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What vegetarian things can I eat that won't leave me hungry an hour later?
If you're having issues with your hunger response, it's almost certainly because you've simply eliminated meat from the meal, without replacing it with something nutritionally equal. Your hunger response is mediated by a number of food chemicals, which you've like never had to notice before because meat provides the appropriate ones automatically,
Solving it is easy - just eat protein (nuts, beans, etc) and fat (nuts, oil, peanut butter, etc.). That'll hit you with the right stuff to replace what you're losing with meat, and keep your stomach's brain happy because it's receiving the right chemicals.
People too often think vegetarianism is just a light salad at every meal. >_<
In response to
The Super Happy People (3/8)
"A better question," said the Lord Programmer, "would be, why are the two of them reciting multiplication tables?" He glanced around. "What, none of you can read lips?"
"Um..." said the Xenopsychologist. "Okay, I've got to admit, I can't even begin to imagine why -"
Then there was a uniform "Ewww..." from around the room.
"Oh, dear," said the Xenopsychologist. "Oh, dear, I don't think they understood that part at all."
I've read this several times now, and I'm still not getting what the "Eww" is about. What am I missing here?
I'm surprised this never got answered! Well, better late than never, I suppose.
The SuperHappies misread the saying "Be fruitful and multiply.".
His first, and seemingly most compelling, argument for Duplication over Unification is that, assuming an infinite universe, it's certain (with probability 1) that there is already an identical portion of the universe where you're torturing the person in front of you. Given Unification, it's meaningless to distinguish between that portion and this portion, given their physical identicalness, so torturing the person is morally blameless, as you're not increasing the number of unique observers being tortured.
I'd argue that the torture portion is not identical to the not-torture portion and that the difference is caused by at least one event in the common prior history of both portions of the universe where they diverged. Unification only makes counterfactual worlds real; it does not cause every agent to experience every counterfactual world. Agents are differentiated by the choices they make and agents who perform torture are not the same agents as those who abstain from torture. The difference can be made arbitrarily small, for instance by choosing an agent with a 50% probability of committing torture based on the outcome of a quantum coin flip, but the moral question in that case is why an agent would choose to become 50% likely to commit torture in the first place. Some counterfactual agents will choose to become 50% likely to commit torture, but they will be very different than the agents who are 1% likely to commit torture.
I think you're interpreting Bostrom slightly wrong. You seem to be reading his argument (or perhaps just my short distillation of it) as arguing that you're not currently torturing someone, but there's an identical section of the universe elsewhere where you are torturing someone, so you might as well start torturing now.
As you note, that's contradictory - if you're not currently torturing, then your section of the universe must not be identical to the section where the you-copy is torturing.
Instead, assume that you are currently torturing someone. Bostrom's argument is that you're not making the universe worse, because there's a you-copy which is torturing an identical person elsewhere in the universe. At most one of your copies is capable of taking blame for this; the rest are just running the same calculations "a second time", so to say. (Or at least, that's what he's arguing that Unification would say, and using this as a reason to reject it and turn to Duplication, so each copy is morally culpable for causing new suffering.)
However, you can flip this over trivially and come to a terrible conclusion. If Duplication is true, you merely have to simulate a person until they experience a moment of pure hedonic bliss, in some ethically correct manner that everyone agrees is morally good to experience and enjoy. Then, copy the fragment of the simulation covering the experiencing of that emotion, and duplicate it endlessly.
True just if your summum bonum is exactly an aggregate of moments of happiness experienced.
I take the position that it is not.
I don't think one even has to resort to a position like "only one copy counts".
True, but that's then striking more at the heart of Bostrom's argument, rather than my counter-argument, which was just flipping Bostrom around. (Unless your summum malum is significantly different, such that duplicate tortures and duplicate good-things-equivalent-to-torture-in-emotional-effect still sum differently?)
I'm not really sure that I care about duplicates that much.
Bostrom would probably try to argue that you do. See Bostrom (2006).
Am I crazy, or does Bostrom's argument in that paper fall flat almost immediately, based on a bad moral argument?
His first, and seemingly most compelling, argument for Duplication over Unification is that, assuming an infinite universe, it's certain (with probability 1) that there is already an identical portion of the universe where you're torturing the person in front of you. Given Unification, it's meaningless to distinguish between that portion and this portion, given their physical identicalness, so torturing the person is morally blameless, as you're not increasing the number of unique observers being tortured. Duplication makes the two instances of the person distinct due to their differing spatial locations, even if every other physical and mental aspect is identical, so torturing is still adding to the suffering in the universe.
However, you can flip this over trivially and come to a terrible conclusion. If Duplication is true, you merely have to simulate a person until they experience a moment of pure hedonic bliss, in some ethically correct manner that everyone agrees is morally good to experience and enjoy. Then, copy the fragment of the simulation covering the experiencing of that emotion, and duplicate it endlessly. Each duplicate is distinct, and so you're increasing the amount of joy in the universe every time you make a copy. It would be a net win, in fact, if you killed every human and replaced the earth with a computer doing nothing but running copies of that one person experiencing a moment of bliss. Unification takes care of this, by noting that duplicating someone adds, at most, a single bit of information to the universe, so spamming the universe with copies of the happy moment counts either the same as the single experience, or at most a trivial amount more.
Am I thinking wrong here?
I (a habitual satisficer) have a similar arrangement with my husband (an occasional maximizer) about car purchases. He researches a bunch and picks a few possibilities, from which I choose.
I have an identical arrangement with my wife. She does the research and narrows it down, I make the final choice so she doesn't have to deal with maximizing.
In response to
Procedural Knowledge Gaps
I am curious how you manage the cash in your wallet. I usually withdraw a fixed sum whenever it is empty, and pay some items by card, some by money. But I usually do not remember how much I carry.
Some peers have a super tight wallet where they basically care next to no cash at all, while others always have a healthy sum on their hand. Is there a preferred way to do it?
I do a zero-based budget monthly, where I precisely account for every dollar coming in and going out. Some of the categories in my budget (anything I buy in person) are designated as "cash" - every paycheck I withdraw enough from the ATM to cover the next two weeks worth of cash categories. These are then distributed into envelopes per category.
All of this leads up to my answer: I carry around personal allowance (budgeted for!) in my wallet at all times, and extra cash pulled from the envelopes when I'm going to buy something that day.
(When I end up using my card for a cash expense, because I didn't anticipate needing to buy something that day, the cash goes into a separate "Return To Bank" envelope. The next time I would withdraw cash, I just take what's in that envelope first, and then withdraw only what I still need. In other words, using my card is merely a loan taken out against my next cash withdrawal.)
They insist they're just as fast as they would be touch-typing (they're not)
I would estimate (based on my geeky friends I've seen at a keyboard) less than 20% of you can touch-type properly
This seems like dogmatic adherence to tradition. Is there actually evidence that the traditional method of touch typing, where each finger is assigned a keyboard column and returns to the "Home Row" after striking a key, is at all faster, more efficient, or ergonomically sound than just typing intuitively?
I ask because I type intuitively with ten fingers. I know where all the keys are, and I don't see the need to return each finger to the home row after every single keystroke, which seems inefficient. If I type a common sequence like "er" or "th," I do it with a single flick of the hand, not four separate ones.
Also, I cover a much larger portion of the keyboard with my right hand than my left, because it's stronger and more natural for me than assigning each finger the exact same amount of keyboard real estate.
<blockquote>If I type a common sequence like "er" or "th," I do it with a single flick of the hand, not four separate ones.</blockquote> Skilled touch typists certainly don't make four separate motions to type "er" or "th". Keyboards are specifically designed to accept multiple keys being pressed at the same time, because a skilled typist naturally presses the next key before they have finished the motion for the previous one. Nearly all keyboards will accept two simultaneous keypresses, with higher-quality ones accepting 3, 4, or arbitrary numbers of simultaneous keystrokes.
To be specific, typing "er" involves lifting my hand upwards, hitting "e" and "r" with my middle and pointer fingers in quick succession, and then dropping my hand back down. Typing "th" involves lifting my left hand at the same time as I shift my right hand slightly leftwards, and striking the "t" slightly before striking the "h" (though I often transpose the two actions and end up typing "hte" or "htat").
Okay, thanks for stating your point -- this should have been your first comment.
Now, could you provide a source for your claim about "people who touch type find transcribing easier"? Your reasoning doesn't make sense: when I transcribe, having to learn what I'm supposed to type is the bottleneck, which is why typing what's already in my head is faster for me -- I skip the stage of reading. I also don't think about each individual letter as you seem to be implying, and I type as fast as the OP touch-typist claims.
I can even type fast enough to transcribe people talking. (The accuracy isn't good, but it's high enough to reconstruct it afterward.)
I use 10 fingers, I base 8 of them on the home row, I type a touch-typing speeds, I use a keyboard optmized for touch typing, I use the keyboard in preference to the mouse; what exactly would "learning to type" include, and how would it be an improvement?
I can concur with the reporter's comments in that transcribing is faster for me (as a touch-typist), and more accurate. I can disconnect my brain when transcribing and just let the text flow from my visual center straight to my fingers. When transcribing properly you're not actually "reading" - I, at least, retain very little of texts that I transcribe.
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As a mostly-vegetarian person myself, I find this article's primary moral point very unconvincing.
Yes, factory farms are terrible, and we should make them illegal. But not all meat is raised on factory farms. Chickens and cattle who are raised ethically (which can still produce decent yields, though obviously less than factory farms) have lower levels of stress hormones than comparable wild animals. We can't measure happiness directly in these low-light animals, but stress hormones are a very good analogue for an enjoyable life, and we know that high levels are directly linked to poorer health outcomes (and thus likely suffering).
It's simply not that hard to raise food animals in a way that makes them better off than wild animals, and so unless you're strongly in the "reform nature" transhumanist strain, ethical animal farming is at least somewhat of a positive over not farming at all.
(I'm personally vegetarian by ecological reasons, and abstain from eating some animals due to moral compunction against eating things likely to be sentient.)