Writer, editor, teacher. Expertise in personal finance and habit formation. Full-time freelancer and part-time musician.
Nicole Dieker
Karma: 170
If you define your win condition and achieve it, your next step is to define a new win condition and achieve it as well. That means you could go from “play passage all notes accurate from memory” to “play passage all notes accurate from memory without curling 5th finger.”
I’m going to write a post on Tuesday about reps reps reps vs. mindful repetition, and why a rep where you pay attention to why you’re failing is just as valuable as a win.
I think the real question is whether the traditional approach to shooting a 3-pointer works. Do people who shoot shoot shoot shoot land more 3-pointers than people who prep, define, shoot, evaluate, prep with new information, etc.? And do the best players do all of that so quickly (and so integratedly) that it looks like rep rep rep?
That’s how I’ve done it, too. Once you know what pitch your favorite song starts on, for example, or what key it’s in, learning pitches becomes much easier.
This assumes that you can recall music from memory in its original key, of course. If you can’t, your first step might involve strengthening that kind of recall.
Thank you! Have you read Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning? That’s where I stole all of the ideas that I didn’t steal from Chessable...
What happened when I applied metrics to my piano practice (a five-part essay about the process of learning)
I think the question of whether there is a Faustian effect is the wrong one to ask, and it may in fact be a substitution for the real question (as Kahneman would say).
Your actual question is “should I get the Pfizer booster in the first half of February?”
I would answer that question (and in fact have answered it for myself) by asking questions like “what do I observe happening to people I know personally who already got boosted?” and “what do I observe happening to people I know personally who did not get boosted?”
If you subdivide the people you know personally category into “people I know personally who do not live in my immediate community” and “people I know personally who live in my immediate community,” it also becomes a useful way to distinguish the COVID prevalence/risk in your community from the COVID prevalence/risk in other cities and countries.
Then you can use that information to ask yourself “what do I believe will happen to me if I get boosted?” and “what do I believe will happen to me if I do not get boosted?”
You can also ask “what do I believe will happen to me if I do not get boosted with this particular formulation, and choose instead to wait for a newer model?”
If you consider yourself to be at a lower risk for serious COVID complications but have loved ones within your immediate circle who are at higher risk, you should also ask “what do I observe happening to people I know in terms of spreading COVID to others?” and “what do I observe happening to people in my high-risk loved one’s demographic who catch Omicron?”
Those are answerable questions, as opposed to evaluating a potential Faustian Hypothesis against an ever-growing series of secondhand, confounding data.
You can compare both ingredient lists and serving sizes if you look at cookbooks from the 1950s-1960s and recipe sites today. My Betty Crocker cookbook from 1969 (where I get most of my dessert recipes) has a brownie recipe that calls for 2 cups sugar, 4 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter; it’s meant to bake in a 13x9 pan and yield 32 brownies.
The brownie recipe on Betty Crocker’s website (that is, “today’s brownie recipe”) calls for 1 3⁄4 cups sugar, 5 oz chocolate, 2⁄3 cup butter, but is meant to bake in a 9x9 pan and yield 16 brownies.
hmmmmmmmm...
The obvious question is “what were you eating in 2014 and how was it different,” and the answer is “I was still doing most of my own cooking because I wanted to save money, but I was terrible at it (one of the reasons I switched to Huel was because I didn’t have the skills to make food taste good) and most of my meals would have been embarrassing to serve to anybody else.”
Then, when I felt badly about not having anything good to eat in the house, I would order takeout or walk to the local Walgreens and buy candy and cookies. (Huel effectively stopped that habit, fwiw.)
Do we naturally eat more when there is something missing in our foodstuff, whether it’s flavor or nutrient or the experience of sharing a meal with people we care about?
the one thing I do avoid is HFCS, that stuff is not allowed in the house ;)
but I will make some kind of fancy-pants dessert once a month or so, I have an old-fashioned pound cake recipe that is just delightful, we are also good at making pie (crust from scratch)
I eat honey every day, probably a tablespoon’s worth on my morning oatmeal.
We don’t avoid sugar but we don’t go out of our way to add it. None of the food we ate today had sugar in it, for example.
Breakfast: steel-cut oats, fruit, nuts, honey, butter, egg, milk, coffee
Lunch: Rice, homemade mango slaw, homemade guacamole, smoked sausage (we didn’t make that, but it has no sugar, no HFCS, no nitrates/nitrites, no MSG), grapes, cheese
Dinner: Rice, homemade naan, homemade dal, vegetables cooked in butter and various Indian-influenced spices, red wine
Dessert: 100% dark chocolate square (Ghirardelli), segmented orange
You have to create your own personal finance system
Oh, very true. The point of my narrative was to make an argument against “bland food being the solution,” while acknowledging that hyperpalatable food could still be part of the problem.
When I ate bland food nearly exclusively, I was focusing on metrics that allowed me first to lose and then to maintain weight, even though those metrics were high effort (not overwhelmingly high effort, but still), encouraged binge-restrict cycles (if I eat 3600 cals today and 1400 cals tomorrow, I’ll still be on target) and added anxiety to food-related cultural rituals that could not be measured and tracked.
When I focused on maintaining equilibrium during meals (mindful eating, as the kids say) instead of following preset rules, my body also lost and maintained weight without the associated stress.
Plus I got to eat tasty foods.
also any discussion of CICO is incomplete without Vi Hart’s video of how food companies juke the numbers:
This is what I thought when I read the SMTM papers too. “People are eating more calories but that’s not why they weigh more” okay hmmmm...
Not that I think CICO is the only factor, and that’s important! The leptin resistance and the insulin resistance hypotheses both make sense, for example.
Here’s another compounding factor (pun intended):
We know that it takes more energy to sustain greater mass, which is part of why people get really excited about CICO (“if I just consume less energy, my body will naturally resolve to a smaller mass”) and then disappointed when it doesn’t work out quite as planned (“wait my body is naturally resolving to tired?”).
And yes, when my body weight was 22% more than current, I was hungrier. Full-stop.
But here’s where the numbers get interesting. We know that many hyperpalatable foods have been hyperengineered to hit ever-increasing bliss points (go read Salt, Sugar, Fat), which means that an Oreo Double Stuf gives you 70 calories per cookie vs the original Oreo’s 50 calories per cookie.
So it compounds—you’re hungrier because you have more mass to maintain, and the food you’re eating has more calories but you don’t realize it first because the size of the food is the same as it’s always been and second because the food has been engineered to not feel rich/heavy/filling (so you’ll eat more of it, go read Salt, Sugar, Fat again).
Then mass increases, then hunger increases, and if you eat 4 Oreo Double Stufs instead of 3 you’re getting 280 cals instead of 210 whereas if you’d eaten 4 Original Oreos instead of 3 you’d have only gotten 200 cals instead of 150.
Cycle cycle cycle.
It’s also helpful to put less food on your plate to begin with, as a tool to recalibrate how much is “enough” for you. It is always possible to take food off your plate and put it back into a Tupperware and then into the refrigerator, but the easy, default choice is to convince yourself to clean your plate—especially when the alternative is putting a spoonful of whatever into either a shared leftovers container (which could be an issue depending on the hygiene standards of the people you’re living with) or in a separate bin to be consumed on the day you’re hungry for a partially-eaten bit of pork loin with a smear of mashed potatoes still attached to one end (which will never look quite as appetizing as properly-plated leftovers or a fresh meal).
Starting with less food to begin with makes the default habit (clean plate) more likely to result in a win condition.
I can actually speak to a variation of this theory, since I used Huel (a nutritionally complete powder) as my primary food source for, like, two years.
I can also speak to the “losing weight and keeping it off for 5+ years” thing, because in 2014 I hit my all-time weight high of 138 lbs (at 5′3″, this is the point at which the scale tips to overweight). I started calorie counting with a food scale and lost 15 lbs in a little over a year, which tracks with what the research claims will happen if you try to lose weight at a consistent small caloric deficit.
The end of this weight loss adventure coincided with the beginning of my Huel journey, and I continued weighing my food, weighing the ingredients that went into foods and dividing by the number of portions that I cut foods into, doing the guesswork that comes with eating meals that you cannot weigh, tracking all of the related numbers, and so on.
It worked, in the sense that I had the willpower to do it, and it wasn’t particularly time-consuming. But it didn’t work half so well as what happened next.
In the second half of 2020, I moved in with the great love of my life and he was all “what are you doing eating Huel when the world is full of delicious food?” He is a very capable home cook, and I quickly learned how to be a capable home cook, and between the two of us we ate meat and cheese and homemade bread and potatoes and vegetables cooked in butter and all of the things that people who are weighing their food and trying to get the maximum food volume for the fewest number of calories try to avoid.
It’s worth noting that we ate very little processed food. Obviously steel-cut oats are processed; Brie is processed; wine, if you want to think about it that way, is processed. But when we wanted cookies, we made our own. When we wanted naan, we made our own. When we wanted hamburgers, we made our own.
This could mean that we ate very little “highly palatable food,” although the food we eat seems to be extremely palatable.
The point of this story is that I assumed I would gain weight on this diet.
I lost ten pounds in a year, without tracking calories or increasing my exercise or anything like that.
This took me from “healthy weight for my height” to “slim end of healthy weight for my height,” and for what it’s worth being slimmer has demonstrated benefits. Aggressive, sustained piano practice is easier, for example, when you’re lighter. So is biking.
But that’ll take me off-topic, so let’s get to the actual thing of the thing:
WHAT DO I THINK HAPPENED HERE?
French Paradox. We were eating high-quality, home-cooked foods in small portions—and including a variety of foods at every meal. Three bites of a casserole next to three bites of baguette next to three bites of a salad next to three bites of dessert and so on. We spend roughly 30 minutes every night on food cooking and prep, so this kind of food is not overwhelmingly time-consuming. It does take planning ahead, in terms of grocery shopping and what not.
I was optimizing for equilibrium, not calories. After I got interested in the French Paradox thing I read French Women Don’t Get Fat, which still remains the most sensible thing I’ve ever read about “how to eat” (and I have read all of the Michael Pollan books). Basically, Mireille Guiliano says “eat so that you feel the same way all of the time.” Excessive hunger is just as distracting as bloated fullness. A meal that causes your body to change shape in a visual or palpable sense isn’t great; neither is trying to force your body into a particular shape by withholding food. Intoxication and abstemiousness are two incorrect solutions to the same problem.
Eating good food is the side dish to the main course of my life. I am very sure that I put on extra weight in 2014 because I was lonely, understimulated, and didn’t have anything else to do. If food is your primary source of dopamine, etc. etc. etc.
Anyway, what I am saying is
DON’T EAT BLAND MEALS FOR SCIENCE
IT WILL MAKE YOU SAD
WHICH WILL MAKE ME SAD
IT WILL ALSO CAUSE YOU TO AGONIZE OVER CALORIES, BINGE-RESTRICT, AND SUBJECT YOURSELF TO EXTRA MISERABILITY EVEN IF YOU MAKE IT WORK BY GETTING THE MATH RIGHT (oooh I ate 3600 cals yesterday so today I’ll only eat 1400, never mind how either of these eating experiences make me feel physically/mentally/emotionally).
~also read French Women Don’t Get Fat even if you are neither French nor a woman~
How to Become a Magician
P(C) vs. NP(C)
The most important thing I discovered in regards to my current partnership is that the relationship is the thing that exists between the partners. The relationship is the choices that are made by both people.
In every previous situation, the relationship was dysfunctional because there was an unwillingness to acknowledge “what I want it to be,” “what the other person wants it to be,” and “what actually exists between us”.
(Think 500 Days of Summer, when Tom says “you can’t say we’re not a couple, we do all of the things couples do” and Summer says “I can say we’re not a couple because I only want something casual,” and what actually exists between them centers on the illusion of emotional intimacy, the practicality of exclusive sex, and the decision that “hoping the other person will change their minds about what they want” is better than “putting in the effort to find someone new” and/or “accepting the pain and effort that comes with ending a relationship that is not giving me what I want.”)
Everything changed the day I realized that an action could only be considered “of the relationship” if it were willingly entered into by all parties in the relationship. This applies to families and friendships as well as romantic relationships/adult partnerships.
I can expand on this if you want...
Specific, replicable actions that lead to predictable, desired results > specific, replicable actions that lead to unpredictable, desired results
(with the understanding that you may need to grind unpredictability for a while until you get what you need to consistently achieve predictability)
(example being “building freelance career” vs. “maintaining freelance career”)
(actions that lead to undesired results aren’t even on the table for consideration, of course)
BTW I could learn something even more useful than “stop after win” with another month of metrics; maybe “immediately redefine more sophisticated win condition and work towards that” is the real key. But the data I’ve got now suggests that just repeating something you’ve already practiced to a defined win condition is counterproductive.