If you presume rationality is the goal, then the rational mind should point to decades of research and anecdotal evidence that shows the positive effeccts of meditation and breathwork on mental well-being. Why are you assuming depriving your brain of oxygen for a short period of time is decreases the ability to think rationally? That could be a short term effect, but a long term adaptive effect could be the brain thinks more clearly. Same with fasting from food, etc.
Well, if one's thoughts can be altered depending on the amount of oxygen the brain receives. How can you possibly be sure about your own rationality. Couldn't you rationally start to question anything you've come to a conclusion about before, as just a byproduct of your brain's oxygen levels at that time.
The best part about true things is they are still true whether you believe and understand them or not. Seeking truth isn't limited by your ability to understand everything.
I believe by "true things" what is meant is "as good as a real world experience as one can get", rather than "logically sound".
It is certainly reasonable to argue about whether logic stands on its own without an observer, but not to doubt that there is a true world out there to be experienced.
Oddly enough becoming a serious athlete, changing my diet and training as my job, completely changed who I am and remembering my thought processes and overall mental state of the previous lifestyle is bizarre as though that person is truly alien to my current self.
So increasing your VO2 max, has improved how your brain functions. A few years ago, I read an article where they improved kids Math scores by having them exercise on a treadmill before class.
Ah yes, we should wait for irrefutable proof to determine whether nutrient-dense real foods are better for our children than the ubiquitous ultra-processed food made up of ingredients that are entirely foreign to the human body.
Over 50% of American kids are dealing with chronic illness. The food supply is the #1 culprit.
Fantastic writing. I recently did a yoga / meditation retreat (Inner Engineering by Sadhguru) that helps develop this and I find it immensely helpful. I always had trouble knowing how or where to begin, despite reading and knowing so much about the benefits. Inner Engineering gave me structure and insights, and after only practicing it for a week, I have experienced significant changes already.
The Spiked artcle is dominated by impassioned rhetoric and lacks dull science.
He seeks to persuade with bombast:
All you really need to know about furin cleavage sites is that SARS-CoV-2 is the first and only SARS-like virus, out of many hundreds that have been described, ever to show up with a furin cleavage site in its spike gene. Sure enough, it’s an insertion, not a mutation, and it’s at the S1/S2 junction.
and ignores dull studies:
*Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses*
The spike protein is a focused target of COVID-19, a pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. A 12-nt insertion at S1/S2 in the spike coding sequence yields a furin cleavage site, which raised controversy views on origin of the virus. Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.
Like many people he has studied science. As the twig was bent so he bends his view of science towards a pro fracking, Euroskeptic, Conservative House of Lords, investment banker PoV.
Not just taking into account the furin cleavage site issue, but there is every incentive for the scientific community and those in power to blame this on the wet market over the lab leak.
More than that, he's made quite a lot of his fortune by shilling pseudoscience to benefit his fossil fuel lobbying clients. I don't see why or how serious people would take this career con artist at his word.
The American sick care system is based around and incentivized to keep you a customer for life. I recommend people find preventative health and longevity specializing medical providers - they prioritize actual health and wellness.
If you are actually interested in learning about Musk, I would suggest Walter Isaacson's biography. The man is not pleasant, but he is highly capable of building significant things (which he has proven over and over again).
I agree, but they are very different companies and industries
I think Elon has pushed things ahead of where they would be with Tesla and SpaceX, but is shown complete incompetence with Twitter
A person can be good at, and doing good, with some things, while also being a complete idiot about other things. His political commentary and ideology are definitely hurting him and his reputation, undermining the good work he had done elsewhere. I am no longer a fan
In order for life to appear on Earth, a lot of things had to go right and in a specific order. Earth got lucky, it hit the 1 in whateverillion jackpot lottery.
I think the same about Elon. His luck ran out with Twitter. He's peaked and on the downward slope now. He's not some mastermind. He's not some uber-businessman.
Like I guess if somebody creates a startup and sells it can be luck.
Musk did that and earned 20m. Ok lets claim luck, internet was crazy. Then he exited his next one with 100M. Well again lucky, its just internet stuff I guess.
Then he invested that in 2 companies, both in capital intensive technology industries that had a long history of failure where the US was not at all world leading. Now both companies are being valued over 100 billion $.
Like to claim that all of this is luck is just a claim that doesn't make any fucking sense. Maybe if both of the 2 companies had continue to exit and were just kind of there and hanging on, maybe then you could argue that somehow that is luck.
But leading two companies like Tesla/SpaceX at the same time revolutionizing the industry they are in. Common.
Twitter is different in that he bought a company that most people thought was totally overvalued and not profitable for far to much money when the value was very high and he did it for political reasons. That was of course stupid but it doesn't at all prove that he was just lucky up to this point.
> I think the same about Elon. His luck ran out with Twitter.
Why would that be? Because some advertisers pulled their ads? That's not what he's trying to do. He wants Twitter - actually X now - to be the next PayPal, the Western counterpart to WeChat that folks can use to accomplish pretty much anything. The whole free speech angle is very much in service to that: no one is going to be financially dependent on a platform that can ban you for life simply because influential people did not like what you said in the platform's BBS-like "town square".
> The whole free speech angle is very much in service of that: no one is going to be financially dependent on a platform that can ban you for life simply because influential people did not like what you said in the platform's BBS-like "town square".
You mean like wechat? Also didn't Musk not (personally) ban people he didn't like (the private jet guy comes to mind, but also the journalists who reported on it)? Does he not count as "influential people"?
> to be the next PayPal, the Western counterpart to WeChat that folks can use to accomplish pretty much anything
PayPal is not anything like an all-in-one app like WeChat, and basically every platform from Apple Messages to Facebook Messenger to Snapchat has allowed users to send money, for years. And a few of those apps have attempted to be all in one apps, with years of a head start in that space.
No one is going to be financially dependent on a platform that can ban you for life simply because influential people did not like what you said in the platform's BBS-like "town square".
Exactly, which is why it will be a cold day in Hell before I deposit money with any company run by Musk. "Free speech as long as you agree with me" doesn't work for me.
From Dr. Robert Lustig in his book, Metabolical (highly recommended):
"Michael Pollan (full disclosure, he’s a friend), in his now-famous New York Times Magazine article, espoused seven simple words: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Three separate clauses, but I think that each clause is misleading. Eat food doesn’t take into account that some people may do better on a low-fat diet, while others may do better on a high-fat diet. Not too much doesn’t say how you are supposed to moderate that, as it doesn’t take into account food addiction or what generates satiety. And mostly plants doesn’t take into account that Coke, French fries, and Doritos are all plant-based. If you buy your organic, all-natural, GMO-free tortilla chips at Whole Foods, you’re still stuffing your liver and starving your gut—you’re just paying more for the privilege."
> doesn’t take into account that Coke, French fries, and Doritos are all plant-based
By the very definition Pollan gives, none of those are food, they are lab concoctions that have been invented in the last few generations. Like the advice given about McDonalds by all the doctors and nutritionists in Super Size Me, a healthy person should never eat them.
When Pollan says "eat food", he means "real" things that exist naturally. [Note 1]
He also introduces the "grandma test" which is to say you shouldn't eat anything your grandma wouldn't recognize as food. A glass of black fizzy liquid sugar? no. Drink water.
[Note 1] I often think about this like the periodic table. Many of the elements that have been on the table forever (low atomic numbers) can be found just lying around on the ground (Gold, Copper, etc.). They are "real".
Almost all the ones added in the last few decades (nihonium, moscovium, tennessine) (high atomic numbers) never exist naturally and must be concocted in a lab under extremely specific circumstances. Often they only exist for a fraction of a second. They are "fake".
Can you find an Apple, spinach, meat or fish out in nature? Yes - that's "real" food.
Can you find Doritos or coke out in nature? No - that's not food.
This feels like an overly complex response to a statement that's intentionally simple though.
The whole point of Pollan's statement is to have simple guidelines that ignore optimizations in favor of directionally good flexibility, which makes me feel like Lustig either misses Pollan's point, or just believes in a completely different philosophy.
