It's the same kind of schizm that has lead to a lot of hate and mass murder over the last century or so:
Abstraction/dimensionality reduction vs. concrete logic and statistics
Concrete statistician: I can learn the problem in its full complexity, unlike the dumdum below me.
Abstract thinker: I understand it, because I can reduce its dimensity to a small number of parameters.
CS: I can predict this because I have statistics about its past behavior.
AT: I told you so.
CS: You couldn't possibly know this, because it has never happened before. You suffer from the hindsight bias.
AT: But I told you.
CS: It has never happened, you couldn't possibly have statistics of when such things occur. You were just lucky.
CS: I'm smart, I can be taught anything
AT: You are stupid because you need to be taught everything.
War (or another sort of mass death or other kind of suffering) emerges.
Mood and evidentuality are two somewhat distinct concepts.
Mood denotes the informations factuality, if something is, could be, would be, certainly is so, or there may be moods for direct or indirect commands (tell him to come) and so on.
Evidentiality denotes how the speaker knows - you use different evidentiality if you have directly seen something, if somebody told you, or if you deduced it.
Then there is mirativity, which denotes how expected or unexpecred the information was.
That isn't how I understood Dilbert. Dilbert is a normal guy and PHB is actually mentally retarded.
It's essentially gallows humor for a world where, for no apparent reason, blithering idiots often seem to be the only people who wield any decision making power.
Scott Adams had a take on that. The "Dilbert Principle" (his version of the Peter Principle) is that useless engineers that are promoted away from doing real work to keep them from messing it up.
I have a much darker hypothesis about it - when people are left to compete, they often resort to badmouthing those who they think could outcompete them.
Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
Definitely. Alcohol just makes me confused and sick, with no upsides to it.
I'be been told that I must be drinking incorrectly, and given advice how to drink correctly, but no, no positive experience with it for me.
The funny thing is, I actually like the taste of it (it tastes kind of minty to me, while most people claim it tastes bitter) but the effects are pure poison.
Funny, I could place myself directly in middle of you two. When I drink, I feel pretty great at the beginning and it gets progressively more tiring and confusing with more drinks (but you still crave it, it being effectively a drug). Then the next day is just wasted time because of the hangover.
So while I liked to drink more with friends in the past, now I do so less often. And when I do, I tend to overthink how much I should drink not to feel bad later. So usually I just don't drink much, with more time between days when I drink (currently I'd say it's weeks inbetween).
Same, it is the least feel-good drug of any I have tried. But I do love a good German beer with a steak or burger, amazing. Or a cold beer at a baseball game.
> “The meds are highly effective for a majority of patients but there is still a percentage who don’t lose a clinically significant percentage of body weight. Everyone’s physiology is a little different,” – Veronica Johnson MD, an obesity medicine specialist in Chicago
> He explained that for someone who is overweight, shedding even a small amount of weight can improve heart and kidney function
And, the Guardian is exactly the kind of outlet that would publish "woe is me, it doesn't work for me" stories, as it's their target audience.
It's a tool - it can be a force multiplier if you also make other changes. If you just take the jab and do no exercise and continue eating bad, weight loss will be minimal.
Yes it's been oversold – just like almost any other product/service that ha an advertising budget. That doesn't mean it "doesn't work" for everyone.
Does your car 'not work' because you can't attract those extremely attractive ladies in the street which are often featured in the adverts?
It also cites a study which says that the average loss is 5%. That isn't what most people imagine as "highly effective".
Weight also doesn't tell the whole story. The people don't get any better, they get (more) starved in addition to staying obese.
It's a disease with another cause, hunger is only a symptom.
Too much money has been wasted on proving and "educating" people that it's just overeating, while there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary.
The one that convinced me is horses. Horses get fat, and they need to wear a muzzle that makes eating difficult for them. Otherwise, they eat so much so fast that it literally kills them.
There seem to be AREAS that are affected and areas that are less affected. Either there are fat people in the area, or there are no fat peoplle in the area. People who move seem to quickly change weight to fit the local norm. There doesn't seem to be any clear correlation with dietary habits, or anything else that is commonly observed. The entire Japan appears to be spared.
It gets commonly missed that it isn't possible to get obese on purpose either. It's hard to eat more, and the body just seems to burn off the excess.
This is a load of bullshit man. Even the article you linked describes lying to his friends' parents to get a second dinner, being unable to have just one cookie etc.
The only way to get fat is to eat too much and anyone who really eats too much will get fat. There's a huge amount of people who simply lie or are ignorant about their food intake. Fat people falsely claiming they hardly eat anything but can't lose weight etc. Of course you lose weight if you don't eat. Your body can't create energy from nothing. Without energy you die.
Always a fair request. I don't know it well enough or have time at the moment, but afaik it's the medical consensus:
Obesity is a disease, (mostly) not a result of behavior. Eating less and/or more activity doesn't cure people; iirc bodies adjust to retain the same amount of fat, etc. under the new conditions.
Then how does ozempic, whose primary mechanism of action is to decrease appetite, work for obese people?
Yes, your body will compensate somewhat for caloric deficit, and yes, when you gain enough fat mass your adipocytes will divide, creating more/stronger hunger signals that encourage weight gain moreso than someone who was never obese.
But your body is not magic. If you feed it a sufficiently low amount of calories, it has to break down energy stores, e.g. fat, to make up the difference in energy requirements.
That's a report on one person under direct medical supervision. The general consensus, afaik, is that starving yourself doesn't work, at least not more than short term - the weight comes right back.
It is a disease as in “your metabolism is slow” so you need to cut food even more. It is a disease as “you have problem with controlling your impulses and therefore crave food”
Psychological diseases are not better or worse from psychical/metabolic ones. They are real, and for some of them we have or we develop medicine.
Nobody is claiming that obesity can’t be a result of a disease, but under the hood it always ends up as: calories surplus is stored as fat.
Slow metabolism is a bit of a myth. By that I mean that it's not strictly wrong to say someone has a slow metabolism, but metabolism is an expression of your activity level so what you're really saying is the person is sedentary. If the person starts being more active their metabolism will necessarily increase.
So, slow metabolism is not a disease, it's not a genetic disorder, it is simply a result of the fact that someone is spending too much time on the couch.
I think this gets lost a lot when people talk about "slow metabolism", they turn it into this thing they're just helpless to influence, like they're just cursed with a slow metabolism and that's that. It's not like that at all, which is why I don't like the term. It just hides the reality of the situation.
I don't know where you get your science man but I'm about 100% sure what you just said is completely false. Not even remotely controversial just flat out wrong.
I asked first. You're the one claiming all this scientific and expert consensus. I'm just talking common sense stuff that pretty much everyone agree on. This is simply the basics of how the body works. I could take some time to find some sources but so could you and you aren't so why should I?
It's pretty clear that you're thoroughly convinced of your own bullshit anyway, if you had any interest at all in finding the truth you'd do some light googling and find that pretty much everything I'm saying is true. I'm not interested in wasting my time finding arbitrary sources for common knowledge that you're just going to ignore anyway.
You don't have to find sources for me, I know they don't exist and if you find anything it's going to be obvious bullshit anyway. There are no serious doctors, nutritionists nor researchers who have any doubt whatsoever regarding what the roles and relationships of food and fat are in the human body. You're obviously just delusional. So good luck with that, I hope you can get past your issues and improve your life some day.
You admitted to me a few days ago that you are so fat that it makes you miserable. If direct, personal experience with it not working doesn't convince you, nothing will.
Yeah I said I find it miserable to be moderately overweight. I never said being more active and eating less doesn't work. It works great when I do it. I was under 90kg last year after just a few months of being active and eating better. And when I stop being active and start eating too much food, I gain weight. Which is literally exactly what I'm saying. So, I have direct personal experience with my advice working exactly the way I'm telling you it does.
At this point I'm just saying the same shit I said in the other comment already. The fact that I find it hard to follow my own advice, which I just told you because I thought it might help get my point across, is completely irrelevant to whether the advice works.
Anyway I'm over this whole conversation at this point. Do and believe whatever you want. I've said what I wanted to say. If you don't believe me that's fine, I don't care.
Let's say there is a new discovery tomorrow - there is a virus that lives in your mitochondria, and makes them unable to produce energy. We can make a vaccine against it, and nobody will ever get fat.
Why would I be against that? I'm not against ozempic either.
I'm just against people who throw their hands in the air, say "my fatness is a disease" and continue eating 4000 calories a day while hardly moving at all. And just to be clear I'm not against the fatness - if you want to be fat that's fine, I don't care. It's your life. And if you want to say it's a mental disorder that's fine too, addiction is real and I know first hand that it's hard to resist good food and get off the couch.
Just don't claim there's nothing to be done about it. There is. I and many people I know have successfully lost weight by eating less and moving more. I've also gained weight by eating too much and moving too little. Because that's literally how it works, for everyone in the entire world. Sure it's possible to have some disease or disorder that prevents you from gaining weight by preventing you from utilizing the calories in your food. Or parasites can steal your calories. But if you aren't eating, your body still needs energy. It can't just choose to not use energy, energy is required to live. Without energy the heart doesn't beat, the lungs don't breathe, the brain doesn't brain, the muscles don't work. It's not like the body's just wasting energy, it uses as much as it has to. It's a fine tuned machine. So it can't just use less - the only way to use less energy is to spend less by moving less. Maybe the body can reduce it slightly by adjusting organ activity and such, but not much.
This is why we breathe oxygen and exhale CO2. Oxygen is literally used to burn calories, CO2 is the product of that combustion. Just like in a fire. When you exert yourself the body is spending more energy so it needs more oxygen and produces more CO2, that's why we need to breathe faster and our heart beats faster to get the oxygen to where it's needed and get rid of all the CO2. When you relax, your pulse and breathing lowers because you're burning very little.
Now, with this understanding of basic body functions it's obvious that moving more and eating less is how you lose weight. There is no question about it, it's just clear as day and absolutely indisputable.
Entire world? Everybody? No, I think most people are completely aware of the link between overeating and overweight. If everyone around you agree that food intake and weight are entirely unrelated things then maybe you're just in some kind of echo chamber. Or maybe people just don't care enough to challenge your ideas. I don't know, but I do know for a fact that what I said earlier is true and that it is the overwhelming scientific consensus.
That's why common remedies for obesity are things like dieting, stomach reducing surgery to reduce capacity for food, and ozempic and similar drugs that reduce appetite. See how the common denominator here is less food? Diet for those who can do it that way, more drastic measures for those who struggle with self control. And of course all of these solutions work better when coupled with regular physical activity. Simply taking a daily walk for half an hour is a great way to burn some extra calories and get the heart pumping at least a little, this has many benefits beyond burning calories.
Trust me I know it's hard. I'm not in the shape I wish I was. It's a lot easier to order a pizza than go to the store, figure out what to make, buy ingredients and cook a heathy meal. And it's so nice just crushing half or more of a large pizza in one sitting. The amount of junk food i can eat before I feel full is way more than I should have. It's a lot easier to spend all day in front of the computer or on the couch than getting out and doing some exercise. It's hard to do the things I know I should do, when what I should do and what I want to do are so different. I know from experience that when you get going it's easier to keep it going but I've also fallen off the wagon a lot. And it's not like you just do it for a little while and you're good, it's a permanent lifestyle change. It takes months or years of dieting to get down to a normal weight, it's a huge task.
But if you don't even believe that this is the solution, which it unequivocally is by the way, then you're either going to waste your time and probably money on things that don't work or more likely just keep eating yourself into an early grave while telling yourself you're just unlucky.
And I think it's worth some negative social points for saying things that might upset some people on social media, if I can maybe influence someone to get their shit together and work towards a better life.
This isn't opinion, I am 100% sure about these things and I'm not paid to say them. I just want to help. Trust me, you can lose weight and eating less and moving more is the way to do it. Ozempic and similar drugs can help with that and there's no shame in using them. The only thing that matters is getting healthy.
Obesity is a deadly condition and it's miserable. Trust me I've been in great shape I know exactly what I'm missing. And I'm not even very overweight, I'm about 100kg and it's already miserable. I can't imagine what it must be like for someone to weigh 150+. Struggling to breathe, getting winded just from getting off the couch. It's no way to spend your limited time in this world.
Oh and I forgot to mention a cool fact in my previous comment: that CO2 you're breathing out - that is your fat. That's where your fat goes when you burn it, you literally breathe it out. And the carbs of course. Your body turns the food you eat into energy and CO2. Unless you eat too much, then it turns it into fat to store it for later.
It doesn't need aliens. The people would have to encounter such things as the ruins of Jericho (destroyed at the beginning of the new kingdom period), or later cities burned down during the late bronze age collapse. Either could easily represent an extent of destruction incomprehensible to unsophisticated herdsmen. Later it was Greece or even Rome itself, before the area became a part of the empire. It's pretty clear that angelos was something like a courier or mailman, for example, and only later it acquired the mystical meaning.
Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances
1. Can obviously be made
2. Can be made very fast
There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.
If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.
The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.
It's the other way around. Think about it, how would the oil travel to the rest of the tool that's not touching the felt?
Felt is bad, it wicks away oil from the tool's surface and often absorbs moisture from the air. Tools placed on clean felt will often rust where they touch the felt.
You need to mitigate its wicking and hygroscopic properties by applying lots of oil to it. Use rubber mats instead.
> The thing is, you could probably create something FAR more horrific by simply mixing spent nuclear fuel with TNT...
Nope. It turns out you need astronomical amounts of spent waste to noticeably impact a large population.
The trial of Jose Padilla (aka "the dirty bomber") has the best data on this. He went to Al Qaeda, offering to build and detonate a dirty bomb. Al Qaeda wasn't at all interested. They had run the actual numbers from an engineering standpoint (unlike everyone else who had just said "ooh scary bad!"), and demonstrated clearly that dirty bombs aren't actually a viable mass casualty weapon.
Before the Jose Padilla trial, we used to hear lots about dirty bombs. Since then, not at all. It's not that people forgot about them. They just aren't actually a credible engineering threat. It's too hard to get enough material distributed over a large enough area to measurably impact health outcomes for the impacted population. That was a surprise that came out of the trial.
There are lots of attack types to worry about. Dirty bombs are very far down that list.
Not that I want to be necessarily contrarian, but just a few months ago I decided to stop worrying about using my phone, and it honestly feels like the most liberating decision of my life.
There is nothing wrong with it.
I think that many people feel like their lives suck in some way that they can't define or explain, and they want something to blame it on, and their phone is an excellent target. It's relatively new. Of course it's the source of recent problems. It's CONVENIENT. You can do something about it by simply not looking at it.
Your phone is not the source of any of your problems.
>I think that many people feel like their lives suck in some way that they can't define or explain, and they want something to blame it on, and their phone is an excellent target.
They will blame anything but the billionaires.
But to be a devil's advocate: I think most phone issues arise from a child's use of them. They don't have the discipline to put a phone down, and then it enshrines habits that last into adult hood. Gen Z is the testing grounds for such a phenomenon.
Sadly, working adults who need to chat with work, get calls for interviews, schedule and get updates on appointments, and check on family do need to have their phone on the ready. I don't think anyone is condemning the people here. Just the system.
The turn-off-the-phone crowd tend to be in situations where parents, young kids, doctors, interview calls, etc. getting in touch isn't a priority. Yes, voicemail is a partial answer but an imperfect one in this day and age. Didn't even used to have and just got messages on a voicemail device (after the mid-80s or so) but there's a much greater expectation of being able to reach people easily today.
Varies a lot on your job or family situation. As expected, minimum wages jobs can have the most abusive behaviors in terms of respecting your time.
And of course,culture.30 years ago, if your kid got hurt you wouldn't be considered an ignorant parent if the school took an hour to get a hold of you on a phone. They may even call your work and have that relayed over to you. Now, good luck even having the chance to speak to a human that can receive the message, let alone relay the message to the right branch and team to you.
Concrete statistician: I can learn the problem in its full complexity, unlike the dumdum below me.
Abstract thinker: I understand it, because I can reduce its dimensity to a small number of parameters.
CS: I can predict this because I have statistics about its past behavior.
AT: I told you so.
CS: You couldn't possibly know this, because it has never happened before. You suffer from the hindsight bias.
AT: But I told you.
CS: It has never happened, you couldn't possibly have statistics of when such things occur. You were just lucky.
CS: I'm smart, I can be taught anything
AT: You are stupid because you need to be taught everything.
War (or another sort of mass death or other kind of suffering) emerges.
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