zemvpferreira

Personally I have noticed a lot less cognitive impairment after a poor night’s sleep since starting on 10g per day. It seems to make a noticeable difference in my ability to reason and to act having slept less than 7 hours per night, even on consecutive nights.

You might not want it for yourself but many people, especially health professionals in my experience, will take a smaller but less painful lifespan over a chance to live longer through horrible treatments.

The father of a good friend passed away recently from a brain cancer. He was a doctor, but atypically accepted every treatment available. His last 3 years were spent in surgery or sick from chemo, did not have one good day after his initial diagnosis. If he could have gone back I'm sure he would have decided not to be treated.

I don't want or need war, but I won't deny to having felt tribal impulses before. I won't deny culture and groups are different from individuals. Idealism is fine until it starts interfering with reality.

Where there are simians, there is war. The more primitive the society, the bloodier and more total the war is. I wish our problem were psychopaths in power, but the truth is we are a tribal and fearful species and war is in our genes. It's as certain as a sunrise as long as there are humans.

I don't mean to belittle the American war machine but as someone involved in overseas manufacturing for a while, I just don't see how it's possible to source 90% of items now made in China without a solid decade or two of investment. There are no factories, no supply chains, no skilled workers. It seems like fantasy.

No, culture and the means of production went global. Bespoke only makes sense when you can’t get an acceptable good at a decent price. That goes for food, building materials and physics engines. Different will only be found in fetishistic disneylands from now on.

Interesting that you would use as an example two people who ingeniously built complex systems, through lots of hard and clever work, to turn the odds in their favour.

Given that the lottery has a typical expected value of -$1.00 per ticket you really should revise your opinion of how lucky/smart these people who repeatedly make tens of billions by pouring all their money into tickets are.

I didn't claim there's a simple solution, rather that the simplified system of publish-or-perish doesn't work. Personally I believe you can't replace a management layer that's aligned with the institution with a career progression based on metrics. Embrace complexity, let managers decide who should be promoted, sack or pay those managers based on their performance. Propagate onwards through the ownership chain.

The fact that Covid vaccines worked so well is precisely an endorsement of a hands-on, results-driven approach.

As a former scientist it's embarrassing how easily the dismal state of science today could have been predicted decades before by applying Goodhart's Law, or any simple train of thought on incentives and moral hazard. Instead we chose to assume scientists collectively behave on a higher plane. No wonder the general public distrusts "the intelectual elite", we deserved it.

Simple is definitely the wrong term. Chess's simplicity is where its inherent difficulty comes from. It's paradoxically much more difficult to optimize than more complex games like SC.

From what I can tell the average school at best can aspire to teach kids how to work and how to socialize. That's it. I'd personally be very happy with computers mostly going away from school too. Most actual learning and exploring will hopefully happen at home.

If all you need are labourers to prop up the economy there are billions of people willing to work on temporary visas.

In the end we have to face that systems have failed to replace competent managers. If there isn't a chain of accountability starting at the top that can manage people without extensive justification in metrics and is properly incentivised to keep the organisation healthy, whatever we are left with will be gamed to the detriment of everyone.

I don’t think we should miss the forest for the trees. If you incentivize people to publish as much as possible, and institutions to apply as little oversight as possible, and peers to positively review and cite as much as possible, you end up with a system that produces a huge volume of the easiest “science” to produce over quality, meaningful work. Modern academia is mostly a ponzi scheme and that’s that.

Couldn't agree more. Jobs' advice to say no to a hundred things sounds easy in a vacuum, but to actually go against the powerful people around you and gatekeep the quality and essence of your business over decades is incredibly hard, foolish and brave.

Not a fan of Altman but the devil you know is a powerful argument. If you believe a CEO/Founder to be a grifter-position at its core (fake it till you make it etc etc), retaining the best grifter you can find is the optimal play.

What he actually wanted was a straw-man to burn. Glad it's out in the open now.

Yep, the Time Machine minus the fear, the cannibalism, the suffering, the apathy, the reduced capacity for engagement etc are essentially the best-case scenario, which takes us out of HG Wells enough for it not to matter much as a cautionary tale.

I don't think you need to worry yourself so much on my account friend. You asked, I told. Let's keep it at that. Also feel free to keep the name-calling to yourself.

Sure. The machine gods are benevolent gods who care deeply for their creator-species. We are freed from labour and troubles into a paradise, to eat peaches and cream and make love under the sun. Rich or poor, we'll all be emperors of our domain, free to do as we please. Our lives keep getting better and better with technological progress, at least in the scope of our social-capitalist system. They will only get better until they end.

Sorry to hear that. As a counterpoint for the peanut gallery I've been on tirzepatide for 5 months and lost 15 kg in the first 3 months, never going past a 1.25mg dose. I've only creeped up to 3mg since and keep losing around 0.3 kg per week. No side effects except for super mild nausea every now and then. I plan to stay at a similar or lower dose for the next couple of years.

I had the good fortune of responding well and being at a great starting point: despite being 40% body fat I exercised a lot and had great labs to begin with. Anecdotally I've found starting metabolic health to make a huge difference in dose response.

You mean the price of software, as well as the cost. The value (to the user) is the same if not more.

I would earnestly suggest reading Apple In China:

https://www.amazon.com/Apple-China-Capture-Greatest-Company/...

It both captures Tim's genius and the genius of the person much geniuser than him: Xi Jinping.

Paranoia as in fear of losing sovereignty. The average Swiss is not a cleverer or more productive person than the average European. However like you said they make outstanding communal decisions because they at their core believe Switzerland must stay strong to stay independent. To the point of paranoia. No one does bunkers like the Swiss. EU does not do bunkers. Or much of anything material for itself these days.

European who has travelled/lived extensively in China and the US. I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large. We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours, but an immense amount of it is syphoned into areas that don't help us get ahead. We are too invested in tides that lift all boats. Being well-rested is not the issue.

Edit: I’ve recently started spending a lot of time in Switzerland and the contrast in mindset (and wealth) with the EU is staggering. There is a healthy amount of communal paranoia. They don’t work any harder either, if anything it’s the contrary.

Not to beat my own dead horse but at the heat stress needed to cause an adaptation there’s nothing pleasant about the experience. If it’s not causing nausea and palpitations, it’s not hot enough.

Have you tried submerging yourself in moderately hot water, I wonder? And have you spent some time pondering the difference in heat transfer between convection and conduction?

Yes, if by hot bath you mean submerging yourself to neck level in 40ºC or above water for 20-30 minutes. There's no reason to believe any "heat therapy" modality is superior to another as long as you suffer equal heat stress.

For the record, if you're not acclimated, intense heat exposure is a lot more agonising than 30 minutes of exercise for less benefit. If you haven't experienced a properly tuned sauna in your life you are in for a ride. What's being studied in the literature is nothing like your standard hotel experience.