Are you saying it didn’t work because it didn’t curb your hunger or your desire for other, less healthy foods? Or it didn’t work because you stuck to the diet of healthy foods and gained weight nonetheless? The latter seems hard to believe, though I suppose it’s technically possible to accumulate an excess of calories via turkey and bananas...
AlexU
Karma: 152
So, maybe staying thin requires Herculean effort for some. Why turn your back on that particular challenge? Elsewhere you seem to take a lot of pride in your determination to “save the world,” which seems like no small feat. Don’t try to lose weight—lose weight!
Diet (singular) does work in the sense of consistently, indefinitely eating healthier foods.
Yeah, and I realize that simply recommending “diet and exercise” is a bit too pat. Getting oneself into virtuous cycles, with extremely short-term rewards and consequences, is the most effective meta-tactic I know. There are various ways to do this; the key is just to render willpower moot.
You raise an interesting point I’ve considered before in relation to Bostrom’s simulation argument: if we’re living in a simulation, wouldn’t that effectively make God real? I can’t see a way to deny this without some linguistic legerdemain. It seems like one’s probability assignment to the proposition “God is real” should be lower-bounded by the proposition “we’re living in a simulation.”
It seems like you’re questioning the value of diet and exercise—almost as if they don’t work for all people, or they only work for limited amounts of time. This is, of course, untrue, and I know you know this. The real key is to put yourself into a virtuous cycle, where the rewards (or negative consequences) of diet and exercise make themselves apparent to you every day, rather than months down the line, effectively circumventing akrasia.
Right. It’s basically a family association; different religions will share different things in common, but there’s no real core concept. If anything, I’d suggest “a system of principles and beliefs for living one’s life,” in which case, yes, rationalism would be a religion as well.
The diet pretty obviously works because fat plays a huge role in satiety. If you can get a certain amount of fat in the lowest caloric form possible (olive oil, most likely), you won’t be have to eat massively caloric things like bacon cheeseburgers in order to slake your hunger.
Still, good diet and exercise are the keys to staying thin. Satisfy your hunger by filling up on vegetables and lean protein. Exercise harder, eat less.
The “Shorter EY” thing has occurred to me too. It seems like a good idea. Maybe we can get volunteers to do this for every post of his?
I’ve talked before in this same vein about the limits of rationality. One can be a perfect rationalist and always know what to do in a given situation, yet still be unable to do it for whatever reason. This suggests that pretty strongly that good “rationalists” would be wise to invest their time into other areas as well, since rationalism alone won’t turn you into the ubermensch. It won’t make you healthy and fit, it won’t enable you to talk to girls any better or make friends any easier. (And I object to any conception of “rationalism” so sweepingly broad that it manages to subsume every possible endeavor you’d set out on, e.g., the old “a good rationalist would realize the importance of these things and figure out meta-techniques for developing these skills.”)
I’d suggest objective morality, essentialism, and various folk psychology ideas like the “self” and “freedom.” Perhaps more controversially, “the sanctity of life.”
Can I suggest a moratorium on the use of the phrase “Art of rationality”? There are some serious language issues among this community that I believe may be clotting people’s thought processes. The above post talks about developing “x-rationality” almost as something entirely parallel to science and mathematics, an entirely new field with limitless horizons. This might make sense if we conceive of rationality as the sort of thing one can possibly develop an art or science of. But I’m not sure this isn’t a category error, much like the phrase “the Art of breathing” or the “Science of walking” would be. Has anyone shown that rationality is the sort of thing we can successively build upon, generation after generation? (Note that it’s very important here to distinguish between advances in formalizations of rationality and advances in rationality itself.) We should iron these conceptual issues out, or at the very least, minimize the rhetorical flourishes for a bit.
I have yet to hear what anyone even means by “rationalism” or “rationalist,” let alone “x-rationality.” People often refer to the “techniques” or “Art of rationality” (a particularly irksome phrase), though as best I can tell, these consist of Bayes theorem and a half-dozen or so logical fallacies that were likely known since the time of Aristotle. Now, I’ve had an intuitive handle on Bayes theorem since learning of it in high school pre-calc, and spotting a logical fallacy isn’t particularly tough for anyone accustomed to close reading of philosophy or doing science (or who’s studied for the LSAT). So apart from simply calling oneself a “rationalist” and feeling really good about being a part of some “rationalist community” (much like Dennett’s tone-deaf coining of the term “brights” to describe atheists), is there actually anything to this?
“Use of gratuitous mathematical notion is likely to help keep it that way.”
Is that desirable? (Not saying you’re implying it is.) The community could probably benefit from some smart humanities types.
That wasn’t meant as a criticism of you specifically. I’ve just noticed that people on this site like to use equations to describe thought processes, some of which might be better communicated using everyday language. I’d argue Eliezer’s post is an even worse example—why not just say “the lesser of the two quantities” or something?
It just seems at odds with the scientific ethos of cutting out the bullshit whenever possible. Instead, Eliezer seems bent on injecting bullshit back into the mix, which I’d argue comes at the expense of clarity, precision, and credibility. However, I do realize it’s a calculated decision intended to give normally dry ideas more memetic potential, and I’m not in a position to say the trade-off definitely isn’t worth it.
Ditto with “conspiracy.” I’d argue that giving LW the language and trappings of a 12-year old boys’ club is ultimately detrimental to its mission, but it looks like I’m in the minority.
Do you people actually think in terms of equations like this? Once you begin throwing in exponents, I think the metaphorical/illustrative value of expressing things in math drops off quickly.
Is a wiki really needed? Why not just a simple page linking to all the relevant OCB posts as well as Wikipedia entries? It’s all in there anyway. This seems unnecessarily duplicative.
Of course not, but you’ve contrived an odd corner-case that, in fact, doesn’t exist in reality. I’m not sure what that goes to show.