Group Rationality Diary, November 1-15

therufs

This is the public group rationality diary for November 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Previous diary: October 16-31

Next diary: November 16-30

Rationality diaries archive

This is the public group rationality diary for November 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Previous diary: October 16-31

Next diary: November 16-30

Rationality diaries archive

Physics is pretty adamant it is.

Yeah, that's why it confuses me. But after posting this and sleeping on it, I think I'm really experiencing one part epistemic confusion to two parts regular frustration.

Discussions of metabolism adjustments are almost never quantitative, for some frustrating reason. My impression has been that 750 cal/day is well beyond a realistic adjustment, especially in the absence of obvious side effects (lethargy, severe hunger, chills, sexual dysfunction, etc). But it occurs to me that I've been too dismissive: supposing e.g. a 250 cal/day depression in metabolism, and that self-reporting inaccuracy has me really overeating by 250 cal/day compared to my target intake, that would leave me at a 250 cal/day deficit, which... would just about match the observed rate of progress.

So okay, yes, those two things together would just about explain it. Then epistemically, I don't have much reason to dispute the model. Now there's just the instrumental problem of actually making progress: attempting a steeper deficit of 1000 cal/day has proven deeply unpleasant before, and rapidly produced the previously-mentioned side effects. Perhaps I need to plan more for hunger management, and/or get really obsessive about not eating things during a cut unless I can measure them exactly? At least this gives me some parameters to experiment with.

Discussions of metabolism adjustments are almost never quantitative, for some frustrating reason.

The reason is that directly measuring your metabolism is highly inconvenient (you basically spend time in a gas mask) and requires specialized and expensive equipment.

750 cal/day is well beyond a realistic adjustment

No, I don't think so.

For a frame-of-reference adjustment consider reports that the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps consumed 8-10,000 calories per day while training. He didn't get fat :-)

attempting a steeper deficit of 1000 cal/day has prove

... (read more)