I don’t really know enough about metabolism to say why his example is wrong, but I will say that I lost 30 lbs by counting calories, at pretty much exactly the rate that the calorie-counting predicted, so I’m gonna have to say his first-principles reasoning about why that’s impossible is probably wrong
First you take some food in. Then you apply the Krebs cycle. Then you suddenly learn a lot more about organic chemistry. Then things start getting into the funky. What’s hard? :sarcmark:
But you already lost Yud right after step 1, so you’ll have an edge up either way
Counting calories and abiding by your commitment to eat fewer of them is hard, hard enough that while it worked for me I can’t just recommend it to everyone. Like yeah no shit eat less food. It’s really hard to admit that there are limits to what people can do with willpower alone, especially if you live in a subculture where you think that being galaxy brained should allow you to do literally anything. There must be some reason, any reason, besides people not being fully 1000% in control of their actions.
Yeah, it’s definitely really hard. The hard part is not “knowing that eating less food will make you lose weight,” it’s actually doing the thing without suffering from willpower failure. But, even given that, Yudkowsky seems to be arguing here that eating less calories won’t make you lose less weight, because such a simplistic model can’t possibly be true (analogizing it to the silly idea that eating less mass will make you lose weight.)
However, uh, his conclusion does contradict empirical reality. For most people, this would be a sign that they should reconsider their chain of logic, but I guess for him it is instead a sign that empirical reality is incorrect.
I don’t really know enough about metabolism to say why his example is wrong, but I will say that I lost 30 lbs by counting calories, at pretty much exactly the rate that the calorie-counting predicted, so I’m gonna have to say his first-principles reasoning about why that’s impossible is probably wrong
He’s just… choosing to ignore that different foods have different calorie densities? I don’t know this is a mess
Look it’s really simple
First you take some food in. Then you apply the Krebs cycle. Then you suddenly learn a lot more about organic chemistry. Then things start getting into the funky. What’s hard? :sarcmark:
But you already lost Yud right after step 1, so you’ll have an edge up either way
Counting calories and abiding by your commitment to eat fewer of them is hard, hard enough that while it worked for me I can’t just recommend it to everyone. Like yeah no shit eat less food. It’s really hard to admit that there are limits to what people can do with willpower alone, especially if you live in a subculture where you think that being galaxy brained should allow you to do literally anything. There must be some reason, any reason, besides people not being fully 1000% in control of their actions.
Yeah, it’s definitely really hard. The hard part is not “knowing that eating less food will make you lose weight,” it’s actually doing the thing without suffering from willpower failure. But, even given that, Yudkowsky seems to be arguing here that eating less calories won’t make you lose less weight, because such a simplistic model can’t possibly be true (analogizing it to the silly idea that eating less mass will make you lose weight.)
However, uh, his conclusion does contradict empirical reality. For most people, this would be a sign that they should reconsider their chain of logic, but I guess for him it is instead a sign that empirical reality is incorrect.
It turns out that thermodynamics works!