If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Genes take charge and diets fall by the wayside.
You need a New York Times account to read it, but setting one up only takes a couple of minutes. Here are some exerpts in any case.
Obese people almost always regain weight after weight loss:
...So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.
Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories con
On the other hand, here's a study that shows a very strong link between impulse control and weight. I'm not really sure what to believe anymore.
Moderately surprising corollary: so society IS treating fat people in a horribly unjust manner after all. Those boring SJW types who have been going on and on about "fat-shaming" and "thin privilege"... are yet again more morally correct on average than the general public.
Am now mildly ashamed of some previous thoughts and/or attitudes.
What are we to make of the supposedly increasing obesity rate across Western nations? Is this a failure of measurement (e.g. standards for what count as "obesity" are dropping), has the Western diet changed our genetics, or something else altogether?
If it was mainly genetics, then I would think that the obesity rate would remain constant throughout time.
What are we to make of the supposedly increasing obesity rate across Western nations? [...]
If it was mainly genetics, then I would think that the obesity rate would remain constant throughout time.
Environmental changes over time may have shifted the entire distribution of people's weights upwards without affecting the distribution's variance. This would reconcile an environmentally-driven obesity rate increase with the NYT's report that 70% of the variance is genetic.
I see. Personally, I'm struggling with the proper application of the Tone Argument. In archetypal form:
A: I don't like social expression X (e.g. scorn at transgendered).
B: You might have a point, but I'm turn off by your tone.
A: I don't think my tone is your true rejection.
But in practice, this can devolve into:
B: Social expression X isn't so bad / might be justified.
A: B deserves to be fired / assaulted / murdered. (e.g. a mindkilled response)
B: Overreacting much?
which is clearly problematic on A's part. Separating the not-true-rejection error by B from the mindkilled problem of A is very important. But the worry is that focusing our attention on that question diverts from the substantive issue of describing what social expressions are problematic and identifying them when they occur (to try to reduce their frequency in the future).
The fact that second wave feminists exercised cisgender privilege to be hurtful to the transgendered seems totally distinction from "Tone Argument" dynamic.
There's been more recent work suggesting that planets are extremely common. Most recently, evidence for planets in unexpected orbits around red dwarfs have been found. See e.g. here. This is in addition to other work suggesting that even when restricted to sun-like stars, planets are not just common, but planets are frequently in the habitable zone. Source(pdf). It seems at this point that any aspect of the Great Filter that is from planet formation must be declared to be completely negligible. Is this analysis accurate?
To whoever fixed it so that we can see the parents of comments when looking at a user's comments, major props to you for being awesome.
I dislike the change, as it's harder to get an impression about a new user based on their user page now, the comments by other users are getting in the way, and it's not possible to tune them out. Also, the change has broken user RSS feeds.
I'm a little torn on that one-- on one hand it adds convenience most of the time, but it makes it less convenient to check on recent karma. The latter is something I feel like doing now and then, but it's possible I'm saner if it isn't convenient.
I just found out that there exists an earlier term for semantic stopsigns: a thought-terminating cliché.
A thought-terminating cliché is a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissent or justifying fallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating.
The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1956 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Lifton said, “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”
Has anyone written a worthwhile utilitarian argument against transhumanism? I'm interested in criticism, but most of it is infested with metaphysical and metaethical claims I can't countenance.
I was an intern at MIRI recently and I would like to start a new LW meetup in my city but as I am still new on LW, I do not have enough karma points. Could you please upvote this comment so that I can get enough karma to post about a meetup? lukeprog suggested I do this. I only need 2 points to post in the discussion part. Thanks to you all
Thanks for bringing back the bright-colored edges for new comments.
The additional thing I'd like to see along those lines is bright color for "continue this thread" and "expand comments" if they include new comments. I'd also like to see it for "comment score below threshold", but I can understand if that isn't included for social engineering reasons.
Risks of vegetarianism and veganism
Personal account of physical and emotional problems encountered by the author which were reversed when he went back to eating animal products. Much discussion of vitamins and dietary fats, not to mention genetic variation. Leaves the possibility open that some people thrive on a vegetarian diet, and possibly on a vegan diet.
I just realized that willingness to update seems very cultish from outside. Literally.
I mean -- if someone joins a cult, what is the most obvious thing that happens to them? They update heavily; towards the group teachings. This is how you can tell that something wrong is happening.
We try to update on reasonable evidence. For example we would update on a scientific article more than on a random website. However, from outside is seems similar to willingness to update on your favorite (in-group) sources, and unwillingness to update on other (out-group) sources. Just like a Jehovah Witness would update on the Watch Tower, but would remain skeptical towards Mormon literature. As if the science itself is your cult... except that it's not really the science as we know it, because most scientist behave outside the laboratory just like everyone else; and you are trying to do something else.
Okay, I guess this is nothing new for a LW reader. I just realized now, on the emotional level, how willingness to update, considered a virtue on LW, may look horrifying to an average person. And how willingness to update on trustworthy evidence more than on untrustworthy evidence, probably seems like hypocrisy, like a rationalization for preferring your in-group ideas to out-group ideas.
How do other people use their whiteboards?
After having my old 90 x 60 whiteboard stashed down the side of my bed since I moved in, nearly two years ago, I finally got around to mounting it a couple of weeks ago. I am amazed at how well it compliments the various productivity infrastructure I've built up in the interim, to the point where I'm considering getting a second 120 x 90 whiteboard and mounting them next to each other to form an enormous FrankenBoard.
A couple of whiteboard practices I've taken to:
Repeated derivation of maths content I'm having trouble remembering. If there's a proof or process I'm having trouble getting to stick, I'll go through it on the board at spaced intervals. There seems to be a kinaesthetic aspect to using the whiteboard that I don't have with pen and paper, so even if my brain is struggling to to remember what comes next, my fingers will probably have a good idea.
Unlike my other to-do list mechanisms, if I have a list item with a check box on the whiteboard, and I complete the item, I can immediately draw in a "stretch goal" check box on the same line. This turns into an enormous array of multicoloured check-boxes over time, which is both gratifying to look at and helpful when deciding what to work on next.
Firstly, a hypothesis: I am highly visual and like working with my hands. This may contribute considerably to any unusual benefit I get out of whiteboards.
So, advantages:
A whiteboard is mounted on the wall, and visible all of the time. I'm going to be reminded of what's written on it more frequently than if it's on a piece of paper or in a notebook. This is advantageous both for reminder/to-do items and for material I'm trying to learn or think about.
Instant erasure of errors. Smoosh and it's gone. I find pencil erasers cumbersome and slow, and generally dislike pencil as a writing medium, so on paper my corrected errors become a mess of scribbled obliteration.
Being able to work with it like an artistic medium. If I'm working with graphs (either in the sense of plotted functions or the edge-and-node variety), I can edit it on the fly without having to resort to messy scribbles or obliterating it and starting again.
Not accumulating large piles of paper workings of varying (mostly very low) importance. I already have an unavoidably large amount of paper in my life, and reducing the overhead of processing it all is valuable.
The running themes here seem to be "I generate a lot of noisy clutter when I work, both physically and abstractly, and a whiteboard means I generate less".
So I'm interested in taking up meditation, but I don't know how/where to start. Is there a practical guide for beginners somewhere that you would recommend?
From Meditation, insight, and rationality (Part 2 of 3):
...Basic method: Sit down in a place where there are few distractions, and pick an object to focus one's attention on. The most popular objects are the feeling of breath at the tip of the nostrils / upper lip, and the motion of the abdomen as one breathes in and out. (In this description I'll assume you're using the latter.) Begin by trying to clearly perceive the feeling of the abdomen expanding and contracting; when it expands and you perceive it clearly, attach the label 'in' to that perception, and when it contracts and you perceive that clearly, attach the label 'out' to that perception. As your attention becomes more stable and precise, you can divide the experience up into as many parts as you can discern: for example, 'in'->'holding'->'out'->'holding', or further, 'in-beginning'->'in-slowing'->'holding'->'out-beginning'->'out-slowing'->'holding'. The label you use is not important so long as it's simple and makes sense to you. What is important is attending to the perception, and the best way to do this is by attaching a label to the perception every time you notice it clearly. Focus on perceivin
More grist for the hypothetical Journal of Negative Results
Scientist wants to publish replication failure. Nature won't accept the article (even as a letter). So scientist retracts previous letter written in support of the non-replicated study.
While researching a forthcoming MIRI blog post, I came across the University of York's Safety Critical Mailing List, which hosted an interesting discussion on the use of AI in safety-critical applications in 2000. The first post in the thread, from Ken Firth, reads:
......several of [Vega's] clients seek to use varying degrees of machine intelligence - from KBS to neural nets - and have come for advice on how to implement them in safety related systems... So far we have usually resorted to the stock answer "you don't — at least not for safety critical f
[I made a request for job finding suggestions. I didn't really want to leave details lying around indefinitely, to be honest, so, after a week, I edited it to this.]
I would like to get better at telling stories in conversations. Usually when I tell a story, it's very fact-based and I can tell that it's pretty boring, even if it wasn't for me. Are there any tips/tricks/heuristics I can implement that can transform a plain fact-based story into something more exciting?
It's okay to lie a little bit. If you're telling the story primarily to entertain, people won't mind if you rearrange the order of events or leave out the boring bits.
Open with a hook. My style is to open with a deadpan delivery of the "punchline" without any context, e.g. "Quit my job today." This cultivates curiosity.
Keep the end in mind. I find that this avoids wandering. It helps if you've anchored the story by "spoiling" the punch line. We all have that friend who tells rambling stories that don't seem to have a point. That said -
Don't bogart the conversation. If you're interrupted, indulge the interruption, and bring the conversation back to your story if you can do so gracefully. It's easy to get fixated on your story, and to become irritated because everybody won't shut up. People detect this and it makes you look like an ass. Sometimes it works to get mock-irritated - "I was telling a story, dammit!" - if doing so feels right. Don't force it.
Don't get bogged down in quoting interactions verbatim. Nobody really cares what she said or what you said in what order.
Since I'm used to hearing Dutch Book arguments as the primary way of defending expected utility maximization, I was intrigued to read this passage (from here):
...The Dutch book argument concerns the long-term consistency of accepting bets. If probabilities are assigned to bets in a way that goes against the principles of CP [Classical Probability] theory, then this guarantees a net loss (or gain) across time. In other words, probabilistic assignment inconsistent with CP theory leads to unfair bets (de Finetti et al. 1993). [...]
These justifications are not
All students including liberal arts students at Singapore's new Yale-NUS College will take a new course in Quantitative Reasoning which John Baez had a hand in designing.
Baez writes that it will cover topics like this:
http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4435.html
...Just after the PRISM scandal broke, Tyler Cowen offered a wonderful, wonderful tweet:
I’d heard about this for years, from “nuts,” and always assumed it was true.
There is a model of social knowledge embedded in this tweet. It implies a set of things that one believes to be true, a set of things one can admit to believing without being a “nut”, and an inconsistency between the two. Why the divergence? Oughtn’t it be true that people of integrity should simply own up to what they believe? Can a “marketplace of id
I'm running an Ideological Turing Test at my blog, and I'm looking for players. This year's theme is sex and death, so the questions are about polyamory and euthanasia.
You can read the rules and sign up at the link, but, essentially, you answer the questions twice: once honestly, and the second time as you think an atheist or Christian (whichever you're not) plausibly would. Then we read through the true and faux atheist answers and try to spot the fakes and see what assumptions players and judges made.
Anybody with tips for beginning an evaluation for the purpose of choosing between future career and academic choices? As far as I can tell, my values are as commonly held as the next fellow:
Felt Purpose - A frequent occurrence of situations that demonstrate, in unique ways, the positive effects of my past actions. I see this as being somewhere in the middle of a continuum, where on one end I'd have only rational reason to believe my actions were doing good (effective charity), and on the other only the feeling as if I were doing good, but less rational
I have started writing a Death Note fanfiction where the characters aren't all as dumb as a bag of bricks (or one could say a rationalist fic) and... I need betas. The first chapter is available on http://www.fanfiction.net/s/9380249/1/Rationalising-Death and the second is pretty much written, but the first is confirmedly "funky" in writing and since I'm not a native English speaker I'm not sure I can actually pinpoint what exactly is wrong with it. Also I'd love the extra help.
Anyone interested? My email for contact is pedromvilar@gmail.com (and...
Politicians have a lot of power in society. How much good could a politician well-acquainted with x-risk do? One way such a politician could do good is by helping direct funds to MIRI. However, this is something an individual with a lot of money (successful in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street) could do as well.
Should one who wants to make a large positive impact on society go into politics over more "conventional" methods of effective altruism (becoming rich somewhere else or working for a high-impact organization)?
Should one who wants to make a large positive impact on society go into politics over more "conventional" methods of effective altruism (becoming rich somewhere else or working for a high-impact organization)?
If you think about it, this is quite a striking statement about the LW community's implicit beliefs.
Sam Nunn was a US senator who wanted to buy surplus nuclear weapons from Russia, rather than risk them wandering off. He was unable to convince the rest of the government to pay for it, but he was able to convince the government to let Buffet and Turner pay for it. He has since decided that he can do more to save the world outside of government.
Added: But, he was rumored to be Secretary of Defense under Gore. So he thought some positions of government were more useful than others.
I have concluded that many of the problems in my life are the result of being insufficiently impulsive. As soon as I notice a desire to do something, I more or less reflexively convince myself that it is a bad idea to do just now. How can I go about increasing my impulsivity? I want to change this as a persistent character trait, so while ethanol works in the short run it is not the solution I am looking for.
Aaron Winborn: Monday was my 46th birthday and likely my last. Anything awesome I should try after I die?
...Just over two years ago, I was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. In short, that means that my mind will increasingly become trapped in my body as the motor neurons continue to die, and the muscles atrophy and waste away, until my diaphragm dies, bringing me with it.
...
But yes, there is a silver lining to this all, such as it is. Kim Suozzi made a similar plea to the Internet a year ago today, and came up with the brilliant idea o
What's actually known about women's biological clocks?
Pretty much the usual if someone looks closely at a commonly held belief about a medical issue. The usual dramatic belief that fertility drops off sharply at 35 is based on French birth records from 1670 to 1830. Human fertility is very hard to study. Women who are trying to have their first child at age forty may be less fertile than average. And so on.
Zach Alexander just posted a reverse engineering of the Soylent recipe. It looks pretty legit, and reasonably easy to put together.
In last year's survey, someone likened Less-Wrong rationalism to Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Rand once summed up her philosophy in the following series of soundbites: "Metaphysics, objective reality. Epistemology, reason. Ethics, self-interest. Politics, capitalism." What would the analogous summary of the LW philosophy be?
In the end, I found that the simplest way to sum it up was to cite particular thinkers: "Metaphysics, Everett. Epistemology, Bayes. Ethics, Bentham. Politics, Vinge."
A few comments:
For metaphysics... I considered "...
Over the past several months, I have been practicing a new habit: whenever I have a 'good' idea, I write it down. ('Good' being used very loosely.)
This is a very simple procedure but it seems to have several benefits. First, I began noticing that I remembered having a 'good' idea but not being able to remember what it was. I now notice this behavior much more strikingly and it causes some small amount of distressing thinking about what I might have forgotten. Writing it down relieves that worry. Second, I can refer back to it later. So far nothing signific...
So with the PRISM program outed, the main thrust of discussions is about its legality and consequences. But what interests me is a rather non-political issue of general competence. One would think that the NSA and in general any security agency would take risk assessment and mitigation seriously. And having its cover blown ought to be somewhere close to the top of the list of critical risks. Yet the obvious weak point of letting the outsiders with appropriate clearance access deep inside the areas with compromising info was apparently never addressed.
Even...
You need IT people to implement the logging and auditing to track other people. However you automate it, even automated systems require human maintenance and guidance.
Sysadmins are a natural root of trust. You can't run a large-scale computing operation without trusting the higher-level sysadmins. Even if you log and audit all operations done by all users (the number of auditors required scales as the number of users), sysadmins always have ways of using others' user accounts.
Second, as for it being a"sellers market", that only means that someone decided that saving a few millions a year in wages was more important than reducing the chances of the breach.
This isn't a matter of paying more to hire better sysadmins. The value you want is loyalty to the organization, but you can't measure it directly and sometimes it changes over time as the person learns more about the organization from the inside. You can't buy more loyalty and prevent leaks by spending more money.
So how can you spend more money, once you've hired the most technically competent people available? I suppose you could hire two or more teams and have them check each other's work. A sort of constant surveil...
http://qz.com/96054/english-is-no-longer-the-language-of-the-web/
Plenty for LW here-- not just that English is a steadily declining fraction of online material, but the difficulties of finding out what proportion of the web is in what language, and the process by which more and more of the web is in more and more languages.
I am very interested in higher order theory of mind (ToM) tests for adults to differentiate those with high theory of mind quotient if you will. My hypothesis is that people with strong theory of mind are better at sales – I have an interest in both. Most tests I find online are meant to test children and for Asperger's Syndrome, what I want are complex questions and problems.
I recently saw a highly upvoted comment on reddit that stated "...Mifune, destroying the top black belts..." and cited this video However, I believe OP has misread the ...
Showing Compassion To Designated Enemies; A Punishable Offense
There's this very interesting trope being forged on TVT, and I found it very interesting from a rationalist standpoint, especially the examples involving God... What an asshole.
I just found this nice quote on The Last Conformer which is supposed to prove that betting on major events is qualitatively different from betting on coinflips:
I wouldn't even offer bets on this kind of probability because that would just invite better informed people to take my money.
It seems to me that the problem exists for coinflips as well. If I flip a coin and don't show you the result, your beliefs about the coin are probably 50/50. But if I offer you to bet at 50/50 odds that the coin came up heads, you'll probably refuse, because I know which ...
Doctors say "If I'm going to die, please don't freaking try to keep me alive". Normal people and doctors agree that they want a peaceful death, but only doctors are truly aware that a peaceful death is often a willing one.
Useful chrome-plugin for learning to do fermi calculations:
What is the proper font, spacing, and so forth for a LessWrong article?
Bayes' theorem written a certain way is surprisingly effective and easy to use in Fermi estimates of population parameters and risks. Unless you are already quite well versed in intuitive Bayes, this is likely of interest.
Hastie & Dawes (2010, p. 108) describe the "Ratio Rule", a helpful way of writing out Bayes' theorem that is useful for the quick estimation of an unknown proportion:
Pr(A|B) / Pr(B|A) = Pr(A) / Pr(B)
(Ratio of conditional probabilities equals ratio of unconditional probabilities.)
To steal their example, it's often reported t...
A meetup is coming up on July 4th in Tel Aviv. I want to post about it, but I've never done a meetup post before. Are there any non-obvious guidelines I should follow? A template? What about the map?
So, the technology is here to grow human pancreas in pigs and potentially improve lives of millions of diabetics. The obstacles are mostly ethical/regulatory, apparently. Does this mean that we explicitly or implicitly value non-creating a donor pig life, however short it might be, over quite a few human QALY?
Is there a general way to answer questions like this, which often occur in economics and the social sciences:
"Does institution X play a part in keeping parameter Y stable? It looks like parameter Y has been really stable for awhile now. Is institution X doing a good job, or is it completely useless?"
Does anyone want to make a small study group to read one of these books at a relatively slow pace?
I've been meaning to read these (which I learned about from LW) for a long time and just now have the time.
Causality looks like the best option: the entire first edition is freely avaiable on Pearls si...
So, I just moved to Europe for two years and finally got finantial independence from my (somewhat) Catholic parents and I want to sign up for cryonics. Is there international coverage? Is there anything I should be aware of? Are there any steps I should be taking?
I was thinking about writing down everything I know. After reflecting a few seconds on that I realized what a daunting task I haveset out to do. Has anyone tried this or a suggestion how I should go about this if at all?
I think you'll get more concrete suggestions if you explained what you hope to accomplish with this proposed task.
...Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the new study, said that after decades of research but little success in fighting obesity, “it has been disappointing that the message being communicated to the American public has been boiled down to ‘eat less and exercise more.’”
"An underlying assumption of the ‘eat less’ portion of that message has been ‘a calorie is a calorie,’" he said. But the new research "sheds light on the strong plausibility that it isn’t just the amount of food we are eating
My overview page is missing some comments. They do show up on my comments page. This is true of the other accounts I checked too: Eliezer_Yudkowsky, JonahSinick, lukeprog, and orthonormal.
Edit: Looks like it's fixed. (26 June 2013 07:00:00AM UTC)
Richard Dawkins' New Strange Video
Now, as far as I'm concerned, he's preaching to the choir: not only does his message here sound like oversimplified, old news, but the freaky video is a mildly unremarkable instance of Seapunk which is in turn a memetic mutation of many, many things.
Nevertheless, I'm worried that many commenters seem to have decided that this clip was strong evidence that Dawkins has "gone insane". Don't they have any sense of humor?
Also, for comparison, a video done by someone who probably is "insane" (or rather, depr...
Just had a gender-balanced LW meetup in Bratislava, 4:4. The small numbers most likely don't prove much, it could have been a coincidence. But after some discussions we had at LW, I would like to ask -- how likely is it to have a gender balance on a LW meetup?
What happened to the "How to have space correctly" article? I can't find it in either discussion or main.
Edit: Its reappeared with revisions, I must have been trying to access it while the author was editing.
I saw a video link from LW (I think it was from here) in which a man gave a TED-style talk arguing that artists should try to elevate pornography to a serious art form. Does anyone know the video I'm talking about? I'm pretty sure it wasn't an actual TED talk, but it was structured similarly.
Edit: Found it. It was a talk by Alain De Botton.
Is being fashionable optimal? When it comes to fashion, it seems apparent that the main goal is to make an impression on others, so it seems reasonable to conform ones fashion to what other people call fashionable. However, we also know that there are plenty of examples of cases where people's expressed preferences do not match their actual preferences. Is there a compelling reason to think that expressed fashion preferences are actually those that give the best impression? Does anyone know of studies on this? Does anyone have any anecdotes one way or the ...
I just saw this:
...Persistent Autonomy means going beyond what has been done before. PANDORA is creating a new class of AUVs that keep going under extreme uncertainty. AUVs that respond to system faults by doing what they can. AUVs that generate their own missions when idle. AUVs that act appropriately under unexpected environmental challenges.
Humankind needs a new class of underwater vehicle to address the new challenges that deep sea exploration and mechanization create. A PANDORA AUV constantly replans, continuously questions its assumptions, and adjusts
I was reading Outlawing Anthropics and especially this subconversation has caught my attention. I got some ideas; but that thread is nearly four years old, so I am commenting here instead of there.
My version of the simplified situation: There is an intelligent rational agent (her name is Abby, she is well versed in Bayesian statistics) and there are two urns, each urn containing two marbles. Three of the marbles are green. They are macroscopic, so distinguishable, but not for Abby's senses. Anyway, Abby can number them to be marbles 1, 2 and 3, she is just...
Somewhere I think there's a quote about Eliezer writing faster with a writing partner. Could someone point me to this quote?
Odd brain exercise I find entertaining: Using only knowledge about this universe, try to determine what kind of universe would be most likely to simulate our kind of universe.
For example, to my eye, general relativity, plus the propensity of pi to pop up in odd places, implies something like a hierarchy-relative polar coordinate system is the standard mathematical model in our host universe, as opposed to the Cartesian coordinate system we tend to default to. So, what would a universe look like such that this is the most intuitive way of considering data?...
WHY PEOPLE REALLY HAVE DOGS
People really have dogs so they can talk to themselves
without feeling crazy. Take me, for example, cooking
scrambled eggs, ranting about this dumb fuck
who sent naked pictures of himself to strange women,
a politician from New York, I read about it in the paper,
start telling my nervous cock-a-poo, blind in one eye,
practically deaf (so I have to talk extra loud) all about it
and he’s looking at me, poor thing, like he thinks I’m
the smartest person he’s ever heard and I go on, him
tilting his head, and when he sees me pick up my dish
of ...
All right, since I was told on my very first, and abortive, discussion thread that I should post a larger summary or excerpt of the link I had on there if I wanted to comport with LW's norms, let me do that here instead (since my karma is now too low to make another discussion post).
So I've written a long article summarizing a life philosophy which asserts the significance of a certain kind of meditative self-expression for grasping human freedom and understanding the significance of pain and suffering in human life.
Any LessWrong readers interested in thi...
This may be overly harsh, but:
This essay is nonsense. There's an easy trick for analyzing writing like this: As you read, mentally remove all of the emotionally charged words and connotations and see if the argument still makes sense. When we get rid of all the flowery language here, we end up with (admittedly uncharitable) things like, "Humans can think about pain and other experiences and use these thoughts to create art that others find pleasurable" and "By paying close attention, you can gain more understanding of complex things (e.g. wine tasting)." None of this analysis even mentions the actual, causal reasons human beings suffer, or established theories about coping with suffering and creativity. As a result, I don't see anything particularly insightful or useful.
Assuming what you said is true, can you give a concrete example in one sentence what I should choose differently than I do now?
For example, I would draw from my experience as a lawyer to say:
Beware signing any written agreement you haven't read or understood.
Constructive suggestion: Write more like this, less like what you posted about.
Substantively, I think one could substitute any emotion or sensation and get the same advice. Thus:
Had good sex? Write a poem exploring the feelings you experienced - it will enhance the positive experience of the sex.
Which I expect is true. But pain is generally no fun, and it isn't clear that you think avoiding pain is worth the effort.
When I stub my toe, I'm not doing something wrong by first choosing to figure out why I stubbed my toe and what to change to avoid that in the future. And once I've done that, I'm not sure I have time to do what you suggested.
Genes take charge and diets fall by the wayside.
You need a New York Times account to read it, but setting one up only takes a couple of minutes. Here are some exerpts in any case.
Obese people almost always regain weight after weight loss:
Thin people who are forced to gain weight find it easy to lose it again:
The body's metabolism changes with weight loss and weight gain:
Genes and weight: