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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • The “experiment” is one you conduct on yourself, it’s not for thinking about a process and using your imagined results as the basis of further study. It’s very useful in a number of non scientific fields, and it can serve as an aid in scientific education though, so it shouldn’t be written off generally.

    The paper clip thought experiment is a punchy, memorable example of the conflict between what input you give to a computer and what the computer interprets from that. The goal is for people who hear it to remember that they need to be thoughtful about what exactly they want and precise in their phrasing when they’re programming or training an AI.





  • It’s not as comfortable, certainly, but there are very overweight people with active jobs (my husband’s a butcher, and this describes about a third of the people working in his shop- they’re on their feet and walking around, lifting half hogs and doing really physical work).

    For most people, as long as you stay active, you can continue to be active. If you’re completely or mostly inactive, it will take some time to gradually build up your endurance, and that’s certainly more difficult, the more weight you have to move, but walking is very low impact. I’m not suggesting that two people with BMIs of 22 and 42, respectively, would have identical walking endurance, but it’s not uncommon in my very walkable German town to encounter very overweight people who walk a ton.

    Walking is obviously better at burning calories than driving, but we’re really efficient walkers and it’s not very difficult to eat enough to be obese while using walking as your primary mode of travel. If you walk at a moderate pace with little incline for 2 hours a day at 150kg, you’ll likely burn between 700-1000 calories (way more information is needed to get an exact number), and you can completely neutralize that by eating an order of fries with mayo, or a container of Ben and Jerry’s.