These are fantastic! I'll add two that I have learned from wiser people, and that have paid out again and again in my life.
1. It's better to target an interesting constellation than one specific star. If you're pushing yourself reasonably hard, you're working close to the limits of your ability, and so there's some chance you will fail. If you go all out to hit an ambitious goal and don't succeed, you're likely to feel burnout [1]. This is much less likely if you make moves in the direction of an interesting area using a cluster of subgoals instead. This diversifies your risk, plus it's easier to adjust as you move in that direction and learn more. (For people in ML there's some clear parallels with the gradient descent process)
2. A twenty minute walk in the park with no music or media makes all kinds of useful stuff naturally fall out of your brain, and you get some light exercise and sunlight / vitamin D at the same time - which also helps improve your mood and flush out anxiety etc.
Strongly agree on number 2 - multiple times a week, a solution to something that has been bugging me all day suddenly appears in the shower, when getting ready for bed, when going for a walk before work etc.
Reminds me of the routine kept by maintainer of D language (Walter Bright, if I'm not mistaken). First thing he does every day is open up his laptop and review issues that he needs to solve. Then he immediately closes his laptop and goes on a run.
It's close, but I only use a laptop when traveling. The screen is too small, the keyboard is too cramped, it's too slow, not enough disk space, etc. I like my desktop with dual big monitors, full size keyboard, mouse, and lots of places to plug things in.
But the rest is on point :-) I almost never have a good idea while at my computer.
I run as well actually! I have found that the quality of thinking I get when walking is different enough that I try to make time for a walk as a separate thing. YMMV though, I am not super fit, perhaps my brain has a harder time with contention for oxygen than yours!
True, but I find that driving requires enough attention that I cannot do any useful thinking that goes into "the zone". But with running, it's easy to get into the zone, and the miles go by that I can't even recall.
The clarity that a walk in the park brings is likely related to inflammatory suppression from urocanic acid. See this 2009 paper-slash-letter-to-the-journal, “Molecular basis for cis-urocanic acid as a 5-HT2A receptor agonist”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960894X0...
We have a chemical coating on the skin called the “acid mantle”. One of the substances the body makes for this acid mantle is urocanic acid – the trans isomer. It’s known to serve as a sort of sunscreen. Trans-urocanic acid captures ultraviolet light into a molecular reaction – it’s transformed into the isomer cis-urocanic acid.
And cis-urocanic acid fits the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor which is an unusual one – its effects are rather potent immunomodulation. Downregulation. Beneficial.
Correct me if I'm wrong, this is a mechanistic study and the "likely related" claim is yours - I think there's a lot of evidence on exercise as it relates to mood regulation though.
There are plenty of papers related to this. Before and after that one. The term for this paper might be that it’s a mechanistic study, idk!, but it’s one that establishes a, well, mechanical premise for effects which are known to occur.
Regarding the relationship between sunlight and immunomodulation via cis-urocanic acid activation of serotonin receptor 5-HT2A, what parts of that relationship would you like to see more papers on?
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Note also that UV immunosuppression is standard clinical practice in psoriasis treatment. Both with artifical UV light and simple sunbathing.
I'm trying to differentiate between "this is how the mechanism works" and "this mechanism creates effect in humans" - the latter you implied by saying the walk in the park is likely related. I do not have even a basic understanding of the science in the paper so I may be missing the point.
So I guess what I'm asking is: is there evidence that the mechanism described in the paper results in "mental clarity", and further is there evidence that a walk in the park actually encourages this interaction (it sounds like it will as long as you get some sunlight).
I’ll find papers even though it might be a little late given the thread’s momentum. I wish I’d drawn up the connection first time around!
Off the cuff, I’ve seen results that inflammatory downregulation is associated with alleviation of depression – with both SSRI use… and psychedelic mushrooms! (which directly activate the same 5-HT2A receptor). A sense of a clear head is a common description in both instances. Both types of drug are known to alleviate depression, and are known to reduce inflammatory markers – the same as cis-urocanic acid is known to do. Lower those same markers, that is. The “pretty likely” part is my sense that there’s something there that’s causative for the feeling of clarity – yes. (Part of it. Maybe!)
There are also papers on cis-urocanic acid and… glutathione metabolism? or was it glutamine? in the brain.
I’ll dig up something concrete.
(I was very, very surprised to learn about these mechanisms. I’m not at all speaking as someone who’s into psychedelics. Just someone who marvels at what seems to be the molecular biology.)
> There’s no good reason to believe that someone extremely attractive would be a great conversationalist, or that someone extremely intelligent would be emotionally intelligent, etcetera.
I actually disagree. At the extremes, sure. The top athlete is unlikely to be the top scholar or conversationalist. But I believe health, beauty, EQ and IQ are all correlated. These traits all likely have some shared genetic components. And a great, healthy childhood will augment all these traits to some extent.
Also, beautiful people are less likely to experience social isolation or estrangement, which would otherwise hurt EQ and health in general.
From another angle, experiences that leave emotional scars will often have physical manifestations, and vice versa.
That said, we may subconsciously assume a higher correlation than exists between these traits, so directionally the author may be correct.
One thing that's clear is that there are some underlying traits that manifest in many different domains, such as language skills. A friend I knew was extremely good at languages (fluent in 10+), and also excelling at math and programming. Traditionally, these fields are considered different but they are more similar than we give them credit for. All are heavily symbolic, relational and contextual domains.
To complicate things more, you can become great at math and programming by having e.g. a visually oriented mind. My friend didn't seem to have much of that though, which suggests you can excel in a domain using different underlying skills or traits. Totally armchairing of course.
The in-spirit premise of the proposal (fundamental traits are mostly roll-of-the-dice) is still compatible with your response.
Like the author, I've been burnt by assuming that traits overlap way more than the opposite - eg if someone is good at X intellectual thing they're good at Y too. So many times I've gone "how can such a smart person not get this simple thing?".
As we get older, we have more and more influence over the state of our minds and bodies. Being attractive is strongly correlated to being healthy. Take a look at the Olympic athletes - they're all attractive. Fitness and attractiveness correlate. You can decide to get fit -- or not. You can decide to eat healthy -- or not. This has a big influence on attractiveness, and the state of your mind.
There is some overlap between fitness & attractiveness, though there is also some cultural context to consider. For example, consider a panel of female shotput athletes to be rated on an attractiveness scale by a representative sample of straight men of different ages from around the world. How would they fare contrasted with a similar panel of female gymnasts?
My guess is that healthy people have a greater probability to also be considered attractive. On the flip side, there is likely a much smaller probability of 'attractive' people being objectively healthy, with the numbers changing from place to place and time period.
Outliers in what way? Outliers in terms of healthiness and fitness? Are they more or less healthy than the gymnasts? Even if they are outliers, it's an illustrative example - gymnasts are extreme outliers as well even among athletes, so why isn't that an issue? I would suggest that while the lens of evaluating physical attractiveness in most of the western world currently largely aligns with physical fitness, this is a relatively recent development and far from universal. Even a few generations ago I would suspect that the majority of current female Olympic level athletes would have been graded far lower on the attractiveness scale than we currently might.
I've never met one in real life. Anyway you want to look at it, such levels of muscle development is highly unusual. I doubt it's healthy either.
> I would suggest that while the lens of evaluating physical attractiveness in most of the western world currently largely aligns with physical fitness, this is a relatively recent development and far from universal.
I don't believe that. I don't really have a choice as to what I find attractive. I don't believe you do, either.
For example, I am never going to find "heroin chic" attractive, no matter how much the fashion industry pushes it. Some women like bald men, some don't, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that.
> such levels of muscle development is highly unusual. I doubt it's healthy either.
I think that holds true for almost all female athletes, does it not? Every female Summer Olympic level athlete I can think of has very visible musculature far in excess of what you might see in otherwise 'attractive' women. In terms of ultimate health outcomes, I am not sure. I doubt any top level athlete fares well health wise long term.
> I don't really have a choice as to what I find attractive. I don't believe you do, either.
I think we're coming at this differently - you're referring to what you might find attractive, and I'm trying to consider an attractiveness grading scale. For example, as a gay man, I find both male shotput athletes as well as male gymnasts very attractive, but can at the same time appreciate that on my attempt at an objective attractiveness scale I might grade them differently - and other gay men might grade them very differently. Similarly, I feel absolutely no attraction to female athletes and can still consider them objectively attractive.
Evolution ensures that being sexually attractive is very closely tied to being healthy: we all want procreate with people who appear to be the most capable of producing offspring that can themselves reproduce.
I find sometimes it mixes a matrix of desirable and undesirable (but useful in limited contexts) traits together as a way of selling the bad (but useful) stuff enough. So, I don't necessarily entirely buy this argument, though it in principle makes sense, It's definitely a bit more nuanced in practice.
Yeah I was unconvinced by this one. It seems to me any individual lucky enough to be born with good genes and raised in a nurturing environment is likely to score well in a number of health, intelligence and "well roundedness" dimensions.
No guarantees of course, and caveats about exceptions to the rule, yes no doubt. But those positive traits shouldn't be dismissed as entirely unrelated to one another!
Critics argue that many hypotheses put forward to explain the adaptive nature of human behavioural traits are "just-so stories"; neat adaptive explanations for the evolution of given traits that do not rest on any evidence beyond their own internal logic. They allege that evolutionary psychology can predict many, or even all, behaviours for a given situation, including contradictory ones. Therefore, many human behaviours will always fit some hypotheses. Noam Chomsky argued:
"You find that people cooperate, you say, 'Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.' You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that's obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."
As an example the same author has an article on the "Truthiness" of "Stereotypes" : https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-funda.... Applying it to "Blonde Bimbos", the Stereotype says "Blond Bimbos are dumb", while the other explanation says "Beautiful people (Blonde Bimbos are a subset) are more Intelligent" which is a direct contradiction!
Fascinating. Attractive children were found to have an average of 12.4 more IQ points than unattractive children. He suggests beauty and IQ are correlated to the same extent that educational attainment and IQ are.
I think I had read about this or similar research long ago, but that's a bigger effect size than I would've guessed. I wonder if the results could be replicated.
It isn't exactly damning evidence to refute your claim, but some beautiful people find it very hard to get dates because their looks are intimidating. For example - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10411887/Playboy-... (possibly NSFW images if you work in a convent or something).
I mean, cry me a river if you're a Playboy model who can't get a date, but it is plausible.
A separate issue is that while I agree on the correlatii of talents and ability/circumstances to nuture it, extreme performance also requires practice - a finite resource.
> a great, healthy childhood will augment all these
I would put it that poor developmental conditions (from gestation on) prevent realization of genetic potential, rather than great ones "augment", because it just has to be adequate. A so-called "hygiene factor". Nutrition, stability - that sort of thing.
that would be ridiculous and it’s a fair interpretation of the grandparent comment, but there’s actually a coherent theory of “mutational load”, which basically says that
1. almost all mutations are bad
2. mutations come together (like if you’re born near chernobyl you’ll have a ton of mutations all over the place, also maybe if your parents are older or if they’re smokers and things like that)
Mutations that make you less attractive could be completely different from mutations that make you less intelligent, but if mutations tend to come in packs then having a lot of mutations in sections of the genome related to attractiveness probably means you have lots of mutations in the sections related to intelligence.
Also, I think there are plenty of mutations that do negatively affect all four areas. For example: Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. (The "beauty" is subjective, of course, but I expect people's sense of "beauty" to be optimized towards "avoiding potential mates with genetic defects".) I knew about the first two; I learned about the third by clicking on a few entries in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Syndromes_with_cranio... .
I expect there are plenty more mutations that have a mild negative effect in all areas, but are sufficiently mild that they haven't been identified as "disorders".
I imagine that certain genes can effect two or more of those areas. For example, I would be quite surprised if there isn't a gene that effects both IQ and EQ. But no, I don't think there is some single "god gene" that entirely determines these outcomes.
To be clear, I have no special knowledge or expertise in genetics or biology. This is all speculation on my part.
>Surely you do not mean that a single gene influences all of this?
don't forget Epigenetics! The whole dogmatic way of genotype influencing phenotype view really need to readdressed. There are many other factors influencing what our trait.
This reminds me of the statistic that men are on average taller than women. This is actually a useful heuristic for making policy at a mass scale.
It is worse than useless as a way of estimating the height of someone you just met. The actual experience should completely invalidate any priors, which are trivially insignificant at the individual level.
It doesn't fade nearly as quickly as you, in particular, would like to think. If you have good facial symmetry, straight teeth, good skin, all your hair, etc, this will continue to yield benefits literally throughout life, assuming you don't catastrophically fail to maintain it.
The same is true for athletic ability / fitness in the sense that people like to say "it will fade", but the reality is that it provides a ton of benefits well into the 60s barring catastrophic injury.
I'd like to believe that there is some kind of counter-balancing drawback to beauty like you suggest. Life would be more fair. But I think the cruel truth is that people continue to enjoy advantages from the headstart they got from their youthful beauty long after their beauty has faded. Advantages like self-confidence, career advancements, and social networks don't vanish the instance beauty fades.
Also, I don't think beautiful people are particularly likely to be narcicists or sociopaths or otherwise consciously rely on their beauty as a tool. I think most beautiful people are oblivious to the advantages they enjoy. Things are just a bit easier for them. Steve Yegge tells how he was catapulted into leadership at Amazon shortly after losing over 50 pounds.
I believe white privilege works in much the same way. It's difficult to see that you're playing on easy mode when you've never played on hard mode.
There are some awful looking guys, who nevertheless achieved quite a lot despite their lack of beauty. Naturally, some selection bias might be at play here ( as in -- you don't hear from the ones that did not make it about how they persevered and failed ).
There is no doubt about the advantages. Beyond the already present research, I have my own little anecdote of a friend, who was not great with computers and yet is now IT manager at a major corporation.
As for the white privilege, I can only say that I don't know. I come from a very white country. As you can guess, given the invariable laws of human nature, since nearly everyone was white, another other had to be found. I don't know what it is about humans that forces us to immediately label everything and self-segregate.
> Listening Is in Your Interest, Even If You’re Totally Selfish
Decades of touchy-feely woo woo about the power of empathy has convinced people that empathy is a magic hack that makes you feel totally fine about people no matter what heinous things they do. If you empathize with someone, if you "understand," then you'll realize why they behave the way they do, and you'll realize it's all okay.
Naturally that makes people wary of empathizing with people they believe are behaving in a destructive way, such as their political enemies, sexual predators, etc. If you empathize with someone too effectively, you might lose your motivation to oppose them.
That's flat-out wrong, and it makes people less effective at promoting their own values in the world.
Sure, you might learn to feel sorry for a sexual predator or realize that an opposing political view has some internal logic or even a kernel of truth, but that isn't going to turn you into a defender of predatory or destructive behavior. Empathy for a flat-earther isn't going to convince that the earth is flat, either.
Know yourself. Know your enemy. Know everybody in between. It makes you safer and more powerful in the world, and it's only dangerous in a good way.
Remember What Used to Work, Then Do It Again - this one really resonated with me. Recently I've taken up meditation with an app, and a recurring theme of it is to "Just begin again" - in context, meaning begin again, when you mind wanders. But I've found that the idea is very applicable to almost every faced of life. For example, I wish to start working out, but my willpower is low and I tend to miss some days. By just beginning again, without judgement, without guild, I'm getting back to the problem and working on it again. Sounds like this is the same idea. Remember what used to work, then do it again. Just begin again.
This reminds me of Torvald's talk at Google about git, where he emphasizes how important it is to be able to change branches fast, reasoning that it will determine how git will be used in the future. There is a tremendous difference between five seconds and `instant` in our decision making. Since then I observed this behaviour in myself in countless daily routines.
> Listening Is in Your Interest, Even If You’re Totally Selfish
To me this seems an obvious and important but surprisingly uncommon idea. I can't stop trying to explain this to others: if you don't really do your best to understand the other person you are wasting your own time. And you don't have to agree to them, just understand. Even if the other person is your enemy (especially if they are!), precise understanding of what and why do they think and feel is in your best interest.
Listening is essential for winning arguments - or you can't counter their arguments.
Listening enables you to "win" a negotiation, by discovering what the other party values, that you might be able to give them. It's predicated on the reality of negotiation, that it's with another person with free-will and autonomy, who will only give you what you want if it makes sense from their perspective. So helps to know what theirs is.
Communication cannot occur without listening. And not just by the "recipient": you need to determine if communication has been successful, or if error correction is required. Words mean different things to different people, in different contexts. The better you understand the other party, the better chance you have of communication. A preliminaries can be helpful to align contexts (get "on the same page"), and then have purpose/concerns understood.
Don’t define yourself in terms of your work, as you have no “self” once it stops.
Remember, one works to get the resources to do what you want to do. It has to be useful for this, and ideally interesting enough to go back to tomorrow.
The first duty of any citizen is to mistrust his government,
and to be critical of their long term goals.
Never let people discourage you from thinking,
because ignorance spreads like a disease.
The saying, that one should not mistake stupidity for malignity, matters only little to the stupid, but a lot to the malign.
All stupid people at the top are either not actually stupid, or string puppets.
Political correctness is, by definition, not correct.
Participating in collective behaviour, without hesitation, is frivolous. Absolutely most things most people do have some sort of hidden catch. Just because everyone does it, doesn't mean it's smart to join them.
Never let fear, or those who spread it, guide your decisions.
You don't have to be able to imagine all the contexts. You can imagine at least some of them if you think about it. And it's better to think seriously about them rather than to not.
1. It's better to target an interesting constellation than one specific star. If you're pushing yourself reasonably hard, you're working close to the limits of your ability, and so there's some chance you will fail. If you go all out to hit an ambitious goal and don't succeed, you're likely to feel burnout [1]. This is much less likely if you make moves in the direction of an interesting area using a cluster of subgoals instead. This diversifies your risk, plus it's easier to adjust as you move in that direction and learn more. (For people in ML there's some clear parallels with the gradient descent process)
2. A twenty minute walk in the park with no music or media makes all kinds of useful stuff naturally fall out of your brain, and you get some light exercise and sunlight / vitamin D at the same time - which also helps improve your mood and flush out anxiety etc.
[1] https://www.stavros.io/posts/comment-causes-burnout/