Originally posted here: http://bearlamp.com.au/people-who-lie-about-how-much-they-eat-are-jerks/

Weight loss journey is a long and complicated problem solving adventure.  This is one small factor that adds to the confusion.  You probably have that one friend.  Appears to eat a whole bunch, and yet doesn't put on weight.  If you ever had that conversation it goes something like,

"How are you so thin?"
"raah raah metabolism"
"raah raah I dont know why I don't put on weight"
"Take advantage of the habit"

Well I have had enough.  You're wrong.  You're lying and you probably don't even know it.  It's not possible. (Within a reasonable scope of human variation) Calories and energy are a black box system.  Calories in, work out, leftovers become weight gain, deficit is weight loss.  If a human could eat significantly more calories for the same amount of work and not put on weight we would be prodding them in a lab for breaking the laws of physics on conservation of mass and conservation of energy.

So this is you, you say you gain weight no matter what you eat and that's scientifically impossible.  Now what?  You probably don't mean to break the laws of physics (and you probably don't actually break them).  You genuinely absentmindedly don't notice when you scoff down whole plates of food and when you skip dinner because you didn't feel like it (and absentmindedly balance the calories automatically).  It's all the same to you because you naturally do that.

This very likely is about habits, and natural habits that people have.  If for example John has the habit of getting home and going to the fridge, making dinner because it's usually the evening.  Wendy doesn't have the habit.  She eats when she is hungry.  Not having a set mealtime sometimes means that she gets tired-hungry and has a state of being too exhausted to decide what to eat and too hungry to do anything else that would help solve the problem.  But for Wendy she doesn't get home and automatically cook dinner.  (good things and bad things come from habits.)

Wendy and john go to a big lunch together.  They both eat 150% of the calories they should be eating for that meal, and they don't mind - enjoying food is part of enjoying life.  It was a fancy restaurant with good food.  Later that evening when Wendy gets home she doesn't feel hungry and goes off to read a book or talk to friends on the internet.  Eventually she has a light snack (of 10% of her "dinner" calories) and heads off to totalling 160% of the calories for the two meals.  Effectively under-eating for the day.  John on the other hand, has his habit of heading home and making dinner.  Even after the big lunch, his automatic systems take over and he makes and ordinary dinner of 100% of his calories for that meal.  John's total for that day is 250% for two meals or effectively half a meal extra for that day.

If W and J do this every week (assuming the rest of their diets are perfectly balanced), John will have an upwards trajectory and Wendy will have a downwards one.  John might ask Wendy how she stays so skinny, and Wendy wouldn't know.  After all they eat about the same amount when they are together.

No one understands this.  

What can we do about it?

1. We can hire scientists to follow both J and W around for a week and write down every time they eat something. (this is impractical - maybe if we are in an isolated environment like a weekend retreat it would be easier to do this)
2. We can get them to self report via an app (but people are usually pretty bad at that)
3. We can try ask more specifically, "what do you eat in a day?", or "what have you eaten since this time yesterday?" and gather data points to try to build a picture of what a person eats.
4. We can search for people with similar habits around food to us and ask them how they stay healthy.
5. We can look for people with successful habits around food, ask them for advice and then figure out why that advice works, and how to make that advice work for us.

On the noticing level.  You should notice that every single thing that you eat adds to your caloric intake. Every single piece of work you do adds to your burn.  It's easier to eat another piece of chocolate (for 5 seconds) than run another 15minutes to burn that chocolate off.  If something is not working towards your dieting success it's probably working against it.

Meta: this took one hour to write.

Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/against-the-five-love-languages/

You are in a relationship, someone made some objection about communication, you don't seem to understand what's going on.  Many years later you find yourself looking back at the relationship and reflecting with friends.  That's when someone brings up The Five Love Languages.  Oh deep and great and meaningful secrets encoded into a book.

The 5 languages are: 

1. Gifts
2. Quality time
3. Words of affirmation
4. Acts of service (devotion)
5. Physical touch (intimacy)

Oooooh if only you had spent more energy trying to get quality time, and less effort on gifts that relationship could have been saved.  Or the other way - the relationship was doomed because you wanted quality time and they wanted gifts as a show of love.  

You start seeing the world in 5 languages, your coworker offering to get you a coffee is a gift.  Your boss praising your good work is words of affirmation.  You start thinking like a Man with a hammer.  Strictly speaking I enjoy man with a hammer syndrome.  I like to use a model to death, and then pick a new model and do it all again.

What I want you to do now is imagine you didn't do that.  Imagine we cloned the universe.  In one universe we gave you the love-languages book and locked you in a room to read it.  In the second universe we offered to run you through a new relationship-training exercise.  "It's no guide book on how to communicate with your partner, but it's a pretty good process", we lock you in a room with a chair, a desk, some paper, pens (few distractions) and order you to derive some theory and idea about how to communicate with your partner.

Which one do you predict will yield the best result?

When I ask my system 2, it is fairly happy with the idea that using someone else's model is a shortcut to finding the answers.  After all they pre-derived the model.  No need to spend hours working on it myself when it's all in a book.

When I ask my system 1, it thinks that the self-derived system is about a billion times better than the one I found in a book.  It's going to be personally suited, it's going to be sharp and accurate, and bend to my needs.

Meta-strategy

Which is going to yield the best result for the problem? Self-derived solutions to all future problems? Book-derived solutions for all problems?

I propose that the specific strategy used to answer the problem, depending on the problem (obviously sometimes 1+1 will only be solved with addition, and solving it with subtraction is going to be difficult), is mostly irrelevant compared to having the meta-strategy.  

In the original example:

My relationship has bad communication, so we end the relationship.

The meta-strategy for this case:

My relationship has bad communication, how do we find more information about that and solve that problem.

In the general case:

I have a problem, I will fix the problem.

the meta strategy for the general case:

I have a problem, what is the best way to solve the problem? 

Or the meta-meta strategy:

I have a problem, how will I go about finding what is the best way to solve the problem? 

I propose that having the meta strategy, and the meta-meta strategy is almost as powerful as the true strategy.  On the object level for the problem example, instead of searching for the book in the problem field that is the five love languages you could instead search for any book about the problem area.  Any book is better than no book.  In fact I would make a hierarchy:

The best strategy > a good strategy > any strategy > no strategy
The best book > a good book > any book on the topic > no book on the topic

You encounter a problem in the wild - what should you do?

1. Try just solve the problem
2. Try any strategy (with a small amount of thinking - a few seconds or minutes)
3. search for a better strategy
   

Depending on the problem, the time, the real factors - the best path forward may be to just "think of what to do then do that", or it may be to "stop and write out a 10 page plan before executing 10 pages worth of instructions".

Should you read the five love languages book?  That depends.  What is the problem?  and have you tried solving the problem on your own first?

Meta: this took an hour to write.

My table of contents: lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mp2/my_future_posts_a_table_of_contents/ (which needs updating)

EDIT: No one was doing what the post suggests, so I accepted an idea from one of the comments, and embedded my response in a comment, not the post itself

I'd like to ask this question to you, and I'll respond it myself as well.

What Is The Worst Problem You've Ever Encountered and Solved? And the One You Didn't, Yet!

Some prior considerations:

1) I mean "problem" in a very general sense, it could be a math problem, an existential problem, a social problem, an akrasia problem,  a disease problem etc...

2) I'd like people to give informative/didactic responses.  Try not only to state the facts, but also to help someone who'd encounter similar situations to be able to deal with them.

3) When talking about the one you didn't, give enough specifics that someone would actually be able to help you.

The general idea is to teach people how to Win by example, taking in consideration all the shortcomings of biases etc...

Well, that is all. One solved, one not yet solved. State your own issues and help others here. Someone else's rationality is always welcome.

Did computer programming make you a clearer, more precise thinker? How about mathematics? If so, what kind? Set theory? Probability theory?

Microeconomics? Poker? English? Civil Engineering? Underwater Basket Weaving? (For adding... depth.)

Anything I missed?

Context: I have a palette of courses to dab onto my university schedule, and I don't know which ones to chose. This much is for certain: I want to come out of university as a problem solving beast. If there are fields of inquiry whose methods easily transfer to other fields, it is those fields that I want to learn in, at least initially.

Rip apart, Less Wrong!

I'm working on a list of question types which come up frequently in day-to-day life but which I haven't yet found a reliable, rational way to answer. Here are some examples, including summaries of any progress made in the comments.