I'm not sure Eastbourne (or more likely, the nearest city Brighton) has a lot of LW readers, due to each of their typical demographics. However, due to this post, I am rather tempted to try it out. Indeed, worst that happens is sitting in a café with a book (which sounds like something I should be doing more of anyway).

Main purpose of comment: any Brighton- or nearby LW folk, call out! I might otherwise procrastinate about this prospect by a month or more.

Uhm, maybe I actually don't understand the poem. I'll read it over again.

EDIT: I still get the same message from the repeated lines, that the complex systems behind the surface can't be beautiful, and are somehow innately terrible.

I think a book of poems like these would be enough to fend off a whole load of existential angst.

I really liked this, it was very thoughtfully posted (i.e. most vaguely reductionist/scientific poetry is unbearable), and would like to see other polite conversations between intellect and emotion such as this. It's nice to see them getting along for once.

I requested that data because for some reason, in my own experience, I've noticed the tendency you mentioned in your previous post as being strongest when I'm trying to avoid the internal monologue way of thinking.

If I try to avoid using words in my thought process, I often find myself walking around empty-headed for some reason. It's as if it's a lot harder to start a non-verbal thought, or something. I don't know.

When walking around with a lot of thinking time on my hands, I've found a lot of success keeping myself occupied by simply saying words to myself and then seeing where it takes me. For example, I may vocalize in my head "epistemology", or "dark arts", or something like that, and then see where it takes me (making sure to start verbalizing my thought process if I stall at any point).

Maybe I'm on a different topic though. Are you simply asking what you should spend your time thinking about, and I'm going into the topic of how to start a thought process (whatever it is)? This seems like an unlikely interpretation though because you said the problem is not having a pen and paper, which suggests to me that you know what to think about, but end up not doing anything if all you can't write or draw.

Sorry if this is pretty messy. I wanted to respond to this, but didn't have much time.

How often do you think in words, and how often in visuals, sounds, and so on? Do you normally think by picturing things, or engaging in an internal monologue, or what? Or is the distribution sort of even?

I'm often walking to somewhere and I notice that I have a good amount of thinking time, but that I find my head empty. Has anyone any good ideas on useful things to occupy my mind during such time? Visualisation exercises, mental arithmetic, thinking about philosophy?

It depresses me a little, how much easier it is to make use of nothing but a pen and paper, than it is to make use of when that is removed and one has only one's own mind.

I agree that downvoting new people is a bad idea - and every comment in the Welcome Thread should get a load of karma.

However, I think people should aggressively downvote - at the very least a couple of comments per page.

If we don't downvote, comments on average get positive karma - which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there's a high chance of positive karma.

However, we don't want these posts. They clutter LW, increasing noise. The reason we read forums rather than random letter sequences is because forums filter for strings that have useful semantic content; downvoting inane or uninsightful comments increases this filtering effect. I'd much rather spent a short period of time reading only high quality comments than spend longer reading worse comments.

Worse, it can often be hard to distinguish between a good comment on a topic you don't understand and a bad one. Yet I get much more value spending time reading the good one, which might educate me, than the bad one, which might confuse me - especially if I have trouble distinguishing experts.

Downvotes provide the sting of (variable) negative reinforcement. In the long run, well kept gardens die by pacificism.

Yes, it exists: http://genomera.com

They're actively running experiments and collecting data but are in "beta testing" and are very exclusive on whom they allow to join. I'm disappointed they didn't choose me when I filled out their request for a beta invite.

A huge problem with collecting data like this in the US population, is that everyone has a similar diet. There's so few people totally excluding gluten, you can't expect to measure it's effects with epidemiological diet surveys: you need to actually do a controlled trial where you tell people to avoid it.

In China where only about half of people eat foods with gluten the biggest epidemiological study ever performed (the China Study) did find that wheat intake was independently correlated with overall mortality (http://rawfoodsos.com/the-china-study/). They never published this finding themselves, but the correlation is clearly there in the data.

There's a lot of question about their methodology- they didn't keep or report data on individuals, but lumped whole communities together as single data points. There's likely a lot of highly correlated regional habits that weren't on the questionnaire, and I tend to find the whole study pretty questionable. For the most part, it's just comparing the health of rural farmers with wealthier urban Chinese- the two groups have radically different health, lifestyle, and diets and we can only control for the few questions they actually asked.

Perhaps now that gluten avoidance seems to be becoming a "fad diet" in western countries, suddenly it will be possible to actually collect good data on this.

I've often wondered if a large-userbase data collecting website could help solve problems like this by looking for very weak statistical correlations among coinciding events over large datafields. I.e. see how often people self-report eating X, see how often people self-report feeling Y, see how often one precedes the other and when they happen independently. The function to users would be letting them track their own actions (e.g. diet, health, etc) according to preset (or high-karma member-submitted) input:data -sets. I should think with members in the thousands such a thing would become useful. Especially were the service entangled with some social app to get users and some very good statistics processing to get results. Does anything like this at all exist? (Any obvious ideas why it doesn't, barring there possibly being lack of incentive to use it, lack of an incentive for a company/person to program it?)

I've been working on a personal organisation web-app. Partly because it's fun, partly because hopefully it'll get to stage of being useful. Currently all data is basically private to each user (I have the only user account, though now that it's online it is open to new users). Features right now are calendars and diaries, with users being able create multiple iterations of each for whatever differing purposes.

One planned feature is the ability to have dialogues with oneself, (Alicorn's Luminosity Elspeth-style) between 1-8ish other named personalities / selves / sides. The idea is that you can talk to yourself in different styles or with different opinions, so that you can evaluate more precisely any internal conflicts, be they between values or ideas or choices. Then if you feel the conflict come up again you can check the log rather than worry about it all over again, maybe with additional insights the next times.

Very reluctantly posting link: http://buytherooftop.com/yourder/ (because it's only slightly of use to me at the minute, although I anticipate making it more so).

I made it because I didn't see anything similar on the web. I'm hoping to add a few other more complex things to it (like full hierarchical task / goal management systems) but those will wait for a while.

I may post about other personal projects, but this was the most obviously relevant.