David_Gerard comments on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms - LessWrong

37 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 09:59AM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 06 October 2012 10:16:31PM *  1 point [-]

With diets, liking it is pretty much essential to staying on it, as far as I can tell from myself and people I know. e.g. I've been on Tim Ferriss' slow-carb diet for a year and a half, and it's great, but only because I like all the food on it already and it suits me. If it didn't I'd have quit in a week. So I laughed at the bit you quote, but I'd say in practice it's not far off the mark and I laughed because it implies my first sentence.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 October 2012 05:20:27AM 3 points [-]

Liking a diet may be necessary for it to have positive health consequences, as you say, but for most people it's not sufficient. So it's probably a mistake to treat "X diet has positive health consequences" as equivalent to "I like X diet" when uttered by most people. (For example, I might be able to experimentally demonstrate the latter and demonstrate the opposite of the former for the same diet and speaker.)

Comment author: David_Gerard 07 October 2012 08:30:12AM *  -1 points [-]

I took it as literary allusion in a place where such may not have been suited to something in a literalist genre. Which may count as a mistake.