I appreciate your reply.
The government also makes cars have seatbelts and airbags; is this because seatbelt and airbag manufacturers lobbied the government? How dare they make you pay for features you don't want! If you think you're never going to need that airbag, why should you pay for it?
I was going to knee-jerk reply to this and say I'll gladly pay for that because all advanced nations agree that seatbelts and airbags should be standard, but I thought I'd look it up first. Apparently air bags aren't required by the European Commission!
https://ec.e...
When it comes to needles to stick my new kiddo with, I'm not really being persuaded to do more than the intersection of vaccinations between similar nations."
You don't know enough to decide this. What is "similar" (climate, culture, disease spectrum?) Do you know the history of their immunization laws?
That's incorrect. I know that my generation was vaccinated against a more limited set of diseases and has survived pretty well.
It's not wrong to question US health orthodoxy when it's not at all a secret that pharma can influence US po...
I haven't digested your entire reply yet, but I'll respond to this part.
- Avoiding the fallacy of the one-sided wager. The post talks about cost-benefit analysis, but in a complete cost-benefit analysis one has to consider the risks of both choices under offer, not just one. The post takes specific notice of the default course of action's risks (money, tears, side effects) but focuses less on the risks of the alternative (e.g. toddlers winding up in the ER because they're shitting themselves half to death from rotavirus).
[...]
...So we have a mundane exp
Upvote for interesting and relevant links, although this part made me want to shout at my screen.
(9). Therefore, we should give up on medication and use psychotherapy instead Makes sense right up until you run placebo-controlled trials of psychotherapy ... Another study by the same team finds psychotherapy has an effect size of 0.22 compared to antidepressants’ 0.3-0.5
Even if this is true I don't agree with the cost-benefit analysis. Psychotherapy costs time and money but probably won't cause weight gain, sexual dysfunction and crippling withdrawal if you miss a dose or need to cycle off of them.
EDIT: I guess he says as much in a different article. Hmph.
Makes sense, thanks for the link and your summary.
I've taken a keen interest in soylent but am happy to let others beta test long-term effects for me before I give it a shot :)
FWIW, the way soylent people describe their results is more or less how I describe what happened to me when I adopted a whole food plant-based diet (the "china study diet"): BF% dropped/I got leaner, various body odors improved, huge reduction in acne, became a morning person, was able to stop taking ADHD meds, and felt no negative effects at all. Except for maybe I now have so much energy I just had to pick up distance running and ultimately hurt my ankle. :P
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...
Lindeberg is a nutrition researcher (conducts studies, co-authors papers) coming from a medical background, which makes him just as much an expert as a nutrition researcher coming from a biochemistry background
Am I asking for too much by insisting on a nutrition researcher from a biochemistry background to refute Campbell? Or are you saying they can both be right within the framework of their fields?
...To summarize: Lindeberg, like Campbell, is an experienced nutrition researcher with impressive and relevant credentials. Nutrition is a young and complex
I've come across this quite often. This is written by an amateur whose authority stems from "I typically spend about five hours a day reading and writing about nutrition—voluntarily".
As a layperson myself I'd be a lot more moved if other nutrition scientists agreed with her. As it stands for me her input is basically +1 "non-nutrition scientists disagree' with Campbell".
...Based on what I know about the words "professor" and "emeritus" and "cornell", I assume this is written by an authority in the field of nutrition.
The value of being an authority in a field is that you can accurately convey the consensus within that field. Whenever consensus within a field does not exist, the ancient injunction against "argument from authority" remains true. The "authority" derives not from the authoritative individuals themselves, but the collective wisdom of the field to which they've
(6.) The natural world can be complicated, and scientists have limited tools to investigate and a lot of incentive to oversell.
Agree that the world is complicated. Could you go into more detail about incentive to oversell? Do you mean they need to promise groundbreaking results to close funding?
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...
Permit me to ramble a bit.
So, I think I have a bias against startups for getting rich. I think it might be reasonable.
I'll relate my personal experience as well as the experiences of three close friends. Around eight years ago, four of us each joined different startups. I quit mine about 3 1/2 years in. They've remained at theirs. What's the current status?
me: I've learned that my equity in my startup, which I took at a substantial discount to my salary, is now worth low six figures.
friend 1: his startup has almost been acquired but the deal sunk in d...
(4) I work a normal-ish job, have a normal retirement plan, and save enough to retire at a normal age.
The point I want to make in this article is that 1, 2, 3 seem way more likely than 4. Which makes me think that long-term saving might not actually be such a good idea.
Are you sure? Take a look at http://firecalc.com/
You plug in your nest egg size and expected cost of living and it will trial it against historical market performance. That is, if you retired the day before the Great Depression and similar events, would your portfolio keep you alive l...
Alright, let's say I agree that in the space of all possible activities there exist some pleasurable activities that have zero future utility.
Couldn't we die at any minute? Given this, shouldn't we always do the pleasurable thing so long as there's no negative utility and no opportunity cost because there's a small chance it'll be the last thing we do?
Doesn't choosing the beautiful vacation that evaporates when it's over have the benefit that if we die in the middle of it, life was just that much more pleasant?
I guess I don't understand why someone would choose not to take the vacation.
Understood. In that case, I disagree on this point.
most of us choose to indulge in pleasures that have no future utility (and in some cases have negative future utility) all the time. We eat junk food, watch TV, waste time watching cat videos. Things that would not obviously be missed if they could not be got.
Are you sure there's no future utility? Doesn't resisting these useless but pleasurable activities deplete the ego? Doesn't depleted ego lead to bad decision-making?
This is not to say that every time a parole judges eat a brownie it's because t...
If I were Kahneman and I had posed that riddle, I would object that the entire point of the thought experiment is to consider the activity as being of no future utility whatsoever.
Sorry, I don't follow you. If you were Kahneman you would have posed the riddle differently? Or are you saying that I'm unfairly describing it?
So,
which do you choose?
I like this because 1 has the benefit of being closer to the actual human experience.
Not if everything is reset back to the way it was!
He doesn't say that though. Perhaps he meant to imply that. Let's suppose he did, what does the experiencing vs remembering self model say about that?
You would start building memories. As you build them you're servicing the experiencing self, and over the course of the vacation your remembering self can recall the things you did earlier in the vacation. Finally the vacation ends and time resets to before the vacation and it's all gone, memories, sunburn. All of your new Facebook friends are stranger...
Try to hack your body into feeling more relaxed so your scholarly zeal calms down a bit and lets your mind rest.
I'll tell you what works for me.
After initial success but then several bouts of plantar fascitis, new mystery leg pain and a heaping helping of denial I've finally given on up the minimal shoes thing.
I agree walking around in super comfortable shoes all the time probably makes us puny and weak, but I doubt paleolithic man walked and ran on hard city-grade pavement 50+ miles a week.
Sorry for the confusion. I'm picking authorities at random and asking why I should trust you over them, not vouching for any authority in particular. Perhaps I should have asked more bluntly: who are you and why are you qualified to give us health advice?
No offense. :)
I am having a hard time finding places I disagree significantly with them.
More a curiosity than anything: dairy isn't represented at all on the HSPH's "healthy eating plate" but is specifically highlighted in your section on nutrition. Why the discrepancy?
Why should we listen to you and not, say, the Harvard School of Public Health ?
That is, why do you think you did a better job of reading and interpreting the literature and publishing guidelines?
There's a bit of a false dichotomy here between 'earning to give' and 'altruistic career'. I'll talk about one of them which we'll need to go macro to see. I will also implicitly complain that 'earning to give' allows companies to deflect on charitable giving in a way that satisfies individual actors but may result in less charitable giving overall.
Working on Wall Street and practicing an 'earning to give' plan may not be a great way to maximize giving to high-ROI aligned charities.
I work at an HFT of order 1000 employees. The HFT itself makes no chari...
Great request. Along a similar line, what about a decision tree for evaluating claims?
Are you being asked to think about past decisions, prior beliefs, or intent? Take steps to rule out hindsight bias.
Does the claim challenge prevailing beliefs, possibly alleging conspiracy? Consider confirmation bias.
...
(sorry if this is a FAQ)
I'm skeptical this is a great strategy for topics in general.
Nutrition, for example, doesn't appear to be the kind of topic where you can just learn its axioms and build up an optimal human diet from first principles. It's far too complicated.
Instead you need substantial education, training, experience and access, as well as a community that can help you support and refine your ideas. You need to gather evidence, you need to learn how to determine the quality of the evidence you've gathered, and you need to propose reasonable stories that fit the evidenc...
Yes. I spent a lot of time reviewing critiques of The China Study (TCS), including Minger's. At the end of it I came to the following conclusions.
So, those are my reasons. I admit they're not very satisfying. I'm spoiled by fields...
The immediately available example supporting your article for me is the relationship between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol. There's high general confusion around this health claim.
What no doubt compounds the confusion on the issue is that intuitively you might infer that eating zero cholesterol should lower blood cholesterol, or that eating high cholesterol should raise blood cholesterol. Evidence shows this often happens, but not always. There are enough notable outliers that the claim has been defeated in the general mind because it does...
I discovered lesswrong.com because someone left a printout of an article on the elliptical machine in my gym. I started reading it and have become hooked.
I'm a formally uneducated computer expert. The lack of formal education makes me a bit insecure, so I obsess over improving my thinking through literature on cognitive dissonance and biases, such as books from the library and also sites like this.
Nowadays I get paid to be a middle-manager at technology companies. Most of my career has been in Linux system administration as well as functional programmi...
Shocked to see a Eugene meetup! Sadly we will be out of town that week. Hoping for other excuses to hang out in the near future!