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 impact their health.
implies we're going back to the ideologies I was trying to kick out.
We're going back not to ideologies, but to values. You can't kick out values and be left with anything useful.
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.