From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Apr 19 2003 - 12:52:22 MDT
gts wrote:
> Concerning the important role of laboratory testing in
> helping us understand proper diet:
>
> "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
>
>>Or rather, it doesn't matter what the null
>>hypothesis or Bayesian prior or whatever
>>*was*, because there are now enough specific
>>cases of modern diets being detrimental because
>>of violating ancestral invariants that I would,
>>indeed, tend to take as the *new* working assumption
>>that the ancestral diet is better until proven
>>otherwise.
>
> Actually that is what I mean by the paleodiet
> being the null or default hypothesis. To those like
> you and me who see validity to the idea that the
> healthiest foods are paleothic foods because we are
> best adapted to those foods, the paleodiet appears to
> be a good working hypothesis, and should be considered
> the null hypothesis which must be rejected in any
> statistical test about diet. This would mean that the
> the "burden of proof" would indeed be on those
> researchers who would like to formulate and test any
> hypothesis that deviates from the default paleodiet
> working hypothesis.
No, that *would* be just playing burden-of-proof tennis. The paleodiet
hypothesis is an interesting one, but if your sole justification is
"because that's what our ancestors ate", in the absence of any evidence
it's not really all that much more plausible than a dozen other
hypotheses, i.e., eat as much vitamins as possible, eat as many calories
as possible, eat as much food as possible, eat only what tastes best, and
so on. The paleodiet is the *new* working hypothesis *because of* the
evidence that has accumulated in its favor, singling it out over
apparently equally plausible a priori arguments such as "eat whatever
tastes the best".
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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