Mewis
1yr ago
Man who isn't President doesn't die. Is this what passes for Things Happening these days?
Mewis
11mo ago
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-i-dont-buy-538s-new-election
FiveThirtyEight versus 538
Nate Silver, public statistician, has launched a broadside against the forecasting blog he originally set up, which continues to produce modelling that indicates a incredible dead heat between Biden and Trump. What gives?
What it really comes down to is how unusual this election is turning out, and how forecasting is not keeping up with reality. On paper, Biden is secure - he's an incumbent President in an America that is peaceful and prosperous. These indicators have been long championed as the surest omens of victory. But nothing lasts forever. As Silver points out, those advantages count for less and less nowadays. And they assume that the candidates are otherwise mentally competent to run an effective campaign. If Biden still retains the faculties to run the country, he's not demonstrating them.
There of course, is a limit to models. We cannot predict exactly how Biden's incapacity might affect the election, or a horse switch to Harris, because events like this have never occurred before in modern electoral history. But it's at the point where these models now interfere with normal political judgement. Biden backers use the 538 model as a palliative, even as Biden slips further in the polls. As a result they are sleepwalking into picking a candidate who himself seems to be sleepwalking.
Nate Silver's own model does give Biden a fighting chance, especially when fundamentals are emphasized over polling. But he himself admits that the model is probably useless by this point, and that polling is a better indicator of Biden's weakness. Silver also has reason to say "I told you so" - he has beaten the Biden is too old drum for years now, and gotten plenty of flak from his own team over it.
Mewis
1yr ago
One thing that stuck out to me in Dune was the chasteness. The Harkonnens are sex weirdo pederasts in the books, an element that is totally excised in the movies, even though they're delightfully weird in other ways.
Mewis
1yr ago
Other way around, surely?
The fact is, nobody is actually sitting down and crunching the numbers on utils. When it comes to actually making decisions in the real world and not in thought experiments, everyone resorts to the same expedients and heuristics - usually, some combination of virtue ethics and deontology. Don't commit murders, don't be dishonest.
Mewis
2yr ago
Even Elon Musk is a human - nobody holds their principles so highly that they won't discard them to safeguard their 2 year old child. To me, the real problem is the people who seem to think that they're exposing hypocrisy by trying to goad Elon into breaking his own rules. They're not.
Mewis
1yr ago
"we need to fight this stupid war or we a pussy" this is the stupidest fucking argument in the world, it's responsible for so many deaths, and it's exactly why I don't trust the pro Ukraine people.
Mewis
9mo ago
For the most part, pro-CICO people seem to reject the idea of fast or slow metabolisms.
Mewis
9mo ago
The thesis of CICO is that it's not just a useful guide, but literally an iron law of the universe. Ever heard of something called thermodynamics? So it's not obvious to me how a "metabolism" (whatever that is) can conjure up, or delete, energy or mass.
Personally I found CICO useful for losing weight and not useful for gaining weight. But, based on my own direct observation, you'll probably just call me a liar or say that I was tracking wrong. That is of course, what every CICO advocate does immediately. After all, CICO is (apparently) totally perfect and based on thermodynamics.
Mewis
1yr ago
The latest craze on Youtube? A guy called Sam Sulek. Sam Sulek is a 21 year old bodybuilder and mech eng. student from Ohio who has, over the past six months, gone from about 50,000 to over 1.7 million subscribers. I've heard dudes at work that don't lift mention him, either. He is, for his age, ridiculously large, and has already attracted accusations of not being 'natty' (i.e. he's using PEDs). Regardless of how he gets his gains, his appeal, however, seems pretty genuine. Unlike the deluge of overedited, attention-grabbing garbage on Youtube, Sulek's videos are lightly edited and mostly show him driving to, working out in, and then driving back to the gym with occasional meals, while he provides a kind of stream-of-consciousness of his thoughts on training and diet. There's very little groundbreaking stuff here, his videos are nearly entirely unscripted (like his workouts themselves) and Sulek saves all his intensity for his lifting. In fact he comes off as a fairly charismatic, positive, intelligent student. More than that, though, his videos scratch a desire for society and friendship. Commenters describe them as relaxing, and Sulek as authentic, but really what they are is parasocial. Sulek isn't acting as a coach or source of information or salesman (though he does have a deal with Hosstile), but more as the lifting buddy that millions of people wish they had. And though it can hardly be any good for my very poor self-esteem and body image issues, it's difficult to stop watching.
Mewis
9mo ago
I don't hate CICO advocates, I just don't know if there's a constructive conversation to be had with people who consistently respond to everything with "you're lying" or "you must have missed something". This is also epistemic closure - anyone who struggles with CICO is always accused of lying.
As I've already said I did get some benefit from calorie tracking. I think it's useful even just to learn how many calories are in your food. So of course, I don't hate CICO, but of course this kind of defensiveness is also very typical of CICO advocates.
If the defense of CICO epicycles is that "uh, actually sometimes people just burn extra calories for no reason", that's not that compelling. Isn't the point of CICO that it should always give you predictable results, and that if your results are wrong, it's because you made a mistake or are lying?
Mewis
1yr ago
It does work for some people, you can definitely find cases of people losing the weight, and they often frame their motivation in terms of self-image and shame.
Mewis
1yr ago
Maybe not in so many words, but the line of logic of "we need to show the world that we are maximally willing to engage in war" can excuse literally any level of escalation, and used to reject any effort of diplomacy - which is what you're doing, here, with the by this point very predictable accusation of appeasement, since your history book ended at 1945.
Mewis
2yr ago
I mean, that depends on the meaning of 'coming for the children'. Trans activists see themselves as benevolent saviors, swooping in to protect innocent trans children from being tortured into suicide by evil Christians. In that sense, of course they would not be embarrassed about it. But you probably don't mean it in the same way.
Mewis
2yr ago
Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths". I've seen comments casually tossed off about 'normies', about '95 IQ rednecks', many assumptions that Ordinary People Are Dumb, and we know it because they must all be sub-100 IQ, we know that because if they were Smart Like Us they wouldn't be rednecks or normies.
My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.
Well, guys, here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans".
Ordinary people buy scratchcards. And honestly, who's to say that SBF even messed up as far as his own benefit is concerned. He got to spend several years as a rich and influential power broker, and may still evade severe punishment. The actual dumb people are the 110 IQ cryptophiles that got ripped off again.
The entire set-up at his Bahamas tax haven base (see the Sequoia article again, man that is probably the worst thing this Adam Fisher ever wrote but it's a treasure trove of nuggets about the mindset of everyone involved, from the fanboy journalist to the investors throwing money at Bankman-Fried on the basis of one Zoom call) was juvenile - it sounds like "still living like we're in college in our second year even though we're all late twenties and heading into our thirties".
This describes a lot of people in their late twenties nowadays. It's not abnormal.
Mewis
9mo ago
Honestly, these histrionics about Altman being some gay supervillain make me like him more, not less. Being crazy and ambitious is a prerequisite to doing great things. And the notion that because he's gay, he doesn't care about anything is ridiculous. If only he could be as pro human as Joseph Stalin (two children), Robert Mugabe (four children) or Genghis Khan (innumerable children)?
Mewis
1yr ago
Since we are talking about the UK, shale fracking is illegal there. Hardly a revolution.
Mewis
1yr ago
Would you deny your 14 year old daughter a life free from financial concern?
But of course, it's not your daughter - the premise is that the parents also consent. Would you let someone else's daughter have sex with an old man?
Mewis
9mo ago
My actual experience of CICO was exactly the opposite. It worked initially but when I tried to bulk, I found it predicted weight gain very poorly. Since CICO is of course, perfect and never wrong, it must have been a mistake I was making, and since I couldn't find my mistake, I decided to spare myself the stress and anxiety and stopped tracking.
Mewis
2yr ago
I wrote before on Reddit on the WW threads about negative thoughts and lifting (under a different username). I thought I might continue here.
I have switched to 5/3/1 programming over the past few months. First doing Original, then Forever-style programming last month. I haven't really progressed at all though. It's been very difficult for me to gain weight. Since starting my new job, I have eaten more than ever in my life, but weight gain is still very slow - I have ramped up from eating about 3000 calories a day at the start of June to over 4500 now and only have 2kg to show for it. I still freak out every time my scale gives a lower number, and I am still paranoid about not gaining any muscle. Over the past month I got frustrated with the lack of progress on 5/3/1 and decided to push it a bit further. I am now doing FSL for supplemental work and have cut out rest days nearly entirely so I'm in the gym every day. This is basically the opposite of what Wendler counsels... but I'd rather err on the side of doing too much than doing too little.
Mewis
9mo ago
I have a similar understanding of the published literature to you, I think - but knowing that planes crash when their altitude decreases is not enough to avoid crashing a plane. The published literature tells us, for example, that calories out should probably exceed calories in by about 500 and then you'll lose weight. But as I've heard in this thread there is no reliable way to measure either, calories out has been shown to change in response to calories in, so you are in effect chasing a constantly moving target.
What useful information are we left with? Pretty much, eat more or less until you get the desired change in weight, and that "more or less" refers specifically to calorie content. Which is a reasonable start.
But all this amounts to is a fine motte. The actual bailey of CICO is that everyone who follows a calorie tracker and gets an incorrect result is lying or denying science, that it's physically impossible to fail to lose weight on 1800 calories or to fail to gain weight on 4000 calories, and that hormones don't affect weight.
Mewis
9mo ago
Well, I'm not really interested in judging others (beyond ways that are immediately useful). Fundamentally, people base their judgment not on their own, spontaneously generated values, but on the values they were taught by society. I don't think it's possible or even worth trying to truly escape from those values, though of course you can react against them superficially or engage in dialogue with them.
Mewis
11mo ago
It's not that monumentally consequential in a healthy political party. Part of the Democrat Party's problem is this weird desire to keep passing the Presidency to anointed successors instead of actually allowing any kind of party democracy to occur. That's how they got Clinton in 16, Biden in 20 and now look stuck with Harris in 24. But it really doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't so long ago that it was quite normal to hand the Vice Presidency to an empty suit like Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle.
Mewis
11mo ago
I don't think it was normal, even two weeks ago, to actually call for Trump to be assassinated, and yeah, you might have faced consequences for it (or not, depending on how your boss feels). That's why this celebration of victory is premature, nothing has really changed. Many individuals on the left have overreached and gotten burned, but nobody is going to get fired merely for supporting Biden, let alone for being gay or black or trans. The rules, written and unwritten, about what you can or can't say at work, are still written or unwritten and enforced or unenforced by the same fat liberal white women.
To what extent do you think it's appropriate to judge someone else for their body type? Would you assess someone that was weak, small, or skinny as also lacking in character?
I think these days basic nutrition knowledge is pretty widespread. I mean it's not very good quality - someone that says "you need carbs for energy" is missing the mark but they at least have the concept of a macronutrient. I did meet a guy once who I had to explain what calories, protein and carbohydrates were to.
More options
Context Copy link