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Alternate day calorie restriction seems to be one of the most effective ways of increasing my life expectancy, but it isn’t easy. I tried it about three years ago, but gave up because it interfered with my sleep. I started it again three weeks ago, and this time I seem to be adjusting to it.

One important difference is that this time I’m better informed about what it takes to adjust to the diet. I planned a strict induction phase of 7 down days (about 550 calories) and 7 up days (unlimited food), followed by a less strict pattern of 2-3 days per week on which I’m limited to around 1000 calories a day. (I ended up adding an extra up day after each of the first two down days, then switched to strict alternation for the remainder of the induction phase). The severity of the induction phase may be important at triggering adaptation to this kind of diet.

The second difference is that this time I’ve been obsessive about measuring my food intake to the nearest gram. I suspect that when I intended to eat 1200 calories a day in my prior attempt, I was actually getting at least 1400 calories and fooling myself into thinking I was following the diet. This time I’m using a good scale to weigh each serving.

After the first down day, I slept poorly (as expected), getting impatient for sunrise to bring me an excuse to get up for food. After about the fourth down day, waking with an empty stomach seemed normal enough that it doesn’t provide a motive to get out of bed, or to get food quickly when I do get out of bed. I hardly notice the feelings of hunger then, even though I ought to be hungrier than late in the previous day when I did notice some of the standard hunger feelings. My sleep isn’t quite back to normal, but it seems close to normal and improving.

I’ve been feeling full about 50% of the time. I felt noticeably hungry about 30% of the time at first, and now it’s more like 20% of the time. Hunger feels a bit less important now than it used to feel (i.e. it affects my attention less).

Weight loss wasn’t an important motive for changing my diet, but I hoped I would lose about 7 pounds. I lost at least 5 pounds by the end of the 5th down day (my weight fluctuated enough that it’s hard to evaluate it precisely). I couldn’t comfortably eat enough on the up days to make up for what I lost on the 550 calorie days, even when I became mildly alarmed at my rate of weight loss.

Then my weight rebounded within a few days, without any apparent change in my diet, to roughly what it was at the start. The obvious guess is that my metabolism slowed down to compensate for the reduced calories. I did feel noticeably colder in bed after down days. I also felt less mental energy, and when doing an easy hike on the day after the 6th down day I felt a need to take rest breaks that was unusual in that it wasn’t caused by anything like muscle fatigue.

During the induction phase, I practiced strict protein fasting (< 15 grams of protein per day) on down days due to guesses that protein restriction is more effective at causing beneficial metabolic changes, which might cause faster psychological adaptation. My results seem to provide weak evidence in support of this guess. My diet on down days was mostly sweet potato and lettuce, with modest amounts of other vegetables and sugar-free chocolate. This provided more bulk to fill my gut than is typical for this kind of diet, but that was likely offset by the lack of protein related satiety. I’m not restricting protein now that I’m out of the induction phase (although I expect to do so maybe once a month).

My heart rate variability mysteriously increased after the first down day, then declined to a much lower than average level after the fourth down day, and has fluctuated a lot since then (averaging somewhat below normal).

Why did I have enough willpower to get this far, when I probably didn’t have the willpower needed to do it right three years ago?

One factor is that I now consider the CFAR community to be an important tribe to belong to, so my sense of self-identity has changed to attach more importance to being able to make big changes to my life.

Another factor is having information that led me to be somewhat confident that by a specific, not too distant, date it would become a good deal easier.

A third factor is being more obsessive about measuring how well I was complying with the rules I set down.

The induction phase cost me a fair amount of productivity. For 17 days I wasn’t close to having enough willpower/ambition to start writing a blog post (and had similar problems with most other non-routine tasks). But now I feel that writing this post is easier than normal. It’s too early to tell whether that means I have more mental energy than before.

I don’t know how to get strong evidence about whether it is worth the effort. I seem to feel more self-efficacy. I now think I can set my weight to any reasonable target simply by changing my calorie target on 2 or 3 down days per week. But in order to be clearly worthwhile it needs to improve my long-term health. I won’t know that for quite a while.

Ethical diets

I’ve seen some discussion of whether effective altruists have an obligation to be vegan or vegetarian.

The carnivores appear to underestimate the long-term effects of their actions. I see a nontrivial chance that we’re headed toward a society in which humans are less powerful than some other group of agents. This could result from slow AGI takeoff producing a heterogeneous society of superhuman agents. Or there could be a long period in which the world is dominated by ems before de novo AGI becomes possible. Establishing ethical (and maybe legal) rules that protect less powerful agents may influence how AGIs treat humans or how high-speed ems treat low-speed ems and biological humans [0]. A one in a billion chance that I can alter this would be worth some of my attention. There are probably other similar ways that an expanding circle of ethical concern can benefit future people.

I see very real costs to adopting an ethical diet, but it seems implausible that EAs are merely choosing alternate ways of being altruistic. How much does it cost MealSquares customers to occasionally bemoan MealSquares use of products from apparently factory-farmed animals? Instead, it seems like EAs have some tendency to actively raise the status of MealSquares [1].

I don’t find it useful to compare a more ethical diet to GiveWell donations for my personal choices, because I expect my costs to be mostly inconveniences, and the marginal value of my time seems small [2], with little fungibility between them.

I’m reluctant to adopt a vegan diet due to the difficulty of evaluating the health effects and due to the difficulty of evaluating whether it would mean fewer animals living lives that they’d prefer to nonexistence.

But there’s little dispute that most factory-farmed animals are much less happy than pasture-raised animals. And everything I know about the nutritional differences suggests that avoiding factory-farmed animals improves my health [3].

I plan not to worry about factory-farmed invertebrates for now (shrimp, oysters, insects), partly because some of the harmful factory-farm practices such as confining animals to cages not much bigger than the animals in question aren’t likely with animals that small.

So my diet will consist of vegan food plus shellfish, insects, wild-caught fish, pasture-raised birds/mammals (and their eggs/whey/butter). I will assume vertebrate animals are raised in cruel conditions unless they’re clearly marked as wild-caught, grass-fed, or pasture-raised [4].

I’ve made enough changes to my diet for health reasons that this won’t require large changes. I already eat at home mostly, and the biggest change to that part of my diet will involve replacing QuestBars with a home-made version using whey protein from grass-fed cows (my experiments so far indicate it’s inconvenient and hard to get a decent texture). I also have some uncertainty about pork belly [5] – the pasture-raised version I’ve tried didn’t seem as good, but that might be because I didn’t know it needed to be sliced very thin.

My main concern is large social gatherings. It has taken me a good deal of willpower to stick to a healthy diet under those conditions, and I expect it to take more willpower to observe ethical constraints.

A 100% pure diet would be much harder for me to achieve than an almost pure diet, and it takes some time for me to shift my habits. So for this year I plan to estimate how many calories I eat that don’t fit this diet, and aim to keep that less than 120 calories per month (about 0.2%) [6]. I’ll re-examine the specifics of this plan next Jan 1.

Does anyone know a convenient name for my planned diet?

footnotes

0. With no one agent able to conquer the world, it’s costly for a single agent to repudiate an existing rule. A homogeneous group of superhuman agents might coordinate to overcome this, but with heterogeneous agents the coordination costs may matter.

1. I bought 3 orders of MealSquares, but have stopped buying for now. If they sell a version whose animal products are ethically produced (which I’m guessing would cost $50/order more), I’ll resume buying them occasionally.

2. The average financial value of my time is unusually high, but I often have trouble estimating whether spending more time earning money has positive or negative financial results. I expect financial concerns will be more important to many people.

3 With the probable exception of factory-farmed insects, oysters, and maybe other shellfish.

4. In most restaurants, this will limit me to vegan food and shellfish.

5. Pork belly is unsliced bacon without the harm caused by smoking.

6. Yes, I’ll have some incentive to fudge those estimates. My experience from tracking food for health reasons suggests possible errors of 25%. That’s not too bad compared to other risks such as lack of willpower.

Book review: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss.

This book has a few worthwhile sections, such as a good explanation of how virtual particles imply that matter came to exist in a previously empty region of space. But the book has much less substance than Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe (in particular, Tegmark comes much closer to answering why there is something rather than nothing).

One puzzling claim he makes is that scientists of the far future (when the visible universe is 100 times the current size) are likely to falsely conclude there was no big bang. Whatever problems they might have with new experiments, why wouldn’t they use results of experiments done when the universe was younger?

Book review: Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit, by Charles W. Calomiris, and Stephen H. Haber.

This book start out with some fairly dull theory, then switches to specific histories of banking in several countries with moderately interesting claims about how differences in which interest groups acquired power influenced the stability of banks.

For much of U.S. history, banks were mostly constrained to a single location, due to farmers who feared banks with many branches would shift their lending elsewhere when local crop failures made local farms risky to loan to. Yet comparing to Canada, where seemingly small political differences led to banks with many branches, it seems clear that U.S. banks were more fragile because of those restrictions, and less competition in the U.S. left consumers with less desirable interest rates.

By the 1980s, improved communications eroded farmers’ ability to tie banks to one locale, so political opposition to multi-branch banks vanished, resulting in a big merger spree. The biggest problem with this merger spree was that the regulators who approved the mergers asked for more loans to risky low-income borrowers. As a result, banks (plus Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) felt compelled to lower their standards for all borrowers (the book doesn’t explain what problems they would have faced if they had used different standards for loans the regulators pressured them to make).

These stories provide a clear and plausible explanation of why the U.S. has a pattern of banking crises that Canada and a few other well-run countries have almost entirely avoided over the past two centuries. But they suggest the U.S. banking crises should have been more unique among mature democracies than was actually the case.

The authors are overly dismissive of problems that don’t fit their narrative. Commenting on the failure of Citibank, Lehman, AIG, etc to sell more equity in early 2008, they say “Why go to the markets to raise new capital when you are confident that the government is going to bail you out?”. It seems likely bankers would have gotten better terms from the market as long as they didn’t wait until the worst part of the crisis. I’m pretty sure they gave little thought to bailouts, and relied instead on overly complacent expectations for housing prices.

The book has a number of asides that seem as important as their main points, such as claims that Britain’s greater ability to borrow money led to its military power, and its increased need for military manpower drove its expansion of the franchise.

Book review: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo.

This book gives an interesting perspective on the obstacles to fixing poverty in the developing world. They criticize both Jeffrey Sach and William Easterly for overstating how easy/hard it is provide useful aid to the poor by attempting simple and sweeping generalizations, where Banerjee and Duflo want us to look carefully at evidence from mostly small-scale interventions which sometimes produce decent results.

They describe a few randomized controlled trials, but apparently there aren’t enough of those to occupy a full book, so they spend more time on less rigorous evidence of counter-intuitive ways that aid programs can fail.

They portray the poor as mostly rational and rarely making choices that are clearly stupid given the information that is readily available to them. But their cognitive abilities are sometimes suboptimal due to mediocre nutrition, disease, and/or stress from financial risks. Relieving any of those problems can sometimes enable them to become more productive workers.

The book advocates mild paternalism in the form of nudging weakly held beliefs about health-related questions where people can’t easily observe the results (e.g. vaccination, iodine supplementation), but probably not birth control (the poor generally choose how many children to have, although there are complex issues influencing those choices). They point out that the main reason people in developed countries make better health choices is due to better defaults, not more intelligence. I wish they’d gone a bit farther and speculated about how many of our current health practices will look pointlessly harmful to more advanced societies.

They give a lukewarm endorsement of microcredit, showing that it needs to be inflexible to avoid high default rates, and only provides small benefits overall. Most of the poor would be better off with a salaried job than borrowing money to run a shaky business.

The book fits in well with Givewell’s approach.

Book review: How China Became Capitalist, by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang.

This is my favorite book about China so far, due to a combination of insights and readability.

They emphasize that growth happened rather differently from how China’s leaders planned, and that their encouragement of trial and error was more important than their ability to recognize good plans.

The most surprising features of China’s government after 1978 were a lack of powerful special interests and freedom from ideological rigidity. Mancur Olson’s book The Rise and Decline of Nations suggests how a revolution such as Mao’s might free a nation from special interest power for a good while.

I’m still somewhat puzzled by the rapid and nearly complete switch from a country blinded by ideology to a country pragmatically searching for a good economy. Coase and Wang attribute it to awareness of the harm Maoism caused, but I can easily imagine that such awareness could mainly cause a switch to a new ideology.

It ends with a cautiously optimistic outlook on China’s future, with some doubts about freedom of expression, and some hope that China will contribute to diversity of capitalist cultures.

Book review: Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves, by C. Terry Warner.

This book consists mostly of well-written anecdotes demonstrating how to recognize common kinds of self-deception and motivated cognition that cause friction in interpersonal interactions. He focuses on ordinary motives that lead to blaming others for disputes in order to avoid blaming ourselves.

He shows that a willingness to accept responsibility for negative feelings about personal relationships usually makes everyone happier, by switching from zero-sum or negative-sum competitions to cooperative relationships.

He describes many examples where my gut reaction is that person B has done something that justifies person A’s decision to get upset, and then explaining that person A should act nicer. He does this without the “don’t be judgmental” attitude that often accompanies advice to be more understanding.

Most of the book focuses on the desire to blame others when something goes wrong, but he also notes that blaming nature (or oneself) can produce similar problems and have similar solutions. That insight describes me better than the typical anecdotes do, and has been a bit of help at enabling me to stop wasting effort fighting reality.

I expect that there are a moderate number of abusive relationships where the book’s advice would be counterproductive, but that most people (even many who have apparently abusive spouses or bosses) will be better off following the book’s advice.

Book review: Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking, by Ralph L. Keeney.

This book argues for focusing on values (goals/objectives) when making decisions, as opposed to the more usual alternative-focused decisionmaking.

The basic idea seems good. Alternative-focused thinking draws our attention away from our values and discourages us from creatively generating new possibilities to choose from. It tends to have us frame decisions as responses to problems, which leads us to associate decisions with undesirable emotions, when we could view decisions as opportunities.

A good deal of the book describes examples of good decisionmaking, but those rarely provide insight into how to avoid common mistakes or to do unusually well.

Occasionally the book switches to some dull math, without clear explanations of what benefit the rigor provides.

The book also includes good descriptions of how to measure the things that matter, but How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard does that much better.

I recently got Bose QuietComfort 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones.

I had previously tried passive earplugs and headphones that claimed 30 dB noise reduction, and got little value out of them.

The noise cancelling headphones suppress a good deal more train (BART) noise, enough that I’m now able to read nonfiction while on the train.

It won’t help with the situations where noise bothers me most (multiple conversations nearby) because it mainly eliminates predictable noises. It makes speech sound more distant without affecting the speech volume a lot. But reducing the cost of train and plane travel is valuable enough that I feel foolish about not having tried them earlier.

Book review: How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity, by Rodney Stark.

This book is a mostly entertaining defense of Christian and libertarian cultures’ contribution to Western civilization’s dominance.

He wants us to believe that the industrial revolution resulted from mostly steady progress starting with Greek city-states, interrupted only by the Roman empire.

He defends the Catholic church’s record of helping scientific progress and denies that the Reformation was needed, although he suggests the Catholic church’s reaction to the Reformation created harmful anti-capitalist sentiments.

His ideas resemble those in Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, yet there’s little overlap between the content of the two books.

The early parts of the book have too many descriptions of battles and other killings whose relevance is unclear.

I was annoyed at how much space he devoted to attacking political correctness toward the end of the book.

In spite of those problems, he presents many interesting ideas. Some are fairly minor, such as changes in privacy due to the Little Ice Age triggering the invention of chimneys. Others provide potentially important insights into differences between religions, e.g. “many influential Muslim scholars have held that efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy because they would seem to deny Allah’s freedom to act.”

Alas, I can only give the book a half-hearted endorsement because I suspect many of his claims are poorly supported. E.g. he thinks increased visibility of child labor in the 1800s caused child labor laws via shocked sensibilities. Two alternatives that seem much more plausible to me are that the increased visibility made the laws feasible to enforce, and the increased concentration of employers into a separate class made them easier scapegoats.