“Compare the options, and choose the one that results in the greatest (pleasure—suffering).”
mare-of-night
Karma: 661
I think it depends? People around here use utilitarianism to mean a few different things. I imagine that’s the version talked about the most because the people involved in EA tend to be those types (since it’s easier to get extra value via hacking if your most important values are something very specific and somewhat measurable). I think that might also be the usual philosopher’s definition. But then Eliezer (in the metaethics sequence) used “utilitarianism” to mean a general approach to ethics where you add up all the values involved and pick the best outcome, regardless of what your values are and how you weight them. So it’s sometimes a little confusing to know what utilitarianism means around here.
(Edited for spelling.)
Okay, thanks.
I just saw your website, and it looks like a really neat idea. (I tried to make a whole foods soylent myself, and couldn’t achieve a texture that didn’t gross me out.) My body doesn’t usually handle eggs well, but I’ll probably join the crowdfund to try it anyway, since it’d be so convenient if it did work.
Do you have any plans to publish a recipe? (I imagine it would be possible to make substitutions, for people in situations like mine.) Kudos for avoiding so many of the common allergy foods (gluten/soy/corn/peanuts).
I’m looking at starting a meetup in Rochester (or possibly on the RIT campus). Are you still interested in attending? If you are, I can give you a poke on this comment thread when I have something more specific posted.
In the US, Mint.com can give you nice graphs of when and how you spend money, too.
For example a cutting board should be large and easy to wash. An increased size can make cutting much easier.
Depending on where you’re using it. When my roommates leave the kitchen to cluttered to use, a small cutting board that fits on the desk in my bedroom is really nice to have. (Use case is usually eating cheese or carrots while doing homework—it doubles as a plate. I wouldn’t want to chop meat that way.)
Awesome :)
I really enjoyed this post. Useful topic, some new insight that suggests other insights (as Gunnar_Zarncke pointed out), good examples.
What does that role entail for you?
Thanks! That looks interesting.
Thanks! I’ll have a look.
Ah, thanks :) I figured that different diets are good for different people, since that’s what seemed to happen for people I know. But I wanted to find out how common and how extreme that sort of thing is, since if people are getting results like “I can handle going to school now”, then people should be more aware of it than they are.
I’m pretty sure I already know the most important reactions for me—I’ve gotten to the point that there’s not anything really really wrong anymore. I didn’t expect the rest to just be in a book somewhere, since what I’ve already found out by experimenting doesn’t match up to any known pattern other than “diet does stuff”.
Sorry, I didn’t make the intent clear. I do want to do more experiments on myself, and I need to work on figuring out a non-annoying way to collect data so I can do that. But I’m also really curious how common this sort of thing is in other people. So the library research is for testing your alternate hypothesis, and my hypothesis that some people are strongly influenced by food but mistake it for a chronic problem.
I’ve suspected that food might have more affect on people in general than general opinion says it does. But I act really differently on my diet vs. when eating what most Americans eat (I haven’t tried eating normally since childhood because the effects are too unpleasant, but I’ve made enough mistakes in a row to come close on one occasion—see my comment to James_Miller), and most other people act more like me on a good diet than me on a bad diet.
I’ve considered generalizing from one example when it comes to people who do act similar to me with a bad diet. I tend to keep quiet about it because it comes off as really insensitive to tell someone that their depression might be caused by the candy they eat, when I don’t have any evidence for that besides generalizing from my own experience.
Good hypothesis. I still don’t think I’m completely normal, because when I eat a typical American diet I can’t function in society, which most people seem to be able to do. (Mainly thinking of a family trip where I ate out a lot and wasn’t as careful as usual, and after a couple days I was breaking down crying about once a day, at things that would normally just annoy me.) But then, I could see the more subtle symptoms being things that people assume are chronic problems they can’t change. Alternately, my normal is near some kind of borderline for a mental problem and that’s why my diet can push it over so easily.
I’ve also wondered how much of mental illness could be caused by this sort of thing. I was told that as a child, a doctor thought I had ADHD and was about to have me tested, and then my mom forgot to buy bananas at the store one week and my behavior suddenly improve. It seems likely that other children with the same problems I have exist, and most of their parents weren’t already alert to diet influences.
Thanks for the app link. I don’t have iphone, but I bet I can find something similar for android.
I guess what I should do first is hit up a library database and find out if anyone has already researched this. (I’ve made a few efforts to look it up before, but mostly just google searches—though I did find that mental symptoms for corn and milk allergies aren’t unheard of.) If nutritionists don’t think food works this way, but also haven’t studied this specifically and found it false, I’m not sure if I should try to do my own experiment or not.
My diet seems to influence my mind and body a lot more strongly than is normal. (Food intolerances that mess with my emotions or focus, apparent hypoglycemia that goes away when I take vitamin B, that sort of thing. I know a lot of people have something like this, but I’ve got so many that diet is the default first suspect whenever anything goes wrong.) I’m not sure whether this makes me a potentially useful test subject for things like nootropics because the effects might get inflated and easier to notice, or just an outlier whose results won’t work on anyone else. I also wonder if this means there might be foods that have good effects on me for no apparent reason, in which case I might experiment to find them.
Could someone who knows more about biology than I do offer some insight?
Thanks. I was getting them confused with Middle Earth trolls.
Hmm… Trolls are rocks (sort-of), the Philosopher’s Stone is a rock, can the Philosopher’s Stone turn you into a troll?
(This is probably a stupid theory, but maybe it’s related to something more workable.)
I might have misremembered. Sorry about that.