I'm not sure I understand why the body would eat internal organs on a two month diet when there's plenty of fat and muscle to burn, or why losing some muscle mass would be dangerous.

A caloric deficit of more than 25% is considered very dangerous

Is the caloric deficit inherently dangerous or is it that people usually cut the wrong things from their diet? Do you think there are significant dangers to an otherwise healthy person who gets all the micronutrients they need during the deficit and does it only for a month or two?

There are a lot of people who assert that they cannot lose weight on 1200 calories per day. Normally such people assert that it is their metabolism.

When such people are metabolically tested, it is invariably discovered that their metabolisms are perfectly normal and they eat far more calories than they realize.

Of course the claim being made by Eliezer's friend is a bit different. It's that if she has enough of a calorie deficit to lose weight, her fat cells will not give up enough energy to make up the deficit. So that she will feel terrible but not lose any weight. While I concede that there may be people out there like that, it's a pretty extraordinary claim for any individual to make. For one thing, even if your fat storage system is working perfectly normally, it will be uncomfortable to run a caloric deficit especially in the early days of a diet as your body adjusts. Such discomfort is widely reported among all dieter, successful or not. So how can the person possibly know that she isn't experiencing the normal discomfort experienced by all dieters? I would want a medical diagnosis before concluding that something was so seriously wrong with a person's fat storage system.

Here's a question: Did the individual successfully lose weight in the past (even if they later regained)? If so, that's a good indication that their fat storage system is working properly.

I've never tried starving myself that much (I worry that it will cause my brain to cannibalize irreplaceable neurons or something, the way the rest of the body cannibalizes muscle) but I've just recently watched that happen to someone else who tried to lose weight by not eating and wasn't metabolically privileged enough to get away with it.

I think she was probably on 1200cal/day or something like that? Maybe less? Naturally, eating more hadn't produced weight loss, so she went lower, which naturally also failed to produce weight loss.

Bleah. Still not used to this high status thing.

But seriously, if you are not metabolically privileged, what happens if you try this is that your body shuts down and goes into starvation mode instead of losing weight. Your fat cells do not release fat under any circumstances, though they're happy to hoover up blood sugar so you always feel tired. We're not talking "feeling hungry", we're talking that you stop feeling hungry and lie down, feeling very very cold and having a hard time moving. Literal starvation, instead of your fat cells releasing fat. I've never tried starving myself that much (I worry that it will cause my brain to cannibalize irreplaceable neurons or something, the way the rest of the body cannibalizes muscle) but I've just recently watched that happen to someone else who tried to lose weight by not eating and wasn't metabolically privileged enough to get away with it.

A calorie is not a calorie. The thermodynamic theory of metabolism is a fucking lie. And it seriously does wear away on your nerves like sandpaper, after a while, to be blamed for it, when the exact same diet can make one person thin and cause the other to blow up like a balloon...

Eh, just read "Beware of Other-Optimizing."

I think that all ethical systems are just rationalizations, hence all the difficulties in using them consistently.

To be perfectly honest, if I had my morality stripped away, and I thought could get away with it, I'd rape as many women as possible.

Not joking; my tastes already run towards domination and BDSM and the like, and without morality, there'd be no reason to hold back for fear of traumatizing my partners, other than the fear of the government punishing me for doing so.

The comparison that leapt into my mind was Chomskians talking about how politicians and the media decide which topics are even discussed. Not sure if they have a term for that. I guess what you call "Privileging the Question" is part of framing in the social sciences sense. It's handy to have a phrase for this particular thing, though.

I also struggle to create mental imagery. In this scenario, I do imagine a scene, but it's not generally composed of imagery. I'm aware that this probably won't make sense to someone who has a primarily visual imagination, but when I'm imagining a scene like this, it's more like a network of facts in my head - I piece together the underlying concepts behind what's being described, rather than a visual representation of them.

For example, if I'm imagining a room full of people, I'll have a mental model of everyone's positions in the room, which I'll then update if the story mentions that someone is stood at the left of the room and I'm imagining them at the right. However, I don't have a picture of the room in my head while I'm doing this, there's no image of where the people are stood - it's just something I 'know'.

If I'm given a description of a person's appearance, I incorporate facts about their appearance in my mental model of them, but I still don't form a mental image representing them. If I was asked to draw someone that was described to me, I could attempt it (despite my poor drawing skills), but I would be converting my mental model into a picture at this stage - I wouldn't be drawing from a picture in my head. When I try to recall a fictional character, my mental model of them is overwhelmingly based on things like personality traits, and my perception of how their mind might work. I can remember details of appearance, but they take the form of 'has ~5cm, dark straight hair', rather than a picture of how said hair might look.

Inside Harry Potter's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but the level five Tegmark multiverse.

Hmmm... makes sense...