This is a set of fascinating questions and fascinating possibilities. I’d like to be more help; I find it all interesting and important, and I’ve thought about some of the general issues (genetics vs. choice vs environment factors vs societal influence) and some of the specific issues (modern American obesity). I don’t have clear answers on any of them, other than to say it’s complicated. There are multiple influences on both the reality and the measures of reality (self-reports/diagnosis of queer status, neurodivergence and mental illness in this case, and summaries of scientific studies in a lesser but still important way).
Unfortunately, there’s not even a way to discount some of those influences on some of those questions, as you seem to try in some places. It could be mostly one factor, or it could be all of them in roughly equal parts. It is definitely all of them to some degree.
This post is so complex that I find it daunting to comment usefully, since I’m supposed to be devoting my time to other things. I’m commenting mostly to say I’m impressed by the effort you’ve put in and the analysis you’ve done. I was outright embarrassed to find that LessWrong had downvoted this below zero at some point despite it being clearly high-effort and on topics of community interest. I consider LessWrong to be an exceptional community, but it frequently disappoints me in downvoting good posts that just aren’t quite fully written for LessWrong’s specific standards. This post might be a bit complex and make somewhat broad claims without careful argumentation this community likes, but that’s a guess on where the downvotes are coming from. Again, I’m a bit embarrassed that this community isn’t more understanding and supportive of new users who clearly are rationalists and want to get involved.
On to some specifics: This isn’t my area, and I defer to anyone who’s looked into it specifically. Calories have been plentiful for some time. But calories continually become cheaper and more delicious, making overeating more tempting to more people more of the time. Endocrine imbalances seem entirely plausible, but changes in average body temp seem as likely to result from average body size as to cause it. Changes in average activity level as demanded by occupation and transportation also seem likely to play a huge role in average weight/fitness.
WRT number of queer people, I’d have no idea how to disentangle incentives for self-reporting from any actual change. Choice (under societal influence) and genetic/cultural determination aren’t binary factors in this or any human area; it’s both in different measures in different areas. The Kinsey scale of straightness/queerness on a spectrum, has seemed highly plausible to me for some time.
All of which might not be helpful.
My biggest actual disagreement: You start out by saying we’re all doomed to die by AGI soonish. I’m pretty sure that’s not right, or at least more debatable than being able to take it as a fact. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a lot of my day job weighing that question over the last year and a half. There are quite reasonable cruxes of disagreement about alignment difficulty, and neither side can accurately claim that it’s either easy or very hard; we’re simply not that far along. The game is still afoot. So I invite you: join us in solving AGI alignment, and the related societal alignment question of getting it into the right hands. Then we’ll have plenty of analytical power to settle more other complex, important questions like the ones you address. They’re important, but I think actually perhaps harder than solving alignment, and a bit less pressing, since the survival of humanity seems to quite possibly be on the line, quite possibly based on the analysis we collectively do in the next few years. That’s not at all dismissive of the importance or interest of the issues you raise, just an explanation of why I’m not spending more time on them, and an invitation to you to turn your sharp mind in that direction.
It is true that in future posts I should account for availability of calories over time, and physical activity over time.
Possibly I would get a better reception if I waded into all the sub-possibilities for what could be causing the increase in self-reported queerness, but that issue is so political that I doubt more positive reception from the audience, would correspond to more accurate Bayesian updates from the audience. As it is, I feel “you can lead a LessWronger to a hypothesis, but you can’t make them suborn their political arguments-are-soldiers brain to their adult brain”.
”AI alignment is not in the category ‘alarmingly impossible problems for the time we have left’” is certainly a position many people hold. I am doing my best to make them correct. Alas, going along with their fantasy world where it’s already true, will not help make it true.
This is a set of fascinating questions and fascinating possibilities. I’d like to be more help; I find it all interesting and important, and I’ve thought about some of the general issues (genetics vs. choice vs environment factors vs societal influence) and some of the specific issues (modern American obesity). I don’t have clear answers on any of them, other than to say it’s complicated. There are multiple influences on both the reality and the measures of reality (self-reports/diagnosis of queer status, neurodivergence and mental illness in this case, and summaries of scientific studies in a lesser but still important way).
Unfortunately, there’s not even a way to discount some of those influences on some of those questions, as you seem to try in some places. It could be mostly one factor, or it could be all of them in roughly equal parts. It is definitely all of them to some degree.
This post is so complex that I find it daunting to comment usefully, since I’m supposed to be devoting my time to other things. I’m commenting mostly to say I’m impressed by the effort you’ve put in and the analysis you’ve done. I was outright embarrassed to find that LessWrong had downvoted this below zero at some point despite it being clearly high-effort and on topics of community interest. I consider LessWrong to be an exceptional community, but it frequently disappoints me in downvoting good posts that just aren’t quite fully written for LessWrong’s specific standards. This post might be a bit complex and make somewhat broad claims without careful argumentation this community likes, but that’s a guess on where the downvotes are coming from. Again, I’m a bit embarrassed that this community isn’t more understanding and supportive of new users who clearly are rationalists and want to get involved.
On to some specifics: This isn’t my area, and I defer to anyone who’s looked into it specifically. Calories have been plentiful for some time. But calories continually become cheaper and more delicious, making overeating more tempting to more people more of the time. Endocrine imbalances seem entirely plausible, but changes in average body temp seem as likely to result from average body size as to cause it. Changes in average activity level as demanded by occupation and transportation also seem likely to play a huge role in average weight/fitness.
WRT number of queer people, I’d have no idea how to disentangle incentives for self-reporting from any actual change. Choice (under societal influence) and genetic/cultural determination aren’t binary factors in this or any human area; it’s both in different measures in different areas. The Kinsey scale of straightness/queerness on a spectrum, has seemed highly plausible to me for some time.
All of which might not be helpful.
My biggest actual disagreement: You start out by saying we’re all doomed to die by AGI soonish. I’m pretty sure that’s not right, or at least more debatable than being able to take it as a fact. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a lot of my day job weighing that question over the last year and a half. There are quite reasonable cruxes of disagreement about alignment difficulty, and neither side can accurately claim that it’s either easy or very hard; we’re simply not that far along. The game is still afoot. So I invite you: join us in solving AGI alignment, and the related societal alignment question of getting it into the right hands. Then we’ll have plenty of analytical power to settle more other complex, important questions like the ones you address. They’re important, but I think actually perhaps harder than solving alignment, and a bit less pressing, since the survival of humanity seems to quite possibly be on the line, quite possibly based on the analysis we collectively do in the next few years. That’s not at all dismissive of the importance or interest of the issues you raise, just an explanation of why I’m not spending more time on them, and an invitation to you to turn your sharp mind in that direction.
Thanks for the encouraging feedback!
It is true that in future posts I should account for availability of calories over time, and physical activity over time.
Possibly I would get a better reception if I waded into all the sub-possibilities for what could be causing the increase in self-reported queerness, but that issue is so political that I doubt more positive reception from the audience, would correspond to more accurate Bayesian updates from the audience. As it is, I feel “you can lead a LessWronger to a hypothesis, but you can’t make them suborn their political arguments-are-soldiers brain to their adult brain”.
”AI alignment is not in the category ‘alarmingly impossible problems for the time we have left’” is certainly a position many people hold. I am doing my best to make them correct. Alas, going along with their fantasy world where it’s already true, will not help make it true.