Link to those results: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/
I've been basically lurking this site for more than a year now and it's incredible that I have actually taken anything at all on this site seriously, let alone that at least thousands of others have. I have never received evidence that I am less likely to be overconfident about things than people in general or that any other particular person on this site is.
Yet in spite of this apparently 3.7% of people answering the survey have actually signed up for cryonics which is surely greater than the percent of people in the entire world signed up for cryonics. The entire idea seems to be taken especially seriously... (read 322 more words →)
Do you disagree with any matters of fact that I have asserted or implied? When you try to have a discussion like you are trying to have, about "logical necessity" and so on, you are just arguing about words. What do you predict about the world that is different from what I predict?
I agree that low carb diets are an effective means of weight loss relative to low fat diets for people in the aggregate. I do not agree that they are in the aggregate better for reducing mortality than DASH, and I think my personal health is optimized by eating whole grains, fruits, vegetables, low fat dairy, and lean protein and avoiding all else.
The reason I rejected the utility function and why I rejected this argument is that I judged them useless.
What would you recommend people do, in general? I think this is a question that is actually valuable. At the least I would benefit from considering other people's answers to this question.
This pattern-matches exactly to everything else conspiracy theory related I have ever read, and by that I mean it misinterprets the relative incentives. You speak of organizations that apparently face financial loss if they turn out to be wrong, but you provide no convincing reason for why they would lose funding if they revised their positions due to new evidence. You also don't mention the huge profits an organization would surely make if it provided compelling evidence for how to actually lower the risk of the largest cause of death in the United States. In particular:
-I'm not going to read a book rather than reading the results of randomized, controlled trials or meta-analyses of many such studies.
-You say you "could point to studies." Then do it.
This line of discussion says nothing on the object level. The words "altruistic" and "selfish" in this conversation have ceased to mean anything that anyone could use to meaningfully alter his or her real world behavior.
It doesn't seem to me that this post actually makes any coherent argument. It spends a fair amount of words using seemingly metaphysical terms without actually saying anything. But that's not even the important thing.
Is this post supposed to increase my happiness or lifespan, or even that of someone else?
If this is article is actually correct, representative, etc. then the only thing it says to me is that the entire field of self-help is completely worthless, so I am going to actually operate under that assumption and just do what I want.
By listing those "suggestions," you are causing people at least one person to try to use them even though they are in my judgment largely worthless or at least not worth the time and effort required to try to adopt them (this judgment means little compared to actual evidence of their relative effectiveness, but since I haven't seen any it will have to suffice as a prior). I have also seen no plausible argument here that this type of bias actually causes unhappiness, and so I therefore care nothing about it.
So the normal chain of events here would just be that I argue those are still all subgoals of increasing happiness and we would go back and forth about that. But this is just arguing by definition, so I won't continue along that line.
To the extent I understand the first paragraph in terms of what it actually says at the level of real-world experience, I have never seen evidence supporting its truth. The second paragraph seems to say what I intended the second paragraph of my previous comment to mean. So really it doesn't seem that we disagree about anything important.
This is reaching the point of just arguing about definitions, so I reject this line of discussion as well.