thejdizzler
8hr ago
Any tips on relaxation/decompression activities that I can do in the evening to help me prepare for bed/do during the work day to help manage stress? Thinking my marathon training wasn't as effective as it could have been because of poor stress management, but not sure how to do a better job.
thejdizzler
8hr ago
- Work. Nothing new to report
- Fitness: Boston marathon went not how I was hoping but not exactly badly. Went out conservative (1:19 first half) and was hoping to pick it up the second half but ended up fading to 6:30s and running a 2:41 high. A few weeks off/extremely easy then I'm planning on starting up the build again. This time I think I need to be more running-focused, serious about recovery and sleep, and hit the gym at least once a week.
- Intellectual Stuff: Plugging away at After Virtue and The Warlord Chronicles. Trying to find an Italian speaking group in baltimore to keep up with.
- Finances: Found a third roommate starting in June, and spending is on track to be below $3k this month.
- Dating. No news to report
- Tarot. No session this week
- Socializing: Saw all my college friends at the marathon.
- Screen time: 1.5 hours phone.
- Mental health: feeling pretty relaxed post-marathon.
thejdizzler
5d ago
One of my earliest podcast memories from high school is of Sam Harris discussing the paradoxical path towards becoming a successful meditator. For those of you haven’t tried Vipassana, or mindfulness meditation, the end goal is basically to quiet the mind: to be present in the purest sense of being present without latching onto thoughts or judgements. However, I usually find it is quite difficult to actually do this: even when I do manage to successfully clear the mind of thoughts about dinner or my crush in dance class, there’s still a part of me that’s judging how empty my mind is, preventing me from actually being fully in the present. In order to actually successfully meditate you have to cease being this reflective self. That self, as Sam Harris puts it, can’t get there from here.
While I still don’t fully understand how this works in terms of meditation, I think this serves as a pretty apt metaphor for many other areas of life. We simply don’t understand how development, whether as an athlete, artist, or businessman is going to change our relationship to that craft, and who we are in that domain of life in general. In all these fields, the novice can never obtain mastery because it doing so he becomes a master and no longer thinks or behaves like a novice. He couldn’t get there from here.
There are three areas in my life, probably quite familiar to readers of this blog, where I very clearly see this process at work: running/triathlon, language learning, and science. I don’t pretend to be a master at any of these categories, but I do claim to have experienced a profound transformation in how I relate to my own process of improvement in each of them. There is no path from 12-year-old swimmer who pushed as hard as he could every practice, the grammar-drilling high-school student, and the flailing first-year graduate student to who I am today, but rather and abrupt disconnect– which paradoxically cannot be placed at a single point in time. I’ll unpack what I mean more for each specific example below.
Endurance Sports
I started competitive swimming when I was in 4th grade around 9-10 years old. Before that, my parents had made me try a variety of different ball sports (soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis), as well as fencing. I was not particularly good at any of these: I was supremely uncoordinated (still am), not very fit, and because of the first two not very interested in improvement. Swimming changed all that: I quickly became more coordinated, more fit, and much more interested in improvement, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Perhaps this first season of swim club represents the first “you can’t get there from here” moment: before I had no interest in sport despite parental pressure, and afterwards it became one of the pillars of my life. The Joshua that deliberately ran away from the ball in soccer games, couldn’t hit a single baseball, and walked during the elementary school run-a-thon would never have been able to understand the person I became within a few months.
The next phase of my endurance sports career was characterized by what I like to call a try-hard, or a no-pain-no gain attitude. I thought that if I just worked harder I would improve. I would constantly sprint the warm-up, race during dry-land circuits, and, once I switched my primary focus to running, treat every easy day as a tempo or light threshold. The model of how I saw myself improving was the ability to continually handle more and more pain and more and more work until I was some kind of athletic übermensch.
This phase lasted from when I was about 10 to my senior year cross country season when I was 18. Ending it required another shift in perspective. I wasn’t going to keep improving, and in fact, I was getting worse by continuing to bash my head into a wall of always high-intensity all the time. In my junior year, along with my friend Zack, I began to become interested in how to actually train and improve based on the science. It wasn’t so much a question of grit and mental toughness and grinding really hard every day, but of intelligently putting together a mix of training that would support the physical and psychological adaptions necessary for improvements. The try-hard, whose favorite poem was Invictus5, and prided himself on how tired he was after practice, never could have gotten here from there.
I have changed my attitude towards training and endurance sports quite a bit since I was 18, but I don’t think I’ve had another discrete transformation. My realizations that lifestyle can have a larger impact than the training itself, the importance of adapting training to my individual genetics and physiology, and the importance of truly easy days all fit within this framework of training as recipe rather than a wall to be knocked down with a sledgehammer. I could get here from there.
Language Learning
One of the big problems with most language learning instruction in schools and on apps like Duolingo, is the disconnect between how the language is taught and what kinds of activities you want to actually use the language to do. In my other blog posts I like to break up the later into four different domains: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Traditional classroom instruction, as well as the apps, heavily favor the output domains, probably due to the need to evaluate a student’s progress, which is much more difficult to do from the standpoint of pure input. This approach also heavily relies on translation from one’s native language. It’s a little absurd to expect that constant grammar drills, and speaking exercises that involve heavy amounts of translation from one’s native language to lead to fluency, which involves seamless and intuitive understanding of written and spoken language. You simply can’t get there from here.
I tried really hard to get there from here using traditional methods in various languages. 10 years of Spanish in elementary→ high school. Not fluent. 3 years of an hour of Duolingo a day in Dutch. Not fluent. I made similar attempts, although with much less effort for Japanese, Hebrew, and French.
It was only with the discovery of Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, and a fundamental change in my approach to language learning away from book learning and towards acquisition that I was able to make real progress. Sixth grade Josh who thought drilling his conjugations harder would lead to fluency never would have made it here from there.
Science
In the career of every single scientist there is almost guaranteed to be a sharp “you can’t get there from here” moment. For me this happened during the second year of my PhD, where classes and controlled experiments gave way to the vast wilderness of the unknown that I would have to hack and slash through to arrive at my thesis. The skills that served me so well in class, memorization and logic, could only take me so far in this brave new world. The intimate details of your specific experiments and systems, how complex pathways interact with each other, and if your hypothesis is total bullshit or not are not facts that you can derive with a pencil and paper sitting with your advisor in July of 2021, but can only be won through the cauldron of trying things out and seeing what shit sticks. You can’t get there from here.
thejdizzler
7d ago
- Work. Working on only three things at a time which seems to be helping with the overwhelm. Still thinking about this job opportunity: if I take it I need to wrap up the PhD in the next few months.
- Fitness: 9 hours. Tapering a little this week for the Boston marathon which is Monday! Goal is a PR (sub 2:35:30)
- Intellectual Stuff: Italian class is ending, which I am happy about. Adopting the only three books at a time, and only one YouTube/Podcast and one substack/blog article a day is also helping.
- Finances: Talked to a financial advisor at my brokerage and he suggested that I should put money into individual bond funds rather than CDs (better liquidity and slightly better rates). Spending is low for this month, and we are working on finding a third roommate, which should ease my financial worries for the next year (if we don't find a third roommate, my rent will go up 50% at the beginning of June.
- Dating. Had a fun time hanging out with my friend Bella last night, but didn't and am not planning on making any romantic moves.
- Tarot. Great session with my ex-roommate when I asked about job stuff. The cards basically said to stop trying to please other people and do what I want to do
- Socializing: went to a board game bar with my lab. Will be hanging out with friends all weekend at the marathon.
- Screen time: 1.15 hours phone.
- Mental health: anxiety is 100% hunger-related. Haven't been the best about eating enough this week, so was quite anxious Friday-> Monday.
thejdizzler
8d ago
You might be interested in checking out MacIntyre's After Virtue. He makes the same argument, although I think his solution is kind of ass.
thejdizzler
8d ago
There's a difference between the regime and the Iranian people, which I'm sure you know. The Iranian people give probably nearly zero shits about Israel as a country. The regime is a bunch of theocrats who are very interested in exporting fundamentalist Islam and destroying Israel.
thejdizzler
8d ago
I talked to some of my colleagues more about this (not my professors as they are completely unwilling to talk about not academia) and they said that I should definitely aim higher with my skillset, but that it could be a good temp job while I wait for the startup to get more funding/look for other positions. I'll get to do a lot more chromatography/protein work on stuff that hasn't been my specialty in the PhD which looks good on my resume. So not a don't take, but more of a don't sell yourself short and play hardball if necessary.
thejdizzler
9d ago
This is an absurd position. Israel has had nukes for ~30 years. Tehran still exists and Israeli nukes have never been used.
There was also no conflict between Israel and Iran under the shah. The entire reason this conflict exists is because the Iranian regime wants to kill all the Jews.
thejdizzler
9d ago
Think it's time to buy USO tomorrow AM...
thejdizzler
11d ago
The idea is that I would get paid more after a year or two when the company grows. Postdoc salaries around 65-75k.
thejdizzler
12d ago
I just got an informal job offer from my friend's startup company here in Baltimore. It's almost exactly what I want to do (engineer soil microbes) and although it would only pay 60k, I have significant financial assistance from my parents to buy a house, and would come with significant equity in the company, which could have huge upside.
On one hand staying in Baltimore is hugely appealing. I have a ton of friends and community here, the crime problem in the city has gotten significantly better since I started my PhD, and I could actually afford a house, even without my parents' help. On the other hand, dating here has been total ass, I'm not sure I'm ready to give up the dream of academia just yet (although I think American universities are sinking ship for a variety of reasons), and while crime has gotten significantly more under control than when I moved here in 2020, there's still an anti-white racial animus here that I don't like. I'd also have to speed run the end of my PhD, but that again shouldn't be too much of a problem.
I guess I'd like your guys' thoughts: should I stay or should I go?
thejdizzler
14d ago
For the swing dancers on the forum. How can you dance/do swing outs for a long time without getting exhausted? Cardio shouldn't be an issue: I'm a fit runner/triathlete, I'm thinking it's a skill issue.
thejdizzler
14d ago
- Work: Lab meeting today. Working on only three things at a time which seems to be helping with the overwhelm.
- Fitness: 10.5 hours with a 23 mile run. Amazing repeat of the 40 min tempo (5:36 pace this time). Cooler temps and fueling helped loads.
- Intellectual Stuff: Knocked out a lot of books last week, but need to get back to substack writing!
- Finances: Put most of my parents money into 4% CDs. Maybe a conservative move, but I just don't know with all the geopolitical uncertainty. Spending is on track for this month so far.
- Dating. Porn free all week. Think my friend Bella may be interested in me, but I'm not sure about her because she's a Sanderson fan and that gives me the ick.
- Tarot no session.
- Socializing: Swing dancing and two brewery hangouts.
- Screen time: 1.2 hours again.
- Mental health: anxiety is 100% hunger related as eating more fixed it.
thejdizzler
15d ago
Where is an example of this?
thejdizzler
17d ago
Please no!
thejdizzler
18d ago
This is amazing thanks man!
thejdizzler
19d ago
What an amazing article! Thanks for this!
thejdizzler
19d ago
Is there somewhere where we can view AAQCs by user?
thejdizzler
21d ago
I actually really liked IJ! Some thoughts on it below!
Infinite Jest is a book that is primarily concerned with the role of entertainment in American culture. The book explores this question on multiple levels. Firstly, through the three-pronged plot that follows the Incandeza family (the youngest son Hal mainly) at an elite American tennis academy, the recovering narcotics addict Don Gately at a halfway house, and a thriller sci-fi intrigue between the US government and Quebecois separatists over a rather ridiculous superweapon. But unlike many other novels, Infinite Jest also addresses its themes through its structure: the first 300 pages of the book are incredibly hard to read, and the copious amount of (rather important) endnotes does nothing to help the situation. I believe this was deliberate on the part of DFW, as it ties directly to the primary thesis: that we should be skeptical of a culture that only knows how to express itself through pleasure seeking and entertainment.
Background
I have a fairly long history with this book. I first tried to read it in the summer of 2018 with one of my friend from college, Billy, while we were both busy with our research. Billy finished the book, but I made it barely 200 pages due to the complexity of the plot and the fact that I was reading on a Kindle. This was the first time I had failed to complete a book because of its difficulty, and though I moved on to many other books, Infinite Jest stuck around in the back of my mind as a mountain I had not yet summitted. Six years later, I added it to my ten books to read before I die list. In the interim, I had fallen in love with David Foster Wallace’s work as an essayist and as a interviewee, and so when the opportunity presented itself to read the book with my philosophy book club, I leaped at the chance to tackle this book again.
David Foster Wallace was an English professor at Pomona College, novelist, and essayist, whose work focuses on how modernity makes it very difficult to be an individual with a grounded identity. Infinite Jest is his shot at grappling with this conundrum: it was published in 1996, right before the take off the internet, and the subsequent real acceleration in the strength of the dissolving power of our culture. DFW killed himself in 2008, more than likely because of the how reality seemed to match the worst of his prognostications.
I personally got three main things out of Infinite Jest: culture is not entertainment, drugs are bad actually, and postmodernism isn’t the devil it’s cracked up to be. More on each of these below.
Culture is not entertainment
I think one of the biggest flaws of modern American (or Western in general) culture is a deep-seated fear of engaging with one’s own life. On one hand we have the work-a-holics, who spend every waking (and sleeping in some cases) moment in pursuit of productivity. We see these kinds of people in Infinite Jest, at the tennis academy, where Hal Incandenza, his family, and his friends seem to dedicate their entire lives to excellence in tennis without ever thinking about why they are doing so, or about the other aspects of their life that might suffer as a result. On the other extreme, we have those who numb themselves with the stories of other people’s lives. Before the internet, the average American used to watch around 6 hours of television a day. With YouTube and social media it’s probably even worse. DFW addresses these kinds of people through the Hal’s late father, James Incandeza, who makes thoughtful but commercially unsuccessful films, various funny and on-the-nose anecdotes about media technology, and finally with the central premise of the book, a film so entertaining you can’t do anything else other than watch it.
Can we approach media differently? I have to hope that DFW thinks so: he spent his life as a novelist, which seems like a strange thing to do if one believes all media is bad. I think rather he would argue that there is value in literature, but not primarily in its entertainment value. Rather, literature is for helping us to understand how other people think and live their lives, so we can live our own better.
Drugs are bad, actually
The second big plot arc of this book revolves around Don Gately, an ex-addict who now works as a live in a halfway house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This meandering storyline explores how Gately came clean, and the depraved world of substance addiction through his interactions with other people at the house and at Alcoholics’ Anonymous meetings. The AA sections of this book came off extremely positively, despite Foster Wallace’s clear initial skepticism of the metaphysical claims the group makes. Those claims are extremely important to Gately’s continued sobriety, namely the existence of a moral power above one’s own desires.
Aside from the mild comedy at seeing marijuana portrayed as this world’s version of heroin (hyperaddictive and supremely damaging to one’s mental health), these were quite tough sections of the book for me to read. Although I have used a fair amount of drugs, they have always been in limited amounts, and in the safe, middle-class environment in which I have lived my whole life. Drugs for Wallace’s characters, and for many in real life, are a path to an underworld that eats people alive. In many cases, the drugs are an attempt to cope with something worse, but they never really end up helping.
This book has firmly convinced me that drugs are another example of what Charles Murray calls a failure of bourgeoises values. It might be okay for Elon Musk or Bill Gates to have a heroin or marijuana addiction, just as it is okay for those men to destroy their families because the monetary resources that both enjoy mean that they can recover from such setbacks. For the lower class, no such thing is true. Drugs are a road straight to hell (here on earth). I honestly think this is a huge flaw in libertarian thinking, and I wish there was more discussion around this topic.
Postmodernism is good actually (to a point)
I find it very frustrating how those on the Right (and also the Left) refuse to engage with the substance of what postmodernism is actually trying to say. A lot of this comes from a confusion on definitions. I would define postmodernism in two separate ways. The first in its purely literary sense: a work that uses its structure to reinforce its themes. My favorite example to turn to for this definition is the video game Dark Souls,which beyond the usual RPG levelling system has a mechanic of respawning you at the nearest bonfire after death with one chance to reobtain your lost “souls” and items at the spot of your defeat. This has the effect of reinforcing the theme of the loss of larger purpose due to repetition: it is very easy to forget the larger plot of the game when you’re so focused on making runbacks to the same boss.
Infinite Jest has the same relationship between structure and theme. We already discussed how the book suggests that it’s important to separate culture and understanding the world from mere entertainment. How does Infinite Jest do this? By being quite difficult (although rewarding to read). There are three main plot lines with innumerable side characters with various degrees of importance introduced within the first two hundred pages: the length of many shorter novels. It takes time to understand how these arcs fit together, and for me these two hundred (and to a lesser extent the next three hundred) pages were not fun in the normal sense of the word, although David Foster Wallace does happen to be quite a humorous writer. There’s also an endnote on almost every page, which requires flipping to the back of the book to read (to simulate a tennis match according to DFW). Yet the slow start and the footnotes both allow DFW to build a rich literary world deep in meaning that would not be possible to the same extent) in shorter and shallower fiction.
The second definition of postmodernism is probably closer to what people on this platform actually have a problem with.
From Hans Bertens:
If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.
I’m sympathetic to a critique of this kind of post-modernism taken too far. You can’t actually live (or at least live well) without a system of guiding values. Nor do people on the woke left actually live this way: they have merely replaced one system of values with another (worse) one. Yet I think the critics miss some important points about what postmodernism was (and is) trying to accomplish.
First, there is a clear misunderstanding of the primary targets of postmodern critiques. Postmodernism is a response to modernism, not the traditional faiths of the West (Catholicism) or the East (Hinduism, Buddhism). Postmodernism is primarily a critique of the cult of progress, which was born from the Enlightenment and the Reformation and is without a doubt destroying our world. And this is reflected in Infinite Jest. DFW doesn’t shit so much on Alcoholics’ Anonymous, a traditional Christian organization, but on the vapidity of the Tennis Academy, and the empty slogans of the reality TV show that is what has become of the US government.
Then, I think many people mistake critique for dismissal. Just because the representations of our ideals and values are flawed and corrupt, and exposed as such by postmodern critiques does not mean that those ideals are wrong, or that we should abandon those institutions. Rather, postmodernism exposes real flaws that need to be addressed in order for those institutions to survive. I’m thinking primarily here of the Catholic church and the child molestation scandals in the Northeastern United States, but this critique could just as well apply to the American electoral and university systems.
Finally, I think the curt dismissal of post-modernism fails to acknowledge the complicated nature of traditional faiths. The book of Job and Ecclesiates are both in the Bible, and if they were written today, they would surely be taken as post-modern critiques. The church itself has a long history of mystical and out-of-the-box thinkers, and even many of Jesus’ parables could not be less clear. To shy away from the issues raised by post-modernism is an act of cowardice, close-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty.
thejdizzler
21d ago
I don't run with my phone or headphones at all. There could be exposure to plastics from my dry-fit shirts.
thejdizzler
21d ago
Yea I can run a full marathon in Sub 2:35, so fat gain probably isn't the culprit.
thejdizzler
21d ago
We went to an art activity (really fun) and then dinner (not as fun) and then I walked her home. Art activity was 2 hours, we had an hour before dinner reservation, then dinner was like 80 min, then walked her home.
thejdizzler
21d ago
A friend of a friend works Rhythm health, which does mail-in blood tests, and I got a free test last week from her. Despite nearly passing out while collecting blood from myself (this is the #1 reason I am not a medical doctor), I managed to do the collection successfully, and got my results back on Sunday. Everything looked fine or even good except for two things.
1). Low HDL. This has been a problem for the past few years, and I think it is because I don't eat any dietary cholesterol because I'm basically vegan other than eating a small amount of fish and shellfish. I had a long discussion with my boss about this, and our conclusion is that this isn't really a problem. HDL is a cholesterol scavenger that brings back extra cholesterol from tissues to the liver. My tissues probably need all the cholesterol they have (/synthesize it through the squalene pathway) so that would explain why my HDL is low.
2). High estrogen. This one was more concerning to me. My estrogen was 38 pg/dL (normal is 20-30). I have two theories about this. Firstly, I eat quite a bit of soy, so the test could be picking up phytoestrogens from that, artificially inflating the reading. The second is that I unfortunately have gained a bit of fat since 2023, which could also be increasing the amount of estrogen in my body. In either case, I'm going to bring it up with my PCP during my visit next Friday.
thejdizzler
21d ago
- Work: Need to get some projects off my plate, as I feel like I'm juggling too many balls right now. Still on track to graduate next May, if not sooner.
- Fitness: 11 hours last week again. Amazing workout again this morning: 40 min tempo at 5:40 pace, which is around
15-20 sec/mile faster than my planned Boston pace! Nearly bonked at the end, which means that I'm not fueling as well as I could be. - Intellectual Stuff: Pacific trilogy is done, and working on finishing Italian book. After this is done I'll be working through Game of Thrones (in Spanish) and trying to finish Indigenous continent. Also starting After Virtue by MacIntyre for philosophy book club, which should make for some good discussion.
- Finances: Over spending targets last month by about $220, but still had a 7% savings rate because it was an excellent month for dividends. First part of parents' transfer(120k) came through and I liquidated it a few days ago and am keeping it in a 3.5% MM fund until I decide what to do with it. Have already put ~8k of it into my IRA. This coming month expenses should be under 3.2k, even if I do end up signing up for a 70.3 in Madison in September.
- Dating: Had a date with the Saudi girl on Saturday, which was fun for about 2 hours, but not so much for the other 3! Will not be seeing her again.
- Tarot: No session this week.
- Socializing: Went back to Spanish happy hour and silent book club this week. Also stopped by a furry convention in downtown Baltimore and had a good laugh.
- Screen time: 1.2 hours again.
- Mental health: think anxiety is probably screen time and nutrition related! The anxiety is often accompanied by hunger. Will continue to observe and hopefully get to the bottom of this.
Thanks! I'm trying not to be too disappointed, as this is the best marathon since my PR in 2023 (2:35:34). I know what I need to do better next training cycle, which is getting me quite excited!
More options
Context Copy link