randomstudent's comments

As a counterexample, every time I have valiantly tried to use Grit to face a challenge that's uncomfortable and hard for me naturally I have failed miserably. In all occasions, I would have been better just quitting the challenge or doing it in a different way that didn't require as much grit.

Yes, you can say that I just wasn't "gritty" enough, but that's the same as saying that everyone who injures themselves in exercise wasn't "careful" enough. You're redefining "careful" in order for your theory to be right. Sometimes bad outcomes happen even when you do everything you can.

My goal here is not only to discourage you from trying hard to achieve your goals (that's a goal, of course). The main thing here is to get ready for life to kick you in the face no matter how much grit you have, and sometimes, precisely for having a lot of grit (no, I won't go into details).

The most important skill isn't grit, it's the wisdom to decide when applying grit is worth it. And no, I don't know how you train this or even if it is trainable. It might be just luck.

Instead of relying on grit, stick to what you do best and don't try to use grit as a replacement for talent or other qualities. If someone is naturally better than you, in a competition they'll just get grittier than their baseline and eclipse you.

This is anecdotal but so is the linked article. For any aphorism there is an equally valid and opposite aphorism.

You might also find yourself buying tuberculosis with your milk, but that's your choice.

> A bloke my sister knows (she's a nurse), was diagnosed with 'hypertension not otherwise specified', at the ripe old age of 31. But they didn't catch it early because he 'felt fine'. He wasn't overweight unhealthy. But he needs new kidneys now!

It's possible that kidney disease caused hypertension in that case. It's pretty much impossible to prove which one came first in many cases. None of this argues in favor or against regular checkups, it was just something I thought was interesting to refer.

It also runs on Google's servers, which makes it unacceptable for many use cases.

Unsong is not exactly rational fiction. The author itself claims it isn't (some people claim it is despite this fact, though).

This is a major problem for me when reading digital material, especially if not on something like a PC. On the comuter I can at least Ctrl+F for the part I'm after.

Cool, thanks. That definitely answers my questions. They really should link the study!

The part about distinguishing the animals from one another is still a problem, but I think that if Pokemon were actually real animals kids would distinguish them just fine anyway.

This is very interesting. Do you know if they have any interesting misconceptions about those animals they know about but have never seen (assuming you yourself know enough about rabbits, badgers, hares and such to know that they are misconceptions)?

It's interesting when many people know about a certain phenomenon through media or things like cartoons, which obviously distort reality beyond any possibility of recognition.

The most amazing example I've ever seen is the one about bullfights. Apparently, many Americans know about bullfights from a single Bugs Bunny sketch, in which he is dressed as a Matador and kinda "dances" with the bull in the arena. This apparently made many people think that that's basically what happens in a bullfight. Then you get some nasty culture shock when people watch the real thing, as in this reddit thread (WARNING: video with blood and violence against animals, first in CGI then in real life): https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/68i332/to_those_who...

The comments were really surprising to me. I would expect most people from outside of Spain, Latin America and Portugal not to know about bullfights, but I definitely didn't expect people to know about it from a cartoon and harbor so many misconceptions about what it really is!

Spoiler: in a bullfight, the matador does nasty things to the bull (like sticking short spears with hooks so that they don't come out when the bull moves), dodges the bull's charge while distracting it with a cape, and in the end he kills it with a sword through the back. If the killing blow fails to kill the bull, they kill the animal with a knife just below the brain. Also, Matador literally means killer in Spanish, because he kills the bull.

Regarding the study they mention(the one that shows that children recognize Pokemon better than real animals and plants).

There is an important aspect of this finding that the article doesn't discuss. They don't link to the study, so I can't check for myself.

All the Pokemon names they mention are first generation. There are only 150 first generation Pokemon. It's a relatively small closed corpus. They also have bright colors and are very easy to distinguish. How many species of animals or plants does England have? Way more than 150, of course. How large was the sample from which the ones used in the study were chosen? It wouldn't surprise me if there were more than 150 relevant species that are needed to be knowledgeable in "nature stuff" in England.

Of course kids in urban environments don't know much about naming animal or plant species, that's just common sense. My beef with the study is that it doesn't seem to go beyond the common-sense notion because of the problems above... Knowing a small limited corpus of highly distinct entities will always be easier than knowing the very large (although still finite) corpus of animal and plant species that might be quite similar on the surface (e.g. cork oak vs holm oak, bee vs wasp, cat vs lynx, etc)

Do you mean CSF instead (Cerebrospinal fluid)? I'm not qualified to answer that, sorry. But my best guess is that the problem is almost 100% intracellular.

My very cursory analysis, after skimming the article follows. First, the article in general is quite misleading. It's written in a language that a layman would understand, but in a way that causes such layman to misunderstand some crucial points. I don't know if this is on purpose, or if the author is just honestly trying to address a complex topic and failing.

- Part 1. Background

> Life on earth depends on appropriate pH levels in and around living organisms and cells.

I take issue with this sentence. This is obviously true, as life must carefully control the concentrations of some substances inside and outside the cell. However, this makes it seem like pH is uniquely special. This is not true: pH is merely a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution. If this is meant to address the layman, as it's supposed to, such clarification is important. In fact, I think many of the myths around pH would be better addressed by making the pH concept taboo, and talking instead of "the concentration of H+ ions in solution".

> As a comparison, in the past 100 years with increasing industrialization, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 because of increasing CO2 deposition.

This is very important for the bisphere as a whole, but useless to understand the impact of pH changes in the body. I don't understand the reason for this section.

> This results in a diet that may induce metabolic acidosis which is mismatched to the genetically determined nutritional requirements

No. This is not true. Such diet may wreck your kidneys due to hypertension, and the kidney damage will give you metabolic acidosis. The diet itself will not give you metabolic acidosis, as long as your lungs and kidneys are fine. This is written in a very misleading way.

> With aging, there is a gradual loss of renal acid-base regulatory function and a resultant increase in diet-induced metabolic acidosis while on the modern diet

Now we're talking. I don' know if this is exactly true, but at least it makes sense.

- Part 2. The Role of pH in Various Cells, Organs, and Membranes

None of the mechanisms described here have anything to do with the systemic blood pH. The author doesn't say it, and he should. This section adds confusion and very little understanding

- 3. Chronic Acidosis and Bone Disease

This section is a little confusing. Many studies, little understanding.

The interesting part is this:

> There is evidence that in healthy humans the increased sodium in the diet can predict the degree of hyperchloremic metabolic acidosis when consuming a net acid producing diet

The study this is taken from has does have some regressions that advance this point, but the correlation is so weak I'm not sure we should take the results at face value.

- 4. Alkaline Diets and Musce

> Conditions such as chronic renal failure that result in chronic metabolic acidosis result in accelerated breakdown in skeletal muscle [40]. Correction of acidosis may preserve muscle mass in conditions where muscle wasting is common such as diabetic ketosis, trauma, sepsis, chronic obstructive lung disease, and renal failure

While you can manipulate the pH f patines with no functioning kidneys by giving them tablets with NaHCO3 (an alkali), you should never, ever extrapolate this to the diet of healthy people. Even in patients with kidney failure, doctors don't try to correct the pH with diet alone.

- 5. Alkaline Supplementation and Growth Hormone

> It has long been known that severe forms of metabolic acidosis in children, such as renal tubular acidosis,

No, no, no... Again, don't extrapolate from serious kidney diseases to healthy subjects.

- 7. Alkalinity and Chemotherapy

Some drugs work better with low pH and some work better with high pH. Again, you won't change the pH with diet, so this is useless to a discussion of Alkaline diet

> It has been suggested that inducing metabolic alkalosis may be useful in enhancing some treatment regimes by using sodium bicarbonate, carbicab, and furosemide

As you can see, even when you cant to induce alkalosis, you sue actual drugs, and not dietary changes (one of these drugs, furosemide, works by manipulation kidney function, it's not merely an alkali concentrate).

The discussion and conclusion say that the evidence is weak for lots of things. The only stroong part is the K/Na ratio. If the Alkali diet does this, then its benefits have nothing to do with blood alkalinization per se.

The K:Na balance is very interesting, especially because pre-agriculture societies usually have very low levels of hypertension, and this is probably the cause. Na+ and K+ balance does have something to do with acid-base regulation, because of urinary excretion of HCO3- and H+, but the benefits of a low sodium diet seem to be related to hypertension and not to acid-base regulation.

I haven't read the study, and I don't want to claim that Alkaline diets have zero supporting evidence. I just wanted to argue against the claim that your pH is "too acidic" or "too alkaline" or whatever. Any potential benefits of an alkaline diet are surely independent of the pH variation they induce, because the variation will be close to 0 in any case, if your body's working properly. The stress hypothesis is interesting (I'm not saying it's even remotely correct! only that it's an interesting twist on the crackpot claims I've heard elsewhere), but you'll never be able to gauge how stressed your regulation mechanisms are just by measuring the blood's pH. You'll have to find some upstream biomarker that measures "stress" directly.

This is very interesting, and I particularly like the causal test of inducing sensitization to the antigens present in the bacteria through exposure. It's probably the strongest causal link you're going to get in humans (you can't infect them with the bacteria to see if it induces nerve damage for real!).

The problem here seems to be that this doesn't measure how feasible it is to reverse the tendency for the immune system to attack the nerves. Even if you erradicate the causative bacteria, once the immune system has started to attack the nerves, it's possible that it won't stop. Maybe the presence of the antigens (the proteins that are attacket) in the bacteria is needed as the trigger that starts the attack, but once that's gone, the low level presence of the same antigens in the nerves might be enough to sustain the attack. On a more optimistic note, maybe the erradication of the bacteria leads to a lack of simulation that causes the aggressive cells tow ither and die. This must be tested experimentally.

If the autoimmune ttack doesn't stop after erradication of bacteria, maybe a case can be made for aggressive prevention with testing for those bacteria periodically, ,especially in families predisposed to the disease, and prompt erradication once they appear. Maybe there are correlations between diet and the presence of such bacteria, which we can exploit.

I think the long term impact of these studies will depend on how reversible the "state of war" between the immune system and the nerves is.

You still have gut bacteria in the small intestine, and they're probably as important as the ones in the large intestine. I can guarantee you that without both the small and the large intestine, you do notice a difference (but unfortunately for reasons more serious than just not having the bacteria). Glad you're adapting well to living without the large intestine!

Probably not. Unlike MS, which is an autoimmune disease, ALS is not autoimmune. The exact cause is only known in some cases, but it seems to stem from problems with the machinery inside the cell, not an aggression by the immune system from outside the cell.

> Apparently at the current moment the best is to keep your PH value in the body neutral. It's particularly important to prevent "acidity"

If you're talking about a neutral pH as in pH = 7.0 (the usual accepted definition of neutral), these claims are contradictory. The pH of the human blood is usually between 7.35 and 7.45. This is usually way less acicic than the neutral pH of 7.0. Furthermore, a pH of 7 is usually associated with very serious disease (and yes, it is causal: if you inject/ingest enough acid to make the pH drop to 7.0 you're in pretty bad shape, especially because it means the regulatory mechanisms aren't working as they should). I don't know who that "professional nutritionist" is, but this sounds like crackpot-level science.

Also, to the best of my knowledge, it's extremely hard to change the blood's pH with diet... The body has a multi-layered system specifically dedicated to keeping the pH in the normal range (7.35-7.45), and that's independent of what you eat. Maybe you're mistaking it for changing the urine's pH, which is much easier to do, and can be achieved through diet alone. Unfortunately, changing the urine's pH doesn't seem to achieve much beyond preventing some inds of kidney stones...

> People are not very rational. Almost all trips in cars are very short, yet people are still very concerned about range in electric cars

As they should be... What good is a car if it can't be used for the occasional long trip? I expect my car to be up to the task to go visit friends or family 200km away on a whim, after coming home from work, instead of sitting idly while my battery is charging for a couple hours... I'm sure many users have the same expectations. Are we irrational?

Yes. This Elixir library aims to have a virtual DOM on the server and send minimal diffs to the client: https://github.com/grych/drab

It can already do this for some kinds of diffs, but it doesn't have a full VDOM yet. It basically allows you to build interactive pages without writing any javascript.

Thanks. I'll read these papers he I have the time. I agree that gamma knife surgery on the hypothalamus is probably not yet ready for prime time (and it might never be if we can find something better)

> Hopefully some day we will find ways to drive repair of these circuits.

Any idea on how we may do it? AFAIK, currently we have no good mechanisms to "repair" individual brain circuits: even in strokes, we mainly exercise the affected area so that neural plasticity repurposes other neurons (usually in the cerbral cortex) to take over lost functions.

Does the hypothalamus have this degree of plasticity?