buzzcut's comments

Whatever your political views, the ellipses in the quote are deeply misleading, and in fact make his quote seem to say something Joel emphatically did not say.

Here is the full quote:

>It’s impossible not to see the parallel: the only way to build a successful world today is to allow the contributions of everyone. Carving up the world into us vs. them, building walls, and demonizing religions, nations, and refugees is both morally repugnant and counterproductive, and it goes so much against the spirit of Stack Overflow that as a community we must speak out.

It's hard to imagine a description of Kissinger that is more unfounded and, sorry to say, more ill-informed than this one.

> "there aren't doctors out there recommending cutting out fats and subsisting on sugar"

That's true as far as it goes, but the internal fight inside the medical research community was whether it was fat or sugar that was the culprit in a host of physical problems. Fat won in a slam dunk, even though it turns out to be wrong. Doctors are largely not researchers, and they are taught what was the conventional wisdom. There is no suggestion of malice, just bad (or at least overturned, but it was actually bad in this case) research that has been promulgated in the medical community. A lot of doctors think fat is bad and pay less attention to sugar.

The Guardian recently wrote about this: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-con...

So, it's not bullshit to say a lot of doctors don't understand the nutrition.

OK, later! :)

> "Fat people just need to eat less, and the issue basically comes down to compliance.:

On oversimplification, but the crux of the issue. The astronomical failure rate is because of compliance. The prescription you seem to be suggest is "comply more! comply better!" but the biology of this is exactly why it fails so often. The type of food you eat is what sets you up for sustainable long-term success or its opposite. What you wave away with a wash of the hand--compliance--is the reason people fail and more willpower is not the issue and not a solution. It's a dysfunction of the hormones brought on by high insulin resistance brought on by excessive sugar and flour, which becomes a hunger trap, unless you add fat to your diet, which is exactly what people are told not to do. So, I do think hunger tends to differ when you suffer from fatty liver disease and insulin resistance. People can endure calorie restriction and lose weight for a while doing low-fat but they do not stay on it. Saying that people should just comply more is like telling someone with sleep apnea to sleep better. They need a different intervention.

edit--A failure rate of 80-90% is not an anomaly, it's a colossal failure. It's not something to be overcome, it's an indication of wrongness. By asking for more compliance you are asking people to fight their biology and they will lose this fight. Instead the intervention should be to employ their biology as their ally, and lose weight more easily and without much hunger and that's possible. It's just not helpful to tell people to eat less. We've been telling them that for forty years.

(Side note. The 4% bodyfat in the UofM study you mention is an assumption of yours, and not the starting weight of the people in the study. I think you're unfairly dismissing the study and presenting it as if it's a binary condition between starving/not starving, and that may be a thing, but it's not certain that it is. I'm merely cautiously using it as evidence that calorie restriction is difficult (actually more than difficult) to maintain, which anyway we all know from experience. It would be good to explore other studies on the topic). Intermittent fasting, for example, is vastly easier than consistent calorie restriction, and you're consuming the same number of calories as calorie restriction (if you design it right). That's not a matter of willpower, that's a different intervention).

Unfortunately I don't have time to continue the conversation, but take the time to explore some of the links I posted (there are tons more)--they go into way, way more detail and make the argument better than I have.

> "No dude, you are ignoring the fact that these people did not have ample fat stores."

I don't think I am ignoring it. You seem to be asserting that their issues with calorie restriction were lack of body fat. There is no evidence for that I am aware of. A simple rejoinder based on anyone's experience, do fat people get hungry? If they do, why? They have all that energy available. But I don't need to rely on arguments like that, since in the vast corpus of research on this at this point, it's pretty well established that calorie restriction by itself (even with exercise) does not work long-term. The failure rate is astronomical and it is in part due to what plain old calorie restriction as we've been told to do it does to metabolic energy and also due to the psychology of hunger. Also, and this is very important, a full fast does not have these effects according to the evidence. People can totally abstain from food for very long periods of time (depending on body fat), with very little hunger. It is smaller scale calorie reductions, without breaks (like the breaks intermittent fasting provides) and without much dietary fat since fat is highly satiating, that cause these reactions to calorie restriction.

> "This is basically unrelated to your statements about insulin though, so don't conflate the two."

Again, I'm not. I was responding to the request for a source on the idea of energy output reduction in response to lower calories. I'm not claiming there is a link between energy output reduction and insulin.

Fat people can get energy from fat stores, just not in the way we are typically told. If it was impossible to get energy from fat no one would ever lose weight, which is trivially and obviously not true.

Unfortunately I can only summarize.

On the starvation study it's merely one example that highlights how calorie restriction affects people. Yes, it's an extreme version, but it is different only in degree from any other calorie restriction, and when people try to reduce by X calories, it's probably a linear effect; more restriction, more of these effects. Oddly though, fasting tends not to have these effects, it's only in sustained calorie restriction, so fasting in various forms is one of the tools people can use to lose weight.

As for the lowered energy output Jason Fung wrote (pg. 53 of the Obesity Code, "One major problem is that the basal metabolic rate does not stay stable. Decreased caloric intake can decrease basal metabolic rate by up to 40 percent. We shall see that increased caloric intake can increase it by 50%."

If you want to learn more here are some sources:

Jason Fung - The Obesity Code: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01C6D0LCK/ref=dp-kindle-re...

Robert Lustig on sugar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

and also here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxyxcTZccsE

Peter Attia on ketosis and fat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqwvcrA7oe8

Reversal of diabetes by diet, also Jason Fung: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAwgdX5VxGc

"Self-inflict."

It's actually a fairly complicated and can be quite difficult for people to break out of, even people who desperately want to change. When people follow the standard guidelines (which are beginning, slowly, to change) to avoid fat and reduce calories, they end up feeling hungry all the time, and have to white knuckle their way through. This is not a state that people can maintain long-term.

Starvation studies from the University of Minnesota have been described this way: "During the semi-starvation phase the changes were dramatic. Beyond the gaunt appearance of the men, there were significant decreases in their strength and stamina, body temperature, heart rate and sex drive. The psychological effects were significant as well. Hunger made the men obsessed with food. They would dream and fantasize about food, read and talk about food and savor the two meals a day they were given. They reported fatigue, irritability, depression and apathy. Interestingly, the men also reported decreases in mental ability, although mental testing of the men did not support this belief."

In addition, there is evidence that the body begins to reduce energy output in response to reduced energy input, thus making the advice every overweight person hears from nearly every source to "eat less and move more" a load of nonsense. That can work short-term, but the combination of reduced energy output and constant hunger make that recipe very ineffective long-term.

There is even more to complicate the story (e.g. it is common for overweight people to feel hungry even with massive amounts of energy stored in fat due to some of the effects of what's now being called variously, metabolic syndrome, syndrome X and diabesity).

In short, when people become overweight, which is a progressive condition of insulin resistance that grows slowly over time, or in other words and emergent hormonal dysfunction because of diet, they cannot "eat less and move more." To that extent it is not self-inflicted especially since millions of Americans are doing exactly that as told by their doctors and it is having no effect.

The only way to really change body composition long-term, is to change diet in a way that is at odds with what doctors learned twenty years ago in the two days they studied nutrition in medical school, which, as it turns out, is wrong.

Start spending some time reading Cal Newport's blog. You still have the problem of deciding which things are important to you, but just immersing yourself in how he approaches focus and deep habits, about how he prioritizes his work, will send you in the right direction.

If you time block your available time as he does, you're forced to make choices--there is only so much time available, obviously--and the discipline starts to emerge by that simple process.

Start here, but spend an afternoon going through his articles when you have a free chunk of time. If it resonates with you, and you adopt some of these strategies your focus and productivity will both improve.

http://calnewport.com/blog/2013/12/21/deep-habits-the-import...

At 52, he had no such notion at all, I can virtually guarantee it. That employment model, predicated on strong unions in most cases, was well on its way to oblivion in the mid 80s, and by the time he was actively working, say in the late 80s/early 90s it was on life support. By that time there were vanishingly few people who though they were going to GM or US Steel for a lifetime job with a pension. This millennial vs. the 50-year-old thing is crazily ahistorical.

It's about combating injustice and miscreant behavior where we find it. You don't act that way. Super. Neither do I. Criticizing the behavior in others (which, make no mistake, is all motivated by gender) doesn't push you into some sort of solidarity of villainy. The instant recourse to "not all men" and "not my friends" is a kind of solipsism that's not helpful. Yes, a two-year-old can tell you "not all men." Now that we have that observation out of the way, what's next? Are we done? Are you more upset at the tone of the article you don't quite like, or at the rape threats?

Just in case you don't know, you're part of the problem.

This is built on so many bad assumptions. At best the "rules" it's trying to enforce are training-wheel rules, the sorts of rules given to novice writers to help them avoid flabby, purple writing.

But the assumption that short sentences are better than long sentences, or that simple sentences are better than complex sentences is just wrong. There are all kinds of reasons why you might use one type of sentence over the other or vary them for effect. You might be concerned about rhythm, or you might be attempting to establish a certain tone, distance, closeness, formality, or lack of.

We have this weird cultural obsession with the clarity, brevity, and simpleness of writing. Jacques Barzun even wrote a writing manual called Simple and Direct, as if these are the only virtues to be found in writing.

But I think you want as many tools as possible to achieve the effects you want. There is a huge rich tradition here, that we've largely lost, a tradition that teaches about hypotactic and paratactic sentences, that teaches about periodic and loose sentences, that teaches how to make left and right branching sentences, that teaches subordination, that teaches rhetorical devices, and that advocates (at times) longer, more complex sentences for richer and denser writing.

Thankfully there are a number of books out (some of them) recently that seem to be fighting back against the austerity view of writing.

They include, if you're interested: - Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences - Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence - Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences, Syntax as Style - Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose

I'd just add, there is nothing wrong with being simple and clear. There is nothing wrong with cutting out needless or weak adverbs. But there is something wrong with worshiping the austerity style as, at all times, the best and the only way to go. There are lots and lots of reasons and occasions to deviate from it, but the style orthodoxy these days is the one assumed by that (admittedly cool) website.

The one thing this country (I'm speaking here of the US) doesn't have any discernable lack of is massive herds of people who are desperate to make more money. Lots of it. Piles of it. Mountains of it. And right now. If there is a clear and unambiguous, nearly universal, practically uncontested value in this country it's to make more money.

That's not necessarily bad, but it often is, and frequently has both bad personal and economic consequences.

Of course it's not even clear what we're talking about since "making money" isn't really defined in the article, and the kinds of salaries that are easily within reach of, I would assert, most professional HN readers (who are programmers), are airily dismissed with the claim of heavy taxation (which are actually near historical lows), and the costs of "maintaining a certain lifestyle" which is more or less a personal choice. If you are a person living in NYC or SF and you make $125,000 a year, and are unable to max out your 401k AND save at least a grand a month, then you are making extremely poor decisions. Now, that may not be the kind of money the author has in mind, but it ain't bad, and you can lead a decent lifestyle and save at the same time without much effort.

There is, I think, some small truth to the claim that there is more talk of changing the world in SV than at, say, Lehman Brothers, but I think it's slightly naive not to see that this is often a thin tissue over the desire to make money. Not too many people go into to business and don't want to make money and a lot of it if they can. Talk of changing the world is prevalent precisely because the current software revolution makes it astoundingly more likely that you can make money AND change the world. That's certainly not true if you start a bodega and probably not true if you start a hedge fund. But in software it is. Software companies are changing the world in ways that are both trivial and profound, and some of them are even making a boatload of money at it. I don't see a lack of people who want to make money anywhere. I see a set of people who recognize that they can potentially have an outsized impact on the world and make a lot of money because software makes this massively more likely than at any time in the past.

It just seems to me that the author both assumes a problem that doesn't really exist, and proposes an answer to said problem that is presented as more sure and easier than it actually is. But anyway I think the confusion is because we shift from getting rich at the beginning to "make enough money to be comfortable" at the end, so it's slightly confused: it's not about all out self-interested greediness he tells us, except at the end it is. And the social consequences of that mindset are just conveniently ignored. In the end there just doesn't have to be strong competition between the desire to make money and the desire to also do decent things in the world. It only seems that way when one of those desires (the first one) is grossly out of whack.

Oh I read it, but since it was confined to programming only, leaving out the vast domain that is the rest of the world, and with the weight of evidence so far is on the other side, it didn't seem as interesting to me. In addition to the possible methodological problems mentioned in the Ars article. In any case, the state of the evidence, always subject to revision of course, is that innate talent is largely not in play.

I see break dancing in your future!

Two points

1) That this seems intuitively obvious is precisely what I was referring to in my post. This is a scientific question, to the extent it can be answered and we should probably be unsatisfied with what appears to be obvious. The research, as I understand it, just doesn't bear out your observation.

2) I think why people stick with something is a super fascinating question. What's that all about? Why did you stick with programming and become good at it? Why do I find the same tasks utterly soul crushing and frustrating to the point of rage? Why do I persist in taking Latin as I am now? I've almost quit half a dozen times when it's gotten really hard, but I don't quit. There is something that keeps me coming back to it. I suck at it right now, but I'm not quitting, in fact, I've been working pretty hard at it. So to me that's the research I'd love to see: why do you stick with programming when I, despite numerous attempts, just don't like it and give up on it easily?

But your physical form w/r/t a sport isn't really a matter of controversy since no one thinks a 5'7" person is going to become a basketball great, although it's not totally impossible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_Webb

But even in athletics it's more about the type of practice as shown by this study of swimmers: http://www.lillyfellows.org/Portals/0/Chambliss-Mundanity%20...

What I mean is, of course there is "natural talent" in being 6'7" that pushes you towards one sport and away from another, but that's not that interesting I don't think. What's interesting are those things-- chess, music, writing, film making, etc.-- that aren't tied to physical types, and so far the evidence seems to be that talent is largely a myth.

Now, the interesting question you raise is why do some people keep going and others give up.

"And while this is somewhat true, it gets the causation backwards. It was obvious to me from a very early age that I was better at sight reading as a singer, so I spent more time doing it."

This is self-refuting really. You admit that you spend a lot more time on one skill and then report that you are better at that skill and are hopeless at the one you tinkered with.

K Anders Ericsson, who is one of the sources of the research on this speculates somewhere (I can't recall of the top of my head where), that there are very likely extremely small marginal differences in initial aptitude, but that these alone are enough to garner praise and tiny edges in performance that are self-rewarding to the practitioner and that these advantages make them more likely to continue with the work required to get better. That's not natural talent, if it's true, that's just a minuscule advantage that may help foster interest and practice and lead to better skill.

The 10,000 hours rule isn't someone's fantasy, it's based on an increasingly large body of evidence, but this article just dismisses the evidence with a wave of the hand and some assertions. A good selection of research is in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Other people here have mentioned also that it's a specific kind of practice that's called for, not just mindlessly amassing hours, but rather relentlessly working on your weak spots and on skills that are just a bit outside what you can currently do.

The Grandin book looks interesting, but this excerpt just seems lazy.

There is also the recent research on grit by Angela Duckworth who is demonstrating that success depends on perseverance. That observation probably seems pretty intuitive, but she's demonstrating it with research. The "I was hopeless" reaction to something hard is just a failure of grit. The author has no idea how they would do if the ground it out through the really tough parts.

I also find that when I talk to people about this they are often very resistant to this model of essentially talent-free skill development. It makes a lot people uncomfortable, and just seems wrong to them. I think maybe the notion that it's all innate talent absolves them of the need to work hard to develop advanced skill. Instead nature capriciously doles out talent and that's the story of why I'm not ...

The author is a her.

Good point. I'll try to add a little qualifier.

I would say that sales is definitely a creative task (but you're right that's the important question w/r/t Ariely). There is a rote aspect to working the phones, or keeping records, but sales is a performance skill that requires a lot of thought about strategy, rhetoric, timing, etc. etc. By no means is it rocket science (I wrote a bit about that here: http://www.fogcreek.com/guide/The-most-basic-things-your-com...), but there is a lot to consider and get good at.