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Hi Mike, welcome to Veritula. I’m Dennis, the founder.

Take a look at the discussions for any topics that might interest you.
You can also participate in bounties.

What brings you to V?

Universal explainers seek good explanations…

You sounded persuaded by https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable. As in, you agreed that people don’t seek good/hard-to-vary explanations.

So why still speak of good explanations?

Speed is a property of programs, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation

The other day, I heard an American say ‘must not’ in the sense you mean. So this seems to be more common than I realized.

He didn’t use the contraction, and I suspect Americans would find the contraction unnatural. But they do apparently agree that ‘must not’ does not only mean ‘is forbidden to’ but also ‘necessarily cannot’. So I was definitely wrong about this.

Some people think if they’re hungry that means they’re losing fat. I think that’s wrong.

You can eat a single meal at Cheesecake Factory for 2500kcals and be hungry again an hour later.

Or you can eat low-calorie foods throughout the day and not get very hungry until it’s actually time to eat again.

Some people might have trouble reaching their maintenance calories if they ate nothing but chicken breast, boiled potatoes, and broccoli for a day. They’d feel very full throughout the day.

I don’t expect much correlation, if any, between how satiating and how calorically dense some food is.

The good news for people who enjoy volume eating is that you can eat a lot while losing fat as long as you do it right. That means foods high in fiber and/or water (again, potatoes) and lean proteins. Vegetables generally work well.

The most important thing for fat loss is a calorie deficit, not hunger. Hunger is not a reliable indicator that you’re losing fat. You could be losing fat without being hungry, or you could be gaining weight while being hungry often.

Don’t go off of feelings. Count calories, macronutrients, and fiber, and weigh yourself to track progress.

Some people think if they’re hungry that means they’re losing fat. I think that’s wrong.

You can eat a single meal at Cheesecake Factory for 2500kcals and be hungry again an hour later.

Or you can eat low-calorie foods throughout the day and not get very hungry until it’s actually time to eat again.

Some people might have trouble reaching their maintenance calories if they ate nothing but chicken breast, boiled potatoes, and broccoli for a day. They’d feel very full throughout the day.

I don’t expect much correlation, if any, between how satiating and how calorically dense some food is.

The good news for people who enjoy volume eating is that you can eat a lot while losing fat as long as you do it right. That means foods high in fiber and/or water (again, potatoes) and lean proteins. Vegetables generally work well.

The most important thing for fat loss is a calorie deficit, not hunger. Hunger is not a reliable indicator that you’re losing fat.

Don’t go off of feelings. Count calories, macronutrients, and fiber, and weigh yourself to track progress.

Need time indicators again, for when an idea was posted, like we used to have. But shorter: something like ‘1h’

Need time indicators again, for when an idea was posted, like we used to have. But shorter: something like ‘1h’

Not if the criticism is clear and concise. That should be incentivized somehow.

In everyday English, we say ‘probably’ to leave room for error and communicate some uncertainty. That’s fine because everyone knows we’re not assigning actual probabilities in the sense of the probability calculus.

In math, we use the probability calculus to describe the frequency of outcomes for underlying processes that look random. Like a coin toss. That’s also fine because we know all possible outcomes and we have a measure for each.

Things go wrong when people use probability even though they don’t know the outcomes (because of the growth of knowledge, say, as you write in #4762) or they have no measure for them or the underlying phenomena don’t behave randomly (again because of the growth of knowledge). Like Elon Musk tweeting we’re 90% likely to see AGI in 2026. (Not a literal quote but he says stuff like that sometimes.)

Some people try to steal the prestige of math and hide their ignorance by using the probability calculus illegitimately.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfzSE4Hoxbc. It’s been years since I watched it but it’s bound to have related ideas.

“What do people misunderstand most about crystal meth addiction?” https://www.quora.com/What-do-people-misunderstand-most-about-crystal-meth-addiction/answer/Notmy-Realname-133

Interesting read.

A discussion can get long even if each criticism is concise.

Someone who recently joined made a bunch of low-quality posts in a short amount of time.

Need summaries at top of discussions. Could be AI generated.

Making a Minecraft clone with AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxmPfBODGuw&list=PLBGDngphGY_2ZC8eNc39yPxfc_RZDtQSN

Making a Minecraft with AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxmPfBODGuw&list=PLBGDngphGY_2ZC8eNc39yPxfc_RZDtQSN

If you don’t have any counter-criticisms, how could the criticisms not be decisive?

To arrive at that conclusion, you’d first need some counter-criticism anyway.

Just how ‘tiny’ is a criticism then? By reference to what principle or measure?

To incorporate some notion of decisiveness or severity, we need to be prepared to program that into our decision-making tool. I’m not aware that anyone knows how to programmatically determine the severity or decisiveness of a criticism, and I suspect outsourcing it to the user would result in the same unintended behavior we saw with the sliders for hard to vary.

My Conjecture

Conjecture: addiction is the result of the entrenchment of a conflict between two or more preferences in a mind.

Picture someone who wants to give up social media but also really enjoys social media. Those preferences conflict.

If the conflict is entrenched, then both preferences get to live on indefinitely. The entrenchment will not let that person give up social media. He will become addicted.

As I write in #4624, curing addiction involves finding a common preference between the conflicting parts of the addict’s mind: something all involved parts prefer to their initial positions. In addition, it may involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

Limitations

I don’t know whether my explanation applies to physical addictions. For example, I understand severe alcoholics run the risk of death if they quit cold turkey, so for them, it can’t be only about preferences. There’s clearly a physical component as well. So I’m limiting my thoughts on addiction to what we might call ‘addictions of the mind.’ Note, though, that addictions could come in pairs: an alcoholic could have both a physical and a mental addiction to alcohol.

Also, I don’t claim that entrenchment always causes addiction, or that every addiction is the result of entrenchment. I claim that entrenchment is a cause – maybe a common cause – of addiction. I also claim that curing addictions of the mind is an epistemological matter, not a medical/scientific one.

Yes, but they’ll need to be aware of the conflict, at which point both conflicting ideas/preferences exist in both minds. So that scenario reduces to a conflict of preferences inside a single mind.

Yes, but they’ll need to be aware of the conflict, at which point both conflicting ideas/preferences exist in both minds.

Idea: does the entrenchment not even strictly need to be between preferences that are both inside the same mind?

Could entrenchment between preferences across minds also cause addiction for at least one or both of them?

Be sure to mention the title of your book so others can look it up :)