Search Ideas

Are you thinking of sun exposure to get enough vitamin D?

To be sure, I’m not a doctor, but because I have very fair skin, every dermatologist I’ve ever talked to has advised me to avoid the sun and instead take vitamin D supplements.

I want to live in places that are mostly sunny, most of the time. This is for health reasons.

You may want to check out Instagram account jacbfoods. He used to be opposed to seed oils, but when he got his master’s degree in dietetics, he changed his mind.

I could have multiple homes around the world that I move between throughout the year. This way I can make the most of geographical and seasonal advantages of different places.

Ideally I would live at some altitude, for health reasons.

I want to live somewhere with a more libertarian culture than average. I want to live somewhere where property rights are respected more than average, and people are left alone by the government more than average.

I want access to good quality food, particularly good quality meat, dairy, and fruit. Ideally the place I live has a growing culture of eating well (for example, in Austin, many restaurants are now making it a point not to use any seed oils in their cooking.)

I want to live close to thriving cities (say, no more than 60 minutes away on an average day).

I want superior water quality for drinking, bathing, etc.

This means I need to live somewhere sufficiently advanced to be able to provide and service high quality reverse-osmosis water filters. Otherwise I would need to be somewhere that I can directly access spring water, which I think is much more difficult.

Will the criterion for “battle tested” change as the site grows? If the purpose of this feature is to enable users to quickly see the best ideas on the site, I would imagine the number of addressed criticisms needed to count as “battle tested” would need to grow with the site. @dennis-hackethal*

Guess: We can generalise economics further and let it be subsumed by epistemology.

When we choose to try to solve certain problems, we always make trade-offs from a place of scarcity. Likewise, our conjectures wouldn't evolve without the competition enabled by scarcity in our minds.

I don’t think the meta algorithm is necessary for the evolution of ideas. After all, there is no meta algorithm across minds, yet ideas (memes) evolve across minds. Inside a single mind, the meta algorithm is inherited from our non-creative ancestors, where (among other things) it acted as a fail safe against erroneous behaviors.

Yeah nice, seems true. There's no objective explicit/inexplicit ratio for knowledge, it depends on the person's background knowledge.

May have misunderstood, but do you mean that explanatory knowledge corresponds to truth, whereas biological/evolutionary knowledge doesn't?

I think that was refuted by Lucas Smalldon and others: https://barelymorethanatweet.com/

Hmm never thought of that, interesting! I think since the disease involves continuous loss of brain volume, hardware decay seems like the best explanation.

In general I think it makes sense to speak of diseases in neurology (e.g. Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, stroke) as bad hardware and psychiatric disease as bad software. But it could very well be that some of those diagnoses are miscategorised.

Yeah that's definitely a possible medical condition, e.g. in psychosis or after having ECT. Don't think it's the best explanation for Alzheimer's though, where the loss of brain volume is so apparent.

Wait, do you view the pruning as separate from the mere competition of ideas, or simply its hardware consequences?

One of my previous comments notwithstanding, don’t be shy to mark ideas as criticisms whenever you point out a shortcoming. Otherwise, you won’t know later on which ideas you can adopt. In the context of Alzheimer’s, this sounds like a criticism.

In Darwinian evolution, competition and pruning are the same phenomena.

That doesn’t sound right. Not all competition is necessarily deleterious.

Wait, do you view the pruning as separate from the mere competition of ideas…?

Yes. When I say ‘pruning’, I’m referring to a specific mechanism of a meta algorithm in the mind. For more details, see my book A Window on Intelligence, I think chapter 5. There is no such meta algorithm in biological evolution.

In that same vein, why couldn't we class biology (evolution) under epistemology?

Yes, but that inhirent in biology (evolution) right? I see it as part of the evolutionary strand for this reason.

I currently see Constructor Theory as a meta-theory. A different mode of explanation. But it raises an interesting question: does CT actually qualify as a deeper theory than the four strands? Even if we were to express all four strands in constructor-theoretic terms, that alone wouldn’t make it explain more or have greater reach. So when would it truly deserve to be considered a strand/theory of everything?

Economics as a fundamental study of trade-offs.

My point is rather that it's not so clean a line between explicit and inexplicit. You're a doctor, so imagine the steps being something like:

1. Extensive description of patient's symptoms, test results, conclusion, etc, in English.
2. Same as above but mostly made out of quick notes by attending doctors and nurses.
3. Only a collection of test names and test results. Test results accompanied by Chinese.
4. Just a collection of numbers coming out of tests, without saying which test.

Arguably all the information is always there, and can be read off, but with increasing difficulty, requiring you to learn another language, or do a series of deductions.