What does 6th year AU mean?

Thanks for the openness.

I have also received negative views on sex during childhood. I wasn't even sure if women do derive any pleasure from sex, or whether they merely do it to achieve something else (e.g. to have children, to have a relationship, to conform to social pressure, etc.). Of course if you can't model the other person even approximately, then it is difficult to propose win/win solutions in situations when there is a social taboo to debate things openly. And as a nice guy (unlike how the sociopathic online warriors define the term, I simply mean a person who genuinely cares about how other people feel), I wouldn't propose anyone a deal I wouldn't believe they would like. -- But the truth is, many people do enjoy sex a lot, both men and women. Whatever the sex-negative people say, it may describe a fraction of population they belong to, or maybe they just say it because it is their idea of how to conform to their political or religious views; I never had the courage to ask.

I was perhaps lucky that one day I was in a situation where all other men in the group were even more "omega" than me, so the environment selected me for the role of the "local alpha", and I happened to date the only girl in the group. And we had enough time and patience to experiment. She was curious too. -- But when the relationship was over, despite the lack of tension about sex, I still didn't have the proper seduction skills. That I only learned a few years later, reading some online stuff (during the beginning of the "seduction industry", when people were still trying to provide useful advice to their online friends, instead of trying to win more customers by doing something even more outrageous than all their competitors). Yes, social skills can be learned from textbooks, if you are willing to try it in real life later. And an imperfect textbook is better than no textbook at all.

Your strategy seems reasonable to me. Just wanted to warn you that "not feeling tension about sex" is only a part of the seduction skills. But if you can rid of the tension this easily, then why not.

I think you overestimate the impact on the "male hierarchy". Seriously, how can anyone know how much sexual experience did you have? Do you tell them? I guess many of them lie, or at least exaggerate, why couldn't you? (The rule of thumb is that men usually multiply the number by two, women divide it by two.) If you can't invent plausible details, then simply don't mention any details.

My advice: If you have an opportunity, learn to dance. In my experience, usually women are more interested in dancing than men, and men with good dancing skills are rare. So if you learn to dance decently (nothing too complicated, you are not trying to win competitions, only to have and provide fun when the music plays; give it one afternoon every week, and in a few months you are ready), you will get enormous opportunity to make a positive impression on women in socially acceptable situations. Even in politically correct societies, it is still acceptable for men to lead during the dance. In dance, everything is "plausibly deniable", and yet it is almost a demo version of sex. When people feel good dancing together, they will probably feel good having sex together, and they both know it. Dancing jumps over many awkward steps from the usual dating scenario: one moment you are complete strangers, the other moment you are spending time together isolated from the rest of the group, touching each other and enjoying it. -- I guess now I sound like a dancing club advertisement, but this stuff really helped me a lot. And you could combine it with your strategy.

I take it the requisite level of mathematical maturity is fairly low? (For instance, I'm assuming Rosen doesn't leave gaps in his proofs for the reader to fill in.)

I ask because I've sometimes had trouble with low-maturity math books with novel content, and "accessible" can mean "little mathematical maturity required" or "high-school-level prerequisites".

Separate topic!

(FWIW, I spent about 5 years as a vegetarian, followed by 1.5 years doing the paleo thing, and now subsist entirely off DIY soylent, which combines the virtues of deriving all its protein from animal sources and being processed.)

What I find alarming about soylent-like diets is the idea that you can completely capture human nutritional needs as a table of micronutrients quantities to fill, and then go out and source those individual micronutrients, combine them, and drink.

Aren't you discounting the importance of the configuration of these micronutrients as they arrive in their natural packages? That is, you can certainly decompose an apple into fructose, fiber, vitamins, minerals and water (and etc), but I find it hard to accept that shopping for these individual components, blending, and pouring down your throat is just as good (or better) than eating the apple. Surely we do not completely understand everything nature has done in building us this apple.

I'm specifically trying to avoid weighing the actual science or studies myself, because I don't think nutrition is linear enough for me to just dive in and read contradictory studies and start making informed decisions about my diet. So, all I'm really electing to do here is try to valuate experts. In that vein...

I produce for you a book written by a relevant expert

According to Wikipedia the author of that book, Staffan Lindeberg, is "M.D., Ph.D., (born 1950) is Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the Department of Medicine, University of Lund, Sweden. He is a practicing GP at St Lars Primary Health Care Center, Lund, Sweden."

I agree he's a health expert. I even agree he's more qualified to judge nutrition science than me. But shouldn't a nutrition scientist like Campbell be even more qualified to evaluate nutrition literature than a professor of Family Medicine?

He may be right, and Campbell completely wrong but I don't see a good way to figure this out for myself unless, say, someone can make an extremely good case that Campbell is either a rogue in nutrition science, or that nutrition science shouldn't be trusted. Getting to your next point...

So, to address your questions directly: you should believe that nutrition is a young and complex field, and therefore shouldn't have everything all figured out

Why wouldn't nutrition scientists studying nutrition come to a similar conclusion about how young, murky, and complicated nutrition is? Shouldn't they on average know this better than anyone and only make very careful and strongly supported recommendations?

If you can't trust nutrition scientists to judge the literature properly, why should you trust scientists outside of the field or layman attempting to dive into the field would be better?

I know very well a registered dietitian who deeply knows her stuff. She's explained quite a lot to me, and given me considerable knowledge (it helps that my field is chemistry, and while biochem is different than what I do it's not completely alien).

Unfortunately I can't say much about nutrition in one single post. Like so many things, it's a really complex and rich science and to really know something about it would take years of education on the subject. As you may imagine, everything comes with lots of exceptions and qualifiers. My recommendation if you really want to learn this stuff is to talk to a registered dietitian (any quack can call themself a neutritionist, but RD is a protected title), or read recent academic textbooks (NOT popular books) on nutrition.

About the subject matter in the main post, from my knowledge, meat and heavily processed foods tend to be more in the territory of things that are worse to eat a lot of. I can pretty certainly say it's true that many people would do better to eat considerably less of that stuff than they do.

Speaking from my area of expertise now, I'll say that it's pretty silly from a thermodynamics standpoint to eat meat. You can do fine as a vegetarian, and raising plants to eat is significantly more energy efficient than raising plants to feed animals to eat. Animal raising leads to a considerable amount of energy waste, as well as material pollution. I don't have the numbers on hand, but it's enough to be a significant factor. So what do I do? I don't eat meat very often.

the Inuit derive something like 98% of their calories from animal sources and are virtually untouched by Western disease, and concludes that very high consumption of (unprocessed) animals is perfectly fine

Just how genetically isolated are the Inuit?

I am thinking of things like the evolution of adult lactose tolerance, and wondering if what's good for the Inuit might be different from what's good for the rest of us. I'd expect the ability to consume large amounts of meat without ill effects would be pretty powerfully selected for, in an environment where nearly all calories come from meat.

I've been watching for several years now (I adopted the diet myself in 2010), and all of the negative critiques tend to fall into (a) critiques from non-experts, (b) critiques from experts in unrelated fields, (c) health experts who agree that his recommendations have merit, but that they're impractical for the general public to follow.

I produce for you a book written by a relevant expert with ~2.5 times as many references as The China Study (2034 vs 758) who advocates eating an ancestral diet (lean unprocessed meat/fish, fruit, nuts, vegetables/root vegatables) (1). A list of individuals with relevant graduate degrees who more-or-less agree with him can be found in this list of speakers at a paleo conference he spoke at. His recommendations are at least as similar to the recommendations the Mayo clinic returned for me as Campbell's.

That is, I can make a symmetrical argument for a significantly different diet (2), complete with experts and evidence and stuff.

So, to address your questions directly: you should believe that nutrition is a young and complex field, and therefore shouldn't have everything all figured out; my take is that you may do well to replace grains with root vegetables, since that's something everyone agrees is good (plus they're really tasty!); this isn't good enough to inform your dietary choices because I just used a symmetrical argument for a diet that has nonnegligible discrepancies with the diet Campbell recommends; and I don't know how to dig out a signal that experts, to my knowledge, haven't managed to dig out without becoming an expert.

(FWIW, I spent about 5 years as a vegetarian, followed by 1.5 years doing the paleo thing, and now subsist entirely off DIY soylent, which combines the virtues of deriving all its protein from animal sources and being processed.)

(1) Interestingly, Campbell's and Lindeberg's diets can be eaten simultaneously, and this intersection is 100% in-line with what the Mayo clinic recommended me. The difference is that Campbell allows grains and beans, and Lindeberg allows (unprocessed) lean meats, fish, and eggs.

(2) Again, there's substantial overlap, but also substantial disagreement: Lindeberg, for instance, observe the Inuit derive something like 98% of their calories from animal sources and are virtually untouched by Western disease, and concludes that very high consumption of (unprocessed) animals is perfectly fine, whereas Campbell claims that humans should eat minimal amounts of animal.

I don't think this is a good data point, since the makeup they wear is explicitly designed to counteract visual artifacts (glare, unnatural-seeming skin tones, etc.) that are introduced by the camera. Thus, the makeup does not necessarily have a positive effect on people who see the movie stars in person.

This answer here: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-website-for-beauty-related-products Lead me to here: http://www.sephora.com/sephoratv/htfs-sephora-makeup.jsp

I think I saw a subject-blind study somewhere that indicated men prefer light makeup to no makeup despite their claims to the contrary.