Vaniver comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - Less Wrong

37 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (134)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Vaniver 06 October 2012 05:10:48PM 15 points [-]

"Why you should think the paleo diet has the best consequences for health"

"I like the paleo diet"

Those look significantly different to me- someone who likes the paleo diet because it lets them eat bacon all day and is indifferent to the health consequences is very different from someone who believes the health consequences of paleo are best, but doesn't like it because they enjoy bread and beer too much.

Comment author: David_Gerard 06 October 2012 10:16:31PM *  1 point [-]

With diets, liking it is pretty much essential to staying on it, as far as I can tell from myself and people I know. e.g. I've been on Tim Ferriss' slow-carb diet for a year and a half, and it's great, but only because I like all the food on it already and it suits me. If it didn't I'd have quit in a week. So I laughed at the bit you quote, but I'd say in practice it's not far off the mark and I laughed because it implies my first sentence.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 October 2012 05:20:27AM 3 points [-]

Liking a diet may be necessary for it to have positive health consequences, as you say, but for most people it's not sufficient. So it's probably a mistake to treat "X diet has positive health consequences" as equivalent to "I like X diet" when uttered by most people. (For example, I might be able to experimentally demonstrate the latter and demonstrate the opposite of the former for the same diet and speaker.)

Comment author: David_Gerard 07 October 2012 08:30:12AM *  -1 points [-]

I took it as literary allusion in a place where such may not have been suited to something in a literalist genre. Which may count as a mistake.