I also ask myself these questions and I’m unable to answer them. In the end, I exercise and modify my diet as much as my will allows without causing me too much stress.
As for valuing years of life, if I considered that the very best outcome of cryonics (as HungryHobo described) is certain, then, well, even for very small values that will result in cryonics giving me far more utility than exercice. I don’t value later years of my life that low.
Yudkowsky believes that cryonics has a greater than 50% chance of working, and that we will be able to have fun for any amount of time, so for him, the expected value of cryonics is ginormous.
I get quite a bit of disutility from forcing myself to eat a bit more healthily. My food diversity is very power; if I try to ingest one of many foods I don’t like, I will throw up. Attempting to eat those foods anyway causes me great discomfort. So that’s not a great way for me to increase overall utility.
On the last paragraph, it appears to me that the two basics—avoiding obesity and not smoking—are the best thing you can pester them about. But the other lifestyle choices have the expected benefit of a few years total, if you don’t expect any new medical technology to be developed.
Not to be pedantic, but I thought this might be of interest: As I understand it, amount of exercise is a better predictor of lifespan than weight. That is, I would expect someone overweight but who exercises regularly to outlive someone skinny who never exercises.
For example, this life expectancy calculator outputs 70 years for a 5“6” 25 year old male who weighs 300lbs, but exercises vigorously daily. Changing the weight to 150 lbs and putting in no exercise raised the life expectancy by only 1 year. (a bit less than I was expecting, actually. I was about to significantly update, but then it occurred to me that 300 lbs isn’t the definition of obesity. I knew this previously, but apparently hadn’t fully internalized that.) EDIT: This calculator may not work well for weights over ~250 lbs. See comment below.
So, my top two recommendations to friends would be quit smoking and exercise regularly. I’d recommend Less Wrongers either do high intensity workouts once a can read or watch Khan Academy or listen to The week to minimize the amount of time spent on non-productive activities, or pick a more frequent but lower intensity activity they Sequences audiobook while doing. I’m not an expert or anything. That’s just the impression I’ve gotten from my own research.
I’m not sure I would trust that calculator.
I’m not used to US units so I put in 84kg (my weight) and it said “with that BMI you can’t be alive” so I put in 840 thinking maybe it wants the first decimal as well. Now I realize it wanted pounds.
And for this, 840lbs, it also outputed 70 years.
I’m not sure where the calculator gets its data from.
Hmmm, that’s worrying. I played with some numbers for a 5′6″ male, and got this:
99 lbs yields “Your BMI is way too low to be living” 100lbs yields 74 years 150lbs yields 76 years 200lbs yields 73 years 250lbs yields 69 years 300lbs yields 69 years 500lbs yields 69 years 999lbs yields 69 years
It looks to me like they are pulling data from a table, and the table maxes out under 250lbs?
amount of exercise is a better predictor of lifespan than weight
First, there is no reason for you to care about ranking (“better”), you should only care whether something is a good predictor of lifespan. Predictors are not exclusive.
Second, weight effect on lifespan is nonlinear. As far as I remember it’s basically a U-shaped curve.
I also ask myself these questions and I’m unable to answer them. In the end, I exercise and modify my diet as much as my will allows without causing me too much stress.
As for valuing years of life, if I considered that the very best outcome of cryonics (as HungryHobo described) is certain, then, well, even for very small values that will result in cryonics giving me far more utility than exercice. I don’t value later years of my life that low.
Yudkowsky believes that cryonics has a greater than 50% chance of working, and that we will be able to have fun for any amount of time, so for him, the expected value of cryonics is ginormous.
I get quite a bit of disutility from forcing myself to eat a bit more healthily. My food diversity is very power; if I try to ingest one of many foods I don’t like, I will throw up. Attempting to eat those foods anyway causes me great discomfort. So that’s not a great way for me to increase overall utility.
On the last paragraph, it appears to me that the two basics—avoiding obesity and not smoking—are the best thing you can pester them about. But the other lifestyle choices have the expected benefit of a few years total, if you don’t expect any new medical technology to be developed.
Not to be pedantic, but I thought this might be of interest: As I understand it, amount of exercise is a better predictor of lifespan than weight. That is, I would expect someone overweight but who exercises regularly to outlive someone skinny who never exercises.
For example, this life expectancy calculator outputs 70 years for a 5“6” 25 year old male who weighs 300lbs, but exercises vigorously daily. Changing the weight to 150 lbs and putting in no exercise raised the life expectancy by only 1 year. (a bit less than I was expecting, actually. I was about to significantly update, but then it occurred to me that 300 lbs isn’t the definition of obesity. I knew this previously, but apparently hadn’t fully internalized that.) EDIT: This calculator may not work well for weights over ~250 lbs. See comment below.
So, my top two recommendations to friends would be quit smoking and exercise regularly. I’d recommend Less Wrongers either do high intensity workouts once a can read or watch Khan Academy or listen to The week to minimize the amount of time spent on non-productive activities, or pick a more frequent but lower intensity activity they Sequences audiobook while doing. I’m not an expert or anything. That’s just the impression I’ve gotten from my own research.
I’m not sure I would trust that calculator. I’m not used to US units so I put in 84kg (my weight) and it said “with that BMI you can’t be alive” so I put in 840 thinking maybe it wants the first decimal as well. Now I realize it wanted pounds. And for this, 840lbs, it also outputed 70 years.
I’m not sure where the calculator gets its data from.
Hmmm, that’s worrying. I played with some numbers for a 5′6″ male, and got this:
99 lbs yields “Your BMI is way too low to be living”
100lbs yields 74 years
150lbs yields 76 years
200lbs yields 73 years
250lbs yields 69 years
300lbs yields 69 years
500lbs yields 69 years
999lbs yields 69 years
It looks to me like they are pulling data from a table, and the table maxes out under 250lbs?
First, there is no reason for you to care about ranking (“better”), you should only care whether something is a good predictor of lifespan. Predictors are not exclusive.
Second, weight effect on lifespan is nonlinear. As far as I remember it’s basically a U-shaped curve.
I think it’s only U-shaped if you’re plotting mortality rather than lifespan on the y-axis...
Fair point.
This seems like a good news to me, because I can have greater control over my exercise than my weight.