All of Elizabeth's Comments + Replies

I definitely want that book review.  Assuming the lessons are good, I'm especially interested in how transferrable they are. 

In highly developed fields like music and chess, this meta-analysis also found that deliberate practice was important, predicting more than 20% of success. Yet, it found that deliberate practice explained only 1% of the variance for professional performances such as computer coding or selling insurance.

 

I can't tell for certain from the wording, but this could perfectly accurately describe a situation where practice makes a big difference for an individual, but all top performers are maxing out practice and so the difference between them must be determined by something else. 

2lynettebye12h
Hmm, I'm not certain where you're getting that. I interpreted this as the amount of deliberate practice contributed to success in some fields much more than it did in other fields. (Which could be explained by some fields not having developed techniques and training methods that enable good DP, or could be explained by everyone maxing out practice, or by practice not mattering in those fields.) DP still makes a difference among top performers in music and chess, indicating that not all top performers are maxing out deliberate practice in those areas.  

Looking at the list, I don't see any vitamins or minerals listed. It tests a variety of markers, but not raw micronutrients.

Lightspeed grants were just announced, with a July 6th deadline. They are unusually promising as a source of funding, so it might be worth your while to meet that deadline. 

1df fd1d
so update, after consultation with a research doctor turn out I am not qualified to do it. I need to be either a doctor, a higher ranking nurse or a nurse on research track at least. since I am a nurse on the clinical track so I am not qualified to do the research, bummer. people could still go to their doctor, get their blood check and give the result to me to tabulate, but it does not require me in particular.
3df fd3d
jinx, I have applied already, not sure if I did a good job selling it though. Thanks for reminding me though. still waiting on whether my hospital would be interested in the study.   so far community members I have spoken to said "others" should be interested, but few actually gave me a commitment, I am not pushing very hard though.

I see it did cite a specific vegan hazard ratio, however that ratio is tied with pescetarianism in men, and well above both pescetarianism and 1/week meat consumption in women. If you take this at face value it suggests small-but-present meat consumption, in addition to millk and eggs, are good for women, and fish at least is good for men. 

[Note that the pescevegetarian and semivegetarian categories include unlimited milk and egg consumption]

 

Thank you for the empathy, this has been extremely challenging.

I think something similar to "why the post gave you the impression it did" could be helpful, and I'm even more interested in what you think could be done to convey the important, true points with as little animosity-due-to-misreading as possible

1wilkox4d
Thoughts on why the post gave (me) the impression it did, in no particular order: * 'Trade-offs' is broad and vague, and the post didn't make a lot of detailed claims about vegan nutrition. This makes sense in the context of you trying to communicate the detailed facts previously, but coming to the post without that context made it hard to tell if you were just making an unobjectionable claim [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Lv4NyFm2aohRKJCH/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one?commentId=zLxXHeNY3vouQRTky] or trying to imply something broader. * Some statements struck me as technically true but hyperbolic. Examples: * I was very confused by what you were hoping to learn from an RCT or 'good study', and my impression of your in-office nutritional testing was that you were trying to gather new primary data about vegan nutrition. Because the basic facts about the risk of nutrient deficiencies in veganism seemed uncontroversial, my interpretation of that was that you thought there were other and potentially more significant 'trade-offs' that might exist at the level-of-evidence gap between an RCT or in-office testing and e.g. the introduction to the Wikipedia article on veganism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism]. * The implied model for the relationship between diet and health felt...off, or at least different from my own. I tend to think of diet as an input to a set of homeostatic processes, which are generally robust but can be slowly pushed off-balance by sustained problems and usually fixed with gentle correction. This post seemed to model diet as an all-or-nothing 'logic puzzle' to be either solved or, more likely, failed. Beyond the points above, I genuinely don't know. I'm probably not the intended audience anyway, since that seems to be vegans or potential vegans who don't already know about the risks of nutrient deficiencies. The only thing I can think to c
1kuira6d
Thanks for the reply. I did use "plus." I also tried the "commercial" preview, and it's a bit better, I may end up compromising with it if I can't find a better solution.

I feel like I'm in a bit of a trap here.

I don't think anyone thought "oh, Elizabeth's statement is obviously true but I will argue with her and make obviously false claims" while twirling a mustache. That's not how people work. But I also think my words were extremely clear, and if they're being misread this often there's a systemic problem in the readers. 

I realize this is a big claim; frequent misunderstandings are by default the fault of the author. But a lot of people got it, and I don't know what I could have done to get a different outcome. You ... (read more)

1wilkox6d
That is a frustrating situation. As you note in the introduction this is a charged topic that tends to lead to poor discussions, so you deserve credit for wading in anyway. I'm not sure. The discussion in this comment thread (and [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one?commentId=mpgB9a4Hp3gyA3jaQ#mpgB9a4Hp3gyA3jaQ] others [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Lv4NyFm2aohRKJCH/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one?commentId=zLxXHeNY3vouQRTky#zLxXHeNY3vouQRTky]) has been productive in the sense that I now have a much better understanding of your position and the context. In terms of the original post, I don't know if a one-sentence summary [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3Lv4NyFm2aohRKJCH/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one?commentId=RucegEG4f3xCyZfty] would have changed much; given my impression of the post it might have looked like an attempt to motte-and-bailey. I could try to break down why the post gave me the impression it did, if you think that would be useful.

It feels weird to me that you describe this as "missing context", when the whole point of the post is "I might be missing evidence, please show it to me". The 7DA data is easily the best answer I've gotten so far and it makes me very glad I asked. 

What kind of certainty are you looking for? Can applicants change their mind between being offered money and starting the project? If you're considering multiple projects, should you apply separately for them?

2habryka10d
It is kind of a logistical headache to handle withdrawn application after we figured out a funding allocation, though it's not that bad.  If you do have a lot of uncertainty on whether you will actually want to go ahead with the project (or think it's somewhat conditional on funder enthusiasm), I think it's best to choose the "get a response within 2 weeks" option. That's I think also the best option if you are applying for multiple projects (in which case I would recommend filling out one application that gets processed in the 60-day window, and then some secondary applications that you might pivot to if you get funding within the 2 week window).

This feels very epistemically cooperative, thank you.

The answer is primarily point 1,  although whether that's distinct from point 2 depends on the definition of "widely recognized" .  Which brings me to your question:

in which case I’m still confused why you wrote this post instead of just presenting this information

The answer is that I did present the information, and proactively provided help, and I got pushback that only made sense if people disagreed with "veganism is a constraint on a multidimensional problem". But they would never defend th... (read more)

3wilkox8d
Thanks, this and your comment here [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one?commentId=GjfAp3ovya6MwAaBX] helped a lot to clarify your position and intentions. My initial impression was similar to Natália's [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one?commentId=mpgB9a4Hp3gyA3jaQ], i.e. that you believed something more like point 3. Re. point 2, by "widely recognised" (and similarly for "widespread" in point 3) I meant something like "widely recognised in relevant academic literature/textbooks/among experts" rather than "among people who have ever tried a vegan diet". My impression is that on this definition you wouldn't endorse point 2 either. We may still disagree on the "importance" of point 1, although to be clear I completely support any effort to inform vegans or potential vegans about the risk of nutrient deficiencies. It's probably not possible or worth the effort to resolve this disagreement, but it does make me wonder about: and: Could at least some of these encounters be explained by a similar "disagreement about importance", as opposed to disagreement about the basic facts? That might explain why these exchanges seemed obfuscated or un-cooperative; you thought they were evading obvious facts, while they thought you were making mountains out of (what they saw as) molehills.
2[comment deleted]10d

PSA: if you are vegan, you might not know you are at increased risk of certain nutrient deficiencies; read (this link) to find out more and see your doctor if you have (list of symptoms) or want to get tested

 

I did. I also provided tests and supplement suggestions (none of which, AFAIK, led to anyone resuming animal consumption), and tried to get the ball rolling on vegans helping vegans. I kept getting pushback, public and private, that felt extremely epistemically uncooperative. People did not necessarily outright say "everyone can switch to veganis... (read more)

3Natália Coelho Mendonça12d
That's not true. The Adventist study I cited explicitly calculated the mortality hazard ratio for vegans, separately from non-vegan vegetarians.    (I’ll reply to the questions in your last paragraph soon). 

The Faunalytics data says, at a minimum, 20% of vegans develop a health issue that's cured when they quit. Do you disagree with their data (please elaborate) or not consider that important (in which case, what is your threshold for importance)?

6wilkox12d
I don’t doubt the Faunalytics data. If anything the number seems surprisingly low, considering it comes from self-reporting among people who went on to quit veganism. I’m not sure how to weigh ‘importance’ other than subjectively, but I’ll attempt to at least put bounds on it. As a floor, some number of people experience health issues that are important enough to them that they are motivated to quit veganism. As a ceiling, the health risks of veganism are less important than those of other harms related to diet – for example, dyslipidaemia or diabetes – that increase mortality, given that veganism doesn't seem to increase mortality and may reduce it. My stance at the moment is still more ‘generally confused about what you’re trying to communicate/achieve’ than ‘disagreeing with a particular claim you’re making’. I'd like to close the inferential distance if possible, but feel free to ignore this comment if you don’t think it’s leading anywhere useful. I still don’t understand which of the following (if any) you would endorse: * Many vegans don’t know about the risk of nutrient deficiencies and would benefit from this knowledge (in which case I’m still confused why you wrote this post instead of just presenting this information) * The health harms of nutrient deficiencies in veganism are more serious than is widely recognised * There are serious health harms of veganism other than the risk of nutrient deficiencies that are known but this knowledge is not widespread, or that we don’t know about yet but have good reason to suspect exist

I don't think there's a way to get a representative sample of healthy people (vegan or omnivore) without paying them. People just don't care about the information enough. 

One thing I have toyed with is comparing [% of omnivores with fatigue who have nutritional issues] with [% of vegans with fatigue who have nutritional issues]. My theory is if all other sources of fatigue strike each group equally often, and vegans are more prone to nutrition-caused fatigue, vegans with fatigue should have a higher % of nutritional issues than omnivores with fatigue.... (read more)

1df fd13d
Let's not jump the gun, I'll look deeper into it once I am certain there is huge interest. tbh the main thing I care about is whether those who self-designated as vegans are significantly more likely to be deficient compared to baseline and whether supplement help. Everything else is extra.

Beyond these well-known issues, is there any reason to expect veganism in particular to cause any health harms worth spending time worrying about?

I'm confused- the issues you mention seem both important and, in most cases, extremely easy to fix. If there's a large population that is going vegan without the steps you mention (and my informal survey says there is), it seems high value to alert them to the necessity.

Perhaps you expect this to be caught at regular physicals, but many people don't have those, or their doctors don't think to run the right tests ... (read more)

9wilkox14d
I suspect we have different intuitions as a matter of degree for ‘important’, ‘high value’, and ‘necessity’ here. Despite that, I think we would probably agree on a statement like ‘vegans who are not aware that their diet increases the risk of nutrient deficiencies would benefit from learning about this’. If you had posted something like ‘PSA: if you are vegan, you might not know you are at increased risk of certain nutrient deficiencies; read (this link) to find out more and see your doctor if you have (list of symptoms) or want to get tested’, I would have thought this was a good idea. What confuses me is why you wrote the post you did instead, which seems to be gesturing at a larger problem. As a specific example, in ‘Evidence I’m looking for’, you wrote: While more high-quality evidence on veganism would be valuable in general, I’m confused by what you expect to learn from such an RCT or study. Do you think there is reason to believe there are significant health harms of veganism that we don’t know about yet? If so, why?

I'd want to spend more time with the numbers before committing to specifics, but tentatively I'm delighted my request got fulfilled a month ago without my knowledge.  As a compromise diet I think it's great, I'd be really happy if this became the new EAGlobal standard.

My guess is poultry is easy to give up, nutritionally speaking, unless someone has a serious issue like a red meat allergy. People are weird and variable but there's nothing obvious poultry has that something else doesn't. 

Giving up eggs and farmed fish is harder. My guess is that f... (read more)

2TAG14d
The Wikipedia page says 65% of the global population -- bearing in mind that LI is normal in East Asia -- and 42% in N.America.

I want to say "take all the time you need", but then I remembered I go almost off the grid for July and August, so there's a discontinuity there. I may be able to connect you with funders, although I don't know what the situation is in Australia, and EA money is harder to come by than it was when I started. 

I mean if say 20 EA vegans in Sydney got blood tests and for some reason, none of them has any iron, Vit B12, Vit D deficiency [by some metric] it would be significant evidence contradicting your belief isn't it?

I feel like this skips over the part... (read more)

4df fd14d
RE timeline: no problem, I am happy to wait until September or after, giving me even more time to look into it. I am going to put a feeler out to see if there is any interest in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney, I would not go ahead unless 30 people plan to participate. RE base rate: I can run blood tests on [say 10+] omnivores in the community, assuming Lesswrong/EA community to be homogenous in other aspects aside from the tested diet, [we do have 10-20x the autism/neurodivergent rate compared to general population]. That should establish Lesswrong/EA community-specific base rate [hopefully]. RE protocol: the pool should be anyone from Sydney Lesswrong/EA community I can talk into participating, divided by diet. The result of [how many self-described vegans in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney are deficient in iron, Vit B12, Vit D as found in blood tests [according to so and so metric]? and would supplementation help?] should speak for itself. RE "Real study": yeah, it's nice for me to talk a big game but personally, I am very pessimistic [<30%] that any test is going to be done at all. If nothing else, at least it should raise the problem to the local community consciousness. Personally, I am a big fan [did I say big? I mean huge, humongous] of your past works and found them to be enlightening.  I believe your numbers and my only complaint of your in-office test adventure was that you did not manage to establish the benefit of supplements. Which, if the stars aligned, I hope to remedy this round. I am an omnivore, although I greatly admire those who go on vegan diets for animal suffering. I am only in this to find out what is true and if there's anything we can do about it. My stake is that I care deeply about the community, many of them vegans. If doing vegan causes easily fixable deficiency I would really want to know.

Note for posterity: I've asked Portia to make her responses fewer, slower, and more concise. I'm very happy about her best comments on this post, but the volume, length, and muddledness of the lowest end was untenable. 

While we're here: orthonomal has been doing some defense so I feel like I should note he's a personal friend and not an objective stranger, although I assure you he's not bending his epistemics out of friendship

could you quantify "mostly", and connect this to "omnivores who grew up in an omnivorous culture"?

to be clear- you agree with the stipulation that the diet needs to be well-planned and balanced?

3Portia15d
Yes. But would you say an omnivorous diet does not need to be?

Not to dump a bunch of homework on you, but... could I encourage you to write up vegan nutrition tips and tricks on the EAForum? I think imparting the same nutrition culture hardcore vegans get into the wider community of EA vegans would be extremely useful. 

And while I'm making a wishlist, I think "optimizing your health per unit animal suffering" would be a good blog series. Organ meats (lots of health benefits, few health costs, lower marginal cow production) certainly seem more justifiable to me than chicken nuggets or egg custard.

4lincolnquirk12d
Not who you're responding to, but I've just written up my vegan nutrition tips and tricks: http://www.lincolnquirk.com/2023/06/02/vegan_nutrition.html [http://www.lincolnquirk.com/2023/06/02/vegan_nutrition.html]
2Portia15d
(Long nerd rant ahead, I find nutrition genuinely interesting.) I find it difficult to give general nutrition advice, because good nutrition is such a very individual topic. Eating lots of vegetables is one of the few things with really good support, but depending on the person, they might have huge difficulties digesting them, at which point the benefits become completely outweighed by their constantly digestive issues. I have very bad opinions on high sugar high calorie diets, and know people who do great on low carb, but also people who get absolutely fucked on keto, especially women, and see lower carb lower glycemic index as a good alternative, too. I generally consider fibre and fermentables and wild ferments healthy and very important, but depending on your gut problems, some types can completely screw you. Protein is extremely important, but frankly, the type of people who worry about nutrition often overconsume. Eating a great variety of differently naturally coloured foods is generally a good rule, but if you have serious disease states, you will likely need an elimination diet to get to the bottom of it. The whole idea of particular substances being "easily digestible" or even more so "healthy" very much depends on the individual, and on the quantities - too much of even the healthiest things will kill you. On the other hand, there are a lot of substances that humans do not strictly need, because they can in theory synthesise them, but de facto, you in particular may not be able to. (E.g. I recommend that all vegans supplement algae oil, because humans utterly suck at producing the omega 3 from the precursors you encounter in things like flaxseed, and find it ludicrous for any person in the global North to believe they can synthesise their own D3; but in a lot of people with depression or chronic fatigue, it also makes sense to try to up products that your body ought to be able to synthesise, but may be failing to) But it all depends on where you are, yo

As a tool of data collection to inform expectations around EA vegans as a whole: probably not, the format doesn't deliver that kind of data.

As a tool to get more people tested and well supplemented: I expect that or something like it could be quite helpful. Even though my follow-up rate was bad, the buzz around it motivated many non-participants to get tested and treated. The fewer people currently testing themselves, the more useful I think it is.

I'm happy to provide advising to get this off the ground. 

4df fd14d
I'll look into the actual feasibility of this. May I get back to you in one week?   I mean if say 20 EA vegans in Sydney got blood tests and for some reason, none of them has any iron, Vit B12, Vit D deficiency [by some metric] it would be significant evidence contradicting your belief isn't it? It would help me if you can outline a short sketch [don't spend much time on it] on what you think I am going to do [both to prevent the double illusion of transparency and a type of pre-registration].

When I was vegetarian (for complicated digestive reasons) I met omnivores who were deeply invested in my choice and demanded a bunch of justification and emotional management around it, and it was super irritating. I just wanted to eat my peas in peace. To the extent that's what's happening to you: I'm sorry, yeah, that sucks. People feeling entitled to have your diet meet their standards is bad in all forms. 

But can you live a very healthy, long life while vegan, just like an omni?

 

I worry the following will sound defensive, but it's an important question and I couldn't figure out a better way to ask it.

I agree with what you said here, with some minor quibbles on the margin. I tried very hard to signpost my belief that veganism was not necessarily a big hit to health for most people, and few people eat optimally anyway. Reading your comment and a few others, it sounds like that did not come across in the original post. What could I have done to better convey that belief to you? 

-1Portia15d
Edit: I currently have debilitating pain levels due to a spinal injury, and have been distracting myself with this content, resulting in writing comments increasingly stream-of-consciousness style. I fear my comments have long become increasingly incoherent. Apologies. *** Third: I also think the responses to your text are a bit all over the text, because the overall pragmatic goal/motivation behind the research question remained unclear. Like, when it comes to veganism, having concluded that eating vegan would be much better for animal rights and the planet, in order to make my own diet choices and advocacy, these were things I needed to settle and needed data for: 1. Is it possible for me to live vegan, without compromising my health or happiness significantly? (The data I saw made it plausible enough for me to decide to try in 2009. Actually going vegan and checking my values across 14 years confirmed it, and I found it much easier than expected.) 2. Is it possible for specific person x (say, a friend of mine) to live vegan, without compromising their health or happiness? (Very probably, but depends on the person. Need to listen to them to understand their individual needs and issues to assist them in making a transition to a point they pick for themselves, to e.g. see if we can still find a particular nutrient if they can't digest a particular class of food. But for the most part, again, I found people overestimated how tricky it would be.) 3. Is is sensible for humanity on average to significantly reduce meat consumption? (Definitely yes. Whatever positive role meat may play for some people, the quantities currently consumed are definitely unnecessary and harmful for the planet and health, so advocacy in this direction is likely to promote average health. So getting vegan food into my university cafeteria, or reducing tax breaks for meat producers, is a good idea.) But none of these questions seem
2Portia15d
To follow up after more pondering: I think it is the title. Veganism having "trade-offs, and one of the axes is health" sounds to me like "veganism will necessarily make most people sick in a significant way they should carefully consider before going vegan to see if this is a sacrifice they are willing to make", and that, I would not have agreed with at all. I think for near everyone, the problems are fixable, and that I have not sacrificed my health for veganism in any relevant way. But the specific statements in the text - that a vegan diet can be harmful, if badly done, like any diet; that it isn't necessarily suited for everyone, if that person has a lot of allergies or severe digestive issues; that being careless about your diet, vegan or not, is not a good idea; that while veganism avoids some health issues from excessive meat consumptions, it comes with risks of deficiencies in turn that need to be countered - I would all agree with. I'm in the camp "For the vast majority of people, veganism can be done without relevant harm to their health, while achieving a lot of ethical good. For most people, this is not as hard as they think. Some may even feel better and get healthier, but I wouldn't rely on that, and you should put some thought into changing your diet so profoundly, and do regular blood tests to make sure you haven't dropped something you needed." But collectively, I wouldn't title these statement the way your text was titled. But more as "please get blood tests, folks, nutrition is easy to fuck up and impactful" or "can we please not guilt sick people into going vegan, they have enough shit on their plate without complicating their diet further via restrictions" or "can we please not promote veganism as a panacea, the data does not support this, going vegan doesn't make french fries suddenly healthy" or "B12 and D3, supplement it, people, seriously, how many times do we need to tell you".
-1Portia15d
I think the impression I got from your text is that it is motivated and overshadowed by a profoundly traumatic personal experience (namely, your body consistently rejecting food, and hence ruining your well-being) and the immense frustration when some vegan people witnessing this degree of suffering went "hey, have you considered, on top of all the existing problems, also introducing an additional complication into your diet by cutting out a huge part of the little that somewhat works for you? It is easy, I did it, it is great for everyone!" This was tone death of them. With all the shit you are dealing with, whether it is in theory possible for you to be healthy as a vegan or not, I think it is utterly unreasonable for you to make a situation that is already very, very hard on you even harder. Originally, the definition of "vegan" was "to avoid consuming in a way that harms animals, wherever reasonable." I like this definition to this day. For you, a reduction in animal product consumotion is currently likely not reasonable at all. If you are doing better, and you have the mental and other capacities for it, and want to, I'd be happy to support you in doing so, but getting your health working is clearly more important, and going vegan would entail a significant sacrifice for you that is totally disproportional to the gains. I think you are aware that your experience is not common, which is why you said so - but the big factor it plays in the text gives a different impression to the reader, because presumably, all the cases you have encountered resonated with you, a lot. Hence all the readers who are stressing that for most people, going vegan does not have to entail any meaningful sacrifice in their health, because most people can be perfectly healthy while vegan. But exceptions like you are valid, and important. It also sounds like you have heard from a lot of vegans with what I would consider fringe opinions. When this movement started, people kept saying that

I have attempted to delete this comment for being off topic. I asked veganism's advocates to stick to health and nutritional issues in their responses and while it didn't occur to me to explicitly ask the same of critics, I think that's only fair. However the UI is failing and I'm about to enter some meetings. Please don't respond, I intended to delete it as soon as the option is available. 

I'm looking for much finer gears on this. Some examples would be:

  1. what does "not good for your microbiome" mean? What, specifically, is it hurting? is it encouraging bad bacteria? putting potentially-good bacteria in a bad state?
  2. What are the consequences of whatever it is doing to your microbiome? discomfort? worse nutrient absorption? 
  3. how noticeable are those consequences?
  4. why four hours? what's the curve on eating closer to bed?

People need this information in order to weigh the costs and benefits.

It's true I didn't include any math on why sleep is goo... (read more)

I think this undervalues nod posts. Most people don't hear a good idea once and immediately implement it perfectly. They need reminders, in general and at the right time. Different authors put different spins on posts, a given one may resonate more or less with any particular person. I think the same thing about books that could have been blog posts- the point of the length isn't to convey more information, it's to give the same information more real estate in your brain.

Probably most nod posts deserve less karma than the initial post but not always (sometimes the restatement is better, sometimes it's a new development not a restatement), and less karma doesn't mean they shouldn't exist at all. 

2Adam Zerner17d
Yeah, I definitely hear ya. I agree about those benefits you lay out. Despite those benefits, nod posts still strike me as being generally overvalued, but I'm having a hard time coming up with a crux or a way to make progress on the question "are they generally overvalued?". I think we as well as most people agree on the costs and benefits, but just have different intuitions on how the costs and benefits typically play out.

I agree concerns about short-term fixes reinforcing the problem long term are a very big deal, and that either of the mechanisms you point to could create that effect. But...

[basically all of the following is nullified because you took care to specify sleep was the most important thing. I'm using this as an opportunity to discuss patterns around health advice specifically because you avoided the problems, so it doesn't feel like picking on someone. Which I realize is annoying, and I apologize for that]

There's a pattern in online health advice. Most of it i... (read more)

1Anton Rodenhauser16d
I've read that in multiple sources, e.g. the book "The Gut Health Protocol". The general recommendation is to not eat 4 hours before going to sleep.

I agree that getting a low-effort emoji in response to a lot of good faith effort sucks. But I think that scenario is already pretty well handled with normal replies. There are enough cases that aren't handled well by replies, and might be really well handled by reacts, that I'm glad they're making them. But it's still important to track costs like the one you're bringing up. 

I want a bikeshed emoji so bad and if we had line-level reacts I wouldn't have had to write this comment

4Nathan Young14d
yeah but it would need to look right, maybe we need a 150 person commitee and $10,000 to figure out the right one

I don't see something for "rests on a faulty premise".  There are "obtuse", "locally invalid", and "disagree", but none of these feel right. Possibly line-level reacts will fix this, since you can highlight the faulty premise.

What do you think is the right way to handle someone writing long paragraphs that ignore a point you made in the original post?

3Razied19d
Anyone writing an effortful response to the original post should be presumed to have good faith to some reasonable degree, and any point that you think they ignored was probably either misunderstood, or the relevance of the point is not obvious to the author of the comment. By responding in a harsh way to what might be a non-obvious misunderstanding, you're essentially adopting the conflict side of the "mistake vs conflict theory" side of things. Any comments which aren't effortful and are easily seen to have an answer in the original post will probably just be downvoted anyway, and the proper response from OP is to just not respond at all.  To be clear, I think that the community here is probably kind enough so that these aren't big problems, but it still kind of irks me to make it slightly easier to be unkind.

Sounds like you're suggesting eating those processed, fortified foods? Lots of people avoid those or just don't like them, so knowing they're valuable is important information.

2shminux22d
I suggest (well, my partner does) including those you like as a part of a diverse vegan diet. Oat milk is nominally processed and enriched, but it is not a central example of "processed foods" by any means. There are many vegan options that are enriched with vitamins and minerals to cover nearly everything that humans get from eggs, milk products and meats, most people can find something they like with a bit of trying. Of course, there are always those who are allergic, sensitive, unable to process well, or supertasters that need something special. I am not talking about these cases.

Thanks for filling it out, this inspired me to add an "actively harmful" option to the choices. 

oh no.

Can I ask you to fill out the form, so I get all the data in one place?

5Elizabeth1mo
Thanks for filling it out, this inspired me to add an "actively harmful" option to the choices. 

I can't give that kind of individual advice. For ferritin (the best proxy for cellular iron) I gave some guesses here but those are more about returns to treating very low results. The data just isn't there for finding optimal, and as people have pointed out elsewhere it is definitely possible to go too high. 

Thanks for checking, this was really helpful.

I wonder if this is why the Apollo is so much more expensive than it seems like it should be? Maybe getting vibration smooth even at very low levels is hard and hasn't had the demand to justify optimization yet. 

What an asshole way to ask that question.

Participants represented themselves as wanting treatment. It turns out many did not want treatment enough to go through the effort to get it. I was surprised by the extent of this phenomenon but not its existence, which is why "do people get treatment?" was the experimental question in the first place.

it's been a while since I used an electric toothbrush. My guess is that the head is probably much more intense than the Apollo, but the body might be about right for the lower end (warning: I last used an electronic toothbrush 10 years ago, if they've shrunk this might be less true, but you could insulate it).  I think if you hate the toothbrush body vibration you'll probably hate the apollo. If you love it you might want to stick with the toothbrush, or the baby toys, which I've now tested and don't like because they maintain a constant intensity lev... (read more)

4philh1mo
Nod. I just tried a toothbrush and it didn't really feel like anything, but indeed I don't trust myself to notice small effects. Lovense offers a continuous slider control, but I just checked and it seems like it's actually 20 different power levels. Holding in my hand I could definitely tell the difference between them especially at the lower end. (As in I could tell when it changed from one to the next, not that you could give me one and I could say which it was.) That's a lot more than most vibes IME and might be fine, but I'm not confident. I wondered if that was a limitation of the app but a quick look at the protocol [https://buttplug-spec.docs.buttplug.io/docs/stpihkal/protocols/lovense] suggests not. And what I thought was the scale-down feature doesn't seem to work with local control, so I can't easily test to check that it's actually a scale-down (rather than a simple maximum, or redistributing the lower levels without adding in-between levels, or something) and in any case it would make it a lot more of a hassle to use. So this is less promising than I thought at first :(

A possibly more useful answer:  I started out at maybe 70% of fitbit notification strength, but lowered it over time, and now often need to touch with a finger to check if it's running. 

 I use the Relax setting when I'm going to bed, and restart it if I wake up before I want to. There is a Sleep setting that theoretically lasts longer but weakens over time, and I find if I start at a reasonable intensity it gets too low too fast.

In the morning I'll usually start Rebuild, which is similar to Wake Up but last much longer.

During the day I'll use a few different settings. The names of the settings are guidelines but not 100% accurate. If I'm doing something stressful I'll often use Clear and Focused, because it makes me feel better able ... (read more)

Yeah I think one reason groups go dark-forest is that being findable tends to come with demands you make your rules legible and unidimensionally consistent (see: LessWrong attempting to moderate two users with very strong positives and very strong negatives) and that cuts you off from certain good states. 

My own take is that group houses and meetups sometimes have a flavor of Dark Forest to them, when there's one or more predatory people whose uncomfortable attentions everybody is trying to avoid. I have often seen this happen with men competing for the romantic attention of young women in these settings. The women aren't necessarily trying to hide in the shadows, and the men aren't typically trying to destroy a potential rival as win the woman's attention, but the women do seem to have to figure out ways to avoid unwanted attention from these men. 

&nb... (read more)

4Dagon1mo
I think that's an important insight (though I'm not sure how universal it is).  The Dark Forest effect may be happening at multiple levels.  Not only can't you find the people you expect in the forest, you can't even find the reasons might be hidden or work on better search or attraction methods to find them.  Or even hypothesize well enough to find evidence for hiding vs nonexistence.
2DirectedEvolution1mo
Yeah, I think this is an important explanation for why (in my preferred image), we’d find the faeries hiding under the leaves in the faerie forest. To avoid behavior that’s costly to police, or shortcomings that are hard to identify, and also to attract virtues that are hard to define, we rely in part on private, reputation- and relationship-based networks. These types of ambiguous bad behaviors are what I had in mind when I wrote “predatory,” but of course they are not necessarily so easy to define as such. They might just be uncomfortable, or sort of “icky sticky,” or even just tedious, and not only in a sexual way. The grandstanding blowhard or tireless complainer or self-righteous moralizer also fit the bill. Maybe the word “scrubs” is a better word?
4Viliam1mo
It seems like a scale with "obviously bad" on one end, "annoying but not too bad" somewhere in the middle, and "okay but slightly worse than current group average" on the other end. Sadly, even the last one has a potential to destroy your group in long term, if you keep adding people who are slightly below the average... thus lowering the average, and unknowingly lowering the bar for the next person slightly below the new average... and your group has less and less of the thing that the original members joined or created it for. Kicking out the obviously bad person at least feels righteous. Kicking out the annoying one can make you feel bad. Kicking out the slightly-below-average person definitely makes you feel like an asshole. (It is even more complicated in situations where the group members improve at something by practicing. In that case, the newbie is very likely currently worse than the group average, but you have to estimate their potential for improvement.) Sometimes it can even make sense to reject new people who are actually less problematic than the worst current member, but still more problematic than the average. Just because your group can handle one annoying member, doesn't mean it will be able to handle two. (Also, who knows what kind of interaction may happen between the two annoying members.)

I'm using it at lower settings and for less time, which makes me unafraid of building up a tolerance. But I haven't tried sleeping without it. 

shrug anything with a real effect can do harm you but I can't say I'm worried.

See here for my guess on how it works.

The subjective experience before bed is the lessening of problems I usually encounter while trying to get to sleep, like being stressed or needing stimulation. But it's a matter of degree, not kind; I read less before bed but still some. The bigger difference is in (remembering) waking up less and waking up more rested, and I don't have subjective experience for those because I'm asleep.

There is a minor effect of "feeling time passing", which I like a lot and used try for with very simple music, but I don't think that's the bulk of it. 

The Apollo Sleep setting tapers down but it's much too fast for my tastes, if I start at a reasonable intensity it's undetectable long before I'm asleep.

Load More