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shminux comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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Dieting is one of many topics discussed on this forum where the level of discourse is hardly above dilettante. Applied rationality and AGI friendliness research is done by several people full-time, which brings the discussion quality up in these areas, mostly. So it would not be fair to judge those by the averages. Everything else is probably subreddit-level, only more polite and on-topic.
Sure. That makes really good sense.
But couldn't it also be said that dieting is pretty simple subject matter? (It also happens to be a pretty integral part of life—so it makes sense for people interested in "winning" and optimizing their rationality to have a solid understanding of how to maintain a top-flight diet.)
It's hard for me to grasp how people could be at "subreddit-level" understanding af something that is so simple while making such bold assertions about hyper-complex stuff in the cosmologically distant future.
With no disrespect, your reply reads to me a bit like this: "You can't expect a graduate-level philosophy professor to know how to long divide...it's not his area of expertise."
Dieting is anything but simple. It is still an open problem. Human body and mind is an extremely complicated system. What works for one person doesn't work for another. Eliezer put in some significant time into figuring out his weight issues, to no avail, and is apparently desperate enough to resort to some extreme measures, like consuming home-made gloop. Many people are lucky to be able to maintain a healthy weight with only a few simple tweaks, and you might be one of them. If you want a more fair comparison, "You can't expect a graduate-level philosophy professor to know how to design a multi-threaded operating system". No, that's not quite enough. "...how to solve an unsolved millennium problem" is closer.
I think we have a misunderstanding in regard to the definiton of "simple". Likely my fault for adding this aside:
I'm not saying actually executing a good diet is easy. I'm saying understanding what needs to be done to lose weight is simple.
Consuming fewer calories is very challenging—it can lead to fatigue, mood changes, etc., etc. Likewise, exercising consistently is easier said than done.
Add to that that some people have slow metabolisms, the fat-shaming that overweight people deal with in many cultures, the availabity of superstimulus foods everywhere. Maintain a healthy weight isn't easy.
But the fundamental causal mechanism at play is very simple.
Sure, calories in vs calories out... Except it is not helpful when you cannot effectively control one or both without reducing the real or perceived quality of life to the level where people refuse to exercise this control. This is where most diets eventually fail. And you seem to agree with that, while still maintaining that "understanding what needs to be done to lose weight is simple", where it is anything but, since it includes understanding of the actual doable actions one has to perform and still enjoy life. And this all-important understanding is sorely lacking in a general case.
I agree. Any complex problem can be made to appear simple if you look at it from the right perspective. For a lot of people, it's very tempting to oversimplify the problem of dieting down to something like "eat less move more!"