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gwern comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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One of the old standard topics of OB was cryogenics; why it's great even thought it's incredibly speculative & relatively expensive, and how we're all fools for not signing up. (I jest, but still.)
Why is there so much less interest in things like caloric restriction? Or even better, intermittent fasting, which doesn't even require cuts in calories? If we're at all optimistic about the Singularity or cryogenic-revival-level-technology being reached by 2100, then aren't those way superior options? They deliver concrete benefits now, for a price that can't be beat, and on the right time-scale*.
Yet I don't think I've seen Robin or Eliezer even once say something like "and if you don't buy the benefits of cryogenic preservation, why on earth aren't you at least doing CR?".
* Assume we're in or close to our teens - as many of the readers are, and would live to to 80 or 90 due to our family background; that pushes our death date out to ~2080; assume CR/IF deliver less benefits in humans than in lower organism, say, 20%; that gets us another 18 years, or to 2098, which is close enough to 2100 as to make no difference.
In the same vein, although I fear I tread too close to 'life-hacking' territory here (and I recall the LW community had consciously decided to avoid descending down into the 'cool tips/tools' territory? or am I wrong about that?), I've noticed very little discussion of the various substances labeled 'nootropics'.
We discussed quite a bit how to motivate ourselves and increase the percentage of time spent being 'productive'; shouldn't it be equally fascinating to us that things like modafinil* can eliminate the need for sleep, gaining hours? Even if modafinil's benefits averaged out cuts the need for sleep only in half or a quarter, well, it's the rare productivity or mind technique that saves you 4 and a half or 2 and a quarter hours a day.
* which I know for a fact some LWers happily & effectively use
This is an Open Thread. No restrictions here. Though, I wish we'd replace these with a proper forum that's active throughout the month.
I'm not a fan of having a Less Wrong forum. One of LW's advantages is that it has low volume and high quality. It doesn't take much of my time to read and most of the posts are worth reading. Forums are the opposite: higher volume and lower quality. This makes forums a bigger time sink for everyone: moderators, posters, and readers.
I think the low volume high quality nature of the LW front page is why a forum would be a bonus. People could hash out more low to mid quality ideas without detracting from the more developed postings that the readers who want to invest less time are looking for. I'm not a fan of a forum in lieu of the current LW format, but as an idea incubator, I think it could be interesting and of use.
I think a forum here would be fantastic. I don't believe it would detract from the articles, it would just give discussions that have potentially smaller interest bases a chance to still develop.
If the open thread were always visible somewhere in the sidebar, would that constitute "a proper forum" for you? or if there were weekly open threads?
I definitely agree that a forum would allow for more discussion, particularly of the less-momentous but still-beneficial topics. In particular, I think that discussions of actual strategies people have tried, what has worked and not worked, could actually be highly beneficial. I see them as data we need to collect in order to begin forming some kind of method for actually helping rationalists win in real world situations.
Even a general forum would be great - I wouldn't mind finding out what books and movies the rest of LW enjoys; this place is what turned me onto Torchwood. Though I could understand worries that it might distract from the core purpose of this site.
AIUI, the forum idea was tried for Overcomingbias.com back when it was a shared-authorship blog. It didn't quite work out.
There's plenty of opportunity to hash out lower-interest points here. In addition to the monthly open threads, just clicking on "Recent posts" in the sidebar will bring up a list of posts which didn't make the front page.
What are you referring to?
Some life hacking: narrow the distance between "I wish" and "I will". Shared hosting starts in the realm of $5/month. Open source forum software is very available. With fairly basic computer skills and Google you're probably not more than 6hrs away from having the forum you want. Some early research might narrow that gap further.
Forum is people first and foremost. I see no way I could attract LWers to a forum on a separate site. Besides, that is not what I want at all. I want a forum here.
More fascinating for me is how modafinil improves my motivation.
Yes, I've noticed that too, but it's hard to say what it is: is it a simple placebo effect, or is it the miser in me saying 'you spent $1.20 on modafinil for today, and dammit you'd better get >1.20 out of it!', or is it the reduction of tiredness, or the sense of lots of time in front of one (I think of Lin Yutang's quote: "A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.")?
Or something entirely else, like that one notices the drop in motivation only when stopping modafinil, and this drop might be due just to recovery from usage? (A slow depletion of dopamine, eg.)
If it's this last suggestion, then the motivation effect is just a modest version of the amphetamine motivation-then-crash - but what makes modafinil most interesting is that it by and large seems like a 'free lunch', and those are so rare in biology/pharmaceuticals.
A lot of commenters outside America on this one? You need a prescription for Modafinil in the US.
Yes. Yes, you do.
I eat between 1200 and 1500 calories a day. I found it surprisingly easy to make the transition.
I've also tried polyphasic sleep, which would be a huge tangible benefit if I could get it to work, but I simply lack the willpower to stick with it through the transition period.
Did you try polyphasic sleep before or during CR? I think MV found it only possible during CR.
I've tried it several times, both before and during.
The real costs of caloric restriction are very high. We experience all sorts of negative symptoms, like lack of attention/lack of sexual function and physical pain when we are hungry. I am quite certain that I couldn't achieve a true CR diet if I tried. Even if I made a strong effort, there is still a fair chance I will wind up in an unhappy medium, in which I don't achieve the benefits because I couldn't pass some threshold at which CR becomes effective.
In fact, for most people, CR is probably impossible. Most of us do not even have the willpower to keep our weights in the "acceptable" range in spite of the fact that we idealize lean, low-fat bodies. We're battling millions of years of evolutionary programming.
However, we might see some of the same benefits from taking resveratrol or the forthcoming sirtuin drugs. Resveratrol is pretty cheap, much cheaper than CR (in terms of suffering), so I bet that would be a better candidate for most people than attempting (and likely failing) CR.
knb: I found it a little hard to separate your experience from your speculations there - could you clarify the meaning of "we experience" vs "I couldn't achieve a true CR diet if I tried". I suspect that you're speculating.
CR isn't a line you need to get over - more CRON (CR with Optimal Nutrition) is better: http://www.crsociety.org/files/images/cr-youth.gif
I don't CR as much as I'd like to, but I lost about 18% of my body weight from my set point (at which point my family instructed me not to look any freakishly thinner)… and it was only hard at first. Some of what makes it easier is habit, some is clearing the high GI cycle from your system (once I stopped eating high GI foods I fairly quickly stopped craving high GI foods), but I think most of it is simple life hacking:
knb: but what about IF? You get all the calories you want there. From my college days with the buffet, I remember on more than a few occasions I would simply not eat for a day and then the next day I would gorge. (I wasn't losing weight during this time, just to be clear, and I was also more athletic than my norm.)
That's actually really interesting. When I was an undergrad, I "accidentally" used intermittent fasting as well. I was about 20 lbs overweight when I started school one year, I managed to lose 25 lbs on accident, in spite of the fact that I regularly binged after 24 hours of being to busy to eat.
My (limited) understanding implies this kind of thing is unhealthy and leads to suboptimal mental functioning.
If there's any unhealthiness to it, I didn't notice. It seemed to work out fine with my fencing & Taekwondo.
But mental functioning I really don't know. I ate pretty healthily even in the binging phase, but I know from my N-backing and polyphasic sleep experiments that one can be utterly unaware of even large deficits (or surpluses), and I was using no mental benchmark or task back then, so I would have remained unaware.
One of my videos is about the topic. See:
"Tim Tyler: Why dietary energy restriction works"
1) I can't work and starve at the same time.
2) State of evidence in favor of CR wasn't very good last time I checked. I recall something along the lines of, "Cutting calories by 40% extends the lifespan of (some short-lived creature) by a week, and it's looking like it may extend human lifespan by a week as well."
That assumes you're starving during intermittent fasting. Many practitioners actually find that they are much more clear-headed when they have not eaten recently.
My guess is that you're equating hypoglycemia with hunger. I eat a paleo diet, which has low levels of dietary carbohydrates. This forces the body to use gluconeogenesis to meet its glucose needs. Because you're producing it endogenously, your blood sugar remains completely steady. You only suffer from hypoglycemia when you're dependent upon exogenous sources of glucose, forcing you to eat every few hours. I much prefer the freedom to eat whenever I want.
I find that I'm more light-headed when I haven't eaten enough, but it's not the same as clear-headed.
I just wanted to add myself as another data point: I have been low-carb for three months and I can vouch for this. (I also lost 10 kg)
If only I had known this when I was a kid. So many mid-mornings at school, hungry (and suddenly sleepy) because of "healthy" breakast cereals!
There's prior discussion on this subject that you haven't read -- in particular, this.
There's even been a little discussion of hypoglycemia.
Update: Gregory Benford (who recently founded a life extension company) says that CR slows down life processes in both flies and humans. You live longer but you're less active. Sounds plausible.
I remember that there is a considerable benefit for mice (not a week), but no good evidence for people. On the other hand, there is lots of evidence about correlation of weight with all sorts of diseases, which themselves kill.
I remember that there is this resource called Wikipedia. So I look up Calorie Restriction. I find there's a very detailed research summary there.
On primates, it starts out with this:
"A study on rhesus macaques, funded by the National Institute on Aging, was started in 1989 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This study showed that caloric restriction in rhesus monkeys blunts aging and significantly delays the onset of age related disorders such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and brain atrophy. The monkeys were enrolled in the study at ages of between 7 and 14 years; at the 20 year point, 80% of the calorically restricted monkeys were still alive, compared to only half of the controls...."
The section on negative effects talks mainly about what happens when nutrition is poor, or when calories are too low to sustain life. My favorite: "A calorie restriction diet can cause extreme hunger that may lead to binge eating behaviour." Uh-huh. Every guide on CR I've read counsels taking a gradual approach, to give your body time to adjust, and people on CR diets often report that the feelings of hunger attenuate.
The so-called CRON approach ("Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition") focuses on preventing malnutrition, as you'd expect from the name, and is decidely not "starvation", which is obviously an eventually terminal condition.
There is promising, but inconclusive, evidence for a positive effect with human beings. If it works well for monkeys, yeast, fruit flies, nematodes and mice, it's hard to see why it wouldn't work for human beings. But human beings are exceptional in a number of ways, so I suppose it's possible it doesn't work for us.
Indeed. Most mammals tend to have roughly the same number of heartbeats in a lifespan; short-lived mammals such as mice have much faster heartbeats than long-lived mammals such as elephants. Nearly every mammal on the planet (except those that hibernate) has a lifespan of about one billion heartbeats, give or take a few hundred million here and there.
Humans have a lifespan of two billion heartbeats.
Compared to other mammals, we already have a greatly enhanced lifespan. It's quite possible that whatever switch calorie restriction turns on in mice, humans already have turned on by default.
This is, incidentally, the exact same argument David Brin gave me. (He also argued that if CR/IF really worked, we ought to know already based on millennia of religious practices that imply CR/IF and said communities' intense interest in health matters such as herbal remedies.)
That's where I got my argument from, actually.
There is evidence of benefit for non-human primates.
I thought that mild "obesity" (BMI 25) was associated with lower lethality rates than being thin (due to thin people dying more easily when sick; apparently that body fat actually does do its required job sometimes). Normal weight is probably still better, but is that what CR gets you?
Actually, the lower death rates with moderate rather than lower BMI, was an early claim and was later shown to be the result of people being thinner as the result of previously undiagnosed illnesses. I don't remember the source, as I have read several books on the subject, I sort of think it was from Fumento's "The Fat of the Land", but it could have been several others (none of which supported the superiority of moderate over lower BMI, until you get down to starvation levels, ie BMI of less than 18).
Looking at mortality rates in the general population broken down by BMI gives a poor guide to the effects of dietary energy restriction - since many people get thin through being sick or malnourished.
A fairly typical study on the topic:
"How Much Should We Eat? The Association Between Energy Intake and Mortality in a 36-Year Follow-Up Study of Japanese-American Men"
You are probably right, hence the disclaimer that it's unchecked memory. There clearly must be some unknown point after which the diet starts to kill you, and this point may be very human-specific.
I don't know about CR, but I've done IF (intermittent fasting) for months at a time while maintaining my normal body weight.
I think that's an excellent question. I would guess that it's harder to do CR/regular fasting than sign up for cryonics, and not many ppl want to preach what they don't practice. I take flaxseed oil daily, which is perhaps the easiest if not the best way to improve long-term health.
Even if caloric restriction increases longevity, it doesn't protect you against death due to accident, disease, or violence.
A Bayesian gives the win to CR.
Actually, I think the costs of caloric restriction are higher than cryo and the benefits are less.
I'm a 24 year-old male. According to this actuarial table I can expect to be alive for 52 more years, which puts my death in 2061. I'll use gwern's numbers and assume caloric restriction increases life span by 20% in humans. In that case CR would give me 10 more years of life, moving my funeral out to 2071.
CR would only pay off if life-extension/singularity/whatever technology happens in that 10 year span. I'm very confident that advances in curing aging will happen sooner than 2060, so I'm not concerned about dying from old age. I am concerned about dying due to accident, disease, or violence, so I'm signed up for cryonics.
Caloric restriction doesn't cost money, but it does decrease quality of life. Hunger makes it harder for me to have fun. I can't think as clearly. I can't run or cycle as fast. I'm not nearly as productive. Cryonics doesn't require a major lifestyle change and it doesn't hurt my current quality of life.
What eating less energy does to your quality of life depends on how fat you are.
For many people in the west, eating less dietary energy would improve their quality of life - often rather dramatically.
First, let me explain why caloric restriction isn't for me: I weigh 120lbs and I exercise a lot.
I think you're overstating the benefits of caloric restriction and neglecting to mention other ways to get healthier, such as aerobic exercise. Also, there's a big difference between recommending that fat Americans eat less and recommending that fat Americans do caloric restriction.
Maybe - but protection against heart attack, stroke and cancer is worth quite a bit.
Body building is extremely at odds with fasting.
True, if you mean body building as "bulking up". But I work with weights partially to keep from losing muscle mass when dieting. If you diet without strength training you lose muscle mass right along with the fat.
Not necessarily true, actually. Fasting can release a good deal of growth hormone. It can also keep your insulin response in good condition. Intermittent fasting, in particular, doesn't even decrease the total number of calories a person eats, so could be ideal for body building.