Missing out has been the dominant mode since language was invented, we've just never had as much access or been as aware of what we were missing out on. But you could have read Newton's thoughts instead of the news today or any yesterday in your life. Which is more valuable? Given a limited capacity for information processing I find it's best to spend the least amount I can on worry and the most on the stuff that I will actually enjoy wrestling with.
Personally I have resorted to batching, narrowing my scope, raising my quality threshold and making peace with missing out. Summarizing tools don’t interest me in the least, I read to think. News are inessential, opinions are good brain food.
It’s a lovely essay, thank you for commenting. Personally I found the moralizing first section grotesque, but the latter pragmatical half very intuitive and relatable. Curious what filters through culture.
Yes, but not via robotics any time soon. The first wave of AI job replacement will come from letting the computers make the decisions while the meatpuppets (personified by whoever is lowest-costing at the time) turn the knobs. If you have the plumbing expert system ready to go why would you wait for the actuators to catch up? Slap AR glasses on 5000 kids/immigrants, get a couple of actual plumbers to go around town checking the work and let the AI dictate which tool they should use where and how. GPS was the zero to one, now for everything else.
I’ve sadly stopped being curious about that since I realised that we’re already cyborgs, only the other way around from what popular sci-fi predicted: the internet does the thinking and the meatbags move their fingers. It started with GPS, came for software engineering and won’t stop any time soon. Actuators won’t be critical if humans are ever more fungible.
There is no comparison between a programmer who chooses not to concern himself with ergonomics and a labourer who must put his health on the line daily or be fired.
This virtue signalling where everything surrounding an indigenous people or other minority must be handled with the fluffiest epistemological gloves is really exhausting. Can the author describe his own personal wonder at discovering this factoid (maybe with the same wonder as when he learned about penicillin in fact) without being de facto labeled a racist?
Do teenagers need to work out to get stronger than when they were little children, or are their hormones making them grow regardless? This should be self-explanatory to a good degree.
Appreciate your kindness. Unfortunately it’s very hard to understand if a woo-woo provider is waiting to prey on you when you’re at your weakest. I prefer not to support any pseudoscientific treatment modality if I can help it. Stick to disciplines who are subject to a higher degree of effectiveness and scrutiny and you’ll be saving yourself and others. Anything called mecidine and anyone called a doctor must uphold the highest standards.
Hear hear. An alarming amount of people around me have had serious health scares directly caused by manipulation. A friend of a friend was nearly left paraplegic after a sports "straightening" by a well-known local specialist.
A close friend who had an extremely aggressive breast cancer at 35 (and is given to natural cures etc etc) took up acupuncture as a secondary treatment. All well and good until the third session, when the acupuncture people tried to get her to drop out of chemo and radiotherapy to fully commit to their treatments. Alternative medicine as a term should be considered fraud and its more radical practitioners thrown in jail immediately.
I'd love to be able to make that statement with such confidence, but you just don't know. Literally no one has any clue what the long-term effect of injecting BPC-157 or what ever stupid well-marketed bullshit is the flavour of the week is, is.
Ozempic and Mounjaro are peptides. They are a silver bullet for obesity and orders of magnitude more effective than anything up to a gastric band surgery. Insulin is a peptide and keeps some 50 million people alive globally. You could go on and on.
The real question is: Should you be putting novel, poorly researched and dubiously manufactured substances (which happen to be peptides) in your body via injection? To that I say, to each their own but I'll wait for the pharma industry to catch up. I'm not that bored.
Possibly maybe, but plenty of caucasian friends at my old bodyweight/fat percentage had/have horrible markers. I lean more towards the protective effect of exercise.
I hope Retatrutide pans out but encouraging people to hop on research chemicals when we already have drugs that can get lots of T2D people into remission is a stretch too far. Let's wait for the actual medicines to be produced by legitimate manufacturers instead of ordering grey market peptides from some nameless whoever with zero liability. This is absolutely not on the right side of the risk-reward equation. Mounjaro is more than good enough.
At the risk of being argumentative I had a horrible diet for the past ~10 years and carried 50 extra pounds. However I also exercised a lot as a hobby and to my shock my glucose and other bloods always came out in the normal range.
This year I started Mounjaro and dropped the 50 pounds. Curious to see what my next checkup shows.
I echo that sentiment but oppose the positive adjectives tied to his motivation. Rather I believe can be at our best when motivated by our dark emotions towards positive actions: Grief, rage, madness.
Mr. Manjhi was compelled to this momentous thing after his world was torn apart by it. He persevered while the very people whose lives and whose children's lives he was improving mocked him. He worked for 20 years compelled by his demons and the universe is better off for it. I hope destroying the mountain gave him peace.
We have more energy hitting the planet every second as radiation than we can possibly use. This is a non-issue for any civilised society switching to solar.
Because I’ve often been with professors in math, literature, arts who pride themselves on a certain intellectual purity that makes them a cut above, while living on wages paid by the taxpayer. Suddenly the golem of basic market dynamics comes for them and these extremely smart people are struck by the unfairness and bruteness of it all. Whole careers having fun publishing useless nothings, funded by people sowing soccer balls and scrubbing toilets. I have nothing against having fun while doing your job, I have it often. But I have a job first to serve society, not myself.
This is what locking yourself away in an ivory tower gets you. Do things ‘for beauty’ and watch as they are automated and commoditized by the people who depend on them for their continued wellbeing, reduced to a hobby or sport. But the reduction began when you yourself started putting more importance on your enjoyment of the process over the value being provided to your customers.
Personally I have noticed a lot less cognitive impairment after a poor night’s sleep since starting on 10g per day. It seems to make a noticeable difference in my ability to reason and to act having slept less than 7 hours per night, even on consecutive nights.
You might not want it for yourself but many people, especially health professionals in my experience, will take a smaller but less painful lifespan over a chance to live longer through horrible treatments.
The father of a good friend passed away recently from a brain cancer. He was a doctor, but atypically accepted every treatment available. His last 3 years were spent in surgery or sick from chemo, did not have one good day after his initial diagnosis. If he could have gone back I'm sure he would have decided not to be treated.
I don't want or need war, but I won't deny to having felt tribal impulses before. I won't deny culture and groups are different from individuals. Idealism is fine until it starts interfering with reality.
Where there are simians, there is war. The more primitive the society, the bloodier and more total the war is. I wish our problem were psychopaths in power, but the truth is we are a tribal and fearful species and war is in our genes. It's as certain as a sunrise as long as there are humans.
I don't mean to belittle the American war machine but as someone involved in overseas manufacturing for a while, I just don't see how it's possible to source 90% of items now made in China without a solid decade or two of investment. There are no factories, no supply chains, no skilled workers. It seems like fantasy.
No, culture and the means of production went global. Bespoke only makes sense when you can’t get an acceptable good at a decent price. That goes for food, building materials and physics engines. Different will only be found in fetishistic disneylands from now on.
Interesting that you would use as an example two people who ingeniously built complex systems, through lots of hard and clever work, to turn the odds in their favour.