truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman

Examples?

The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and practices that directly involve their subsistence... The more remote these beliefs and practices are from subsistence activities, the more likely they are to involve nonrational characteristics.

Robert Edgerton

+1 for last comment making me imagine lukeprog as Charlie Sheen.

You've misconstrued what you're replying to. The statement was:

Science is designed to avoid belief in untrue things

You misconstrued it here:

If science is to avoid belief in untrue things, you can instantly complete science by not believing anything.

Analogously:

lessdazed wrote that umbrellas are designed to protect against rain.

You replied that if umbrellas are to protect against rain, then you can instantly complete an umbrella by moving to a place with low precipitation.

When lesswrong said that science is designed to avoid belief in untrue things, he was not saying that everything that is to avoid belief in untrue things is science. Any more than had he said that umbrellas are to protect against rain, he would be saying that anything that protects against rain is an umbrella.

Science should maximize expected value.

That is a "should" statement. However, what science is, is an is, not an ought. There are many reasons to be careful about not bridging the distinction. One is that you want to distinguish between mechanism, proximate function, and (ultimate) function. Even if the ultimate function of science is to maximize expected value, that does not tell us anything about the mechanism of science or its proximate function, through which it maximizes expected value. Science may, for example, serve the ultimate goal of maximizing expected value by helping avoid belief in untrue things.

If we look at the activity of a scientist, not everything they do is science. A scientist needs to eat breakfast, but eating breakfast is not science. A scientist needs to imagine possibilities, but imagining possibilities is not science. Artists do that as well without being scientists. What makes someone a scientist - and I'm simply restating what I've heard many times and seems plausible, not something I've put a lot of thought into recently - is that he tests these imagined possibilities, which in the context of science are called hypotheses. It's putting the hypotheses to the test, particularly to a systematic, rigorous test, that sets science apart from other activities. And this bit - the testing bit - the bit which is what (I have often heard) makes science science and not religion or art - is designed to avoid belief in untrue things.

I agree with what you said about main stream fields being diluted, but offer an interesting corollary to that. Economic motives compel various gurus and nutritionists to make claims to the average joe, and the average joe, or even the educated joe cannot sort through them. However, if one looks in more narrow fields, one can obtain more specific answers without so much trash. For example, powerlifting. This is not a huge market nor one you can benefit financially from that much. If one is trying to sell something or get something published, he can't just say "I pretty much agree with X", he needs to somehow distinguish himself. But when that motive is eliminated you can get more consistency in recommendations and have a greater chance to actually hit upon what works.

While you might not be interested in powerlifting, reading in more niche areas can help filter out profit/status seeking charlatans, and can allow one to see the similarities across disciplines. So while I've read about bodybuilding, powerlifting, and endurance sports, and their associated nutritional advice, I would never read a book about "being fit."

When discussions about such topics are opened on LW, often the logical next step would be to ask about the more general underlying problems that give rise to these situations, instead of just focusing on the arguments about particular problems in isolation. (And even without a concrete motivation, such questions should directly follow from LW's mission statement.) Yet I see few, if any attempts to ask such general questions on LW, and my occasional attempts to open discussion along these lines, even when highly upvoted, don't elicit much in terms of interesting arguments and insight.

Your own points have struck me as on the mark; but I haven't had much to add.

There are some interesting general comments that I could make based on my experience in the mathematical community in particular. I guess here I have some tendency toward self-preservation myself; I don't want to offend acquaintances who might be cast in negative life by my analysis. (Would be happy to share my views privately if you're interested though.) I guess my attitude here is that there's little upside to making my remarks public. The behaviors that I perceive to be dysfunctional are sufficiently deeply entrenched so that whatever I would say would have little expected value.

The main upside would be helping others attain intellectual enlightenment, but although I myself greatly enjoy the satisfaction of being intellectual enlightenment, I'm not sure that intellectual enlightenment is very valuable from a global perspective. Being right is of little use without being influential. In general the percentage of people who are right (or interested in being right) on a given topic where a contrarian position is right is sufficiently small so that the critical mass that it would take to change things isn't there and nor would an incremental change in this percentage make a difference.

The reason why the above point has so much weight in my mind is that despite my very high interest in learning about a variety of things and in forming accurate views on a variety of subjects; I haven't achieved very much. It's not clear whether having accurate views of the world has been more helpful or harmful to me in achieving my goals. The jury is still very much out and things may change; but the very fact that it's possible for me to have this attitude is a strong indication that knowledge and accurate views on a variety of things can be useless on their own.

The best cure against such prideful attitudes is to ask yourself what you have to show in terms of practical accomplishments and status if you're so much more rational and intellectually advanced than ordinary people. If they are so stupid and delusional to be deserving of such intolerance and contempt, then an enlightened and intellectually superior person should be able to run circles around them and easily come out on top, no?

Regarding:

As an illustration, we can take an innocent and mainstream problematic topic like e.g. the health questions of lifestyle such as nutrition, exercise, etc. These topics have been discussed on LW many times, and it seems evident that the mainstream academic literature is a complete mess, with potential gems of useful insight buried under mountains of nonsense work, and authoritative statements of expert opinion given without proper justification. Yet I see no attempt to ask a straightforward follow-up question: since these areas operate under the official bureaucratic system that's supposed to be guaranteed to produce valid science, then what exactly went wrong? And what implications does it have for other areas where we take the official output of this same bureaucratic system as ironclad evidence?

I made a comment that you may find relevant here; I would characterize nutrition/exercise/etc. as fields that are obviously important and which therefore attract many researchers/corporations/hobbyists/etc. having the effect of driving high quality of researchers out of the field on account of bad associations.

Another factor may be absence of low hanging fruit (which you reference in your top level post); it could be that the diversity of humans is sufficiently great so that it's difficult to make general statements about what's healthy/unhealthy.

Yeah um no, being refrigerated is a) not something I currently have free access to and b) falls into the same category as exercising outdoors in the cold. Minus one reading comprehension point.

You will receive only one negative reading comprehension point for this mistake if you choose not to turn this into a thread in which you say abusive things about me or contradict me on the subject of myself and how I work. Yaaaay.

I do not exercise.

(Caveat: I will refrain from taking any advice that would lead to me starting to significantly exercise until I have a diagnosis and a treatment plan of my apparent heart condition, which doesn't indicate it would be unsafe or otherwise a medically bad idea. I'd be really surprised if my doctor told me not to exercise, but in case she does I want to wait and make sure that my body is really lying to me when it says "don't do that, bad things will happen".)

Reasons (and existing known routes around each):

• Sweat is horrible, and I overheat too easily. (Swimming gets around these; outdoor exercise in cold weather, interestingly, does not.)

• Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues). (Anything indoors or at night gets around the sunshine thing. Other environmental issues are mostly limited to smelly gyms and excessively humid indoor pool facilities. Anything outdoors and at night and in nice weather gets around this.)

• Many forms of it are financially costly (equipment, facility use). (Going for walks does not have this problem.)

• It is boring. (When I tried jujitsu, it did not have this particular problem. Merely being able to listen to music does not solve this, although it could combine with another partial solution. If this problem is solved by simultaneously watching a movie, it has to be in a context where I can turn on subtitles, because I will not be able to reliably hear dialogue over any non-perfectly-silent form of exercise.)

Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don't happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.

Exercise can be fun if your brain is wired in a certain way, but needing to basically pointless busywork for physical maintenance is still stupid. There might be some entertaining flareups of cognitive dissonance from people who like to view being a diligent exerciser as a terminal value once there's technology for keeping the body in excellent working order without doing pointless stuff that makes you sweat. For instance.

Also, how come no-one talks about different people probably having quite a bit different endorphin reactions to exercise? It's pretty likely that they exist, but people still act like they are good exercisers because they make better choices as rational actors, not because it gets their brain pumped full of happy juice.

" I wish to make the world a place where "Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I'm not taking your advice" elicits the same reaction as "Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I'm not taking your advice" "

This would be nice. Now when I undertake this rejection challenge and come up with a reason for why I'm are not doing x-action, I can compare that reason to a hardwired physiological reaction. I will then feel satisfied that I am not doing (x-activity) for a good reason that I cannot change, because one surely cannot be expected to put their hand on a hot stove. In this way I will feel satisfied that I am in my current position for a good reason, and can happily fall back into acceptance.