reo
13d ago
dunno, why it has an Elijah under the Juniper tree feeling.
The physical work I was referring was either:
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Heavy Kettlebell Work (it could be 16K or 20K but not above that). The simplest is goto a shop, swap your credit card, pick it and walk back to your home. start with 10 minutes (= set a timer for 10 minutes, pick it with one hand, two hands, exchange hands while moving around, and move around without putting it down till the bell rings; that's all). Just for 1 week, do it daily 10-11 minutes. Do it any time in the day or night. Hell, do it before sending the first message into TheMotte. Seven Days.
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Heavy Resistance Training: 70-80% of your Rmax, 10-20 reps (in whichever way) within 5 minutes each, for Squats, Benchpress, and Deadlift. If interested, add Overhead Press. The Intensity (in terms of weight, not in terms of inducing fatigue) should be high.
Walking, running in hospital, mandatory steps all are low intensity workouts <-- not what I was suggesting.
reo
13d ago
This story looks very different from the one which you wrote a few months ago.
reo
13d ago
ever tried the opposite? do lot of physical work and your depression may reduce or you may become too tired to be aware of your depression.
reo
13d ago
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Kettlebells. 12K for average woman, 16K for average man. At max, go one step down (8k, 12k respectively). You can do Rows, Floor Presses, Swings (will have to learn that), Squats (goblet, front, back). And you can just pick it up and go for some time / distance (Kettlebell Mile is also a thing).
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Pullup bar (either get one which you can setup in the doorframe) or fix it outside.
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one speed Rope.
reo
16d ago
try Robert B Parker Spenser series. genre is hardboiled detective fiction. i started with Looking for Rachel Wallace. i am 7 down in the series.
hard SF: if you haven't, then Anathem and Seveneves.
reo
18d ago
all LLMs actually trained on your essays, which is why they took your styles. even their alter-name AI is derived from your username. see.
Sensible Savings Saturday
Sustainable Spending Saturday
Savings and Spending Saturday
Savings Saturday
Securities Saturday
reo
19d ago
if it is raining, then there must be a Rain-god who is calculating the humidity and temperature and doing the rains?
your logical leap is like that: a process is observed, so a specific doer-entity must exist behind it.
you are thinking inside the Indo-European grammatical structures, where every verb demands a subject. It is a local linguistic habit, not some universal metaphysical proof.
You are using a linguistic tautology - of course the subject exists, because the sentence required one.
reo
19d ago
Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
from Burton Watson - The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (Book 2, last passage).
The point being "I" is not stable between a dream, when it was butterfly, and the woken up form of Chuang Chou. So, one cannot latch on to that unstable "I".
reo
19d ago
i have a problem with "I exist". what is the "I"? where is it? is it entirely built upon something which is there in a group of cells or atoms or has it come from somewhere else? Like what some other traditions claim to be - individual consciousness is part of the Universal Consciousness (like Advaita Vedanta). You need to explain if the self is some real, separable entiry or a convenient fiction the thinking tells itself.
Another thing: the self who thinks, and judges, and values things is not derived from just that bag of atoms bounded by the skin. It has inherited all the values from its upbringing, culture, education and then made up of that. Since your Self has been shaped by external values, the moral conclusions it reaches are not derivations from first principles - they are built from externalities.
This takes us into the problem of Ship of Theseus. If you replace each atom of your body with another, does your Self remain the same? What will happen when all those replaced atoms are placed similarly in front of you? which one is the real You? Where is the limit between You and the external World? Is the 10 year old self the same as the 30 year old self? is the thinking of those two selfs same? what is the common ground that binds the self and thinking and their values? And which Self, the 10-year Self or the 30-year Self, your framework wants to preserve? And is the transition between them a moral success or failure of your framework?
I have not even gone to the next step of "The self has value". Because that takes us into an Is-Ought problem.
reo
20d ago
you will have to look at Lower Crossed syndrome. eg link. (i am not a pro physiotherapist). but the sequence would be something like this:
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make the correct diagnosis. self-diagnosis can be done but keep in mind about repeating different tests to make the diagnosis more certain (don't rely on a single test). You can do videos of your posture and deeply feel your muscle while starting various movements (which one contracts first is important, which you check by feeling that muscle).
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finding the reason of why the glutes are sleeping or why others are firing first or firing more. two big examples are long sitting hours and shallow breathing (less diaphragmatic breathing, more thoracic breathing). those would need to be corrected.
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Then step by step approach to correction. This would include:
A. Relaxing the misfiring / early firing muscles - this you do with foam rolls, egg/tennis ball rolls, or hot fomentation over those particular muscles. This will relax these muscles and stop their inhibitory (automatic relaxing) effect on their opposite group (in this case, the glutes).
B. Relearn the correct firing pattern. The example exercises are: B1. Hip Hitch (the first one in your provided youtube) = stand on a step on one leg, let the other side of the pelvis drop below level, then Hike It Back Up using only the Gluteus medius, do 15 reps very slowly. B2. Side-lying hip abduction with pre-squeeze (squeeze glute first, leg slightly behind the body, toes neutral, take your leg up till your back muscle fires at which point you stop. B3. Single leg bridge with other hip flexed. B4. Dead bugs.
C. Progressive loading with correct sequence. Single leg Romanian deadlift.
reo
20d ago
maybe you should look at misfiring of quadratus lumborum while your glutes are sleeping. Normally, glutes should fire first and after that QL should start its work. if the opposite is happening then you will have overactivity of QL which would get into spasm and pain. making the body learn the correct pattern will help in getting rid of this kind of pain.
It doesn't mean that your glutes or QL are weak (so making them stronger is not the solution). The firing mechanism has got reversed, that's all.
- timeline from first meeting (i was old, she was new joining at workplace) when i wasn't thinking about new relationship TO serious thinking (about) 2 months. From serious thinking to "Surely this is the one" (about) 3 months more.
- it was neck-to-neck for my case about seriousness about each other. (she proposed first though)
- mentioned above.
- No, there was nothing that was unacceptable. but my mentality has been - whatever was or could be a problem, i was / am sure to overcome it.
- when two people want each other in same order of magnitude (not lopsided like man wanting woman much more than she wanting him back OR vice versa), then there are so many things which become smooth. Then there is no need to do bookkeeping of who did what and how much for whom. I think, i only realize now when that sort of thing is not needed to be done and how easy it makes life for both the persons.
Some other thoughts:
- i had some sort of long list of things we realized for each other - at that time, i had put something like our relationship has reached level 1, 2, and so on for 18-19 levels till i counted. after that, i stopped.
- for us, time didn't matter. at one time, it was a possibility that we would not be able to see each other for a long time - and it was okay. it didn't change the internal feelings.
- it all was a gut feeling kind of thing. i can still remember the first day when i saw her coming into the common room and saying something to someone else (i can still remember the texture of the voice). maybe it can be labeled as serious attraction at first sight and first listen. all the mind's calculations were put aside by me (as such, i tend to be analyst, just not in this case). in this case, it was - this is really the one, whatever my mind says i will manage later. whether that is a good idea in all other cases, i don't know. this is n=1 situation.
To compare:
- this kind of thing had happened once before. but in that case, it was a feeling only in me and not the girl. Lopsided. Would have definitely failed later on, even if it would have been an arranged marriage sort of thing (Indian context).
- Other time, it was partly the opposite way. The girl had serious crush on me, and i didn't have (lopsided again). We still proceeded and it was a long drawn painful experience for each of us (she remained always insecure about me, being very jealous of my normal interactions with other people, lot of long drawn mega-fights taken to extremes). Eventually, parting away was the only way out. But it remained a really bad experience overall.
- few in-betweens, timepasses you can say.
In short, my personal mantras would be: nearly equal levels of attraction with each other, no deep insecurities in either of the persons, gut feeling and not completely mind / excel calculations.
reo
25d ago
there are so many replies that i got confused as to where to place this. so i just wrote about the philosophy of medicine, as i understand.
Medicine is the only field where the tool and the patient are the same kind of things - one complex human system meeting another complex human system. That is not a limitation, which needs to be overcome. It is precisely the practice.
Medicine is basically a field where no single model is complete, and the models are always being revised.
By model, i mean it is a simplified picture of how something is or how it works. And it is useful exactly because it leaves things out. Doctors are a special kind of cartographers trying to build up better and better maps to different types of territories.
How do we build those? We started with dissecting the human body, of a cadaver precisely not alive human. Some of us had experience with dissecting a frog or cockroaches (plenty a dime at my place). if you have never seen an open frog, you would be very surprised how much empty it really is. so we cut open a cadaver slowly, methodically, and matched with the photographs in an accompanying manual. we did what it asked us to do, and we continued to match and understand the specific naming systems. the naming systems and particular language are a new language which we learnt so that we can read and talk through that new language with other doctors and nurses and be sure what we are trying to convey is correctly and unambiguously understood by them. and we use it to read books, articles, journals, all life.
Over time, we got comfortable building those new language and mental models of how some particular structure in body is seen and how it is expected to be at a certain place only and not at some other place. Then we shifted to not normal stuff aka pathology. Those normal structures - how can they go wrong. so that knowledge was built upon multiple such cuttings of not-normal structures. We built branches over our normal mental models. eg. the stomach model has this normal model and these abnormal models (which can be of a huge variety).
We also pattern matched these newer not-normal models to find patterns across multiple structures and systems. So, we found Infection Models work reasonably well across the Stomach model, Liver model, Kidney model, etc. This all works pretty well for most of the structures.
Except the brain system. The system is completely different from all other systems. For example, it has a different way of blood supply. Which we named blood-brain-barrier (just a model to say that there is some kind of barrier to normal passage of stuff between the brain tissue and blood).
Over time, more correctly in only last few decades, we have started to see the brain in exquisite detail live and we have been able to have some understanding of which side and which parts of it do what (or get active doing some particular activity).
So for brain things, the models are relatively new and they have to be assessed in terms of what the patient says about his problems, how we are able to see what is happening, what we give (by trial and error) and how it affects the patients. we keep on doing it, write the entire process and revise it more and more. since it is a relatively new field, there are lot of competing what-to-do models, including non-medicinal models and medicine-models. we have done lot of experimental stuff to name all the various little parts of all these models (namely the little chemicals which go to and fro), but they are mostly arbitrary. imo, we are a long way from deep understanding.
The brain has a different problem too. The structure of brain and the function of brain are very disjointed categories. like if you are reading this line, a combination of light pattern goes from this LED to your eyeball, to a functioning wire connecting the back of the eyeball to back of your brain, and then it lights up a particular set of other wires, which are criss-crossed across lot of other brain parts. This is just this little reading line. add the memory of this particular style of light pattern with what it means. now build upon this layer of complexity to what things are normal (the normal model). what things are out of normal (huge number of other not-normal models). and what-to-do models about all those.
When someone thinks of DSM as some sort of fixed written well defined set of maps, i think it is a wrong idea - it is like confusing the map with the territory. IMO, it is a good (at present) way to have a comprehensive set of loose maps. and it will be revised as our understanding gets better, sometimes worse before getting better. sometimes, there will be paradigm shifts.
Same with the genetics parts: yes, those are some newer models, in which we pattern-matched some particular sequences with some disease patterns, because we found few which were absolutely always associated with one particular way of the patient's model of behavior (we call them sure-shot way to label a model). and at other times, it was just found to be more common (we call them more or less probable ways of having a particular set of problem model).
But my base understanding is: Medicine is an interactive playing of what patient shows up, what lenses the doctors have, what models are used to try to change the course of patient's behavior and how it can help in changing the course. At times, it is as simple to sit and listen to the patient and the doctor needs to lend the ear and hold the hand. And at other times, it is a full fledged active working of doctor, a nurse, and 3 attendants to tie the patient and give a sleeping medicine.
So, given how much of this is model-stacking on model-stacking, where does the irreducible human encounter fit? I don't think it as a failure of science, but as the thing which makes medicine medicine and not engineering.
reo
1mo ago
i think we are operating at different levels. my original argument was whether one should assess which inherited rules to maintain, not whether practical maintenance is useful. i agreed (later) that it is useful.
but "an ounce of prevention" applied universally to all walls, all rules, all traditions, sometimes with the urgency of leaky roofs, is exactly the unreflective position i was describing. the question is not whether to maintain walls, it is which ones, and why?
reo
1mo ago
i agree that practical walls (and roofs) serve real functions.
but do you ever assess which walls require mending? or do you mend every wall on reflex?
reo
1mo ago
The military does it all the time to regulate soldier's personal lives and it works.
The military example actually supports my point. A soldier who stays within the system, gets to reap the advantages, but under a threat of court-martial. Which means it is an external earring, with harder edges. The incentive alignment has changed the cost of disobedience, not the mechanism.
My point is narrower than the social alignment. You have told about systems which may work better for the individual. my point is what should an individual do when the system, whichever it is, is not working for them? Not revolts, not reform the priests. Become autonomous- assess independently, act on the assessment, and live with the results.
The fifth column segment is very different from my argument line. i am arguing against all priestdoms equally, including whichever corrected (or broader) one you may prefer. Substitution of one earring with another is still the earring problem.
reo
1mo ago
the fence in Frost's poem is a metaphor for inherited rules (and sayings). i am not arguing for removal of literal property boundaries but for assessing which traditions serve us before mending them reflexly.
reo
1mo ago
Robert Frost poem Mending Wall
'He will not go behind his father's saying,' And he likes having thought of it so well
It is an allusion to people just following what their father told. And they never counter it back. It is a deep programming of the subconscious.
Over that, they will think that it is what they thought themselves. Kind of Inception, but without the sci-fi stuff. Deep ingrained system of thought which appears like the person has thought it out themselves (makes them feel rational too, so the counter logical arguments do not work easily). They call it conviction, when it is just inheritance.
They follow what the father told, and find that things (the world, their life) doesn't quite work well that way. And they still don't go beyond them.
They find someone with a new set of sayings, and again never go beyond them.
They continue to behave like Blind Bats with new Beepers, never considering that they have a built-in navigation system and never using it.
The father said. The mother said. The society said. The priests said. And the automaton follows.
The Whispering Earring also fits here. The perfect guide able to tell you what you need to do to have lot of money, social prestige, big house, car, kids, happiness, everything what one can want - you just have to follow what the earring says and you get that. All these people want their father to be that Earring.
But there is no such earring. No such perfect sayings exist.
Trying to correct the sayings, to correct the priests, or the earring, is still the same problem. Somewhere in that solution, you still want people to follow the new corrected system. You are changing the voice in the earring, not the ear.
Yes, there is wisdom in what one's father says. But there are also things which are wrong also. One needs to be able to differentiate the right from the wrong. Then have the courage to discard the wrong things and add new right things.
Stop blindly following your Maps app when you can see that there is no road in that direction, no bridge across that river.
Frost would have liked that son to be able to assess if the neighbor was good or bad. Look at the apple tree. and Decide for himself whether to mend the wall or let it fall.
reo
1mo ago
- I cycle my perfumes across the week, while some remain more used than others.
- I am not sure if this is what you are asking: perfumes/fragrances, the ones being talked about, have different notes (the initial, the mid, the late). These perfume oils reside on your skin and mix up with your body (skin) oils and that combination is what comes out as the smell. Over time, the perfume releases different sets of oils and the combined mixture keeps on changing over the course of the day, so your nose doesn't actually get acclimatized since there is no single type of scent. This is why some perfumes sit absolutely great with you while not so good with some other people. Also, depending upon your own moods and aura and other mystical elements (which we cannot pinpoint), the effect of a particular perfume also changes with time. eg. (personal anecdotal experience) - when I am stressed, X EDP perfume (2 sprays) would completely vaporise over 3 hours, would have less intensity and less attractive; while if I am very relaxed, in bright mood, the same X EDP perfume (only 1 spray) would work all day (9 hours), would smell much much better. Contra this with the colognes or deo sprays - which tend to have only top notes. in those, you will have the acclimatization problem, both over the course of single day, and across multiple days.
- Perfumes are for yourself or someone who gets in very close to you (like low talking volume level or whispering even, or slow dancing!). becoming a perfume bomb is not a good idea. if you are feeling like that, then time to stop using whatever you are using, in the way you are using. Better not to wear any scent then.
reo
1mo ago
opus 1870 Penhaligon is my most fav fragrance - i consider it the dad perfume. To always keep my kids remind them of me whenever they smell it.
Guerlain L'homme ideal is another fav.
Plenty are there:
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