mytyde

Karma: 41

mytyde Nov 13, 2012, 9:27 PM
−2 points
in reply to: elhelado’s comment on: Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline
I would charge that the same ‘institutionalization’ which has neutered psychology has changed philosophy into a funding-chaser.

Psychology was invented as a means of studying society so that the social situation could be improved: Freud was a socialist. Because many disciplines have moved to institutions, they have less freedom to pursue research and less freedom to depart from the views of their institutions.

Also, because funding is dependent on people who have ulterior motives in what they choose to fund, it would be almost impossible for a school of psychology to develop which says, for instance “there’s something seriously wrong with our society” because they would be hard-pressed to find research funding. That the general population surrenders so much initiative to scientists who are so strongly influenced by veiled politics is the true tragedy of our time.

mytyde Nov 13, 2012, 9:20 PM
2 points
in reply to: zaph’s comment on: Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline
The decision of what disciplines belong to “science” or “humanitees”, “art” or “engineering” is significantly a political decision. Indeed, it is a political question which disciplines exist in which organization and how they fit together.

Rationalist philosophers just need to call themselves “Psychologists of Quantitative Reasoning” in order to get funding. In the current political era, it is fashionable to claim ‘objectivity’ in one’s profession despite frequently inquiring into non-empirical matters. This claim of objectivity often serves to hide one’s personal biases which, if made explicit, might otherwise be useful in interpretation of research.

The drive to be unconcerned with the political implications of one’s work is the ideal paradigm for economic exploitation of a class of highly-educated scientists by institutions and people who control how funding is utilized to enables, disables, or actualize research and engineering.

Fox News is a perfect example of brutally skewing scientific evidence towards political ends “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525

(For those of you who would: instead of voting me down because you dislike these ideas, how about trying to engage with them?)

mytyde Nov 13, 2012, 8:44 PM
0 points
on: Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct
This happens frequently, and we don’t see these questions resolved because the scientific method is far from bulletproof. Doubtless many of our modern ideas will be proven incorrect by the next generation; others will learn to make more accurate predictions using more advanced analysis; some paradigms will seem ludicrous in rhetrospect (as some models which were accepted only decades ago seem today). Just how frequently such an obvious problem happens, for the same reasons this case went unnoticed, it is very difficult to estimate.

mytyde Nov 13, 2012, 8:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct
Kinda speciesist, don’tcha think? People in the modern world in large part have learned to be illogical, but it isn’t an inherent quality; in fact, some would argue that the current low level of rational capacity is very difficult to maintain. If people were inherently irrational, why can everyone learn mathematics, why can children sometimes disagree with their parents, and why was a prerequisite for degeneration into the current American political system that 7 corporations should own all major media outlets?

mytyde Oct 25, 2012, 6:28 PM
2 points
on: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet
A more elegant explanation of the effectiveness of the diet would be that eating a calorically-dense food in the morning knocks your fat metabolism into gear.

I would like to take measurement of body temperatures while on the Shangri-La diet; I would expect body temperature to rise significantly from its nighttime low towards maximal resting temperaturen when olive oil was consumed (oil/fat being the most calorically dense macronutrient). Fat storage is very powerful, and very mysterious to doctors. If you’re body doesn’t feel comfortable losing weight, you will find it extremely difficult to do so and even more difficult to keep the weight off. The most important thing is to balance the body’s nutrient needs and remove stressors that would cause of enhance weight gain. Any human could run for days on end if they were able to access this fat storage without other constraints (and the point of V02 training is to increase access to this energy).

http://learnthis.ca/2011/02/how-to-boost-your-metabolism/

mytyde Oct 25, 2012, 2:26 AM
2 points
on: 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions
The political definitions are confusing and many would consider some of the distinctions wrong, clearly Americanized. American liberals are to the right of European conservatives, USSR was a socialism just a different kind, etc., etc.....

Find a non-political way of describing political preferences or, better yet, break it up into a political compass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass (test on http://politicalcompass.org/ to chart your location.)
1. Economic
2. Social
Apatheism should also be added to the list of choices for religion.

mytyde Oct 25, 2012, 2:03 AM
3 points
in reply to: Oscar_Cunningham’s comment on: [Link] Offense 101
The scary thing is when you can win the debate whichever side you choose, even though YOU can tell what the correct side is.

Also, since the other side being pure evil is a rare phenomenon, perhaps a better cultural understanding of psychopathy would help some people to understand that 98% of the people they debate will be just as sane as they are and thus to stay open.

mytyde Oct 25, 2012, 1:52 AM
7 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: [Link] Offense 101
(Napoleon didn’t invade Russia because of cognitive bias. He’d already defeated Russia several times and “invaded” in 1912 with the object of forcing Russia to keep out of Poland and remain in the Continental System. Logistics killed Le Grand Armee.… Napoleon was actually above average height for his time period… the rumor that Napoleon was short is due to a perhaps-intentional failure to convert French measurement height units into British units of the same name, and so there’s no basis for a “Napoleon Complex”.)

A more interesting question would be “What cognitive biases through history have led us to think of Napoleon as a short person?”

mytyde Oct 23, 2012, 4:19 AM
−3 points
on: The Fabric of Real Things
Philosophy is analogous to masturbation, as science is to sexual love. How can you manage the latter if you’ve never learned how to use your most important organ by practicing the former?

Yudkowsky is indeed too “hard” on philosophy, even as he practices it himself.

mytyde Oct 23, 2012, 4:00 AM
0 points
on: [Link] An argument for Low-hanging fruit in Medicine
Every doctor should be required to study The Art of War before being allowed to practice. Practicing medicine is not like balancing an equation. Medicine is not a game of perfect information, nor are its rules unchanging. Indeed, each person’s health battles take place upon an idiosyncratic battlefield with various assortments of forces. The war of evolution, which has been raging for millennia, has developed in Homo Sapien what is likely one of the most highly adapted immune systems in the history of the planet. It is not surprising that doctors fail so often when they survey the battlefield and can think only to higher suspect mercenaries to fight proxy battles (drugs on secondary symptoms)...

We should think of our brain as a GrandMaster General, the spine her chain of command, every specialized organ a legion brimming with age-old veteran forces. Should we think the whole army, which have never yet succumb to defeat in millenia of evolution, could be defeated by average maladies? Should we assume that the General of millions of victories makes simple mistakes like misallocating resources (like making too much cholesterol)?

And when we’ve given the majestic human body its due respect, is it reasonable to expect people with 4 years of training, who are bombarded by biased solicitations and have to side-step personal biases, who primarily wield simple synthetic compounds and inelegant machinery… to have mastery over it?

The key thing to remember is: Correlation does not equal causation.

mytyde Oct 23, 2012, 3:49 AM
0 points
in reply to: Xachariah’s comment on: Anyone with the medical knowledge to evaluate an extraordinary claim?
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein

If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren’t popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).

mytyde Oct 23, 2012, 3:26 AM
0 points
in reply to: anotheruser’s comment on: Anyone with the medical knowledge to evaluate an extraordinary claim?
It’s good to see skepticism in attributing everything to genetics...
1. Some legit anthropologists think pre-agricultural humans actually frequently lived into their 70s and 80s, contrary to popular assumptions
2. I would consider the possibility that changes in lifestyle and/or diet somewhere between 10,000 years ago and the present could have SERIOUSLY affected human health and social organization. Particular culprits I personally find likely are soil-nutrient depletion, the hyper-domestication and consolidation of monocropping corn & wheat, or confounding modern environmental factors introduced by not-fully-understood technologies.
3. Maybe decreasing infant mortality means more unhealthy babies are being born to become unhealthy adults
Douglas_Knight is essentially right. NancyLebovitz also makes a good point. The confounding factors are too complex to possibly deal with individually in the present, so we have to have massive experiments using the best available methods to establish correlation in present-day circumstances.

mytyde Oct 23, 2012, 3:14 AM
0 points
on: Anyone with the medical knowledge to evaluate an extraordinary claim?
Hundreds of thousands of Americans die of medical malpractice every year. Anyone who holds medical science in such high regard that they can do-no-wrong has not studied its history. American medical practice especially, compared to European standards, is positively wretched to the average patient.

I would not assume that this man’s breakthrough is real, but it is ludicrous to assume its falsity without any expertise to make such a judgement. Moreover, if his methods are reasonable and his results happen to be incorrect, it does NOT make him a “crackpot”. Seriously, a scientist being wrong should be considered the norm: scietists are almost NEVER fully correct in their assertions. To call a scientist a “crackpot” is akin to calling a politician a “fascist”: sure, there are a few milling about, but overwhelmingly it’s just a cheap insult. Shame on yea who consider yourselves rationalists but use such emotionally-charged, biased terminology and make epistemology claims they have no qualifications to make.

...Additionally, there are the institutional criticisms to make of modern scientific practice. Of course, some “scientific” institutions are horribly corrupt, but even those which are run legitimately can fall victim to cognitive, publication, and funding biases. http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html (There’s plenty more to look up. Privately-funded studies far more likely to net positive results; positive results are far more likely to be published; negative results are more likely to be redacted after publication...)

mytyde Oct 2, 2012, 6:20 PM
−1 points
in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: How a pathological procrastinor can lose weight [Anti-akrasia]
Your claim that poor people in rich countries suffer less from poverty is fallacious and insensitive. Statistical information shows that standard of living (and about every other imaginable method of judging well-being) is tied to relative wealth rather than absolute wealth.

mytyde Sep 30, 2012, 3:50 AM
0 points
in reply to: vizikahn’s comment on: Akrasia and Shangri-La
If they don’t have the nutritional basis for changing their bodies, they won’t. Some people, mostly those suffering from chronic conditions, are actually low in cholesterol

mytyde Sep 29, 2012, 3:50 PM
−1 points
in reply to: evtujo’s comment on: Akrasia and Shangri-La
The “extra-virgin” designation does make a difference, fyi. That’s probably not what was throwing you off, but I’ll leave this here for future Shangi-la researchers.

mytyde Sep 29, 2012, 3:47 PM
−1 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: Akrasia and Shangri-La
That’s really neat. How is it that Tim Ferriss could have developed a more effective weightloss system than nutritional experts? If such a claim is indeed true, it would necessarily lead to questioning the basis of nutritional experimentation: is it even built upon a solid enough base to be useful?

mytyde Sep 26, 2012, 4:23 AM
14 points
in reply to: simon’s comment on: Akrasia and Shangri-La
Americans who have grown up in at least moderate financial security have developed astounding rates of obesity. People who grew up in Nazi-occupied countries who were malnourished as children also developed astoundingly high obesity rates as adults. From the evidence I’ve seen, genetics is over-emphasized as the missing factor in almost every medical theory before enough is known to know better. While income correlates with obesity, it does not explain the physiological mechanism through which poorer people (relative wealth may seem to mean much more than absolute wealth, interestingly) have a much harder time staying healthy.

It seems much more plausible that both semi-adaptable epigenomic variation and multi-generational lifestyle adaptions play bigger roles in generating familial and social trends of obesity. The nutrition, gut health, and overall health of BOTH parents contributes to the making of a child, and the mother’s health strongly affects it from then until birth, after which point colostrum and then breast milk will continue to play a direct parent-to-child role in the young one’s development.

Though there is no conclusive research that I’m aware of, it is probable that children establish certain growth limitations based on signals about nutrient availability received directly from their parents during conception and then from the mother during pregnancy and breastfeeding (variances of conveyed gut flora could be the mechanism here). Then, lifestyle and its epigenomic effects as normalized during childhood continues to play probably the same-seeming role since parents will tend to feed their children the same things they eat.

Anthropologically, going back a mere few hundred years there were no cultures anywhere in the world suffering obesity epidemics, so it doesn’t make sense to attribute variance too strongly to genetics. Historically, humans have survived healthfully on almost any combination of macronutrients while the main variant between healthy civilizations seems to have been micronutrients. Since studies generally don’t account in any fashion for idiosyncratic in-utero environment or for epigenetic variations among individuals, it could turn out that a vast amount of nutritional research is entirely worthless. E.g. clinical studies of nutrition among populations could depend entirely on sociological factors about the last generation’s diet than about the objective value of macro-nutrients (which, in my opinion, should never be claimed as the object of a study as if removed from the context of the foods they are a part of).

The father’s health can play a role after conception as well since beneficial gut bacteria, in the least, can be transferred through saliva & sex. Additionally, since these gut bacteria build up multi-generationally, it could be that antibiotic treatment seriously impairs the functioning of newborns, especially if they don’t have probiotic sources in their diet (the best of which is breastmilk from a biotics-rich mother!).

-med student

mytyde Sep 26, 2012, 4:13 AM
10 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Akrasia and Shangri-La
People who grew up in Nazi-occupied countries who were malnourished as children also developed astoundingly high obesity rates as adults. From the evidence I’ve seen, genetics is over-emphasized as the missing factor in almost every medical theory before enough is known to know better. While income correlates with obesity, it does not explain the physiological mechanism through which poorer people (relative wealth may seem to mean much more than absolute wealth, interestingly) have a much harder time staying healthy.

It seems much more plausible that both semi-adaptable epigenomic variation and multi-generational lifestyle adaptions play bigger roles in generating familial and social trends of obesity. The nutrition, gut health, and overall health of BOTH parents contributes to the making of a child, and the mother’s health strongly affects it from then until birth, after which point colostrum and then breast milk will continue to play a direct parent-to-child role in the young one’s development.

Though there is no conclusive research that I’m aware of, it is probable that children establish certain growth limitations based on signals about nutrient availability received directly from their parents during conception and then from the mother during pregnancy and breastfeeding (variances of conveyed gut flora could be the mechanism here). Then, lifestyle and its epigenomic effects as normalized during childhood continues to play probably the same-seeming role since parents will tend to feed their children the same things they eat.

Anthropologically, going back a mere few hundred years there were no cultures anywhere in the world suffering obesity epidemics, so it doesn’t make sense to attribute variance too strongly to genetics. Historically, humans have survived healthfully on almost any combination of macronutrients while the main variant between healthy civilizations seems to have been micronutrients. Since studies generally don’t account in any fashion for idiosyncratic in-utero environment or for epigenetic variations among individuals, it could turn out that a vast amount of nutritional research is entirely worthless. E.g. clinical studies of nutrition among populations could depend entirely on sociological factors about the last generation’s diet than about the objective value of macro-nutrients (which, in my opinion, should never be claimed as the object of a study as if removed from the context of the foods they are a part of).

The father’s health can play a role after conception as well since beneficial gut bacteria, in the least, can be transferred through saliva & sex. Additionally, since these gut bacteria build up multi-generationally, it could be that antibiotic treatment seriously impairs the functioning of newborns, especially if they don’t have probiotic sources in their diet (the best of which is breastmilk from a biotics-rich mother!).

-med student

mytyde Sep 26, 2012, 1:31 AM
2 points
in reply to: mytyde’s comment on: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet
My experience is years of frustration with my health, being overweight, low energy all the time, and it turns out that the lyme disease I had been treated for back in high school had survived and continued to plague me beyond my immune system’s capacity to completely eradicate. It returned periodically for years, and only during periods of extremely low stress when I was out of school was I able to live comfortably at all. What tipped me off to getting treatment was comparing my physical abilities during high school as an athlete to my abilities up to this point in which I can barely engage in anaerobic exercise.