All of mytyde's Comments + Replies

No, my claim is literal. The role of the discipline 'psychology' has shifted over time away from what we now consider 'sociology' and towards an individualistic approach to mental health. The assumption didn't used to be that mental problems were profoundly unique to the individual, but now mainstream psychology does not take into account the sociological factors which affect mental health in all situations.

Some sources to elaborate the transformation of the discipline are historiologists & sociologists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Michel Foucault, but there are plenty of non-mainstream psychologists who still practice holistic psychology like Helene Shulman & Mary Watkins.

Poorly informed anything is a mind-killer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JroogX7zBek

Cheese is one of the very few commercial foods you'll be able to find live (fermentation) bacteria living in, but even then many cheeses won't because the producers save expense by pasteurizing instead of more closely monitoring cheeses to make sure they don't develop molds.

But, there are a few companies who do sell high-quality raw fermented foods, like Real Pickles up here in New England. You'll be able to find healthy bacteria on organic farm-bought produce as well; sauerkraut can be made easily by putting some sliced cabbage in a jar with salt, pounding it down, topping off the jar with water, and capping it for a week.

This is already sold. It's called humility, but you'll have to import it if you live in the US.

You're right, but note that most store-bought sourdough breads are barely sourdough at all; they're mostly just flavored but don't undergo the traditional fermentation process which takes too long for bread corporations more interested in moving stock. Roman legions actually survived largely off of long-fermented sourdough bread.

As a medical student who has been closely reviewing probiotic research, I would like everyone to know that research is extremely important.

Perhaps it will be the greatest breakthrough in medicine of the 21st century. This angle is one of the primary reasons that the 'calories in=calories out' theory doesn't function as a successful principle for people trying to lose weight and keep it off. I recommend looking into the GAPS diet for anyone suffering auto-immune problems, since auto-immune disorders are all primarily caused by dysregulation of the digestive... (read more)

What is the mechanism by which Warren Buffet creates wealth by himself? If you're talking about investing, couldn't a good supercomputer hypothetically do the same job for free? Anyways, Buffet doesn't do all of his own investments: most capitalists don't. They engage in joint ventures and mutual funds. Their only "contribution" to these is being the owner of investment funds (an arbitrary title when removed from historical context). Buffet does contribute to society but not (through some divine justice) proportionate to the compensation he is al... (read more)

In regards to Hume's interesting contributions to the question, I stumbled across this video a while back which I think will be interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVZG0G-jnAM (don't let the title throw you off; there is content within it).

You might not think the economic value was so low if you had children in school, were going to have children, were a child yourself, had significant health expenses, had a criminal record, were poor, or are going to get old eventually.

Economic value pays for the cultural value.

Hmm would an AI be superior or inferior if it were unable to not think Bayesianally?

Yudkowsky recently posted something interesting on this, let me see if I can find it...

This is a very interesting paper. Reminds me of HIGHLANDER for some reason... those guys lived for thousands of years and weren't even rich? They hadn't usurped control of vast econo-political empires? No hundred-generations-long family of bodyguards?

I find it really helps if you do the voices. Like pretend Yudkowsky sounds like Harry Potter from the movie and is having a conversation with Dumbledore (in the HPMOR universe, obviously).

...it all makes sense now.

The bleak grey world turns lucid at once!

Unfortunately, the impact of information is often too closely tied to the funding poured into its propagation. Look at the way American media networks are basically billboards for the rich

You're totally right. Art & Utopianism go together like a horse and carriage. This is an interesting blog on the subject:

http://nomadicutopianism.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/art-and-utopia/

This is the crux. You can't take a small amount of empirical data, skip sociology, postulate a hypothesis which you don't intend to test, and then generalize from it. I'm not gonna downvote this thread because I don't think stating this hypothesis is bad; I just think its presentation is sloppy. Lukeprog, please don't take this too harshly; I make similar mistakes all the time.

Reagan had Alzheimers throughout his second term, and if he didn't have clinical alzheimers during his first term, it's not difficult to demonstrate that a pre-Alzheimers condition isn't much better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONNMiuWI4Fo&feature=related http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_01/027551.php

I would charge that the same 'institutionalization' which has neutered psychology has changed philosophy into a funding-chaser.

Psychology was invented as a means of studying society so that the social situation could be improved: Freud was a socialist. Because many disciplines have moved to institutions, they have less freedom to pursue research and less freedom to depart from the views of their institutions.

Also, because funding is dependent on people who have ulterior motives in what they choose to fund, it would be almost impossible for a school of psyc... (read more)

The decision of what disciplines belong to "science" or "humanitees", "art" or "engineering" is significantly a political decision. Indeed, it is a political question which disciplines exist in which organization and how they fit together.

Rationalist philosophers just need to call themselves "Psychologists of Quantitative Reasoning" in order to get funding. In the current political era, it is fashionable to claim 'objectivity' in one's profession despite frequently inquiring into non-empirical matters. This... (read more)

This happens frequently, and we don't see these questions resolved because the scientific method is far from bulletproof. Doubtless many of our modern ideas will be proven incorrect by the next generation; others will learn to make more accurate predictions using more advanced analysis; some paradigms will seem ludicrous in rhetrospect (as some models which were accepted only decades ago seem today). Just how frequently such an obvious problem happens, for the same reasons this case went unnoticed, it is very difficult to estimate.

Kinda speciesist, don'tcha think? People in the modern world in large part have learned to be illogical, but it isn't an inherent quality; in fact, some would argue that the current low level of rational capacity is very difficult to maintain. If people were inherently irrational, why can everyone learn mathematics, why can children sometimes disagree with their parents, and why was a prerequisite for degeneration into the current American political system that 7 corporations should own all major media outlets?

A more elegant explanation of the effectiveness of the diet would be that eating a calorically-dense food in the morning knocks your fat metabolism into gear.

I would like to take measurement of body temperatures while on the Shangri-La diet; I would expect body temperature to rise significantly from its nighttime low towards maximal resting temperaturen when olive oil was consumed (oil/fat being the most calorically dense macronutrient). Fat storage is very powerful, and very mysterious to doctors. If you're body doesn't feel comfortable losing weight, yo... (read more)

The political definitions are confusing and many would consider some of the distinctions wrong, clearly Americanized. American liberals are to the right of European conservatives, USSR was a socialism just a different kind, etc., etc.....

Find a non-political way of describing political preferences or, better yet, break it up into a political compass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass (test on http://politicalcompass.org/ to chart your location.)

1. Economic
2. Social

Apatheism should also be added to the list of choices for religion.

The scary thing is when you can win the debate whichever side you choose, even though YOU can tell what the correct side is.

Also, since the other side being pure evil is a rare phenomenon, perhaps a better cultural understanding of psychopathy would help some people to understand that 98% of the people they debate will be just as sane as they are and thus to stay open.

(Napoleon didn't invade Russia because of cognitive bias. He'd already defeated Russia several times and "invaded" in 1912 with the object of forcing Russia to keep out of Poland and remain in the Continental System. Logistics killed Le Grand Armee.... Napoleon was actually above average height for his time period... the rumor that Napoleon was short is due to a perhaps-intentional failure to convert French measurement height units into British units of the same name, and so there's no basis for a "Napoleon Complex".)

A more interesting question would be "What cognitive biases through history have led us to think of Napoleon as a short person?"

Every doctor should be required to study The Art of War before being allowed to practice. Practicing medicine is not like balancing an equation. Medicine is not a game of perfect information, nor are its rules unchanging. Indeed, each person's health battles take place upon an idiosyncratic battlefield with various assortments of forces. The war of evolution, which has been raging for millennia, has developed in Homo Sapien what is likely one of the most highly adapted immune systems in the history of the planet. It is not surprising that doctors fail so o... (read more)

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein

If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren't popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).

It's good to see skepticism in attributing everything to genetics...

1. Some legit anthropologists think pre-agricultural humans actually frequently lived into their 70s and 80s, contrary to popular assumptions

2. I would consider the possibility that changes in lifestyle and/or diet somewhere between 10,000 years ago and the present could have SERIOUSLY affected human health and social organization. Particular culprits I personally find likely are soil-nutrient depletion, the hyper-domestication and consolidation of monocropping corn & wheat, or confoundi

Hundreds of thousands of Americans die of medical malpractice every year. Anyone who holds medical science in such high regard that they can do-no-wrong has not studied its history. American medical practice especially, compared to European standards, is positively wretched to the average patient.

I would not assume that this man's breakthrough is real, but it is ludicrous to assume its falsity without any expertise to make such a judgement. Moreover, if his methods are reasonable and his results happen to be incorrect, it does NOT make him a "crackpot... (read more)

Your claim that poor people in rich countries suffer less from poverty is fallacious and insensitive. Statistical information shows that standard of living (and about every other imaginable method of judging well-being) is tied to relative wealth rather than absolute wealth.

If they don't have the nutritional basis for changing their bodies, they won't. Some people, mostly those suffering from chronic conditions, are actually low in cholesterol

The "extra-virgin" designation does make a difference, fyi. That's probably not what was throwing you off, but I'll leave this here for future Shangi-la researchers.

That's really neat. How is it that Tim Ferriss could have developed a more effective weightloss system than nutritional experts? If such a claim is indeed true, it would necessarily lead to questioning the basis of nutritional experimentation: is it even built upon a solid enough base to be useful?

Americans who have grown up in at least moderate financial security have developed astounding rates of obesity. People who grew up in Nazi-occupied countries who were malnourished as children also developed astoundingly high obesity rates as adults. From the evidence I've seen, genetics is over-emphasized as the missing factor in almost every medical theory before enough is known to know better. While income correlates with obesity, it does not explain the physiological mechanism through which poorer people (relative wealth may seem to mean much more than ... (read more)

People who grew up in Nazi-occupied countries who were malnourished as children also developed astoundingly high obesity rates as adults. From the evidence I've seen, genetics is over-emphasized as the missing factor in almost every medical theory before enough is known to know better. While income correlates with obesity, it does not explain the physiological mechanism through which poorer people (relative wealth may seem to mean much more than absolute wealth, interestingly) have a much harder time staying healthy.

It seems much more plausible that both s... (read more)

My experience is years of frustration with my health, being overweight, low energy all the time, and it turns out that the lyme disease I had been treated for back in high school had survived and continued to plague me beyond my immune system's capacity to completely eradicate. It returned periodically for years, and only during periods of extremely low stress when I was out of school was I able to live comfortably at all. What tipped me off to getting treatment was comparing my physical abilities during high school as an athlete to my abilities up to this point in which I can barely engage in anaerobic exercise.

Newer research has revealed that certain chronic conditions seem much more common than is thought. It could be that a relatively large portion of the population is suffering from certain conditions which don't exhibit severe enough symptoms to be diagnosed with anything or that symptoms are ignored by harmful social paradigms, e.g. someone with a mitochonodrial disorder is labelled as "lazy" despite inability to properly metabolize energy.

Lyme Disease is one disease which could be extremely prevalent but be underdiagnosed because of the difficult... (read more)

And if this sort of evidence can be overlooked/ignored for large clinical trials, what other sorts of partially or totally valid alternative treatments might be receiving similar improper treatment?

I am not assuming you're wrong klfwip, but I would like some examples of times that ideology was the cause of mass warfare. It seems to me that ideology is usually just the justification for actions intended to produce material results.

• I don't think sociohistorical scholars can really believe that fascism would have risen without the threat of communism pushing the corporate class to pour massive amounts of money into fascist parties.

• The crusades wouldn't have happened without the Pope trying to expand his influence and gain wealth for the church throu

Zarathustra running through the streets of their underground city screaming: "WHERE IS THE SKY?"

Awesome comment. Shame you seem to have so few other posts on Less Wrong

They break earth in the middle of a cottonfield?

I find it disingenuous to entangle serious materially-based political concerns with abstract irrelevant political concerns. Whereas the blues and greens obviously shouldn't (and in real life, probably wouldn't) care what color an alien sky is, there are serious political disputes often tied to such abstract concerns regarding civil liberties, regarding the application of the law or the non-application of the law, regarding the right of the wealthy to victimize the poor, etc..

When people get caught up in complicated political institutions that propound dogm... (read more)

This sounds like a 'bacteria colony' analysis of humanity. It seems to me that by defining the hypothetical situation so narrowly, it is turned into a de-facto trigonometric equation, a graph function dependent only on the variable quantity of resources available.

It only sounds like a reasonable conclusion because of the ridiculous assumption that creating more people is a moral imperative, when in reality if people enjoyed a high standard of living they would choose when to reproduce in part as a function of deciding not to lower their own standard of liv... (read more)

More important than coming up with a correct grand narrative, is coming up with a world conception that allows a high degree of functionality and adaptability. I doubt if the strongest rationalist has the correct ideas about everything or would have time in her lifetime to reason all the things most important to her.

Taking principles, tempered by material results, as goals instead of using pure technical reasoning skills, can be very useful in uncertain circumstances.

For example: you are in a classroom debating whether the development of Irani nuclear weap... (read more)

It's rationalization instead of a rational argument because postulating that people can sometimes be irrational (e.g.: believing traditional medicine to be magical) isn't an argument for them making that choice over another. By the exact same argument, you could posit the opposite and it would seem correct: e.g. that people choose non-alternative medicine because they perceive it to be magic.

It's practically axiomatic to say that people sometimes (even often) act irrationally, but you've defined one side as rational and the other as irrational, from what I... (read more)