OrphanWilde

Karma: 2,850

OrphanWilde 12 Aug 2016 17:01 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: People who lie about how much they eat are jerks

No it doesn’t. You use up more calories when you weigh more. If you eat an apple a day you will reach an equilibrium where you have just enough extra weight to burn a number of calories per day equivalent to an apple. 95 calories in an apple will still get you to about 9.5 kilograms extra, which is a lot, but not near 50 pounds and it won’t increase without limit.)

The information I have seen suggests a pound of fat requires 2-3 kilocalories per day to maintain itself, which implies a range of 30-47.5 pounds from a 95 kilocalorie deviation, which would be 13-20 kilograms.

I have no idea how accurate that is, but it doesn’t matter too much, as the underlying point remains the same: People’s expectations of food consumption necessary to be overweight are entirely inaccurate. Fat people think thin people must be eating almost nothing at all, thin people think fat people must be eating three hamburgers per meal, where the actual difference is quite small, relative to our out-of-whack expectations.

OrphanWilde 10 Aug 2016 15:19 UTC
2 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: People who lie about how much they eat are jerks
It’s not just “harder”, it requires skills and knowledge, which most people don’t actually have.

The point is that “exercise” isn’t helpful advice to lose weight. First, it’s not terribly effective at it over short durations, and people need to know that what they’re doing is working. Second, if somebody isn’t already exercising, they’re going to hurt themselves, have a six week recovery time, try again, hurt themselves, and give up on losing weight. Third, you’re communicating something different than what you think you are; “Go for a walk every day” is good advice, by comparison to “exercise”. The temptation is to object that that is exactly exercising—but it isn’t what people think when you tell them to exercise.

I’ve been both. My natural tendency, absent constant pressure, is to settle 40-50 pounds over my ideal weight—and it’s relatively easy for me to lose weight now, but mostly because I know it’s possible. The first time I lost weight, willpower had nothing to do with it—I had a minimum-wage job that kept me constantly active, and I didn’t feel like I could afford to waste money on anything but the minimum sustenance of food. So I was dieting and exercising against my preferences. Since then, I’ve been able to lose weight—because I knew it was possible. Without the prior experience of having lost weight, it feels like an impossible achievement.

OrphanWilde 9 Aug 2016 15:15 UTC
2 points
on: People who lie about how much they eat are jerks
I don’t recommend having this argument. It’s useless in almost every respect.

There are two fundamental issues. First, most people don’t understand what a Calorie looks like, and think the difference between a healthy weight and an unhealthy weight is a large amount of food, rather than a small amount of food compounded over long periods of time. Want to lose weight in a sustained and sustainable fashion? Subtract a small amount of food over a long period of time. Instead, people crash-diet, then go back to normal eating habits.

An extra apple a day translates, over years, to up to 50 extra pounds. Looking at two people’s daily diets, one is overweight, one is healthy, and most people couldn’t tell the difference by looking at what they ate.

The second problem is that exercise is incredibly unpleasant if you’re overweight. If you’re currently in shape, try tossing 50 lbs of weights into a backpack the next time you exercise. Or better yet, don’t, because you could hurt yourself pretty easily in exactly the ways overweight people injure themselves when doing things like jogging.

It takes physiological issues to gain serious amounts of weight in the first place; these won’t stop you from losing weight, but they’ll make it harder to maintain a steady weight. Normal people fidget or otherwise increase their base level of activity when they overeat, burning off excess calories. Overweight people have to be more deliberate and conscious of these things.

OrphanWilde 1 Jul 2016 13:10 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums
You think that an argument that ultimately boils down to “Look how capitalism is a failure at providing basic things” isn’t going to provoke defensive reactions?

This doesn’t even pretend very hard.

OrphanWilde 30 Jun 2016 14:05 UTC
−6 points
on: Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums
Downvoted: If we’re going to have a ban on politics, let’s have a ban on politics.

OrphanWilde 29 Jun 2016 14:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: entirelyuseless’s comment on: Meme: Valuable Vulnerability

That does not mean never ever having a single negative emotion, just as I presume that he was not speaking of never having any emotions of any kind.

I was, indeed, speaking of not having any emotions of any kind. Or rather, not qualitatively experiencing them; I’d get angry, for example, but I’d notice I was angry because my hands would start clenching of their own accord, not because I’d experience anything resembling an “anger” qualia, or have my thoughts actually influenced by my emotions. To such an extent that, because I didn’t experience either lust or love or any of the variations on those two themes as an internal emotive force, I assumed for many years I was asexual.

OrphanWilde 29 Jun 2016 12:50 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

Absolutely agreed. But it’s about conflicts among preferred outcomes of a decision, not about preferences among disconnected world-states.

Less about two outcomes your preferences conflict on, and more about, say, your preferences and mine.

Insofar as your internal preferences conflict, I’m not certain ethics are the correct approach to resolve the issue.

If they’re unaware because there’s no reasonable way for them to be aware, it’s hard for me to hold them to blame for not acting on that. Ought implies can. If they’re unaware because they’ve made choices to avoid the truth, then they’re ethically inferior to the version of themselves which do learn and act.

This leads to a curious metaethics problem; I can construct a society of more ethically perfect people just by construction it so that other people’s suffering is an unknown unknown. Granted, that probably makes me something of an ethical monster, but given that I’m making ethically superior people, is it worth the ethical cost to me?

Once you start treating ethics like utility—that is, a comparable, in some sense ordinal, value—you produce meta-ethical issues identical to the ethical issues with utilitarianism.

OrphanWilde 28 Jun 2016 20:47 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

Ethics is solely and simply about decisions—which future state, conditional on current choice, is preferable.

From my perspective, we have a word for that, and it isn’t ethics. It’s preference. Ethics are the rules governing how preference conflicts are mediated.

I’m not trying to compare a current world with poverty against a counterfactual current world without—that’s completely irrelevant and unhelpful.

Then imagine somebody living an upper-class life who is unaware of suffering. Are they ethically inferior because they haven’t made decisions to alleviate pain they don’t know about? Does informing them of the pain change their ethical status—does it make them ethically worse-off?

OrphanWilde 28 Jun 2016 13:52 UTC
5 points
on: Meme: Valuable Vulnerability
Well, I followed a policy of strict emotional regulation, and it made me anhedonic for more than a decade. I’m actively working on feeling things, whereas previously, I would have described my emotional state almost entirely in terms of equanimity, although, since I didn’t know the word, I used an artful description of same. (In an emotional state, I would describe myself as balancing on top of a very narrow tower, where emotions were winds attempting to knock me down.)

Which is to say—in my experience, you don’t get to pick and choose which emotions you experience. If you start refusing some, you’ll discover they all fade away. This is initially extremely attractive, if you’re experiencing intense negative emotions, but in the long-term, I believe the term for the mental state this produces is “clinical depression”.

It’s better to learn to cope with your emotions than to attempt to refuse them.

OrphanWilde 28 Jun 2016 13:40 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016
There are two problems.

In the first scenario, in which ethics is an obligation (i/e, your ethical standing decreases for not fulfilling ethical obligations), you’re ethically a worse person in a world with poverty, because there are ethical obligations you cannot meet. The idea of ethical standing being independent of your personal activities is, to me, contrary to the nature of ethics.

In the second scenario, in which ethics are additive (you’re not a worse person for not doing good, but instead, the good you do adds to some sort of ethical “score”), your ethical standing is limited by how horrible the world you are in is—that is, the most ethical people can only exist in worlds in which suffering is sufficiently frequent that they can constantly act to avert it. The idea of ethical standing being dependent upon other people’s suffering is also, to me, contrary to the nature of ethics.

It’s not a matter of which world you’d prefer to live in, it’s a matter of how the world you live in changes your ethical standing.

ETA: Although the “additive” model of ethics, come to think of it, solves the theodicy problem. Why is there evil? Because otherwise people couldn’t be good.

OrphanWilde 24 Jun 2016 17:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MalcolmOcean’s comment on: Two kinds of Expectations, *one* of which is helpful for rational thinking

The response on LW continues to be aversively critical

Yeeeeup.

It’s not the upvotes/downvotes, either. It’s the comments.

OrphanWilde 24 Jun 2016 15:56 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016
Okay. Imagine two versions of you: In one, you were born into a society in which, owing to nuclear war, the country you live in is the only one remaining. It is just as wealthy as our own current society owing to the point this hypothesis is leading to.

The other version of you exists in a society much more like the one we live in, where poor people are starving to death.

I’ll observe that, strictly in terms of ethical obligations, the person in the scenario in which the poor people didn’t exist is ethically superior, because fewer ethical obligations are being unmet. In spite of their actions being exactly the same.

Outside the hypothetical: I agree wholeheartedly the world in which poor people don’t starve is better than the one in which they do. That’s the world I’d prefer exist. I simply fail to see it as an ethical issue, as I regard ethics as being the governance of one’s own behavior rather than the governance of the world.

OrphanWilde 23 Jun 2016 17:27 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016
I’d classify it loosely as Both; nothing requires an ethical system to distinguish between the two cases, but I think it’s a substantial divide in the way people tend to think about ethics.

I’m starting to think “ethics” is an incoherent concept. I’m a strict-negative ethicist—yet I do have an internal concept of a preference hierarchy, in terms of what I want the world to look like, which probably looks a lot like what most people would think of as part of their ethics system. It’s just… not part of my ethics. Yes, I’d prefer it if poor people in other countries didn’t starve to death, but this isn’t an ethical problem, and trying to include it in your ethics looks… confused, to me. How can your ethical status be determined by things outside your control? How can we say a selfish person living in utopia is a better person, ethically, than a selfish person living in a dystopia?

Which isn’t to say I’m right. More than half the users apparently include positive ethics in their ethical systems.

OrphanWilde 22 Jun 2016 17:21 UTC
−2 points
on: Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016
Incidentally, do we have anybody about who can answer a very specific question about meditation practice? (And if you don’t know exactly why I’m asking this question, instead of asking the question I want to ask, you shouldn’t volunteer to try to answer.)

OrphanWilde 22 Jun 2016 15:12 UTC
2 points
on: Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016
A thought occurred to me on a divide in ethical views that goes frequently unremarked, so I thought I’d ask about it: How many of you think ethics/morality is strictly Negative (prohibits action, but never requires action), a combination of Both (can both prohibit or require action), or something else entirely?

ETA: First poll I’ve used here, and I was hoping to view it, then edit the behavior. Please don’t mind the “Option” issue in the format.

[pollid:1159]

OrphanWilde 10 Jun 2016 13:37 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Pimgd’s comment on: Review and Thoughts on Current Version of CFAR Workshop
If somebody downvotes an entire chain of content you’ve posted, you’re probably expressing an idea they disagree with, rather than making a mistake. (Not always true, but usually.)

OrphanWilde 9 Jun 2016 20:20 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lucidian’s comment on: Who are your favorite “hidden rationalists”?

Highly recommend kazerad, for Scott-level insights about human behavior. Here’s his analysis of 4chan’s anonymous culture. Here’s another insightful essay of his. And a post on memetics. And these aren’t necessarily the best posts I’ve read by him, just the three I happened to find first.

I gave him/her a shot.

After five or six pages of angry ranting about Gamergate, which was four or five pages too many, I quit. I have no dog in that fight, and I find the notion of arguing about specific people’s specific lives as if they were culturally or socially significant to be a really misguided enterprise. It’s tribal superstimulus, and it is both addictive and socially self-destructive.

OrphanWilde 7 Jun 2016 14:23 UTC
7 points
on: Morality of Doing Simulations Is Not Coherent [SOLVED, INVALID]
You’ve encrypted a brain, and maybe salted it a bit to boot. You’re still running the brain’s “consciousness” program, it’s just encrypted, and the brain is still experiencing exactly the same things, on account of it is running exactly the same program it would otherwise. The fact that the brain is cryptographically entangled with other data doesn’t make the brain not exist.

OrphanWilde 3 Jun 2016 18:51 UTC
7 points
on: Open Thread May 30 - June 5, 2016
Something I and my local group of conversational partners noticed (I don’t have a better word for it) over the weekend: Greek philosophy was a matter of law; Theseus’ Ship had tax consequences, and shifting conventions in philosophy had legal ramifications. Greek philosophy was argued in court; Sophists were lawyers who were paid to argue your case, and would argue any side whatsoever, as that was what they were paid to do. Socrates had to die, not because he was annoying important people (which he was), but because he insisted on a “pure” philosophy, and was causing all kinds of legal havoc.

It’s an observation which probably isn’t particularly unique, as all the clues are in just about every philosophy book I’ve ever read, but it’s an interesting part of the history of the divergence between instrumental and epistemic rationality.

OrphanWilde 1 Jun 2016 23:30 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: When considering incentives, consider the incentives of all parties

Given your own charge that other people are mindkilled it’s interesting that you see that charge as an insult and not as a factual description.

It is a claim of irrationality; yes, it should be taken as insulting.

I didn’t intent to insult, but to state a hypothesis. A hypothesis that I stated with the word “maybe” to mark uncertainty. Don’t generalize from one example.

I hypothesize you may be an idiot. (Do you see the issue?)

The opposite of fighting the hypothetical is to avoid critical thinking and not challenge it’s assumptions.

Reversed stupidity isn’t intelligence. Something can be poor rationality, and its opposite can be poor rationality as well.

The problem with the hypothetical is that it ignores how beliefs in a society actually form. That’s a process that’s vital to the topic at hand. At a core it assumes that a society has beliefs about a war hold 50 years ago that have nothing to do with propaganda.

No it doesn’t. It makes it clear that there’s motivated reasoning—and thus propaganda—going on on both sides of the equation.

What does “conspicuous” mean here? That you should treat people as being an enemy tribe? That’s tribal thinking.

No. It means there are clear and obvious problems with the article that COULD have been criticized, but weren’t, in favor of dumb tribal things to criticize.