Downvoted means you agree (on this thread), correct? If so, I’ve wanted to see a post on rationality and nutrition for a while (on the benefits of high-animal fat diet for health and the rationality lessons behind why so many demonize that and so few know it).
MrShaggy
Karma: 110
I was worried people would think that, but if I posted links to present evidence, I ran the risk of convincing them so they wouldn’t vote it up! All I’ve eaten in the past three weeks is: pork belly, butter, egg yolks (and a few whites), cheese, sour cream (like a tub every three days), ground beef, bacon fat (saved from cooking bacon) and such. Now, that’s no proof about the medical claim but I hope it’s an indication that I’m not just bullshiting. But for a few links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19179058 (the K2 in question is virtually found only in animal fats and meats, see http://www.westonaprice.org/abcs-of-nutrition/175-x-factor-is-vitamin-k2.html#fig4)--the pubmed is on prevention of heart disease in humans http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/11/can-vitamin-k2-reverse-arterial.html shows reversal in rat studies from K2 http://trackyourplaque.com/ -- a clinic that uses K2 among other things to reverse heart disease note that I am not trying to construct a rational argument but to convince people that I do hold this belief. I do think a rational argument can be constructed but this is not it.
Eating lots of bacon fat and sour cream can reverse heart disease. Very confident (>95%).
Just to add to the anecdotal data, I’ve had the same experience upping animal fat and being able to be productive (mentally and physically) even without eating, and I work a physically demanding job at night, either of which alone can induce fatigue. I eat mostly butter, egg yolks, cream, coconut oil, and fatty cuts of meat like pork belly and fatty ground beef (epsom salts, mineral water and magnesium supplements take care of any muscle soreness).
More useful than melatonin for sleeping in particular?
Not AT but something similar and free online vids is “Intuflow”, for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsMPqP7hxRk
T&C report that mapping the Wason selection task to examples from everyday life doesn’t improve performance, only when changed to detecting cheating does it change performance.
If I understand your last sentence correctly, that was my other main problem with their argument for evolved social contract algorithms or whatever: I didn’t see sufficient evidence that the “cheating” stuff was part of our “native” architecture rather than a learned behavior. Hence the suggestion to create tests that vary on things we know to culturally vary.
Well the EvPsych Primer referenced uses it as their centerpiece for how EvPsych works. I can’t say what the rest of the literature says.
I’m not positing that the beating helped the kid learn. See Kaj_Sotala’s comment above for an example of how students perform math better when say, doing their job but they can’t at school. I found the Wire anecdote plausible, but I didn’t mean to suggest I accept the kid’s understanding at face value: I generalized to the kid being motivated, which may’ve well been the case even if the kid hadn’t been beaten but having been beaten, that’s the explanation the kid looked to. Also, I think your historical evidence doesn’t necessarily prove your point. My impression is that corporal punishment was often rather arbitrary and to enforce social norms more than teach math lessons (though that too), and I would guess that if kids are beaten for reasons they often can’t understand (which is my impression from reading accounts), then being hurt for reasons they can understand (not memorizing their multiplication tables) has a diminished effect. I’m having trouble recalling any specifics, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read accounts from kids that suggest they saw the punishment as a motivating force for learning, whether it actually was or not. Just to be clear, even if corporal punishment were shown to be effective in certain ways if used in certain ways, I wouldn’t be in favor of using it and would guess it would decrease self-motivated learning long term and there are hopefully more humane ideas to make learning motivating.
This example helps clarify something for me. I don’t think it’s that the “cognitive context was...too dissimilar” for the students, I would guess that it’s that they don’t care in class. When they’re doing they’re job or shopping, they do care. But the obvious reply is: why do I hypothesize that cheating-examples make people care in a fictional context? Maybe someone can help say it clearly for me, but it just makes sense to me that math requires a higher threshold of “caring” than something like “cheating.” If I were reading a novel about a kid solving math problems in class, I’d probably wouldn’t care about the math problems, but if I were reading a novel and cheating was possible, it probably would cause a reaction. This is what I was trying to get at with testing “various types of emotionally-motivating things,” it just seems obvious that some things will evoke emotions in some contexts but not others, and some emotional responses will increase performance or some won’t, but I can’t put it better than that right now.
The Wire versus Evolutionary Psychology
Yeah, the idea that a certain concept of states is what explains North Korea and Somalia is wrong. Seconding the point on North Korea: it can defend itself quite well, and it’s not just the size of the army. Also, compare post-Westphalian but pre-WW2 with post-WW2 to see a difference in terms of conquering other countries and redrawing borders. The difference: a deal between the US and USSR, two countries with enough power to enforce a certain kind of stability in general, and with the collapse of Stalinism leading to an uptick in the exceptions (esp. Kosovo and Russia-Georgia stuff).
Right, it’s responsible for the complexity of what we regard as human behavior, but that doesn’t meant that part of the brain is more complex than other parts. Also, I doubt but do not know that it’s the only part that regulates or suppresses other parts.
“These points illustrate a very important basic principle: the mind is made out of ‘layers’ of modules and functions, starting with the most rudimentary, basic, and primitive, and moving to the most complex and subtle.”
The evidence you gave doesn’t point to this conclusion. Modules and functions are the dominate way of thinking about how the brain works currently, but what you’ve shown is only that the brain isn’t a single process free of contradiction. More importantly, even in the view of modules and functions, the rudimentary/basic/primitive ladder to complex/subtle doesn’t follow. Sure the front cortext is more recently evolved, but according to what measure is it more complex than another part of the brain? I could be wrong, but I think you’re sort of anthropomorphizing parts of the brain (the reptilian part is primitive, the ‘human’ part is complex).
Sure, but this is basically only worthwhile to us as an introduction...meaning you just gave us an introduction, the point of which is for something more substantial to come after it. Neat example yes, but still wordy for that neat example. This could’ve been two paragraphs.
“These situations sound like there is a much bigger problem than the elementary error, perhaps that the people involved just don’t care about seeking truth, only about having a routine.”
Well, a large part of it is funding/bureaucracy/grants. I tend to thing that’s the main part in many of these fields. Look at Taubes’s Good Calories, Bad Calories for a largely correct history of how the field of nutrition went wrong and is still going at it pretty badly. You do have a growing number of insiders doing research not on the “wrong” path and you did all along, but they never got strong enough to challenge the “consensus” and it’s due not just to the field but the forces outside the field (think tanks, government agencies, media reports). So even being published and well-known isn’t enough to change a field.
You would probably like Ferris’s Four hour workweek, has an example of how to get your boss to let you work from home and stuff like that. Not the same as above, but similar enough to help you.
“Take a tile known to both of you (if there is doubt, take one your oponent knows).”
I don’t understand the parenthetical comment: it seems to be saying “If you are not sure both of you know what a tile is, then choose a tile your opponent knows.” How could you know your opponent knows what a tile is but not be sure you know? Or maybe I’m just not understanding?
Not just hold the belief but eat that way even more consistently (more butter and less sour cream just because tastes change, but same basic principles). I’m young and didn’t have any obvious signs of heart disease personally so can’t say it “worked out” for me personally in that literal, narrow sense but I feel better, more mentally clear, etc. (I know that’s kinda whatever of evidence, just saying since you asked).
Someone else recently posted their success with butter lowering their measurement of arterial plaque: “the second score was better (lower) than the first score. The woman in charge of the testing center said this was very rare — about 1 time in 100. The usual annual increase is about 20 percent.” (http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/08/04/how-rare-my-heart-scan-improvement/) (Note: I disagree with the poster’s reasoning methods in general, just noting his score change.)
There was a recent health symposium that discussed this idea and related ones: http://vimeo.com/ancestralhealthsymposium/videos/page:1/sort:newest.
For those specifically related to heart health, these are most of them: http://vimeo.com/ancestralhealthsymposium/videos/search:heart/sort:newest