga was one of my last experiments before I started gaining weight; I’m naturally quite flexible, but am approaching the age where this will start to decline, and wish to avoid this.)
The idea of a hot room is not at all appetizing. That sounds exactly like the kind of weather I routinely -avoided- as a youth in the swamps of East Texas.
To use a slightly different problem pair, because it would be easier for me to compute:
Problem one. I have mass of 80kg at point [10,0] (simplifying to two dimensions, as I don’t need Z). A 2,000 KG object is resting at position [0, 0]. The Newtonian force of 1.0687 10^-7 N towards the origin should be accurate. [Edit: 1.06710^-6 N, when I calculated it again. Forgot to update this section]
Problem two. I have mass of 80kg at point [10,0] A 2,000 KG object is moving at 10 m/s along the Y axis, position defined as r(t) = [0, −50 + 10t]. Using strictly the time interval t = 0 → t = 10, where t is in seconds, calculating the force when t=5...
distance(t) = sqrt(10^2 + c^2((5 - t)^2) Gravity(t) = 6.67 10^-11 sum(802,000distance(t), for t > 0, t < 10) (10 / distance(t)) [Strictly speaking, this should be an integral over the whole of t, not a summation on a limited subset of t, but I’m doing this the faster, slightly less accurate way; the 10 / distance(t) at the end is to take only the y portion of my vectors, as the t portion of the gravitational vectors cancel out.]
Which gives, not entirely surprisingly, 1.067 * 10^-6 N directed to the origin. (I think your calculation was off by an order of magnitude, I’m not sure why.)
The difference between Newtonian gravity and gravity with respect to y is 3.38 * 10 ^-33. Which is expected; if the difference in gravitational force were greater, it would have been noticed a long time ago.
I probably messed up somewhere in there, because my brain is mush and it’s been a while since I’ve mucked about with vectors, but this should give you the basic idea.
Howdy.
I was a sometimes-reader of Overcoming Bias back in the day, and particularly fond of the articles on quantum physics. Philosophically, I’m an Objectivist. I identify a lot of people as Objectivist, however, including a lot of people who would probably find it a misnomer.
I created my account pretty much explicitly because I have some thoughts on theoretical (some might prefer the term “quantum”, but for reasons below, this isn’t accurate) physics and wanted (at this point, needed might be more accurate) feedback, and haven’t had much success yet getting anything, even so much as a “You’re too stupid to have this conversation.”
So without much further ado...
Light is a waveform distortion in gravity caused by variation in the position of the gravitic source; gravity itself has wavelike properties at the very least (it could be a particle, it could be a wave, both work; in the particle interpretation, light is a wavelike variation in the position of the particles, caused by the wavelike variation in the originating particle’s position). Strong atomic forces, weak atomic forces, gravity, and the cosmological constant/Hubble’s constant are observable parts of the gravitic wave, which is why the cosmological constant looks a lot more variable than it should (as it varies with distance). A lot of the redshifting we see is not in fact galaxies moving away from us, but a product of that the medium (gravity) that light is traveling in is spreading out (for reasons I’ll get into below) as it attenuates. Black holes are not, in fact, infinitely dense, but merely extremely so.
Gravity moves at the speed of light—light is, in effect, a shift in gravity. This is why matter cannot exceed the speed of light—it cannot overcome the infinitely high initial peak of its own gravitic wave. I believe this is also the key to why the wavelength of gravity increases with distance—the gravitic wave is traversing space which has already been warped by gravity. The gravitic wave moves slower where gravity is bending space to increase distance, and faster where gravity is bending space to increase space. This results in light becoming spread out in certain positions in the spectrum, and concentrated in others; a galaxy that appears redshifted to us will appear blueshifted from points both closer and further away on the same line of observation, and redshifted again closer and further away respectively yet still. Most galaxies appear redshifted because this is the most likely/stable configuration. (Blueshifted galaxies would either be too far away to detect with current technology, or close enough that they would be dangerously close. This is made even more complicated by the fact that motion can produce exactly the same effects; a galaxy in the redshift zone could appear blueshifted if it is approaching us with enough velocity, and the converse would also hold true.)
The nomer of quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong, but accurate nonetheless. Energy does not come in discrete quanta, but appears to because the number of stable configurations of matter is finite; we can only observe energy when it makes changes to the configurations of matter, which results in a new stable configuration, producing an observable stepladder with discrete steps of energy corresponding to each stable state.
I go with a modified version of Everett’s model for uncertainty theory. The observer problem is a product of the fact that the -observer’s- position is uncertain, not the observed entity. (This posits at least five dimensions.) Our brains are probably quantum computers; we’re viewing a slice of the fifth dimension with a nonzero scalar scope, which means particles are not precisely particulate.
Dark matter probably has no special properties; it’s just matter such that the substructure prohibits formative bonds with baryonic matter.
Particularly contentiously, there probably are no “real” electrical forces, these are effects produced by the configurations of matter. Antimatter may or may not annihilate matter; I lean towards the explanation that antimatter is simply matter configured such that an interaction with matter renders dark matter. (The resulting massive reorganization is what produces the light which is emitted when the two combine; if they annihilate, that would stop the gravitic wave, which would also be a massive gravitic distortion as far as other matter is concerned. Both explanations work as far as I’m concerned)
(For those curious about the electrical forces comment, I’m reasonably certain electrical forces can be explained as the result of modeling the n-body problem in a gravity-as-a-wave framework, specifically the implications of Xia’s work with the five-body configuration. I suspect an approximation of his configuration with a larger number of his particles becomes not merely likely, but guaranteed, given numbers of particles of varying mass—which results in apparent attractive and repulsive forces as the underlying matter is pushed in directions orthogonal to the orbiting masses, an effect which is amplified when the orbits are themselves changing in orthogonal directions. The use of the word “particle” here is arbitrary; the particles are themselves composed of particles. Scale is both isotropic and homogeneous. As above, so below.)
Time is not a special spacial dimension. It’s not an illusion, either. Time is just a plain old spacial dimension, no different from any other. The universe is constant, it is our position within it which is changing, a change which is necessitated by our consciousness. The patterns of life are elegant, but no more unusual than the motions of the planets; life, and motion, is just the application of rules about the configuration of contiguous space across large amounts of that space.
This means that the gravitic wave is propagated across time as well as all the other spacial dimensions; we’re experiencing gravity from where objects will be in the future, and where they were in the past, but in most cases this behavior cancels out.