samrmay's comments

The article does specifically mention that the strain used produces an antibody which survives in the gut and may demolish your gut microbiome. Also one of the footnotes mentions that producing alcohol instead of lactic acid as a byproduct may not be as harmless at it seems.

I'm also not sure that taking issue with a company bypassing systemic protections against dangerous drugs is an appeal to authority.

"Social media bad" is much more palpable than grappling with the fact that mental illness is a complicated problem with many contributing factors. Very frustrating because the researchers suggest increasing mental health resources and exercise, whereas the headline suggests social media as the much easier scapegoat.

I love the idea of a future historian looking back at the timeline of human history, seeing immense suffering (including worse pandemics), and laughing at us for thinking our struggle is important enough to create a new era. Perhaps they’ll just accept it (like how we accept year 0), but the thought is very entertaining.

The article mentions a myriad of factors that correlate with mental health issues going into adolescence. It’s interesting that the headline targets social media, as the body of the article doesn’t seem to highlight it as an especially strong correlation.

As a side note, the differing trends of boys and girls after adolescence is really interesting.

> However, it recognised that girls' self-esteem and wellbeing stabilises as they move into their late teens, whereas it continues to drop for boys

Will have to read the source material to see if they propose any causes for that

I've heard other people say similar claims (about Twitter hosting equal/greater amounts of hate speech, threats, etc.). Totally plausible and I wouldn't be surprised if it were definitively true, but have there been any data driven studies to back it up?

Don't know if sentiment analysis ML algorithms are powerful enough to do something like this, but there has to be some scientific consensus on the relative hateful content that each site allows right? Or at least some pretty graphs.

A 15% shift, while quite substantive, is actually a little lower than I would've guessed. I could totally see this number shifting based on geopolitical climate, but that percentage switch is lower than it could be. Perhaps a minor silver lining?

Correct. Was talking about the sheer size of many countries in NA makes it a much different situation than many countries in Europe. Could've been much clearer so I apologize.

NA’s geography does make it slightly less prone to cycling/walking based transportation, but it seems people use a predilection towards cars as an excuse not to evolve. Super interesting that the shift to biking in Amsterdam was a concerted effort rather than a natural shift.

I think there is also some outcome bias towards cars because they’re a comfortable/ known quantity for most people.

I find that most are exactly as you mentioned. Definitely depends why you’re reading self help books, but generally speaking, I think that general philosophy and “mental model” books are more useful for evolving your world view.

The other general reason to read self help seems to be to gain practical benefit from concrete knowledge (as opposed to a world view change). In that case I would just suggest psychology or business books (at least the ones that tend to shy away from the self-help genre).