This was, I think, a reasonable characterisation of wikipedia in the early days. Things are very different now.
You have to navigate a gauntlet of deletionistas, poorly defined rules, gatekeepers, and political biases. I gave up a couple of years ago. The most difficult aspect is the arbitrary rules about what sources are authoritative and what are not.
One small example: You are (or were when I looked) required to refer to male genital mutilation as “circumcision” and are not allowed to refer to it as “male genital mutilation”. The female version may not be referred to as “circumcision” and must be called “female genital mutilation”. The opinions of the doctors who make money from this operation on males must be deferred to as definitive. Basically I found everything was like this.
You are not allowed to refer to primary sources such as journal articles but must only refer to secondary sources such as textbooks or newspapers, which are often out of date, biased or wrong. You have the ridiculous situation where people have tried to correct their own date of birth by supplying a copy of their birth certificate and this was rejected. In at least one case, the person had to arrange for their date of birth to be mentioned in a newspaper and then it was accepted.
In fields where there is no political controversy things are not so bad. But you are still subject to the deletionistas who will find any possible reason to nuke your hard work. And wikipedia’s view that there is a definitive version of the truth on any given issue makes it utterly hopeless at covering anything that is controversial. I am certain that wikipedia of the early C17 would be presenting the geocentric view of the universe as definitively true.
waveman
One point not noted anywhere as far as I can see is that, by allowing the pandemic to spread to millions of people, the risk of a more dangerous or virulent strain appearing increased enormously.
If the pandemic had been kept to relatively small numbers, as in Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Thailand, (China if you believe their statistics on this, unlike all their other statistics are correct) etc. this new more infective strain would likely never have appeared.
My sympathies to you.
This is a pretty common situation in medicine—you have a problem and you have little idea what the numbers are and insight is very hard to come by. It is incredibly frustrating. There may be studies but they only report the risks for a small number of factors or even just one (eg risk of stillbirth by age of mother or given a prior stillbirth). The raw numbers from studies are usually not available to “lay people” to allow them to do their own analysis for their own circumstances which would provide a much better insight.
When you go and look at the studies you see results that differ by a factor of 5 or worse. Does low Testosterone halve (one study), or triple (another study) your chance of getting prostate cancer? Is the risk of death within 15 years from prostate cancer at stage T1C with Gleason score 6 without surgery or radiotherapy 3% (one study) or 20% (another)? What is the incidence of impotence after prostate removal (pick a number, any number between 20% and 80%)?
You are asking “what is the likely cause?” however it is fairly likely you will never know this. Most stillbirths are never explained. There are probably thousands of things it could have been. Human reproduction is a fallible process with many points of failure. I suggest you may have to move past this question at some point.
I guess what you really need to know is “what is the risk of another stillbirth given you have had one already?”.
The base rate is about 1⁄160 to 1⁄200 births. I see nothing in your report that indicates an elevated risk. I assume you have looked at the risk factors including possible family history, and found nothing.
Acording to this meta-analysis http://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h3080 the chance of a second stillbirth given a history of stilbirth is about 2.5% or 1/40. This is a lot higher than the base of ~1/200 but it is still pretty unlikely.
Sorry that’s the best I can offer.
I have no medical qualifications but due to various health issues I have been reading medical books and papers and learning statistics for several decades.
I find this post naive, like much writing on weight management.
I have struggled with my weight for 40 years (BMI currently 26, slightly overweight but strangely enough the level at which death rates are lowest). And I have read just about every book on the subject and cubic meters of academic papers. Perhaps I have learned something.
> things that will help
I tried all, yes all, those things over the years. Some worked, a bit, temporarily and none worked permanently. I agree that they are plausible stories but they are nothing more.
What this and most writing on diet ignore is that weight management is tightly controlled by the body and lower brain, almost entirely out of conscious control. Yes you can eat less for a while, just as you can consciously stop breathing for a while. But in the end willpower has almost zero effect.
Feedback mechanisms operate through many mechanisms—by regulating appetite. by downregulating metabolism, willingness to expend energy, feelings of fatigue, sleepiness etc. If you have not woken at night having been dreaming about eating, with the only thought in your head being “I don’t care what happens I must eat now” you have not experienced hunger. In Ancel Keys’ WWII study on starvation subjects were found literally eating from garbage cans after a while.
When people are young they find it far easier to control weight. As you get older it gets harder. BY 50-60 virtually everyone is struggling. So don’t declare victory too soon. https://politicaldictionary.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/mission-accomplished-moment.jpg
The idea that eating one extra cookie a day voluntarily will have the results predicted by a simplistic mathematical model is not even wrong. You see this in studies where they try to get people to gain weight—it is just as hard for many people to gain weight as it is for others to lose weight. the nody adapts and counters any destablizing inputs.
As Ey pointed out no-one thinks that weight loss is worth the price if it means you effectively lose 15-20 points of IQ because your body has decided to economize on energy supplies to the brain. And no-one thinks that weight loss is good if you mostly lose lean body mass, bone mass and your immune system is weakened. What people want to lose is fat. This is a very different thing from weight loss.
So what is the solution? I have lost 15kg of fat over the years (10 kg of weight when you take into account +5kg muscle).
I do not claim any of the things below are a magic bullet. Such a thing does not exist. But these things have helped me.
1. Eat a nutritionally rich diet. If you are lacking nutrients you will be hungry. Something like the diet recommended in “Eat Rich Live Long”. Just ignore the author’s views on covid19. Protein is often the nutrient in short supply.
1a. In general try to avoid empty calories. Sorry this includes wine and beer, even ‘craft’ beer.
2. Limit carbohydrates to the lowest level consistent with feeling OK. Note that a period of adaption is needed. Especially avoid sugar/fructose. You do not need keto but low carb changed the game for me.
3. Limit polyunsaturated fats especially Omega 6 “vegetable oils”. Like sugars they are nutritionally barren and do not provide satiety commensurate with calories. They are essential but only to 2-3% of calories and it is virtually impossible on a diet with real food to go under this. In contrast saturated fat produces great feelings of satiety and is IMO metabolically benign.
4. Eat seldom e.g. once or twice a day. This helps your body learn to burn fat.
5. A combination of small amounts of intense exercise and large amounts of light exercise such as walking. I walk about 6km/day and do weightlifting. But rest days are important too.
6. It seems to take about 2 years for the body to adapt to your new level of fat. In the meantime you will be hungry. But after the adaption (IMHO due to a reduction in the number of fat cells—contrary to medical orthodoxy) things get a lot better.
7. Get plenty of sleep and limit stress and have pleasure in your life. If you are miserable and stressed you are far more likely to overeat comfort food.
8. Avoid toxic environments like fast food outlets, most cafes, restaurants etc. The focus on hyper-palatability combined with hyper-calories and hypo-nutrition is terrible.
9. Be aware that much nutritional advice, including that delivered by captured regulatory agencies, is warped out of recognition by financial agendas, and various other ideological agendas (e.g. that coming out of the College of Nutritional Evangelism, now renamed Loma Linda University, whose doctrines seem to be inspired by 19th century religious fantasies that held that everyone including the lions were vegans in the Garden of Eden). The whole medical field is also very prone to capture by “Great Men” who dominate the field for decades for reasons utterly removed from the correctness of their theories.
I have been stewing about this question in general for a while. When I look back at my long (so far) life, I think of the many times I have been misled by so-called experts.
From which I learned that experts, even real ones:
Are subject to massive cognitive biases, without realizing it. One common one is the filtering of data based on prior beliefs, not updating when new evidence comes along. Science advances funeral by funeral.
Are often influenced by mercenary motives, and are frequently oblivious to it.
Often defer to out of date, wrong or incompetent but powerful figures. Another reason why science advances funeral by funeral. Medicine is particularly prey to this problem, due to the strict hierarchy in medical organisations.
Frequently optimize something other than truth. Publication, career advancement, money (as mentioned above), status, etc. Ask “What is the success metric?”.
On top of that a lot of self-proclaimed and even highly credentialed ‘experts’ don’t actually have much of a clue. Because:
Fields often have huge blind spots. E.g. I frequently see studies of the influence of childhood poverty or education or SES etc on people’s lives, in which the model explicitly assumes that there is no influence from parent to child via genes. Knowledge of statistics and of mathematics, key tools for understanding pandemics, are particularly weak in many fields. In my country it is typical of doctors to have mathematics only up to year 11.
People are experts in a far more narrow domain than they realize. My own country has a Chief Medical Officer, who seems to have little grasp of the management of epidemics. Long ago he was a medical specialist in a largely irrelevant field, for several decades a bureaucrat/political player. Dunning Kruger Syndrome.
Training often induces in people a hefty dose of arrogance—medical training being a particularly unfortunate example; law is another—and this arrogance is transferred to areas beyond the person’s sphere of competence.
Fields of study are often set up with safeguards and barriers which may or may not be well intentioned, but which prevent outsiders with good ideas from having any influence. In endocrinology, a field that impacts me personally, the practitioners in my country appear to have lost large swathes of knowledge and nothing can be done about it (e.g. of how to understand complex systems, so that endocrinological problems are typically assessed in terms of “is this individual blood level ‘normal’” rather than looking at the system as a whole).
Ideas, beliefs and practices that were formed based on little or no evidence become entrenched and remain in place, while anyone trying to overturn them is held to extremely high standards of rigor. Have a look at the evidence behind the original recommendations to avoid saturated fats, and to eat “healthy” trans fat laden margarines for example.
Important **None of this is to say that an amateur with google and ten minutes to spare can do better**. be cautious. It is very hard to do better than flawed experts.
Personally I have worked out, over time, some heuristics which have proven useful to sort out actual experts. Some things that mark out an actual expert:
1. They can make surprisingly accurate predictions. Better than most people, and better than simple techniques like linear extrapolation.
2. They can fix things that are broken. Whether broken machines, or dysfunctional social systems, or sick people.
3. They can explain things in a way that is as simple as possible, illuminating, and gives one clues as to how things might be better.
Not only that, but they have evidence for this. An example of the opposite: After thirty-five years of Freudian psychoanalysis, someone thought to do a study of whether they actually helped people get better more than doing nothing. No, they did not.
Things that do not mark out an expert:
1. Status among peers. The peers may be equally clueless or useless.
2. Great confidence. This is more a sign of arrogance than of competence. In “A Mind for Numbers” it is pointed out that claims of skill or competence or knowledge not accompanied by proof are actually far worse than acknowledged incompetence.
3. Ornate certificates on the wall.
4. Having attended high status institutions.
5. Having been successful, after taking huge risks. They may be a lucky idiot—look closely.
6. A few lucky breaks.
In the current context, I am willing to listen to experts who have a proven track record, who have relevant experience, and who have the skills needed to do the job. Even then I look hard for biases.
I welcome any additions/corrections/clarifications to all this.
Does that [cutting cases by 50% per week] sound like something any Western country could possibly accomplish from here?
Yes. Have a look at the state of Victoria in Australia, which went from close to 700 cases a day in early August to zero in about 8 weeks. https://www.covid19data.com.au/victoria
I sympathise with people in countries run by incompetent buffoons (i.e. most of Europe and the Americas) but it is not inevitable.
Overall a terrific post—your point about the need to act before there is certainty is solid gold.
- 1 Jan 2021 14:07 UTC; 35 points) 's comment on Covid 12/31: Meet the New Year by (
There is a grain of truth in what the book says but I offer four caveats for the reader to consider.
1. Basing expected returns on the US market is an egregious case of selection bias. The US market is an outlier and an unexpected outlier at that. Suggesting in 1900 to anyone that they put their net worth into the US market would have been a brave move—a ruinous civil war, rampant corruption, booms and busts, etc—Are you Joking! “Triumph of the Optimists” has some figures for other markets but not for all—many markets went to zero and never recovered. Yes you can diversify globally but this cuts the returns almost in half compared to the US market’s recent history.
People will often say they are bullish on America. This is an easier argument to dispute than it used to be—“So, nothing really serious can go wrong in a country that elected Donald Trump as president?”. But more seriously one’s feelings of confidence are a very poor prognostic indicator, as Japanese investors found post 1989.
2. Any mention of the normal distribution or the central limit theorem in relation to financial markets opens you to huge errors. This is the ludic fallacy—markets are not tame and do not comply with tractable probability distributions. The returns from one year to the next are not independent and identically distributed, and nor is the underlying distribution necessarily tame enough for the CLT to apply. I suggest to rework the numbers with more realistic distributions such as Student’s t or a power law distribution. Results may be worse than you intuitively expect.
3. There is a more subtle problem… Books advocating leverage, stocks for the long run, index and forget etc, tend to appear after a run-up in the market (as in this case after a 50% surge after the GFC slump). People tend to invest in this way also. Last year, as the market was making new highs several people advised me that they had decided on stocks for the long run because stocks always outperform bonds (until they don’t—consider the Japanese stock market, currently at 50% lower than its level in 1989). Many of these “long term holders” have since sold out, perhaps close to the bottom. My suggestion is that anyone feeling an urgent and pressing need to invest in the market for the long run may do well to trickle-feed their money into the market over a period of a few years.
4. Terrible market returns often coincide with hard times for the portfolio owner, such as unemployment, slumps in the value of other assets and other difficulties. Having a leveraged portfolio that went to zero or beyond (“losses can exceed your initial investment” as they say in the fine print) in 1932 would have been very unfortunate. Margin purchases of stocks were very popular in 1929, and in general high levels of margin lending seem to be an indicator of trouble ahead.
I do commend the study of markets to the LW community. There are so many interesting aspects to it—psychology (yours and others’), cognitive biases, subtle statistical issues and many lessons on the limitations of vanilla statistics, the subtleties of risk management in the real world, the difficulties of a system comprising intelligent adaptive agents, agency issues. And it is a way to put your insights into the nature of reality to the test.
expertise does not generalise.
To me it also brings home the difficulty of working out if “experts” are really expert. Or if a given organization is optimized to deliver the benefits of expertise. Many times I have been seriously harmed by ‘experts’ who didn’t know what they were doing.
One indication: The CDC been subject to some trenchant criticism from medical people.
Another: Their problems seem not to be so much in highly technical issues but basic organisational failures.
<Maybe it is better not to speak the truth> pseudo-quote
The long term costs of past lying, or even of signaling that you would lie in certain circumstances, can be very severe. Consider the fact that people are by now basically discounting everything the CCP says to zero. Even when they tell the truth, they are not able to transmit that information to people because we assume they are lying.
An excellent and thoughtful post IMHO.
I would add the dimension of hidden or invisible quality.
Sometimes it is hard to determine or effectively specify the quality of an outsourced product or service. For example, if I go to a restaurant, I don’t know if the chef washed his hands or has a cold or other illness. I don’t know if they use cheap/semi-rancid seed oils or actually extra-virgin olive oil as claimed. Friends who worked in expensive restaurants claim that such cost-cutting is common, and it is almost invisible. My experience is that often when quality is not immediately visible to the customer, corners are cut.
Another example of this is when buying food and supplements. Often I have bought food that is supposedly free of additives, only to have a bad reaction, due to additives that were in fact present. Minced beef often contains sulfites which is illegal but often done. These preservatives are then used to disguise old product. One vitamin C tablet supposedly contained only natural colors and flavors and affected me quite badly. I later found out that it contained coal tar base dies and cyclamates and saccharine.
[as background I have a defective gene for the breakdown of histamines (defective enzyme is diamine oxidase) so I am sensitive to histamines in diet and also to the very common chemicals that inhibit the breakdown of histamines or that trigger its release from the mast cells].
A friend of mine went to a presentation for a coffee shop chain. They boasted that they could get coffee for $1.50AUD/kg. “How can you get good coffee for that price?” my friend asked. “You can’t—and that’s the secret!!! - they can’t tell the difference, especially if you add some flavours”.
Somewhat alluded to is the issue of operational entanglement. Providers will often attempt to “lock you in” so that you end up spending more than you planned because it is difficult to extract yourself. I am in this situation at present where a lawyer has set things up so that he can charge $$$s for work I could do, but it is difficult to get him out of the picture.
As with much philosophizing, I agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but the solution seems dubious.
ultimate reality can be experienced
You see this claim all the time (e.g. Ken Wilber) but I have yet to see a shred of evidence for it. Given how the brain works, there seems to be no pathway to experience ultimate reality directly.
Bear in mind also the claim
the ultimate reality is the source of all existence
So we are supposed to be able to directly apprehend the source of all existence. The fact that many people experience similar feelings/insights/beliefs is weak evidence for the claim. Not much stronger than the common feeling among each and every new generation that they are the most virtuous and ethical of all generations. (As an aside, which usually comes with the feeling that they are the first to discover the wonders of sex and drugs/alcohol).
On the question of enlightenment this is a very overloaded term.
One use of the term that I found useful and other rationalists might is “The Finders” by Jeffery A Martin. This is a practical and useful version of enlightenment with very little mystification and few grandiose claims.
I think if a person cannot point to several opinions they currently have that are regarded as abhorrent or stupid by most people, then it is unlikely that they would actually have held “correct”* opinions on the matters mentioned above, and other similar matters.
*i.e. opinions regarded as correct in <current year>.
Intelligence is no antitode. The philosopher Heidegger was closely allied with the Nazis. The most famous economist J M Keynes was Director of the British Eugenics Society (1937-1944).
I do hold several such opinions but there is no way I am going to state them in public. One thing that has not changed is the intolerance for divergent opinions. If anything it has become worse.
I am old enough to have seen many changes such that opinions regarded as totally abhorrent have now become the orthodoxy. And the old opinion is now regarded as abhorrent. I see the new generation quietly adopt the new opinion and easily condemn those who grew up in earlier times.
A few years back a young less-wronger informed me how grateful he was to have grown up in a time and place where he had a peer group with correct opinions on all the important issues. My thought was that it was mostly likely that the reason he thought those opinions were correct was because they were held by his peer group. Not especially because they are correct.
We actually had a session on this at the local LW where we tried to imagine current beliefs that a future generation would regard as terrible.
One scenario someone came up with was that society became much more conservative (plausability from the idea that coservatives and the like tend to have more children) and many of the current ‘woke’ beliefs would be seen as very regrettable and harmful.
Another was a kind of Idiocracy scenario where the policies of our time were regarded as a catastrophe because they were dysgenic (e.g subsidies for low-IQ single mothers etc). I do stress these were scenarios we came up with, not beliefs we hold.
Here http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/inside-robbers-cave/4515060 is a radio show on ABC radio Australia (roughly equivalent to the US PBS), casts a new light on the Robbers Cave experiment.
It is claimed that
Those conducing the experiment came in with a preconceived agenda which they wished to prove ie that conflict easily arises based on quite trivial group differences etc.
There had been two previous failed experiments in which attempts had been made to create the conflicts described in this study and involving in some cases quite blatant attempts to foment conflict (eg false flag attacks) (see at 12:15 in the audio).
In this third experiment conditions were artfully manipulated to create and then defuse conflict. It appears the key issue in creating conflict is that the two groups must not be permitted to get to know each other and become friendly, and that intense competitive situations are needed, preferably with zero or negative sum outcomes. To then defuse the conflict, allowing socialization no longer sufficed and it was necessary to create a common threat or difficulty to bring the groups together again.
So the statement in the main post that
Well, the 22 boys were divided into two groups of 11 campers, and— —and that turned out to be quite sufficient.
Is perhaps overstated significantly.
It is a very interesting listen.
I don’t know if the claims are true. Given how ‘right’ the results of the original experiment feel, and did feel after WWII, one should be on guard.
Edit; corrections—the experiment was not rigged to quite the degree I originally said. But still I would argue not quite as advertised.
Creepy behaviour is behaviour that tends to make others feel unsafe or uncomfortable.
It would be really good to have a definition that had some shreds of objectivity to it. As it stands your definition simply assigns to one person the responsibility for another person’s feelings. This is infantilizing to the ‘victim’ and places the ‘perpetrator’ at the mercy of the “victim’s” subjectivity.
The alleged safeguard that a significant fraction must agree the behavior is creepy is rarely applied in practice. “If you made her feel creeped out, man, that’s creepy”.
In practice this definition of creepiness is almost solely used against men. I had a female colleague (many, actually over the years) who wore inappropriately ‘hot’ outfits at work and behaved in overtly sexual ways that left me feeling uncomfortable. One cannot complain about this because it is “slut shaming”.
I notice a disturbing trend for rationality orientated groups to be invaded by people who like to impose long lists of rules about acceptable behavior and speech, generally with a feminist flavor. These people generally have made little to no contribution to the groups in question. I see here for example OP’s first post here was all of three months ago. The open source and atheism communities have seen similar phenomena.
We need to expose these people and their ideas to full rational scrutiny. I have read a lot of feminism literature and I believe that the field could benefit significantly from an infusion of LW style rationality.
Finally can I point out a clear source of irrational thinking that tends to surface in these discussions: the “protective instinct” towards women. For reasons that don’t particularly matter in this context, when we see women (or children) at the risk of harm, powerful emotions arise. Thus, if you want a massacre to sound as bad as possible you say “100 people were killed including 50 women and children.” In movies, it is almost always unacceptable for a sympathetic female character to be killed (read any guide to writing move scripts).
I think this is sometimes true but often not.
An example:
Andrew Denton, an Australian journalist, did a podcast about the question of euthanasia ( well worth the listen https://www.wheelercentre.com/broadcasts/podcasts/better-off-dead). During this process he attended a right to life conference. During the conference speakers spoke openly about the fact that the arguments they used in public against voluntary euthanasia were not at all their own reasons for opposing it.
In summary their actual reason for opposing VE is that in Christian theology you are not allowed to die until Jesus decides to take you / that you have suffered enough. Because this reason is unacceptable to most people, they said that they would try on various arguments and use the ones that seemed to resonate e.g. Hitler used euthanasia as an excuse to murder people, people will kill granny to get the inheritance, people will kill the disabled and other “useless eaters” , governments will encourage euthanasia to save aged care dollars.
In American politics Donald Trump started using the phrase “Drain the Swamp” frequently when he noticed that people responded to it. I leave it to the reader to judge whether it was his intention to drain the swamp, or whether he even thought it was possible.
In general IMHO people often advance bogus arguments because they know their real reasons will not be acceptable. In fact there is some evidence that confabulation is a core competency of the human brain. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
>>> The final conclusion I’d like to draw from this model is that it would be preferable to not have weapons that could destroy other weapons. For instance, suppose that both parties were countries that had biological weapons that when released infected a large proportion of the other country, caused them obvious symptoms, and then killed them a week later, leaving a few days between the onset of symptoms and losing the ability to effectively do things. In such a situation, you would know that if I struck first, you would have ample ability to get still-functioning people to your weapons centres and launch a second strike, regardless of your ability to detect the biological weapon before it arrives, or the number of weapons and weapons centres that you or I have. Therefore, you are not tempted to launch first.
This was the case with the San people (formerly Kalahari Bushmen). They had slow acting poison arrows . This meant that any deadly fight resulted in the death of all the parties. So such fights were few and far between.
The book “The Rise of Christianity” by Rodney Stark was an interesting discussion of the rapid growth of the LDS.
The main point was that the LDS like most religions, propagated via relatives and friends. People tend to “convert” when a preponderance of their friends and relatives have converted. It becomes increasingly uncomfortable to resist.
I suspect that atheism is benefiting from this syndrome at the moment.
Missionary work, including LDS, has a phenomenally low success rate. I don’t recall it, but from memory a missionary might convert 1-2 people per year based on cold calls. I suspect that missionary work is done, not so much to get converts, as to reinforce the group identity of the missionaries.
There is a great book along these lines, highly recommended: “Parent Effectiveness Training” by Thomas Gordon.
One thing the book emphasises more than OP is letting children make their own decisions wherever possible. This encourages them to take responsibility for their own outcomes and massively helps them to learn. It is important—and empowering—to allow them to experience the consequences of their decisions.
Our daughter picked her own clothes from the age of 8, for example. There were only two instances where we overruled her about her own life choices after she turned 12. We never forced her to do homework. [She ended up with a PhD in a hard science, so yes she mostly did her homework. But it is her life.]
A lot of this seems counter-intuitive to people. Parenthood seems to trigger some sort of authoritarian program in many otherwise liberal people. It may be that you could make better decisions on a given issue than your children, but they lose the opportunity to learn when you do that.
It may also be that you would not actually make better decisions than your child. Conjure up in your mind a 16 year old dressed for a party a) in clothes of their own choosing, b) in clothes chosen by their parents. Who did the better job?
I am not OP but I can give an example.
As background there are some activities that are general purpose feeling obliterators and thus are commonly used by firefighters: binge-eating, drinking alcohol, drugs, sex, TV, video games…
I have been fighting with my weight for many (26!) years. I did lose a lot of weight but still at BMI 26 and could not get off that last 7kg. Using the IFS process I identified the firefighters which used eating to make various feelings go away:
Social stress, anxiety about food being available (from when I was young = “Jimmi”), feelings of emotional deprivation (childhood situation), feelings of frustration when I could not understand something, feeling tired, feeling frightened (childhood situation)
Once I connected with these protectors and made friends with them, connected (with their permission) with the original exiles, and established that the problems have solutions, I have been able to stick to my diet for 50 days straight and lose 2.5kg in less than two months. This takes me almost half way to my target.
As an example how much has changed I have had a packet of chocolate biscuits in my refrigerator for the last few weeks with no drama at all about being tempted to eat them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Tam).
Why do I have a packet of tim-tams in the fridge?
This is a possibly interesting aspect of the IFS process. Having satisfied all the exiles that their problem is solved you are supposed to check in with them every day for a week. You should also check in with the protectors every day, that they are happy also and that they are liking the new roles they have chosen for themselves.
Well the character Jimmi above on the second check-in said that he bought in theory that nowadays I can always get the food I need but he wanted actual proof. So we went and bought various foods that 8 year old Jimmi liked. Thus the tim-tams. This then satisfied him. But I ate them as part of my diet e.g. this morning I had two tim-tams as my carb/fat portion of breakfast. They were delicious!
I give this as an example of where thinking of the parts as characters can sometimes help. How you rationalize them is less important.
LWers can get too hung up on the theory of things. “I know it works in practice but does it work in theory” as one economist said.
All models are wrong but some are useful. I find this one useful.
As OP pointed out, IFS is very useful for understanding other people. Additionally if you model someone’s bad behavior as a part flaring up, it can help you to be more compassionate.
I find the nesting of comments within threads too subtle. I can’t “see” the nesting and have to work at it.
In the context of programming languages the research (quoted in Steve McConnell’s books I think) seems to suggest that indenting by 3 characters optimizes the ability to “see” the nesting. Currently it’s one character only.
Increasing the nesting characters is not free of course as it leads to very deep indentation. But there are ways of displaying very deep nesting though eg displaying ! for every ten levels.
If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying “you can find lots on google scholar” is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.
For a long time I too was somewhat skeptical about global warming. I recognized the risk that researchers would exaggerate the problem in order to obtain more funding.
What I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into a few often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point, and learning whatever I needed to learn along the way (it took a while). The result was that the academic researchers won 6-0 6-0 6-0 in three sets (to use a tennis score analogy). Most striking to me was the dishonesty and lack of substance on the “skeptic” side. There was just no “there” there.
The topics I looked into were: accuracy of the climate temperature record, alleged natural causes explaining the recent heating, the alleged saturation of the atmospheric CO2 infra-red wavelengths, and the claim that the CO2 that is emitted by man is absorbed very quickly.
In retrospect I became aware that my ‘skepticism’ was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same techniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said “Our product is doubt”.
An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.
Another thing I have noticed in looking into various areas of academic research is just how much research in every field I looked at is inconclusive, inconsequential, flawed or subtly biased (look up “desk drawer bias” for example).
Edit: fixed a few typos.
Edit: good article by the way, very well reasoned.