“Why does anything exist at all?”

I lose no sleep over this. I think people who do are just confused by language.

I'd say that if you examine your concept of "why", you find it presupposes existence.

But the question "what I will experience in the next moment of time" is physical. And all physics is based on idea of the sameness of an observer during an experiment.

"Is it me?" is a question of value masquerading as a question of fact.

Intertemporal, interstate solidarity is a choice.

Chewing gum is generally recommended with this kind of food.

There are already known problems with this kind of food, and I wonder why no one seems to address them. First, the lack of probiotics. Second, some metabolic pathways cannot be done at the same time (sorry, I don't remember the specific examples), so if you eat both X and Y in the same food, X will take priority and get digested, but Y will be ignored. This is not a problem if some of your food contains only X and other contains only Y, but may become a problem when X and Y always come mixed together.

The second problem seems relatively easy to fix: just split the food into two (or more if necessary) variants. For example, make one variant with double X, zero Y, and the usual amount of everything else, and other variant with no X, double Y, and the usual amount of everything else. Not sure what to do about the first problem; I suspect probiotics do not have the same shell life as the usual Soylent ingredients.

I've never tried the meal replacements, but I've got a pretty good simple food regimen going lately. At least I like it, feel good, and have been losing weight.

(I supplement heavily as well. )

Cheerios in the morning, with almond+coconut milk plus vanilla powdered eggs over them. Tasty. Avoids dairy and easy carbs. Carrot juice with some of the ac milk (much tastier with the ac milk added).

Lunch - salad bar at work. Chunk fruits. Spinach. Red/Green peppers. Olives. Artichokes. Feta. Wish they had avocados. Usually some chunked chicken and tiny cheapo shrimp.

Dinnner - Vegetable infused pasta, chopped chicken thighs, some tomato sauce, and shredded cheese. Started having some wine with it.

I've gotten off the rice/bread/potatoes. And I only actually cook once a week, when I bake a pile of chicken thighs. Otherwise, it's pour or microwave to reheat. With cooking not a daily grind, I usually cook something interesting once a week. Rib eye steak last night. Tasty.

But picking and choosing the category is again so subjective.

No. Use all information available. What problem are you actually looking to analyze? What information do you have?

Someone may also argue that woman inequality back then was so great that the data should only look at men, as a woman’s chance of being portrayed on a coin was skewed in a way that isn’t applicable to men.

That may be some useful information to include. Willfully ignoring relevant information, or not seeing how to use some information that seems like it may be relevant does not mean that the problem is "subjective", it means that we are often lazy and confused. And that's fine.

Include what you can transform into meaningful probabilities.

That thinking is hard is not a problem unique to bayesian methods.

I don't recall Jaynes discussing it much. Anyone?

For him, I think the reference class is always the context of your problem. Use all information available.

A brief google for "jaynes reference class" turned up his paper on The Well Posed Problem.

http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/well.pdf

He analyzes the Bertrand Paradox, and finds that in the real world, the mathematical "paradox" is resolved by identifying the transformation group (and thereby prior) that in reality is applicable.

My take on this is that "non-informative priors" and "principle of indifference" are huge misnomers. Priors are assertions of information, of transformation groups or equivalence classes believed appropriate to the problem. If your prior is "gee I don't know and don't care", then you're just making shit up.

What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?

Mathematics is our language for understanding quantitative relationships. Most people are simply illiterate in that language, and are basically reduced to magical thinking where quantitative relationships are concerned. They just don't have the concepts to deal with the problem domain, so they use the inapplicable concepts they do have instead.

Know the probabilities of fatal and adverse side-effects and update them with evidence(Bayes' theorem mentioned above)

Update on all relevant evidence, even if you don't have empirical data.

I would add:
Make decisions based on cost/benefit analysis, not simply probabilities. For example, low probability treatments can make perfect sense to try if they are low risk, low cost.

Know that the failure to reject a null hypothesis is not proof of the null hypothesis. It does not establish the null hypothesis. A failure to reject is simply an epistemological failure.

I will have to copy paste my answer to your other comment:

Yes I could. I chose not to. It is a balance between suspension of disbelieve and narrative simplicity. Moreover, I am not sure how much credence should I put on recent cosmological theories that they will not be updated the future, making my narrative set up obsolete. I also do not want to burden my reader with familiarity of cosmological theories.

Am I not allowed to use such narrative technique to simplify my story and deliver my point? Yes I know it is out of touch with the human condition but I was hoping it would not strain my audiences' suspension of disbelieve.