Where is somewhere to go for decent discussion on the internet? I'm tired of how intellectually mediocre reddit is, but this place is kind of dead.

I have a friend with Crohn's Disease, who often struggles with the motivation to even figure out how to improve his diet in order to prevent relapse. I suggested he should find a consistent way to not have to worry about diet, such as prepared meals, a snack plan, meal replacements (Soylent is out soon!), or dietary supplement.

As usual, I'm pinging the rationalists to see if there happens to be a medically inclined recommendation lurking about. Soylent seems promising, and doesn't seem the sort of thing that he and his doctor would have even discussed. My appraisal of his doctor consulations seem to be something along the lines of "You should track your diet according to these guidelines, and try to see what causes relapse" rather than "Here's a cure all solution not entirely endorsed by the FDA that will solve all of your motivational and health problems in one fell swoop." For my friend, drilling into sweeping diet changes and tracking seems like an insurmountable challenge, especially with the depression caused by simply having the disease.

I'd like to be able to purchase something for him that would let him go about his life without having to worry about it so much. Any ideas on whether Soylent could be the solution, in particular as to its potential for Crohn's?

Karma points to whoever identifies them correctly!

The guy on the right is more accurately represented than the guy on the left, but the guy on the left may still be guessable based on the subject matter. Hint: the guy on the left is a philosopher known, among other things, for his post-1950 contributions to theory of causality.

(The guy in the middle is Judea Pearl, Ilya's advisor at UCLA.)

Update: dougclow correctly identified the man on the right, and vallinder correctly identified the man on the left.

What are the 'benefits' you alude to?

Mostly access to exceptional people / opportunities, and admiration / social status. For example, become a major donor to a wildlife rescue center, and you get invited to play with the tigers. I would be surprised if major MIRI donors that live in the Bay area don't get invited to dinner parties / similar social events with MIRI people.

For the status question, I think it's better to be high status in a narrow niche than medium status in many niches. It's not clear to me how the costs compare, though.

I had the opposite effect recently - I thought that I'd save time by waiting for the bus, but it turns out that walking gets me to work from the train about 12 minutes sooner. Coming back, I don't have a ridiculous wait, so I still take the bus.

I could do even better if I got some wheels of some sort involved. Maybe it's time to take up skateboarding. Scooter? Bike seems like it would be too cumbersome, even if I can get one that folds up.

Genes take charge and diets fall by the wayside.

You need a New York Times account to read it, but setting one up only takes a couple of minutes. Here are some exerpts in any case.

Obese people almost always regain weight after weight loss:

So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.

Thin people who are forced to gain weight find it easy to lose it again:

...His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

The body's metabolism changes with weight loss and weight gain:

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.

Genes and weight:

.A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.

The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

I was homeschooled. I have pretty mixed feelings on whether this was a good thing or not. Kawoomba asked, so here:

Pros:

• No bullies

• Teaches you how to teach yourself

• No PE/sports

• Go to college early

Cons:

• Go to college early

• Limited contact with others left me pretty socially inept.

• No resources (chemistry experiments, etc)

• After Algebra II, you're on your own.

• With Saxon math books.

• No sense of position among one's peers, no sense of why one might go to college, higher learning, etc. I'm maybe +1 S.D. appearance and +3? S.D. IQ but had no idea until much much later.

• History books tend to be extremely biased (America is a christian nation, gosh darn it) (but my parents somehow mostly avoided this)

• Biology books tend to be completely wrong because you have to lie a lot when you don't believe evolution (I'm still pissed about this)

• Science/astronomy books tend to have wrong sections because you have to lie a lot when you believe the earth is 6000 years old

Of these problems, most of the really bad ones seem easy to prevent if you're aware of them. I expect I could do a really awesome job of homeschooling myself and a really terrible job of homeschooling a more normal person.

I really hated school as a kid. My best guess is that a public school with a good gifted program would have been an improvement, but one without would have been worse than what I experienced.

On keyboard utility: I've been using the a mechanical keyboard for 3 years and enjoy typing on it more than a membrane switch (generic). Prior to this one regular keyboard lasted me about 8 months; at maybe $15 for a cheap keyboard compared to $70 for this, $15/8 months - $80/x months gives a breakeven time of 3.5 years. (IBM/unicomp Model M keyboards can last for decades)

If you have a problem with keyboard durability then mechanical keyboards have slight positive utility, otherwise I would only recommend them if you noticeably preferred typing on one.

Edited to add: The research on repetitive strain injury (thanks wgd!) along with anecdotes of faster typing definitely make this low hanging fruit. Updated to strong recommendation.

To prize every thing according to its real use ought to be the aim of a rational being. There are few things which can much conduce to happiness, and, therefore, few things to be ardently desired. He that looks upon the business and bustle of the world, with the philosophy with which Socrates surveyed the fair at Athens, will turn away at last with his exclamation, 'How many things are here which I do not want'.

--Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, #119, December 25, 1753.

So... was I the only one who had the QM sequence popping in my head when I reread this article?