I thought they were pretty upfront about how this was exploratory (trying to generate hypotheses and see if the effect is plausible, not confirm a hypothesis).
Also, yes, that was my impression as well and what I signed up for. It’s just that a lot of features of the study directly clash with this exploration.
(I also disagree that their results are that remarkable.)
Edit: By remarkable, I mean “shows that it is specific to potatoes”
Typo, I meant chips/crisp. Thanks!
Then shouldn’t it be weirder? Like, having full open data, not trying a month specifically and varying this, etc?
I think doing this kind of thing is really important because trying to make everything safe means we frequently don’t do useful science
That is a very good point, and I agree.
Two things on this point:
It did not seem to me that SMTM marked this as clearly unsafe, but I am not neutral enough to know. Just: There is a difference between “quit if you feel unwell” and “This might have drastic negative impact on you you will not even notice or feel”
While mad unsafe science is cool, it is a good idea to make it safe_r_. For instance, SMTM did tell us to take vit A and B12, which was warranted. The same way, other precautions, specifically about how to quit the diet, could have been mentioned
It might be that I over-updated though.
I’ve been using a lenovo ideaCentre G5 14IMB05 for two years now and it’s been very powerful and useful for ~900 euros.
The current one in Lenovo store seems lower-end than the one I bought (my specs are RTX 2060, i5 processor, ), but there’s probably something awesome within that space. With respect to your specificationa:
windows 11
Quiet fan, I often don’t hear it. Has an ambiance sound when I’m using it intensely but it doesn’t feel loud
Has 4+ port for monitor displays
Never noticed any lag (Often opening several vs-code instances and running services at the same time)
I’ve also often used the Alienware you linked thanks to a friend of mine. It really is awesome, but unless you often do machine learning/very high graphics with lots of visual details and frames gaming, I don’t think it is that worth it.
Wish you the best with your search ^^
I feel that, while you went a level of meta up, this article really encapsulates why I am so hesitant about EA. I have several concerns about VNM utilitarianism applied to a global monolithic scope. My experience discussing them in the EA space is people looking at me funny and something along the lines of “How can you be against it though?”
By far the main problem I have, which I feel you pointed here elegantly, is how prone EA is to congratulate itself on being so willing to change its mind, without a broader interrogation of what that even means. (I remember Julia Galef saying something like “There was an EA forum post voicing criticism of the movement, to which others cheered on and said ‘well said, here are some more criticisms’” which I do not think is a reaction of reception)
Another concern I have is that “Effective Altruism” is eating the memetic space of “doing altruism effectively”. That is, there is more and more a conflation between the general idea of “let’s do the most good” and the set of values and memespace EA has developped. I find it makes communicating about it a lot harder.
Thank you for writing this article, if there was an effective altruism movement receptive to it, I would feel less hesitation about the whole thing