I lost around 40 pounds using low carb methods. Should this make me less confident in anything you say when you promote other ways to lose weight?

If there is an in-depth discussion of the problem, it is reasonable to expect that discussion to focus on the more complicated sub-problem.

If this is what happened, I'd have said nothing.

What I observed was a discussion of 2 as if it were not really simple.

1 is a very useful conversation. My guess is that, generally, people want to talk about 2 because 1 is the hard part of dieting. If there is someway to hack 2, then you don't need to worry about 1.

In my understanding, there isn't a way to hack 2. But the discussion swirling around the articles on Taubes seemed to be advocating some ideas that seemed bogus and pseudo-scientifc to me, but I trusted LWers on account of the fact they tend to be smarter than I. Since losing weight (rather simply, and by ignoring all the noice I heard here) I've noticed my confidence in LW is lower.

The other thing to consider is that there does exist some evidence relating (1) to (2). For example, some people claim to have an easier time restricting their eating if they shift their diet away from carbohydrates.

This still is a 1 issue to me. I have dieting tricks I use too. But they aren't somehow negating the simple calorie math that determines weight loss.

As far as carbs, my assumption (that I now feel stronger than ever about) is that carb-restriction diets "work" because Western diets tend to have lots of carbs in them and people are so accustomed. If you make a rule saying you'll not eat carbs, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with enough calories eating non-carb stuff to not lose weight.

I mean, if someone is eating 60-65% of their caloric intake in carbs and then they quit carbs, they'll lose weight.

If someone drinks a 6-back of beer a day and then quits, they'll lose weight on account of consuming fewer calories. But we don't call this the No Beer Diet and pretend something magical is occuring like we do with Atkins and other low carb diets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joZV0XARmvA - "Is Amanda Knox Guilty?" - NBC produced docu for BBC.

Summary: Guede might be guilty (I don't know), Knox+Sollecito lied to try to get out of trouble, there's interesting DNA evidence with severe technical problems:

1. a lot of DNA from Solecito (likely making him the one who handled it) on a bra clasp that wasn't collected from the scene until 46 days later. Unfortunately by then there was plenty of incentive by then for authorities to falsify evidence to bolster their extremely weak case.

2. A tiny trace of Kercher's DNA on a knife in Solecito's apartment - also collected after incentive to falsify (they cheated by running the test when they weren't supposed to due to insufficient amount of material, at the very least).

3. faint bloody footprints of the right size in the bathroom. not strong evidence of killing and apparently might not even be blood (they didn't collect any, just have illuminator dye photos which can trigger off bleach too).

The rest seems like comparatively unreliable evidence to me. DNA of you, even drops of blood, in your own bathroom? Big deal. Accusations from the convicted killer (Guede)? People pressured by police lied to try to get out of trouble? No surprise. I believe ~90% that neither Knox nor Sollecito killed her or helped cover the killing. Most concerning to me are the reasons given by the authorities - it's mostly pretty lame ("there must have been 3 attackers! there weren't many defensive wounds! kercher knew karate! not even superman could do that alone. and amanda covered her ears!")

video interviews of Knox - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/30/amanda-knox-prison-meredith-kercher-murder

Well, I've been on the same dose for the past 8 years (set by my original endocrinologist and carried forward by all doctors since, who've basically shrugged and said "ehh, worked so far"). Last time I had my testosterone levels checked they were on the high end of normal, which suits me fine. I have a fairly high sex drive, which you might expect, but very low aggression, which you might not - although I've always been a very passive and non-aggressive person. So I guess to answer your question, I haven't really explored different amounts. I don't particularly plan to in the future, if for no other reason than I've been on my current dose long enough to self-identify with the range of behaviours it produces.

I didn't think I had anything particularly interesting to offer, but then it occurred to me that I have a relatively rare medical disorder: my body doesn't produce any testosterone naturally, so I have to have it administered by injection. As a result I went through puberty over the age range of ~16-19 years old. If you're curious feel free to AMA.

(also, bonus topic that just came to mind: every year I write/direct a Christmas play featuring all of my cousins, which is performed for the rest of the family on Christmas Eve. It's been going on for over 20 years and now has its own mythology, complete with anti-Santa. It gets more elaborate every year and now features filmed scenes, with multi-day shoots. This year the villain won, Christmas was cancelled for seven years and Santa became a bartender (I have a weird family). It's...kind of awesome? If you're looking for a fun holiday tradition to start AMA)

I had the same sense of "This is the kind of criticism where you say 'we need two Stalins'" as one of the commenters. That doesn't mean its correct, and I, like some others, particularly liked the phrase "pretending to actually try". It also seems to me self-evident that this is a huge step forward and a huge improvement over merely pretending to try. Much of what is said here is correct, but none of it is the kind of criticism which would kill EA if it were correct. For that you would have to cross over into alleging things which are false.

From my perspective, by far the most obvious criticism of EA is to take the focus on global poverty at face value and then remark that from the pespective of 100,000,000 years later it is unlikely that the most critical point in this part of history will have been the distribution of enough malaria nets. Since our descendants will reliably think this was not the most utility-impactful intervention 100,000,000 years later, we should go ahead and update now, etc. And indeed I regard the non-x-risk parts of EA as being important only insofar as they raise visibility and eventually get more people involved in, as I would put it, the actual plot.

This is not something you will learn even from reading many atheist critiques of apologetics, because many critics are willing to politely play along with the pretense that the purpose of apologetics is to open minded-skeptics and debates between skeptics and believers are serious intellectual engagements.

This sentence is messed up.

I read it a few years ago and didn't enjoy it at all except for an early section describing some interesting categories. I'm a great programmer and familiar with functional programming but not much Haskell. I worked examples, followed proofs, and generally understood the material.

I view as cargo-cult any recommendations to read this book for someone who wants to program (AI or otherwise).

We should unpack "banish talk of X" to mean that we should avoid assessments/analysis that would naturally be expressed in such surface terms.

Since most of us don't do deep thinking unless we use some notation or words, "banish talk of" is a good heuristic for such training, if you can notice yourself (or others can catch you) doing it.