Haha. Humans.

I laugh at us too GLaDOS. Sometimes, I have to so I don't cry.

A more elegant explanation of the effectiveness of the diet would be that eating a calorically-dense food in the morning knocks your fat metabolism into gear.

I would like to take measurement of body temperatures while on the Shangri-La diet; I would expect body temperature to rise significantly from its nighttime low towards maximal resting temperaturen when olive oil was consumed (oil/fat being the most calorically dense macronutrient). Fat storage is very powerful, and very mysterious to doctors. If you're body doesn't feel comfortable losing weight, you will find it extremely difficult to do so and even more difficult to keep the weight off. The most important thing is to balance the body's nutrient needs and remove stressors that would cause of enhance weight gain. Any human could run for days on end if they were able to access this fat storage without other constraints (and the point of V02 training is to increase access to this energy).

http://learnthis.ca/2011/02/how-to-boost-your-metabolism/

The political definitions are confusing and many would consider some of the distinctions wrong, clearly Americanized. American liberals are to the right of European conservatives, USSR was a socialism just a different kind, etc., etc.....

Find a non-political way of describing political preferences or, better yet, break it up into a political compass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass (test on http://politicalcompass.org/ to chart your location.) 1. Economic 2. Social

Apatheism should also be added to the list of choices for religion.

I feel uneasy when someone suggests that people should (for practice or whatever) argue for something that they don't believe. If you can argue for anything your words mean nothing.

That would be an amazing class. Even dropping the "offensiveness" billing and just advertising it as a class that would expose you to as many new and unconventional ideas as possible would be pretty neat.

While we're asking for the impossible, I'd kind of like to scrap the entire current primary/secondary school curriculum and replace it entirely with rationality. You'd learn math on the way to being able to use Bayes' Theorem. You'd learn English while writing counter-attitudinal essays. You'd learn history because your assignment is to point out what cognitive biases led Napoleon to make the mistake of invading Russia, and how you would have done better in his shoes. And then you'll play a game of Diplomacy (or Civilization IV, or whatever) to prove it. All exams are calibration tests.

People will complain that it might not give people the same breadth of knowledge. But our current curriculum is entirely about signaling breadth of knowledge. I learned about Sargon of Akkad in sixth grade and I have >90% confidence I'm the only person in the class who remembers his name, and that entirely because I'm the sort of person who would read about people like Sargon anyway outside of class. Once the primary/secondary school system is producing a generation of scholars of Mesopotamian history - or even people who can still speak Spanish five years after their high school Spanish class is over - then they can complain about breadth of knowledge.

But if you optimized the entire school experience for learning how to evaluate information and make good choices, maybe some of that would stick.

Every doctor should be required to study The Art of War before being allowed to practice. Practicing medicine is not like balancing an equation. Medicine is not a game of perfect information, nor are its rules unchanging. Indeed, each person's health battles take place upon an idiosyncratic battlefield with various assortments of forces. The war of evolution, which has been raging for millennia, has developed in Homo Sapien what is likely one of the most highly adapted immune systems in the history of the planet. It is not surprising that doctors fail so often when they survey the battlefield and can think only to higher suspect mercenaries to fight proxy battles (drugs on secondary symptoms)...

We should think of our brain as a GrandMaster General, the spine her chain of command, every specialized organ a legion brimming with age-old veteran forces. Should we think the whole army, which have never yet succumb to defeat in millenia of evolution, could be defeated by average maladies? Should we assume that the General of millions of victories makes simple mistakes like misallocating resources (like making too much cholesterol)?

And when we've given the majestic human body its due respect, is it reasonable to expect people with 4 years of training, who are bombarded by biased solicitations and have to side-step personal biases, who primarily wield simple synthetic compounds and inelegant machinery... to have mastery over it?

The key thing to remember is: Correlation does not equal causation.

Actually, raw order of magnitude it might not be.

There are currently 6 billion people on earth. In their lifetimes (presuming the singularity doesn't extend that to infinity), I expect there will be significantly less than 600 fundamental theory changes to our systems. Sure, entirely new fields like computers and genetics have occurred in the last ~80ish years, but those occurred within the framework of existing theory. Few and far between are the refutations like Phlogiston, Impetus, or Spontaneous generation. The prior probability for anyone to overturn an established branch of science is therefore already much less than 1 in 10 million.

If our prior probability is already at 1 in 10 million, additional facts like him having no training in an area and incoherent sentences push it to being even less likely.

Evolutionary arguments about disease are difficult. Make sure your argument does not explain too much: vitamin >deficiencies are real!

Yes, they are difficult. That is because there are many factors at play in reality. But if his theory was correct, the solution would be so simple that evolution could solve it easily.

In reality, vitmain deficiencies have strong negative consequences, but nothing as drastic as what he proposes.

If vitamin deficiencies really had such an incredibly huge impact there would be a much stronger evolutionary pressure. With such a strong pressure, evolution might have developed vitamin storage organs or even a way for creatures to exchange vitamins to prevent vitamin deficiencies at any cost.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans die of medical malpractice every year. Anyone who holds medical science in such high regard that they can do-no-wrong has not studied its history. American medical practice especially, compared to European standards, is positively wretched to the average patient.

I would not assume that this man's breakthrough is real, but it is ludicrous to assume its falsity without any expertise to make such a judgement. Moreover, if his methods are reasonable and his results happen to be incorrect, it does NOT make him a "crackpot". Seriously, a scientist being wrong should be considered the norm: scietists are almost NEVER fully correct in their assertions. To call a scientist a "crackpot" is akin to calling a politician a "fascist": sure, there are a few milling about, but overwhelmingly it's just a cheap insult. Shame on yea who consider yourselves rationalists but use such emotionally-charged, biased terminology and make epistemology claims they have no qualifications to make.

...Additionally, there are the institutional criticisms to make of modern scientific practice. Of course, some "scientific" institutions are horribly corrupt, but even those which are run legitimately can fall victim to cognitive, publication, and funding biases. http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html (There's plenty more to look up. Privately-funded studies far more likely to net positive results; positive results are far more likely to be published; negative results are more likely to be redacted after publication...)

Perhaps oddly, being threatened with a large negative consequence for inaction makes me even more paralyzed.

That's not odd at all; it's what I consider the normal definition of "pathological procrastinator".

People who find this sort of forfeiture arrangement motivating are probably not pathological procrastinators, the way poor people in wealthy nations aren't all that poor compared to relatively-well off people in poor countries. Doesn't mean they don't suffer from their problems, just that they're really not in the same class of hurt.