Current prior: nothing has helped so far, so the odds of something she missed ended up being useful is pretty low.
This assumes she's good at sifting through the massive expanse of information available, and good at implementing the suggestions therein. These are two extremely questionable assumptions. Knowing nothing about her except that she has severe fibromyalgia and that she's the friend of a frequent poster on LW--two factors that hardly seem very relevant, and I'd put the likelihood of those two assumptions holding up to be very low. Quite bluntly, most people have no idea what's really out there. The Internet is a vast space.
All possible conventional and alternative medicine? I doubt it. This is a mind-destroying sentence if I ever saw one. I'd suggest re-wording it to "she's tried a ton of different approaches both from conventional and alternative medicine".
First thing to be said: Fibromyalgia is one of those health issues where there are no widely adopted hypotheses for the base mechanism at work. This means, quite simply, that there is little hope for targeting it specifically. It's not a case where e.g. your lips are chapped and your knuckles are splitting, and ...
Alcohol causes temporary loss of motor control and some brain functions, and this is exactly the point. Any mistakes can be blamed on 'being drunk', and thus people are able to cast of the shackles of social inhibition, and enjoy themselves more unimpeded. Our society is rather oppressive when it comes to making mistakes or looking 'low status' in normal situations, so alcohol is the perfect way for many people to compensate, and allow themselves temporary spans of time where they're less afraid to make mistakes or look incompetent (and I would argue this ...
I've read a decent number of your posts, and it seems a bit out of character for you to generalize so heavily, and use all caps to describe everyone on LW as having a sentiment similar to, "Doctors are incredibly stupid and just by knowing about this one study I can totally outdo all of them."
I know you don't really mean it literally, but it may be worth pointing out that that sort of thing is just another one of those epistemically hazardous and unhygienic habits that should be done away with.
What, you didn't think doctors had medical myths too? Although Yvain seems to have voided your particular example, it should be pointed out that there are a ridiculous number of doctors in any first-world country, and based on what we know about the sanity waterline it seems absurd to assume anything other than, "Most of them are probably rather irrational."
I would define it as something like, "The course of action one would take if they had perfect knowledge." The only problem with this definition seems to be that one's utility function not only defines what would be the best course of action, but also defines what would be the second best, and third, etc.
I would say "utility function" takes all possible actions one could take at each moment, and ranks them from 'worst idea' to 'best idea'. A coherent agent would have no disagreement between these rankings from moment to moment, but agent...
While I sympathize with you, I think you should decrease your threshold for apparent difficulty of problems.
Along with what I just posted, I should also mention that I did say these two lines:
...at the most fundamental, there's nothing to the task of figuring out one's terminal values other than simply figuring out what sensory patterns are most 'enjoyable' in the most basic sort of way imaginable, on a timescale sufficiently long-term to be something one would be unlikely to refer to as 'akrasia'
It gets somewhat confusing when you factor in [...] akrasi
For example, you should be able to choose between things that will make no sensory difference to you, such as the well-being of people in Xela.
This is an example of the sort of loose terminology that leads most people into the fog on these sorts of problems. If it makes no sensory difference, then it makes no sensory difference, and there's nothing to care about, as there's nothing to decide between. You can't choose between two identical things.
Or to be more charitable, I should say that what seems to have happened here is that I was using the term &qu...
When you say "values", do you mean instrumental values, or do you mean terminal values? If the former then the answer is simple. This is what we spend most of our time doing. Will tweaking my diet in this way cause me to have more energy? Will asking my friend in this particular way cause them to accept my request? Etc. This is as mundane as it gets.
If the latter, the answer is a bit more complicated, but really it shouldn't be all that confusing. As agents, we're built with motivation systems, where out of all possible sensory patterns, some pre...
As far as I can tell, "wisdom" is just a word that refers to the sort of knowledge that (1) defines the person being described as high status, and (2) is the result of extensive experience. When I imagine someone as "wise", I think of the person looking rather eminent, and most likely sort of old simply because long stretches of experience require long stretches of living--that is being at least somewhat old.
...So we know that many smart people make stupid (at least in retrospect) decisions. What these people seem to be lacking, at least
I'm surprised as well. I expected to be downvoted to -2 or so pretty quickly, and stay around there.
As for your disagreements, I should stress that what I said is perhaps the absolute most important thing for the average person with a health issue like that to hear. All too many people get hung up on trying to target the problem specifically, when they're dealing with an issue where doing so is not practical. Day after day, they ask, "What causes fibromyalgia? What are the new treatments suggested for it?" They remain fixated on these questions, ... (read more)