If you could you might as well just register for the service and use it legally. It's not like any of those biology-as-a-service companies evaluate what their customers synthesize for pathogenicity.
I'd say readers of Less Wrong are at least a standard deviation better off in life expectancy then what you get by just looking at age and sex (consider zip codes, income, race, substance abuse, risk-seeking etc.)
Hey. You might have had this question answered already but just in case: they don't have housing or dorms. But they do have room and allow you to put up a cot or inflatable mattress and sleep there for the duration.
Truth-telling seems clearly overrated (by people on Less Wrong but also pretty much everyone else). Truth-telling (by which I mean not just not-lying but going out of your way and sacrificing your mood, reputation or pleasant socializing just to say something true) is largely indistinguishable from "repeating things you heard once to signal how smart or brave or good you are. "
Truth-seeking as in observing and doing experiments to discover the structure of the universe and our society still seems incredibly important (modulo the fact that obviou...
What is meant by heretical?
Chris covered a lot of things. Re getting accepted, I think you'll be okay. You're ahead of where I was and I can tell you're smart. Do the prep work they give you, do some project Euler problems. I don't think you have to do the challenges in Ruby, but knowing at least one language well will help.
If you are accepted I strongly recommend a) Going to SF, not NY. The job market is better and I suspect the instruction is as well. B) If you don't mind too much: stay at App Academy (2016 edit: they no longer allow this). It isn't comfortable but you'll greatly...
Hey Jayson. What's your programming background?
......I think that's misleading. While smokers like and presumably enjoy the relief cigarettes provide from cravings, I doubt that at reflective equilibrium they'd want to be smokers, or would approve of their smoking. When samples of smokers in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia were surveyed, about 90% agreed with the proposition that if they could live their lives again they would not start smoking, and a clear majority (67% to 82%, depending on the country) reported an intention to quit within the next year. In Gallup polls, most US smokers say they b
As someone who occasionally smokes while not being addicted to it: it is definitely enjoyable for people.
Yes, other drugs are not unmitigated evils either. I've heard heroin is a 1000 times better than sex. The fact that it will eventually kill you and likely ruin your family life doesn't change that. I think alcohol and caffeine probably come out on the positive side of the ledger while most don't. But it is hard to say.
A lot of industries are going to look really bad if you only score one side of the ledger. Given that a huge number of people continue to smoke and enjoy it, despite knowing the negative implications for their health it seems reasonable to assume that tobacco companies supply the world with a great deal of utility, in addition to the lung cancer.
Enjoy it? Or want it because they're addicted? What we want and what we enjoy are not guaranteed to be aligned.
App Academy was a great decision for me. Though I just started looking for work, I've definitely become a very competent web developer in a short period of time. Speaking of which if anyone in the Bay Area is looking for a Rails or Backbone dev, give me a shout.
I don't know if I agree that my decision to do App Academy had a lot to do with rationalism. 4//40 is a high percentage but a small n and the fact that it was definitely discussed here or at least around the community pretty much means it isn't evidence of much. People in my life I've told about it have all been enthusiastic, even people who are pretty focused on traditional credential-ism.
Does Patriarchy explain the left tail too?
App Academy is live-work in San Francisco: meaning lots of people bring air mattresses and stay in the office and get a gym membership to shower. My understanding is that they are working on making the NYC office live-work as well.
This back and forth is delightfully ironic given the micro-reactionary content of Well-Kept Gardens.
FYI, I'm going to keep citing him.
Also, there is no particular reason why learning that a group's average IQ is a standard deviation lower than you thought before should cause a decrease in your sympathy and empathy for that group. I see no one in that camp saying "How can we use this information to optimize charities?" which is the obvious first question if you care about the people you're talking about. Why would a fact about an innate feature that people can't control shrink your moral circle?! I'm sure there are exceptions, but it is eminently clear reading reactionary blogs just who they care about.
The problem isn't the word. If you describe a policy that meets the official definition, but don't use the word people still hate the thing you're talking about and know it is called eugenics.
People actually call things that are less controversial than actual eugenics, "eugenics". E.g. Project Prevention.
I would enthusiastically answer yes to both questions. The first is a million dollars for 35 minutes of moderate discomfort. The second signals that I'm both tolerant and confident in my heterosexuality. I don't even have to ponder this.
It gets more interesting as the price comes down and I would have clarifying questions if we wanted to determine the exact level, and the answers would probably be different. I don't know how common my answer is, but I suspect very common among my demographic cohort (white, urban, mid-twenties, of the liberal tribe). A rationalist friend recently gave his price as $200, which would be too low for me.
That you would say this tells me that your picture of how mainstream science works and the merits of Taubes' critique is even more distorted than I realized.
That was fun, but seriously. I posted it precisely because the nonsense about sat fat causing heart disease is one of Taubes biggest cudgels against nutrition science and it's something many experts are now admitting the medical establishment has been wrong about for decades. I'm confused how you came to a conclusion about Taubes without looking into it. It's probably what he deserves the most credit ...
Not "unfair" just not relevant to whether or not he is essentially right.
You quotes from mainstream sources certainly indicate that the nutrition science community is familiar with the diverse factors that can lead to obesity-- but that's not surprising and wouldn't be surprising to Taubes. The issue has never been that the mainstream refuses to recognize that heredity, medications, hormones and altered metabolism can contribute to individuals being overweight. The issue is that these facts contribute almost nothing to the medical and nutrition authorities response to individuals trying to lose weight or to the world's growing...
The CDC diet and nutrition website at this very moment says:
Diets high in saturated fat have been linked to chronic disease, specifically, coronary heart disease. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 recommend consuming less than 10% of daily calories as saturated fat.
There is meaningful disagreement between those positions, but none of them dispute conservation of energy.
No. I'm taking issue with his misrepresentations of what they were saying.
I don't see outright misrepresentations. I see a focus on what Taubes thinks they did wrong.
Agreed. So why are you defending him?
Because everyone fails Less Wrong's standards for argument and discussion. Everyone here could spend 24 hours a day pointing out dark epistemology in the writings of public intellectuals and we would always have more work to do. If you're going to target a particular person it doesn't seem worthwhile unless the central content of the persons's work ...
Because everyone fails Less Wrong's standards for argument and discussion...
Let me put it this way: if I found distortions as bad as Taubes' in an article or book I'd previously been citing or recommending to people, I'd stop citing and recommending it.
Case in point: I recently won a $500 bet about whether or not refined sugar was at the base of the food pyramid.
So that's an interesting data point. If this is a common view among paleo/low-carb people than I would certainly agree that Taubes is to blame.
Sure, but its the focus of this particular less wrong thread. Throughout the book, Taubes style is to present his information as outside of the mainstream when much of the time, its right in line with the mainstream.
I didn't get this impression about his position on sugar from his books. Never thoug...
Taubes actually agrees with mainstream nutrition on this, but misleads his reader into thinking the opposite.
I think that a) Taubes probably wants a more aggressive anti-sugar stance than, say, the government has taken. And b) his readers aren't actually being misled-- they know what the mainstream dieting advice has been.
To be fair to Taubes, I think its largely a ploy to sell books (everyone wants the secret information, not the standard), and if people find it useful to absorb that message, more power to them.
Sugar is one chapter in his first b...
Although you claim that it was done simply to "to explain to you why I'm not going to debate the subject with you," you said nothing about that in your earlier post.
Back one more post:
And precisely how I might disagree with those definitions isn't important since you and I aren't going to have an extended conversation about this. If you're curious you can read the discussion I'll have with Chris.
I was trying to be polite...
...I will -- it's pretty obvious why you keep trying to shift the exchange away from your earlier claim about the clari
Taubes is critical of the government for failing to say or do more about sugar. You seem to take issue with the fact that he doesn't give mainstream nutrition authorities props when they don't screw something up. Yes, I suppose the FDA could have encouraged people to consume more high fructose corn syrup and good on the government for not doing that. Taubes is a polemicist. He's taking a side in a debate. He is not a rationalist-- and he is using arguments as soldiers. He's also constrained by popular science book length limit.
I'm sure the direct content ...
Taubes is critical of the government for failing to say or do more about sugar.
Except he doesn't even acknowledge what they did say about sugar, and portrays their recommendations as a mirror image of the Atkins diet.
You seem to take issue with the fact that he doesn't give mainstream nutrition authorities props when they don't screw something up.
No. I'm taking issue with his misrepresentations of what they were saying.
Taubes is a polemicist. He's taking a side in a debate. He is not a rationalist-- and he is using arguments as soldiers.
Agreed...
I think the point is that the mainstream nutrition is just as against refined sugar as it is fats (they are in the same area in the pyramid). Taubes actually agrees with mainstream nutrition on this, but misleads his reader into thinking the opposite. Taubes and mainstream nutrition largely AGREE, but Taubes paints himself as a contrarian. To be fair to Taubes, I think its largely a ploy to sell books (everyone wants the secret information, not the standard), and if people find it useful to absorb that message, more power to them.
As an anecdote, when ...
An ad homenim is an attempt to tarnish a person's position by criticizing the person. I'm not doing that at all and if anyone else is unable to a definition by googling they can ask me and I'll point that in the right direction. I brought up my opinion on you as a poster to explain to you why I'm not going to debate the subject with you.
But by all means, take my response as a concession. You're victorious and have successfully show Gary Taubes position to be unclear.
So I don't take the weight gains from a high-carb diet to be directly analogous to a diabetic injecting insulin. Mainly, I'm talking about artificial insulin injection here just as a simply rebuttal to the notion that weight gain/loss is entirely about eating too much/ not exercising enough. People naturally tend to underestimate how much biochemistry influences decisions, mood and personality. It's a product of lingering Cartesian mythology.
That said, most of what I've seen on insulin and leptin resistance emphasizes peak insulin level in the minutes to ...
I don't think weight gain from insulin treatment has anything to do with the diet and exercise decisions people make. Obviously, as a matter of fact they take in more calories than they burn.
What's weird is that agriculture-- or at least the modern food system apparently also makes it much easier for low-status people to get fat, even when their children are starving -- pdf.
The whole thing confused me, but the edit helps a bit. There is nothing particularly wrong with "Calories in, calories out" it just fails to illuminate anything at all which is why it's a bad response to make to any claim about the effects of diet. It also, as a practical matter leads to people thinking about their size as the result of a system where their best control levers are how much they eat and how much they exercise. If trying to eat less and exercise more is a bad way to try to lose weight then attacking the model as simplistic (despite...
Basically all hunter-gatherer societies, as far as I know.
Again, huh? All of your replies in this thread sound like they're replying to a position I haven't taken.
Why does it happen?
Well that's what insulin does. It's the hormone that mediates growth in adipose cells. If a person has broken insulin regulation (aka diabetes) and then you start injecting them with the stuff there is a good chance they'll get fat (the effect of insulin is a little more complicated than that, such that people react differently-- obesity has a significant genetic component).
There are a lot of known hormonal and metabolic disorders that can cause obesity. They don't make up a very significant fraction of people who are obese in the mod...
Not buying what? I'm just explaining the position and asking what you find incoherent about it.
So people undergoing insulin treatment (for example) get fatter because they start overeating and stop exercising enough?
But anyway, you seem to be saying that, according to Taubes, if you simply avoid eating refined carbohydrates, you can eat other foods ad libitum and avoid obesity. Is that pretty much it?
Yes.
Also, could you define the phrase "refined carbohydrates" for me?
No. There are adequate definitions that are easily googleable. And precisely how I might disagree with those definitions isn't important since you and I aren't going to have an extended conversation about this. If you're curious you can read the discussion I'll have with Chris.
Taken literally, this is false. Children voraciously isn't literally an epiphenomenon of their growth. If it were, children would still grow regardless of how little they eat. But in fact, not eating enough when you're a kid stunts your growth.
It is literally true. Notice the tense. It's not an effect of their growth it's an effect of their being something that is growing -- having a hormonal system that is aligned toward increasing size.
My current view is that weight loss (or gain) is simply (calories eaten - burned).
This is like saying that the success (or failure) of a product is simply (revenue - cost). Or that the key to winning a sporting contest is to score more points than the other team.
Yeah, I was trying not to pull you ahead. But dealing with the big picture is more my style.
Taubes certainly does say things that seem to suggest that, but what it would even mean for that to be true?
I think he says it pretty directly actually. Good Calories, Bad Calories:
...When Rony discussed positive energy balance, he compared the situation with what happens in growing children. “The caloric balance is known to be positive in growing children,” he observed. But children do not grow because they eat voraciously; rather, they eat voraciously because t
His position seems plenty clear to me as far as anyone's position is clear: Obesity isn't about pigging out, it's about consuming refined carbohydrates.
Playing gotcha with with quotes that don't hedge enough on extreme cases of caloric intake doesn't seem like the best way to go about this. Maybe concentrate the critique a little more?
Taubes would agree that someone who is overweight necessarily has consumed more calories than they have burned. He's said so in maybe every interview I've ever heard with him. His claim is that that is epiphenomenal to a metabolic condition that prevents people from using fat as an energy source, which is in turn caused by excess carbohydrate intake.
Is there good reason to think he is wrong about that? Or does mainstream nutrition science agree with that view-- despite what they've recommended to people for the last 30 years?
Playing gotcha with with quotes
Perhaps part of the problem is that it's not 100% clear what Taubes' position is. It's arguably in his financial interest to leave his position ambiguous. There is huge marketing value in giving people permission to pig out; at the same time it's easier to defend his position if he doesn't approve of pigging out.
This is the kind of post that requires citations. Quote Taubes describing nutrition science orthodoxy and then quote an authoritative source from the establishment.
I say this not to just demand citations for citations sake-- it's just that it's easy to model how Taubes would respond to this post when all you're doing is asserting things. He would, at minimum, assert the opposite.
I read the title and immediately thought "that's a phrase that's going to bother people".
The fact that people here tend to prefer wordy literalisms to a catchy bit of clear poetic license is really illustrative of Less Wrong's cognitive profile.
I'm sure it goes hand-in-hand with everything I like about the place, but it is a custom that irks me.
Feels like I should tie a bow around this, in memory of old Less Wrong. They got married 6 months ago.
Huh, that sure was an interesting series of comments. Thanks for updating this after so many years and providing a tiny bit of data (and humour).