thejdizzler
6d ago
Added to the list!
I think fiction can be really really valuable for understanding psychology and philosophy, but you have to be careful not to take it as the truth about how people behave, or worse about the world facts. I try to keep my intellectual diet quite balanced between fiction and nonfiction, but I'm thinking I should try and stay away from historical fiction in the future, as it really seems to grind my gears.
I think there are a few reasons.
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A lot of people don't have liquid cash. If you're living paycheck to paycheck you can't do this.
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This checking account isn't earning any MM interest. I either need to keep 1500 in there for perpetuity or go through the hassle of closing the account (which also would only take an hour or so). At less than 4% money market it's still worth it to keep the money there after the $400, especially as I can use it to just pay off my credit card every month.
thejdizzler
6d ago
I've heard good things about McCullough from people who criticize Posteguillo, so I'll have to check him out.
I have no issue with Caesar being portrayed as charming or a prodigy: he likely was. What Posteguillo does that grinds my gears is sweep every flaw that Caesar had as a human being (probably in context the wife-fucking and huge ego, but I also consider the treatment of the Gauls to be pretty terrible, if not too far outside the norm for the time) under the rug so he can be a "perfect" hero.
thejdizzler
6d ago
I think I'm just going to stop reading historical fiction, except from authors I know are good (Bernard Cornwell).
thejdizzler
7d ago
I will usually post them here first! Thanks for the offer though!
thejdizzler
7d ago
I think a big part of it for me was also the writing style but in addition to that I had two main other problems. There is a huge amount of sex and sexual assault, while which I'm sure happened plenty in the Middle Ages, reflects our modern culture's obsession with sex more than it reflects the lived reality of the characters. This also an issue in the The Cathedral of the Sea, which uses the quasi-mythical practice of the first night to show us how evil European nobility was.
Then the stonemason also has a very modern attitude towards his work on the Cathedral. Not a whole lot of doing it for the glory of God, which probably the main motivation for the average peasant. He seemed to have a very careerist attitude towards the whole thing (like building cathedrals was his passion) which I found odd.
Then there's also the unhistorical widespread literacy, lack of cultural conflict between England and Wales, and the lack of language barriers between the nobility and peasants (remember this was set less than 100 years after the Norman conquest of England)/
How accurate should historical fiction be?
What do we owe to history?
I just finished Aquitania by Eva García Sáenz de Urturi (what a mouthful), a “historical fiction” novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine’s first marriage to Louis of France. This book was one of the nine I brought back from Spain; I picked it up because I had really enjoyed the Kraken police thriller novels that made Garcia Sáenz de Urturi famous, and generally enjoy historical fiction as a genre, although I am not sure this will continue to be the case based on the way the genre is heading. Unfortunately, I didn't like the book very much: the plot was all over the place because the author tried to insert an unconvincing thriller element into what was otherwise a period piece, the characters were at best two-dimensional, and the writing tried far too hard to be poetic. What really riled me up however was the absolute lack of concern that this book had for historicity. García Sáenz de Urturi took every salacious rumor that surrounded Eleanor of Aquitaine, ramped them up to 11, and then added in her own fabrications for good measure. Below are some of the more egregious events that I believe to be non-historical.
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Eleanor was raped by the brothers of Louis the Fat when she was 8!!! after her older brother died while her father was still alive to attempt to claim Aquitaine for the Kings of France.
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Eleanor was lovers with her uncle Raymond from the ages of 10-13 before she married Louis the Pious at 13. When she saw her uncle again on the 2nd crusade once she was actually married to Louis she refuses to have sex with him. Historically, the rumors of a tryst between Eleanor and Raymond only surround her visit to Antioch during the Second Crusade. I think these rumors are pretty unlikely in any case.
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Eleanor is the director of a secret spy network called the Aquitanian cats that she uses to investigate the death of her father and undermine the Capets. She also a secret handbook filled with #inspirationalquotes from her ancestors.
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The Abott Suger is actually Eleanor's uncle because Eleanor's grandfather had a secret brothel where he fucked nuns and Suger was the son of one of these nuns. Suger is also responsible for Eleanor's father's death because he has him murdered after he tries to kill the nuns rescued from this brothel to hush up the whole thing.
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Eleanor is actually a secret pagan and so doesn't give a shit about the church or God because the Catholic Church is #corrupt and #political.
Aquitania is not unique in this sensationalism. Almost every historical fiction book I've read in the last five years plays at least this fast and loose with history and with historical figures. In Santiago Posteguillo's immensely popular Saga of Julius Caesar, Caesar is portrayed as a paragon of virtue who protects the poor and also is god's gift to women in bed, while his enemies, namely Sulla, are portrayed as twist sex-fiends who get off to young boys getting whipped and just want to oppress people for fun. Posteguillo's even more famous Africanus trilogy is just as bad, with Scipio subbed in for Caesar, and Fabius Maximus for Sulla. Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, while fairly historically accurate, completely fails to capture the medieval mindset. Sharon Kay Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept tries so hard to be historical, but ends up making the Empress Maud and Stephen to be caricatures of themselves.
But @thejdizzler, why do you even care about all this ? These people died thousands of years ago, and we have sparse, if any, historical documentation of any of these people. The political and social conflicts of the roman world, and certainly the medieval world have little to do with the conflicts we have today. Let the people have their fun!
I disagree with this attitude for three reasons. Firstly, I think the truth is important in of itself. Lying about long dead people is a short step to lying about more recently dead people which is a short step to lying about people who are still living. Of course the amount of missing information increases substantially as we go back in time, but in the novels I've cited above, the portrayal of characters and events goes knowingly against the historical record. Where there is a gap, such as in the adolescence of Julius Caesar, or Eleanor's childhood, what we do know about character and era can be used to attempt a faith reconstruction, rather than a juvenile telenovela.
Secondly, a biased reading of history leads people to make specious comparisons to the present day. Posteguillo is guilty of this. During the tour for his first Julius Caesar book, he compared the struggle between Sulla and Caesar to the Russia-Ukraine War, with Putin being a stand-in for Sulla. Dude, do you really want to make that comparison? Pretty sure Putin doesn't have a sex dungeon in the Kremlin, and last I looked Zelensky wasn't committing genocide against the Celts. This is present a bit in Aquitania too, where Eleanor feels like her Occitan language is being oppressed and dominated by the French. Not only was Eleanor probably raised to speak French before Occitan, but repression of minority languages didn't really begin in France until the age of Napoleon. Nationalism wasn't really a thing until the 19th century.
Thirdly, and most importantly, historical fiction doesn't have to be written this way. If you want to change the outcome of a historical event because it makes your story better, you can write in a heavily inspired parallel universe like Guy Gavriel Kay, who has El Cid go down fitting Muhammad ibn Ammar in the Lions of Al-Rassan and Belisaurius becoming Emperor after Justinian in The Lord of Emperor's. You can also can be entirely truthful: Javier Moro's El imperio eres tú has biographical levels of accuracy on the life of Pedro I of Brazil, but reads like a novel. You can even make up your own characters, like Bernard Cornwell does in his Saxon Tales series and use the historical setting as a backdrop of what would otherwise be a fantasy novel.
Perhaps this is an unfairly high-bar to clear for authors, but I don't think so. No one is forcing you to write historical fiction, and if you don't want to do the research for a book to at least pass the sniff test of this amateur historian, you should just stick to fantasy.
New Year's resolution check in
- Work: Terrible week at work. Boss forgot to plug in the water supply to the fly incubator, so humidifier ended up cooking all our flies, including some stocks that it took me years to make! This sets me back a month or two which is really annoying.
- Fitness: 11 hours last week! Started track night Tuesday's again and had a surprisingly low heart rate for what I hope will be my marathon pace in October (workout was 8x 3 min at tempo, I averaged 5:50 pace and my heart rate was around 170, which is right at the edge of Z2/Z3 for me). I woke up a little wrecked this morning and skipped this morning's session: hoping this doesn't compromise volume for the week.
- Intellectual Stuff: Finished my first Spanish book this year and HP7 in Italian! Got my blog posts for this month planned, and got another paid subscriber on substack (it's my friend emory so it feels like it doesn't count.
- Finances: Going well this month. Earned $400 extra from opening a new checking account at Wells Fargo (guess they want my mortgage) and will be earning extra on cat sitting throughout the month.
- Dating: Had a pretty disregulated Sunday as I got super drunk at tavern run (~13 mile run+bar crawl) and ended up bypassing all my controls and masturbating to porn. Decided to pause all my dating apps and focus on building real life connections that may or may not turn into anything.
- Screen time on my phone is at an hour/day, despite my binge on Sunday. Need to update my controls to better prevent binging in the future.
- No tarot this week. Giving the ex-roomate some space.
- Socializing: Tavern run was awesome, always great to hang out with the whole running community here. Otherwise have had a good balance of social activity and rest this week. Would like to host a dinner party this month or next.
How goes it @FtttG and @oats_son? I enjoyed your blog post on rejection quite a bit last week FttG!
thejdizzler
7d ago
Option 5: I can’t find a partner so I can’t have kids. Many such cases.
thejdizzler
7d ago
You're missing one. Pollution! The most obvious aspect of this is climate change, where we are wrecking the climatic conditions that allow stable agriculture, but there are many other aspects of pollution including microplastics which I mentioned, and heavy metals that will heavily impact our fertility rate.
I don't believe we have unlimited energy resources like you seem to, but this is an argument for another time. In terms of space, we already use the vast majority of arable land on this planet.
thejdizzler
8d ago
I don't think this is true for a number of reasons. Firstly, declines in fertility are somewhat due to endocrine disruptors from microplastic pollution we've caused. That isn't going away for anyone any time soon. Secondly, there seems to be a deeper link between modernity and fertility that most want to admit. We may see high fertility as you say, but it won't be in the world we currently live in culturally, socially, or technologically. Finally, as many on this forum are loathe to admit, we have actually outrun the carrying capacity of this planet. There won't be another fertility explosion in this culture because the planet literally will not support it for much longer.
thejdizzler
9d ago
The main thing I’m noticing is that’s there’s an unwillingness to examine priors deeply. Spinoza just takes things like causality as a given, just like the EA people take utilitarianism as a given.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Just started on Spinoza after a few philosophy book club sessions of reading Kant, and I'm surprised by how similar the errors of the modern rationalists are to the errors of their 17th century counterparts. The philosophies of both suffer from an inability or unwillingness to really interrogate their assumptions (which is also Nietzsche's critique of most philosophy in general). I'm also reminded by how annoyed I was a couple years ago to discover the parallels between Yud's thought and various branches of ancient and modern philosphy that Yud likes to pass off as his own original thoughts. Maybe not really that surprising given how devalued humanities education is, and how inaccessible a lot of philosophy is.
thejdizzler
11d ago
Thank you but I think I have a general idea of how to do this myself. I have a detailed budget with spending categories that I allocated cash to every month. I track expenses every week to make sure I'm on track. I just need to allocate more to the saving category, which means less spending on eating out/frivolities in general.
- Work: Had a good week at work this week. Doing more by doing less: getting more done by putting less stuff on my calendar.
- Fitness: Got sick again (ugh), which has reduced both my desire to exercise and the positive feelings it gives. Still will hit 10 hours this week, but need to prioritize sleep and rest.
- Intellectual stuff: feeling very overwhelmed on this angle: I've committed to too many things. Marx book club will end this month, and extra time from reduced screen time has also been nice. Thinking of limiting blog posts and YouTube to one a day each to make more space for books!
- Finances: Made 3.8 (post tax) last month. Only spent 3.2k, which is about a 16% savings rate. Would like to get this closer to 20%.
- Dating: Only masturbated one time (which took 5 minutes, excellent time reduction) and not to porn. Went on a date with a medical student: there won't be a second date, partially from my end (her hobbies include "watching short form content") but mainly from her's (ghosted). I wasn't particularly interested but it still #feelsbadman. Unsurprisingly, ghosted by Argentinian chick. I continue to talk with a girl I met in Spain and a girl from swim club but I feel like those are more of friendships. I plan to not give out any likes on dating apps for the next month, and then pause my accounts.
- Didn't do any tarot this week.
- Screen time on my phone is at 45 (!!) minutes and dropping. There just isn't that much to do on there once I took away all the fun sites.
- Socializing: I'm overbooked on this front and need to leave 2-3 nights a week for personal projects or just catching up on self-care. I have a social activity every night this week except Monday, which is too much.
thejdizzler
16d ago
Maschi veri: Italian remake of Machos Alfa! General criticism of modern dating and male/female relationships. Absolutely hilarious.
thejdizzler
18d ago
Kautskyism. Democratic socialism without revolution.
thejdizzler
20d ago
Total agreement. Seems like an amazing drug to get metabolically healthy. I think I would prefer the lifestyle interventions that Attia recommends once I'm there to stay in that condition though.
thejdizzler
20d ago
Yea it's absolute insanity. I'm glad I started for so many reasons. Hopefully can completely switch over in the next few years: certainly will save me a lot on running shoes!
thejdizzler
20d ago
thejdizzler
20d ago
Right, and this treats the same thing that lifestyle interventions, without the willpower. I do worry about muscle wasting long-term from GLP inhibitors.
thejdizzler
21d ago
I've heard a minimum of 0.8 g/kg for an active person (roughly ~.4 g/lb). The max dose with a shown benefit for performance is 2.2 g/kg, which is 1g/lb. So making sure you get at least 0.5 g a day seems good, and not more than 1g/lb, especially if you aren't training intensely. This likely means protein in the 80-200 g range for most of us.
It's been a problem with every single girl I've dated. I've decided to bite the bullet one day a week and have no limit on bed time, but it's still difficult. Going to sleep at 10pm most nights, and between 11-1am one night a week, which usually fucks me.
I'll look into it, especially when I move away from Baltimore. Just tired of the options here, which are either extremely woke or extremely trad.
thejdizzler
21d ago
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Yea I think the confusion on Z2 comes from the fact that in highly trained athletes, Z2 is heavily fat burning still. As you get fitter you can handle more intensity without it cooking you. Same with strength. What Gordo and I advocate for is a volume first approach where you focus on time exercising first and then worry about intensity. Of course not appealing in current milieu because people don't want to spend the time exercising that is required to be fit. Weight lifting and cardio are both important as you say, which means even more time.
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I think you might be a little bit heavy on the protein still, but I broadly agree.
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Sleep really is key. The biggest problem I have with it is that my cronotype is much earlier than most of the population, so I get a ton of shit for wanting to go to bed earlier.
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Also agree with religion as an alternative to therapy, although I unfortunately don't find the versions of Christianity around me to be very appealing. I want a more environmental-focused version of christianity basically, but the only communities that I see doing that are a bunch of wokies. I also agree therapy isn't the answer. Perhaps it would be if therapists actually wanted to cure people, but it seems like the current profit model leads to people spinning their wheels forever and using "childhood trauma" as an excuse to never change.
thejdizzler
21d ago
As promised my review of Peter Attia's Outlive.
For those of you that don’t know me in real life, I’m a biologist by trade. For at least the past five years of my PhD, I’ve been absolutely obsessed with understanding fat metabolism and metabolic dysfunction. Heart, or cardiovascular disease (CVD) is still the #1 global killer, despite decades of research and the existence of a very effective class of drugs that largely treat the condition. CVD is thought to be largely caused by dysfunctions in metabolism, which is also true to some extent for the other three largest killers in the west: diabetes, cancer, and dementia. While traditional medicine has had a ton of success eradicating traditional infectious diseases, it seems largely unable to effectively treat these “four horseman”, despite the billions of dollars that have been poured into research and the development of thousands of pharmaceuticals. A reactive, treatment-focused approach isn’t working: we need something new.
This is where Peter Attia’s Outlive comes in. Unlike other longevity books like David Sinclair’s Lifespan, Outlive is relatively light on pharmaceuticals and lifespan extension. Lifespan extension doesn’t seem very tractable in humans currently: even the massive advances in public health, germ theory of disease, and antibiotics did little to increase the maximum age of death: the increase in life expectancy of what Attia calls medicine 2.0 rather came from massively reducing child mortality and the impact of infectious disease across all age brackets. While there is some promising research in animal models on lifespan extension, and Bryan Johnson is attempting to biohack himself into immortality, neither Attia nor myself think that focusing on this kind of stuff as an individual is very useful. Rather, Attia is focused on lifestyle interventions to prevent and delay the onset of the four horseman (CVD, diabetes, cancer, dementia), effectively increasing the healthy years of one’s life, or healthspan.
Outlive is divided into two sections. In the first, Attia gives an overview of the mechanism of action of the four horseman in order of lethality. This is the only part of the book in which pharmaceuticals are mentioned, mainly in relation to CVD and diabetes, that can be well-managed by statins (CVD)[1] and drugs like metformin (diabetes). I generally liked these sections, although there was frustratingly little information about dementia, likely due to our poor understanding of the disease. The common thread that seems to tie all four of these horseman together, including cancer and dementia, is dysregulated metabolism, which is also the central theme of Attia’s practical recommendations in the second half of the book. This section is divided into roughly into four, with the book highlighting lifestyle changes with regards to exercise, nutrition, sleep, and emotional well-being. Like with the first section, I broadly agree with Outlive’s prescription, although I have some quibbles with some of the details. More on each of these below.
Exercise
I originally discovered Peter through an interview with Iñigo San Millan, who is most famous for being cycling super-star Tadej Pogacar’s coach. Iñigo is a professor at University of Colorado (of course he is), who works on understanding what the metabolism of athletes can tell us about metabolic disease. Millan has shown, perhaps unsurprisingly, that athletes are far more insulin sensitive, and have far more of an ability to burn fat than both untrained and metabolically unhealthy people. They obtain these adaptions through a ton of exercise in what psychologists term Zone 2, which is done at a relatively pedestrian pace. This exercise in Zone 2 forms the basis of Peter’s prescriptions.
In addition to preventing the four horseman, the focus on Outlive in this section is on what Peter dubs the “centenarian decathlon”. These are a group of activities that you would like to be able to still do when you are 100 (or 80 or 90). In addition to the aerobic capacity developed by zone 2 exercise, which is necessary for actives like hiking or even walking, you also need to develop maintain muscular strength and coordination, as well as max aerobic capacity, also known as Vo2 max. Peter recommends roughly 6 hours of exercise a week, composed of a few weight lifting sessions, something like yoga for mobility, 2-3 Zone 2 sessions, and a hard Vo2 max workout. This is much more than the amount of exercise that most of us are doing, and much more than the current medical establishment recommends.
I don’t that this is a bad plan: certainly it’s better than doing nothing. But I worry that what Peter recommends is too intense, especially for someone who hasn’t really done much exercise before. What Outlive defines as Z2, right around the first lactate threshold of 1.5-2 mmol is pretty intense exercise, and will rely heavily on sugar, especially as an untrained athlete. Vo2 max work and the gym are also intense and heavily glycolytic. Instead of training your body to better burn fat, you may be creating massive amounts of sugar cravings. Since this program is also quite intense, I would imagine compliance might be an issue as well, potentially leaving you in a worse place that you started.
I would instead recommend a program like one Gordo Byrn outlines in this post: 4 hours of Z1 before the first lactate threshold, 30 minutes of higher intensity, an hour of gym work, and thirty minutes of mobility/agility a week. For an unfit person, even something like walking may be in that first zone. This plan will generally be much gentler on your nervous system, and will properly train your metabolism so you avoid CVD and diabetes like Peter intends.
I would also like to put in a small plug for barefoot shoes. I’ve been interested in them for years, but I was prompted to take the plunge by the recommendation of my friend. I’ve been wearing barefoot shoes to work and out and about for the past three months, and there has been a huge improvement in my balance and agility. Even my arch has returned. I haven’t done much running in them yet, but that will come!
Nutrition
One of the reasons I have such high respect for Peter is his ability to change his mind. Mid-2010s Peter would have put this section first and used it to advocate for the ketogenic diet. However, there just isn’t evidence for the effectiveness of this diet, nor really of any other diet for longevity: Peter is skeptical of epidemiological studies because of their inability to control for confounding variables. While I think he comes down too harsh on epidemiology, I largely agree. Diet is so individualized that it’s difficult to make prescriptions about what to and not to eat. As a result of this uncertainty, this section ends up being a little sparse on detailed advice. Avoid large caloric surpluses or deficits, avoid behaviors that spike your blood glucose and blood lipids, and make sure to eat enough protein to build muscle mass. All very non-objectionable, although I think Peter’s protein targets are a little aggressive. Protein is readily interconverted into sugar, and if you aren’t using it to build muscle you’re just going to be stressing your kidneys and raising your blood sugar. Plus high protein intake (beyond the needs of muscle synthesis) is associated with shorter lifespan in humans and pretty much every single model organism. I wouldn’t go much over 1g/lb of body weight, which is upper limit for more effective muscle synthesis.
Sleep
This chapter was also very non-objectionable. Get your 7-9 hours. Make sure you create a relaxed environment on both sides of sleep. Don’t track sleep if it stresses you out. I’m coming off a period of being too stressed out by my sleep tracking, so I’m trying to only focus on giving myself 9 hours in bed, and not worrying.
Emotional
I’m glad Attia included this chapter in Outlive, as I think it’s very important to consider why we want to live longer. Without joy, community, and love, increasing health and lifespan starts to increasingly look like Voldemort creating Horcrux’s while destroying every relationship that could have made his life better However, I didn’t find this chapter to be incredibly informative, most likely because Peter is a total newbie in this area. There’s a fuzzy recommendation for some kind of therapy, or at the very least self-directed CBT. The aim of this seems to be to understand environmental triggers for negative (and I suppose positive) emotional reactions and outbursts that ruin relationships and fix them. I don’t think this a bad idea, but I would appreciated more direction, and also more of a focus on the importance of social connection. As one of my friends in Baltimore keeps pointing out, loneliness can be as damaging as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. This is an aspect of longevity that was not addressed at all in this book.
Conclusion
Despite my quibbles, I think Outlive is the most solid and accessible longevity book on the market. Attia grounds his prescriptions in the tangible goals of chronic disease prevention and the centenarian olympics, and the advice he gives is practicable and actionable. While I wish that he would have touched more on the emotional and social aspects of healthy aging, he at least acknowledges the former and likely will feature more guests on his podcast The Drive that deal with this aspect of health.
- Statins are difficult to get over the counter, but you can take nattokinase, which is almost as good
Work: Been using the fact that flies are still growing up to tackle some long term analysis and presentations that I've been procrastinating. This is going pretty well, and highlighting that I need to wrap up experiments completely before moving on to something new. Have my committee meeting friday, which I generally feel prepared for.
Fitness: 9.5 hours last week. Huge breakthrough the weekend where I ran an 8k at 5:30 pace, and last night, where I did a tempo ladder ending at 4:40! Unlike last week got in this morning's session as well. In a good place with this: just need to make sure I don't start compromising aerobic volume as I build intensity going into Boston. Should be 11-12 hours this week.
Intellectual Stuff: About to finish Marx and enjoying Spinoza! Having trouble balancing Italian and Spanish, but this should get easier as my work calms down slightly.
Finances: Unexpected huge windfall. ZIM, an Israeli shipping company that's about 10% of my portfolio is going to be sold to a German shipping firm for $35/share. I bought at $19 a share, and have been accumulating extra shares through dividends, so will end up making around $3000 from this. Also got some cash back from PT, and spending is looking like it will be under $3k this month.
Dating: Masturbated once to porn this weekend, but removing stimulus has helped a lot. Decided firmly not to date right now.
Tarot: Really good session with my ex-roommate who's started a teaching job that he likes much more.
Socializing: Cooked tempura with my friend nick, and hosted track night Tuesday last night. Going to co-host a Chinese new year party soon.
Screen time: 1.5 hours.
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