From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Apr 15 2003 - 12:10:01 MDT
Ramez Naam wrote:
> From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
>
>>The way Paleo diet theory works is that you make sense of the human
>>metabolism by assuming that it evolved to fit a Paleolithic
>>diet, then you feed that metabolism whatever makes it work
>>best, whether or not that constitutes a Paleolithically
>>realistic food supply.
>>
>>Think of it as a two-cycle step:
>>
>>1) Early humans adapt toward metabolisms making better use of the
>>available paleolithic diet. I.e., metabolism optimized for
>>presented diet.
>>
>>2) Modern humans deduce which modernly possible diet
>>provides the best fuel for the evolved metabolism. I.e., diet
>>optimized for presented metabolism.
>
> Thanks for the clarification. My skepticism remains and is focused on
> the concept of optimization.
>
> Optimized for what? For rapid growth? For least energy used in
> breaking down the food? For greatest free glucose to feed the brain?
> For largest energy supply to hunt and fend off predators? For longest
> life in our ancestral environment? For longest life today?
You're overshooting the ability of modern dietary science to handle that
class of problem. Start with simple things, like: "On a hunter-gatherer
diet it is very nearly impossible to get *more* sodium than potassium,
with a typical hunter-gatherer intaking perhaps ten times as much
potassium sodium. Today, salt is added to nearly all processed foods.
What does the violation of this assumed metabolic invariant do?" And so on.
I suppose once you had cleaned up the major ongoing catastrophes you might
want to do a little fine-tuning. I don't have that much knowledge myself.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 15 2003 - 12:17:24 MDT