Yes! I'm in the middle of the SST progression. Just did 3 x 20 min last week, planning on doing 2 x 30 min tomorrow.
In complete agreement!
I'm not saying that grit isn't real. Heck I'm reminded of this cycling study where they had people do some max power efforts, a longer VO2 max effort, and then the same max power efforts. Most people had around the same max power the second time around, meaning they weren't able to push themselves effectively on the VO2 max stuff. Rather, I'm saying that the way that you sustainably develop grit looks a lot like the kind of training that you should be doing anyway, and much less like just being yelled at by a guy that you're not trying hard enough. There is nothing that has made me want to quit a sport more than my coach telling me I wasn't trying in the middle of a race where subjectively I was burning all cylinders.
thejdizzler
5d ago
I played a lot of sports when I was younger. From about the age of 11 on, I was doing about nine to twelve hours of aerobic exercise a week. Initially this was swimming, but I transitioned to running in high school, and then later took up cycling to complete the triathlon trifecta. I still do all three of these sports, am very glad that they were such a large part of my formative years, and frankly, I would like to get back to the kind of hours that I was putting in a few years ago: dedicating yourself to sport is one of the most meaningful things you can do in today’s society. These sports have taught me many things: patience, discipline, fortitude, and even kindness. They continue to cultivate these virtues even today, and will probably always be part of my life.
However not everything that sport inoculated in me was positive. Every coach I had, from middle school swim club onward, was drawn to a conception of mental toughness, or “grit” that made it difficult to understand where improvements came from, or to have a healthy relationship with competition in general. When races went poorly, poor training, physical conditions, or distractions were never at fault. Rather, I was made to feel that there was something defective in my brain or character. That I was, to quote Severus Snape, a weak person. Not only is this position a philosophically bankrupt form of the worst kind of Cartesian mind-body dualism, it also fails to offer any actual avenue to improvement. Willing yourself not to slow down doesn’t actually work when you’ve completely overshot your sustainable threshold pace ten minutes into a thirty minute race.
So how does one actually improve mental toughness in racing? There are a couple strategies. The first is to simply not put yourself in a situation where you need to be mentally tough. This means starting out a more intelligent pace that will lead to a slower accumulation of exhaustion and allow you to finish the race without having to rely on mental toughness. This was the real issue for myself and many of my teammates in college: we overestimated our fitness, went out too fast and had to rely on “grit” and “toughness” which couldn’t make up for the extra accumulated muscle fatigue from overshooting our capacity.
The second solution is to recognize that mental toughness is trained in much the same way as physical toughness: by doing training sessions that are physiologically, and psychologically challenging, and progressing these over time. By targeted exposure to the kind of pain that you would be likely to experience in a race, that pain becomes both physically, and mentally easier to deal with. You can push yourself more because it “feels” easier to do so because you’ve practiced it. And that practice looks a lot like the kind of training you are already doing to prepare for the race physically.
However, the two things aren’t exactly identical, or there wouldn’t be such an “epidemic” of mental weakness on high school and college cross country teams. The key distinction, I think comes from how we would break up intense training sessions, or workouts, as they are colloquially referred to.
In college, we ran an 8k (5 miles) on grass about every other weekend. Our weekly Tuesday night workout was about this same distance, but split up into intervals anywhere from 400m to 2 miles. The longer repeats tended to be much faster, but with more rest proportionally. We sometimes did even longer and slower intervals on non-race Saturdays, but these were never close to the 8k distance. Physically, these intervals made a lot of sense: they allowed us to get in the kind of stimulus (neuromuscular and metabolic) that was essential for improvement in the 8k but without the toll on the body that running a full 8k all-out every Tuesday would have required. Psychologically, it was a different story. My best 8k time was around 25 minutes, but the longest of these intervals was only around 10, providing very little opportunity to learn how to cope with the mentally taxing final 5 minutes of the race. There was also little opportunity for progression week to week: the total length of the workout didn’t get any longer from week to week, and neither did the average interval length.
Contrast this to how my current Tuesday workouts are structured. I would start the season with just a simple 10 minutes and my target half-marathon pace. The next week I would progress in total volume to 3 x 5 minutes, but compensate for the increased intensity by making the workout psychologically easier by splitting up the 15 minutes into intervals. But the next week I would progress psychologically by doing 2 x 7.5 minutes instead, as the longer intervals are harder mentally. And so on and so forth until I got to about an hour of work at half-marathon pace, which would be sufficient mental preparation for that kind of race.
The real problem with our team at MIT (where I went to school) was not lack of character, confidence, or belief in oneself, but poor training. Mental strength in racing does not come from some inner reservoir of “will” but from treating the brain as a muscle that needs to be developed in the same was as one’s body through the principles of overload and progression.
I think this has some implications for other areas of my life as well. If I'm giving a presentation at work about my research, I’m going to be much more confident in my work if I’ve spent the time to carefully collect data it and think through the details of the experimental design. If I doubt my own work, bullshitting can only conceal so much of that from the audience. With Spanish, conversations with natives and my reading ability get better when I spend time in the language. If I haven’t read all week, of course my speaking ability is going to suffer. There is no substitute for putting in the time, bro: this idea of willing things to be so through sheer “grit” and “determination” cannot die fast enough. Confidence comes from competence, there are no shortcuts.
(Mods not sure if this is better suited to Wellness Wednesday, but thought it was relevant to culture war because of mind-body dualism, grit talk).
thejdizzler
22d ago
Awesome! Glad to hear it!
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Good advice. I think I'm honestly too open to giving people chances whereas the dates I've been on where it worked out (at least short term) things just clicked fast.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Careful you don't feel too inferior or I'll eat you too!
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Only oysters and clams and mussels and scallops. Shrimp are too developed for me.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
God only allows humans to eat meat after the Noahide covenant. Before that animals are reserved for burnt offerings. Adam is almost certainly a vegetarian, at least while he lives in the garden. Thus eating meat is another sign of our fall away from grace.
Beyond Christianity there is the inconvenient fact that my lying eyes (and other senses) tell me that animals are like me and experience pain and pleasure and have some form of consciousness. I don't think it's correct to eat human babies for meat, even though they are objectively less conscious than me, nor do I think it's okay to eat retards, who will never be as conscious as me. Without some arbitrary human/animal distinction (which is one of the flaws of christianity IMO) I don't think you can justify one and not the other, at least in my opinion.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I know sleep is going to be compromised when I have kids. This is fine, and other areas of my life will just have to suffer for a while. I just don't see a need to do this for relatively superficial social reasons.
Car I'm also willing to buy/share when/if I get married. It's not a good investment now, and I have a zipcar membership when I absolutely need it (for a hike or something).
The vegan restaurants issue is not an issue. Because I eat shellfish, there is always something for me, at least around here. What I've done in the past is cook vegan every time my girlfriend is over. She appreciates the cooking even if she isn't vegan herself. In marriage I'll probably continue to do the same. Worst comes to worse I'll have to learn how to cook some amount of meat. Kids are not going to be vegan, at least at first. There are too many open questions about nutrition at that age that I'm not looking to have an argument about.
I think this is a problem with the institution of the Church in the West. There are so many propositions that you have to accept based on blind-faith, many of which I think are incorrect. It doesn't need to be this way. You can have a lot of doctrinal flexibility in your religious community while still maintaining a strong moral core of belief.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I am vegan for ethical reasons. Not open to changing this, although I am open to compromises on specific animal products (i.e. will eat eggs if we keep chickens ourselves). I am happy to do all the cooking myself.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I've done Volo, it's a lot of fun!
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Personality flaws: The biggest straight-up flaw I have is insecurity. I care too much about what others think, and don't see my own value. I also am quite judgmental, but I don't see this necessarily as a straight up flaw, rather as something I need to keep better to myself. Other things that might be seen as flaws: pretty strict about sleep and exercise, don't own a car for environmental (but also economic) reasons (I have a zipcar membership so this doesn't have to be a problem), I'm also pretty irreverent to authority/ to any particular "team".
Beliefs that might be seen as dealbreakers. Veganism. Certain women want men who are hunt and eat steak, and many others want their husband to be able to cook their favorite dishes, which usually contain meat. I'm open to comprise as long as it doesn't involve me eating meat or animal products, but this isn't always clear on the first date. Catholicism. For woke women it's usually over (how can you hate women and gay people so much). Truth seeking. This goes with the irreverence above. I will not swear forever allegiance to any institution or group that doesn't allow me to update my beliefs based on my experience in the world. This obviously causes problem with catholics (I believe revelation is incomplete and evolving), but also with lots of secular people. A lot of this comes down to keeping my mouth shut, but I have also been burned real hard when I've expressed these kinds of thoughts to people who I thought loved me.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
No specific time frame in mind for marriage, but I would like to have children before I'm 40. When I've dated people over the past few years it has been with an eye towards marriage, and when it becomes apparent that that is not on the table due to personality/ideological differences, the relationship ends pretty fast.
Thanks for the other advice! I'm finding the open-mindedness thing to be very hard. Woke and catholic women seem to find different parts of my beliefs/personality to be a deal breaker. Perhaps this is just that I'm a). not quite hot/chad enough b). haven't found a woman who likes me enough to look past that stuff.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
So dating. I'm at a bit of a crossroads. On one hand I want to get married and have kids, so in some sense dating is required for that. On the other, most people I seem to meet through dating apps are not really the kind of person I would like to spend my life with. I have two big requirements: open-minded and physically active, which surprisingly seems to cross out a lot of candidates. Things have been better organically, but those kinds of relationships kind of just "happen". I also subjectively feel extremely busy: I'm working on my PhD, studying for the DELE B2 Spanish Exam, running 50-70 miles a week, and hanging out with my friends. If the right person comes along I'm very willing to sacrifice some of these things, but I feel a bit like I'm wasting my time going on dates with girls from dating apps that I don't end up liking, rather than focusing on job/hobbies/community.
27M living in Baltimore, MD for context. I'm a non-strict vegan (shellfish+honey), and don't care if partner is also vegan. Catholic, but pretty critical of the narrow-mindedness of the church on dogma. Extremely fit endurance athlete. No problem with most drugs, but not a heavy user of anything.
What does theMotte think I should do?
thejdizzler
1mo ago
This is bad for me personally. Very bad. Goodbye F31 funding. Goodbye future career in the sciences.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Thanks for this reply. I am indeed a Greer-nik, and it seems that my post was too doomerish (judging from many other comments) to convey that. I share many of the perspectives that you write here as a Greer-sockpuppet. If I were to rewrite my original post reflecting this, I think I would probably reframe it terms of that perspective. Instead of the framing of "why aren't we more worried about these slow moving, natural, and impossible to stop problems", I would try and state instead: "why is the motte so concerned about things like AI/colonizing mars etc. when those things are energetically impossible pipe dreams?" I'm also not advocating we do nothing, but rather I see our resources (energy, but also human intelligence) as being misspent on futile treadmilling rather than "collapsing now to avoid the rush" as Greer might say. Localizing agriculture and manufacturing are really important for preserving the innovations that this civilization has built, and we are really not doing that at all.
I would like to take the time to reply to a lot of those down thread, but I think, because of what you state in the first paragraph, there is not much point. We are looking at different the world through two completely different narratives. Inconvenient facts like declining EROI of every fuel source we are using and greater and greater dependence on fragile global supply change can be brushed away in the name of technological innovation or market efficiency. At the end of the day our system is predicated on infinite growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, and when we bump up against those limits there will be some kind of collapse.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Also really dystopian. Would also explain the success of the new Chinese model. They don't give a shit about privacy.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
This could be. Dystopian AF
thejdizzler
1mo ago
It doesn't though. In the linked article, there's clearly evidence that synthetic data leads to hallucinations over time.
Okay where are they going to get more training data from? They've already used the entire internet. You also aren't accounting for the fact that OpenAI lost $5 billion last year.
It's not helpful for you to say the article is low quality without providing examples.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Why don't users on theMotte take the idea of societal collapse more seriously? It's not just things like resource depletion and climate change that could cause something like this. Rather I think there are many layers of various pillars of society going towards the shitter that I think makes some kind of collapse of Western Civilization inevitable. I'll list a few below
-
Resource Depletion/Peak Oil: Although we seem to have stemmed off global peak oil for about 50 years, it seems like the peak is finally actually coming into sight. Some say 2018 was actually the peak, others say it won't arrive until 2030. Whatever the case, it is an inevitability given the fact that discoveries of deposits have been outpaced by demand for the past fifty years. Barring a scientific miracle like effective hydrocarbon synthesis by bacteria, the alternatives don't look promising. Ethanol from corn has an abysmal energy return on energy invested (EROI). Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks, and even for passenger vehicles, we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars. It's not just oil: copper is being mined at extremely low-grades (because we have exhausted the high-grade deposits), uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves, and we've already hit peak phosphorous. Further reading: Art Berman, Simon Michaux, Alice Friedman
-
Climate Change/Environmental Degradation: Anyone with two eyes can see that climate change is happening. It's not just that temperatures are getting warmer, but variation seems to be increasing as well, which is really bad for parts of our civilization that require fairly regular climatic conditions like agriculture. Here in Maryland we had one of the hottest summers on record, followed by an extremely warm fall. Now we're in the middle of one of the coldest winters in the last twenty years. Even if you don't believe that climate change is happening, other aspects of environmental degradation are harder to deny. For the past few summers we've had massive wildfires across most of the Northern hemisphere, and in California during the winter. Some of these are natural, but many are the result of poor management and ecological practices. We've contaminated our drinking water with birth control, our soils have been largely stripped of nutrients by industrial farming, and microplastics are literarily everywhere. None of this is sustainable
-
Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture: Although COVID was likely a lab leak, one of the initial hypotheses as to its origin was a cross-over event from bats to humans at bushmeat market. We create millions of such crossover opportunities in our agriculture system every day, and it's only a matter of time before the current bird flu pandemic, which has decimated US chicken and cow populations (spiking the price of eggs to $6 / 12 eggs) crosses over to humans. This has happened before in both 1918 and in the 1960s.
-
Birthrate collapse: Everywhere that modern Western society touches seems to experience a rapid and catastrophic decline in birth rates to far below replacement levels. There's been a lot of discussion of this issue at least here, and it seems like nothing any government does is effective at turning things around. While declining populations may be good for our resource consumption/pollution problems, without some kind of reversal in birth rates, there will tautologically be a death of Western culture. A somewhat related issue is the general collapse of community in the West, which is talked about a lot in books like Bowling Alone.
-
Brainrot: modern society is incredibly complex and requires a lot of smart people at the helm keeping the systems that keep us alive going. Many of these people are aging out of the workforce, and there aren't many zoomers and millennials who can replace them. Part of this is an issue of desire: few people want to run a wastewater treatment plant or work as a mining engineer when you can just grift with things like crypto and OnlyFans. But I also think we're all just getting dumber to some extent. I put a lot of blame on addictive technologies on the internet (and so does Jonathan Haidt), but I'm sure there's also crossover with the issue of environmental pollution.
There's many more specific issues I could list, but I think you get the gist. Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient). I think it may have something to do with TheMotte severely overrating the utility of human intelligence in solving large scale problems, but I'm not sure. Is there something I'm completely missing here?
Further reading/listening. DoTheMath, Rintrah, The Great Simplification.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Oh yea I really don't think it's worth it either. And yes it's only a partial solution to the Incel problem. Sex tourism doesn't help the NEET in his mom's basement, or the man who really wants to start a family. But it does like you said, directly make sex interchangeable with everything else through the medium of money. This was the natural result of the sexual revolution, but certain people (mainly women) don't want to hear it.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive, Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
- Czelaw Milosz, Encounter 1936
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss for philosophy book club. Generally enjoying it, but I feel like he makes some dubious assumptions about things. Also working through Judas by Amos Oz and the last few hours of Solaris.
Just wanted to agree with the second part. Monogamy allows us to focus our energies on cultural outputs on things other than being a coomer. Which is straight good. This obviously way more difficult in harem/polygamy situation (because of time constraints), and in a situation where you never mate (not having a partner is bad for mental and physical health).
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