1. I wasn't counting eating 500 calories extra a day as a diet change. Most people can do that with an extra glass of milk and some cookies easily.

2. I don't know a lot about vegan nutrition. I would imagine getting caloric density basically means fatty plants. Avocados, coconut oil, peanuts (peanut butter and oats with some almond milk is probably a staple bulking food), tree nuts, etc.

Questions about nutrition:

Question 1.

Don't try to implement a new diet and a new exercise plan at the same time.

If you are underweight or normal weight, you'll need to eat more when you start exercising.

Don't these two statements contradict each other? If I'm on the light side (which I am) and start exercising without changing my diet first, won't I have a calorie deficit?

Question 2.

I'm vegan and in college. These make it harder to get adequate nutrition because the dining halls don't usually have calorie-dense plant-based foods. It's my understanding that I need to eat about 4000 calories a day while gaining muscle mass, but if I eat at the dining hall, that basically means eating tons of rice, beans, and pasta. What other options do I have? Right now my plan is to drink a lot of Vega Sport, which I can order from Amazon and store easily.

• I have no idea where you got the idea that Less Wrongers tend to believe in natural rights. This seems to have come out of nowhere. I don't understand how you infer it from the evidence you presented.
• Many LWers believe that FAI is important because an unfriendly AI would likely lead to negative consequences, not because it would violate any natural rights.
• In general, your arguments seem completely disconnected from the beliefs conveyed in the sequences and other prominent writings on LW.

Why not give us a short bullet point list of your conclusions, most readers around here wouldn't dismiss them out of hand, even lacking a chain of arguments leading up to them.

We sure would. We think we are smart, and the inferential gap the OP mentioned is unfortunately almost invisible from this side. That's why Eliezer had to write all those millions of words.

If you have a high IQ, strong social skills but are bad at math go into law.

Is this still true? Recently there have been reports about an oversupply of lawyers and scandals involving law schools fudging the statistics on the salaries of their graduates.

For any given company, you'll be able to get them to up their offer at least once and potentially thrice.

How do you assess when a company isn't going to up their offer anymore? It seems hard to distinguish between "We're saying this is our highest offer but it's actually not" and "This is our highest offer."

The links to the public data given at the end appear to be broken. They give internal links to Less Wrong instead of redirecting to Slate Star Codex. These links should work:

sav xls csv

Most of the Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World. An example:

Our World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Explosions, Rising Stars.

Mathematically Literate World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Inflation, Rising Population.

Since high school I've been involved in conworlding - collaborative development of fictional worlds and societies, then setting stories or games in them.

Around 2005, I and some friends set a story in a culture with a goddess named Per married to a god named Elith. The religion gets called "Perelithve".

Skip to 2008. Neil Stephenson publishes Anathem, One throwaway reference mentions two of the avout, a woman named Per who marries a man named Elith. The marriage rite they invent gets called "Perelithian"

If names can have between 3 and 8 letters, and always alternate vowels and consonants, and ''th' counts as one sound, I calculate that the chances of someone who needs two names coming up with "Per" and "Elith" is on the order of one in a billion. The similarity in stories maybe adds another two or three bits of unlikelihood. If I've read 1000 novels, each of which has 100 minor characters, and my conworlds contain 1000 characters, then the odds aren't really that bad, maybe as high as 1%

Still freaks me out, though.

I realize not everyone is familiar with or has witnessed or has even heard of the kind of interactions that are described when children are compared to pets, but it still baffles and surprises me on a gut level whenever someone asks about it.

Here's a few contrasting examples as a (weak) attempt to McGuyver an intuition pump:

To Roommate: "Your music's bothering me, I need to concentrate / have calm for XYZ reasons, could you please turn it down a bit?" (justification usually given or implicit)
To Pet: "Your meowing's loud, shut the fuck up." (optional addition: *gives a cookie to shut it up*)
To Child: "Turn down your music! It's loud!" (No justification given, usually even upon request)

To Roommate: "Could you wash the dishes? I'm really tired and I still have to do XYZ. (or insert X'Y'Z' reason)"
To Pet: ... (pet eats in dirty dishes, or at best rinsed with flowing tapwater)
To Child: "Do the dishes before 5 PM." "Come do the dishes NOW or I'm unplugging your computer / gaming console / (insert other arbitrary unrelated top-down punishment)"

To Roommate: "I'll take care of cleaning my room/space, I don't care about yours as long as it doesn't stink or infest the whole place, although you should help me clean bathroom/kitchen/living room/etc for XYZ reasons"
To Pet: (trains to not be messy, yell at whenever it makes a mess of its personal space)
To Child: "Clean your room by the end of the day or you can't go out this weekend."

In other words / to generalize, what is meant with "treating children like pets" is that the interactions, decisions and their properties are, in the case of children, more accurately modeled by a decision tree / graph like that for Pet interactions than one for Roommate / Significant Other / Actual Other Human Being Living With You interactions.

For many families, though I don't know how many, the interactions for children is extremely close to the counterfactual "pets if my pet could talk", and completely incompatible with the "Roommate" examples (my .5 is 70-80%, .95 for 40-95%).

In a large number of situations I've seen personally, replacing the child with a roommate for a similar situation being treated similar to the child would have resulted in a civil or perhaps even criminal lawsuit, even if the roommate was otherwise similar (say, a cousin living there and going back to university that for some family circumstances you're stuck living with, but who still doesn't / can't pay rent and food and amenities, e.g. because 100% of money goes for studying).

But their child? "People can educate their children however they want, they have a right to their children's education" (read: They have a "right" to decide what the child does, how they do it, which rights the child is entitled to or not, etc.)

Also compare the rights of parents and what parents are allowed to do with their children legally to what they have towards pets, versus what they have with other-people-just-living-with-or-near-them.

Basically, this is similar to what rationalist!Harry sometimes complains about in the early parts of HPMoR. Children are Not People.