Reported numbers vary quite a bit (perhaps in part because the physical activity intensity of training or warfighting also varies), but you might be interested to know that soldiers in training or active duty might hit something like 4000-5000 kcal/day in energy expenditure, maybe thousands more for outlier people and/or circumstances.
jferguson
Karma: 286
A PSA for those who might like to have less body fat: a number of observational and experimental studies find that the energy density of your diet (as in, calories per gram) is a very, very good predictor of ad libitum caloric intake. I doubt that an increase in the caloric density of our diets fully explains the obesity epidemic—there’s probably something to the “hyperpalatability” idea (though hyperpalatable foods are almost always very energy dense too), habitual nicotine and THC intake trends probably matter, I’d buy that some contaminants even if not lithium are causing people to be hungrier or less physically active, etc etc—but I find it implausible it’s not an important one, and even better, it’s one that you can calculate very easily for most of what you eat and then control with less effort than you’d have to expend for almost any other type of “diet”.
This is consistent with e.g. the potato diet being anecdotally weirdly effective at causing weight loss (~1 cal/gram which is pretty low), and also consistent with most of the generic conventional wisdom around diet like “eat more fruits and veggies and lean meats and less dessert and fast food”, and IMO makes lots of intuitive sense—satiety is complicated, but having a lot of stuff in your stomach is clearly pretty important, so, just put a lot of stuff in your stomach that doesn’t actually have many calories, lol.
I strongly disagree with this interpretation of those overfeeding studies. From what I can tell (though I couldn’t access every study SMTM cites), “overfeeding” is usually defined relative to the output of one of the typical BMR/TDEE estimation formulas given a person’s parameters, not based on actual measurement of a subject’s TDEE. Those formulas are fine for a baseline guess, but even the most accurate ones are going to be substantially off in either direction for a fair number of people! Some of the difference is unaccounted-for NEAT, some of it is differences in absorption efficiency, some of it is probably other factors we don’t understand yet. Given the known reality of interpersonal variation in what your actual calories in and out are relative to their naive estimates, some subjects not gaining weight while “overfeeding” is exactly what you’d expect to see.
A fun fact: my estimated “effective TDEE” is (averaged over months) pretty consistently around 3300 cal/day for the past 18 months—rarely more than +/- 100 cal/day off in either direction—whereas the best formula I could find (using my body fat %, as actually-measured by a DEXA scan) says it should be something more like 2600-2800 cal/day. This is based on weighing my body daily and recording the caloric intake from actually-everything I eat, almost always weighing food when necessary rather than coming up with estimates.
Related to this, I assume? (Don’t click that until after you take the survey.)
For a brief period of time, maybe a month or two ago, the favicon for the site was “< X” (less than, then a red X). I liked it more than any variant of “LW” I’ve seen so far, but whoever actually decides must not have, and unfortunately it wasn’t around long enough that many people who you’d hope would get it would get it.
I’d be the first to buy three LW shirts and a bumper sticker if they were ever made.
Shouldn’t you ask when the respondent thinks the Singularity will occur before mentioning the year 2100, to avoid anchoring?
I don’t think it’s accurate to say LW focuses on atheism. Consider: this is the only post whose title involves atheism or any religion on the first page of the discussion section (40 posts, for me).
I predict that the lesson behind this exchange will turn out to be “Don’t argue with people who think consciousness is fundamental”.
Going off this post of his, it sounds like people who take a daily multivitamin should have dramatically lower morbidity for at least some diseases that aren’t already typically associated with nutrient deficiency. Studies on that subject already exist, and I can predict what they’ll have to say, though I can’t look for them right now.
For “1 is useless because not-3”, Cox’s theorem might be persuasive.
Are these works of psychology and neuroscience really illustrating that human emotion governs decision making?
Yes, they are. It sounds to me like your friend is exactly right. The claim that humans mostly use their subconscious minds in decision-making isn’t controversial.
Could you clarify what you mean by “the Bayesian point of view”? What does your conception of those words in that order have to say about human cognition?
Long ago, I used to worry about situations where I do awkward things (and was pretty awkward), but then I remembered everybody else is too busy worrying about themselves looking awkward to really care about my awkwardness. I stopped being strongly awkward after that, and of course I’m much happier—it was probably the one “turning point” in my life where I went from anxious/unhappy to calm/happy. (It was at about the age of 12, IIRC)
I can’t figure out which post you’ve recently made that’s relevant to this. Could you link it?
Probably not. The methods used to get the desired phenotype are obviously not something that was happening before humans, but the desired phenotypes are pretty much always analogous to something that could have happened without human intervention (resistance to some environmental condition, different nutritional content, etc.), but didn’t because they don’t improve fitness in nature. Genetic engineering is pretty damn impressive, but it’s not magic—drought resistance and increased vitamin A content and those sorts of things have an opportunity cost to the plant (not spending energy on things that would increase the plant’s chances of reproduction in nature), meaning they’re probably going to be less fit than their wild counterpart without human intervention, so those genes are very unlikely to be expressed more in nature. And, if it is something that improves fitness in nature, it was most likely going to happen sooner or later anyway. (That could still be bad, but I’ll wait until I hear specifics before I worry about it.)
One good reason to fear GMOs is that they could promote monoculture to some extent (compared to not using GMOs but still using modern industrial farming), which introduces a big risk of famines, though monoculture was already pretty much the norm before GMOs came around so focusing on GMOs probably isn’t a good way to reduce the risks associated with monoculture. Or, at least as far as I know, though I admit I haven’t studied this very much. That’s my current impression, and I don’t predict I’ll turn out to be wrong.
What are some examples of plausible (not necessarily likely or expected) experiences that would lower your degree of belief in your religion?
I have a pretty poor work ethic for boring things—college is fun and I like doing most of the work, but I couldn’t bear adding and subtracting meaningless numbers for hours. That may or may not be typical of college students, but college probably signals something more like (general work ethic) x (interest + talent in specific field), while this would signal (general work ethic) x (tolerance for repetitive, boring tasks), which would have its own uses but doesn’t necessarily apply to many jobs that usually require degrees.
Less funny; it kills the joke. Lever is pronounced like “never” in American English. Better late than never, etc.
There was a fair amount of stuff in there that I “knew” I wanted to read (some LW sequences stuff among them). I’ve found a bit more success by putting things I actually want to read in my top-level bookmarks, right at the front, because then it causes clutter which I want to reduce (by reading and removing them). The difference may just be in that I’m less likely to bookmark something with this system in the first place, but it feels like it works.
This sounds exactly like Read It Later. I don’t know what the differences are between the two, but it’s an alternative if you’re looking for something like this. Anyway, my experience with this sort of thing is that I never feel like reading all the momentarily-interesting things I discover when I come back to them later. I think that by putting it off, you place reading about an interesting idea into the “this is something you want to put off for later” mind category and it never gets read, or at least that’s what it felt like in my experience.
> A question I have here is, why not try for low calories per litre instead of (or as well as) low calories per gram?
I think calories per gram is usually what people study due to some combination of:
- this is the way somebody chose to measure “energy density” early on and it stuck for whatever reasons things stick
- in cooking and/or conducting experiments, mass is pretty much always easier to measure than volume (even with liquids, in my opinion...)
- we see this metric work pretty well—better than basically any other known single factor, is my impression—to predict satiety response, ad libitum caloric itake, diet adherence, and long-term weight changes in various experiments
I do know of a single-meal study that looked at how volumetric energy density (comparing potato chips vs. popcorn, which have similar energy per mass) predicted ad libitum caloric intake, and found that it does seem to independently matter. I don’t know of any other similar studies, though I won’t claim to be up to date on the literature.
>Plus at some point things leave the stomach and I don’t know what triggers that.
”gastric emptying” is the key term used in studies of this question (I haven’t really studied this myself)
>How does this whole thing work with fluids? Presumably they leave your stomach quite fast, so per-calorie they should contribute less to satiety than solids?
Right, that’s the usual finding. Drinking lots of water before or with meals does seem to promote satiety and lower ad libitum caloric intake, so water itself certainly counts for something, but liquids are generally nowhere near as filling per mass as solid foods, which agrees with the conventional wisdom around not drinking calories.