I think you guys are just privileging a cool hypothesis a neuroscientist is making about gastroenterology. It's pretty weird and frustrating how many objections this single point is getting, given that just like I already said, it's very testable.
Most raw food diets strongly recommend juicing, blending, mixing, etc. which are essentially pre-digestion.
So is chewing and it works just fine.
Furthermore, they're also generally billed as "weight loss diets," allowing sedentary people to lose weight without exercising -- the calorie total might be in the 1000-1500 range.
Who's doing the billing? Are these people fat to begin with? Where are you getting these numbers from and do they really have anything to do with the foodstuff being raw?
Cooking greatly increases how many things you can eat, what's safe to eat, and how many calories you can fit into your stomach.
Most foods you can make safe by cooking do not comprise a great deal of what people eat. Some of them could be unsafe raw just because human GI tracts are used to cooked food by now. Also, most foods don't significantly shrink when you cook them.
Cooking might decrease nutrient absorption by 5-10%,but when you can eat 50-100% more, it's a fine trade.
Again, where are you getting these numbers from?
Notes I took while listening to the speech:
Eliezer Yudkowsky on Friendly AI
If the human race is down to 1000 people, what are the odds that it will continue and do well? I realize this is a nitpick-- the argument would be the same if the human race were reduced to a million or ten million.
Suppose that a blind person in a first world country wants help paying for a guide dog and/or wants guide dogs for other blind people in first world countries, but has heard of effective altruism. What honest arguments could the blind person use?
If I were designing an intelligence, I'm not sure how much control I would give it over its own brain. People are already able to damage themselves pretty badly, even with the crude tools they've got. I would experiment with intelligent species to see how they'd behave with more control over their brains. What would you do?
Sidenote: Birds show some possibilities of making brains more efficient per weight.
TED talk about neurons and brains. This is not a great TED talk, but it's got somewhat about comparisons between brains in different species, in particular that neuron size and density varies between species. Comparisons of brain size tells you less than people assume.
Brains and competition aren't just about sexual selection: Females (especially) compete for resources to feed and care for themselves and their children. In some species, males also compete for resources for their children. Reproductive selection isn't just about mating selection. See Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy. Interview about humans as cooperative breeders
Do we need to think about hardware, software, and firmware (at least) for brains, rather than just hardware and software?
[Sound cuts off at 38:00. comes back at 39:10]
How much of organisms consist of traits which aren't being selected for?
The sound quality deteriorates enough at about an hour that I'm giving up.