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But knowing I’m losing muscle would inform my decision about stopping the cut sooner.
I’ve been sleeping poorly in general lately. Who’s to say tonight’s sleep will be better? It may even get better because I work out today.
But if I still hit PRs while on aggressive cut and having slept poorly, that data point would be all the more meaningful for it.
But this is the first time I’m doing a cut this aggressive for more than just a week. I’m approaching the two-week mark. I know eventually I won’t be able to maintain strength, but it would still be good to know where the cut-off point is, roughly.
That was at maintenance/slight surplus. Now I’m doing an aggressive cut at 1600 cals/day and the body has more reason to keep fat and shed muscle. So time may be of the essence.
True but it’s already been 5 days since my last workout.
I want to go to the gym today but I didn’t sleep well last night.
No because there’s always a finite amount of deeply nested criticisms.
Related Popper reading: ‘Preference for Theories and the Search for Truth’
The rules should say whether AI-generated content is okay to submit or not.
For posterity regarding the most recent bounty on this idea, ChatGPT made me this awesome illustration a while back for my post about the bounty on X:
I’ve just posted the following update on my article linked in the parent idea. The bounty can be closed, at least for now.
Update 2026-09-06
TL;DR: Computational underspecification may have been solved; HTV is still not a description of rationality or of the cause of progress.
Dirk Meulenbelt, Benjamin Davies, and I ran a Veritula bounty worth USD 3,600 to rehabilitate HTV with regard to its computational underspecification. Jad Elmourad came up with a simple idea:
- Prompt the user for two explanations.
- Prompt the user for variants of each.
- Compare the count of variants and rank accordingly (lower count = better).
Unfortunately, the integrity of the discussion of this idea can’t be warranted because of problematic participation in the bounty. As a result, it’s currently not known whether the idea has pending criticisms, ie, whether its advocacy is rational.
That said, the program runs. I’ve tried it out. It offers a simple alternative to the sliders above. It does seem to partially rehabilitate HTV specifically with regard to its previous computational underspecification. In other words, where proponents of HTV used to be unable to explain exactly how to determine how HTV an explanation is, they can now follow the steps above and answer accordingly. They can now rank explanations this way. That helps.
What the program also shows, maybe ironically, is that nobody actually follows those steps in real life. For example, scientists don’t count variants of theories like that. Deutsch is still right about the following: “Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.” (BoI chapter 1; also, the ‘grass cure’ from FoR comes to mind as an example.) So when a theory is easy to vary in this sense, that does indeed mean we can’t form a rational preference for one of the variants, at least not without additional information. But that doesn’t mean all preference formation involves theories being hard to vary.
What scientists actually do is criticize a theory for being ‘easy to vary’ (they’d just call it ‘arbitrary’), reject it, and look for a different one. They wouldn’t care to rank theories this way. And they’d use HTV as only one mode of criticism among many. It’s not the core of rationality and progress; again, not all problems of preference formation can be reduced to having too many variants.
Philosophers don’t rank theories this way either. I don’t recall a single instance in BoI where Deutsch counts variants and justifies a preference that way. Instead, he lists and addresses criticisms. He follows the Veritula method.
Also, one would only enter variants into the program that have already survived criticism. So then the question is how scientists tell whether an idea has survived criticism. And there the answer is still the Veritula method. So the program could maybe be incorporated into Veritula as an additional step. But again, it’s not needed if ETV is simply one kind of criticism among many, with no ranking.
To be clear, that isn’t a criticism of the program – the bounty specifically asked for the ranking. Here, I’m only exploring the wider implications if the program can be advocated rationally. And the answer is: the computational underspecification is then solved, but HTV is still not a description of rationality or of the cause of progress. That idea, as I just phrased it, can be adopted rationally at the time of writing, and we can move forward accordingly.
The integrity of the discussion branches off of this idea and its siblings is questionable due to problematic participation in a bounty. Labels around pending criticisms and battle-tested may be not be accurate.
This is true, but assumes that "qualiation" still occurs when each subsequent state is pre-existing and determined. Do we know this? What if qualiation somehow depends on the (computational) indeterminacy of the subsequent states..?
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.
Veritula discussion trees can’t accurately reflect problematic vs unproblematic ideas when unreasonable people are involved, see #5624. Submitting this as a fix. Jad agrees to terms, breaks them, then wants to argue the purpose and meaning of them. That’s arbitrary, ie the opposite of reason and Veritula. He will no doubt claim he was just trying to follow the Veritula method of addressing criticisms, but the effect is that he’s turning Veritula on its head in the process. There’s no point discussing with people like him.