thejdizzler
5hr ago
Figured out how to "reduce stress" on Oura ring readings. Basically need to make sure I take computer breaks throughout the day. Post lunch time walk, computer-free lab meeting, etc. have added a lot of restorative time to my days. This seems to be correlated with how I'm feeling as well.
Still waking up every single day at 4am. Usually manage to go back to sleep with a low dose melatonin, but is still annoying. My leading hypothesis is something to do with blood sugar, am trying to eat more fat and protein. Any tips/thoughts appreciated.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Holy shit, didn't even know Israel bombed Qatar. That seems like a terrible overstep by the leadership, as Qatar was kind of friendly to Israel before and in the US pocket.
thejdizzler
3d ago
Cycling easy (running easy never really relaxes me), walking in a forest, reading a good fantasy novel.
thejdizzler
4d ago
It’s also in money heist, which is a fairly popular, albeit Spanish, show on Netflix.
thejdizzler
5d ago
My bad, realized I said against when I meant for. I was referring to all the leftists saying Charlie Kirk deserved it because he was pro second amendment.
This would make sense.... if they weren't so for gun control.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Yep my comment makes no sense in the light of the Oz universe. But as analogy to the Charlie Kirk situation, I think it still fits. The democrats aren't "slaves" to Charlie Kirk (maybe you could make this argument about Trump).
thejdizzler
5d ago
Another great comment! Academia is supposed to be this place where these ideas can be debated, which I think is the appeal of it to me. It would be one thing if professors/scientists said: "I don't care what the science says about xyz policy, I believe abc for ideological reasons". That's basically what the right does most of the time, which I find annoying, but not objectionable. It's this twisting of objective truth finding that really grinds my gears. Things like racism is a bigger public health crisis than COVID, denial of a genetic basis for racial differences, and excessive focus on grifting redistributive policies that don't work do a lot to undermine public trust in sense making as a way to tackle problems. Now I don't think right-leaning academia would necessarily be much better (look at all the crap that people come up with about seed oils), but that's not the world we live in.
And maybe it's never really been free from bias (which many posters here will certainly be happy to claim), but I think it's also crazy to deny that science is objectively more corrupt and less effective at changing society (for the better) than 100 years ago.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Very good comment, and very true. The most sane graduate students and professors I know completely stay out of politics (or are some kind of milquetoast abundance liberals, which I find problematic for other reasons). Those slightly less sane think of people outside of academia as children to be reasoned with using patronizing arguments. The least sane think that they are shit that needs to be wiped off the floor. This would maybe be coherent (yet still abhorrent imo) if they were authoritarian ubermenschen who controlled all the levers of political and personal violence. But these people are usually terribly out of shape, gun-hating, "democracy" loving keyboard warriors. Say what you will about the revolutionaries of the 20th century, they actually had the cojones and physical abilities to enact and enforce their political ideas.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Imagine now that half of Oz supports the witch and her policies. Imagine the Munchkins know this. Doesn't that cast their celebration in a different light?
thejdizzler
5d ago
Re your last point: oh I know. I've always been an anti-idpol leftist, and the past 12 years have been frustrating to say the least.
Also see my second point. Leftists did this to themselves.
thejdizzler
5d ago
You gotta read the next sentence. Even if they advocating for this, it's stupid. The right has more guns. In tit for tat, we lose.
So we just had an emergency lab meeting about the Charlie Kirk situation. Someone screenshotted an instagram story from one of my fellow lab members and sent in anonymous email to my PI (professor/supervisor). The instagram story said basically that Charlie Kirk's death was a good thing, actually. PI didn't name names, and it was also unclear what exactly the anonymous emailer wanted, but did caution us that this is a dangerous environment to be posting this kind of thing. EDIT: He also said that he STRONGLY disagrees with this position, but he's very in favor of free speech and would defend unnamed individual from the university/public if push came to shove, despite disagreeing with their politics.
I have a couple thoughts about this. Firstly, it's legitimately pretty scary that internet posting is now important enough to warrant an emergency lab meeting. It feels like we rapidly are descending into an authoritarian anti-free speech environment (not that universities were bastions of this to begin with). My own social media and blog are extremely clean, but it's trivially easy to link this account with my real name, and I've posted some not kosher things here before.
Secondly, universities/leftists have kind of done this to themselves. This is the old Cory Doctrow/ Freddie DeBoer stick. Trigger warnings, anti-racism and cancel culture have all led to this kind of environment where speech can be policed in this way by the state and doesn't look hypocritical.
Thirdly, and I hate to say this, but whichever one of my colleagues posted this is a fucking idiot, along with most of the left in my generation. I still think of myself as a socialist, perhaps less so recently, and I want to shake this person and ask what good this kind of statement actually does for our cause. Do you want more vigilante killings? The right is going to come up on top with that one, as most lefties in this country are strangely anti-gun. Do you want to win elections? Advocating for murder isn't very popular with most of the electorate. Do you want continued science funding so you can have a job and accomplish the things that you think are so important you dedicated 8-12 hours of your day to, every day? Then stop tarnishing the reputation of universities and science in general with your crazy politics: our stipends come from taxpayer money. As I've written on earlier, scientists are woefully naive about politics. This is not how you win political victories, which makes me think that the goal isn't actually political victory, but some kind of LARP/ in-group signaling game.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Also divided on alcohol right now. On one hand like you say, it's extremely Lindy. On the other hand, even a drink will plummet my HRV the next day. I've settled on a compromise: drinking NA beer. Helps with not feeling super awkward not having a drink but doesn't cause the same health effects
thejdizzler
13d ago
Yea this is great! Especially connected with the third paragraph! It's important to say no to that little voice that says to go harder and also to that voice that tells you to be more lazy.
thejdizzler
13d ago
To try and find patterns in my training and have a record of past training all in one place.
The problem is I deleted my strava account in 2023. I made a new account in 2024, but everything from 2015-2023 I have to try and find on old logs or on places like Garmin connect.
thejdizzler
14d ago
Is patience the ultimate virtue to try and cultivate? I've been listening to a lot of the endurance guru Gordo Byrn while doing trainer rides lately. His big shtick is the 1000-day, or roughly three year, plan that encourages you to focus on longer time horizons for improvement. The focus of this mainly seems to be with building fitness for endurance sports, but can be applied to a lot of other things like finance, education, and personal relationships (indeed Gordo seems to take this approach with his family too, with seemingly pretty good results). This has got me thinking about my own life and how a more patient longer term view could have served me much better in many areas of my life. I can think of three big examples off of the top of my head.
First with endurance sports. I ran 14:41 for 3 miles at the Illinois state cross country meet my senior year of high-school, which was roughly ten years ago. I got marginally faster in college, up to about that speed for 5k, but haven't gotten any better, and have in fact probably regressed quite a bit since then (can maaaaaybe run a 16:00 5k right now). Part of this is just aging and reprioritizing things in my life, but there's a very real sense in which large periods of injury/illness/burnout has derailed my training because I was too aggressive and impatient and had to completely shut it down because I put myself in a huge hole. Of course it's far from too late, I'm only 27 and have at least another good 8-15 years to continue to improve with a less-aggressive, more balanced and kinder training plan focused on maximizing recovery.
Secondly with my scientific career, my publication record would be much improved and my doctorate would be complete if I had been more patient. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get results NOW, leading to overly complicated failed experiments that didn't produce any data that I could use in my thesis. If I had focused on this long term view (producing things that are real and useful and gradually building that number up over time), instead of trying to impress my bosses at our weekly meetings, I might have enough material to graduate. This is still something I need to work on, and is perhaps not helped by the weekly meeting structure in my lab. Also want to note that my publication record isn't particularly bad: I have one first author paper and multiple 2-3 author papers, and will have two more by the end of my PhD, I just think I could have accomplished this all faster and with less stress if I was more patient and systematic.
Finally, with romantic relationships, as many of you on this forum have probably observed, have suffered greatly from a lack of patience. In high school and college it was an impatience to be "in a relationship" which led me to be with people who were much more interested in me than I was in them. This is still part of the problem, but now there is an additional layer of impatience about wanting to get married and have children, which exacerbates the former problem. I'm both desperate for a partner and unwilling to actual discriminate between those who come my way because I'm impatient to get married and have children.
Contrast this to things in which I feel like I have applied patience. The foremost thing that comes to mind in my life is learning Spanish, which I've been doing consistently for the past 5 years. This past year I passed the DELE and consider myself functionally fluent, although there is still a ways to go in terms of what I would like to accomplish. This success came from the consistent 1-2 hour a day practice in the language. Another example is my blog, where I've slowly built up a following into the low hundreds, just by consistently publishing an article or two a month.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk. What has your experience with patience been? Are there error states I should watch out for (i.e. being too patient?).
thejdizzler
15d ago
Starting to put together a log with my last ten years of endurance training. It's been a... frustrating experience. My record keeping was not good for about 60% of this period (I have no records of most of 2018, which is quite frustrating because that was a particularly good year for me, especially with summer training). Also frustrating to see how much of my long term potential was squandered on impatience which led to burnout/injury/illness.
thejdizzler
16d ago
Yes he is another one that fits this mold.
thejdizzler
17d ago
I've been in Baltimore ever since I started posting on this forum. Was a lurker when I was in college in Boston.
thejdizzler
19d ago
Goals from last month went pretty well! I set up a cold-turkey block on my computer that will lock the internet behind a 1000 character random passcode after 9pm. I can get through it if I need to, but it's a pain in the ass and usually get me to turn of my computer at 8:30 pm every night to avoid having to deal with it in the morning. Scheduling also has gone pretty well, although I need to have better follow-through with lab stuff. Sleep has also been pretty good, but I'm always waking up at 4 am quite hungry. The temporary solution has been to eat a banana and go back to sleep, but I'm trying to prevent this from happening in the first place by shifting my diet away from simple carbs.
Systems goals for next month
- Take some time at the beginning of each week and month to plan out what I’m going to do for that week/month. This doesn’t have to be a prison, but it should be a guide. I should have a pretty good reason to deviate from the plan because (I think) I am getting to be much more soft with my expectations for myself so a lot of buffer is built into the schedule.
- Run a few self-experiments. The big one I’m conducting this month is trying to increase the amount of fat (and a little more protein) in my diet. This isn’t going to be very rigorous, but the outcome I’m hoping to see is to stop waking up in the middle of the night hungry. The other experiments are stuff I’ve talked about in my natural oura ring experiments: rerunning correlation between bedtime/wake time and other health variables corrected for wake-up time, correlating external variables (Anki pass rate, workout performance) with sleep.
- Make sure I’m spending a bit more alone time. I think August was perhaps too social for me: there has rarely been a night where I’m not doing something with some group of friends. This is causing my intellectual goals and chore backlog to suffer a little bit. Tentative goal is to have 2 nights a week with NO plans.
thejdizzler
22d ago
I think so. Something happened in 2012 when it came to interpersonal relationships, depression, test scores, etc. And all these trends are in the wrong direction This shit is bad news bears.
Relevant article: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/what-the-heck-happened-in-2012
thejdizzler
22d ago
I think this is because a lot of advice is extremely non-specific. General advice is not helpful for most people: you either need to modify it for your personal situation (or have the advice come from someone who knows you).
thejdizzler
24d ago
I'd have to say that The Children of Men feels both more realistic and hopeless to me (and also The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster). Although I suppose both end on a somewhat hopeful note: I have seen the hills of Wessex, as Ælfred saw them when he overthrew the Dane.
I will definitely do this November/December this year when I am not training hard. It is helpful when training to have stuff tell me when to chill out and when I can put in work.
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