I agree getting told to eat less is not helpful advice.  Here is the Facebook post, which I don't think your steelman applies to.

Fair point that I didn't include as much detail as I could.

My belief is that most people react to "the average weight went up over 20lbs between 1980 and 2010" with "wow that's a lot, there must be something really weird going on we need a complex thesis with a scary name" but react to "the average calorie budget per day went up 200 calories" with "wow that's it? I'd expect it to be more given, ya know, everything".

My post was mostly just meant to put the magnitude of the change in perspective for them.

It would have taken me a lot longer than the 20 minutes I spent on the post if I wanted to find sources on the prevalence of low-satiety foods sedentary entertainment to talk about how they're more common. I was trying to nail an effort:usefulness sweet spot

Aren't those types of ads usually pay per click? I've never purposefully clicked an ad* on a site so it's really no different to them if I use an ad blocker

*Not counting things like the front page of steam where I'm coming for the ads specifically

I've always felt weird about my contribution to ads.  Half the projects I've worked on at Microsoft were ads and I'm currently waiting to hear back from hiring committee at Google about working on some different ads for them instead.

I guess the part I'm not sure about is, are the people who purchase something in response to an ad better off?  The only purchase that stemmed from an unsolicited ad I saw was bugging my mom for some Heelys as a kid; but every time I've let an "almost ad" like a friend talking about something convince me to buy something it has always felt like it made my life 0% better and was a waste of money.  I generally notice friends spending a lot of money on things that they grow bored of so quickly and get very little enjoyment out of.  I wonder if ads are pushing behavior that makes people less happy in the end.

Edit: I have had a coworker suggest the most moral thing I could do was stay on the team and intentionally sandbag.  I'm still not sure if she's right.

For me, five hours laying in bed and three hours of sleep is much closer to eight hours sleep than it is three hours. There have been some studies on how much sleep you can replace with meditation and I don't remember the exact conversation rate, but you did say low barrier to entry on comments. When I'm stressing at being unable to sleep, as long as I relax everything and meditate I wake up feeling as good as if I didn't have insomnia issues. Note that it took me a lot of practice to be able to relax everything, you often don't notice some of your muscle tension. It's also an interesting thing to note that I sometimes have rapid involuntary eye movements while doing things which makes me think something sleep like is happening.

I'm finding myself wishing for more resources on picking where to live.  I'm in an uncommon situation: Single.  Enough money to not need to work anymore unless I'm in a high cost of living place so I want to take a few years off.  The only area that I have lots of friends in I already know isn't right for me due to seasonal depression.  Finding the right place to live through my own research will be long having to visit places for long enough to see what they're like but there just doesn't exist super great resources for researching things ahead of time unless I'm missing something.

In related news: I hear Atlanta has a decent dance scene.  Anyone live in the Atlanta area have comments?

I actually think the fun part explains it even more.  I have a buddy I game with all the time.  I always end up better then them.  They ask for help.  I point out something I've identified as a fundamental in the game (the equivalent of aiming/positioning in FPS games, or building workers in RTS games) and some little practice method that I went away and did for 2 or 3 hours one day to get better at that fundamental.  Then, every time, they say "that would make it not fun" and just spam some games.  Because there's a fun inefficient way to practice they just do that instead of the less fun efficient way to practice.

Just to clarify, we're still talking about getting above 3500 when the average is 2500 and pro is 4500?  So, getting to the top 20-25% or so of the game?  What do you find to be the limiting factor on the people stuck below 3500? It's my impression that when we're talking about that sort of rank for a game we're still talking about people who haven't gotten down the basic fundamentals and haven't gotten to the point higher level strategy is super important.  For the equivalent rank in sc2 you can still just pick any random strat you want and work on your fundamentals.  It wasn't till around top 2% I felt the need to learn actual strategy instead of just "spend all your money as fast as possible".  Tons of top20% players would be like "I spent all week practicing this new strategy I saw someone do in the last tournament" but still be floating tons of minerals because practicing spending money faster is boring.

Some general thoughts from a former masters SC2 player, who has also been decently highly ranked at many other games

There was a famous starcraft caster who was constantly being asked how to become a starcraft caster by people who said it was their dream.  He told them all "Go record yourself trying to cast 100 games then send me a message".  Literally only one person took him up on that, and now they're a famous starcraft caster.

My prediction is that people willing to do the work can get good insanely quickly and people who aren't won't.  I think "most people say they are willing to do the work but aren't" explains the vast majority of the phenomenon you call out.  You can train a dedicated person to be good really fast but most coaches find 95% of their clients are people looking to get good quick with no work.  I think being willing to put in that effort is a far more important variable than raw intellect.   If you have someone willing to spend 1000 hours deliberately practicing aiming but isn't smart enough to keep up with the pros when it comes to thinking presciently and can only handle a few very common scenarios then I expect them to get to an obscenely high ranking (much like how "never stop building workers" usually gets you to the diamond equivalent in any RTS game without having to practice any other skills)

I do have limits to how far I'd go.  The impression I have in my head is that the two ways to jump in line are 1) malfunctions where they have to give them away or throw them away 2) areas where the demand is so low that they're having to choose fairly lax rules or throw them away.  My hope is that there's a way to get a vaccine that wouldn't have gone to anyone truly in need without having to do anything particularly illegal