AdeleneDawner comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: AdeleneDawner 01 March 2010 09:25AM

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Comment author: AdeleneDawner 01 March 2010 09:28:24AM 5 points [-]

It turns out that Eliezer might not have been as wrong as he thought he was about passing on calorie restriction.

Comment author: gwern 01 March 2010 02:35:57PM 5 points [-]

Well, there's still intermittent fasting.

IF would get around

"The non-aging-related causes of death included monkeys who died while taking blood samples under anesthesia, from injuries or from infections, such as gastritis and endometriosis. These causes may not be aging-related as defined by the researchers, but they could realistically be adverse effects of prolonged calorie restrictions on the animals’ health, their immune system, ability to handle stress, physical agility, cognition or behavior."

and would also work well with the musings about variability and duration:

"From an evolutionary standpoint, he explained, mice who subsist on less food for a few years is analogous, in terms of natural selection, to humans who survive 20-year famines. But nature seldom demands that humans endure such conditions.

Similar conclusions were reached by Dr. Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey with the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, UK. Species have widely evolved to be able to adapt to transient periods of starvation. “What has been generally overlooked is that the extent of the evolutionary pressure to maintain adaptability to a given duration of starvation varies with the frequency of that duration,” he said."

(Our ancestors most certainly did have to survive frequent daily shortfalls. Feast or famine.)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 March 2010 03:57:48PM 1 point [-]

Where do you get that I thought I was wrong about CR? I'd like to lose weight but I had been aware for a while that the state of evidence on caloric restriction doing the purported job of extending lifespan in mammals was bad.

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 01 March 2010 10:04:22PM *  2 points [-]

...huh.

The last thing I remember hearing from you about it was that it looked promising, but that the cognitive side effects made it impractical, so you'd settled on just taking the risk (which would, with that set of beliefs and values, be right in some ways, and wrong in others, and more right than wrong). But, for some reason the search bar doesn't turn up any relevant conversations for "calorie restriction Eliezer" or "caloric restriction Eliezer", so I couldn't actually check my memory. Sorry about that.