It’s not a question of belief, it’s an issue of presentation.
Here is what you wrote: “Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues).” That is not saying “I have medical issues”, it’s saying (wrist to forehead) I don’t LIKE going out in the SUN!
There are lots of things in life that just flat out suck. There is no way to make worthwhile gains without struggle, effort and dealing with stuff you don’t like.
To put my earlier statement a completely different way, you have a choice. On one side is exercise and sweat, on the other side is where you are now. If you are happy the way you are now there is no need to exercise. Otherwise you’re going to need to sweat, the choice you then get to make is then a matter of intensity and duration.
Physical exercise causes muscles to use either blood sugar or fat to get the muscles to contract. This is an exothermic reaction causing the muscles to heat up. Exercise sufficient to cause physiological changes causes the muscles to heat up enough to cause sweat. You don’t notice this when swimming because it’s constantly being washed away.
There is no big red fucking easy button that gets you magic results. There are shorter paths to a solution, depending on your goals (for example if you PURELY want to lose weight you can do things like intermittent fasting, low carb diets and ice baths), but you asked about exercise.
If you have physical issues with sun then the appropriate thing to say is “I have $DISEASE” which prevents me from spending lots of time outside”. Being light skinned with a family propensity to Melanoma is not a reason to avoid the sun, being light skinned with a family propensity to Squamous Cell cancer IS a reason to take precautions, especially if that family tendency is towards the cancer going metastatic.
Now that we have more information we can work with something. You don’t have to completely avoid the sun, you just have to limit your exposure (duration, clothing) to it and do things to minimize the effects of it (cartinoid consumption, vitamin A with the D etc.). Yes, it takes mountain biking in the Australian Outback off the table, but the sweating issue and your location take that off the table anyway. However the cheapest form of exercise is walking, and if we can somehow dispose of your sweating issues there are walking protocalls that will get you SOME gains, if they’re the sort of gains you’re looking for (again you haven’t stated any goals other than “to exercise”, which is vague enough to be meaningless).
There are some diseases that have sweating as a symptom, but it’s unlikely you have those. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about and investigating exercise and diet, but very little on the sweat side of things, mostly because I just accepted that I sweat a lot more than most people given a particular workload. I have a cow-orker who runs ultra-marathons. He is COLD when the temperatures hit ~70 degrees. I wear shorts down into the upper 30s (with a sweater and a hat). He can run in 90-95 degree heat with minimal sweat—he intends to run the badwater at some point—I used to ride a bicycle to work in 0 (f) weather and SWEAT on the way in. This is a normal part of human variability.
Again the issue is how you deal with it. UnderArmour’s “Heat Gear” fits close to the body, provides some UV protection and does a decent job of moving the sweat out from your skin. Two or three of these shirts in conjunction with some sweatbands to keep the sweat down on your face and hands and for what is called a “High Intensity Training” or “High Intensity Interval Training” can go a long way towards meeting your goals, whatever they may be.
Realistically though just “man up” and be uncomfortable for 20 minutes 3 times a week. Just going doing that will be a gain in your life.
The Austism thing (I presume from your writing you’re down on the functional aspergers end of things) provides a mostly psychological stumbling block. Austists generally have a degree of anxiety about change beyond what normal people face. Examine your feelings about changing your routine, stepping out of your comfort zone and fixing what you may find to be broken.
I wish to make the world a place where “Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I’m not taking your advice” elicits the same reaction as “Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I’m not taking your advice”, rather than being told to man up and being psychanalyzed by strangers.
I’m going to start with the subset of the world named Less Wrong.
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight is a very interesting book about sensory defensiveness—having trouble, sometimes serious trouble, with sensory experiences that don’t bother most people. It’s correlated with autism, but isn’t the same thing, and is sometime misdiagnosed as autism, neuroticism, or lack of willpower.
There are people who specialize in helping with sensory defensiveness. They are cleverly camouflaged as occupational therapists, so they are unlikely to be found.
Exercise can be fun if your brain is wired in a certain way, but needing to basically pointless busywork for physical maintenance is still stupid. There might be some entertaining flareups of cognitive dissonance from people who like to view being a diligent exerciser as a terminal value once there’s technology for keeping the body in excellent working order without doing pointless stuff that makes you sweat. For instance.
Also, how come no-one talks about different people probably having quite a bit different endorphin reactions to exercise? It’s pretty likely that they exist, but people still act like they are good exercisers because they make better choices as rational actors, not because it gets their brain pumped full of happy juice.
Very good idea which we need to test a lot. I’m very afraid it might do bad things later on, build muscle mass but not do anything about fat or many other problems, build too much of a type of muscle and not enough of another, eat something that shouldn’t be eaten to build muscle from it, or create weird dietary needs. But let’s go test it!
Downvoted because it is a general argument against any claimed rational action. Why do people who work at existential risk act like they make better rational choices when really they just get a different neurochemical responses? (Hint: Everything we do is for some neurochemical response)
For an action to be rational in your mind, does it need to obey some Kantian-esque imperative where the actor can’t gain pleasure from it? Are people who loathe exercise but do it anyways more rational?
Was wondering why people don’t look into differences in neurochemical responses at all, when they seem to be a pretty big factor in this case, different thing than arguing against any rational deliberation on it at all.
″ I wish to make the world a place where “Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I’m not taking your advice” elicits the same reaction as “Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I’m not taking your advice” ”
This would be nice. Now when I undertake this rejection challenge and come up with a reason for why I’m are not doing x-action, I can compare that reason to a hardwired physiological reaction. I will then feel satisfied that I am not doing (x-activity) for a good reason that I cannot change, because one surely cannot be expected to put their hand on a hot stove. In this way I will feel satisfied that I am in my current position for a good reason, and can happily fall back into acceptance.
And Alicorn, I don’t know the particular nature of your aversion to sunshine, and maybe it is deeply hardwired like most people’s aversion to a hot stove, so I am not speaking to you in particular. All I am saying is that reasons to not do something come in different strengths and in with different amounts of permanence. There are some dislikes that are able to be overcome through repeated effort, such as talking to strangers or eating vegetables. There are dislikes that can be overcome through mindfulness, (I will start this essay because of how it fits into my long term goals), or through environment (I will start this essay at a quiet Starbucks) or, my personal favorite, through chemical means ( I will start this essay once I finish this bottle of Laphroaig.) Maybe I misread MixedNuts statement and he/she was merely saying that for some people, sunshine and pain aversion are essentially the same, which I could buy. All I’m saying is I think there is a need to iterate this exercise through each of your reasons for not doing activity-x in the hope you can either find fundamental issues (putting your hand on a hot stove) or issues that can be resolved (working out in a walk in refrigerator.)
I think this conversation could use a dose of alternate perspective, and this seems like as good of a spot to drop it as any; zaogao, this is not directed at you personally.
LessWrong as a community makes a point, a lot of the time, of accepting a rather large amount of variance in its members’ values. Except, some of us seem to be better than others at noticing when values-variance is relevant to the conversation at hand. It seems to me that a failure to notice that that’s relevant is the bulk of the problem, here.
Alicorn has made it pretty clear, as far as I can see: Given the choice between a lifestyle in which she sweats regularly, and a lifestyle where she’s less fit and more prone to health problems, she really does prefer the latter—that’s what her values specify. She’s not in denial about it, she’s not complaining about having to make the choice, she’s not making drama. All she’s doing is describing the situation, pointing out the options she knows about, and asking if anyone knows of options that she’s missed. This shouldn’t be a problem, as far as I can tell: Looking for third (or fourth, or fifth) options is a very LessWrong kind of thing to do. But even if we collectively decide that we don’t want to devote resources to this kind of concrete discussion of specific cases, the respectful-of-values-differences thing to do is to say that, not try to shame her for having the values she does.
It might also be worth noting that this kind of thing contributes to LW turning into an echo chamber. If we can’t trust each other to stay respectful and on-topic about values differences that don’t significantly affect anything beyond a single user’s life, how can we trust each other with values differences that do affect other things?
It’s not a question of belief, it’s an issue of presentation.
Here is what you wrote: “Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues).” That is not saying “I have medical issues”, it’s saying (wrist to forehead) I don’t LIKE going out in the SUN!
There are lots of things in life that just flat out suck. There is no way to make worthwhile gains without struggle, effort and dealing with stuff you don’t like.
To put my earlier statement a completely different way, you have a choice. On one side is exercise and sweat, on the other side is where you are now. If you are happy the way you are now there is no need to exercise. Otherwise you’re going to need to sweat, the choice you then get to make is then a matter of intensity and duration.
Physical exercise causes muscles to use either blood sugar or fat to get the muscles to contract. This is an exothermic reaction causing the muscles to heat up. Exercise sufficient to cause physiological changes causes the muscles to heat up enough to cause sweat. You don’t notice this when swimming because it’s constantly being washed away.
There is no big red fucking easy button that gets you magic results. There are shorter paths to a solution, depending on your goals (for example if you PURELY want to lose weight you can do things like intermittent fasting, low carb diets and ice baths), but you asked about exercise.
If you have physical issues with sun then the appropriate thing to say is “I have $DISEASE” which prevents me from spending lots of time outside”. Being light skinned with a family propensity to Melanoma is not a reason to avoid the sun, being light skinned with a family propensity to Squamous Cell cancer IS a reason to take precautions, especially if that family tendency is towards the cancer going metastatic.
Now that we have more information we can work with something. You don’t have to completely avoid the sun, you just have to limit your exposure (duration, clothing) to it and do things to minimize the effects of it (cartinoid consumption, vitamin A with the D etc.). Yes, it takes mountain biking in the Australian Outback off the table, but the sweating issue and your location take that off the table anyway. However the cheapest form of exercise is walking, and if we can somehow dispose of your sweating issues there are walking protocalls that will get you SOME gains, if they’re the sort of gains you’re looking for (again you haven’t stated any goals other than “to exercise”, which is vague enough to be meaningless).
There are some diseases that have sweating as a symptom, but it’s unlikely you have those. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about and investigating exercise and diet, but very little on the sweat side of things, mostly because I just accepted that I sweat a lot more than most people given a particular workload. I have a cow-orker who runs ultra-marathons. He is COLD when the temperatures hit ~70 degrees. I wear shorts down into the upper 30s (with a sweater and a hat). He can run in 90-95 degree heat with minimal sweat—he intends to run the badwater at some point—I used to ride a bicycle to work in 0 (f) weather and SWEAT on the way in. This is a normal part of human variability.
Again the issue is how you deal with it. UnderArmour’s “Heat Gear” fits close to the body, provides some UV protection and does a decent job of moving the sweat out from your skin. Two or three of these shirts in conjunction with some sweatbands to keep the sweat down on your face and hands and for what is called a “High Intensity Training” or “High Intensity Interval Training” can go a long way towards meeting your goals, whatever they may be.
Realistically though just “man up” and be uncomfortable for 20 minutes 3 times a week. Just going doing that will be a gain in your life.
The Austism thing (I presume from your writing you’re down on the functional aspergers end of things) provides a mostly psychological stumbling block. Austists generally have a degree of anxiety about change beyond what normal people face. Examine your feelings about changing your routine, stepping out of your comfort zone and fixing what you may find to be broken.
I wish to make the world a place where “Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I’m not taking your advice” elicits the same reaction as “Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I’m not taking your advice”, rather than being told to man up and being psychanalyzed by strangers.
I’m going to start with the subset of the world named Less Wrong.
Well put!
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight is a very interesting book about sensory defensiveness—having trouble, sometimes serious trouble, with sensory experiences that don’t bother most people. It’s correlated with autism, but isn’t the same thing, and is sometime misdiagnosed as autism, neuroticism, or lack of willpower.
There are people who specialize in helping with sensory defensiveness. They are cleverly camouflaged as occupational therapists, so they are unlikely to be found.
Exercise can be fun if your brain is wired in a certain way, but needing to basically pointless busywork for physical maintenance is still stupid. There might be some entertaining flareups of cognitive dissonance from people who like to view being a diligent exerciser as a terminal value once there’s technology for keeping the body in excellent working order without doing pointless stuff that makes you sweat. For instance.
Also, how come no-one talks about different people probably having quite a bit different endorphin reactions to exercise? It’s pretty likely that they exist, but people still act like they are good exercisers because they make better choices as rational actors, not because it gets their brain pumped full of happy juice.
Very good idea which we need to test a lot. I’m very afraid it might do bad things later on, build muscle mass but not do anything about fat or many other problems, build too much of a type of muscle and not enough of another, eat something that shouldn’t be eaten to build muscle from it, or create weird dietary needs. But let’s go test it!
Downvoted because it is a general argument against any claimed rational action. Why do people who work at existential risk act like they make better rational choices when really they just get a different neurochemical responses? (Hint: Everything we do is for some neurochemical response)
For an action to be rational in your mind, does it need to obey some Kantian-esque imperative where the actor can’t gain pleasure from it? Are people who loathe exercise but do it anyways more rational?
Was wondering why people don’t look into differences in neurochemical responses at all, when they seem to be a pretty big factor in this case, different thing than arguing against any rational deliberation on it at all.
″ I wish to make the world a place where “Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I’m not taking your advice” elicits the same reaction as “Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I’m not taking your advice” ”
This would be nice. Now when I undertake this rejection challenge and come up with a reason for why I’m are not doing x-action, I can compare that reason to a hardwired physiological reaction. I will then feel satisfied that I am not doing (x-activity) for a good reason that I cannot change, because one surely cannot be expected to put their hand on a hot stove. In this way I will feel satisfied that I am in my current position for a good reason, and can happily fall back into acceptance.
And Alicorn, I don’t know the particular nature of your aversion to sunshine, and maybe it is deeply hardwired like most people’s aversion to a hot stove, so I am not speaking to you in particular. All I am saying is that reasons to not do something come in different strengths and in with different amounts of permanence. There are some dislikes that are able to be overcome through repeated effort, such as talking to strangers or eating vegetables. There are dislikes that can be overcome through mindfulness, (I will start this essay because of how it fits into my long term goals), or through environment (I will start this essay at a quiet Starbucks) or, my personal favorite, through chemical means ( I will start this essay once I finish this bottle of Laphroaig.) Maybe I misread MixedNuts statement and he/she was merely saying that for some people, sunshine and pain aversion are essentially the same, which I could buy. All I’m saying is I think there is a need to iterate this exercise through each of your reasons for not doing activity-x in the hope you can either find fundamental issues (putting your hand on a hot stove) or issues that can be resolved (working out in a walk in refrigerator.)
I think this conversation could use a dose of alternate perspective, and this seems like as good of a spot to drop it as any; zaogao, this is not directed at you personally.
LessWrong as a community makes a point, a lot of the time, of accepting a rather large amount of variance in its members’ values. Except, some of us seem to be better than others at noticing when values-variance is relevant to the conversation at hand. It seems to me that a failure to notice that that’s relevant is the bulk of the problem, here.
Alicorn has made it pretty clear, as far as I can see: Given the choice between a lifestyle in which she sweats regularly, and a lifestyle where she’s less fit and more prone to health problems, she really does prefer the latter—that’s what her values specify. She’s not in denial about it, she’s not complaining about having to make the choice, she’s not making drama. All she’s doing is describing the situation, pointing out the options she knows about, and asking if anyone knows of options that she’s missed. This shouldn’t be a problem, as far as I can tell: Looking for third (or fourth, or fifth) options is a very LessWrong kind of thing to do. But even if we collectively decide that we don’t want to devote resources to this kind of concrete discussion of specific cases, the respectful-of-values-differences thing to do is to say that, not try to shame her for having the values she does.
It might also be worth noting that this kind of thing contributes to LW turning into an echo chamber. If we can’t trust each other to stay respectful and on-topic about values differences that don’t significantly affect anything beyond a single user’s life, how can we trust each other with values differences that do affect other things?
How difficult would it be for you to learn how to be gently encouraging? Could it be worth the trouble?