solinent

I've found that I perform way better when I eat well. So that has allowed me to eat more grass-fed meat. I think it's easily possible to do it in a ecologically conscious way if it was something anybody cared about. But they care more about the coast line they're still holding on to that's inevitably eroding.

We can also plant trees, it doesn't have to be a traditional farm. If we planted a certain number of conifers we could easily soak up all of that c02 and even convert it into oxygen, if that's your biggest concern.

I personally don't believe in anthropocentric climate change, so greenhouse emissions aren't a big deal for me--we've been warming for 10000 years and we're still -2C, and the temperature is always correlated with C02. I'd say there's no comparison to clean coal at all, you have the burden of proof there. Clean coal has no advantages other than less C02. Good farming practices can prevent ecological collapse. Especially avoiding use of roundup, which contains dioxin (!) now. Dioxin has been used in chemical warfare in the past. So is the problem meat, or agriculture?

Bigger deal is total ecological collapse. We can lose the coast, or we can lose the most. I don't think it's a choice we can avoid.

So yeah, it's really just a sell to those who believe C02 has a major impact on climate change. It's definitely well correlated--and it has been throughout time, before humans started combusting.

I'll read that study tomorrow and post back, you could be right in terms of the impact of C02 could be negligible, but there are other possibilities like planting trees to divide the cows up.

The epistemal value of epidemiological studies is very low. Nothing can be done to fix it.

Animal farming simply doesn't have to be so destructive. There's a simple solution to a simple problem. Look at New Zeland, regenerative agriculture. By allowing cattle to eat grass instead of grain (ha) we can avoid using pesticide and actually increase biodiversity, while planting trees as well. This increases carbon sequestration and has plenty of other benefits to the local wildlife.

In fact, it can have a positive carbon impact (well, negative, but you catch my drift).

In short, the solution: buy grass-fed or pasture raised animals.

I think it's related to diet, a deficiency in Vitamin D probably indicates a certain type of diet that leads to obesity. I wonder if metabolic syndrome and vitamin D deficiency are also comorbid.

You need fat to absorb vitamin D and perhaps this fat has additional benefits (satiety, less feeding periods, the integral of insulin over time is smaller). Ketosis probably has some role to play, I should check if they're controlling for this factor. Until they can control for the entire diet it's hard to really tell based purely on vitamin D, the metabolic processes can be so complicated in a human.

Disclaimer: mindless speculation above--I'm no expert, just a mathematician.

I used to get severely depressed, and it was often stress-related; adversity, work, even sickness would make things worse. I completely changed my lifestyle and started working out almost 3 hours a day (walking counts)in addition to removing carbohydrates from my diet almost entirely. After this change, I only get depressed for a second, then I realize I can take action, and then I take action, and it leads to happiness.

YMMV.

my personal theory is that it's related to bacteria in your gut--working out helps promote a good gut microbiome (this is well studied) and removing carbohydrates removes all those bacteria such as lactobactilla which will literally cause psychological changes, these bacteria are part of the metabolic process converting carbohydrates to blood glucose, and they are literally interacting with the nerves in your gut making you feel depressed. It's a biological thing. Psychology never helped me, instead it actively harmed me. The lectures of Robert Sapolsky and the concepts of cognitive behavioral therapy helped the most from the psychological perspective, however. This combination of advice is purely anecdotal of course, but all the steps I took have been widely studied. It's hard to create an industry around the removal of a product, I guess.

To me this is a bit absurd--if we're trying to replicate paper, maybe using a tree would be best? You can put the ink in the pen.

I guess the advantage is you can save many documents--but this is actually a disadvantage to me as I like having a physical copy I can splay out on my desk. Or even an entire wall covered with my designs.

That's the one. The nasal rinse stuff comes from studies I've read years ago, if you want I can dig them up.

Sorry, this last little week has been pretty crazy, no time to check back here.

I've noticed that if I am very careful people will often skip authentication steps and even just ignore them if they're lazy.

In my opinion we need to value these positions more. Higher salaries for these positions and more prerequisite education should be required. I don't think it'll happen without regulation though.

I mean, it's trained on the Internet. It kind of makes sense that the epistemological value of GPT-3's statements are essentially zero. It may even contradict itself in ways the Internet never could.

You're right, I should mention not to use fresh water, though many people do use fresh water in India without problems.

This product I've pointed out is pre-mixed ocean water, it comes with the water, not just the salt packet. It's not nasal irrigation, just a spray. It's pretty effective for my sinus infections I've been exceptionally prone to.

You can also boil the water--it doesn't need to be distilled. I'm afraid distilled water may leak ions, probably shouldn't use just distilled water though I've done no research on the topic.

Based on my knowledge (science and tradition combined), you gotta use salt water, ideally the water is from a natural source and has been boiled. I don't know about distilled water. Indians have been doing this for millennia, there is a safe way to do it.

edit: Do you have a source for the fresh water being an issue? Is this an empirical result or just some theory without a study? I'm genuinely interested, I can't find any study of this. It should be easy to do as well, you could study populations in India.

Yeah, definitely use salt water. I will mention that in the main post. You can get a product like the following which has a water preparation which should be safe:

https://www.hydrasense.com/

Not really fatal, there are many products you can use that don't require a full rinse. Have a source for that? I can't find anything.

It's important not to do it too frequently, but certainly more than 1 billion people do it every day I'm sure.

It wasn't a viral email--it was a one hour podcast on Youtube. I can post a link if you'd like.

I'm playing Civ 6 pretty frequently. Cross-platform multiplayer as well!

I'm not a reductionist so I don't conflate the weather and climate, but I'd consider hurricanes, volcanoes, tropical storms, and fluid flows in the ocean to be part of climate, not weather.

Hurricanes have a huge impact on animal populations, volcanoes have a huge impact on atmosphere and temperature of the core, and tropical storms are still big enough that the sum total of them is not negligible at the climate scale.

Chaotic systems sometimes don't have higher level descriptions--sufficiently chaotic systems can't be predicted at any level, and you can actually measure this. Look into the mathematical theory of chaos.

To summarize. The existing models just scratch the surface.

>If you go look at the climate science literature, you'll find that all different kinds of models and explanations have been proposed and studied. Those alternatives have been looked at in detail by people in the field, just like any other study. None of them have been found to better match the data.

Because the system is chaotic and we can't predict it beyond a week. Maybe a day at best. Once you can predict hurricanes, volcanoes, and tropical storms, then let me know.

You can over-fit any data. I guess ML still has to learn this basic concept from statistics 101.

Anyways, I appreciate the discussion, thank you. I'm a bit irate this week.

You can harness chaos in space because things are really far apart. It doesn't work on Earth, or our stock market would be linear.

Fair enough, I don't think it's a good way to convince people to simply claim your excellence however. I'm not interested in arguments from authority. If there's a big spat in a scientific field, usually you get this distribution. It's hard to be a skeptic in science, but that's where all the action is.

Typically useful scientific fields are based in the hard sciences where this doesn't happen, I guess.

How can you even know what the consensus is?

Well evolution is really not entirely certain so it's important to take that point of view scientifically just in-case we've made a mistake. Of course it's obviously true but who knows, I'm sure humanity has said that before.

Holocaust denialism is another topic completely unrelated to science, and this discussion.

You can't deny all denialism just by lumping it all in a big category. Skepticism is the foundation of science.

No, I don't, but you've missed the point. It's not the people who program the models who are at risk, just the one who command armies of masters students to do the trick for them and who can't do it anymore, who also take most of the pie. Not only that, there's a whole industry around writing news articles and selling ads (google) around this climate alarmism. People will literally pay a significant margin for certain products just due to its supposed greenhouse gas impact (it's usually not co2 strangely enough to me). I've seen their arguments on YouTube, and some of them are very very rudimentary and incomplete. It's perverse and real people suffer today. Not imaginary people in the future.

These models are incomplete and unscientific, it's worse than pseudoscience. We can't verify these models until we've had 100s of years of this, and by then we'll have better models we won't need to verify. The entire world is complicated, 10000 or 100000 or even 1000000 parameters is not going to cut it. And it's chaotic, so there's no reason that even if we could measure everything to that degree of accuracy precision and resolution that we'd even be able to predict anything at all. This is a mathematical topic, not even science.

edit: I drank a coffee. I gave up my valuable sleep for this. I hope you're happy ;)

Honestly, at a personal level, I kind of wish I believed you were right. I'd have more friends. People would have more jobs.

Have you verified the other experts who are part of this "consensus" everyone always talks about but never measures? I would guarantee they're connected directly to the journalism / media industry, in fact it's blatantly obvious, the sources for all of those claims are not scientific in that Wikipedia section.

I mean, if there's nothing we can do about climate change and CO2 has no effect, none of them have a job either. The cycle goes [University PR] -> [Funding for the University] -> [Funding for anti-C02 efforts] -> [Paper] -> [University PR]. The process doesn't exist without the PR component which supports an entire industry. No wonder they have a consensus.

Also, I wouldn't trust the Guardian on something like this, as they're directly connected to these climatologists. You could probably prove it, but I'll have to sleep so no one will, and I'm not likely to come back here, I prefer to exist in reality, goodbye! Enjoy the coming economic doom in Silicon Valley.

> "healthy dose of climate scepticism". Beyond embarrassing and straight up evil in my eyes.

I don't take any point of view here ultimately, I keep having to reiterate that, there's a certain uncertainty to science. If it's evil in your eyes, maybe you're caught up in the middle of it. I think skepticism is important in any context as it's the opposite of dogmatism.

Anyways, I do have credentials, but it's a Friday night, if you're still interested in having a reasonable discussion I'd be happy to learn why I'm wrong.

Yes, it's my opinion, and I've presented it as such, but it's entirely based on his point of view. I think the opinions of non-experts are very valuable due to the effects of group-think.

The basis for my claim I could lay down, but this is not the ground for that battle.

Do you have any reason to disbelieve certain experts over others? When they are the foremost in their field, consistently? No one is denying climate change.

In any case, I don't claim its truth, just its existence. It's obviously important to any scientific process to consider alternative theories which have better predictive power, and to criticize our existing ones, however close to reality they ultimately are.

In any case, if reasonable discussion is not permitted here maybe it's not the place for me.

edit:

> That's not a good look.

Maybe I'm just in the wrong neighborhood. Okay maybe I'll stay, seems like there's a mixed response.

Let's just say a combination of a few essentially computational factors--memory, conscientiousness, and scholarship and/or expertise through experience over a significant period of time in varied contexts. But really it's just my intuition, and I'm not the most intelligent person in the world so maybe I'm wrong.

I don't really mean intelligence in the technical or usual sense, just in the sense that it applies to a climatologist that makes good predictions in this context.

Anyways, I'm just here to deliver the message, I don't really pretend to know either way--but I do tend to agree with certain experts over others because their arguments are much more robust, given my math background it appeals to my reasonable side.

edit: I thought about it some more. I think I can boil it down to one thing--high information entropy in their written work.

If you're interested in a healthy dose of climate change skepticism, there's also Richard Lindzen, but he's also derided by the climatologist community. I've found the most intelligent of the entire community is skeptical, but the rest of them are convinced of their mission for ethical means, and are willing to forecast doomsday scenarios based on essentially what boils down to linear regression or maybe some very simplified model that has no chance of being reality. The more complex models are still extremely rudimentary, with fluid sims in movies and games being more robust than GCM in terms of simulation size which has a massive effect on the prediction quality. And there are gaping holes--the ocean's fluid flow effects and clouds. (edit: apparently there are some simulations with these now, but they are very rudimentary, see below)

Listen to him if you're interested though, his videos are all around YouTube.

> Typical AGCM resolutions are between 1 and 5 degrees in latitude or longitude: HadCM3, for example, uses 3.75 in longitude and 2.5 degrees in latitude, giving a grid of 96 by 73 points (96 x 72 for some variables); and has 19 vertical levels.

From Wikipedia. I don't think clouds fit into such a coarse grid. Climate is exceptionally chaotic and there are definitely processes that can't be approximated with such a low-parameter model. I dunno if the latest models are more refined, but six months ago they were still dealing with water vapor.

Over-abstraction usually increases entropy, so your code size is bigger.

I think the biggest value of refactoring is reducing code size, which is directly correlated with bug count / severity (there are tons of studies here). Ultimately you're providing a huge value to your clients. If your code stinks on the inside, it's gonna take a huge effort to make it smell nice on the outside.

If you stop repeating yourself, you may make less mistakes because there are simply less chances of it. Good abstractions help.

They also speed up your development speed, accelerating you towards your goal instead of coasting.

Bill Gates is not an expert. I think I would listen to an infectious diseases professor sooner.

edit: I'm an idiot, I should have read the post, I thought this was about something else Bill Gates had said. Still, my point stands, though the tests are definitely mostly garbage.

Maybe the mechanism of death is similar so if it kills a more difficult strain the same mechanism will kill the "easier strain". It doesn't directly state it though, I think it's just speculation. It doesn't belong in a science paper except maybe in a speculative section about the future I guess.

Also, the dishwasher is very effective at disinfecting since it uses steam.