This is how people’s lives often feel:
And this is how my life feels:
Notice there is a difference. Continue reading The Loose Ends
How Much Money Does 1 Hour of Happiness Cost?
Today, while envisioning my future endeavor Evolving with G I once again turned on that part of the brain that goes nuts over how much money it is good to have, when, and for what. It was a pretty personal day, and I was mostly attuned to my emotional goals, not the external world ones. So this is what came into mind:
Money I need = Price of Happiness/Hour * Hours I will live
Luckily Continue reading How Much Money Does 1 Hour of Happiness Cost?
The Inescapability of My Altruism
In 2013 I was done with Utilitarianism. The “this is too demanding” objection was taking my bones, and I expressed it in a private message to some close friends.
In 2016 I realized that my behavior that attempts to help most others is a deeper and different part of my mind than the part that processes moral convictions, or moral intuitions. It is a preference. These two texts exhibit a kind of inescapability of the altruistic soul. Even after I dropped the moral duty card, after I dropped the moral requirement card, a few years later, I was writing about how I prefer to behave in a way that resembles a lot the utilitarian prescribed way, irrespective of my acceptance of utilitarianism as a moral theory. So here are these two reflections.
2013
I’ve had it with Utilitarianism.
I no longer am a Utilitarian.
Here is why: Continue reading The Inescapability of My Altruism
Examples of Moral Economics Concepts
Moral Economics Concepts
On the shoulders of: Altruistic Arbitrage, Certificates of Impact, Cognitive Load and Effective Donation, Coordination Problems for Donations, Donation Swapping, International Donation Trade, Direct Funding for EAs and especially Moral Trade.
Special thanks to Ryan Carey, Ben Hoskin and Leo Arruda for ideas and corrections.
In these writings we propose the creation of a subfield of knowledge, Moral Economics, and provide in broad strokes its characteristics. We assemble previous writings that can be considered prospective subfields. We also discuss several concepts that have been developed in recent years that are instrumentally useful for Moral Economic thinking, and propose several new ones that could also bear fruit if Continue reading Examples of Moral Economics Concepts
#37 Try Harder
Recent challenges were going pretty well.
I was writing three academic paragraphs a day, which is an amazing feat compared to my previous productivity score.
Then I gave a lot of thought to the concept of “leveling up”
I wanted to level up. So I gave me a harder challenge. Actually running through my to do list value-per-hour in order of value per hour. I am not satisfied with the results, even though I did do it intermittently Continue reading #37 Try Harder
Introducing Moral Economics
Moral Economics
On the shoulders of: Altruistic Arbitrage, Certificates of Impact, Cognitive Load and Effective Donation, Coordination Problems for Donations, Donation Swapping, International Donation Trade, Direct Funding for EAs and specially Moral Trade.
Special thanks to Ryan Carey, Ben Hoskin and Leo Arruda for ideas and corrections.
Crossposted at diegocaleiro.com
In these writings we propose the creation of a subfield of knowledge, Moral Economics, and provide in broad strokes its characteristics. We assemble previous writings that can be considered prospective subfields. We also discuss several concepts that have been developed in recent years that are instrumentally useful for Moral Economic thinking, and propose several new ones that could also bear fruit if the study of this area develops further in the future. Continue reading Introducing Moral Economics
#38 Follow the to-do list value per hour
#40 One cold call a day keeps the doctor away was, overall, interesting. I ended up calling many people in bulk to compensate for the many days I didn’t actually call people but should have.
Due to legal questions I had, many of those people ended up being lawyers, who are well trained to have conversations in which information is exchanged (they are also well trained to conceal information, but had no reason to do so with me).
I feel more comfortable calling people, and consider the experiment to be a partial success. I didn’t call many continents nor famous random people because that didn’t seem like it was needed, or because their phones were hard to find, but if I had a good reason to want to call someone like that now, I probably would be many times more likely to actually follow through with it. Continue reading #38 Follow the to-do list value per hour
#39 Write 3 academic paragraphs a weekday!
#40 One cold call a day keeps the doctor away has been interesting so far. I’ve felt more comfortable calling bureocratic places, ordering food, talking to family members I had no strong intention to talk to, among others. I haven’t yet done many stronger cold calls like slightly of very famous people I know that I have something to ask about. Maybe a commitment here would be nice. Let me try to think of some people to call:
Sam Harriss
Natalie Portman
Molly Crocket
My aunt
Jerry Feldman
Person who contacts Max Brockman
Larry Ellison
Tim Ferriss
Hilary Putnam
Writer by compulsion. Constrained by time limits.
This month I’ll try to act on a classic thing everyone worries about and procrastinates. Writing. I’ve been writing a lot but not in a very structured manner. #39 This month I will write 3 paragraphs about one of the academic topics below outside of the house every day. I wrote two articles of a more academic tone, several blog posts ranging from completely trivial to deeply philosophical, and a meditation on dieting. Basically I’ve been writing a lot of output, but a complete disorganized mess that doesn’t align well with my goals. Now let’s see what I actually want to be writing:
- My article creating the field of Moral Economics, for the EA world.
- Our article on murphy-jitsuing the Singleton with João Fabiano, the beggining of a quest to kill Moloch. I’ve been thinking a lot about my long term goals and interesting paths to pursue, and so far my main conclusion is that I want to kill Moloch (the awful structure of incentives that, in spite of everyone’s desires to the contrary, ruins the world).
- Things that can become my book Altruism: Past, present, propagation.
- Continuing my AGI proposal Imparting Moral Concepts to Artificial General Intelligences.
- Challenge posts here in this blog.
When I see the list above and think of the expected number of hours of work that goes into all of these (4120 to be exact) it becomes very confusing to me how do I even consider the possibility of EVER responding an email at any email group, no matter how brilliant (biosemiotics, CFAR, theories of everything, etc…). I only have 250 000 hours to live. That means that only counting these projects accounts for 1.6% of my expected waking life. It is a sobering thought given how much time I waste doing “writing things” as ineffective as posts in Facebook groups, random stuff at the EA forum, and a bunch of other media. And that is just considering writing, which is itself considered a productive activity.
It is time to level-up. I can’t know the amount of things I know and continue thinking it is ok for me to write about, say, polyamory, politics, facebook posts, etc…. If I anticipate that I will write only for about 20 to 40 000 hours in the future, I clearly have to prioritize not only topics, but also writing styles, media and so on. I can’t waste as many words as I have been wasting on Gchat box, email replies and arguing against people who won’t change their minds or don’t have the skill necessary to learn things fast enough. Whether I want it or not, the world and I have a deadline. Either the Superintelligence will come or I will die, and in both events I won’t be able to write anymore, so there is no point in pretending that writing is a free space of infinite opportunity and no regulation. I’d better get to the point.
Against Process Philosophy
Disclaimer: this is a text about Process Philosophy, the set of philosophical theories in which everything is in time and time plays a fundamental constitutive role in the nature of being. Dynamics takes precedence over static and so on.
If you found the disclaimer intriguing, you may enjoy the writing, if you found it boring and don’t care about philosophy, skip it.
Why Process Philosophy
After taking in that the Incomplete Nature project is like a Lakatos Core Belt epistemically, if not a full blown system, in the philosophical sense of system, I decided some weeks ago to understand what Deacon means by emergence by studying Bateson and process by studying Whitehead. Usually the word “emergence” can be substituted by “magic” without loss of information, but I know Deacon knows better, so I went to the source. Process can only sometimes be substituted by “magic” without loss of information, it normally means something, but I wanted to zero-in on what Deacon means by it, and so there too I went to the source, Alfred North Whitehead (the other guy in Principia Mathematica),
Bateson was extremely productive and I have used it a lot already, and expect to continue to do so.
Whitehead needs steelmanning, badly so.
Whitehead however is very hard to steelman (the opposite of strawman, that is, trying to create the best version of).
Whitehead is a confusing and terrible writer, who states things as if self evident and frequently enmeshes his ideas together with his ideas about religiosity, which are a product of Victorian England + some version of positivism much more than a product of reasoning.
Gladly there are procedures to execute in cases like this. I can read other people who steel-manned him better, so I went ahead to the Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy and read Whitehead, and Process Philosophy and also checked one or two links online. It was better than the Process and Reality Book, but still not compelling at all.
As a last resort, I’m showing my understanding of process philosophy below and asking, if you know any better arguments that I haven’t found, if you could steelman it in a way that would make it more attractive.
The Leaky Monads theory of reality
Whitehead has an “all window” view of reality, which many commentators describe as being like Leibniz’s Monads, because containing all the world, while at the same time open instead of closed. A monad with a window, or, better, a monad that is all window.
This view I had seen endorsed first in “The Doors of Perception” where Huxley praises that conception because it seems to him that mescalin opens more access to reality, and for that to be true, some version of metaphysics where everything is connected to everything else has to be true, and what needs explanation would be why we have these brains and bodies that deprive us of the natural state of full contact with everything. Basically Huxley had motivated cognition after having a great drug based experience to pretend that the experience was revealing more and deeper aspects of reality, and the idea that our sensory parts and nervous systems are “filters” blocking out the possibility of universal binding suited his desired bottom line very well.
Numbers as subtance-less relata
The natural number 2 illustrates some interesting toy aspects of what I think moves minds like Whitehead’s. You can’t have 2 without getting all the other numbers and operations with it. 2 is 2 in virtue of being half of 4, twice 1, the cubic root of 8, 34-32, the number of Pi’s necessary to make a radius as long as it’s circle, and a bunch of other things. There is no 2 without Peano’s axioms (or an equivalent set of axioms that determines the same extension). The natural 2 is nothing but the set of relations it holds to the other natural numbers. Like a castle of cards, you can’t take 2 out and have the rest of the structure standing, being 2 is just the relative position of the card in the castle.
The Real number 2 is different but equally vacuous of substance and constituted uniquely by relations to other real numbers.
In that regard, 2 is a lot like southwest.
Metaphysics of total relation
Maybe then that also holds of all entities in this world of ours, maybe all things are in their relation to other things as well.
Coming from a man who dedicated 8 years to writing Principia Mathematica, this is just what I would expect.
However that seems empirically false. It is a Metonymic fallacy. Though some things like numbers have conditional dependencies on constructs of which they are parts, there are limits which separate these domains completely.
… and where it breaks.
Color has dimensions which all need to be together, hue, chromaticness, and brightness. You can’t make a color that has the first two but not the third, for the same reasons you can’t make a 3 without a 4. But you can definitely make a color without a number, and vice versa. These are what your Gärdenfors calls separate conceptual domains. Sotala (2015c):
Gärdenfors defines two quality dimensions to be integral if a value cannot be given for an object on one dimension without also giving it a value for the other dimension: for example, an object cannot be given a hue value without also giving it a brightness value. Dimensions that are not integral with each other are separable. A conceptual domain is a set of integral dimensions that are separable from all other dimensions: for example, the three color-dimensions form the domain of color.
From these definitions, Gärdenfors develops a theory of concepts where more complicated conceptual spaces can be formed by combining lower-level domains. Concepts, then, are particular regions in these conceptual spaces: for example, the concept of “blue” can be defined as a particular region in the domain of color. Notice that the notion of various combinations of basic perceptual domains making more complicated conceptual spaces possible fits well together with the models discussed in our previous definition. There more complicated concepts were made possible by combining basic neural representations for e.g. different sensory modalities.
So it seems to me false that the constitutive aspects of things require relation to all other things, and it seems that Whitehead thinks so because he thought about principia mathematica for too long, not because he would naturally arrive at that conclusion if he knew present day cognitive science, and could see the math domain from the outside.
Length in time and Reality
Then there is the question of whether things can only be in time or not. This argument loses a lot of force if we concede that actually not everything is connected to everything by some (different) relations.
To me this question is either ill-posed or useless.
If we are asking the substantive question of what has more reality, what is permanent in time (such as some intensional properties in physics, art according to Nietzche in Human all too human, or what some symbols stand for, or types) or what is ephemeral in time (Heraclitus’s flow, the ever-changing wavefunction, tokens in phil of mind) the question seems ill posed. We know that ephemeral things come and go, and stable things stay a little longer, and sometimes are instantiated again elsewhere or elsewhen, there is no further fact which would determine which of these deserves more reality than the other. If we know what ephemeral means, and we know what permanence means, and we can label stuff we encounter correctly with these labels, we are done. There is no further work to distinguish to what degree what is more or less real.
When codes, labels, language, and evolution agree that something is not worth mentioning.
The more permanent stuff definitely seems to depend on time to be what it is – say, an Ox or an Axe. That however is just because we
1) are only able to label stuff that lasts a while
2) Can only communicate about stuff that could be re-instantiated
3) we and evolution only care about what sticks around, no reason to pay attention to what doesn’t.
So there seem to be both fleeting things and more permanent things, and we can only label and talk about the more permanent stuff, which is not to be confused with ‘only the entities that are in time are real”, it’s just that those are the only ones that matter.
This is the first ground to say that process philosophy isn’t useful.
The second ground is more interesting: Because the process of labeling and coding stuff (which would be called prehension and differentiation possibly within the process paradigm) is what generated enormous scientific progress, computers, analytic philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, memetics among others, it has a decent track record as a good way to think about the world in order to find out new interesting things. As a core belt and a research program, it has generated a lot of benefit.
Contrasting that with holistic perspectives, and process philosophy, whose only claims are of the form “If you label X time-less-ly you have failed to capture the reality of X”. What has this type of program achieved? Nearly nothing. It is reminiscent of Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger. It doesn’t create a niche that people can explore in order to have a more accurate understanding. It just casts an emotion upon the senses which says “yes, yes! this is right!” and then shuts down curiosity lane and discovery avenue. It is a curiosity stop-sign.
Feynman said once that if all knowledge would be destroyed but he could send one message to the future people, he would send the notion of (1) atomism, the sense that all large things are made of smaller, identical things.
That is amazing, because in fact, they are not. (2) Things are made of chromodynamic clouds spread over abstract conceptual spaces with continuously decreasing amounts of entanglement to other things elsewhere in the universe.
Idea (2) may not be the ultimate reality, but it certainly is more true than (1). However (2) is not actionable in any way. It doesn’t do anything
That is how I feel about process philosophy. Even if it is true, it is not conducive to knowledge acquisition except as a guiding star intuition.
It has been relegated to a footnote in the history of philosophy, and I would say correctly so, like a note in passing: “Oh, and by the way, most things, and nearly all things that matter are only in time, and dynamic descriptions would be the only way to fully capture them. However because of the way information processing and memory storage works, in humans and in computers, we will continue using labels and maps, we will continuing using the language of code, and just talk and act on the more permanent stuff that can actually be labeled and manipulated.”
Meditations on Dieting
I always begin my challenges by mentioning what happened in the previous challenge. The challenge I ended this month was trying a positive diet. When reporting how it went, the post got a life of it’s own, and I decided to publish it as a meditation on dieting.
The original challenge was that I would, for a month, only purchase above ground vegetables, lean chicken and fish, nuts, and Chai lattes.
For two weeks it worked, until it failed. Again. Maybe my 10th, 20th intervention to lose weight or avoid weight gain. When I started writing, my mind was beaming with energy and needed to talk about the experiences I’ve had so far in this domain. So I’ll write the actual challenge post tomorrow… and meditate on diets now.
#41 Using a positive information diet for food
has ended. During the second half of the month my attention to this goal was sparse at best. It isn’t that much that I failed while trying, but I failed to even try. The initial weight loss of 3.5kg remains, which is good, but new strategies need to be assembled if I want to go back to having a healthy diet.
Dieting is very annoying
It is very annoying to try dieting. Dieting has all the most complicated features for habit acquisition.
It is not all or nothing, you have to eat, period, you can’t just be done with it and stop eating. Eating is very much regulated by context and conditions.
When in a restaurant, it is much more convenient to store food in the stomach than bring it back home.
There are moral triggers in the brain that make us think some things are sacred ok in terms of food (like sushi and chai latte for me) and some things are devilish and out-group (peanut butter, mexican and vegemite for me). They are as irrational and as unavoidable as aracnofobia.
Eating is a social activity, and it’s fun to eat with people.
Cooking takes a long time for above the ground vegetables which are the healthiest candidates on the block.
Cooking is complicated for lean chicken (it also stinks) and for fish, the healthiest meats.
The time it takes to cook stuff creates incentives for eating eggs, bacon (bad fats), bread and pasta (bad carbs), yellow cheese (bad dairy), mealsquares (healthy-ish and super effective, but sugary dry and not meal tasting).
A guest that refuses food is considered a bad guest in some cultures, and moral constraints of all sorts make us eat extra – or do you hate my cooking?
Sugar is addictive.
High glicemic index is also addictive.
Chocolate is great.
Giving chocolate is a good gesture.
Chai Latte is full of sugar, and is sacred.
Unlike the other challenges, its a thing you have to find executable policies for life, not for a month.
Cheesecake, Lasagna, Salami.
Dieting is very important
So dieting is very annoying. It is also extremely important. It correlates with biometrics of aging, fat content in arteries, heart attacks and cancer, death in general, and is by far the most important factor in being thing, average or fat.
Meta-Dieting transforms failure into learning
When an intervention is important enough and hard enough, the appropriate way to think about it is not that you are trying a specific thing, say, the LubaBuba diet, what you are trying is a meta-level thing, in my case, I’m trying to discover which types of strategies, diets or not, are useful for me to avoid being fat in the future. There is no failing at the meta-level, only learning. I have learned many things that don’t work, every strategy is an improvement over the previous set, merely by not consisting on the previous set.
No one knows how to fix this
A reasonable case could be made that dieting is the intervention in my life I should be willing to pay more to harmonize my desires and my values (what I desire to desire). But nutrition science hasn’t figured this out either! The only thing that helps mildly for non-obese people seems to be being mindful and eating when you are hungry, and only then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn0Ygp7pMbA
Moloch wants your fat deposits too, not just your money
Valentine’s day was transformed into a holiday to give presents by the capitalist incentive structure. Christmas was transformed into giving presents by the same structure of incentives and advertisement. It’s no one fault in particular, the system, in form of Moloch, generates the conditions of it’s own awfulness.
Meals are a symptom of civilizational inadequacy
I begin to suspect that one of the worst inventions of modern civilization may have been the apparently harmless invention of these concepts:
Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner
Are these the demons of the modern era?
Beware of other-optimizing
I have an obese family member who has fought dieting battles many times, and lost every one of them so far. Seen from the outside, of course it is super easy for me to design policies that would help they. They never stopped eating red meat and cheese. Never attempted to eat when hungry instead of “during meal time”. They had a concept of meal time. They never said “I’ll eat salad, lean chicken, fish and nuts”.
I have not succeeded, yet – growth mindset!
But I have, and that drove my weight back only so much. I wanted to go from X8 to X3, but I get stuck between X4 and X5. That’s probably near the lower limit of my base level.
How Santa Claus is like randomized intermittent breakfast
I don’t have the problem of thinking that meal times exist. It must be hard to disconstrue that notion. If you had dinner for 50 years every day, you probably believe that dinner time is as robust a prediction as dawn or sunrise. It’s a part of nature. But it isn’t. I only had lunch and dinner for 26 years. Gladly I only randomly had breakfast. Just like Santa Claus gives people the opportunity of noticing that God does not exist, not having breakfast most days but not all days made me able to realize that “meal times” does not exist. This permitted me, from 26 to 28, to let go of lunch and dinner. In that, I was lucky.
Isn’t diet X super weird?
Notice that there are people/tribes/societies out there that eat very different things in the morning as well. Salmon is one. Beans another. Bread butter, honey nut cereal and orange juice is what as a kid I thought the Platonic breakfast was.
For me there is one tribe that exemplifies above all the weirdness, the Snacirema of the north. This tribe doesn’t know much about geography, they are also the only monolingual tribe in their region. Their Platonic breakfast actually consists of frying, concommitantly, the fatty disgusting ugly looking part of a pig’s belly and the ooze that comes out of eggs when they crack. This would guarantee blocking the arteries, but not necessarily the aging, cancer and hypertension, so the chubbiest members of the tribe eat sugar attached to compressed industrialized corn drowning in milk.
This diversity of suicide attempts – let’s call it shotgun approach – contrasts with the diets of the !Kung or the Eskimos. The former just eat one fruit, mongongo. The latter eat just butter and whale fat.
What have I become?
There’s also tribal perceptions that determine identity and belonging, and are completely irrational. For instance, I have become a vegan recently. Whoever you are, wherever you live, no matter whether it’s windy or placid where you are now. No matter if the light of day is shining or the moon is outside your window. It does not matter if you are sitting down or standing while reading this text. I have generated an emotion by saying that I became a vegan. An emotion was just infused into you, one that is hard to erase. But I’ll try anyway. I actually am not a vegan. Some of you are now sad, but some of you are not only relieved, but have regained confidence in the worth of reading through this article. I have temporarily entered the outgroup, but then I said I was joking, and you can now respect me as a human being and an eater again, you can share a meal with me, and maybe what I say about diet can be good for you. Or the reverse. The important thing is to pay attention to the trigger, the strength and quality of the emotion you felt.
Imprinting, Stockholm syndrome, and God.
Try getting someone raised as a Jew to desire to eat shrimp. A vegan to eat stake. Some Snacirema – whom by the way are the backwards Americans, to eat salmon at breakfast. You are fighting a lost battle. Tribal considerations were a matter of life and death in the environment your emotions were designed in. To try to change someone’s dietary preferences when they are associated with the brain areas that determine in-group and out-group, or sacred versus permissible, is as easy as convincing a female peacock to desire a tailless peacock: they don’t speak your language, are not your species, have no reason to hear you and are driven by an instinct stronger than anything you could possibly say which determines if their grandchildren live or die. Good luck trying.
Be humble and surrender
I digress, the important points here are:
It takes an overwhelming amount and complexity of rationality to lose weight. Yudkwosky, one of the most rational beings alive, took many years to start succeeding in losing weight. and who knows for how long it will be kept. And he invented a whole art of rationality (centered around lesswrong.com) with thousands of followers.
Dieting isn’t hard. It is much worse than that. It is hard to run 10 miles four Thursdays from today. Dieting isn’t very hard. It is very hard implement a schedule to run 10 miles 5 times a week for a year. Dieting is as hard as coordinating a group of teenage boys between 13 and 19 to run 10 miles 5 times a week for a year. Dieting is extremely hard. The first step is to be humble and surrender to the possibility that it may be impossible.
Then the second step is to start planning at the meta level. How are you going to know which interventions didn’t work? How different the next intervention should be? How do you know when to try the next thing? How long will you try each thing before deciding. How do you make sure that you are not trying the intervention itself, but training your environment so that it trains you? How are you going to make sure that your intervention is something that treats future you as what she is: a mix of a rational being, an immediate reward monkey and a panic monster, all fighting to take over the wheel?
Next possible actions
The only intervention known to prevent weight gain is to kill Plato and eat only when you are hungry, destroying the concept of meals, and eating only until you anticipate if you stopped eating you’d no longer be hungry. What is called mindful eating.
Besides addiction to substances that increase neural activity, no intervention is known to cause weight loss except stomach reduction surgery, it is unclear if that lasts over a decade. (Disclaimer, I’m not a doctor or nutritionist, don’t do anything stupid, don’t believe my personal opinions, etc…)
- My guess at the moment is that morbidly obese people, or obese people over 60 years old, stomach surgery is the way to go.
- For people who are less fat, mindful eating seems good enough to be worth trying.
- For people who are less old, taking some drugs may be less damaging than not taking these drugs (I have in mind in particular drugs like caffeine, piracetam and modafinil).
- Conversely, avoiding drugs that induce hunger – birth control pills, anti-psychotics and others – is fundamental to not increase your baseline level weight.
- Having an automatic healthy bi-weekly delivery from supermarkets to home with only healthy stuff that is one or zero clicks away seems valuable.
- A rule of thumb is that one should be at least 10 minutes away from the closest sugary or bad fat food when one is at home, and there should always be above ground vegetables and other healthy foods accessible in less than 10 seconds, preferably within arm’s reach and in the field of vision.
- It seems that like there are two natural sleep cycles, there are two healthy diets for people who aren’t naturally healthy. One is protein and starches, no fats. The other is fat and protein, no high glycemic index. The grim reaper is the marriage of fat and high glycemic index. Deciding on one and sticking to it (and then switching every 6 months or whenever you can’t take it anymore) seems to be a smart strategy as well.
Staring into the void
I don’t know much about diets, but I know an unusual amount about rationalizing strategies that don’t work, and how to control the irrational parts of ourselves. I hope other people can benefit from my meditations.
I won’t make any claims about how I lost X or Y kilos and show pictures of before and after. As far as I know, I have at least eliminated many strategies from the scope of what looks like it could work, but doesn’t – I have assessed some stuff that does not work. I have tested many interventions, and noticed those few that don’t obviously don’t work. This seems about as good as the state of knowledge of Google Scholar on the topic these days.
So my leftover message to future self me is: try these interventions above. They are very likely to not make you fatter. They have some chance of making you less fat. That is as far as my confidence goes.
And if you see someone else being more confident than this when it comes to diet, I recommend taking it with a grain of salt – while keeping in mind that maybe, just maybe, salt absorbs water and increases hypertension risk.
Diego Caleiro (G Caleiro) 