If Wolf Tivy trains w/Yud for at least 1 month, Yud will change his tune and basically admit, huh, no hard feelings, I actually can get a lot stronger if I train, and I hadn't realized that before.

1. This is not about body fat percentage or weight

2. This is about getting strong muscles, deadlift, bench, movement, balance etc

3. The claim: If they both agree, and if Wolf happens to overlap w/Yud physically (or online) and they train together, and after 1 month Yud can honestly say that he learned something new from the experience and has gotten a lot stronger, then YES. Otherwise NO.

4. I don't want to get into formal measurement of weights, etc. I just want to see if whether if they both make an honest effort, what happens.

5. Questions like "did you get a lot stronger than you thought possible, once you started training properly and eating well(ish)?"

6. Note again: this is not about losing weight. It's about getting strong. Yud can eat whatever he wants, although he should include some meat, eggs, cheese, or some kind of normal level of protein (no need for shakes, etc, a normal untrained guy doing hard lifting should still get noticeably stronger in the first month with a normal diet)

7. I chose 1 month because for someone untrained, that's actually a really long time. i.e. after the first proper workout Yud will feel incredibly sore and as long as he eats some protein, it's likely we'll know if he's a responder. If it takes forever to recover, or he recovers but doesn't feel good at all, nor stronger, it's likely he's right and he is a severe non-responder. But if he's able to do 2x/week good workouts, we'll know a ton after a month.

Resolution:

• If Wolf says Yud didn't take it seriously at all and never really tried hard, then NA since nothing was proven.

• If Wolf tries to train Yud too hard, that doesn't count. For a normal man, something like crossfit is WELL strong enough to induce gains. I'm thinking more something similar to a PT where you get pushed, hard, but not insane, and not with people screaming at you etc. Yud has to go along with it and try to some degree. If a good training system isn't worked out, then NA.

• The claim can only YES/NO if there really is a reasonable strength-based training program going on for at least one month, or if Yud realizes he can get stronger in an even shorter time than this.

If they never meet or arrange to do this by end of the time period (mid 2027) then NA.

Discussion

There really are two pretty interesting hypothesis, which an experiment could resolve:

• Eliezer really is a fairly extreme non-responder to exercise, and that even with moderate-intense (i.e. 80% of the intensity of a Crossfit session, 2x/week) his body really wouldn't strengthen.

• Or, it just so happens that he hasn't naturally ever run into a person or situation which would result in him really stressing his muscles to encourage muscle growth, but that if he had a good training buddy work out with him, he would break into a new mode, and his muscles would grow.

• Both seem plausible to me for different reasons.

Details:

• Yudkowsky is 45 years old at time of claim creation.

• TRT is allowed

• My note: I'd love to see a genetic test of Yud for athletic variants - I've been interpreting that as a person's natural genetic tendency to gain muscles, enjoy movement, control, balance etc. If that number happens to be low, it could explain a lot.

• Claim goes til end of date, or can extend til we know something, if they're actively training when the claim was set to end.

The public tweets which spurred the original discussion: