The limits of introspection

Scott Alexander

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[anonymous]10y10

"The computer froze."

"Do you see a pop-up window with a message?"

"Yes."

"Is there anything written into it?"

"Yes."

"What?"

(squint, lean closer) "Posting Date must not be empty in..."

"What do you think it means?"

"Ugh, fill out the Posting Date?"

"Exactly."

See in context

41 Solved Problems Repository

by Qiaochu_Yuan

27th Mar 2013

1 min read

275

41

Follow-up to: Boring Advice Repository

Many practical problems in instrumental rationality appear to be wide open. Two I've been annoyed by recently are "what should I eat?" and "how should I exercise?" However, some appear to be more or less solved. For example, various mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, along with spaced repetition, seem to more or less solve the problem of memorization.

I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of solved problems in instrumental rationality. I'm pretty sure you all collectively know good examples; there's a comment I can't find from a user who said something like "taking a flattering photograph of yourself is a solved problem," and it's likely that there are other useful examples like this that aren't common knowledge. Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people.

(This thread is allowed to not be boring! Go wild!)

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[-]CronoDAS12y360

[-]TheOtherDave12y510

My only problem with this flow is that it waits far too long before Googling.

3[anonymous]10y

My only problem is the fucking annoying habit of software corporations to translate everything, not just the GUI which makes sense, but even stdout error messages. This means not only translating back to English but even guessing the original wording, then googling. The worst part is they seriously think they are helpful here, thinking even IT people who read console error messages not always read English. How the heck are they supposed to solve problems then? I don't think they still think people read documentation, do they?

2TheOtherDave10y

Yeah, it's a tricky thing. I've actually been involved in translation projects for global software, and the closest I can come to an answer is that they don't really think anything at all... there's several different divisions involved, and each one has bits of the picture, and it all just chunks along without anyone thinking it through end-to-end. Really, a lot of software development, and of organizational activity more generally, is like that. All of that said... yeah, the "user googles the error message for instructions" use case is not one that gets taken nearly seriously enough. This is also why you get error messages in dialog boxes that don't support copy-and-paste. If it were, every error message would have a unique copy-able ID code .

[-]kpreid12y150

It's a nice joke, but I don't think it's actually good advice. There is a lot of background knowledge about how most computer software works that goes into actually executing the steps of this or similar procedures, e.g.

knowledge defining the “looks related” relation
knowledge about which things are likely to be destructive enough to exclude from “pick one at random”
knowledge about what “it worked” consists of when the shortest path to the goal is more than one step

[-]buybuydandavis12y140

But you acquire that background knowledge faster when you follow the procedure.

My mother is retired, and sits paralyzed in front of the computer not knowing what button to press. I try to explain that you're unlikely to break anything, so just start looking around.

[-]Kaj_Sotala12y210

I initially tried giving my mother the "you're unlikely to break anything" advice as well, then reconsidered after she'd followed that advice and gotten malware on the computer.

9Risto_Saarelma12y

"Boot into this live-CD and you're unlikely to break anything a reboot won't fix." (At least as long as you don't use webmail or similar persistent online accounts that can get hacked by malware you downloaded into RAM during the same session.)

[-]OrphanWilde12y120

I learned most of what I learned -by- breaking things.

For example, I learned how page files worked because American Online and Dungeon Keeper both tried to seize them for themselves, and if Dungeon Keeper was run, AOL wouldn't run subsequently without a reboot. Research on the issue turned up that disabling page filing would fix it, which led me to research page filing to see what disabling it would do.

6kpreid12y

I claim that you have a lot of background knowledge which gives your experimental actions a probability distribution much more like “unlikely to break anything” than hers.

0buybuydandavis12y

Not really, and particularly not with the new managed computing environments (Android/Ipad) that don't give you root. You can install programs they pre screen, and run them. And she's not likely to install anything I hadn't suggested. Just not a lot to break. When in doubt, (<-back), (Home), or reboot, in that order. Is there any kind of widespread problems with a google Nexus getting pwned?

1[anonymous]10y

Can relate, the weirdest habit of non-computer-literate people is 1) not reading what is on the screen 2) not trying to interpret even really simple instructions on the screen. Is there any sort of a cognitive explanation why do we have to have conversations like this? "The computer froze." "Do you see a pop-up window with a message?" "Yes." "Is there anything written into it?" "Yes." "What?" (squint, lean closer) "Posting Date must not be empty in..." "What do you think it means?" "Ugh, fill out the Posting Date?" "Exactly."

1Fadeway12y

Google never fails. The chart shall not allow it.

[-]elharo12y260

I didn't think of this until the recent munchkin post, but one solved problem is what financial instruments to invest in. The answer is index funds with low fees in a tax advantaged account. Vanguard has some good funds with fees as low as 0.1%. Unless you're a professional investor (and maybe not even then) your chance of beating index fund performance over the long term is tiny. Not quite winning the lottery tiny, but maybe winning a big stuffed animal at a rigged carnival game tiny.

3[anonymous]10y

The technical term for "low fees" is expense ratio.

1diegocaleiro12y

How about index funds in countries that have an obviously larger growth potential instead of one's own country. I don't mean to brag, but I'll bet none of you rich country folk have seen rates we've seen in Brazil in the last many years.

[-]elharo12y100

That's the Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index Fund and indeed I own some of that. However it's a relatively small part of my portfolio. The risk and variance are much higher, and the risk and variance of a single country index fund would be higher still. This fund dropped more than 75% during the 2008 crash and still hasn't recovered. The expense ratio ranges from about 0.2% to 0.33%, higher though not hugely so than domestic and total international index funds.

Most investors, especially those with smaller portfolios or who have a shorter time horizon, are probably better off with something like the Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund which includes a developing markets component, but also includes Asia and Europe, or the Vanguard Total World Stock Index which adds the United States to the mix.

0[anonymous]10y

At least in the US, generally expense ratios on foreign index funds are higher than on domestic index funds. They're still a better deal than actively managed mutual funds.

1MTGandP12y

Isn't it more like 50%?

[-]gwern12y160

No; you are incurring extra fees due to your likely extra trading, diseconomies of scale, and uncompensated risk due to less diversification.

-5Lumifer12y

[-]Pablo12y230

At least for people with the right personality profile (relatively high openness, above bottom decile of extroversion), CouchSurfing seems to have solved the problem of finding cheap (indeed, free) and comfortable short-term accommodation in a foreign city.

1[anonymous]10y

Is the problem of feeling terribly ashamed to accept accomodation without payment or compensation solved or this a test for openness / extroversion I just failed? :) There is nothing I hate more than getting favors and feeling obligated.

1Pablo10y

It might be that you haven't used CS enough to internalize the ethos governing host-guest relationships. I don't think CS hosts generally frame their decision to host someone as providing a favor to this person; rather, this is something they do because they genuinely enjoy it. Speaking for myself, I only expect my guests to be considerate (make little noise, be clean, etc., and show kindness in our interactions). As long as this minimal expectation is met, I take them to be under no obligation towards me.

0[anonymous]10y

I never dared trying it so yes, haven't used it "enough". Are they under no obligation to entertain the host, engaging in chat, small talk, not be morose and sullen, not be a killjoy? That alone would be quite a pressure. As it means they owe it to the host to be enjoyable.

[-]Kaj_Sotala12y210

At least for me, getting up when the alarm clock rings used to be almost impossible and I kept staying in bed for 12 hours a day unless there was something that I absolutely had to get up in time for. Anders Sandberg's caffeine pill trick solved that problem for me, and it has worked for over five years now:

This week I have experimented with a new way of getting up in the morning. My problem is that Anders-Sleepy has different goals than Anders-Awake, and is quite adept at resetting the alarm clock. Now I, Anders-Awake, has found a way around this self:
I set my alarm to 6:00 and 8:00. At 6:00 I go up, take a 50mg caffeine pill, and go to bed again. Then I sleep and wake up rested and energetic around 8.
In my case the time for the pill to start working seems to be 1.5 hours. A dose of one pill ensures that I wake up (but still yawning) while two pills makes me start the day much more quickly. The added benefit is of course a regular sleep schedule.
I ran into the problem of a late night one of the days, where I remained awake until 3:30. In this case I adjusted the program slightly, taking the pill at 7:00 and sleeping to 8:30, this seemed to work and the rest of the day was effici

... (read more)

3bokov12y

What works for me in addition to my equivalent of the caffeine pill is: * An alarm that gradually gets louder. It's not even one of the traditional annoying tones, just kind of a gentle new-agey song. The key features seems to be the getting louder with time. * Putting my underwear, clothing, glasses, and the alarm at my desk, away from the bed, so that I have to get up to turn off the alarm and by then it's not that much extra trouble to also get dressed, and I tell myself that if I'm still tired after that I can sit down at my desk, which is still better than rolling back into bed.

1gwillen12y

For me, the problem of waking up when my alarm goes off has been totally solved by using an alarm (Alarm Clock Plus for Android) which requires me to do complex mental math before it will shut off. This doesn't solve the related problem of getting out of bed when the alarm goes off; only waking up and not going back to sleep.

0drethelin12y

one thing that helps me with this is having set up a thing I do semi-automatically whenever I get up. Go to bathroom, check weight, go make coffee usually means I actually get up unless I'm crazy tired and don't actually get as far as coffee making

[-]Stabilizer12y170

The problem of transferring large files over the internet has been solved by Dropbox or similar services.

7sixes_and_sevens12y

For certain values of "large".

6Stabilizer12y

For larger files there is always the SneakerNet.

8fubarobfusco12y

A padded envelope containing a dozen 16GB SD cards, sent by Express Mail (next-day delivery) has a bandwidth of about one megabit-per-second. Networks have actually gotten fast.

1[anonymous]10y

This is a classic demonstration of the difference between bandwith and latency. As in, if you have only 1MB to tansfer, with this method it still takes a day. High-bandwith, low latency, like ship freight (as opposed to low-bandwith, high-latency air freight).

2Pablo12y

I have been using Dropbox for the past couple of years, but the new BitTorrent Sync seems to be a superior alternative: it is more secure and has no size limits.

[-]jsteinhardt12y130

"How do I get stronger?" has been solved and the solution is Starting Strength.

Evidence: The set of my friends who are strong is exactly the set of my friends who do / have done Starting Strength or a close variant. Also, I used to lift with several competitive power lifters (including someone ranked top 100 nationally in the deadlift) and they unanimously advocated it.

These are relatively large N and effect size btw, i.e. I know at least 15 people who've done SS and they're out-benching the non-SS'ers by 20 pounds on the low end, and 100 pounds on the high end (I pick bench because it is the exercise most people are familiar with; the gap for other things like squat is more like 50 pounds on low end, 200 pounds on high end).

[-]DerBerggeist12y150

I wouldn't call SS the end-all, be-all solution for getting stronger, that would more closely be something like "progressive overload using compound exercises (or whatever you want to get stronger at) while under caloric surplus and having decent macro/micronutritional spreads. Also sleeping well and not having any other unusual health problems".

SS is a great program for beginners, but any other program that fits the above should work (like stronglifts). I also wouldn't recommend SS to intermediate or advanced lifters, when linear progression is no longer possible.

4maia12y

This is the impression I've gotten as a beginner to lifting. My current problem is "how can I learn to do SS safely and cheaply?" My university has an appropriately equipped gym, but I can't really afford coaching.

1aelephant12y

No need. Lifting weights is not rocket science. Even if it were, you're smart, right? I'm sure your gym has a squat rack & mirrors -- that's all you really need.

7maia12y

Sure. I feel pretty comfortable with squats and benching already. I'm just a bit concerned about learning, say, powercleans without guidance, and going up on weight on them without assurance that I am, in fact, throwing the huge metal object into the air correctly.

5Brigid12y

There are numerous serious lifting forums on the web that will critique your beginner cleans (for free) out of the goodness their hearts. You just need to film it and upload the video. So do this with lighter weights and see what people say., make the adjustments and ask again. Also, definitely start with cleans--they are a lot safer than snatches and much easier to master.

2aelephant12y

Oh, that makes much more sense. Actually there are various versions of SS that swap out powercleans for technically easier exercises.

1maia12y

Happen to know any that also lack pullups? I can't do one, and likely won't be able to for a while (I am female). All the powerclean-free ones I've seen replace them with pullups. (Also, I just found this on Google and am somewhat disturbed. Rippetoe claims you can learn to power clean without a coach, while this guy claims that Rippetoe doesn't even teach power cleans correctly: http://www.manlycurls.com/2012/02/starting-strength-truth-rippetoe-opinion-fitness/)

7shokwave12y

On pullups - you can replace them with pull-up negatives. Jump up to the chin-above-bar position and lower yourself as slowly as you can, particularly towards the end of the movement. Let go of the bar and jump again. About the only thing this doesn't train, that the regular pullup will, is the starting-from-a-dead-hang motion. (This has the added benefit of eventually being able to do pullups.)

1Brigid12y

I also advise that between jumping pullups, you return to a faux-deadhang position (even if this requires you to bend your knees to fit under the bar). Again, you will get tired of jumping pretty quickly and then will start to rely on your arms and back.

39eB112y

I recommend working up to pullups by using the cable pull-down machine and programming it as 3x5 the same way you do for the main lifts. People typically program pullups for reps because of the inconvenience of adding weight, but it's fundamentally the same as any other movement in terms of the expected effect at different rep ranges. On the cable machine you are limited to lifting at most your own body weight conveniently, but by the time you can do 3x5 at a weight near your body weight you should be able to perform at least one pullup. Also, you should know that at most gyms it's possible to add 5 lb plates to the machine by threading the attachment thing through the plate or by using supplemental plates that you can add to the top of the weight stack, if your gym has them. The cable pull-down is reputed to be slightly easier but I find the difficulty comparable as long as you focus on keeping your torso vertical and pretending you are lifting up to the bar rather than lifting the bar down to your neck (kind of silly but it works). Most people tend to lean back slightly which makes it a little easier and a little less like a pullup. I program my chinups and pullups this way and I can do them weighted with 62.5lb and 52.5lb respectively, starting from only being able to do 1 or 2 at bodyweight. Also I have a powerlifting total >1100lb from Starting Strength then Wendler's 5/3/1 over the last two years, and highly recommend that track.

3Elithrion12y

I was looking up the Marines' fitness requirements at some point randomly, and for females the pull-up requirement is apparently replaced with a flexed-arm hang (wiki about.com), so you could maybe try doing that.

3jsteinhardt12y

Flexed-arm hang won't work as a replacement for pull-ups in the context of this particular program; maintaining a load in a static position is very different from moving that load up and down.

4Brigid12y

As a former Marine, in addition to the difference pointed out by jsteinhardt, the flexed arm hang works your arms only, not your back. Pullups require an overhand grip, whereas the flexed arm hang (and chinup) focus on your biceps.

2RomeoStevens12y

That is correct, Rippetoe teaches the powerclean based on olympic lifting technique from the 60's when the rules were different. Do barbell rows instead of cleans. This won't cause any problems.

1maia12y

Interesting; that's a different reason than the one that guy cited. He claimed that a better source for learning powercleans is actually an older one from the '70's by Bill Starr. He seems to think, and I get the impression, that Rippetoe's changes are actually newer, instead of a reversion to an older standard. Could you elaborate on the differences between what he teaches and... what one should do instead?

2RomeoStevens12y

The concept of a vertical pull originates from technique when brushing the thigh with the barbell was disqualifying of the lift. This lead to lifters keeping the bar further away from the body, and subsequently for rippetoe to teach the first pull as extremely similar to a deadlift. In contrast, modern technique shows a very distinct S shaped bar path on ascent. Rippetoe is disagreeing with every world record holder in the olympic lifts here, and notably has not trained anyone near close to competitive at even a national level. In contrast, Glenn Pendlay (who has trained the number 1 nationally ranked lifters in several weight divisions) and every other olympic coach teaches them very differently. Clean pulls are NOT deadlift pulls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEyoH5FV03s

0Brigid12y

As someone who has been in this situation, pullup negatives have worked for me. I would also add regular jumping pullups, without the negatives. As you do more, your jumping abilities will decrease and youll start to rely more on your arms/back, thus building those muscles. Most gyms also have an assisted pullup machine.

3zedzed11y

Update: Romeo_Stevens has done better than Starting Strength, and every other exercise program I'm aware of, with the power of science.

3Yossarian12y

Additionally, fitness roughly breaks into two broad categories - resistance and cardiovascular. Starting Strength covers resistance training, but the cardiovascular version of Starting Strength is Couch To 5K. It uses the same basic concept of progressive overload applied to running.

0[anonymous]10y

SS covers strength training. There is more visual resistance training, body building, which is more about looks than strength, and utilizes about 50% SS like composite exercises, 50% isolation and higher rep counts, 8-10.

3PECOS-912y

This is also a solution to "I am underweight/too skinny, how do I get bigger?"

8Slackson12y

Is SS for looking good, or for practical strength? I know they correlate, but optimizing for one doesn't necessarily mean optimizing for the other.

5RomeoStevens12y

You will not be looking good in the 4 months SS takes. Body composition is a long term project. SS and similar programs are to strengthen the substrate so you have something to build on.

1jsteinhardt12y

If you want to look good, do starting strength for several months to build a base of strength, then switch to something geared more towards body-building (warning: I haven't tried this myself yet; also, depends somewhat on how much more muscular you want to look). Another point is that body fat percent matters a decent amount for how "buff" you look as well, although there's a tradeoff where you won't build muscle as quickly if you're starving yourself. Also, what you wear has a reasonably large impact on how muscular you look, at least when you're wearing clothes.

3Desrtopa12y

I'll add that there's a considerable opportunity cost in reaching the low body fat levels necessary to achieve a "ripped" appearance. When I made it a goal to hit seven or eight percent body fat, it was a project that not only occupied about a couple hours every day and imposed harsh limits on what I could eat, it led to my being preoccupied with my body condition even at times when I was working on other things.

0[anonymous]10y

When I was young I as instantly doing body-building, as SS was not on the table and it worked well. Of course, I never tried any real world heavy object manipulation. It was purely looks. I think if I tried to do that, the complete lack of squats and deadlifts (just leg presses for quad size) would have made me injure the stabilizer muscles, but I am not a pack mule, I never need to actually use strength.

0Slackson12y

This sounds reasonable. I'm guessing bodybuilding programs are more controversial than Starting Strength. Or is there a clear winner there too? Thanks for the informative comment.

0shokwave12y

Starting Strength recommends three sets of five reps at 90% of your maximum lift, each with a few minutes' rest between, as the best programme for building strength. For increasing muscle mass (which is what makes you look good, and is surprisingly not as correlated with strength as it would appear) you want something like six to eight sets of ten to twelve reps, at 60-80% of your maximum lift, with 60-90 seconds rest in between. Effectively, the more time your muscles spend under load, the larger they will get, assuming your diet provides enough protein and calories. I don't know of a program, but anything you can stick to is good. I use the same routine as I did for strength (SS's A/B workouts, plus barbell curls). I still recommend a few months of Starting Strength to get your weight up to begin with.

0[anonymous]10y

No, body building and not weight lifting is the solution to that. That means basically adding some isolation exercises to SS and doing higher rep counts like 5 x 8 or 5 x 10. This is really not complicated. Getting big is a different goal from getting strong, and there are specialized disciplines for both. Of course they overlap a lot.

1OrphanWilde12y

Super Slow is working pretty well for me, although I haven't been at it very long yet. The biggest advantage to it that I've seen is that it forces me to use more of my muscles - it helps me avoid cheating by using my strongest muscles to gain momentum to skip my weaker. It also helps me focus on the form of the exercise rather than the end state.

2RomeoStevens12y

I wouldn't mind seeing an update on this after a few months. I haven't seen any evidence, even anecdotal, that anyone got strong on it.

2OrphanWilde12y

Aretae swears by it, which is the reason I decided to pick it up. I'm considering putting data together. I haven't collected data on any of my projects since my experiment to see if calories were a reasonable approximation for weight-loss purposes. (And contrary to my original expectations, they are. But my diet was fairly well balanced, and I expect the data wouldn't hold for wildly unbalanced diets.)

0jsteinhardt12y

I don't know anything about Super Slow, but FWIW, these are all attributes of Starting Strength as well.

1RomeoStevens12y

Having done SS, I regret doing low bar squat instead of the much more intuitive high bar squat. Of course powerlifters advocate for low bar squats, it's what their sport measures. Other than that it's pretty great. I have friends following the SS program with high bar and it's working out well for them.

1HungryHippo12y

Why do you regret doing low-bar squats? Presumably you read SS:BBT and thus his arguments for why they are superior to the low-bar version. (E.g. Better use of the hamstrings.)

6RomeoStevens12y

The argument boils down to "you can use more weight" and "it involves the posterior chain more." Neither of these supposed benefits are worth the greater chance of injury. Low bar squats place significantly greater loads on the spinal erectors, which is fine if you're an experienced weightlifter and know how to maintain good form. A newbie who lacks proprioception is the worst person to have doing this. I see and speak with many people doing SS at my university gym and most of the ones doing lowbar do it with poor form and rounded backs. In contrast it is much easier to do highbar squats with correct form as they are much more intuitive. Low bar squats took me months and months to learn proper form with and I strained a spinal erector during this learning process. High bar squats took me a few lifting sessions to learn. All that said, low-bar will work better for some people due to anatomy, but most have an easier time with high bar. You do need weightlifting shoes to do proper high bar squats. And you also need to throw in a few sets of RDL's to hit the hamstrings.

0[anonymous]10y

The part I don't understand is why people want to be stronger as opposed to be more visually muscular. This is not the same thing, for the later goal traditional body-building i.e. one composite and one isolation exercise for every major muscle group works better. Also it is more like 5 x 8 or 5 x 10. A lot of strong people end up still being fairly thin. What is the utility of strength without beach looks today? I just pay movers to carry furniture from the old apartment to the new. Even in a brawl, punching strength depends more on knowing how to use gravity.

0Richard_Kennaway10y

You can do more, it feels better, and your body lasts longer.

0[anonymous]10y

Because just inflated muscles don't do these? The gap between the two is not that big, the body-builders just go a bit less intense on the heavy lifts in order to have some energy left for the isolation ones, and the rep range being higher makes the weights 20-40% smaller. The difference between 5x5 150kg bench presses vs. 5x8 110 kg ones + doing pec-decs is nowhere nearly as big as the difference between these two and just about anything else. The primary difference is joints and ability to move heavy objects. Doing more in the sense of being more a of human forklift somehow does not look that glorious. The feeling better may as well attach better to the more spectacular looks, and as for longer lasting, probably near draw. For me strength always meant punching strength and this guy convinced me it is mainly technique. Caveat: I know grappling sports are getting more popular, such as BJJ / part of MMA. I think this probably does not apply there. I think grappling could be more brute-forced. I think one reason modern culture may be hooked on strength is that when we were children a lot of fighting / domination / bullying / rough play relied more on intuitive grappling than on punching (or kicking). This made us all respect The Strong Guy Who Can Whip Everybody. And of course movies like the 300 etc. reinforce it. This goes back to very old cultural origins, wrestling is one thing many cultures paralelly evolved because this is how people can physically dominate each other and establish a pecking order without actually hurting each other. Here is why I like to argue it: weight lifting techniques are used in many sports for a long time. Still, most guys were scrawny, and not due to lack of nutrition, since even today some lifters use really easy nutrition like eating lots of cottage cheese. Or drinking lots of milk if they are tolerant. Body building got popular in the West roughly after 1977 (Pumping Iron) and elsewhere later, I would say, buff guys on bar dancef

2Richard_Kennaway10y

Try being bedridden for a few weeks and see what you feel like afterwards. Then you can decide how much strength you actually want available in your everyday life.

0[anonymous]10y

And how much endurance you want? And how much speed you want? And how much coordination you want? And how much sense of balance you want? Why single out strength? Feeling my speed improve feels better than strength improvements... I think strength is a dangerously good sounding word, it has way too positive connotations than utility. Of course, I am not advocating weakness, I am advocating that for people not interested in sports beach-muscles may work better, and for people interested in sports whatever amount, form, and methods of acquiring strength their trainer tells them is probably best.

0Richard_Kennaway10y

You spoke of strength, and that is what I was responding to. All those other things are also important. The body you get if you do not attend to maintaining them is unlikely to be optimal, outside of a career that forces you to. Not being a professional athlete, dancer, or soldier, I must take care of the matter myself.

0[anonymous]10y

I understand it, I just don't understand why taking care of the body maintenance equals human forklift stuff? I just baffled that somewhere in the last 10-15 years being healthy or fit gets increasingly equated to having a high one rep max. Alternatives are either beach body building stuff,which optimizes for looks, yet gives most of the forklift stuff as well, or the normal sports, not professionally but like playing tennis 2-3 times a week or something, which does little for muscles but takes care of speed, balance, endurance etc. When I visualize myself as an ancestral hunter - as it sounds like a good way to take care of the body - I don't just see someone who can in a rigid and stiff way pick something up and put it down. It involves reflexes, balance, speed, dodging a thrown stone, throwing another back etc. So this is what I don't understand this contemporary understanding of fitness. I understand the beach body builders, as it is about visuals. But the idea of picking up heavy things being fitness, it just seems so removed from any possible idea of how an animal's body is supposed to function.

1Lumifer10y

I agree that having pretty muscles and having a physically capable body are quite different things. I do not agree that having a physically capable body is useless in our times.

0[anonymous]10y

Physical capability does not equal picking up heavy things, it is not even close. Speed, balance, accuracy etc. just imagine an ancestral hunter or any animal really. A fast, limber, precise, situationally aware guy who can dodge a spear and throw one in return. Our modern weight lifter would be the pack mule of the hunting band, who is too stiff and slow to do anything useful but he can carry the deer carcass home. OK...

1Lumifer10y

I am not arguing that weightlifting is the best thing ever. I am arguing against your assertion that, except for looking pretty, contemporary people do not need physically capable bodies.

0[anonymous]10y

Okay, but how to define physical capability? What kind of capability matters most? I'd like to have better cardio and better muscle endurance in the legs, for example, dancing for hours or walking sight-seeing all day without having to sit down would be awesome.

0Lumifer10y

That's how.

0[anonymous]10y

Yes, the other extreme : be able do everything, even though you probably don't want to do everything. It takes so much time that you probably won't have enough time left do the activity you wanted to become fit for.

1Lumifer10y

It takes as much time as you are willing to commit. You asked what is physical capability, not whether you can afford trying to become physically perfect.

0Gurkenglas12y

I merely read somewhere about how muscles grow stronger when used and took up a habit of periodically tensing muscles whenever I noticed them needing to do much work in the near future, as that didnt require much concious effort or spent time. Since then, my strength has been above average (I think), but the two may be unrelated; the latter especially might have been caused by a 17-puberty pulse instead.

[-]JoshuaFox12y70

I would be very cautious about any claim that any "problem" is totally, finally, and uncontroversially solved.

When a problem gets to that point, no one is calling it a problem.

And even then, better solutions may come along.

[-]JoshuaFox12y252

How can I keep warm when going outside on a blustery fall day? Wear clothing.

How can I eat without spending all my time hunting? Buy food from other people who specialize in that.

How can I retain key thoughts more precisely than by mere memorization? Write them down.

[-]fubarobfusco12y100

Other "solved problems" from early human history:

How can I find out if all the sheep have come in from the field? Count them as they are going out, and count them again as they are coming in.

How can I remember how many sheep that person owes me? Write down their name, the word "sheep", and the number of sheep.

How can I resolve conflicts with someone without fighting, when just talking it out with that person doesn't seem to be working? Find some person whom we both respect, have each of us explain their view on the situation, and follow the respected person's advice.

7FiftyTwo12y

Another category is questions like "(2x^8)/3 +62/4 = x" where the method of obtaining the answer is well defined, but the answer itself is unknown.

-5Clippy12y

[-]Qiaochu_Yuan12y100

Yes, but even so, there may be lots of problems that I think are 50% solved or maybe wide open and that it turns out are maybe 95% solved (loosely speaking), and I'd still like to hear about those.

8jooyous12y

Can we start a thread for unproductive but frequently asked questions that can easily be replaced with other, more productive questions? Like if you're asking this, you probably mean to ask something else. Does that sound useful? One example of these is yelling at a small child, demanding to know why they broke something, which is not that useful because small children sometimes don't have good answers or they have answers that don't quite take all of reality into account. (For example, maybe the child wanted to see what would happen but didn't realize might be permanent or unfavorable.) The more productive question is "How can we prevent you from breaking these types of objects again?"

[-]Qiaochu_Yuan12y130

You can start whatever threads you want! You have the power! (What question should you have replaced that question with, I wonder...)

9jooyous12y

"Do you think this is a good and useful idea? And can I perhaps legitimize the idea further by persuading you to start the thread instead of me since you've been starting a lot of repository threads lately?" See? Questions are a tricky business! That was an unintentionally round-about and meta way of demonstrating it.

[-]ThrustVectoring12y70

As far as I can tell, ketogenic diets solve the problem of fat loss. I know, anecdotes are not data, but it's worked wonders for everyone I know who's tried it (myself included).

Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people.

This is the sole reason I'm posting this. Keto works for very many people. The short story of keto is that your brain can only eat certain kinds of chemicals. Glycogen from eating carbohydrates is one of them. Ketones generated from fat is another. Your body will p... (read more)

[-]Jack12y100

Ketogenic dieting has been very effective for me. But I'm not convinced that this story about the body learning to turn body fat into ketones is actually how it works. My sense is that a super low-carb diet may just a good way of keeping appetite down and maintaining a caloric deficit. At the very least, that seems to be part of why it works so well: high fat low carb foods tend to be much more satisfying per calorie than foods heavy in carbohydrates. E.g. A Starbucks blueberry muffin is 380 calories which is like eating ten strips of bacon or 5 hardboiled eggs or more celery than you could possibly eat in one sitting. Whether or not the chemistry stuff is actually true keto is a good way to feel satisfied on a lower number of calories.

I wonder if a diet that was actually optimized for high satisfaction/calorie would be a) different and b) more effective.

5A1987dM12y

I think it depends on the person. A meal without enough carbs just doesn't feel ‘complete’ to me, and it'd take lots of willpower for me to not eat anything else for a while (but I'm mostly thinking about stuff like pasta or rice or potatoes or bread or fruits, rather than muffins); OTOH I can go several days without much proteins before starting to crave for them. And eating ten strips of bacon without anything else in one sitting would feel very distasteful to me. But I know there are people for whom it's the other way round.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky12y100

Hasn't worked for me.

3MrMind12y

Sigh... me neither. Have you tried intermittent fasting? I'm just adapting to it these weeks. Will see if it works.

4jsteinhardt12y

Just doing intermittent fasting by itself didn't do much for me, but doing intermittent fasting where I also measured and reduced calorie intake allowed me to lose 15 pounds (from 185 to 170). The LeanGains website was really helpful. It's also worth noting that prior to starting this, I already had a relatively healthy diet and exercised regularly. That being said, even the guy who made LeanGains doesn't claim it will work for everyone. But for the first month I did it I screwed it up (by not also restricting calorie intake) and saw no change, then after fixing that I lost about a pound a week.

0DerBerggeist12y

Have you tried eating less and exercising more? How long did you "diet"? Also, how closely were you monitoring things? How many calories below maintenance were you consuming daily, on average [300-500 kcal's generally touted for muscle preservation for those not on steroids by the internet, but that's still pretty slow and not obvious weightloss against a backdrop of fluctuating water weight]? How long did it take you to enter ketosis if you were carb cycling (measured more definitively using something like ketostix and not my housemate-on-keto's "I can just feel it!")?

8Eliezer Yudkowsky12y

Ketosis sticks did not show my entering ketosis even with as close to zero carbs as I could get (admittedly counting things like 3g carbs in a serving of protein powder). I don't recall how long I tried. Probably between 1 week and 2 weeks before giving up on almost-zero carb, then a month of very low carb before giving up entirely. Memory is fuzzy.

[-]Error12y100

Upvoted for evidence. I've read your comments on how diets that ought to work don't for you, and that it's not as simple as calories-in-calories-out, but have been skeptical because my prior for "Eliezer is a metabolic mutant" vs. "Eliezer has the same trouble sticking to a diet (and being honest when they fail) that most people do" is low.

In local parlance, my assignment for "Eliezer is a mutant" and "net calories aren't everything" have both risen.

4Eliezer Yudkowsky12y

I am not a metabolic mutant. There are plenty of people in the world who cannot seem to lose weight, and they aren't all weak-willed scum, and it's not because they just haven't tried your favorite diet. The world is full of metabolic diversity. The fortunate who do not appreciate this are the metabolically privileged. That they can lose weight with an effort causes them to be unfortunately deluded about what is going on.

[-]Error12y100

I am not a metabolic mutant. There are plenty of people in the world who cannot seem to lose weight, and they aren't all weak-willed scum, and it's not because they just haven't tried your favorite diet.

I'm not sure I deserved the heat here. I prescribed no particular diet and said nothing about weak willed scum. I'm of the tentative opinion that modern weight-control problems are just a case of human brains not being built for an environment of plenty. Even if it was simply that people on average can't keep their hands out of the pastry box, that's not a moral failing, just an outdated adaptation. It's worth fixing ourselves because it's now a maladaptation and evolution is too slow about fixing it.

The world is full of metabolic diversity. The fortunate who do not appreciate this are the metabolically privileged. That they can lose weight with an effort causes them to be unfortunately deluded about what is going on.

What is going on? Is there a thread around here that you think covers it in useful detail? It seems to me that there must be some lower bound on food intake beyond which one can't help but lose weight -- otherwise you could eat nothing and still not lose weight,... (read more)

2Richard_Kennaway12y

It has been observed that no fat people emerged from Auschwitz. But if some people do not lose weight below that level of privation, they don't stand much chance of doing so voluntarily.

3MugaSofer12y

Perhaps they all died because they couldn't access their metabolic reserves? [/devilsadvocate]

0Richard_Kennaway12y

All the worse for those with great difficulty losing weight. Apply enough determination and it might kill you! People would probably object to using Nazi data, but it would be interesting if they ever kept logs of inmates' body weight and non-deliberately-caused deaths.

2wedrifid12y

As you may have guessed, this isn't the first time the subject has come up. Frustration builds. It is not just the brain but the entire human body that isn't specialized for an environment of plenty. Lowered food intake changes metabolism and energy expenditure, it doesn't just make you crave more food. That would indeed still be true. That seems technically inevitable. The question then becomes whether this happens before or after your body enters a coma. (Or, more practically, whether valuable muscle mass is lost before undesired fat and whether the effect on fatigue and energy levels is debilitating.)

9Kawoomba12y

A ridiculously charged topic, how could I miss it? We're probably among the last generations (as in so many things) that need to bother with the now counterproductive and out-of-place esterification making us fat. Just as we managed to separate the carrot from the stick (the stimulus we get from an action versus the original evolutionary incentivized purpose of that action) with sex/procreation, so will we eventually be able to indulge in feeling satiated without actually storing unwanted lipids. If not for too strict pharmaceutical standards, some (more) drugs would probably already be available. Given the large impact of diabetes, CHD and other obesity related diseases, even severe side effects in animal trials could be outweighed by the benefits. If not for the fear of lawsuits and strict regulations that throw promising drugs out of the pipeline prematurely. It took a decade and untold needless deaths for gene therapy to recover from a few mishaps to where it can be pursued again. Regarding losing weight, personally I like the volumetrics approach, it's easily combinable with most diets: Feeling satiated is - mostly - a combination of mechanoreceptors in the stomach being activated (which is how gastric lap band surgery works) and various hormones reacting to e.g. rising blood sugar (hunger-stimulating Ghrelin gets inhibited), presence of food in the intestinal tract (hunger-inhibiting PYY is released, NB: it's released more effectively by high-protein intake which would help explain the effectiveness of some high-protein diets, such as variants of keto), and leptin (released by adipocytes, can be mostly ignored, since obese people apparently have high leptin levels and a corresponding high leptin resistence). Now, there is of course a latency between food entering your stomach and the mechanoreceptors triggering and PYY being released. Therefore, a sensible measure is the following: Drink a large-ish quantity of water (cold and tasty with lemon) before ev

[-]gwern12y120

Obesity is interesting because I regard it as a partially-solved problem. For example, dinitrophenol would solve much of it: it makes mitochondria less efficient and so effectively increases metabolism, but at the cost of emitting waste heat - which is potentially fatal and got it banned despite its apparent effectiveness. It could still be safely used; it's 2013 so electronic thermometers are a dime a dozen. Take patients to a fat camp, dress them in clothes with thermometers constantly recording and now doses can be adjusted based on detailed data and the thermometers can warn the patient to jump into conveniently located ice baths. Voila. And I'm not clear on how dangerous it really is when not made illegally and used recklessly by young kids; Wikipedia cites a 1934 paper as estimating that there were ~100k users of DNP before it was banned, and those authors remark, after discussing the grand total of 4 deaths up to that point due to the drug's use under medical supervision, that

When one considers that some one hundred thousand patients have been treated with this exceedingly potent therapeutic agent, it is a matter of some gratification to know that fatalities have not been

... (read more)

0Capla11y

It is frustrating to me that I want powerful cognitive enhancement, but instead of increasing metabolic efficiency, we're decreasing it. Can't we funnel those extra calories the the brain somehow?

7drethelin12y

I think most of the value in being thin is looking attractive and being able to be physically active. I think Eliezer doesn't really need to be more attractive than he already is (4 girlfriends) and isn't a huge fan of rock climbing or whatever. As far as I've heard, most of the health benefits of exercise can be gotten without needing to actually be thin.

2A1987dM12y

I somehow doubt that all of this effect is due to thin people exercising more. ETA: looks like the ‘optimal’ BMI for women is larger than for men, BTW.

2drethelin12y

Considering the social import of being attractive and getting around to see people and the correlation between active social life and longevity I think it's more than you might think, but I agree with you. On the other hand, the trade off is a lot more reasonable if you can be relatively healthy and happy while fat AND it's particularly hard for you to lose weight.

0A1987dM12y

Well, they did control for, among other things, marital status. (Also, I'd guess that the BMI that maximizes conventional attractiveness would be higher for men than for women, and wouldn't depend much on smoking.) Yes. ISTM that for certain people losing weight has become a lost purpose.

0ESRogs12y

Higher for men? Despite the fact that women have higher BMI on average and that curvy figures are considered (by many) to be attractive?

1A1987dM12y

Remember that BMI is based on the total body mass, and that muscle is denser than fat. (OTOH, that study corrected for level of exercise, and it's quite possible that the BMI that would maximize an average white American man's attractiveness if he's not allowed to vary his level of exercise would indeed be around 20.) I am one of those “many”, too, but ISTM that in present-day Western cultures we're a minority; "thin" seems to have become a compliment. (Last year, someone offered to set me up with her roommate who probably had BMI around 18, and when I told her that I didn't fancy her, she retorted “but she's so skinny!” as though it was a positive.)

0ESRogs12y

Ah, good points.

0Kawoomba12y

I don't want to speculate about EY other than saying my model of him didn't expect to ever see "too complex" brought up as a reason not to try anything. Maybe there's too much overlap with HPMOR:Harry. It is possible that there are individuals whose akrasia levels / mental energy and self-image are unaffected by being overweight compared to not being overweight. Just unlikely. That's true, but doesn't change that ceteris paribus given little exercise, you'll still live longer not being obese. Note that I've not even mentioned exercise. It's certainly better being overweight and exercising (while still being overweight), than being overweight and not exercising.

4drethelin12y

You're reading "too complex" as "difficult" but eliezer means it as "something with inherently low priors for working".

0MugaSofer12y

Pretty sure he meant "since this has inherently low priors for working, it's too difficult to be worth it" ie expected utility is too low.

6wedrifid12y

Expected value calculation > your 'seeming'. Because creating an FAI has (strictly!) greater expected benefits than one person successfully losing weight? To the extent that the rhetorical question is ridiculous. This seems false.

3Kawoomba12y

I'd wager you've never been overweight. Strap a few dozen lbs around your waist or don them as a vest, see what it does to your daily routine. We've done that once in some class or other, and I've bordered the 30 myself as well, from time to time. You're affected constantly, we're as of yet embodied agents, not free floating minds. What's the likelier explanation for a lack of action, expected value calculations or - here it comes - 'akrasia'. Depends from whose point of view. E.g. passing away in the knowledge that you've contributed to the eventual creation of FAI (which gives you fuzzies, or at least utilons) can be outweighed by living decades with more mental energy (which also contributes to your development efforts) and a better self-image. That aside, that a task is a complicated problem/puzzle to be solved can be an incentive to solve it in and of itself, especially for certain kinds of people. Assuming the increase in productivity, self image and quality of life (consider the metabolic syndrome, preventing decades of injecting insuline can have quite the impact on your QALY) to be fixed/constant for an individual, "true" or "false" does depend on how easy/hard it would be for that individual to efficiently attain and keep a lower BMI. For metabolically priviledged people, or just those with an easy to fix problem such as hypothyreodism, the statement is probably true. For someone who for whatever reason cannot lose any weight whatever he tries (within his motivational reach given his current energy levels ... there's a catch-22 present), it would be false.

5wedrifid12y

Eliezer has mentioned many of the things he has tried to lose weight (including ketogenic diets and even clenbuterol). I've tried all those he has mentioned. The difference is for me they work (I call it 'cutting' and can merrily play around with my body composition all sorts of ways). But if, like Eliezer, I had expended huge amounts of effort and my body did not respond significantly then I would update my expectations. Things that are expected to fail have low expected value. Sometimes you need to shut up and multiply instead of shut up and do the impossible. Expected value calculations. Unless you are making accusations of lies---outright fabrication of self reports. For the purpose of declaring an accusation of irrationality false the relevant point of view is Eliezer's. If Eliezer had someone else's values then it would make sense to evaluate the rationality of a given choice for him according to those other values. Yes (or at least it would be up there on the list). It just isn't true in this case.

1MugaSofer12y

Pretty sure most people involved in FAI efforts are fatoring in more than warm fuzzies in their EU calculations.

3Error12y

Well, I missed it; I kind of wish the LW inbox included replies-to-replies. In any case I find myself thinking this shouldn't be a charged topic, even though it clearly is. As a culture we're still hung up on the whole self-indulgence-as-moral-failure absurdity. A thousand times yes. Sex without babies is a nearly-solved problem, lacking only a male equivalent of the IUD. Weight control should be just as solved, and no, self-control in food intake is not a solution even if it does work. Like condoms, it's a badly suboptimal necessary evil. I should be able to eat whatever I feel like while maintaining whatever weight I damn well please. That this has failed to happen despite the massive amount of money thrown at weight-control products says something, but I'm not sure what. Has anyone made a serious, prolonged attempt not at "getting people to 'stay good' around food" but at "decoupling food from fat entirely"? If not, why not?

0Kawoomba12y

May I direct you to the subsequent paragraph in the grandparent? :)

0Error12y

Sort-of-valid point. But all drugs I've seen or heard of have been essentally appetite suppressants plus varying levels of bullshit. I wouldn't expect metabolic decouplers to be disproportionately cut out by regulation; if there was substantial research in that area, I would expect some of them to be on the market. (it is possible some are that I'm unaware of.)

2ThrustVectoring12y

Keto isn't a particularly high-protein diet. It's generally a high dietary fat diet. I mean, it can be high protein, but the general idea is high fat.

0Kawoomba12y

Corrected. Although, it's somewhat hard replacing carbohydrates without also increasing the overall protein intake. There are probably variants of keto that fit, and variants that don't. There's apparently no catchy phrase for the overall "high protein diet" reference class.

0ThrustVectoring12y

Yeah, most people who do keto or other low-carb variants tend to eat a high-protein diet. But for fat-loss something like twice as much weight of dietary fat as protein is recommended along with sub-30 grams of non-fiber carbohydrates. And the medical keto diet, iirc, was something like 4:1 fat:protein. It's a lot easier to hit the protein macros than the fat macros.

0Error12y

Fair. I'd seen some of the previous conversations or I wouldn't have responded as I did; but I'm guessing I missed occasions on which Eliezer demonstrated that his body chemistry was provably not doing what theory would predict it should (with regard to ketosis), which I find much more convincing than "I tried X, Y, and Z and none of them worked." If such occasions exist, then I just plain missed them and I've stepped on toes unnecessarily, and I apologize. I'm going to guess "before muscle loss or coma", on the grounds that fat is supposedly for long-term energy storage, and I would expect "break down muscle and/or go into coma in preference to using stored energy" to be maladaptive even in the EEA. I have no controlled study to support that guess, however. I could see "after excessive fatigue," I suppose; that might be physically necessary (fat burning is slow, IIRC) but not so maladaptive as to defeat the purpose of storing fat.

4Vaniver12y

This seems somewhat unfair. There are a handful of diets that work on a broad variety of people, such that the prior any one will work for a particular person is higher than a novel diet like Shangri-La. And so unless you've tried slow carb/ketogenic, intermittent fasting, 30g of protein for breakfast, and ECA stacks and none of them worked, it seems like you're updating too far in the direction of "all diets don't work for me" from the evidence that "diet X didn't work for me." (The only one of those I've tried is IF. It worked for me.) What's the difference between this and the claim that you are a metabolic mutant?

0Halfwit12y

It might be worth going to a sleep doctor; sleep apnea can really fuck up your metabolism, not to mention causing unbelievable akrasia. I would say sleep tests are a GOOD THING, something everyone should do. I had sleep apnea for years. It was like some eldritch monster was sucking away my willpower and I wasn't even aware. Within a few months of getting my mouth guard, which keeps my tongue from blocking my airway while in REM, I lost thirty pounds and gained an enormous well of mental stamina. A small minority of the "metabolically challenged" may just have undiagnosed sleep problems.

7Eliezer Yudkowsky12y

Since it was cheaper than a sleep study, I bought a self-adjusting CPAP on Craigslist and just tried it. Nothing miraculous occurred.

2NancyLebovitz12y

A history of diets-- please note the repetition of ideas and lack of effectiveness for people in general.

4DerBerggeist12y

Well, there's your problem right there -- it sounds like you didn't really especially "do" a ketogenic diet, if you never once reached ketosis (as I understand, you typically need to deplete glycogen stores before entering ketosis, and so you might have 3,000~6,000+ kcal to burn through first, and then there's an interim period of glycogen depletion before it actually begins. Which is where the magnitude of your caloric deficit becomes relevant; was it large enough to get through your stored glycogen in the 1-2 weeks you ate no-carb? I think recently consumed food is generally metabolized first, before dipping into glycogen stores, though that's likely a huge oversimplification), any more than someone eating an egg for breakfast can be said to have "tried" keto. And even with weight as your metric you should have seen some noticeable reduction after a month and a half of "dieting" on a >300 kcal deficit if you were consistent in your measurement conditions (eg, every day after waking/bathroom and before breakfast). Maybe you just overestimated how many calories you needed for maintenance each day? Which is quite common among "dieters". Like I mentioned, the usual advice for muscle preservation is to eat 300-500 kcal below maintenance each day, and if after a month you fail to note any weight loss or note weight gain to reduce your consumption by an additional 300 kcal, rinse and repeat. It might take several months to note any reduction in weight if you had a shoddy initial estimate (or if your metabolism is exceptionally sensitive to intake, though that can only account for so much. Eventually as you progressively reduce consumption [or increase activity!] you will lose weight). Haha, and many people report a "mental fog" when first trying ketogenic diets. Maybe that's why you can't remember :D disclaimer: this isn't my field of study and it's been several years since I tried keto and my research then was cursory, at best, which is why I used less-than-confident

5Eliezer Yudkowsky12y

After numerous previous failures, if it's that complicated I'm not going to bother. Complicated things seem even less likely to work than simple things, and simple things almost never work in the first place. In my experience, no matter what you try, there's always an excuse when it doesn't work. Then when it still doesn't work there's something else you're not doing exactly right that they forgot to mention earlier. Oddly enough, when something does work for someone, nobody bothers to check to see if they were doing everything exactly right by way of confirming that all these extra frills are actually required as opposed to just being excuses that are only invoked when it doesn't work because, in reality, metabolisms are different. Anyway, not interested. Thanks for trying.

4Laoch12y

Do you have any data on your eating and exercising habits? I'd love to know what or how your eating now. If you're eating the standard american diet, then you're definitely doing something wrong, and there are a few simple things you could do to at least eliminate deleterious factors. Do you drink Coca Cola everyday for example? What's your baseline diet? Before ever trying a new one, find out what's wrong with the baseline and tweak it.

1A1987dM12y

It is obvious if you weigh yourself every day for a couple months or longer and you know how to do stats. (FWIW, my weight since 12 February fits to a straight line a + bx where a = (93.74 ± 0.19) kg, b = (−0.018 ± 0.007) kg/day, and x is the time elapsed since 12 February; the RMS of residuals is 0.68 kg. Approximating the posterior pdf of b as a Gaussian, which ought to be close enough given 46 degrees of freedom, I'm 99.42% sure that b < 0.)

4DerBerggeist12y

Haha, well yeah. Though you should hardly need stats if you're recording over a period of months ("golly, I wonder if my 40 lb weight change these past 6 months is just me being dehydrated right now? Maybe I should wait till after I drink my morning 4 gallons just to be sure"). I meant it more on time scales of "between 1 week and 2 weeks", or for where weight loss was very minor due to a tiny caloric deficit. With more precise measurement (eg, via bodpod) of body composition you would better be able to track smaller changes, too.

2evand12y

Excellent point. I suspect you're basically correct, but I would not take the stats results at face value. There are many possible problems resulting from the physical and electrical properties of the scale you're using, that I would not expect to be well behaved in a stats sense. In particular: quantization errors, non-linearity / non-monotonicity of the scale A/D converter (depends strongly on type of A/D used), temperature dependence of both the scale strain gauges and A/D, etc. The general rule here is that trying to get too many more bits of precision out of a measuring device than it is intended to provide is tricky. You could calibrate the scale in a number of ways; easiest would probably be to check that it gives consistent readings over time for a fixed weight that's not too small compared to you. You could simply weigh the fixed weight, or you could weigh you and (you + weight).

1A1987dM12y

You're right, any time-varying systematic error (due to temperature, ageing of the scale, etc.) would screw up the analysis. (Quantization errors shouldn't matter that much so long as they're much smaller than day-to-day fluctuations.)

3David Althaus12y

Ketogenic diets didn't work for me. In fact, they were one of the worst diets I've ever tried.

3RomeoStevens12y

http://paleohacks.com/questions/25449/why-do-people-consider-ketosis-stressful-to-the-body

2elharo12y

Worked for me, though I have been plateaued for the last year a few pounds and several waste inches above where I'd ideally like to be. Haven't figured out how to bust through that yet. I strongly suspect that when we do figure this out, ketogenesis will be a large part of any eventual solution, but I don't think we have all the answers yet. I do know folks for whom low carb diets failed, but in all cases I'm personally familiar with that's because they couldn't maintain them. (which is a strike against low-carb diets, of course; an unmaintainable diet isn't useful) I know of one case of someone who took off 150+ pounds using low-carb and then put 50 or so pounds back on while continuing low carb. Still he never came close to getting back to where he was pre-low-carb. I'm curious if anyone has simply failed to lose weight while maintaining a low carb diet. I think Atkins talked about this possibility in the last edition of his diet book he authored. I'll have to look up the citation, but there are some medical conditions that can cause weight gain/prevent weight loss that show up in a few percent of patients.

0DerBerggeist12y

Err, have you been lowering calorie intake relative to your activity and changing metabolic rate? Lighter bodies require less energy both to maintain and move around. If you haven't been adjusting your "dieting" diet it's no wonder you plateaued, because where initially you ran a caloric deficit you're now much closer to equilibrium. Also, I've intentionally gained weight on cyclical low-carb diets (<5 g carbs each weekday, 1200-1500g carb-up on weekends). It's because I ate a lot.

1Zian3y

What do you think of the research described at https://slimemoldtimemold.com/tag/a-chemical-hunger/ regarding lithium?

0brazil8412y

If I may ask, what was your starting weight; what is your current weight; and how long have you been at your current weight?

0drethelin12y

when I started keeping track 479 days ago I was 270, right now I am at 228. This isn't pure keto, because at first I was doing slow carbs, and then when I switched to no carbs I kept the tim feriss style cheat day. I've also cheated on various trips and so on I've taken, but in general I have 6 days on 1 day off diet. I've gone down something like 4 pants sizes. Right now I'm trying to transition to fewer cheat days or none at all because I feel like I'm plateauing, but it's rough.

0pinyaka12y

Do you get keto flu type hangovers after your cheat days?

0drethelin12y

A little? I tend to feel really heavy and bleh at the end of cheat nights and kinda weird the next day but it's not really what I would call "keto flu"

0brazil8412y

Thank you for sharing. Are you willing to follow up in a year or two to let me know where you are?

2drethelin12y

if you want to ask again in a year sure. Email me or something in a year. Drethelin@gmail.com

4Elo11y

follow up plz?

3drethelin11y

lost some progress, up to 238.6 as of this morning, which is down from getting back up over 240. I stopped tracking regularly for a while, and now I am again and I don't know why but tracking on a daily basis seems to have some sort of causal effect making me lose weight again.

0ThrustVectoring12y

I haven't been keeping the closest track, so this isn't even a good anecdote. I was a 165 lb and 5'10 man going out of high school seven years ago, and went up to 220 as of a year ago. It wasn't all fat (I'm significantly stronger now than I was then), but I did go from wearing 34 waist jeans to a 38. So I started at 220 and a 38 waist, and I've gone down to 180 and I think size 34 jeans (I haven't gotten around yet to buying more jeans, but my size 36's need a belt now). Exercise involved hasn't been too extensive - mostly just walking and housework. I'm still work-in-progress, but I haven't had a history of my weight yo-yoing on diets, and I intend to stay on keto for the foreseeable future.

2brazil8412y

Thank you for your response. Will you agree to update this response in a year or two?

2ThrustVectoring12y

Yeah, I can do that.

0brazil8412y

Great, thanks. I have been doing informal research on diet and weight loss for a while now and I think there is value in following up with people a year or two down the road.

3ThrustVectoring11y

Update: I'm at pretty much the same place now as I was then. Dropped the keto diet since I was happy with where I was. Still fairly active but not hardcore about it.

2brazil8411y

thank you

0FiftyTwo12y

Surely the more obvious solution is "eat less calories than you use."

[-]Qiaochu_Yuan12y380

The calories-in calories-out model is attractive, but it doesn't appear to be all that accurate, or at least it's incomplete. The body responds differently to different foods. They might have different effects on various hormones (e.g. the ones that regulate hunger), and they might be broken down and redistributed in different ways. In one study (Kekwick and Pawan), three groups of people were put on 1,000 calorie diets of 90% fat resp. 90% protein resp. 90% carbs. The first group lost 0.9 lbs / day, the second group lost 0.6 lbs / day, and the third group gained 0.24 lbs / day. (I don't know to what extent the study controlled for exercise but I think it's safe to assume that the difference in the amount of exercise that each group did wasn't large enough to explain these results.) As Tim Ferriss puts it in The 4-Hour Body:

The creator of the "calorie" as we know it, 19th-century chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater, did not have the technology that we have today. He incinerated foods. Incineration does not equal human digestion; eating a fireplace log will not store the same number of calories as burning one will produce. Tummies have trouble with bark, as they do with many thi

... (read more)

[-][anonymous]12y110

I'm heartened that your comment is so well-liked. I made the same point a year or two ago and got back a bunch of nonsense about how the second law of thermodynamics cannot be violated.

5Qiaochu_Yuan12y

It's interesting that the second law of thermodynamics is what people use here. As long as your metric is losing weight, the relevant physical law is conservation of mass, and starting from conservation of mass helps clarify the issue enormously, I think. (Apparently the mechanism by which burning calories actually causes you to lose weight is exhalation of carbon dioxide. I feel like I knew this once, but forgot and only very recently relearned it.)

2A1987dM12y

Probably a brain fart for the first law?

2drethelin12y

Carbon Dioxide and water are the two main byproducts of fat metabolism, which made me really happy to learn because it basically killed my worries about focusing on bowel movements. You literally can sweat the fat away!

1Shmi12y

Probably not as much as excreting all the unprocessed food from the other end.

2drethelin12y

That's not true. Most of the material in bowel movements was never in your fat to begin with.

2Shmi12y

Indeed not from burning calories, sorry. However, it still has to be subtracted from the intake, just like the amount you exhale, so reducing absorption is just as important as increasing burning.

0Qiaochu_Yuan12y

Is this actually true? Do you have a citation for this?

0Shmi12y

Actually, I could not find any data online on the food energy utilization in the small intestine in humans and on the factors affecting it. Apparently the obvious ways to prevent absorption, like laxatives, don't really work in the long term.

0DerBerggeist12y

I don't think so, because calories are a unit of energy, so a simple calories-in calories-out model would necessarily model energy balance as energy intake (through food) and energy expenditure (through body maintenance and activity). Your thermodynamic/energy balance is what would ultimately determine either the anabolism or catabolism of different tissues (a more complex calories-in calories-out model, rather than the simpler one mentioned, would have the greatest explanatory power, I imagine. Metabolic rate is under hormonal control, hormones interact in complex ways, and intake of different foods and different activity patterns can alter hormone expression. A calorie-budget model incorporating varying hormone expression/sensitivity, genetics [for both little things like minute differences in receptor molecules and bigger ones like hyperthyroidism], and different metabolic pathways used [as dictated largely by the previous two], would be pretty accurate, I reckon). Weight can also be stored as different things, which is why it's not the best proxy for the success or failure of a "diet". Different substances (like fat or muscle or glycogen or water) have different energy densities, so not all changes in weight signify the same thing (presumably, a "dieter" wants to lose fat. Drinking a gallon of water might cause his weight to rise beyond where it was a month ago, but that does not mean that his "diet" has been shot, or that he has gained fat). A study that looks only at weight change and not change in body composition under different conditions would enormously simplify what that weight represents -- in the study Qiaochu_Yuan mentions, 90% fat diets might have gained fat and lost muscle, water, and glycogen, resulting in a net weight loss, where the 90% carbs group gained muscle, glycogen, and water, and lost fat, resulting in net weight gain. The second case is obviously preferable to "dieters" than the first. (what I suspect happened in the study is that the

3Qiaochu_Yuan12y

I don't understand what you're disagreeing with. Is it "as long as your metric is losing weight, the relevant physical law is conservation of mass"? Because that seems obviously true to me. What you seem to be arguing is that your metric shouldn't be losing weight, which is reasonable, but you're not disagreeing with me.

4DerBerggeist12y

Huh, I think I read your comment too quickly and missed the "as long as...: qualifier and then started replying and went off on a tangent and forgot what the original comment was. Hah. My bad. Also didn't notice your name, hence my reference to you in the 3rd person. Yeah, weight's not the best metric to use without taking into account body composition. Oh wait, I think I figured it out. I'd combined your post and paper-machine's in my head, so I thought the simple calories-out-calories-in model in the highest level post being the thing referred to by discussion of conservation laws.

0[anonymous]12y

I don't understand what the first sentence is disagreeing with.

5wedrifid12y

I noticed the same difference in response myself and was similarly pleasantly surprised.

0MrMind12y

Due to the evolution of general sensibility or the Karma power-law?

0[anonymous]12y

No idea. Probably just random chance. The parent of Qiaochu's comment is now at zero, so "evolution of general sensibility" is slightly less likely.

6Sarokrae12y

I noticed I was confused. This doesn't seem consistent with the results of the Minnesota Starvation/Semistarvation Study. I went to Wikipedia. My prior consider it quite ludicrous that you can gain weight eating at a 50% deficit, no matter what your macros. The criticisms seem reasonable enough to explain the effect. Note that the link in the citation claimed that when told to cut out carbs and eat as much protein and fat as they liked, "In all subjects, there was a reduction in calories ranging from 13% to 55% during the time they were consuming the low-carbohydrate diet."

4Qiaochu_Yuan12y

Thanks for looking this up! Regrettably, I did not notice that I was confused.

1A1987dM12y

So long as your diet isn't nearly that lopsided, IME (YMMV) the calories-in calories-out is a more decent first-order approximation than many people realize. See also The Hacker's Diet. Second-order effects exist, but they're second-order effects.

5[anonymous]12y

That's basically the point. Places way too much focus on losing weight. See parent; losing weight by losing muscle mass isn't desirable. Your claim here hinges on the presumption that CI and CO are the only first-order effects, which is almost certainly false. Age, body fat proportion, maximal oxygen uptake, etc., are plausible candidates that I've seen in mathematical weight models.

1Sarokrae12y

In my experience, these tend to be taken into effect when calculating the "calories out" part of the equation. By what mechanism were you thinking that these mattered, that's not "calories out"?

2Decius12y

Calorie use is not constant, and varies with calorie intake and type, among other things.

2MrMind12y

Sure, but as you probably know, calories eaten are stored into multiple deposits, depending on various internal and external factors. If the availability of those deposits varies, it might not be so easy to deplete most of the calory intake, short of completely starving oneself.

0ikrase12y

Plus you also have to deal with massive willpower problems.

[-]jooyous12y50

"How do I find out how a particular person thinks/feels about a particular subject/issue/situation?" Ask them.

I'd call this an 80% solution because sometimes they don't quite know (and even more rarely, they deliberately lie), but it's still wayy better than not asking in most cases.

[-]RomeoStevens12y160

Warning: This is worth negative points in many situations.

3jooyous12y

I don't know if I agree. What situations did you have in mind? I can think of a lot of situations where knowing the answer is much more important than "points".

[-]RomeoStevens12y100

Explicitly asking about social hierarchies/status positional moves.

[-]jooyous12y120

Ohh. "Hey friend, do you feel insecure around me because I'm more successful than you?" type questions?

0RomeoStevens12y

exactly.

6jooyous12y

That's a good point; I guess those are hard to ask directly. Though maybe you can still ask a variant of it if you're careful and kick into their abstract reasoning? Maybe something like "Oh my gosh, friend, I feel so insecure around person because they're more successful than me! Does that ever happen to you successful people?" Of course, they might answer the way they wish they could answer and keep acting weird around you anyway. Though, I feel like that's a question you half-know the answer to before you ask. Are there situations where knowing the answer to a status-related question is important for making a decision and guessing wrong has a high penalty?

3RomeoStevens12y

uh...every situation?

0jooyous12y

Sounds like you worry a lot more about status than I do. o_O

[-]Nisan12y101

That's a high-status thing to say :)

2jooyous12y

I probably hang out with mostly similar-status people, but there's got to be a lot of context I'm missing, because I can think of a number of decision questions that don't depend on the answer to "well, is this person I'm with higher status than me?"

2Nisan12y

I just said it because it was funny.

1jooyous12y

I think I am bad at knowing which comment to reply to. ^_^

1wedrifid12y

To the point of being banal and transparent.

3Elithrion12y

I think it depends on the reading. If you read it in a sort of snooty dismissive voice, yes, certainly. But if you read it in a genuinely perplexed kind of voice, it mostly sounds confused.

3jooyous12y

That's why I put the confused-face! I was pretty confused by "every situation" because I can definitely think of some situations where status considerations factor only negligibly into your decision process. For example: you are out with some people and notice your shoe is untied. Do you tie it? Uhh. Does it really matter if your friends are higher or lower status? Maybe if they can't afford shoes or something, but otherwise, not really. I think?

4Kindly12y

It seems like by "status" you mean status within society at large, mainly economic status, while I think most people here are thinking about status within your own social group. So if you stop to tie your shoe and you have high status within your social group, your friends will stop and wait for you; if you have low status, they won't. (You display your assessment of your own status by asking "Hey, wait up, I have to tie my shoe" or by not asking.) There are finer gradations depending on how quickly you tie your shoe: you might hurry to avoid slowing down your friends, which I'm sure has various implications. I'm not saying you should care about any of this; but it certainly could be an issue. If it's not an issue, that could mean one of two things: either you're so high-status you don't even notice these things, or you're not in high school any more :)

3jooyous12y

Oh, that's interesting. I guess I do think about stuff like that but I don't ... usually frame it as a status question. I just think about it in terms of what the people I'm around have a problem with. Like if they seem annoyed that I'm tying my shoes all the time, I try not to do it? Or whether I like the people enough to do stuff for them, for example. Actually, you made me think of a really good example of this and it goes back to the earlier question of whether we should ask people things. I have a bad habit of walking off and not responding during IM conversations! I mostly do it because IM is that sort of casual medium where you can be doing a bunch of other things at the same time. I think most people I talk to don't really care but when people tell me that they're bothered by it, I make an effort to let them know if I'm not gonna respond for a while. But I guess some people might be interpreting it as a status move and therefore not letting me know it bothers them? So maybe the people that I figure are also not responding because they're busy are actually deliberately not responding to also signal status? Oops.

1Sabiola12y

Sounds like he's male. A while ago, I read something in a thread on reddit about women in IT, where a woman complained about women having to prove themselves all the time there. And I was thinking that yes, that sucks; you'd think that after a time, people would recognize that hey, this woman knows her stuff. But then a man asked what was the problem with that, after all, it wasn't like men didn't have to prove themselves with every interaction as well.

6NancyLebovitz12y

There might be a difference in the baselines that men and women have to prove themselves against.

0Sabiola12y

Yes, good point.

3Xahkafka1y

I have a friend who owns a business that they ran for years as a female then transitioned with hormones. Over a short time they appeared very obviously male to everyone they met. He said that people stopped questioning everything he said and just believed him. Like, he would make a reasonable informed statement and that would be it, people accepted it as the truth. I've heard this is a universal experience of transmen, which is interesting as they are often shorter and smaller yet still find this advantage.

1A1987dM12y

My guess: you don't live in a very large city, so most of the people you interact with already know well (cf this), whereas that doesn't apply to RomeoStevens; and/or you are in the hard sciences or similar and he is in the humanities or similar (cf this).

0A1987dM12y

I suspect that depends (among other things) on the wording of the question, the tone of voice, the context and the non-verbal communication. I can't remember such a question backfiring when asked in a ha ha only serious/lampshade hanging way.

7MrMind12y

"Do you want to have sex with me?" Sometimes, just the act of asking changes the answer...

6MixedNuts12y

How to put this delicately... do we have any data on whether this is more likely to change a "yes" to a "no" than the opposite?

9fezziwig12y

My graphs are in another state, but from memory, in 40-ish trials: * About half the time, the encounter ended immediately: either she literally slapped me/walked away/whatever, or the chemistry was too blighted for me to recover. * Most of the rest of the time (~45% altogether?) she said no, but either converted later (e.g. to a date the next day) or turned me down for unrelated reasons. * And then a couple of times she said yes (3 times altogether, I'm pretty sure). There's a lot of fuzz in the numbers and methodology, but 5% conversion was pretty far below my then-average for an otherwise warm, flirty conversation, so I didn't investigate further. Honestly I wouldn't even have done that many trials, except that I knew a fellow who swears by it.

1A1987dM12y

Are you sure they were actually unrelated reasons and not just excuses?

2fezziwig12y

No, of course not. I doubt they were excuses, just because I didn't have any reason to excuse the "just ask directly" strategy, but presumably all those outcomes were influenced a least a bit.

0MrMind12y

I'm more in the range of 10-ish, so I guess that if there's a chance that asking for sex solves the problem of the OPer, it's in the range of 5-7%. Which to me is an anti-solution.

5MrMind12y

Any data? Yes. In my personal experience that kind of question were able to kill flirty and touchy behaviour 100% of the time. Double-blinded, debiased, large sampled data? I don't think, but it might be a fun project for some social scientist out there.

5ahartell12y

There is also the possibility that sex would not have happened anyway but brining it up that that was your intention made them want to distance themselves from the situation. And the possibility that it would have happened if you hadn't asked but only because the flirty/touchy behavior was leading them towards wanting to have sex but asking interrupted the process (this is distinct from the original claim in that the problem wasn't asking but asking too soon).

2MrMind12y

I'm aware, unfortunately there's no way to tell. Asking does seem to lower the frequency, though, at leas as far as I can tell in my cultural environment. That's surely possible. Based on observations in my personal life though I don't deem it much probable... Anyway, the original point was that there are very important situations in which asking for feelings is very bad and quite far from a solution. In this regard, asking too soon to me is a subset of asking, not just an entirely different issue

0MixedNuts12y

My personal experience only contains switches the other way. Maybe I don't ask enough and others don't ask me enough.

2MrMind12y

You mean that asking increases the probability of sex happening? Interesting... I wonder if it's something reproducible or just a cultural artefact.

7MixedNuts12y

How do y'all have sex without asking at some point? Do you just kinda follow a script and try to guess the other person's script from their body language and hope that you get it right enough that they don't have to stop and correct you, and that your default ideas of sex more or less match? And once sex is underway, do you switch to words, or have some other method for requesting things, or just have the same kind of sex every time? Or am I mistaken about what "asking" covers? I'm counting both asking after a makeout session and commencing sex five seconds later, and asking "Wanna meet up five days from now and do these sexual things?" and then initiating those things on the assumption you're working from the same script.

[-]gwern12y180

Comrade, do you enjoy borscht?

0MixedNuts12y

But... at some point you do ask if they are a Soviet spy too!

5gwern12y

If your tradecraft is good enough, you never need explicitly ask. The First Directorate expects its agents to be better, da? That sort of incompetence will get you thrown in the Lubyanka dungeons!

7maia12y

In my experience there are more or less three stages: 1) Flirting without physical contact, or only with physical contact that might be acceptable for an acquaintance (brief touches, possibly friendly hugs) leading up to some kind of asking-out or other fairly direct "are you interested in me" question 2) More overt flirting, possibly later-stage physical contact, possibly leading up to kissing 3) After kissing or similar-level contact, if things seem to be getting hot and/or heavy, body-language-only communication halts. Serious Discussion is had about What Will Happen Next, including sex and/or Future Plans. This is fairly explicit and consists of things like "Do you want this to be a serious relationship?" and "Do you want to do sex act X?" and "I need to tell you about Y." I doubt this is really applicable to anyone else, because our culture doesn't seem to really have a script that is standardized enough for anyone to follow, but it's a script that I like pretty well. I've skipped steps, but more or less always follow the "Talk about it explicitly once physical contact reaches a certain point" part, and I think it is helpful.

6MrMind12y

That's really funny: for the stages I've been experiencing, that's when body-language-only communication begins.

2maia12y

Halts temporarily, I should say. After Serious Discussion is had, it generally continues.

0A1987dM12y

You mean that you explicitly, verbally ask for each step before that?

2MrMind12y

No, only that before it's usually a mix of verbal and non-verbal. After kissing, body-language-ONLY communication begins.

2MrMind12y

I usually just go forward and if a girl is uncomfortable she will stop me. Apparently this is much less awkward than asking directly.

3MixedNuts12y

I'm aware that I'm going in quite a bit more detail than you might be willing to give, but I'm confused. Say you want to receive oral sex. (I don't think that's an uncommon preference.) Do you go through elaborate acrobatics so you can "just go forward" without her actively helping, or is there some nonverbal way to signal you want that (pushing her head down? smoooooth), or once you have tacitly agreed that sex is going to occur can you use words to decide what kind? Say you want something unusual, either for society at large or relative to what you've done before. Do you also just go forward? That seems like it would cause quite a few "Whoa, not that" moments, and a lot of "Um, I may or may not be into what you want to do, but I can't tell what it is" awkwardness. Is she also just going forward with her own script, or only correcting yours when needed? If the former, doesn't that cause confusion and bumping noses? (Maybe being good at reading body language and not so clumsy avoids that.) If the latter, isn't that a lot of corrections (or maybe a full switch back to using words) for her to get what she wants? Or do you do a sort of Designated Control Freak thing where the last person to object becomes in charge? I imagine most of the course corrections will be minor, along the lines of "Slow down, tiger" or "My ears aren't really all that sensitive, kiss my neck instead", but it seems like major ones would tend to be mood-killers. If she asks for X, you can say "Sorry, not into that, but how about Y or Z?" or "Hmm, not sure but I'd like to try"; if she starts doing X when you didn't really expect it, you're more likely (or so I'd guess) to go "Whoa ew no stop" or "Ouch" or "WTF are you doing?", all of which seem hard to recover from. I assume the idea is to notice that she's going for X, and nonverbally redirect her toward Y or Z?

2TheOtherDave12y

I can't speak for MrMind, but typically if I want to introduce novel things into my sex life, I talk about them with my partner when we aren't having sex to see whether there's mutual interest. If there is, I start introducing them. I rarely talk much while having sex, relying primarily on non-verbal communication (which is quite adequate for "is this OK? more of this? less of this? something altogether different?" kinds of negotiations). He's more inclined to negotiate verbally during sex, which is also fine, but not really my thing.

0MrMind12y

I always wonder if it was neurological: if I talk or someone talks too much during sex I lose all the excitement.

0MrMind12y

This. Once sex is a given, words usually can be reintroduced without mood-killing, away from the bedroom.

0A1987dM12y

I wonder whether MrMind's was intended to be a direct quotation or a paraphrase.

2MixedNuts12y

Not precise enough! Do I want to have sex with you right now, after dinner, after you drive me home, next time we see each other, on your birthday, at some unspecified point in the future, after marriage? Are you my boyfriend, my friend with benefits, my date, someone I've been flirting with for weeks, someone I've been flirting with for half an hour, someone I've been talking to but didn't realise there was any flirting going on, a complete stranger? Are we in bed half-naked, cuddling on the couch, at your front door, out on a date, at a nightclub, at a book club, at an orgy, on AdultFriendFinder, on LessWrong? Why are you specifying "with me"?

4Kindly12y

"A potential partner asks you if you want to have sex! How long does it take you to decide?" "Less than a second, sensei!"

0MrMind12y

No more wondering! I'm ok with asking directly ;) Yes, I intended it to be a more or less direct quotation.

3MalcolmOcean12y

If you want to optimize for no->yes, which I presume you do, I would say start with something much less intimate, like kissing. And even then, you'll probably want it to happen when there's already some vectors pointing in that direction. If you ask the sex question out of the blue / too early, then that signals that you just generally have sex on your mind, which in many cases is seen as a bad thing. And depending on tone it can convey lots of other undesirable ideas. There are also (many) situations in which your conversational partner may simply not want to say yes to that question too early, and therefore you don't want to ask the question yet. It's... kind of like inferential distances? If your state of mind is all sexy, but your partner's is not, then it can be weird to just jump suddenly to sex. The difference (I guess) is that unlike just explaining something, there are indeed serious drawbacks (slaps, etc) from assuming the inferential gap is small. In general, I think it's a valuable skill to be able to quickly gauge where someone is on the inference or arousal spectra and respond accordingly. Perhaps separate skills though.

1Izeinwinter12y

Asking out of the blue is highly antagonizing because it transgresses against conversational norms very badly, and this changes the perception of the situation. Basically, from her point of view, the probability that you are either a pickup artist, crazy/dangerous or a psychology student (in decreasing order of likelyhood) just approached unity. None of those three are likely to be fun for her, so bye-bye. It is be possible to clarify the situation without failing social skills forever. - "Are we flirting"? can work, for example.

2MrMind12y

My theory is that it just signals very low social skills, an undesirable feature in general for women.

-2Izeinwinter12y

.. This is bad reasoning. If status was really what women wanted, the vast majority of men would go to their graves without ever getting laid. It is not at all difficult to get a high-status man to sleep with you, after all. Danger avoidance and pleasure seeking suffice to explain the observed facts, so why on earth are you over-complicating your hypothesis ? Simplest Theory: What a typical women wants sexually is a satisfying sex life without becoming a rape or domestic violence statistic. I find this to be a much better fit for observed behavior than bullshit pseudo-scientific theories that postulate enormously complicated drives. How the frack would brainware favoring something as ephemeral as "status" have evolved? And in what way would it be consistently advantageous over "Get laid. Do not get killed"?

7A1987dM12y

Do you feel attracted to all people of your preferred gender by the same amount?

6Desrtopa12y

If we didn't have brainware for favoring status, people wouldn't have a preference for attaining it, or the ability to recognize it, at all. I suspect anyone who's been through an ordinary public school will be able to attest that humans, from an early age, tend to have some degree of motivation to have standing among their peers, and are able to follow cues to determine who has such standing and who does not. If we've established that such apparatus exists at all, it's not a big jump to implementing it in mate selection. I'm going to disagree with Kindly and say that there is a readily apparent advantage here. For most of our evolutionary history, high status would be associated with ability to provide for offspring. A leader who has many underlings paying tribute can much more easily support raising children in safety and abundance than one of the underlings whose resources are being taken in tribute. If we're looking at a culture with really large status differentials, say, Ancient Egypt, a Pharaoh who's already had two hundred kids by various women is still more able to support the raising of a few more than a peasant laborer who hasn't had any children at all yet. We can confirm via genetics that humans alive today have considerably fewer male ancestors than female, because it was rarer for women to go without having any children than men, but men were more likely to have many children by different partners. Reports of sexual activity among men and women support the same pattern today. If both men and women had drives that amounted only to "get laid, don't get killed," we would be unlikely to observe such a pattern. Among animals, organisms with more than a very small amount of processing power tend to implement more complex selection strategies than this. Take, for example, all the herbivores where the males have horns they use to compete with other males over females. Keep in mind that beyond attempting to survive and have offspring, there's a genetic adv

5A1987dM12y

I seem to recall someone mentioning a study concluding that probably only about 40% of men who ever lived had children, compared to about 80% of women.

-1NancyLebovitz12y

However, there's a huge difference between "no children who lived long enough to have descendants" and "no sex".

3A1987dM12y

IIRC it just said “no children”, not “no descendants alive today” (the 80% figure sounds way too large for the latter). Still not quite the same as “no sex”, but given that reliable birth control has only existed for a tiny fraction of human history, they must be quite close.

0NancyLebovitz12y

I don't see how you could tell what proportion of people had ever had children. It might be possible to tell how many common ancestors people have. This seems to be a source for the meme, but it doesn't have a citation. It does mention genetic research, though. By the way, I'd have sworn I saw the thing debunked, which is probably as good evidence as your having seen it somewhere.

2A1987dM12y

I've managed to find the page where I originally saw that claim, and it indeed cites Baumeister's 2007 talk.

1Xahkafka1y

Evolution shapes a lot of behavioral tendencies in us all that we never chose. It's unfortunate that some commit the "naturalistic fallacy" and think that just because something is natural it's a good thing. IS does not imply Ought.

2MrMind12y

Well, I said they're after social skills, not status. And there are others factor involved, for example availability.

2Kindly12y

It wouldn't, but "Get laid. Do not get killed" is a low bar to clear. Once you can do that, your goals may change to finding the best possible partner to get laid with/by (what is the correct preposition here?) and this is where status comes in. As to your other objection: Women also have status. High-status women sleep with high-status men and low-status women sleep with low-status men. (Also high-status men sometimes sleep with other high-status men and so on.)

1drethelin12y

Uh, the same way anything like pairbonding evolved? What about maternal feelings towards children? What about paternal feelings toward children? What about complicated behaviors like nesting, animal mating rituals, and dominance fights among (to pick the first of dozens of examples that sprang to my mind) elk? Status games ABOUND in nature, and mating that isn't just "getting laid" takes place among tons of species, and humans especially. Having a high status man sleep with you isn't anywhere near enough to safely and happily raise children, even assuming you get pregnant. If we ignore your weird ignorance of nature: Social skills do not equal high status. they correlate with high status, but they're not the same thing. Not understanding what is appropriate to say to someone you're trying to get into bed is a sign of foolishness and lack of care far more than it's a sign of low status.

-1JQuinton12y

I don't see a need to separate social skills with pleasure seeking/danger avoidance. Generally, someone with a lot of social skill isn't a rapist, and someone with a lot of social skill would probably have a lot of experience giving pleasure as well. In my experience, women have been more open to me once they've seen that I'm popular with other women. If I were in academia, I would test this by designing a variation of that classic approach-random-women-and-ask-for-sex experiment with one group of males being seen in the company of a lot of women and another group of males approaching alone.

-7jooyous12y

[-]A1987dM12y30

Sleep inertia is solved by sleep cycle-tracking alarm clocks, such as this or this.

1curiousepic12y

Sleep Cycle helped this for me for about a year. I've noticed the effect lessen over the past few months (feeling crappier upon waking than I used to) - but I'm hoping it has something to do with the temperature/season.

2A1987dM12y

Yeah, I was going to mention something about that; now that you remind me... Insomnia may (or may nor) be solved by one or more of: (roughly in order of perceived-by-me importance) making sure the temperature in your room is not too high (or too low), using LeechBlock or something to prevent you from surfing the Web past a certain time, not spending too much time in your room (especially in bed) doing things other than resting (or intimate activities), biphasic sleep (I usually sleep around six hours and a half every night and take a one-hour nap in the afternoon), lots of light/water/caffeine until dinner but very little afterwards, and software that decreases the colour temperature of your display (such as F.lux or Redshift). (I still wonder how could I spend the first two decades of my life having serious trouble falling asleep pretty much all summer nights but seldom in the winter, before it occurred to me that keeping the windows open for a couple hours after sunset to let cooler air in might solve most of the problem.)

[+][anonymous]12y-80

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