People should base self eating on accomplishment not rationality. It is very easy to be wrong about internal mental states, it's much harder to be wrong about real world observables.

If the universe was non differentiable and non continuous I would consider that to be evidence for simulation. And in fact I've heard that argument. Everything is discreet like it's all bits at the bottom is evedence its run on bits and so a simulation. But continuity and discreetness can't both be evedence for the same thing.

I will note that you can't improve the past and have limited ability to improve other countries. So criticism of those won't lead to anything useful. Critical views of where you are right now can lead to effective action. So I don't know if the pattern being criticized is a bad pattern

I down vote posts I think are bad for the sites reputation / public image. I think people who like controversy or trolling privately benefit from such posts and externalize reputation all harms onto the site overall. I also think people in general benefit from a forum with good members and don't factor in long term reputational effects. I use karma to help people internalize these better.

I like this post a lot. It's very clear and seems to be pointing to something. So did the first post. By contrast the second post felt more handwavey to me. That's some indication that you may be missing a step in your chain of reasoning. You may want to mentally walk through the second post "showing your work" in more detail as a double check in case you missed something.

These sound like great tools. Thanks for making them available.

On a meta level I don't mind if members of the community promote their own work here if it's something that other community members will find useful. I'll also note that these seem lik tricky enouph things that they could also have been mentioned in the bragging thread when you finished them.

I think this post jumps the gun. We don't have a really meaningful concept of happened outside of experience or consciousness. At present I think we have very little clue about how those work, how they arise, and what they even precisely are. The later question of happiness doesn't really make sense until we have the first one.

It may just be a coincidence, but I notice this was published at the end of March. Historically there have been a lot of spurious results published on or immediately before April first.

Some paleo diets and blogs claim that people should avoid plants from the nightshade family (tomatoes, eggplants etc). Some inflammation and auto immune blogs claim the same thing. Does anyone know if these claims have a scientific basis and, if so, what mechanism is purportedly driving the effect?

I figure there has been enough interest on paleo here, that before I invest hours into digging through Google scholar it makes more sense to ask if anyone already knows the answer. Thanks in advance

I think this is a good post and I upvoted it. That said, I do want to present an alternative view. Rather than aiming to boost life expectancy by increasing your odds of survival given a life threatening situation, aim to reduce your odds of being in a dangerous situation in the first place. In the amount of time it would take you to arrange one round of paintball you could probably check detailed crimes stats for several neighborhoods including things like time of day.