The thing that gets me is I eat a vegan diet and forgo honey but I also use bug spray, so I’ve got a revealed preference to kill insects if it’ll make my life moderately better.
That said, I’m probably not killing insects on the scale of bee suffering given for honey, especially given if I stopped being strict about honey I’d just be eating e.g. cereal that has honey as an ingredient rather than getting it as an ingredient in its own right, so the amounts would be miniscule. IDK.
Honey is about 3000 cal per kg, beef 2900, so pretty similar. I’m more concerned that they’re not doing typical consumption rates—you could stop eating pork and eat a similar amount of beef instead (or tofu or Beyond, of course), but nobody is replacing a 200g steak with 200g of honey.
I’d imagine the average serving size of honey is 10-30g and a heavy honey consumer eats on the order of 10 servings a week. My dad was a beekeeper growing up and we didn’t go through 1kg of (free—he sold it at markets for an overall profit—extremely high quality honey) a week as a family but we went through several kilos of meat.
I’m a traffic engineer and I’m just cringing at this metaphor. Like, it’s probably a great metaphor, but the maximum throughput for cars is generally accepted as 1200 vehicles / lane / hour, and you have to keep these vehicles at a specific speed range, otherwise the traffic flow breaks down.
More info is this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic_flow
I think the reason I worry about injury is because I am far, far more clumsy than average, am really bad with form in general (I am in a theatre troupe and we often have to learn choreographed movement or rarely simple dances and I’m always the worst at it), and when I did running I ended up with a hip injury that still gives me grief (that said I am trying to build back up to hopefully running 10-20k a week again as I did really love it).
So, yeah, essentially, I’m terrified of baking in poor form and then injuring myself over time, as well as terrified of dropping a weight on myself (that said, I have never dropped a weight on any machine, so maybe that’s a good way to update myself).
The lower body exercises I do on the gym are the leg press, hip abduction/adduction, leg curl, leg extension. They also have an ab and back machine but to be honest I hate them and only use them rarely (once a month when I’m having a good week and want to do everything). But I do alternate between leg-focused machines and arm-focused machines when I exercise. Sometimes I do split sets between two machines if it’s quiet but that’s obviously rare because I want to be courteous. I aim to do 7 rep sets, and will lower the weight if I can only get around 4 and raise the weight if I can get 10+.
Thank you for the suggestion, it honestly didn’t occur to me that I could just add in one or two free weight exercises and use the machines for everything else.
My fitness goals are “have nice buff looking arms”, “do a pullup” and “lift up my husband (~80kg) in the traditional wife-carrying pose”, though I’m not pursuing them relentlessly or optimally, they’re just milestones I want to reach.
What free weight exercises might be best for getting me there, and have the most straightforward technique?
I’ve been lifting once a week for 20-45 minutes for two years and have noticed that I am stronger in everyday life and my body looks better (arms/shoulders/etc). There’s definitely a benefit to be had even if you think 45 minutes twice a week is too much.
Here’s my questions:
I only use machines because I was intimidated by the risk of injury with free weights. What are your thoughts on machines in general?
What is your advice for someone who wants to move from machines to free weights?
How do you track your progress? I use a very bare-bones android app that is simply called “Strong” which I use to keep track of my reps/sets/weights, and find it really useful as it tells me what my previous weight with that machine/exercise was. There’s a lot of paid options out there. Do you have any advice?
Thanks for posting this, it’s not something I talk about but (As A Woman) I have noticed the same things.
I’m trying to be the change I wish to see in the world but I’m not inclined to the sorts of contributions that do well on LW.
That said, I did write a rational vampire romance novel (Vampire Flower Language) as I noticed the same trends with the rational fiction craze (HPMOR et al).
So yeah, please make more posts, about whatever subjects come to mind for you.
I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn’t require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it’s just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.
There’s plenty of research showing that bilingual children have some small advantages, e.g.: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/advantages_of_a_bilingual_brain
Then there’s the cultural value of language that I raised in my previous post, especially for minority cultures (and you state that things from your culture like Buffy and TVTropes are valuable to you). I’m assuming you’re from an English-dominant culture. Can you imagine if you moved to, say, Portugal, and you learned Portugese and all your friends and family spoke Portugese all the time, you might feel as though something was lacking if they watched Buffy episodes that had been dubbed into Portugese?
Generally speaking, people who speak endangered languages also speak the majority language—otherwise it wouldn’t be endangered. Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language. Being bilingual has been linked with a lot of benefits, and the only downside is that it slightly slows initial language acquisition (but children quickly catch up).
Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language. I went on a date with an Australian man who was half belgian half japanese and he said that he wishes his parents had taught him either language, instead he just speaks english.
Our local (australian) Indigenous language is called Noongar and is undergoing revitalisation. By all accounts, the Noongar people benefit from this socially, and the language itself has information and culture.
Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we’d lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. They can be translated into other languages (and, well, Chaucer has to be translated to be understood). But, to my mind, something valuable is lost if culture is lost. These “endangered” languages had culture too—songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That’s important.
I get the feeling that a lot of people in the rationalsphere think that if something won’t help us invent friendly AI or space travel it’s pointless. Culture’s important. Lesswrong has culture (HPMOR, the sequences, etc).
Thanks, you’re right.
It’s a real horses / zebra kind of thing, though.
The situation: a hiker goes missing in an area where hikers are known to go missing (and, sadly, die).
The problem: eyewitnesses report the hiker’s truck being in one direction, then not present at all, then in another direction.
Solution 1: eyewitnesses were mistaken about whether they saw the car / what direction it was facing
Solution 2: someone stole the car, took it away for a bit, and then returned it to the trailhead
Occam’s razor requires only one additional assumption for solution 1 (eyewitnesses sometimes/often make mistakes, which is well-known, especially about something as banal about an ordinary car), whereas solution 2 requires us to postulate an entire person (or persons?) who had a motivation to take and then return the car (what? any motivation—e.g. maybe Bill was involved in the drug trade—adds more assumptions).
Let me posit Solution 3: the ranger deliberately recorded his information wrong because he didn’t want to be in trouble for not sounding the alarm about a missing hiker.
or Solution 4: the park management/police colluded together to falsify the witness reports to provide doubt to Bill dying hiking to try and reduce the number of deaths attributable to JTNP
Both Solution 3 and Solution 4 seem far less fanciful than Solution 2. Sure, Solution 5 (“Aliens!”) would be more fantastical than the u-haul one, but just because the Solution 2 doesn’t rely on us changing our understanding of our place in the world doesn’t mean it’s valuable to think about.
If Bill’s body had been discovered buried in the back yard of some drug lord, then sure, Solution 2 all of a sudden looks good. But the situation presented (missing hiker in a place where hikers have been known to get lost and die) does not require that level of attention.
I don’t deny Adam contributed more to the case than almost anyone out there, but the u-haul theory doesn’t become valuable just because it was he who postulated it.
For the record I’m the same person who brought it up in 2022 on reddit when he was found and objected to it when you posted the original blog to unresolvedmysteries in 2018, so I think this is a case of one particularly annoying person who follows you around chanting “U-Haul! U-Haul!” :)
Thank you for all your hard work on the case, I actually had no idea you were the same Adam on the search and the blog.
Thank you for posting this. I’d been following the Bill Ewasko story and Tom Mahood’s blog for years so it’s interesting to see it posted here.
I think the “Death Valley Germans” is another very good series of articles from the same blog, with a much more conclusive (but equally sad) ending.
What strikes me is before 2022 there were a lot of people posting theories, and there was one person who posted to /r/unresolvedmysteries that the discrepency between the reports of whether and how Bill’s truck was parked could be explained by… someone putting it into a U-Haul, taking it away, and then returning it(!). Source: https://ijustdisappear.com/wp/2018/05/22/unsolved-mysteries/
I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I feel it’d be right up your alley. It’s the story of a war between a human who knows how to weld and a cat who wants to thwart their automatic feeder.
“Drink only water” is a good one. Depends if you think forgoing deliciousness, or other effects (alcohol, caffeine) counts as a tradeoff.
Given you don’t think forgoing the convenience/enjoyment of using your phone in bed counts as a tradeoff, I’m guessing this likely is the sort of thing you’re looking for.
From a traffic engineer’s perspective:
Roundabouts can run into efficiency issues when the two traffic directions don’t have roughly even flow. The shortcut roundabout seems as though it is intended for intersections with a primary and secondary route, with the primary route having the through lane
This sort of “hamburger” roundabout is similar to your proposal: https://www.bristolworld.com/news/hamburger-roundabout-plans-for-a4174-bristol-ring-road-shelved-after-overwhelmingopposition-3443196
Note that your proposed roundabout will not be as safe as a traditional roundabout as the through traffic and circulating traffic can collide at a right angle and at a decent speed (the deflection in the middle isn’t going to be super effective at slowing vehicles, but I love that you thought to include it!). The safety benefit of a roundabout comes from reduced speeds (due to pre-deflection and circulating speed) and the reduced impact angles, both of which are affected by your proposal.
Drivers doing a u-turn while vehicles are stopped on the circulating carriageway at a first pass makes me very uncomfortable but I’d have to think about it seriously / do research on it to work out whether it’s actually a bad idea or if I’m just afraid of anything different to the status quo. Early thoughts are it will confuse drivers (both not knowing how to perform the manouvre/that they can perform the manouvre, and also drivers who witness vehicles doing it won’t be sure what’s happening), and the efficiency benefits are probably minor
Note that my specialty is in improving safety rather than efficiency. I have experience in project work where I had to balance them, but the above is all strongly biased towards discussing safety.
I think I’m making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn’t tell you much about my uncle’s actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. “has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers”?)
Then again, my example here seems to have failed because people do study tallness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000291499390523F , but they crucially define tallness as above the 95th percentile. Other studies I’m glanced at use height as a continuous variable, so who the heck knows.
Yeah, okay.
Look at me thinking like an engineer—“but it’s not useful from a practical point of view because we don’t have access to that data”.
I think the thing you’re missing is you’re still exposed to crashes because of some maniac doing something extremely risky and hitting you.
I’m also a very cautious driver (as you can imagine in my line of work), but I do make mistakes all the time.
This paper seems like it might be interesting for you to read: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1513271113
I’ve just had a skim but here’s some of my impressions. I might read it in more detail when I get to work today.
It doesn’t deal with fatalities (just crashes) but having a quick look at Fig 1, drivers who aren’t distracted or impaired are involved in ~28% of crashes. Note that “impairment” also includes things like anger.
Fig 2 is pretty great for you—shows the baseline of each type of impairment, error, distraction and the odds ratio for crashes it’s involved in. Not a statistician but I believe that means you’re 10 times more likely to get into a crash if you’re visibly angry/sad but only 3 times more likely if you’re drowsy. Which is very interesting to know.
And that 51% of drivers are observed to be distracted in some way during normal driving condition (which can include “dancing in seat to music” and “interaction with adult passenger”.
This paper was just the first result in a scholar search for the term “crash causation factors driver”, so this info is relatively easy to find.
“Passenger mile” is not a stat we use in my jurisdiction (we use VKT, vehicle kilometres travelled), but if I’m interpreting it right, then you need to know the average number of passengers to know the number of crashes the driver is involved in. For example, say that each bus has 10 passengers on average, that would put the fatalities per passenger mile at 0.80, which given this is OOM seems pretty similar to cars.
That said, following that to its conclusion you’d end up with trains having some horrendously high rate of crashing, which doesn’t pass the sniff test. I think I might be having a failure of logic somewhere here.
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I was talking about the spray that kills insects, so yeah, my revealed preferences definitely call for insect death.