Well, at least you tried. My points would be:

• Primary effect should be appetite suppression. There are all kinds of things that can go wrong between appetite suppression and fat loss, but if appetite suppression is not present, something must be wrong early. So ignore possibility (b) - you might need to wait for fat loss, but appetite suppression should be almost immediate.
• What kind of ECA was it? How much ephedrine/caffeine/aspirin? What I used had 60mg ephedrine and 200mg caffeine (plus probably as much caffeine in drinks). Also some pills are called "ECA" but do not contain any ephedrine and instead something supposedly equivalent.
• And as you said, I wouldn't be surprised if you needed more caffeine if you normally take a lot of it.
• Were you actually gaining fat? (as measured by clothing size, or body resistance meters, or other proxy)
• By the way, why did you want to lose body weight if your bmi was normal?

What kind of rationalists are you? There is one way to lose weight with tons of research backing it, and perfectly valid molecular explanation how it works - one ECA pill every morning until you're done, if you're losing weight faster than 1kg/week definitely eat more as that's not very healthy.

You should behave like proper rationalists now, read some pubmed, order some pills, and lose as much weight as you want. No significant side effects observed, unlike "natural" dieting which causes hunger, loss of willpower, loss of energy etc. Your appetite will be so low you'll have to use alarm clock to remind yourself to eat, but it won't hurt when you do, so no willpower expended either way. Ask any random bodybuilder for advice if you need it, they mastered the art of getting rid of fat without harming rest of the body.

I'm 79 kg (bmi 22) down from 106 kg (bmi 30) five years ago, so unlike 95% of after-diet rebouncers I know what I'm talking about.

My post didn't come out quite how I intended. It reads like an angry rhetorical question, when it's supposed to be a sincere request for context. I'm baffled by the depth that people go into probing self-help ideas, talking in abstract vaguenesses of "getting things done" without revealing and explaining the personal goals that the techniques are supposed to help them achieve.

Given your profession and obsessive interest in the field PJ, perhaps you can give some examples of the sorts of objectives people need Akrasia-fighting techniques to accomplish? The examples I gave were humorous and the tone provocative, designed to draw out real goals from real practitioners. It was misjudged and looks like MPF, but that wasn't the intention.

I realise my request for examples of people's goals isn't exactly on-topic, but I find it almost impossible to understand the "tricks" and "secrets" people talk about on this topic when it's so divorced from the context of their specific goals. Let's have some examples to help those like me get what you're talking about. You first.

I have no scientific explanation for the event.

Yes, you do: all four dice were weighted. You did your math assuming only one of them was weighted, but if they all were then the event you saw wasn't unlikely at all. Assume that a weighted die rolls the side that it favors with probability p, each of the sides adjacent to it with probability (1-p)/4, and never rolls the side opposite the favored side. How strongly weighted do the dice have to be (that is, what should p be) for 26 consecutive victories for the defender are assured?

The defender automatically wins on a 5 or 6, which come up with probability p + (1-p)/4. If the defender rolls a 2, then for the defender to win, each of the attacker's dice must either be a 1 (which it is with probability p) or a 2 (with probability (1-p)/4), so the defender wins in this case with probability (p+(1-p)/4)^3. The cases where the defender rolls a 3 or 4 are similar. Summing all the cases, we get that the defender wins with probability

p + (1-p)/4 + (1-p)/4 * ((p+(1-p)(3/4))^3 + (p+(1-p)(2/4))^3 + (p+(1-p)(1/4))^3)

Which simplifies to

(1/64)(-9p^4-6p^3+54p+25)

To win 26 times in a row with 50% probability, the defender would have to win each battle with probability 0.974. To win 26 times in a row with 95% probability, the defender would have to win each battle with probability 0.998.

(1/64)(-9p^4-6p^3+54p+25) > .974 --> p > .841

(1/64)(-9p^4-6p^3+54p+25) > .998 --> p > .958

In other words, to produce the event you saw with 50% reliability would require weighted dice that worked 84% of the time. To produce the event you saw with 95% reliability would require weighted dice that worked 96% of the time. I'm unable to find any good statistics on the reliability of weighted dice, but 84% sounds about right.

So I'm not a mathematician but we note the outcomes of chance events all the time probably thousands to tens of thousands of times in your life depending on how much gaming you do. Given about 1000 low-likelihood events per person over their lifetime (which I'm basically making up, but I think its conservative) 1 in 100 million should experience 1 in 100 billion events, right? So basically there might be two other people with stories like yours living in the US. It is definitely a neat story, but I don't think its the kind of thing we should never have expected to happen. Its not like the quantum tunneling of macroscopic objects or anything.

re: Magician's Trick

My friends had the opportunity to trick me since we regularly played Risk (and I would have been highly amused if they had done so). Since the dice were mine and were distinctive they would have had to get trick dice that matched my own. Then they would have had to wait for the right game opportunity, e.g., my 26 armies against my opponent's last remaining army on his last territory. Knowing my friends very well, it doesn't seem likely to me that they would go to all that trouble and then never laugh about how they fooled me.

My friends didn't appear all that surprised by the event. Both believed in "luck" and neither had a mathematical understanding of just how rare such a "chance" event would be. I interacted on a daily basis with these friends for several more years and they consistently expressed the view that it had been a "lucky run", unusual but nothing earth shaking. My impression was that they viewed it as a one in a thousand event consistent with their belief in lucky people and lucky streaks. To me it was amazing because I didn't believe in "lucky people" and could calculate how unlikely such an event was. ("Rare" events might happen frequently and pass relatively unnoticed because people just can't calculate how unlikely the events really are.)

I have difficulty believing that trick dice would work well enough to fool me in this particular case. My opponent didn't roll a string of sixes. He beat me with sixes, fives, fours, threes, and even a two. (The two sticks in my mind because at the time I thought to myself that I seemed to be trying to lose.) We are talking about a trick die that occasionally rolled every number except a 1 but still managed to beat or tie my best die for 25 times in a row. That is unbelievable control of little plastic cubes considering we are rolling at the same time using die cups.

I have no explanation for that event. I never saw my friend do anything similar before or after and I really don't think he had anything to do with it. In my opinion the three of us were observers in something strange but none of us were really in control. I don't attribute it to luck or psychic powers.

PS. If I were reading some anonymous poster describing this event on the Internet, I'd assume he was lying, was delusional, had been tricked, or was badly mis-remembering the event. However, people who have personally experienced something similar might get something out of my description.

FWIW, one of the reasons Shangri-la didn't quite work for me at first is that I had acid reflux issues. My reflux belches apparently count as "a taste" and after I started taking Zantac to control them - and also drinking less carbonated soda - it worked much better. Another problem I had is an issue S-L has in common with some other diet systems such as Eat-Stop-Eat - any encouragement to "eat whatever you want" when on the diet/regimen is counterproductive if you're eating for any reason other than hunger. I sometimes eat due to boredom or stress or habit; S-L won't stop me from doing that. And it definitely doesn't help to be parsimonious about the sugar or oil because you're afraid of calorie consumption - small amounts just don't work.

What did sort of work for me was to combine S-L with a certain amount of calorie counting - trying to make a conscious effort to cut back net calorie consumption a little, but not too much. To the degree that even that didn't work, it was mostly a matter of akrasy - the oil is nauseating and unsatisfying in the moment I take it so I often didn't feel like taking it.

It's especially hard to come to grips with the idea that even if it works, SL is something you pretty much have to keep doing for the rest of your life. It's the same problem many people have with antidepressants. You take a treatment and if the treatment works it seems like you're getting better and then that you've gotten better, so you start wondering if you really need to keep taking it. Eventually you fall off the treatment...and lose all the previous gains.

HalFinney: "The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare."

Thirty years ago I was playing a game of Risk with two friends. The rivalry between the two meant that I would usually win. In that game I had an overwhelming advantage. I had 26 armies and was attacking the last army of the last territory of one of my opponents. (His captured cards plus mine would give me enough additional armies to defeat my remaining opponent.) My opponent told me that he usually let me win, but not this time. He'd never said anything similar before. I remember thinking to myself, "Fat lot you have to say about it fella." I rolled three die against his one. After losing several rolls, I asked that he use a die cup and he complied. I lost 25 times in a row. It was my Risk game and my die in my apartment.

23 attempts with 3 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 34.03% of the time. 1 attempt with 2 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 42.13% of the time. 1 attempt with 1 attack die against on defender die: defender wins 58.33% of the time. Defender wins the battle 0.58330.4213(0.3403^23) = 4.20057037 × 10^-12.

Assuming my description of the event is correct (i.e., fair die, fair rolls, accurate memory, etc.) then my opponent would be expected to win about 1 out of a 100 billion such battles. (I doubt 100 billion Risk games have been played throughout all history.)

I decided it was more likely that my understanding of the universe was flawed than it was likely that I had witnessed such a rare event. I discussed the event with fellow math graduate students. A couple of them wondered how I, as a scientist, could even question the standard probabilistic model. My response was, "As scientists, how much evidence would they need before they were willing to question their prior beliefs?"

That experience led me to conclude that reality is far weirder than I had imagined. Strange things do happen for which I have no scientific explanation.

Post in this thread if you live within what you consider easy driving distance from New York City.

Heroin/opiates are a bad example. Addicts with a steady supply or chronic pain patients are able to go years without skipping a day. I can't track it down right now, but I read a study a few years ago from some European county where they decided to try just giving a group of addicts all the heroin they wanted. The majority used every day, held down jobs, stayed out jail, and were relatively healthy. Of course government spending money to give addicts drugs was an outrage., so the program got shut down early.

Hallucinogens would be a better example, there would be no way to function in society if you were constantly on one.