thejdizzler
15d 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
20d 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
23d 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
23d 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
24d 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
25d 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
26d ago
Yes he is another one that fits this mold.
thejdizzler
27d 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
29d 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I haven't read Years of Rice and Salt since I was about 16, but I remember absolutely loving it. It is an interesting exploration of reincarnation and of how "locked in" a lot of history seems to have been. It also inspired me to do an Iroquois mega-campaign in Eu4/vic2, which you will understand when you've read the book.
I also have this on my bookshelf (it's been checked out of the library for ages), so perhaps we can agree to read it September and discuss?
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Drove my roommate to the airport and will be picking him up tonight. Wrote a training plan for a friend for the Baltimore marathon.
So what are you reading? I just finished The Children of Men by P.D. James, review below. Also working on Way of Kings, Capital, and some Kant.
Didn't realize that the author of this was THE P.D. James, of thriller writing fame. I guess there is something about British authors who abbreviate there first and middle names and pulling surprisingly deep science fiction commentary that has stood the test of time (thinking of you E.M. Forster).
The Children of Men is a book about a world with ultra-low fertility, in other words, an extreme version of a world that we already live in. I had a friend's birthday party at the park a couple weeks ago (I'm getting close to 30 unfortunately), and I noticed that out of the 20 or so couples there, only one had a child. And I think this is becoming increasingly true over the whole entire world. Many of the downstream aspects of this fact also seem to be shared between James' novel and reality: the prevalence of pet parents, the lack of interest in the future of society (but a fixation on the past), and an obsession with health and safety at all costs.
Beyond the social commentary, the actual plot of the novel is a little lackluster. It centers on an Oxford Professor of History, Theo, who happens to be the cousin of the dictator of England. Theo lives a pretty unremarkable and utterly selfish life (even before the "Omega" where most men suddenly become infertile), until he becomes involved with a rebel group that wants to enact some minor changes in the governmental system, but more importantly, is sheltering a woman who happens to be pregnant. Theo's time with this group changes his inner and outer lives almost completely: it's amazing what hope for the future does to an individual, although I was left wondering at the end how much would really change in England after the birth of this child.
Having children is no basis for a moral system in of itself (this was Chesterton's critique of H.G. Wells), but it sure as hell makes constructing a society a hell of a lot easier. Unfortunately I think our world is headed to a future more similar to what James envisioned in the 1990s. People simply aren't having children: I'm guilty of this too: it's not like I'm close to being married even. And that, I think, means that this society isn't very long for this world.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Not as far as I can tell. When I was actually eating natto my digestive system felt better if anything. I unfortunately don't enjoy the stuff either, so it's tablets for me.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I haven't done any testing myself (which I could because I have access to Western blotting materials), but this is the supplement that I take. You need to take triple the dose they say though: you need at least 10,000 FU to see what they saw in the study, which means 6 tablets not 2. Also more effective if taken with K2, which is unsurprisingly in natto itself.
Yea certainly! I've been very excited about nattokinase recently. This is a compound found in the Japanese fermented soybean dish Natto, that has been shown to reduce plaque by up to 36% in a single year. Been trying to get the parents on it with little success. I myself take it daily.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
We do see people without much plaque who have eaten diets relatively low in fat, especially saturated fat. But this usually means that one's diet is high in protein (which greatly increases cancer risk and kidney failure, although at least the former can be greatly mitigated through DNA-repair), or carbohydrates (which greatly increases the risk of insulin resistance). Now many traditional populations experience none of these three metabolic failure modes. Yet that is (as far as I understand it) usually a result of them being on the edge of starvation most of time, which increases risks for other things like malnutrition which would negatively impact cellular replication.
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
I certainly think it would help, but I'm not sure it would solve things completely. Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
Certainly, and I'm by no means arguing that enhanced DNA repair wouldn't help improve lifespans significantly. I just don't believe that this would be the magic bullet, as there are many other things going wrong as one ages. In addition to metabolism there's also the problem of the brain no longer producing new cells at all, which you point out in a comment thread below.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
This fits what I have read and seen of the research as well. There was a poster at a meeting I went to this year in San Diego where they selected flies for long lifespans by only taking offspring after a certain date (usually around 40 days I think). The genes that they found to be modified were all over the genome and didn't point to a single nice answer about aging other than it's something that affects the whole organism through many different pathways.
Nick Lane (one of my favorite biologists these days) has a theory that aging is caused by accumulations of mitochondrial mutations that prevent optimal ATP production. Eventually you get to the point where tissues can't produce enough energy to sustain themselves and then you get multiple organ failure and die. I'm attracted to this model because it means that in order to combat aging you should do a lot of aerobic (easy) exercise and have kids with people who are physically fit. Over time the average human lifespan should increase.
Uhhh that is not the reason. You get build up of atherosclerotic plaque in the circulatory system for reasons we don't really understand fully yet, but has something to do with the activity of immune cells and levels of dietary fat. Over time the plaque blocks the vessel and you get a heart attack. No cell replication involved. I can point to a bunch of other diseases of aging (T2D for example) that have similar mechanisms of action that are metabolic, not replicator dependent. In the case of T2D for example, making the beta cells of the pancreas more robust won't fix the fact that your body doesn't respond to insulin any more. Of course there are things you can do to prevent these diseases (exercise and diet), but those only work up into a point.
There's also the theory of mitochondrial dysfunction causing aging. This one is a DNA-caused problem. Basically mitochondrial genomes accumulate mutations much more rapidly than cellular genomes. Since a large amount of the DNA for mitochondrial proteins is stored in the nucleus, not in the mitochondria, this eventually leads to some serious incompatibilities and dysfunctions in mitochondrial energy production. These eventually become so large that one by one the individual tissues in your body can no longer keep up and you die from multiple organ failure. This could theoretically be fixed by fixing mutated DNA in the mitochondria, but it's not clear to me yet how you could accomplish this, nor what template you would use for repair.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Ahh I see. It is a lot better than what I'm used to, which is just idle theorizing usually. At least couzens tries to support his ideas with "something". But you're right, it's not very rigorous. Thanks for the explanation.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
My understanding is there is a large metabolic and structural component. Heart disease is still the #1 killer and this is almost entirely due to a break down in how the circulatory system functions. There is a genetic component but ti's not like fixing people's DNA will really help
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.
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