I don't understand the point you're trying to make. I don't really know where we're heading to let's make this a little bit more detailed.
I tried to make some solid foundation about nutrition, and is that the human body needs abcdefgxyz to maintain itself. The most important thing about it is that it kicks ideologies out, because we now have a foundation we can go to in case we're wondering if something is "healthy"*.
You made the point that it's more complicated than a bare metal theory and you're correct, but the point was that we now know where to go. I'd like you to expand on that, too.
I don't think it's such a terrible theory. The "Consequentialism doesn't tell you what should you care about." implies we're going back to the ideologies I was trying to kick out.
*healthy is a grey area term. Sometimes I think it means it will boost your health. Sometimes it's supposed to help you with body functions. Sometimes it means that x is better than y. I think we should clear this word up too because it's annoying.
because we now have a foundation we can go to in case we're wondering if something is "healthy"*.
Well, kinda. Health is a function of many arguments, nutrition being one of them. The problem is that the arguments to the health function are not independent -- you don't get the luxury of changing just food and knowing that nothing else changed.
To give an example, I know some people who would consider being restricted to Soylent and nothing else to be cruel and unusual punishment, to the degree that the resulting unhappiness and stress will impac...
Come one, come all! Test your prediction skills in my Caplan Test (more commonly called an Ideological Turing Test). To read more about such tests, check out palladias' post here.
The Test: http://goo.gl/forms/7f4pQfxB8I
In the test, you will be asked to read responses written by rationalists from LessWrong (and the Columbus Ohio LW group). These responses are either from a vegetarian or omnivore (as decided by a coin flip) and are either their genuine response or a fake response where they pretend to be a member of the other group (also decided by coin flip). If you'd like to participate (and the more, the merrier) you'll be asked to distinguish fake from real by assigning a credence to the proposition that a given response is genuine.
I'll be posting general statistics on how people did at a later date (probably early September). Please use the comments on this thread to discuss or ask questions. Do not make predictions in the comments. I got more entries than would be reasonable to ask people to judge, so if your entry didn't make it into the test, I'm sorry. We might be able to run a second round of judging. If you're interested in judging more entries, send me a PM or leave a comment. I tended to favor the first entries I got, when selecting who got in.