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jimmy comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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I've lost 30 pounds since September 17th, 2013*. Interestingly, I've noticed doing so caused me to lose a lot of faith in LW.
In the midst of my diet, discussion in the comments on this series of posts confounded me. I'm no expert on nutrition or dieting(I do know perhaps more than the average person), but my sense is that I encountered a higher noise-to-signal ratio on the subject here at LW than anywhere else I've looked. There seemed to be all sorts of discussion about everything other than the simple math behind weight loss. Lots of super fascinating stuff—but much of it missing the point, I thought.
I learned a few interesting things during the discussion—which I always seem to do here. But in terms of providing a boost to my instrumental rationality, it didn't help at all. In fact, it's possible LW had a negative impact on my ability to win at dieting and weight management.
I notice this got me wondering about LW's views and discussions about many other things that I know very little about. I feel myself asking "How could I rationally believe LW knows what they are talking about in regard to the Singularity, UFAI, etc. if they seem to spin their wheels so badly on a discussion about something as simple as weight loss?"
I'm interested to hear others' thoughts on this.
Have you ever lost confidence in LW after a similar experience? Maybe something where it seemed to you people were "talking a big game" but failing to apply any of that to actually win in real life?
(*Note: To be clear, I've lost 30 pounds since Sept 17th, but only ~15-18 lbs since my "diet" began on Jan 1, 2014. I'm not really bragging about losing weight—I wish it weren't the case. I injured my neck and could no longer use my primary method of exercise (weightlifting) to stay in shape. After eating poorly and lying around for a couple months, I started—on Jan 1—to do consistent, light treadmill work & light core work, as well as cutting my calorie consumption pretty dramatically.)
Weight loss isn't as simple as you think.
Sure it's all about burning more than you eat, but for a lot of people "just eat less and exercise more!" isn't advice they can follow. You seem to have "lucked out" on that front.
The far more interesting and useful question is "what factors determine how easy it is to eat less and exercise more?". This is where it gets nontrivial. You can't even narrow it down to one field of study. I've known people to have success from just changing their diet (not all in the same way) as well as others who have had success from psychological shifts - and one from surgery.
I don't consider LW to be the experts on how to lose weight either, but that doesn't signal incompetence to me. Finding the flaws in the current set of visible "solutions" is much easier than finding your own better solution or even grasping the underlying mechanisms that explain the value and limitations of different approaches. So if you have a group of people who are good at spotting sloppy thinking who spend a few minutes of their day analyzing things for fun, of course you're going to see a very critical literature review rather than a unanimously supported "winner". Even if there were such a thing in the territory waiting to be found (I suspect there isn't), then you wouldn't expect anyone on LW to find it unless they were motivated to really study it.
Yes, and no.
There are significant differences between some individuals' BMR. And some people are just better at managing will power. And some likely people experience much greater physiological responses to food than others.
In those ways, you're exactly right. I'm apparently wired to be able to white knuckle my way to a successful ~6 week diet where some others cannot.
But that wasn't really the thrust of the argument in the discussion I linked. Rather, it was all sorts of back and forth about the viability of popular dieting methods.
I agree dieting isn't easy to do for all sorts of reasons. But it is simple. And that seemed to be completely lost on a group of people that are way smarter than me.
It made me think twice about LW's views on all sorts of things that aren't easy or simple.
An alternative explanation might be that the "weightloss = energy output - energy intake" model is so simple that all the people involved in the discussion already understand it, consider it obvious and trivial, and have moved on to discussing harder questions.
Perhaps. Though from my recall that was not the case.
Back and forth should be expected in a realm where the studies are terrible and different methodologies seem to yield vastly different results for people based on unknown parameter differences between them.
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
So yes, dieting is simple!