“All kids think they are smarter than their parents.” - my father, constantly growing up
What I learned: Never tell anyone else how to think or feel about anything. Anyone that tries to shape your thinking directly is a fool.
Intelligence is like beauty, we don’t have a very good frame of reference to perceive ourselves. Physical beauty is largely measured by the reactions of others. Like beauty, intelligence has many facets. However my favorite measuring stick is curiosity. This is how I overcame my father’s admonition; while curiosity does not guarantee intelligence, an intelligent person is always curious.
Nah… if someone keeps trying to stick a fork in the light socket or tries to hurt other people, I think its pretty justified to try to change the thinking that leads to that behavior.
If someone doesn’t know what a fork and a light socket are and can’t otherwise deduce what they are based on context, maybe it makes sense to stick a fork in a light socket.
The response is a purposeful obtuse way to make a binary snide comment. These one comment judgments are tired and just not a good way to grade much. Be more creative at least.
i mean, if its any comfort, my eyes glaze over and I want to leave anytime anyone even starts to talk to me, cause I cant stand social interaction, much less having to look at peoples faces to show i’m “engaged”
It may give comfort to someone feeling socially rejected because, knowing that’s something that happens, they may now re-evaluate their previous experience as not having been rejected for having themselves especifically, but because the person they were talking to was dying inside out of their own inertia.
It depends with whom you are yourself with. If you’re with other neurodivergent people, absolutely just be yourself, that tends to work well a lot of the time, at least in my experience.
I wasnt diagnosed with ADHD until I was in my 30s. By that time, masking had long since been instinctive to protect myself from other people. I have to feel very very safe around someone before I feel comfortable enough to start unmasking a bit because of the heinous things people did to me. That is what 30 years of trauma and abuse does and you do not fix that in an instant.
As a religious trans person, it’s deeply insulting how many anti-trans religious authorities say things like “don’t let the world tell you who you are, trust in the voice of God in your own heart” or something, and then go all surprised Pikachu when I’m still trans afterwards.
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
“Follow the food pyramid.”
“Eat a well-balanced diet.”
“Meat is a carcinogen.”
“Saturated fat is bad for you.”
“Don’t eat egg yolks because they’re high in cholesterol.”
“Fruit and vegetables are good for you.”
“The vegan diet is the healthiest diet.”
Ever since the US Department of Agriculture (not health) started their nutritional recommendations, once-rare diseases like cardiovascular disease, Diabetes II, obesity, and a whole host of mental illnesses have become extremely common.
People are only recently discovering that we can reverse/improve Diabetes I & II, arthritis, obesity, PCOS, psoriasis, depression, autism, anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc. by eating what humans have been primarily eating since becoming human ~2 million years ago when we left the trees, lost the ability to digest fiber, and evolved distinctly human traits for hunting (e.g. a skeletal composition that allows humans to throw heavy things accurately further than any other species, the ability to out-run every other land animal long-distance, and a large brain and complex communication for coordinated attacks on much larger animals).
Humans are still biologically evolved to be persistence pack hunters subsisting on fatty meat, a hyper-apex species that all other animals we evolved alongside (including other apex predators) fear just from the sound of our voices. We’ve lost sight of who we are as a species.
Meat is a carcinogen.
Fruit and vegetables are good for you
What…?!
From the studies I’ve seen, meat does indeed carry higher endemic carcinogen and cardio-disease risks, particularly when processed, particularly when fried, compared to other foods.
And yes, too much fruit can lead to glycemic issues, but assuming properly washed and/or cooked, fruits & veggies are indeed an extremely important part of a healthy diet.
The vegan diet is the healthiest diet.
A purely vegan diet means one needs to be careful about getting a full range of amino acids and IIRC some vitamins, but besides that, yes-- a core vegan diet (assuming properly varied) is indeed arguably one of the healthiest diets for most people.
Personally I don’t think one needs to be super-strict with it, but the point is that it’s a great base to build on.
The major problem with most studies in the field of nutrition is that most of them are correlation studies, which are useful in creating hypotheses but are not sufficient in determining causation.
I won’t argue that as a layman, but I feel that there are nutritional meta-studies, plus evidence from inter-disciplines (such as physiology of the colon, how the body processes food at the micro & molecular level, and what H.s.s’s typical diet was across many centuries) to suggest that what I posited above is true.
AFAIK the body of nutritionists and the national academies have to take all of this in to account (including the limitations of correlational studies) when making hypotheses about best diet, making for a reasonably clear picture that the human body (outside of people like the Inuit I guess) typically doesn’t handle excess meat well, and that we likely evolved as omnivores who didn’t eat processed foods, and who mainly ate vegetables & some fruit with opportunistic protein supplementing such.
If this is indeed what our bodies evolved to handle, it shouldn’t really be a surprise that we do best health-wise maintaining that approach. Not to mention, there are plenty of studies to suggest the various ways we can get in to health problems straying from that baseline.
Nutritional meta-studies are based on individual studies. If the foundation is composed of correlation studies, such a meta-study would still not be able to show causation.
I was disappointed in the science of nutrition compared to other disciplines, which is why I looked to adjacent fields of study, like anatomy, evolution, biology, psychology, anthropology, archeology, and the history of the study of nutrition itself.
Modern humans have been around for ~300,000 years, and humans have been around for ~2 million years. Looking at our diets across the last several centuries isn’t enough to get a clear understanding as we haven’t significantly changed anatomically for hundreds of thousands of years. Humans have become apex predators not from scavenging for vegetables and fruits.
Humans have thrived through multiple ice ages where vegetables and fruit were scarce as hunters of megafauna. Our anatomy and unique adaptations suggest that there were strong evolutionary pressures that shaped us into the apex predators we are, despite not having large claws, horns, teeth, jaws, etc. that are typical of other apex predators.
Humans handle fatty meat very well. The growing popularity of the carnivore diet is a testament to this, with several practicing medical doctors starting to speak out in support of it. On the other hand, various populations handle different vegetation with mixed results. For example, a large minority of many populations still can’t handle bread, of all things, very well.
You should double-check those studies, as they are likely to be correlation studies that do not prove causation and are riddled with confounding factors.
Humans have become apex predators not from scavenging for vegetables and fruits.
What’s your basis of conceiving of humans as apex predators? I haven’t heard them described that way before, moreso that we’re fantastic opportunists who can indeed hunt successfully when such is called for. But historically, based on the findings, I don’t know of any evidence that suggests we were universally ‘apex predators’ for any significant amount of time.
Humans handle fatty meat very well. The growing popularity of the carnivore diet is a testament to this, with several practicing medical doctors starting to speak out in support of it. On the other hand, various populations handle different vegetation with mixed results. For example, a large minority of many populations still can’t handle bread, of all things, very well.
This is starting to sound pretty disingenuous or poorly-informed based on my impressions of the science.
Feel free to have the last reply, and if there’s something to learn from it, I’ll try.
What’s your basis of conceiving of humans as apex predators?
Going off memory:
Archeology tells us that human sites were littered with the bones of large and medium-sized animals
Archeology also suggests that our diets were very meat-heavy from looking at stable isotopes in the bones of ancient humans
Biology tells us that the sounds of human voices instill more fear in animals than even the sounds of lions
Biology tells us that we once had the ability to break down fiber, but we have lost that ability after switching to an animal-heavy diet for more than 2-million years
Anatomy tells us that we have many adaptations to hunt and consume meat, such as: our skeletal structure allows for precise long-distance throwing of heavy objects (such as rocks and spears), high stomach acidity (useful for eating old meat from megafauna that weren’t consumed immediately), forward-looking vision (characteristic of predators), the ability to sweat (that allows us to keep cool during persistence hunting), teeth with thin enamel that aren’t well-suited to grinding down vegetation, and an intestine-to-height ratio in line with predators
This is starting to sound pretty disingenuous or poorly-informed based on my impressions of the science.
I’m not sure what science you’re referring to, but from what I’ve learned, nutrition science is very much not a mature field of study, especially compared to adjacent disciplines. If you immediately discount the carnivore diet, I would ask you to ask yourself why (for example, is it because “everyone just knows that fruit, vegetables, and grains are healthy for you”?), and approach the question of what humanity’s species-appropriate diet is from first principles.
Plants are living organisms, and they do not want to be eaten, so they have evolved many defences to that end. They cannot run away nor physically fight back, yet they are one of the most successful kingdoms on Earth.
How do plants protect themselves? Their primary form of defence is chemical warfare. Plants produce chemicals like oxalates, lectins, phytates, cyanide, hormone disruptors, nutrient blockers, and carcinogens to discourage animals from eating them.
Animals and plants have been evolving together in a never-ending evolutionary arms race for millions of years, wherein animals develop adaptations to be able to break down the plants’ defence chemicals safely, and plants evolve stronger defence chemicals. In nature, we see this manifest in herbivores being very specialised in the types of plants they can eat without getting sick. This is why we don’t see every animal desolating entire swaths of forests, marshes, grasslands, etc.
Humans, too, are animals, and it was only in the last 12,000 years or so when we invented agriculture and settled down, thus entering a new age of heavy plant intake. Almost immediately, we experienced negative effects such as a shrinkage of brain size, a shorter stature, and poor teeth health. However, while relying on plants at the individual level resulted in health sacrifices, especially later on in life, at the societal level, agriculture provided a means to dramatically increase a settlement’s population size and strength.
Humans still instinctively know to not eat plants unless necessary to survive. For example, if you were thrown into the middle of a forest, you would know that eating most of the plants around you will immediately make you sick. Parents also frequently see this when they force their kids to eat so-called healthy foods such as broccoli, spinach, and Brussels sprouts, which the kids will intuitively avoid, but are forced to accept in the name of health.
Essentially, each species has a species-appropriate diet, and humans are not special. We have specific adaptations for specific foods for optimum health, just like every other species — we’ve just forgotten what that is.
I think 95% or more of the problem with American diets is just excess calories. Or 50% inactivity 50% overeating. Eating more fat is great if you are walking around all day gathering leaves and berries and chasing after (and running away from) animals. If you are sitting at a desk eating more leaves and less meat will probably work better.
It’s not just Americans — the world is becoming increasingly obese and sick — and I highly doubt it’s because humanity has collectively lost our willpower and health-consiousness within 50 years.
Saturated fat has become so demonised that people can’t comprehend how I’ve lost so much body fat by eating mostly fat while doing minimal exercise. My mental clarity, focus, and energy have also noticeably improved by eating a mostly fatty-meat diet.
Most chess advice. It teaches you to think in simple terms without actually thinking about a position. It’s good if you want to get passably good, but it’s a handicap once you improve.
That applies to most fields, doesn’t it? Any heuristic will be a simplification and becoming an expert in any domain involves knowing when you can apply a heuristic or approximation or model and when you cannot.
Some people out there seem to treat grounding as a magical means for controlling electricity. Even in so far as it’s true at all, you have to consider the situation and how it might move across your body.
Telling a teenager “enjoy these years, they’re the best ones of your life”.
First, tell that to a teenager undergoing severe depression is the opposite of helpful. Second, you just admitted to leading a shitty life. You got to 20 and the next 50 years were garbage?
Other older years aren’t garbage, you just realize the older you get the more the difficulty is turned up. More responsibilities, slower metabolism, less grace for making mistakes or general stupid behavior, and of course sleep injuries. The best thing about getting old is having kids, being exhausted, and sleeping in a weird way one night that causes pain for 7 to 10 days.
I miss when I could eat a box of donuts every day, bench press a cow, and try to flirt with like 10 different girls in the same day. I wouldn’t trade those days for days with my kids and my wife now, but they were objectively great.
Enjoy all of your years. I feel like each decade of my life has had amazing parts, and also shitty parts. They have all been objectively different though. Try to focus on the amazing parts and enjoy them, but also make sure to learn from the shitty parts.
The teenage years have the least responsibility with the most freedom. As you get older and have more responsibilities, it’s normal to look back at the time when you could spend 16 hours straight doing whatever the fuck you wanted as something great.
For a huge amount of people, the teenage years are the years with the most responsibility and the least freedom. You don’t control your health care, your income, your time, or your opportunities in the same way that adults can. Your needs can be neglected and there’s nothing you can do as a teenager.
But it’s objectively bad advice for plenty of people. Depending on the career or hobby, Linux software is not as good (performance, support, or feature wise) as software running on Windows or Mac.
I understand why people evangelize Linux (and I use it plenty at home), but it’s far from acceptable for plenty of use cases.
The Venn diagram for “advice” and “bad advice” is almost a perfect circle. In general, advice is only good if three conditions are met:
it was requested or at least clearly implied to be welcome.
it’s given under a solid grasp of the situation, or after some serious thought.
it’s not assumptive in nature. And, if generalising, it takes into account that generalisations fail.
Those sayings - like in the OP - almost always violate #2 and #3. And usually #1, as it’s that sort of thing that people vomit on your face when they’re really, really eager to treat you like cattle to be herded.
Okay… example. Right. Acquaintance of mine saying that I should work with computers - because I use Linux, because I can recover a password, because I can spend ten minutes (I’m not exaggerating) trying to parse what he’s asking help with. Under that “if u like it than make it you’re job! lol” approach.
Whilst on the face of it, this is sensible message in a specific context, the way it is interpreted these days is so frustrating. Get so many people using this to avoid hard work.
That is not quite the quote, and its meaning changes significantly.
“Worker smarter, not harder”. Means that when a challenge increases or you are wanting to do better/faster/more to step back and think about your methods instead of just brute forcing the problem.
No one that says should mean “do not work hard”. That is the complete wrong meaning to take from this statement.
This. I used to do assembly, the reason I was great at it wasn’t that I pushed myself to the limit to make each thing as fast as possible, it’s that I built everything in batches so I didn’t have to transition between steps on each individual part. If something slowed me down, I’d make a tool specifically for that tedious task. Don’t waste energy trying to make a bad system work.
Yeah, when I worked in factories, I wanted to do better, just increase my numbers because I like improving. I looked up to the people who would be casually doing their job while doing way more output than I could and from that I could easily tell that there were better ways than what I was doing.
I got the best results from things like optimizing my foot positions to reduce steps, thinking about how objects needed to be oriented before I picked them up, finding areas where things could be parallelized (like only pack a part while the machine is building the next one), reducing context switches (like if there’s 5 stages, do a bunch in stage 1 before moving on to stage 2 so you spend less time picking up and putting down tools).
Once you’ve optimized the way you’re doing the work (work smarter), then you can add speed to it if you want it even faster (work harder). If you skip that first step, you can end up working your ass off only to still be embarrassed by the guy that looks like he’s half asleep.
Disagree only in that people are idiots and using work as an example someone would happily hit themselves in the face with a hammer because “this is how we do things”. I’m not going to hit you in the face with a hammer because you’re a moron and don’t know better.
Generally, a deepity has (at least) two meanings: one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound, but is essentially false or meaningless and would be “earth-shattering” if true. To the extent that it’s true, it doesn’t have to matter. To the extent that it has to matter, it isn’t true (if it actually means anything). This second meaning has also been called “pseudo-profound bullshit”.
“Der klügere gibt nach” which directly translates to “the wiser one gives in” or more or less matches the idiom “it’s better to bend than to break”.
Growing up I heard this a lot and it’s mostly use to silence those who have (well-founded) objections. Took me a while to realize that this leads to us following the stupid because they don’t give in which subsequently makes the wise one the stupid one.
The Idiom is regularly abused and misunderstood. Its about being smart what fights are worth fighting. Often heard by kids from their Patents when they fight over “nothing”
It’s basically “choose your battles.” Some battles can be won, but only for minimal gain and a lot of effort. So is it really worth fighting, or do you simply concede the loss so you can better spend your limited time and effort elsewhere?
Yeah, having kids made me realize how important it is to choose my battle.
I prefer being strict on a limited set of important rules and more lenient on the rest rather than trying to do too much and just giving up on everything when i’m exhausted.
Like it’s fine if my two years old is a bit messy on the table and does not finish his plate as long as he’s trying the food and let us have our dinner too in a relative peace.
Add comment