Also, you can use Splenda, for no calories at all, and it tastes just fine. I know some people can get downright militant about how awful the stuff is, but they are the same people who buy organic when the term is essentially meaningless, and they seem to hate the thought that you are "cheating" to get deliciousness. I simply say to them "Er, human technology has progressed to the point where I can have, say, a sweet breakfast without consuming any sugar, and I'm going to do so. Cheating has nothing to do with it." I drink tea with it alllll the time, too. :)

I think exponential discounting already assumes uncertainty. You need uncertainty to discount at all - if things are going to stay the same, might as well wait until later. And it doesn't intuitively lead to hyperbolic discounts - if there's a 1% chance you'll die each week, then waiting from now until next week should make you discount the same amount as waiting from ten weeks from now until eleven.

But there is a way to use uncertainty to get from exponential to hyperbolic discounting. You get exponential if you're worried about yourself dying/being unable to use the reward/etc. But if you add in the chance of the reward going away, based on a prior where you don't know anything about how likely that is, you might get hyperbolic discounting. If you don't eat an animal you've killed in the next ten minutes, then it might get stolen by hyenas. But common-sensibly, if it goes a year without being stolen by hyenas or going bad or anything, there's not much chance of hyenas suddenly coming along in the next ten minutes after that.

Do any of the studies on hyperbolic discounting attempt to show that it is not just a consequence of combining uncertainty with something like a standard exponential discounting function? That's always seemed the most plausible explanation of hyperbolic discounting to me and it meshes with what seems to be going on when I introspect on these kinds of choices.

Most of the discussions of hyperbolic discounting I see don't even consider how increasing uncertainty for more distant rewards should factor into preferences. Ignoring uncertainty seems like it would be a sub-optimal strategy for agents making decisions in the real world.

• A developed country will suffer a currency crisis - most likely either the UK, US or one of the weaker Eurozone economies (60%).

I think the problems in Greece (and to a lesser extent Spain and Portugal) and the resulting turmoil in the Euro are sufficient to say this prediction was correct. The UK pound has also had a rough time but in both cases 'currency crisis' could still be argued. I expect further problems before the year is out.

I think this prediction has failed utterly. In the Euro zone, There are/were debt crises in Greece and Ireland, but the currency, the Euro itself did fine. A graph of the variation of the Euro against the US dollar shows no special variation in 2010 compared to its "typical" variations over the last decade. The pound maintained the value in 2010 that it had already fallen to in 2009, hardly even slightly adhering to a prediction about 2010.

Those were exciting predictions. Had you predicted a sovereign debt crisis in a developed country, you would have been right, and it would have been a much less exciting prediction than a currency crisis.

I agree. When I've experienced sleep paralysis, I've rarely seen anything much at all other than distortions of the appearance of the room. What I get instead is a buzzing noise and a sense of vibration through my body, and then my body feels as if it's being tossed around the bed in impossibly rapid circles by some kind of evil force. I've never culturally heard of any experience like it. It certainly has the sense of oppression and evil, but there's nothing about it that sounds like any kind of mythology I've ever heard in my culture or another.

I find the paleo argument pretty compelling by virtue of the logic of the argument--i.e. homo sapiens evolved in an environment which did not have agriculture and grains. Also there is an M.D. blogger whose name escapes me who strongly advises people to avoid all processed grains because they pulse the glucose-insulin cycle in the blood. In March I overhauled my diet. I was eating a croissant every morning, two slices of bread every noon, and two to four cookies every evening. My grain consumption is now less than three slices of bread every four days. I eat cheese and yogurt. So I am not paleo. I do eat a serving of fruit and a serving of raw nuts at every meal.

I may be the most paleo person I know.

The other overhaul I did to my diet is the largest mass of food I am now taking in daily is a big plate of frozen vegetables at noon. I buy the two pound sacks of: 1) peas; 2) corn; 3) string beans; 4) broccoli and cauliflower mix; 5) peas and corn and carrots and string beans and lima beans mix. Choosing which of the sacks to pour from at noon is one of the high points in my typical day. My weight is down; my body mass index is down; my workouts have more pep. I am going to be hanging with this diet for a while.

I like Pollan's formula: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. If somebody put that in the rationality quote thread I would upvote it. Beyond his formula, I do not like Pollan at all. He is not a nutritionist; he is a journalist. When I try and read any of his writing at length my eyes roll.

The best partisan of the paleo philosophy in my mind is the anthropologist David Abram who is part of the "re-wilding movement". I am not anywhere close to a re-wilding movement partisan, but his discussions of forager cultures and what those folks may have to teach us makes Michael Pollan and most of the other more popular figures look like they are serving up extremely thin gruel.

Normal testosterone in males varies by a factor of almost 4:241-827 ng/dL. This sticks in my memory because the last time my doctor did my blood I was at the top of the normal range and I asked him how come I don't look like a gorilla. (The 241-827 does not stick in my memory--I looked it up.) I think my doctor is awesome but his answer to that question was not.

Your textbook stomach link is truly a picture worth a thousand words.

OK. So reading between the lines somewhat and pushing the argument further, would it similarly/analogously/generally be the case that eating nearly any part of an evolutionarily 'old', highly evolved autotroph would usually be healthy, because they have learned how to make things that are useful for living things to have? (That is, ignoring the part of the argument possibly implying that we might have evolved a dependency upon apples in particular, because that seemed unlikely to me. Though I could be convinced because know it is the case to some degree for oranges and scurvy, for example.)

The people I've read who gave advice based on Ioannidis article strongly recommended eating paleo.

Incidentally, something like the paleo diet works incredibly well for me. I discovered the right details for me about 4 months ago and have quickly lost weight to a point near my optimal weight and I don't have dizzy or tired spells anymore with blood sugar fluctuations. However, calling it the 'paleo' diet begs a question I don't have enough background in evolutionary biology to ask, but I can pose a related question, because it is more concrete:

My father-in-law is on some kind of fruit diet, and he raves about how healthy fruits are, especially if they are fresh and eaten with the peel. Apples, for example, have all these different healthy things in them.

I wonder why an apple should be healthy. Wouldn't any animal be satisfied with a fruit that just had calories? Enough, in any case, to come back for more and scatter the seeds? Why should an apple -- or anything 'natural' -- be so especially healthy for humans?

I'd compare this with employment. Every now and then, you see a media story about some company with a highly unusual internal culture that uses all sorts of unconventional practices in hiring, organization, and management. Yet unless you luckily stumble onto some such employer and happen to be an exceptionally good candidate by their standards, you would be well-advised to stick to the standard conventional advice on how to look and behave in job interviews and, subsequently, in the workplace. In fact, doing anything else would mean sabotaging your employment and career prospects, and expecting that your unconventional behavior will surely be rewarded with a dream job with an unconventional employer is a delusional pipe-dream.

The main flaw of this analogy, of course, is that the conventional wisdom on seeking and maintaining employment is largely correct, whereas the conventional wisdom on dating has fatal points of disconnect from reality. Also, while conforming to optimal workplace behavior is truly painful for many people, fixing the problems in one's approach to dating and relationships typically doesn't require any such painful and loathsome adjustment. (Even though people often rationalize their unwillingness to do it by convincing themselves in the opposite.)

Certainly! If he'd said "women who might like me tend to also like ..." I'd have understood. My confusion was because there was no such qualification, or anything else limiting the population under discussion beyond "women," but the commenter seemed to expect consistency within that population.

The prevalence of different personality types in the population is very relevant here and you seem to be glossing over it.

This is what I thought I was saying. :)