Very interested in any unique approaches and I don't want to constrain your creativity, but I am happy to jump on a 5-minute call to rapidly exchange ideas or discuss limitations or strengths of the data, if you think that might help. Also curious which newsletter so I can thank them for the signal boost.
You are drawing out many thoughts I had not explicitly stated in the post, so thank you. The contest is offered as such because I believe I've already stumbled into an answer and it is buried within the data. A couple weeks here and there when I ate certain macros or walked enough steps and prematurely quit, not realizing careful retrospective analysis reveals statistically significant loss above RMR for those periods that persisted for months, before being reversed by whatever combination of factors "unlocks" raising my set point.
Added a sentence to the opener expressing the essential issue. Whether pure potatoes or meal replacement shakes, my body isn't fooled by them. I have plenty of hunger to eat 2500 calories of potatoes or drink half a dozen shakes, so there's no advantage over eating regular, interesting food.
If I can't solve the mystery subtractively, a 'tide drug is the last resort. I don't yet have a rationale I can articulate for wanting to succeed on my "factory settings" but the desire is there.
Previously, Tourette's occupied the same category in my mind as stuttering, a lifelong organic brain disease or wiring fault not amenable to coaching or psychiatry. However, I'm questioning this after watching The Vow, an NXIVM documentary illustrating, with video, a childhood Tourette's sufferer be "cured" by some sort of negative reinforcement training. Upon looking up the Wikipedia, I'm surprised to find a prognosis of "80% will experience improvement to disappearance of tics beginning in late teens." Further, there's been an extreme uptick in Tourette'...
I believe consciousness mostly exists to translate complex life situations into a language that can be matched to our instincts. One of the instincts underlying testosterone regulation is probably something like: "If you are victorious in a difficult battle for status you did not expect to win, upregulate." I doubt it's easily fooled since your own consciousness is using your full intelligence to map the terms "difficult," "status", and "victorious" from the instinct script to the actual situation you've placed yourself in.
Testosterone levels go up and down based on success and failure in conflicts. It indicates the likelihood you’ll win the next conflict and determines your propensity to engage in further conflict. Win a lot, your levels go up, and you’re more likely to stand your ground or even initiate a conflict. Lose a lot, and that indicator will downregulate your behavior to prevent you from risking conflicts that have, historically, not gone well for you. It’s like a built-in, unconscious hint that regulates your desire to roll a die based on how well you’ve rolled i...
Sometimes, in trading, one accepts a fixed value and in exchange offers something in return of near infinite value to all of society until the end of time that others build upon.
Where can I learn more of the frontier thought on schizophrenia? The most compelling theory I've heard is a failure to realize one's internal monologue is one's own, manifested as "hearing voices." However, if I lost that feedback loop and began hearing my thoughts as externally produced, I'd immediately think, "uh oh, schizophrenia" yet this absolutely isn't the case for schizophrenics. What model offers an explanation as to why I'd begin to hear voices yet still maintain I'm not schizophrenic despite that being, to me, an obvious, known symptom?
Could rationalists be the worst people to be put in charge of keeping an AI in the box? We can assume:
I've seen AI box transcripts in which the consensus was: the AI stayed in the box because the AI player was too "dumb" to be swayed by the nuanced, rational arguments. Instead of attributing stubbornness to lack of intelligence, i
...I'm sure this phenomenon has a name by now, but I'm struggling to find it. What is it called when requirements are applied to an excess of applicants solely for the purpose of whittling them down to a manageable number, but doing so either filters no better than chance or actively eliminates the ideal candidate?
For example, a job may require a college degree, but its best workers would be those without one. Or an apartment complex is rude to applicants knowing there are an excess, scaring off good tenants in favor of those desperate. Or someone finds exceptional luck securing online dating "matches" and begins to fill their profile with requirements that put off worthwhile mates.
Is it possible we already have a lot of information about the impact of viral load and just don't realize it? Ever since we switched to agriculture and civilization, the human population has had a large fraction wiped out dozens of times. I don't think we're descendants of merely lucky or biologically "sturdy" people, but of people whose behaviors optimized viral load or had personality traits that helped them avoid it entirely.
Could we be looking at two distinct, competing behaviors which help survival that have evolved out of the ashes of the plagues tha
...As a child who repeatedly got tonsillitis several times a year, sometimes when totally isolated and sometimes later hearing everyone else around me also got a sore throat, I grew up confused as to why contagious disease tracking was a problem we'd given up on and accepted. No doctor was ever curious of the specific virus or bacteria which caused it. While no one case greatly affected my life, as a whole they very much did. Then again, I was also struck by the possibly false realization that many STDs which have followed us for thousands of years could be p
...Is there general agreement that anchoring experiments are a subversion of an evolutionary trait that is generally beneficial? It's rare to be in a group, be presented with a "random" number, and then be asked a question whose answer will be an unrelated number. Unless you have a lot of group status, it's much less harmful to your standing to be wrong with many others frequently than it is beneficial to be right alone infrequently. It's only recent in our evolutionary history that the balance has tipped in the other direction.
Sticky trap outrage is covert factory farm apologetics. Pretending the suffering time integral of a single mouse held still exeeds the suffering of billions of chicken and cow "instant" deaths is a way to culturally launder factory farming as humane.