ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
And if it's true that label calories can be as little as half of the actual content
That's not true.
[if] it's not possible for a normal person to measure calories out
I mean, it is possible. Lots of people do manage it well enough. Just like lots of people manage to pass their numerical analysis class, even if there is some number of common 'traps'. It's only a few people who get bitter enough after falling into a common trap to decide that the professor is full of bullshit and the material is impossible, then dropping out of the class. Even apps do it pretty darn well these days.
CICO advocates call for weighing every leaf of lettuce and drop of oil.
We get it; you're a very accomplished strawmanner. You don't need to keep making bigger and bigger strawmen to try to prove some point. We didn't count almost any vegetables (some exceptions).
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Questions I still don't understand:
-Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
-Do you, like Arjin, think that there is some discounting for energy sources that were going to be consumed "one way or another/no matter what"?
On to other things.
Whether or not it is renewable on a timescale relevant to humans.
What is a "timescale relevant to humans"? Do consumption rates factor into this?
you can't just assume that we're going to discover these things when making assumptions about the future, because there's no guarantee that a great new energy source will just appear.
Sure, but is there any factor describing something like the probability of new discoveries, given past developments? E.g., if humans never used fossil fuels, do you think the likelihood of discovering nuclear power was lower, higher, or about the same?
Related to this is from earlier in the comment:
If you want to use a financial analogy, they're a massive inheritance that gives us a supply of money far greater than we can actually earn ourselves, which meant that we can live a lifestyle more expensive than our income can support... for a while.
One could also plausibly invest much of that money in productive ventures; how is this taken into account?
Living a lifestyle that your income cannot support is a choice that leads to very predictable consequences, consequences which are substantially less pleasant than adjusting your expenditures before you go bankrupt.
This is getting far afield from the technical questions, which I still think are the core part, but I sort of have to ask - what do you have in mind when you talk about adjustment processes? A normal sort of adjustment process would be a market process - if the demand for some rare resource outstrips its supply, the market price rises. Speculators can help smooth out time-dependent processes (if they think the price is likely to rise in the future, they can buy now, pushing the price up now and implicitly conserving some of that resource for future use). We've had famous examples of the kind of vague "if you use too much stuff now, it'll be painful in the future" predictions that are unmoored from much technical analysis. Moreover, we have reason to believe that from an atoms perspective (rather than a calorie perspective), absolute use is going down even as lifestyles are going up. Are there technical reasons for why a calorie perspective is necessarily different?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
calories out has been shown to change in response to calories in, so you are in effect chasing a constantly moving target
Good news! The CICO folks that you dislike have entire articles on how this works, what the ranges are, how to understand it, etc. To steal a little bit of the plane analogy from below (not adopting it entirely), when a plane uses fuel, its dynamics change, too. That doesn't mean that physics don't work or that we can't understand how to use the system effectively.
What useful information are we left with? Pretty much, eat more or less until you get the desired change in weight, and that "more or less" refers specifically to calorie content.
Much more than that. Once you dial in where you are within the population-level variance, you get remarkably good predictions for how the noisy process works. I have a lot of background in stochastic systems, too, and I think this part trips a lot of people up. It's not easy to filter noisy data appropriately or to even understand the right timescales to pick for your filters. That's why the CICO people don't jump to an imaginary bailey and instead do things like creating an app that has a lot of filtering built-in.
Even though my degrees are actually in aerospace, I'm not sure the plane analogy is the best one for this part. Instead, maybe let's push things to a bit of an extreme with an analogy to semiconductor fabrication. In this case, someone could have some familiarity with the published literature in semiconductor physics, could go through a variety of published patents, but then when they try to make their own semiconductors, they fail. One response could be to claim that everyone in semiconductor physics is lying to them or just blaming them for doing it wrong; that those baddies are claiming that semiconductor physics "just works and must be perfect" or whatever. Another response could be that there are parts of the process that do require some specialized background knowledge to do precisely, perhaps some experience with tuning certain processes along the way that aren't always shouted to the rooftops in the public domain.
I think that careful filtering of CICO data also requires some mathematical experience if you want mathematical precision. I haven't actually used the particular app that I linked, nor am I privy to the tuning/filtering decisions they've made, but I'm familiar with the work of the guys who made it, so I have a reasonable amount of trust that they're doing a pretty good job at tuning it in a way that will work pretty well for most users. But the good news is that most people don't need mathematical precision here (unlike in semiconductor fabrication). I think @07mk goes a bit overboard in how wide of an error bar is needed, but for most people, you really can just hand-tune a bit with a little fudge factor, not needing to be super precise on your filtering, and see the results. But at the same time, if you do get into the details of tuning filters well (or offload that work to something like that app that probably does that ok enough for you), then you probably do get pretty precise predictions.
A lot of this comes down to error analysis and ranges for estimation. One group of CICO-haters say that it's just flatly impossible to filter in a way that gets you even remotely close to usable data without metabolic ward precision. Another group of CICO-haters say that any quantity of error violates their strawman that "CICO is perfect in every way". Most of the time, they don't put numbers to their error ranges. They don't put any numerical analysis tools to the question of how much data must be collected to achieve some O(epsilon) error or how different filtering schemes affect this. Frankly, many do fall into a small number of common 'traps', just like how undergrads in a numerical analysis course often fall into a small number of common 'traps'. I am lucky in that I have the toolset to get a lot more mathematical precision than most people, so I don't have to learn all of that from scratch or trust somebody else's filter. And when I did those things for an n=2 experiment, knowing all of the caveats about how noisy things are and how difficult the numerics is, my technical assessment was that I was shocked by how precise it turned out to be.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I hate seeing my kitchen devolve into even more of a mess.
This was something that started off difficult with my wife, too. She was biting off more than she could chew, was wanting to make three complex dishes in one afternoon (some of which might even be brand new), for example, and not even thinking about any cleanup. She would get real anxiety from all the crazy. To stem the bleeding early, I would come into the kitchen just to clean up everything while she was cooking. She has gotten better at figuring out how to clean as she cooks.
If you're not going nuts and making several complex dishes simultaneously, a dishwasher helps, a lot. If it's a big family with no dishwasher, there's definitely a much bigger time penalty in comparison to just eating takeout and throwing everything away.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I am sorry you had that experience. Unfortunately, it is probably unlikely that I will be able to figure out whatever was going on in your individual case through comments. But I'm not sure what is supposed to change about my understanding of the published literature from your example.
FYI, my personal experience included periods of gaining, and my trend line from the noisy data was bang on at 500cal/day = 1lb/wk on that side, too (and my wife's). But I'm not sure how you might/might not want to update your understanding of the published literature based on my example, either.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
It's mostly start-up costs. Admittedly, the start-up costs are high; we got 'lucky' in that wife wasn't allowed to work for a while during the immigration process, so she bore a lot of those costs while unemployed. We kept a spreadsheet of recipes; I usually did the calorie counts. But once you have the recipe and have done the calorie count once, it's done forever. (You also don't have to do this right away if it's not an important goal; you can always just go do it later, since you have all the information just sitting there anyway.)
Actual cooking time can really vary. We have a mix, with some recipes that are pretty quick and easy to make; honestly, many of these take less time than I would have taken to go out of my way, fight through traffic that always seems to get worse, stop by a drive-thru, wait through what always seemed to be a longer and longer line, and then still have to wait for it to be prepped. Just a burger and fries? Easy peasy, honestly takes almost no time. Maybe 15-20min of cook time for the fries, and you do the burger while they cook. Even faster if you're just microwaving a baked potato. There's a ton of really simple meals, like throwing together a salad or making some spaghetti (purchased frozen meatballs are an easy starter), and legit, I'm probably saving time over running to a drive thru.
Up to this point, you don't even need much "meal prep"; you just need meal planning, so that you can pick up all your groceries for the week in one stop rather than having to constantly run out to the store to get that one thing you're missing.
Getting more into meal prep, with a little time and effort, you can start freezing things to have some 'ready made' stuff that just needs reheating for days when you have no time. We'll have more extravagant recipes that we'll make on some weekend that we're going to be home anyway (winter is fantastic, especially because the cooking keeps the house warm), and we'll just make a double/triple/whatever batch (depending on calorie counts and how many portions we're wanting), bag it up, freeze it, and bam, we've got ten meals that we can just pull out and reheat over the next few months. Family size matters for what is plausible. If you're not a big family, you can bang out twenty days worth (or more) of lunches/dinners in a long afternoon. A freezer helps, so you don't have to eat the same thing every day for a week, which is what a lot of meal preppers do. But we'll also sometimes do, say, a casserole or roast or chicken that we'll just eat for three days in a row or whatever. That maybe takes more time than if you're stopping by Chipotle and buying enough food once to have it sit in your fridge and eat on for three days... but probably less than stopping by Chiptole every day and buying individual meals each day.
Now, once a week, one of us goes through the recipes and picks some for the following week. Can take into account if we know we have some work thing or whatever and put something super easy on those days. Then, since the actual recipes are right there, make a grocery list. That whole process maybe takes 20min now, tops. We often do it between sets while we're at the gym, so it doesn't even take up what would otherwise be productive time. I spend wayyyy more time writing stupid comments on TheMotte than I do on almost any of this.
Costs are a big question mark; it really depends on what you want. We've definitely culled some recipes that were good and tasty, but not so good and tasty that they justified the cost. If you want everything artisanal and fancy, sure, you can rack up the dollar signs. But when you're making it yourself, you really can tailor it to what you want, and for an equivalent quality, you're almost always saving (or for equivalent cost, you're almost always getting better quality). I will absolutely put a cheap American cheese slice on my homemade double cheesey until the day they ban it; nothing else melts quite like it; fight me.
It definitely changes your relationship with restaurants, though. So many times, when we do end up in a restaurant, there's like half the menu that would just pain me to order, thinking, "MFer, I can put Alfredo sauce on some pasta for like a buck o' five; why would I pay you fifteen for it?!" Restaurants now are mostly for being social, when traveling, for an experience, for some international dishes that are kind of a pain to get/keep the ingredients, or for some dishes that genuinely do have a significantly higher home prep cost/difficulty (I may or may not be finally close to cracking sushi well enough; this was always one of our few 'always worth just picking some up' meals).
Since I feel like I need a closer, I will just remind you that the start-up costs are absolutely high, and you will probably feel very very frustrated for a while. But like with most things in life (exercising, taking up a new sport/hobby, buying a house for the first time, hell, being married, etc.), it does get easier. You can try to ease into it, too; don't feel like you need a brand new recipe and make every meal yourself every day for three months; just plan to substitute some number of meals a week to start and hopefully be fine with repeating some things as you're building a repertoire. One last thing that also helped my wife is that I always assured her that if something went horribly wrong with a new recipe, we can always just go pick something up/order something in/pull out a frozen pizza or something; it's not the end of the world. Thankfully, we only had to do that a handful of times.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
There was a flurry of activity trying to make glycemic index do a bunch of things. I don't recall much conclusive coming out of it. For particular questions of addiction/rewards pathways, I don't think the work really got very far out of the stage of some basic theoretical mechanism conjectures. I also haven't followed up enough to see if any of them were busted by empirics.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
merely pointing out that some version of it
The bold part is what I am contesting. I don't think that this blog post is actually speaking to any version of "set point theory".
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Sure, but that's pretty generic and not really making any claims about set point theory. Just that there are some feedback pathways. You might be interested in my old lengthy comment about the gap between simply observing that there are some feedback pathways somewhere and something that could properly be called "set point theory" with all of the features that many of its proponents would like. There are some significant theoretical and empirical challenges that would need to be overcome in order to close that gap.
I've seen a lot of control theory models for a lot of biological systems in my professional career, and there is a wide range in terms of quality. I would not bin what I've seen of set point theory in the high end of that range.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
If the defense of CICO epicycles is that "uh, actually sometimes people just burn extra calories for no reason", that's not that compelling. Isn't the point of CICO that it should always give you predictable results
You're mashing up two different things which should be clearly distinct at this point in the conversation. There is no epicycle that there is variability in CO. There is just variability in CO, given the things we are generally able to control for. That's just the data and the labels we have to go with it. I've seen some attempts to quantify things like calories consumed by individual organs and how that correlates to their sizes and such, but on a population scale, we're basically never going to have measurements like that to control for, nor is an individual likely to go to the effort of taking precise measurements that could, in theory, more precisely predict individualized CO. So, absent that, we take a few factors that are easily measurable, fit the curves, see that they work pretty well, with some variability. Before, you had been claiming that this population-level variability was flatly denied by your enemies. Now, you think it's an epicycle. These are both Obvious Nonsense claims. This is just data and empirics.
Now, what you're stuck on is the second part, given that the population-level curves aren't able to precisely control for everything, how do these curves and the variability they contain provide predictable results for individuals? Well, you need individualized observational data to figure out where you are within that variability. The population-level curves get you close, but if you want precision, you need good individualized observational data. My experience with tracking for my wife and I is that the data is extremely noisy and must be handled with care. But after that care, the trend line is, indeed, 500cal/day = 1lb/wk, only with very noisy measurements. I don't think either of our maintenance levels from the trend line were precisely what the population-level data predicted, but they were both pretty close, and our tracking decisions were probably suitable to explain the minor deviation. It's this part, after you've already gotten a lot of individual observational data to avoid the population-level variability problem, where the vast majority of people (and all tightly-controlled lab experiments) get predictable results. The population-level variability doesn't magically jump into this part as an epicycle.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Perhaps you should read the link, discussing variability in the calories out portion. Saying that CICO is thermodynamics and that there is variability at least in CO is perfectly consistent. I'm not sure what windmill you think you've slain.
you'll probably just call me a liar or say that I was tracking wrong. That is of course, what every CICO advocate does immediately.
I will not call you a liar, but this is indicative of the mindset with which you are entering this conversation. You have tarred the people you hate with a scarlet letter and then simply closed your mind to any meaningful discussion. Very bad epistemic hygiene.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Sorry, there's actually nothing in that blog post about independent upper and lower set points. Or even really about set point theory, broadly speaking, at all.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I want to preface this comment by saying that I think addiction/habituation mechanisms of sugar are still not all that well studied scientifically and that I don't think there is strong scientific evidence for almost any recommendation here. That is, unlike some of my other comments on the general topic area, which are strongly backed by large bodies of published research, this comment is indulging in some mere speculation.
One thing I tried long long ago, in a location far far away from where I currently live, was a weird recommendation that I saw on the internet before I really had any sense of any of the science in these worlds. A quick search doesn't show up any real science for it, only mostly returning results for one study that basically does nothing to actually support the hypothesis. Anyway, the idea was to have one small piece of chocolate basically immediately after you woke up in the morning. The idea was that your reward circuits aren't reared up to go nuts over sugar at that time, so it would be sort of 'training' your brain to think that sugar is less rewarding in general, which could reduce cravings later in the day. I did it, and it seemed to kinda help, but again, totally anecdote and no science. It could have even been somewhat harmful, but overtaken by other changes in my life at the time.
Another thing that I've heard from medical folks like Peter Attia, but haven't gone to look if there is any good science, is to pay attention to the time concentration of consumption. That is, you can down a glass of orange juice or sugary beverage super quickly, and that gives a massively concentrated rush in a way that doesn't happen by, say, getting about the same amount of sugar in the time that it takes to eat that sugar in apple form. (He actually talked about having a continuous glucose monitor and spoke about different foods causing different kinds of spikes; I recall him saying that basically the biggest, quickest spike he ever saw was something like raisins that were coated in some yogurt or candy or something that he had on an airplane.) After getting married, the wife is a big fan of fruits, and I definitely eat more of them now than I used to. Still not a lot, and I definitely can't binge on fruit the way I used to binge on various sugary products wayyyy back in the day. There is some intuitive plausibility to something like this if you think about comparisons to nicotine. There seems to be pretty significant differences in addictiveness of nicotine rushes from smoking/vaping compared to slower delivery mechanisms like gums/lozenges/patches. Again, I haven't taken the time to see if there is any not-bad science here.
I will also note that I don't remember the timeline of how long I had cravings after I got 'off sugar'. But now that most of it comes from fruits or the occasional single piece of chocolate after dinner, I absolutely notice a difference if I go to an event and have basically a 'whole dessert'. I'll likely have some minor cravings the next day, but they go away pretty quickly.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Oh my, the epicycles keep on coming. How would one design an experimental protocol in order to verify/falsify such a hypothesis?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
When I said human labour, I wasn't referring specifically to work performed by human muscles but to energy usable by humans.
Thanks for clarifying, but I still don't quite understand this. I'm guessing from context that you mean something like that you mean to refer to "the calories required to make energy usable by humans"? Or are you just making a distinction between calories that aren't usable by humans and the calories that are usable by humans?
we don't actually have infinite free energy yet
Obviously. We never will.
you don't need to be a genius to work out what happens when a population of animals allows their population to grow to a large number on the basis of a temporary increase in available resources
There are huge timescale questions here. What is a "temporary increase"? When we discovered how to convert fossil fuels into human-usable energy, one might say that it's "temporary", but I'm not sure what the criteria is for being "temporary/not temporary". When we discovered how to convert uranium into human-usable energy, how would I go about computing whether it is "temporary/not-temporary"? How does future discovery of other methods to convert things into human-usable energy come into play? Can new discoveries retroactively convert prior methods from being "temporary" to being "not temporary"? If I had to guess, given the bold starting sentence to this paragraph being that we don't have infinite free energy, I think maybe the line is that any source of energy that is not infinite is "temporary", but that would mean that literally all sources of energy are "temporary", and I think we're maybe stuck concluding that all uses of energy are bad in some way.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I don't know what pile of straw you've found your "pro-CICO people" from, but in my experience, they are happy to point you directly to places where you can see the variability for yourself. I'll even preempt any digging in the straw you might do to claim that "pro-CICO people" simply reject the concept of metabolic adaptation, because they actually write entire articles about it, what it is, what it isn't, and what it practically means for people.
At the end of the day, they say things like that the Cunningham equation (or a few others) actually do a pretty good job of getting you to the right ballpark, but then you probably need direct observation if you want to really nail down where you are with precision. My wife and I proceeded with direct observation, and sure enough, the population-based equation estimates got us pretty darn close, but what was really incredible was that even though the data was insanely noisy (which was expected, and I have enough background in numerical analysis to know how awful that noise would be for estimating derivatives), the trend line over a couple years of tracking (through periods of cutting, periods of maintaining, and periods of gaining) was bang on at exactly 500cal/day = 1lb/wk... for both of us. The "pro-CICO people" that you strawman are actually doing things like putting direct observation into an app rather than making ridiculous claims like there being no variability whatsoever.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Ok, thanks for your responses. I probably should stop peppering you with questions now. I'll have to think about your responses as well. I'm still not entirely sure there's a coherent line to be drawn, given the fuzziness of the value comparison you mentioned as well as whether I think the timescale of growing new trees should matter (and how timescales should matter generally; all of Earth's resources are ultimately going to be expended "one way or another/no matter what" on a timescale of the sun becoming a red giant).
The conversation on coal-eating bacteria made me wonder enough to do a quick search, though. First result I opened indicated that they're producing methane, not CO2. No idea how one would factor that in to any calculation of 'calories in', given that I guess we're doing some strange partial discounting for calories that would be expended "one way or another/no matter what", but that how much we discount I guess depends on some fuzzy value comparison. I mean, a value comparison of coal vs CO2 vs methane vs a tree? If I can't just appeal to prices, then.... ¯\(ツ)/¯
Honestly, my preliminary conclusion is probably that we just can't do this kind of 'calories in/calories out' calculation mechanically, and we'd probably need a fair amount of arbitrary lines and value judgments plugged in. Probably worse once we get further down the chain and are trying to analyse agricultural methods rather than simply power generation.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Last week, this comment spurred a few subthreads about electronic and/or digital and/or online voting (depending on what one wants from it). I felt like the dominant view was that it was a terrible idea, hopelessly insecure, and perhaps even a bridge too far for one being able to think that an election is legitimate.
Today, I saw this article, saying that Kamala Harris' name was left off of some Montana ballots, causing them to shut things down until they could fix the problem. As I started reading, I casually wondered, "Shut what down? Just the ballot-printing process? Why is the headline saying 'voting system'?" Then I read the article and learned for the first time that Montana has an "electronic absentee voter system" that allows, for example, "Max Himsl, a Montana voter living in the UK," (who reported the issue) to "fill out his ballot online".
Whelp, I guess it's arrived. Is it a stupid, terrible idea? Is it hopelessly insecure? Has it delegitimized Montana's election? It is something that nobody's doing, nobody would do, nobody would be stupid enough to do, and it's a good thing that it's happening now?
Having not personally looked into the technicals of the system at all yet (obviously, having only just heard about it five minutes ago) and having said that I thought that a lot depended on technical specifics, I have little idea about how to feel other than that it seems obviously impossible for online voting to seriously maintain secrecy in voting, which I do care about. Of course, almost any system that allows for absentee voting seriously struggles on this point (as was pointed out by one of those international pro-democracy organizations that I quoted long ago), though I think that most people are somewhat willing to give up a little bit of this if it's a small number of absentee votes.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Ok, so I think I'm hearing that you have a "one way or the other" or a "no matter what" test. I think I take this to mean that if calories are going to be expended "one way or the other/no matter what", then we simply zero out those calories. That's a plausible route to go.
This would perhaps go the opposite way of what Nybbler said, though, where he wasn't wanting to count the energy in the fuel. Do you disagree with this and think that we should count the energy in the fuel, so long as it wasn't being expended "one way or the other/no matter what"?
Another question I have is whether something is counted as being "expended". Does it matter if, say, some rays of sun wouldn't just be dissipated as heat, but would instead likely be consumed by plants? Or, if, say, we discovered an oil or coal-eating bacteria which was using it for its own fuel?
Further, suppose we burn a tree that gets 99% of its stored energy from the sun (according to ChatGPT). Does that count in the zeroed out category? If so, is it because it ultimately came from the sun, which was going to expend energy anyway, or could it be in some part because we might think there's a high enough probability of wildfires if we do nothing, so those calories were going to be expended "one way or the other/no matter what"?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
expendable resources
I hate to say it, but we're back to the sun. The hydrogen inside of the sun is, indeed, an expendable resource. Does it matter whether it is being 'expended' up there or down here in a lab?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Great review! Thanks!
Where are the Mountains, or the Deserts, or the Plains?
That was an interesting feature of Zvi's review:
The Village might be in somewhat of a cold war with The River, but the River is not its natural enemy or mirror. Something else is that.
So what do we call this third group? Not ‘everyone not in the Village or River’ and not ‘the other political party’ but rather: The natural enemies of The Village?
I asked for the LLM consensus is in, and there is a clear winner that I agree is indeed this group’s True Name in this schema, that works on many levels: The Wilderness.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I was hoping to get a nice distinction somewhere along those lines that I could probe to see if I could make it consistent, but what I got was "because it takes human labour". If @FirmWeird would like to clarify and say that it's not about human expenditure and about something else instead (maybe some sort of "no matter what" test that I'd want to probe for details), then I'd be very pleased to investigate.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
because it takes human labour
Ok, so am I correct in understanding that your measurement of efficiency is rooted in human caloric expenditure for 'calories in'? If so, then it's a bit strange to think that modern agriculture is less efficient than in the past, since in the past, we had >90% of the population performing hard labor to produce a sustenance level of food product, whereas now, we have about 1% of the population producing an incredible surplus. There is obviously some additional human effort in building the machines and gathering the fuel, but I think it's incredibly unlikely that if we were to tally that all up, the agriculture-specific human caloric input would be anywhere close to 90% of the workforce.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Do you believe the person online who says that it's scientifically impossible to not be racist? (This one definitely personally criticizes you.) The one who says that lizardmen secretly rule the government? The one who has "119 scientific proofs" for why the earth is flat?
How are you supposed to know? Basic epistemic hygiene will get you a long way. Or, ya know, you can throw your hands up and decide that it's impossible to know anything.
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