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> Every case I get requires me to deploy a microscope and retrace the cops’ steps to see if they fucked up somehow (spoiler: they haven’t).
At the risk of stating the obvious, even according to the link provided, not all defendants are guilty.
And there is indeed tremendous pressure to plead guilty given the draconian penalties that some with a guilty verdict after a not guilty plea, versus a plea deal.
The book "Evil Angels" about the Lindy Chamberlain case in Australia illustrates some of the things that can go wrong and lead to innocent people being charged.
See also the reports from the Innocence project.
> waist went down
OK good - all we need now is your height
The standard method to measure waist is with lungs neutral (neither full nor empty) and measure at the point of the belly button. E,g, not necessarily where your belt goes. I assmume you did this.
> I'm in my forties
OK that makes it more impressive.
>Cacao (chocolate) not the precursor to cocaine
That is also a stimulant but not so much as coca.
> weight scale
Waist circumference is a pretty good proxy or you can work out Body Shape Index which is far better than the very broken BMI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_shape_index
> potatoes tasty
They can me made tasty indeed. Though the fact you have to do things to make them tasty suggests they are not inherently that tasty. Monotony can also be a factor in how motivating-to-eat a diet is.
Two pieces of information that would really help me to unterpret this post
1. How old are you? Weight loss seems to get exponentially harder with age (up to about 70 years old)
2. Were you able to assess how much fat was lost as opposed to how much weight was lost? No-one cares about losing weight, the goal - which is what should be measured - is fat loss.
Comments:
Potato only diet sounds a lot like Shangri-La diet - nothing tasty. I did lose weight on the SL diet but it takes away much of the pleasure of consuming food.
A lot of the other things you mentioned seeme to be stimulants (e.g. LSD, Cocoa). These do help weight loss but at a cost.
My only update was the thought that maybe more people will see the problem. The whole debate in the world at large has been a cluster***k.
* Linear extrapolation - exponentials apparently do not exist
* Simplistic analogies e.g. the tractor only caused 10 years of misery and unemloyment so any further technology will do no worse.
* Conflicts of interest and motivated reasoning
* The usual dismissal of geeks and their ideas
* Don't worry leave it to the experts. We can all find plenty of examples where this did not work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
* People saying this is risky being interpreted as a definite prediction of a certain outcome.
As Elon Musk recently pointed out the more proximate threat may be the use of highly capable AIs as tools e.g. to work on social media to feed ideas to people and manipulate them. Evil/amoral/misaligned AI takes over the world would happen later.
Some questions I ask people:
* How well did the advent of homo sapiens work out for less intelligent species like homo habilis? Why would AI be different?
* Look at the strife between groups of differing cognitive abilities and the skewed availability of resources between those groups (deliberately left vague to avoid triggering someone).
* Look how hard it is to predict the impact of technology - e.g. Krugman's famous insight that the internet would have no more impact than the fax machine. I remember doing a remote banking strategy in 1998 and asking senior management where they thought the internet fitted into their strategy. They almost all dismissed it as a land of geeks and academics and of no relevance to real businesses. A year later they demanded to know why I had misrepresented their clear view that the internet was going to be central to banking henceforth. Such is the ability of people to think they knew it all along, when they didn't.
In line with the maxim "read the textbook first" I offer metaethics:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/
https://iep.utm.edu/metaethi/
Nietzsche claimed that "there are no moral facts at all". It does seem that any moral system requires some axiom that cannot be derived from facts about the world, or logic.
Famously Kant's Categorical Imperative is one such axiom.
Your AB should ideally be:
I would add
d) A person who does not have RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria). This is a pretty common condition. A lot of people are just very averse to any feedback and such people do not make good accoutability partners. Such people may to be looking for cheerleaders not accountability partners.
Related ideas around immunity to change in this book https://www.amazon.com.au/Immunity-Change-Overcome-Potential-Organization/dp/1422117367
"Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization" by Robert Kegan
> Our youngest (15m) has recently started sleeping through the night
Initially I was going to point out that letting them cry themselves out sets the scene for neediness and insecurity down the track. But at 15 months it is a different story and what you are doing is fine. You must be at your wits' ends. Ours slept through at 6 weeks which was bad enough.
>Function of REM sleep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep#Deprivation_effects
I had a Zeo sleep monitor and I noticed that I had more REM sleep when doing hard intellectual work or deliberate practice, or after emotionally intense experiences. I had more deep sleep when exercising hard e.g. sprints or resistance training. This suggests to me that these forms of sleep are respectively associated with learning and body repair.
I also notice that I can learn a lot faster when I have naps and/or ample sleep. And that I recover from hard exercise more quickly.
OK this is all a bit uncertain but not just vacuous speculation.
I would like to see some evidence that orexin does not detract from these alleged effects before using it. Edit - the EA article does provide some evidence for this.
For any of those who are not big fans of CBT, ACT is very different
My gripe with CBT is that it tends to resolve to telling yourself that your feelings are irrational, make no sense etc. This is OK if your problem is primarily due to thoughts that are just merely cognitively wrong but I find this is rarely true. The problem is usually at the emotional level and in that situation CBT basically only papers over the problem.
One extreme case of this was a relative of mine who was given CBT for an anxiety condition, which turned out to be due to a cortisol-secreting tumour. It had virtually no benefit as you might expect. A problem needs to be addressed in terms of the causal structure that creates and maintains it.
ACT on the other hand does work at the emotional level - helping you to accept 'bad' feelings and deal with them, and then decide on / commit to your goals and accept that working on them will likely come with bad feelings like boredom, frustration etc.
So to my mind ACT is far more powerful and deep than CBT.
Other techniques that work at deeper levels that I found useful include Internal Family Systems Therapy, Memory Reconsolidation techniques (book "Unlocking the emotional brain") , Holotropic Breathwork*, and Trauma Release Exercises.
*inb4 woo woo
You are right that other therapies do recognize multiple parts in various ways.
From studying and using all of the above my conclusion is that IFS offers the most tractable approach to this issue of competing 'parts'. And in many ways the most powerful.
When you read about modern therapies, they all borrow from one another in a way that did not occur say 50 years ago where there were very entrenched schools of thought.
General comment:
There was a post in this thread claiming therapies are useless. This seems ironic as IMHO there are now available powerful and life changing therapies that simply were not well known 20+ years ago.
Quite often I run into people with trauma and other issues who gave up on therapies years ago and who do not realize that the game has changed.
Examples:
CFT
IFS
The various memory reconsolidation techniques (EMDR, see also the book "Unlocking the emotional brain").
Holotropic Breathwork (inb4 woo woo)
Reparenting therapy for lack of secure attachment.
One thing that I think is neglected is the power of stacking therapies. As one example I achieved a huge breakthrough by doing IFS during a Holotropic Breathwork session. This led to a cascade of breakthroughs to the point where I now seem to be - to my complete surprise - basically trauma free.
After reading the whole thing I don't think he disposed of the hyperpalatability hypothesis. That was the weakest part of the series.
One other thing that was missing related to sugars and seed oils. I have not been able to find any 'native' poulation with access to large quantities of both. You do have some with access to large amounts of fruit or honey, as mentioned. And also some (Kalahari desert dwellers eat large amounts of Omega 6 rich mongongo nuts "why farm when the world has mongongo nuts") with access to large quantities of Omega 6 oils, one alleged culprit in seed oils. But I don't see any that have both, Processed foods are rich in both and this is novel.
Still it is worth reading IMHO and I find myself somewhat convinced that Li has a role.
fruits, which are obviously 'natural'
Given the massive changes in fruits from selective breeding, I disagree. I would classify most fruits in the hyperpalatable category.
How many of the bananas in the article below are you going to eat?
https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits-vegetables-before-domestication-photos-genetically-modified-food-natural
And then there is the issue of availability in nature. Most fruits are only available seasonally in nature but we have fixed that. This temporary availability in quantity may be IMHO what drives binge eating of sweet foods. Because in nature it is a case of use it or lose it.
Notice that jefftk is responding to the child from the child's perspective.
Later on yes - perhaps - but not in real time. The question in my mind is why is the child so anxious about people taking their food and having enough food? Is this a thing that happens often? Is there a lack of security about getting enough food? Do adults behave in capricious ways that violate the child's rights?
Explaining that there is actually enough food may actually miss the point. The point is that in the moment the child did not, for whatever reason, trust that they would have enough food. Why was that?
There is an analogy to my situation in that my problem is that I was very sad that my grandmother had died and it was explained that I was wrong to be sad because she was in heaven. Which my mother much later admitted she did not actually balieve. It was a lie to shut me down. And it was made clear that being sad or expressing sadness was not allowed.
Did they really address the child's concerns - that someone can take their food and they will not have enough? What they did was showed that it was in the power of adults to get more food - not at all the same thing.
> You have to realize that as a parent
I have been a parent for several decades.
> You can't do a psychological deep dive everytime.
True - but would be looking out for other signs that the child is anxious about getting enough food to see if this is a one-off or not. I am still interested in the question of why the child is so anxious about getting enough food that they created this scene. Something here does not add up.
> she probably calmed you down a thousand other times without leaving any psychological scars
Actually denying the existence of real problems was her modus operandi. For example, her solution to my anxiety about having my teeth drilled with a slow drill and no pain-killers was to tell me that the drilling did not hurt - a blatant lie.
There is a book "Daily Rituals" by Mason Currey which looks at the practices of various high achievers. Few were able to achieve much more than 4 hours a day of sustained high calibre intellectual work*. This suggests to me that going much past this is difficult as you would think others who could work harder would do so and win.
A typical day would look like this
1. Hard work in the morning for 4-5 hours with coffee or breakfast.
2. Lunch then take care of business.
3. Relax in the evening.
A nap at lunchtime can help you to eke out another hour or so (as in thar study of violinists who made it to become concert solists - which I can't find right now). Personally I now see sleep not as wasted time but as a useful practice that helps me to learn and to exercise hard or to deal with emotionally challenging situations from the present or the past.
I think people should focus on getting in the 4 hours a day, which is hard enough. If you do that in a goal directed fashion you are likely to be awesome. And the good news is that you can also manage your life and enjoy yourself.
* Note we are not talking about busy work or repetitive work. If there is not a feeling of effort you are probably not working very hard. One example of hard work is deliberate practice.
I remember a slightly similar incident from my own childhood. I was very upset and expressed my concerns, and it was explained to me why my concerns were wrong, and that the winning move was not to be upset any more. As far as the parents were concerned, problem solved. In fact I recall hearing my mother telling someone, many years later, about this as an example of her excellent parenting.
As far as I was concerned the problem was not solved and the message I received was that my concerns about [issue] were to be kept to myself in future and I was on my own in this and any similar matters. Combined with other traumatic events that happened the same year, this left a resudue that was with me for many years.
My question in this case is why does the child have a high degree of anxiety about not getting enough food? What is going on here? I mean, looking beneath the surface a bit...
Keep your speech short. Briefly praise people who are there. Other than that, no-one cares.
An excessive pre-occupation with the wedding is a huge risk factor for a short marriage.
I ran into a similar problem. I was doing estimates of time and costs for projects which then went into the business case. As with OP my estimates were calibrated and usually fairly accurate.
Others' estimates were massively biased to low $ and time and often wildly wrong - in one case too low by a factor of 12.5. This is not rare of course - Microsoft Word for Windows V1.0 took over 5 years but never had an "end date" more than 1 year out.
The problem is that the business units wanted lowball estimates so they could get their projects started. It was then not too hard to exploit the sunk cost fallacy to keep the project alive. They felt I was not a "team player" and so forth.
See the extracts from Moral Mazes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/45mNHCMaZgsvfDXbw/quotes-from-moral-mazes for more on this kind of world.
I think if a person cannot point to several opinions they currently have that are regarded as abhorrent or stupid by most people, then it is unlikely that they would actually have held "correct"* opinions on the matters mentioned above, and other similar matters.
*i.e. opinions regarded as correct in <current year>.
Intelligence is no antitode. The philosopher Heidegger was closely allied with the Nazis. The most famous economist J M Keynes was Director of the British Eugenics Society (1937-1944).
I do hold several such opinions but there is no way I am going to state them in public. One thing that has not changed is the intolerance for divergent opinions. If anything it has become worse.
I am old enough to have seen many changes such that opinions regarded as totally abhorrent have now become the orthodoxy. And the old opinion is now regarded as abhorrent. I see the new generation quietly adopt the new opinion and easily condemn those who grew up in earlier times.
A few years back a young less-wronger informed me how grateful he was to have grown up in a time and place where he had a peer group with correct opinions on all the important issues. My thought was that it was mostly likely that the reason he thought those opinions were correct was because they were held by his peer group. Not especially because they are correct.
We actually had a session on this at the local LW where we tried to imagine current beliefs that a future generation would regard as terrible.
One scenario someone came up with was that society became much more conservative (plausability from the idea that coservatives and the like tend to have more children) and many of the current 'woke' beliefs would be seen as very regrettable and harmful.
Another was a kind of Idiocracy scenario where the policies of our time were regarded as a catastrophe because they were dysgenic (e.g subsidies for low-IQ single mothers etc). I do stress these were scenarios we came up with, not beliefs we hold.
Actually non-autistic people are quite extreme in many ways when you look at it closely.
Here is my spoof DSM6 entry as illustration
From DSM-VI: Hyper-Social (Allistic) Spectrum Disorder
HSSD is a syndrome in which there is an over-focus on social phenomena at the expense of other aspects of the world. Contrast with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which is in many ways the opposite.
Diagnosis: Any 5 of the following are present:
Inability to express self clearly; use of ambiguous and vague language; discomfort with clear language
Obsessive interest in knowing personal details of acquaintances or strangers e.g. celebrities, or even fictional characters
Unfounded belief in being able to read other people's minds, in particular to know if someone is lying or not.
Difficulty in thinking in a systematic logical way, e.g. to do math or program computers
Tendency to try to bend and stretch rules for no obvious reason. Discomfort with accurately following instructions and processes.
Forms beliefs based on the opinions of others rather than on facts and evidence
Tendency to affiliate with groups and to align all opinions to the group
Frequently lies for social convenience
Preoccupied with social status and “looking the part”
Focus on status symbols, and symbols of virtue and group affiliation
Focus on appearances more than underlying reality
Intolerance of diversity of opinion
Intolerance towards people who do not have HSSD
Spends large amounts of time on shallow “social” activities with little actual content. May lead to destructive activities such as substance abuse e.g. alcohol, and over-eating.
Lack of interest in mastering difficult, especially technical, subjects in depth
Tendency to stare into people's eyes, and to believe that this gives great insight into the other person's mind. Usually unaware that this can create discomfort in the other person.
Tendency to think that staring into people's eyes demonstrates trustworthiness
It's not often we get good opportunities to make long-range falsifiable bets against mainstream beliefs about important issues.
Financial markets are full of such opportunities.
It is really hard, especially as these highly emotive situations tend to result in the frontal cortex shutting down due to blood supply being diverted. Thus you see otherwise smart people saying unbelievably stupid things.
My heuristics.:
1. Are they actually experts? Look at their track record. Have they been able to anticipate future events?
Did they say that a Russian invasion was likely? Did they predict the fall of communism in Eastern Europe? Were they sceptical about past hoaxes like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Iraq WMD hoax, the "Itaqis ripping babies out of incubators" hoax? How sceptical about the claims Trump colluded with the Russians on the election? What was their track record on covid?
Have policies they advocated worked? Did they support the invasion of Libya and did they anticipate the results?
2. Other influences on their stated views. Do their views seem to reflect the ideological landscape? Are their views predictable from the ideological landscape? e.g. Some were against the Trump vaccine but suddenly all for the Biden vaccine, even though it was the same vaccine? Are they for the science in some areas but against it in other areas?
In general (2) (being dominated by ideology) trumps (1) any level of actual skill.
Media can be OK on some issues but totally ideologically or financially determined in other areas.
Partly the problems described here are a function of scale and time, I think. They occur when it is hard to link a person's actions to real world results, as in very large organizations and those that have grown more complex over time. This may explain people's experiences that it is not like this <where I work>.
In the early days (1970s) in IT it was not really like this even in large corporations. And in small organizations it is usually not so much like this either, except to the extent that they are dependent on maze-type organizations.
Large slabs of the quotes above (I read it all) could be taken verbatim from numerous organizations I was involved with.
Reading this was one of those experiences where you suspected something, but still retained some shreds of hope that it wasn't so. And now you know that it is so. The covd19 pandemic also produced a lot of those types of experiences for me.
I am coming around to the view that any study whose methods are not prepublished should be assumed to be p-hacked.
I looked at the chapter on bullying and I found the methodology weak, given the huge inherent issues with passive observation.
It is really really hard to "control" for other factors and their efforts were quite lame. Several particular problems appear. First they correct for other factors one factor at a time. This is a failure mode when multiple factors are relevent at the same time e.g. IQ and poor parenting. Second they make no allowance for errors in measurement of factors. As one example they correct for childhood IQ to exclude IQ as a factor that may both lead to being bullied and that may be harmful independently of bullying. But they do not correct for measurement error. Any measurement of factor X will have error and thus tests based on the measurement will understate the effect of the actual factor X. In the particular case of IQ, childhood IQ is not very highly correlated to IQ in adulthood and thus is a poor proxy for IQ in adulthood. It is also poorly correlated to parental IQ and thus heavily fails to capture effects operating via shared IQ genes in the parents.
See Judea Pearl's book "Causality" for a detailed discussion of these issues and what a proper causal model looks like.
I would not base any serious decison on the findings in the book. They are as likely to be anti-knowledge as real knowledge IMHO.
are the "adjusted earnings over the last 10 years" adjusted for inflation?
Generally CAPE past earnings are adjusted to inflation.
Historically the stock market has responded badly over time to a rapid change upwards in inflation particularly if interest rates rise correspondingly, due to valuation effects ("net present value") . Subsequently once the market has fallen it tends to act as a reasonable inflation hedge. Typically this occurs around the point when Time Magazine has a front cover saying something like "The Death of Equities".
Different stocks respond differently to inflation. Consider the analogy of the Nifty Fifty of the late 1960s and the high flying tech stocks of today.
TINA. There is no alternative.
When required to be fully invested this is trueish.
However you can sit in cash while no appealing investments exist. And buy in size when prices become more appealing.
inb4 market timing is not possible
Have a look at Warren Buffett's track record and the amount of cash he held in early 2000 and now.
There is virtually no information here that would allow us to infer how useful your posts might be. So I have no idea.
If you do post, I would suggest limiting posts that mostly talk about yourself and contain little information that is of general interest. I suggest focusing on the question "how can I add value to others".
Consider link posting a choice few of your existing material to see what the reaction is.
First you would get a breakup of the particular strengths and weaknesses that you have (similar to getting an IQ test it is not just a number but the breakup into areas of strengths and weaknesses can be quite useful).
Second they would be able to help with strategies to deal with the ADHD.
Third it gives you optionality about taking meds i.e. it gives you the option to try them lateron.
Great article. Thank you!
I also highly commend reading the original paper referenced in the article. (full text available here https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/neuro.01.1.1.006.2007/full) Reading the original paper was quite a revelation to me. How many things are parsimoniously explained by this hypothesis.... how many things suddenly make sense. As opposed to the jumble of unrelated facts seen in most academic summaries of Autism.
There is of course opposition to the hypothesis but there has also been considerable confirmation as a look at google scholar will easily show.
Indeed at a first approximation technology is about finding cool ways to use cheap energy.
Solar power in particular has plummeted in cost by many orders of magnitude
You need to take into account the base here. Same with batteries. If something goes from ludicrously expensive to just plain very expensive, it is not so impressive.
I spent 3 months trying to put together a picture of what a 100% renewable energy economy would look like. When you take into account a) the need to build and maintain the RE infrastructure using RE (currently it is almost all done with fossil fuels for cost reasons) b) the vast infrastructure needed per Gw generated due to the low density of RE sources, c) intermittency which means you require a lot of redundancy, a lot of storage, a lot of cables, and backup dispatchable power (ask Germans right now!). The need for backup dispatchable power means that even if RE were free, it would still not be cheaper, because you still have to have the backup dispatchable power stations. So the RE cost is additional,
The total system cost is enormous.
FWIW my conclusion was a minimum 30-50% hit on living standards, and at worst it cannot actually work. If you want to bring the whole world up to 1st world living standards it is not at all possible.
> [solar] effectively forever
Solar installations have a very limited life span of the order of 10 years. And a very serious waste disposal problem. Similarly with wind turbines.
So no, not forever. While OP alludes to "maintenance costs" this by no means captures the extent of the problem.
For clarity I think AGW is a real, serious, man-made problem. But that does not imply that a solution is easy, or even possible. In any case, irrespective of the AGW issue, fossil fuels are running out and we need a solution, or we will be forced to dramatically reduce energy use and living standards.
People will say you can have a high living standard while consuming little energy. OK then, show me a country with very high living standard and low energy use. And 10kw/person is a lot of energy.
Limitations of the study of sunscreen which make it inconclusive -
1. They only measured blood levels during summer. They would have declined in winter, and were not actually that terrific in either group even at the end of summer, though not at the levels of frank deficiency. Differences would have widened over winter and with ongoing use/non-use of sunscreen over time, as vitamin D is stored in body fat.
2. The study was small and short term and thus major effects could show up as N.S. E.g the 50% greater increase in the placebo group of over 70s was not found "statistically significant". The confidence intervals were very wide so the result should be seen as inconclusive and tending towards sunscreen reducing D levels rather than definitively showing no major effect over time.
Also endorphins (opiate type things).
This is why a friend described taking heroin as like being "bathed in golden sunlight".
I find this post naive, like much writing on weight management.
I have struggled with my weight for 40 years (BMI currently 26, slightly overweight but strangely enough the level at which death rates are lowest). And I have read just about every book on the subject and cubic meters of academic papers. Perhaps I have learned something.
> things that will help
I tried all, yes all, those things over the years. Some worked, a bit, temporarily and none worked permanently. I agree that they are plausible stories but they are nothing more.
What this and most writing on diet ignore is that weight management is tightly controlled by the body and lower brain, almost entirely out of conscious control. Yes you can eat less for a while, just as you can consciously stop breathing for a while. But in the end willpower has almost zero effect.
Feedback mechanisms operate through many mechanisms - by regulating appetite. by downregulating metabolism, willingness to expend energy, feelings of fatigue, sleepiness etc. If you have not woken at night having been dreaming about eating, with the only thought in your head being "I don't care what happens I must eat now" you have not experienced hunger. In Ancel Keys' WWII study on starvation subjects were found literally eating from garbage cans after a while.
When people are young they find it far easier to control weight. As you get older it gets harder. BY 50-60 virtually everyone is struggling. So don't declare victory too soon. https://politicaldictionary.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/mission-accomplished-moment.jpg
The idea that eating one extra cookie a day voluntarily will have the results predicted by a simplistic mathematical model is not even wrong. You see this in studies where they try to get people to gain weight - it is just as hard for many people to gain weight as it is for others to lose weight. the nody adapts and counters any destablizing inputs.
As Ey pointed out no-one thinks that weight loss is worth the price if it means you effectively lose 15-20 points of IQ because your body has decided to economize on energy supplies to the brain. And no-one thinks that weight loss is good if you mostly lose lean body mass, bone mass and your immune system is weakened. What people want to lose is fat. This is a very different thing from weight loss.
So what is the solution? I have lost 15kg of fat over the years (10 kg of weight when you take into account +5kg muscle).
I do not claim any of the things below are a magic bullet. Such a thing does not exist. But these things have helped me.
1. Eat a nutritionally rich diet. If you are lacking nutrients you will be hungry. Something like the diet recommended in "Eat Rich Live Long". Just ignore the author's views on covid19. Protein is often the nutrient in short supply.
1a. In general try to avoid empty calories. Sorry this includes wine and beer, even 'craft' beer.
2. Limit carbohydrates to the lowest level consistent with feeling OK. Note that a period of adaption is needed. Especially avoid sugar/fructose. You do not need keto but low carb changed the game for me.
3. Limit polyunsaturated fats especially Omega 6 "vegetable oils". Like sugars they are nutritionally barren and do not provide satiety commensurate with calories. They are essential but only to 2-3% of calories and it is virtually impossible on a diet with real food to go under this. In contrast saturated fat produces great feelings of satiety and is IMO metabolically benign.
4. Eat seldom e.g. once or twice a day. This helps your body learn to burn fat.
5. A combination of small amounts of intense exercise and large amounts of light exercise such as walking. I walk about 6km/day and do weightlifting. But rest days are important too.
6. It seems to take about 2 years for the body to adapt to your new level of fat. In the meantime you will be hungry. But after the adaption (IMHO due to a reduction in the number of fat cells - contrary to medical orthodoxy) things get a lot better.
7. Get plenty of sleep and limit stress and have pleasure in your life. If you are miserable and stressed you are far more likely to overeat comfort food.
8. Avoid toxic environments like fast food outlets, most cafes, restaurants etc. The focus on hyper-palatability combined with hyper-calories and hypo-nutrition is terrible.
9. Be aware that much nutritional advice, including that delivered by captured regulatory agencies, is warped out of recognition by financial agendas, and various other ideological agendas (e.g. that coming out of the College of Nutritional Evangelism, now renamed Loma Linda University, whose doctrines seem to be inspired by 19th century religious fantasies that held that everyone including the lions were vegans in the Garden of Eden). The whole medical field is also very prone to capture by "Great Men" who dominate the field for decades for reasons utterly removed from the correctness of their theories.
"Here’s what that looks like in the context of exponential growth:"
True but actually it is worse than this. As places like Australia are finding, it is not just a matter of a different growth rate. Measures that stopped the pandemic in its tracks before fail completely in the face of delta.
I would also point out that this is looking a bit like the Spanish Flu (which apparently actually started in the US midwest). Later variants were more infectious and attacked younger people more severely.
I can attest from personal experience that you do not want to get long covid. There is a view that either you die or you are fine - nothing could be further from the truth.
This is a long way from being over.
"I worry that recently I’ve lacked sufficient skin in the game. Everyone I personally care about is vaccinated or young enough that they don’t need vaccination, so the real sense of danger is largely gone."
[Quotes because editing after using ">" for quotes is totally broken here.]
The strategies being employed at the moment in countries partially but not sufficiently vaccinated are to a close approximation the optimum for evolving viruses that are more transmissible to vaccinated people. We have a huge number of infected and a huge number vaccinated in the same population thus the maximal evolutionary pressure and opportunity.
So it is somewhat likely - hard to tell how likely - that variants that are resistant to the vaccines will appear.
When a disease is only slowly transmissible there is an evolutionary incentive for it to become less ( and less quickly) fatal. However diseases that are easily transmitted have far less incentive to become less quickly fatal e.g. cholera in some parts of the world.
My conclusion is that given the risk that a more transmissible, more vaccine resistant and more deadly variant will appear, everyone has skin in the game.
Not to mention the "long covid" syndrome which is very nasty and fairly prevalent in young people. And that we really have little idea of the long term consequences of non-fatal infections in young people.
I remember when Chicken Pox was considered a mild and harmless illness. Tell that to people who have suffered years of excruciating pain from shingles as a result of Chicken Pox later in life.
This was, I think, a reasonable characterisation of wikipedia in the early days. Things are very different now.
You have to navigate a gauntlet of deletionistas, poorly defined rules, gatekeepers, and political biases. I gave up a couple of years ago. The most difficult aspect is the arbitrary rules about what sources are authoritative and what are not.
One small example: You are (or were when I looked) required to refer to male genital mutilation as "circumcision" and are not allowed to refer to it as "male genital mutilation". The female version may not be referred to as "circumcision" and must be called "female genital mutilation". The opinions of the doctors who make money from this operation on males must be deferred to as definitive. Basically I found everything was like this.
You are not allowed to refer to primary sources such as journal articles but must only refer to secondary sources such as textbooks or newspapers, which are often out of date, biased or wrong. You have the ridiculous situation where people have tried to correct their own date of birth by supplying a copy of their birth certificate and this was rejected. In at least one case, the person had to arrange for their date of birth to be mentioned in a newspaper and then it was accepted.
In fields where there is no political controversy things are not so bad. But you are still subject to the deletionistas who will find any possible reason to nuke your hard work. And wikipedia's view that there is a definitive version of the truth on any given issue makes it utterly hopeless at covering anything that is controversial. I am certain that wikipedia of the early C17 would be presenting the geocentric view of the universe as definitively true.
Well worth reading the linked material - quite damning.
I read the negative paper (I had already read the positive one).
The positive one concludes, rightly I think, that there is evidence falling short of proof that IM is likely to be useful.
I am not at all happy with the negative paper.
1. Lots of highly emotive language against IM suggesting a lack of objectivity. Another thing suggesting lack of objectivity is that they put <did not find IM useful> in their list of strengths. I wonder who would find this a strength and why? Also sneering about studies done in low income countries did not endear them to me.
2. They really went all out, above and beyond the call of duty, trying to exclude papers. Again it did not seem like they were humbly and objectively seeking the truth. It seemed to reek of motivation. Having reduced the papers that qualified to a tiny number, then surprise surprise the result is N.S. Which they can then misrepresent (see next point).
3. Misstatement of the conclusion. Lack of statistical significance does not mean you showed the thing doesn't work, especially given P=13% and RR=0.37. Given the small numbers the reduction in deaths would have had to have been enormous (~80%) to achieve significance.
4. I could not find a design of the study, published before they started. This is a concern, because they excluded studies of prophylaxis (prevention of infection), which is reportedly the strong point of IM. No convincing explanation was given for why they did this. Ironically they criticise other studies for not having prepublished designs.
5. It was interesting that every study that they quoted showed a large reduction in deaths. And they found fault with just about every one of them. Their own study showed a 63% reduction in deaths also, but was N.S.
I too would probably take IM if I had CV (or even was exposed) and could get access. ATM it seems likely it would be helpful and the downside seems low. IM has been in use for decades and billions of people - many with poor nutrition and otherwise vulnerable - have taken it. So it is not a great unknown in terms of side-effects.
Certainly this study does not show IM does not work, but it will be quoted as though it does. There have been studies of vitamin D and CV that are also poorly conducted and seemingly rigged to produce a N.S. result. E.g. you give vitamin D when people are late in the disease, knowing full well that it takes a couple of weeks for it to be metabolised into the fully active form.
Is there any kind of resource that reliably turns up high-quality papers?
No you just have to filter. In any particular field you get to know the agendas and limitations of many of the researchers. X is a shill for company Y, A pushes the limits for p hacking, B has a fixed mindset about low fat diets. etc. Some researchers also tend to produce me-too and derivative papers, others are more innovative.
Also you do get quicker at spotting the fatal flaw.
In finance there are blogs that pick out recent good papers; these are a huge time saver (e.g. Alpha Architect which I have mentioned before).
Some general comments about medical research. Source: I have studied the statistics books in detail, and have read several cubic meters of medical papers and learned most of the lessons the hard way.
When reading medical papers look for
1. Funding sources for the study or for the authors of the study (e.g. "speaking fees" and "consulting fees"). He who pays the piper calls the tune.
2. Statistical incompetence, which is rife in medical research. For example, you routinely see "lack of statistical significance" interpreted as "proof of no effect".
3. Pre publication of the study design, end points and intended statistical analysis. There is a lot of scope to move the goalposts and engage in p-hacking and other nefarious activities.
4. Differences between the abstract and the text. Often you can read the abstract and wonder if it refers to the same paper .
5. In meta-analyses look for whether the selection criteria were adhered to or not or whether subjective criteria were used to exclude inconvenient studies.
6. Financial interests. For example it is notable that countries like India, that make generic drugs, appear to be more favourable to generic drugs. Meanwhile in the US, there seems to be a strong bias in favour of drugs in patent.
7. Read the methods section very carefully. Once you have read enough papers this will become instinctive.
8. Be ready for the vast majority of papers to be of low quality and worthless.
9. I routinely see studies rigged to deliver a predetermined outcome. For example, if you want to find a non-statistically significant effect which can be misrepresented as "no effect", then run a small study, for a short period, and use suboptimal doses or take other measures to minimize differences between the groups compared.
and other says "is not proven"
In the abstract they make a definitive statement that IM is not useful. This goes well past any rational or reasonable interpretation of the evidence. This raises the question of bias / motivated reasoning. I will read the paper in full today and may comment further.
Bear in mind a lot of studies are for me-too drugs i.e. slight variants of existing drugs that have the tremendous advantage of being patentable, even if they are no better. Such trials provide little benefit to humanity.
As a fellow member of the reluctant brotherhood I have seen many friends enter trials only to suffer greatly with no, or even a negative, effect on survival. (Sometimes, I suspect, people will have treatment because it allows them to avoid facing The Horrible Truth*).
*That they are indeed mortal.
heart disease deaths are a third of what they were in 1950, (thanks to innovations like statins, stents, and bypass surgery.)
I had a look into this a while back. My conclusion was that two big factors in the reduction in heart attack death rates (not numbers) was in large part due to the reduction in smoking rates particularly in older people and the dramatic reduction in the use of toxic trans fats in processed foods and butter substitutes.
The evidence for the life-saving qualities of the 3 items listed was not very strong in the studies I ciykd find. Bear in mind in particular that studies started on or before 2003 and meta-analyses incorporating such studies were conducted under lax rules that allowed all sorts of shenanigans e..g changing the end-points, "run-in periods" etc.
I don''t really want to get into a debate about this but be aware at least that the conclusions in the quote above are controversial.
You don't mention which libertarian works you consulted in forming your views on the topic. A very accessible introduction is "What it means to be a libertarian" by Charles Murray.
This point of view is very old e.g. the early Daoist works have libertarian threads. So you don't have to imagine what libertarians think, and they have been thinking hard about the issues for a long time.
One thing that surprises many people is the enthusiastic support among many libertarians for collective action and for cooperative organisations. The caveat being that they are not mandated by overbearing people with guns.
Another thing that often surprises is the realization of how well people are able to coordinate among themselves without too many people who are from the government and here to help.
Some examples of possible misinterpretations would add value to your post.
With the climate emails part of the problem was the use of language in a different sense from its normal meaning. In scientific fields, trick is often used in the sense of a nifty hack, with nothing sinister implied. Just as in common parlance "theory" means something far less definite than it does in scientific discourse, more like what scientists would call a hypothesis.
I would add two other comments:
1. As pointed out in the article, the fact that the lan leak was artificially suppressed does not mean it is right.
2. Just because government officials chronically lie does not mean that any given thing they say is definitely true. It just reduces the information content of what they say.
There is a whole hierarchy of incentives to medical people at different levels in the system.
At the bottom
1. Free samples
2. Free education.
3. Cute/good looking drug reps...
The free education comes with a nice meal and convivial company. You just need to sit through the drug company propaganda, which is duly accredited as good for mandatory training hours. What happens if your prescribing fails to conform to the desired profile? You don't get invited to the next "free" training.
At the top (influential professors):
1. Funding for studies
2. "Speaking fees".
3. "Consultancy fees"
As with the lucrative "speaking fees" paid to ex politicians and the highly paid and often made-up jobs provided to ex-politicians and bureaucrats and their families, everyone knows the score. If you make trouble the "speaking fees" and the like dry up. Completely by coincidence of course.