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I call a water fountain a bubbler and I’m from Australia
I suspect the word 'pre-prepared' is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here--when I see that item on the list I think things like pre-fried chicken, frozen burger patties, veggie pakora, veggies in a sauce for a stir-fry, stuff like that (like you'd find in a ready-made frozen meal). Not like, frozen peas.
Also as a brief pointer at another cool thing in Metabolical, Lustig claims that exercise is useful for weight loss mostly because of its beneficial impact on cell repair/metabolic system repair (something specific about mitochondria?) and not for the calorie deficit it may or may not create.
I consider Lustig's science to be quite thorough, I like him a lot. The main point against him is that he personally doesn't look very metabolically healthy, which I would expect of someone who had spent his life investigating and theorising about what influences metabolic health.
I don't remember individual studies but two books that might be helpful:
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken
Metabolical by Robert Lustig
UPP is terribly written and I imagine mostly useful for its bibliography (I skimmed it in an hour or so). Metabolical is better (although far too difficult a read to be a successful popsci book), although it isn't specifically focused on processing techniques (it in particular discusses stripping out fibre, adding sugars, reducing water, as some major processing techniques with big issues). You might find something helpful looking in the refs section of either book.
Just wanted to say thank you for this post! It changed my mind slightly (to considering seed oils potentially nonproblematic in and of themselves, outside their being incorporated into ultra-processed food). I appreciate that because it's a topic I care a lot about.
Most bread you would buy in the supermarket is ultra-processed (including almost all organic, whole grain etc etc).
Types of bread that are only -processed- (not ultra processed):
- Bakery-made bread, often sourdough, with an ingredients list that looks like (wheat flour, salt, water) perhaps with additions like fruit or seeds. This sort of bread lasts a couple of days at best.
- Bread made from literal whole grains--German fitness bread, pumpernickel, sunflower seed bread. This stuff. It is shelf stable but tastes more like a solid cracker than normal bread.
- Anything you make yourself at home.
That's it. Anything with preservatives, dough thickeners, soy lecithin etc in its ingredients list is ultra-processed.
There's a taxonomy now for levels of processing (NOVA groups); most research only finds problems with the highest level of processing (NOVA 4), which includes processing methods you can't do in an ordinary kitchen, or that were not possible ~100 years ago (extrusion, moulding, preprocessing by frying are some examples given).
https://ecuphysicians.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/78/2021/07/NOVA-Classification-Reference-Sheet.pdf
One way it could be 'the processing, not the ingredients' is that in many cases the fibre is either removed or deconstructed (making it less useful in slowing down the metabolism of sugars), another is that water is removed (although I'm not sure why that's bad exactly). This is one of the key arguments endocrinologist Robert Lustig makes against industrially-processed foods, particularly ones with added sugar, bc the fibre cannot help slow down the metabolism of the sugar because it's broken up or removed.
Lisa doesn’t post much about parenting toddlers; she posts a bit about birth and newborns but the focus of her channel is more on cooking and homemaking and less on parenting IMO. I don’t know enough about the other woman’s channel to evaluate; I’ve only watched a few.
A parent friend recommended the RIE parenting philosophy, and RIE has several demo videos of parents interacting with their kids according to the principles. I’ve watched a few; I think they’re searchable by keyword.
Interviews and kitchen walkthroughs with the head chefs at Michelin-star restaurants; I particularly like one with the head chef at a wild seafood restaurant demonstrating his daily ingredient procurement processes: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUeEVLHfB5-T7E5TPxSphcDweIL5ioLrj
Esther Perel’s podcast called ‘Where Shall We Begin?’ where she does a live couples’ therapy session with a guest couple. It is rare to get access to a recorded therapy session, and she is at least world-renowned as a relationship therapist (although that doesn’t necessarily prove that she’s good at it).
This guy Lance has grown a prolific permaculture food garden in the high deserts of Colorado for the last (iirc) 40 years. It provides almost all his food, including grains and legumes. Here they do a walkthrough of the garden and he discusses how it works: https://youtu.be/i5yUPau-F1c?si=S6lRE4a2Ns9HujGJ
Sofia Bue is a professional SFX sculptor; she works at Weta Workshop which is the most well-known special FX company in the world; they were responsible for SFX on Lord of the Rings. She also won the SFX category at the world Bodypainting championships at least once so I think she’s pretty indisputably world-class at it.
Her entire YouTube channel demonstrates a tonne of her tacit knowledge with respect to sculpting and SFX in general, but this is one good example of her showing her work on a small sculpture:
Sofia Bue is a professional SFX sculptor; she works at Weta Workshop which is the most well-known special FX company in the world; they were responsible for SFX on Lord of the Rings. She also won the SFX category at the world Bodypainting championships at least once so I think she’s pretty indisputably world-class at it.
Her entire YouTube channel demonstrates a tonne of her tacit knowledge with respect to sculpting and SFX in general, but this is one good example of her showing her work on a small sculpture:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1NwYbC5t-9w&pp=ygUJc29maWEgYnVl
A few channels on parenting and homemaking:
Lisa from a YouTube channel called Farmhouse on Boone walks through her house and discusses what items she keeps where and why, and how she avoids clutter. She is a mom of 8 with a successful YouTube channel (successful enough that her husband quit his job and now helps with the channel and homeschooling).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5slnHqMG22Q&pp=ygUjZmFybWhvdXNlIG9uIGJvb25lIG1pbmltYWxpc3QgaG91c2U%3D
This woman (whose name I don’t know) is a Christian mom who homeschools her 8 children. In this video she walks through a day in the life of her family. I know less about any metrics of success, except that she reports that her family is easy to run and enjoyable for her.
I don’t have one video to recommend for each topic, but YouTube is a great source of videos of giving birth and of related activities like breastfeeding, babywearing, and even holding a baby.
I think simply searching ‘birth video’ or ‘homebirth’, ‘hospital birth’ or something similar gets you enough such videos, and watching a bunch of different women give birth is probably better than watching a single ‘expert’.
I wanted to add a (possible, additional) factor in that I didn’t see included, although I don’t know how you would test it. Guess: because of the size and interconnectedness/maturity of SF’s homeless network, it might be easier to be less isolated/more connected while homeless in SF than in other places. It seems clear that in some parts of SF (I’m thinking of particular streets in SOMA and the Tenderloin, and at Civic Center) the people who live on the streets are connecting with each other and also often enjoying each other’s company. They look like friends. And this may be part of what makes the homeless population more visible in SF than in other places—they’re hanging out together, often talking loudly, and they’re often in the same place all the time, every day. There is a social scene it is possible to be part of, and this might feel better than living alone somewhere much nicer.
(There are still many people who seem both isolated and homeless, too.)
Hi Cathleen. As someone inadvertently but meaningfully once tangled up in this story who you probably don’t know, I have a deep admiration, gratitude and respect for this post and your decision to write it and post it publicly. I read all of it, and might yet read it again. It helped to make sense of the story and the parts relevant to me in a way that is, in real time, updating and improving my understanding of how different people with different personalities can participate in the same situation and come out of it with different struggles and different earned wisdom. Yours is a perspective I’ve been missing, so thank you for having the courage and grace to share it.
Upvoted because Anna articulated a lot of what I wanted to say but didn’t have the energy or clarity to say with such nuance.
Thank you for keeping that promise; I imagine it wasn’t easy to write.
I wouldn’t, but I also wouldn’t consider that to be the case for many of the speculative startups I’ve worked at, in hindsight.
I consider ‘wasting millions of dollars’ to be a shitty thing to do, but also unfortunately common. I think focusing on whether the money was wasted is distracting (and perhaps dismissive) away from the stories being told.
This may be a crux; Walter may just value personal suffering versus use of economic resources differently to me.
I feel like if you read Zoe’s medium post, read the parts where she described enduring cPTSD symptoms like panic attacks, flashbacks and paranoia consistently for two years after leaving Leverage, and then rounded that off to ‘she felt useless and bailed’ then, idk dude, we live in two different worlds.
I would also be very interested in a timeline for this.
I really don’t know about the experience of a lot of the other ex-Leveragers, but the time it took her to post it, the number and kind of allies she felt she needed before posting it, and the hedging qualifications within the post itself detailing her fears of retribution, plus just how many peoples’ initial responses to the post were to applaud her courage, might give you a sense that Zoe’s post was unusually, extremely difficult to make public, and that others might not have that same willingness yet (she even mentions it at the bottom, and presumably she knows more about how other ex-Leveragers feel than we do).
I’m someone with a family history of psychosis and I spend quite a lot of time researching it—treatments, crisis response, cultural responses to it. There are roughly the same number of incidences of psychosis in my immediate to extended family than are described in this post in the extended rationalist community. Major predictive factors include stress, family history and use of marijuana (and, to a lesser extent, other psychedelics). I don’t have studies to back this up but I have an instinct based on my own experience that openness-to-experience and risk-of-psychosis are correlated in family risk factors. So given the drugs, stress and genetic openness, I’d expect generic Bay Area smart people to have a fairly high risk of psychosis compared to, say, people in more conservative areas already.
You might not be able to say this, but I’m wondering whether it’s one of the NDAs Zoe references Geoff pressuring people to sign at the end of Leverage 1.0 in 2019,
It seems like one of the problems with ‘the Leverage situation’ is that collectively, we don’t know how bad it was for people involved. There are many key Leverage figures who don’t seem to have gotten involved in these conversations (anonymously or not) or ever spoken publicly or in groups connected to this community about their experience. And, we have evidence that some of them have been hiding their post-Leverage experiences from each other.
So I think making the claim that the MIRI/CFAR related experiences were ‘worse’ because there exists evidence of psychiatric hospitalisation etc is wrong and premature.
And also? I’m sort of frustrated that you’re repeatedly saying that -right now-, when people are trying to encourage stories from a group of people who we might expect to have felt insecure, paranoid, and gaslit about whether anything bad ‘actually happened’ to them.
I am also mad at what I see to be piggybacking on Zoe’s post, downplaying of the harms described in her post, and a subtle redirection of collective attention away from potentially new, timid accounts of things that happened to a specific group of people within Leverage and seem to have a lot of difficulty talking about it.
I hope that the sustained collective attention required to witness, make sense of and address the accounts of harm coming out of the psychology division of Leverage doesn’t get lost as a result of this post being published when it was.
Hi Geoff—have you posted the brief response comment anywhere yet?
Also, for the extended Leverage diaspora and people who are somehow connected, LessWrong is probably the most obvious place to have this discussion, even if people familiar with Leverage make up only a small proportion of people who normally contribute here.
There are other conversations happening on Facebook and Twitter but they are all way more fragmented than the ones here.
This is great, and straightforward, and I’m glad you joined the conversation. Thank you.
I think the fact that it is now a four person remote organization doing mostly research on science as opposed to an often-live-in organization with dozens of employees doing intimate psychological experiments as well as following various research paths tells me that you are essentially a different organization and the only commonalities are the name and the fact that Geoff is still the leader.
I have a sincere question for you, Kerry, because you seem to be upset by the approach commenters here are taking to talking about this issue and the people involved, and people here are openly discussing the character of your employer, which I can imagine to be really painful.
If your sister or brother or your significant other had become enmeshed in a controlling group and you believed the group and in particular its leader had done them serious psychological harm, how would you want people to talk about the group and its leader in public, after the fact? What sorts of discussions, comments or questions would you consider reasonable or necessary under such circumstances, and what would you consider off the table?
(Specifically, I’m not focused on whether you believe Leverage 1.0 had those characteristics, but how you would respond towards a group and its leader that you personally believed -did- have these characteristics)
Yup. I have known all of these things since 2018-2019, and know or know of maybe a few dozen people who also know these things. I’m glad this bare minimum is being discussed openly, publicly.
Secondhand, I have a very negative view of at least some parts of what happened in Leverage 1.0. My best guess is that the relationships and events that some people have (mostly privately) described as controlling or abusive were not evenly distributed across the whole organisation. So it would have been straightforward for someone to be working at Leverage and never see or get deeply involved with situations that a handful of people have, in private or in semi-public conversations, described clearly as cultic abuse. It seems like there are on the order of dozens of people who probably had a roughly fine time being involved in Leverage for many years, and at least a handful of people who report much more negative experiences.
(I’m @utotranslucence on Twitter; never officially had a LessWrong account before but been around the Bay Area community since 2017. I attended one Paradigm training weekend in early 2018 and some parties at the Lake Merritt building but most of my knowledge comes from conversations with friends who did work there, and there are plenty of things I still don’t know with great clarity.)