brazil84 comments on Akrasia and Shangri-La - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2009 08:53PM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 18 October 2012 04:49:30PM 2 points [-]

Still around 95kg. Still like the food. All is fine :-)

Comment author: brazil84 08 March 2014 11:50:58AM *  1 point [-]

How are things now 3 years later? Are things working out? And if so, have you changed your thinking since the beginning?

Comment author: David_Gerard 09 March 2014 01:52:20PM 3 points [-]

Got thoroughly sick of it by last year, largely gave up. Now I eat it some days, ignore it others. Haven't checked weight lately :-)

Comment author: brazil84 09 March 2014 02:30:32PM 1 point [-]

Thank you for responding . . . I wish I could up-vote your post by about 50 points.

My impression is that when people kvell about their diet success, they tend to be reluctant to update down the road if things don't work out. Leading to a survivorship bias problem. And making it difficult to get a better understanding of how diets run off the rails.

From a meta point of view, there is arguably only one real way to diet successfully, which is to think about all the ways that diets fail and then plan and adopt strategies to deal with those problems.

Comment author: David_Gerard 10 March 2014 08:56:17AM *  0 points [-]

The essential problem remains: humanity's basically solved the food problem, but our genes don't understand this so pack on the fat in preparation for a famine that will never arrive. So all diets are unnatural. Too much food for our health is a great problem to have, though, much better than the previous problem.

Comment author: brazil84 11 March 2014 07:27:50AM 0 points [-]

The essential problem remains: humanity's basically solved the food problem, but our genes don't understand this so pack on the fat in preparation for a famine that will never arrive. So all diets are unnatural

Well that's one essential aspect of the problem. There are other issues too. But I think this point is important in at least one respect: There is an idea out there that there is something wrong with obsessing over one's food intake and weight. Another poster asserted that dieting is a mental disorder.

But given that for a lot of people, System 1 (non-conscious thought) is unable to navigate today's environment successfully, it's not unreasonable to use System 2 (conscious thought) as a substitute. Or even what one might call "System 3" -- conscious thought plus brain extensions such as calendars, food and weight logs, written meal plans, etc.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 11 March 2014 08:46:13AM 0 points [-]

So all diets are unnatural.

I thought the entire point of the paleo diet is that it is natural, er, consonant with the ancestral evolutionary environment?

Comment author: David_Gerard 11 March 2014 10:48:26PM 0 points [-]

So it claims. I believe this is more than slightly disputed.