\Will it be possible to import all existing LW content?

the Calories In / Calories Out model of weight loss is correct

My opinion is that it is a "motte-and-bailey" type of a model. Technically correct, but skips some of the important parts.

Things you can control directly:

• amount and type of food you put in your mouth
• type and amount of exercise you choose to do
• whether you really start doing the exercise each day, and keep doing it as long as possible

Things you cannot control directly:

• what your metabolism actually does with the food you put in your mouth

Things this model doesn't even mention:

• there are other important things about the food, not just calories

As a consequense, these things happen in real life that the model does not predict:

If you are lucky, you can actually put a lot of calories in your mouth without getting fat as a result, even if you are not exercising hard. Not sure what exactly happens, my uneducated guess is that the metabolism only takes as much calories as needed, as the rest goes to shit. (So yes, technically it is "calories out", but it is not what people proposing this model typically mean, and you have no direct control over this, i.e. you can't simply decide to lose weight by going to the bathroom more often.)

If you are unlucky, the "calories in" get converted into something that is somehow not easily accessible as an energy source. (Either because your metabolism is fucked up generally, or because your body is low on some important component, such as iron.) You know you should burn some calories, but at the same time you are weak as a fly, so you really can't. (Not because "math doesn't work", but because the linear model ignores some parts of the reality.) But you mentioned this in the "random thoughts" part.

...however, assuming that the metabolism is working more or less correctly, the model is useful.

My recommendation would be:
Step 1 -- get checked by a doctor, whether you are low on something; start taking supplements;
Step 2 -- start exercising regularly, without worrying about the "calories in" yet, just to build the momentum;
Step 3 -- get more strategic about the food you eat.

The reason I put "step 2" before "step 3" is because studing calories can take unlimited amounts of time, and can be used as a convenient excuse to procrastinate on exercising. I would also say that "add a lot of unprocessed vegetables in your food" is a good first approximation for healthy diet.

Other random thoughts:

• don't focus too much on "weight" -- it correlates with the right thing, but is not exactly the right thing; converting 5 kg of fat into 5 kg of muscles increases your health and attractivity even if the resulting weight is the same, on the other hand dehydrating yourself decreases your weight but hurts your health;
• shaming people for their metabolism (or just not having time to exercise because they e.g. have to work 2 jobs to survive) is bad; but enforcing a norm of tabooing information about healthy lifestyle is in my eyes even worse... essentially, because people doing the former are at least usually recognized as assholes, while people doing the latter can pretend noble intentions while in fact they contribute to avoidable premature deaths;
• I believe that "eating a lot of unprocessed vegetables" is the essence of healthy diet, and the rest is mostly role-playing (i.e. you can eat "Mediterranean diet" and imagine being an exotic Italian, or eat a "paleo diet" and imagine being a prehistorical warrior, but the outcome is the same for the same reasons, regardless of your aesthetical preferences)

You can fall asleep, so it seems like continuity does get broken sometimes.

I think it does imply subjective immortality. I'll bite that bullet. Therefore, you should sign up for cryonics.

Consciousness isn't continuous. There can be interruptions, like falling asleep or undergoing anesthesia. A successor mind/pattern is a conscious pattern that remembers being you. In the multiverse, any given mind has many many successors. It doesn't have to follow immediately, or even have to follow at all, temporally. At the separations implied even for a Tegmark Level I multiverse, past and future are meaningless distinctions, since there can be no interactions.

You are your mind/pattern, not your body. A mind/pattern is independent of substrate. Your unconscious, sleeping self is not your successor mind/pattern. It's an unconscious object that has a high probability of creating your successor (i.e. it can wake up). Same with your cryonicically-preserved corpsicle, though the probability is lower.

Any near-death event will cause grievous suffering to any barely-surviving successors, and grief and loss to friends and relatives in branches where you (objectively) don't survive. I don't want to suffer grievous injury, because that would hurt. I also don't want my friends and relatives to suffer my loss. Thus, I'm reluctant to risk anything that may cause objective death.

But, the universe being a dangerous place, I can't make that risk zero. By signing up for cryonics, I can increase the measure of successors that have a good life, even after barely surviving.

In the Multiverse, death isn't all-or-none, black or white. A successor is a mind that remembers being you. It does not have to remember everything. If you take a drug that causes you to not form long-term memory of any event today, have you died by the next day? Objectively, no. Your friends and relatives can still talk to "you" the next day. Subjectively, partially. Your successors lack certain memories. But people forget things all the time.

Being mortal in the multiverse, you can expect that your measure of successors will continue to diminish as your branches die, but the measure never reaches absolute zero. Eventually all that remains are Bolzman Brains and the like. The most probable Boltzman brain successors only live long enough to have a "single" conscious qualia of remembering being you. The briefest of conscious thoughts. Their successors remember that thought and may have another random thought. You can eventually expect an eternity of totally random qualia and no control at all over your experience.

This isn't Hell, but Limbo. Suffering is probably only a small corner of possible qualia-space, but so is eudaimonia. After an eternity you might stumble onto a small Botzlman World where you have some measure of control over your utility for some brief time, but that world will die, and your successors will again be only Boltzman brains.

I can't help that some of my successors from any given moment are Boltzman brains. But I don't want my only successors to be Boltzman Brains, because they don't increase my utility. Therefore, cryonics.

See the Measure Problem of cosmology. I'm not certain of my answer, and I'd prefer not to bet my life on it, but it seems more likely than not. I do not believe that Boltzman Brains can be eliminated from cosmology, only that they have lesser measure than evolved beings like us. This is because of the Trivial Theorem of Arithmetic: almost all natural numbers are really damn huge. The universe doesn't have to be infinite to get a Tegmark Level I multiverse. It just has to be sufficiently large.

I'm not willing to decipher your second question because this theme bothers me enough as it is, but I'll just say that I'm amazed figuring this stuff out is not considered a higher priority by rationalists. If at some point someone can definitely tell me what to think about this, I'd be glad about it.

It seems like you have just reinvented the criticism "if you can extract almost all the value from each transaction (aka 'exploitation'), you will shortly be rich". Well, yes, but the point is that a market with competition generally prevents you from doing that. As someone pointed out, if you make 100 loaves then you have created 100 dollars of value; the question is how those 100 dollars are distributed. You construct an example where the baker is able to capture 99% of the value he created; good for him, but it relies on your construction of the price. Seeing the baker get rich, won't a bunch of other people decide that bread-making can't be that hard, make some loaves, and sell them for 98 cents? And so on until the price of bread is equal to the cost of production plus the smallest profit anyone is willing to live with, which in your example seems to be a penny.

Instead it rewards those who provide value to those who provide value! It's recursive, like PageRank!

Contra Lumifer, this looks right to me. Notice the second-order effects, where a value-provider not only gets tokens to spend, but also them having more tokens means that everyone else is more sensitive to their desires.

That's the main reason why we have so much inequality. Recursive systems will have attractors that concentrate stuff.

This isn't as clear to me. If transactions happen entirely at random, but debts aren't allowed, then you'll end up with a Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution for income, which will be highly unequal. If you allow debts, then probably the resulting distribution is normal or something, which is still highly unequal. That is, this likely explains the particular shape of inequality, but not the existence of inequality at all. (Note, for example, a world where everyone has the same utility function but has variable capacity to produce goods and services will have significant inequality, driven by the variable capacity rather than the spiralling effects.)

That's also why you can't blame people for having no jobs. They are willing to provide value, but they can't survive by providing to non-providers, and only the best can provide to providers.

Trying to reach a conclusion about blame seems like trying to cross the is-ought chasm, and note that not being able to satisfy producers doesn't imply being able to satisfy non-producers.

Nope.

Imagine a loaf of bread is worth 1 dollar to consumers. If you make 100 loaves

...then you have created value, $100 worth of it.

And don't forget that "you" is also part of the society. In both cases society got richer by $100, it's just the distribution is different: in the first case you : others is 99 : 1 and in the second case you : others is 0 : 100.

the market doesn't reward those who provide value

Reality check: fail.

If you make 100 loaves and sell them for 99 cents each, you've provided 1 dollar of value to society, but made 100 dollars for yourself.

Not 99 dollars?

Reading too much into voting decisions is a mistake. Different readers vote for different reasons, and without downvotes (and even with) it's difficult to get a clear signal from the system.

For me, it's perfectly upvote-worthy to write things that are amusing, provocative, or even useless but well-intentioned. Don't be boring, and even then I can skip it pretty easily.

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Edit: Oh, it's in that page's comments. :/

Can you give an operational definition (or concrete example) of the free rider 'problem'? There are a couple of different things that you might not like about the phenomenon, and I'm not sure exactly which is the problem you're concerned about.

Exclusion is the most common "solution" (auctions and "fair" divisions being specific allocation mechanisms within that). Don't let "free riders" actually ride, and there's no problem.