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Good_Burning_Plastic comments on Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: Bound_up 23 December 2015 05:31AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 23 December 2015 04:22:02PM *  13 points [-]

How can a person who promotes rationality have excess weight?

Easily :-)

This has been discussed a few times. EY has two answers, one a bit less reasonable and one a bit more. The less reasonable answer is that he's a unique snowflake and diet+exercise does not work for him. The more reasonable answer is that the process of losing weight downgrades his mental capabilities and he prefers a high level of mental functioning to losing weight.

From my (subjective, outside) point of view, the real reason is that he is unwilling to pay the various costs of losing weight. That, by the way, is not necessarily a rationality failure since rationality does not specify your value system and it's your values which determine whether a trade-off is worthwhile or not.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 26 December 2015 12:35:58PM *  0 points [-]

the real reason is that he is unwilling to pay the various costs of losing weight

That's not incompatible with the hypothesis that said costs would be higher for him than for the average person for whatever reason.

Comment author: Lumifer 28 December 2015 03:59:48PM 0 points [-]

That's not incompatible with the hypothesis that said costs would be higher for him than for the average person

Why would he (or anyone) care about the average person in this context?