I'm not sure I deserved the heat here. I prescribed no particular diet and said nothing about weak willed scum.
As you may have guessed, this isn't the first time the subject has come up. Frustration builds.
I'm of the tentative opinion that modern weight-control problems are just a case of human brains not being built for an environment of plenty.
It is not just the brain but the entire human body that isn't specialized for an environment of plenty. Lowered food intake changes metabolism and energy expenditure, it doesn't just make you crave more food.
Even if it was simply that people on average can't keep their hands out of the pastry box, that's not a moral failing, just an outdated adaptation. It's worth fixing ourselves because it's now a maladaptation and evolution is too slow about fixing it.
That would indeed still be true.
It seems to me that there must be some lower bound on food intake beyond which one can't help but lose weight -- otherwise you could eat nothing and still not lose weight, which seems spectacularly unlikely to me barring the aforementioned metabolic mutation.
That seems technically inevitable. The question then becomes whether this happens before or after your body enters a coma. (Or, more practically, whether valuable muscle mass is lost before undesired fat and whether the effect on fatigue and energy levels is debilitating.)
A ridiculously charged topic, how could I miss it?
We're probably among the last generations (as in so many things) that need to bother with the now counterproductive and out-of-place esterification making us fat. Just as we managed to separate the carrot from the stick (the stimulus we get from an action versus the original evolutionary incentivized purpose of that action) with sex/procreation, so will we eventually be able to indulge in feeling satiated without actually storing unwanted lipids.
If not for too strict pharmaceutical standards, some (more) d...
Follow-up to: Boring Advice Repository
Many practical problems in instrumental rationality appear to be wide open. Two I've been annoyed by recently are "what should I eat?" and "how should I exercise?" However, some appear to be more or less solved. For example, various mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, along with spaced repetition, seem to more or less solve the problem of memorization.
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of solved problems in instrumental rationality. I'm pretty sure you all collectively know good examples; there's a comment I can't find from a user who said something like "taking a flattering photograph of yourself is a solved problem," and it's likely that there are other useful examples like this that aren't common knowledge. Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people.
(This thread is allowed to not be boring! Go wild!)