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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2136 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 27, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm losing access to my gym for the next few months. I've been doing the 4 major lifts (deads, squats, bench, OHP) and some accessory lifts. I also do some mild cardio, about 10-15k/week.

What would be a good stopgap program to prevent me from losing too much strength/muscle mass? I have the following equipment at home:

  • Pull-up/dip bar
  • Dumbbell set (up to 30kg)
  • Ab wheel

I was thinking of just doing some random grab bag of isolation exercises (curls, flies, etc) but if anyone could recommend a coherent dumbbell program with good coverage, that would be awesome. I'm most worried about upper body (my legs are already huge).

If you want to keep up the weights, buy a foldable bench. I have one by Flybird I picked up for $50 on Craigslist. Fits easily in a closet when not being used.

This is a decent program: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/2e79y4/dumbbell_ppl_proposed_alternative_to_dumbbell/

However, a few months off is not a big deal. Your strength and muscle will bounce back quickly. Maybe a good time to explore some other forms of exercise.

Thanks, I was considering getting a bench after seeing the other comment and that's a pretty reasonable price point. And as much as I hate to admit it, this is probably a good time to focus on cardio.

30kg per DB, or 15kg per DB? Without a bench DBs are only good for shoulders and arms. If you have 30kg DBs, two foam rollers (long smooth ones, not lumpy tubes) taped together make for a serviceable ghetto bench to do chest presses.

I would do pull-ups and dips for the chest and back, weighted if needed. Get a belt you can hang your DBs from.

Long term lurker looking for some Wednesday Wellness advice.

I broke up with my girlfriend of 6 years a few weeks ago. The core reason was that I wanted to meet other people - she was my first and only relationship and while what we had was amazing in many ways, I couldn't shake the thought that I might be missing out on more. If I'm going to marry and have kids with someone I want to be damn sure that they're the right person, and I wasn't. I decided to throw away an incredibly stable and largely happy relationship for the chance of something even better. I felt that if I didn't I would live with regret, or just end up breaking up later down the road, which could be even worse. I'm worried this makes me seem selfish and naive.

I've never broken up or been broken up with (again, first relationship), but boy are they fucking hard! She moved out of my place and I don't see or talk with her any more, but I'm paradoxically still surrounded by her every day. I'll drive past restaurants we used to eat at, hear songs we used to listen to, see things in my house that remind me of her. I remind myself this is what I wanted, it's not like this new reality was thrust upon me without my consent, but it's sometimes hard to remember why I wanted it in the first place. I'm wondering if losing her was the only way to make me realize how much I needed her in my life.

Time heals all wounds and I know things will only get easier, but I haven't let go of her yet. And I'm not willing to let go quite yet either, which means things may get even harder before they get easier.

Just musings now, I'm continuing to think and reflect the next few weeks. Happy to answer any questions or take feedback/thoughts from folks.

I don't know what you did right or wrong and won't pretend to.

I'll just note that the worst romantic mistake I ever made was dating a mediocre girl for a year in college. I never should have dated her, she was fine but I was never serious about her while she loved me.

Dumping her hurt like a bitch. I hated to hurt her like that. Watching her cry that hard hurt so bad, and she was wearing my rowing sweatshirt when I did it; and she took it off and refused to wear it out, so knowing she walked home in the cold made me feel so much worse. I dumped her on Friday and cried until Monday. It was like putting my dog down.

On Monday the woman who is now my wife got back from her visit home. She brought me a care package from new England. She'd been advising me "as a friend" to dump the gf. She had been scheming, like a sexy teenage Palpatine, on this subject for weeks. By Thursday she was my gf. This was the best decision I ever made.

I can't predict how it will end for you, but I can say that regardless I understand your pain. I hope all goes well.

I will add some counterbalance and say that the way she feels should be irrelevant to your decisionmaking beyond the possibility of you wanting to get back with her and her feeling bad reducing the chances of this happening.

In the west where "individualism" is the name of the day you have to focus on maximising the outcomes for yourself given your environment because sure as hell nobody else is going to be out there looking for you. I don't think it's possible for anyone to tell just from your post that what you did was not optimal in expectation (it might have been, it might not have been, random strangers over the internet don't have the info needed to make that calculation, only you and perhaps those other people close to you do).

Now you may well have fucked up here, but the reason for that would be that you threw away something good and now can't find anything on the same level, not because "you wasted her years"; she is a human being with the same level of agency as you, if she felt it wasn't working she should have pushed for marriage earlier or broken it off herself when she thought it wasn't going the way she wanted her life to go. Under the standard modern western mentality her failures and suffering are on her, not on you, you have nothing to answer for.

I wish you good luck in the future and hope you are able to meet someone even more amazing who you are sure is the woman you wish to spend the rest of your life with.

How old is she? This really seems like something you should have thought about 5 years ago?

You're a fucking idiot. I threw away my first love for the same reason, and regret it to this day.

Where you never able to find someone else to wholeheartedly love?

Yes. After six months, and meeting my parents, I said "I love you" on vacation on an island in the Great lakes, she did likewise. Then a month later she broke it off. It turned out she went back to her abusive ex husband, who laughed at me for saying "I love you" and called her trash to my face. Less than year later she left him again, but didn't tell me. Or communicate with me at all.

She left me in the fall of 2019, and then COVID happened.

My condolences, and best wishes.

To add a counterbalance here: I don't think anyone here has nearly enough information to clearly state that you've made a mistake. A life-long commitment with children is a huge one, and you have every right to feel a sense of security in your decision when you make it (I'm saying this as a married guy with a 2 year old). I also find it patently absurd that others are holding you accountable to robbing this girl of 6 years of child-bearing-years, it is not your responsibility to provide someone with children, and further, if you have doubts then you don't want those doubts materializing in your relationship later where they could affect your child.

I agree with @self_made_human; you fucked up pretty seriously imo. I realize that you're not feeling the best and I'm sorry to pile on more, but you need to realize this now so that the next time you have someone good you don't set them aside because "what if I can do even better".

My wife and I have discussed this topic because I was in a similar boat as you - she was the first woman I ever dated, and I had to make a call as to whether I should pursue other options just to see what's out there. She, on the other hand, had dated many men over the years before meeting me. I mentioned to her (long after we got married) that I faced this choice, and basically there are two salient points she made based on her perspective:

  1. It was good for me that I chose to not set her aside, because at minimum she would've started dating others and who knows where things go from there. More likely she would not have considered a relationship with me again.

  2. Having dated many people she was able to gain perspective on just how many losers are out there. You're doing decently if you just find someone who is a good person even if they aren't good for you, let alone finding someone who is a good person and also good for you. So basically, if you hit that mark on the first try, be grateful because you saved yourself a whole lot of trouble.

If by some miracle your old girlfriend would take you back, I would suggest that. If she won't, then definitely don't make this same mistake again next time.

So basically, if you hit that mark on the first try, be grateful because you saved yourself a whole lot of trouble.

Or alternatively stick with her while you secretly search for someone who is a good person as well as is good for you. Now this is not an honourable thing to do, but there is no honour left in the modern west and I would not judge a man additionally for doing this beyond what I would judge any normal man who accepts and lives by the modern western belief system uncritically.

I suppose you can just marry the first four (or ten). You can fuck them as children, or murder men to marry their wives. Plus all the sex slaves. That would be the honourable thing in your religion, as per your prophet.

While @BurdensomeCount is clearly trolling for reactions, you're still to blame for being so willing to take the bait and swallow it whole, and this was pure personal attack. You've been banned four times previously for this sort of thing. I'm making it two weeks this time, only because I am feeling the Christmas spirit.

What is the point of a 6 years relationship?

Based on that woman tolerating that, she was probably not a good partner. It shouldn't take more than a year to figure out whether a person is good or not, ideally in chastity. If you can't, ask your older relatives, that's what family is for.

Women only get a couple decades of healthy reproduction, taking 6 whole years away from them is cruel.

I might be missing out on more.

Can you elaborate on that? What is it that some hypothetical woman would bring to the table that would make wasting ~8 years of your adult life worth it (realistically speaking you're not gonna be serious before at least 2 years with a new partner even if you found them tomorrow)?

Hey man, good on you for taking the leap. You're probably right that she's not the one if you're not entirely sure. You're probably also right that you don't know who or what you're really looking for yet. It takes time and experience to know.

Believe it or not, this is actually a unique and wonderful time that you will look back on with fondness. I remember my young breakups and boy do you FEEL like you've never FELT before. It's sad, it's powerful, it's bitterly beautiful. Embrace it, feel it, listen to sad music, draw a picture, just really get it out of your system. You won't be able to feel this hard when you get older (or you will, but it will be a lot less romantic and a lot more bitter). Young hormones are a hell of a(n awesome) drug.

Watch this video and give it a think. I think I watch it once a year, it really puts things into perspective for me. https://youtube.com/watch?v=V_eCrIO0ECw?feature=shared

I feel for you buddy.

I broke up with my girlfriend of 7 years for largely the same reasons. My reasons were based more on the physical chemistry between us; I had largely lost physical attraction to her and, really, I wanted to have sex with other women.

This breakup was two years ago, and I still think about her often. Part of the reason is that we still talk from time to time so it hasn't been a complete break in relations. She was and is a wonderful woman and there were many things I admired about her. But I just wasn't sure she was the right one, and, like I said, I really wanted to mess around with other women.

Do I regret breaking up with her? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When I was in the relationship, I felt largely unfulfilled. I would see a beautiful woman walking by and be filled with negative feelings about my own relationship. It was a major sticking point for me and, honestly, if I'd stuck it out, I would have lived with a lot of regret. At the same time, my ex adored me and treated me incredibly well. I don't think I will find another person who will treat me so well and who's intellect and work ethic I admire so much.

So...give it time. Six years is a long time to be with a person. It's good that you have cut off communication, this should make things heal more quickly. Just make sure you find things to do with your time and minimize time spent by yourself. I've always found alone time is what brings on the thoughts of rumination and regret. It's hard to break up with someone. It's especially hard to break up with someone, not because of anything they've done, but because it just didn't "feel" right or because you wanted to sleep around. Good luck to you.

Well, where is your love life now? How many years has it been?

I decided to throw away an incredibly stable and largely happy relationship for the chance of something even better.

If you read or heard that from someone else, what would you think?

I would think they are a typical westerner and not much more about it, par for the course, as they say. In fact doing so shows they are risk taking, which is a quality I personally admire, so probably slightly positively predisposed towards them.

That they weren't willing to settle and had some balls? I would've said the same thing of my ex-gfs, but when I met my future wife it was a whole new level of satisfaction and happiness.

The core reason was that I wanted to meet other people - she was my first and only relationship and while what we had was amazing in many ways, I couldn't shake the thought that I might be missing out on more. If I'm going to marry and have kids with someone I want to be damn sure that they're the right person, and I wasn't.

What would make someone "the right person?", in your mind?

My modestly informed opinion that you dun goofed.

Of course, the optimal stopping problem and the sub-problem known as the Secretary Problem is relevant:

The basic form of the problem is the following: imagine an administrator who wants to hire the best secretary out of n rankable applicants for a position. The applicants are interviewed one by one in random order. A decision about each particular applicant is to be made immediately after the interview. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. During the interview, the administrator gains information sufficient to rank the applicant among all applicants interviewed so far, but is unaware of the quality of yet unseen applicants. The question is about the optimal strategy (stopping rule) to maximize the probability of selecting the best applicant. If the decision can be deferred to the end, this can be solved by the simple maximum selection algorithm of tracking the running maximum (and who achieved it), and selecting the overall maximum at the end. The difficulty is that the decision must be made immediately.

The shortest rigorous proof known so far is provided by the odds algorithm. It implies that the optimal win probability is always at least 1/e (where e is the base of the natural logarithm), and that the latter holds even in a much greater generality. The optimal stopping rule prescribes always rejecting the first n/e applicants that are interviewed and then stopping at the first applicant who is better than every applicant interviewed so far (or continuing to the last applicant if this never occurs). Sometimes this strategy is called the 1/e stopping rule, because the probability of stopping at the best applicant with this strategy is about 1/e already for moderate values of n. One reason why the secretary problem has received so much attention is that the optimal policy for the problem (the stopping rule) is simple and selects the single best candidate about 37% of the time, irrespective of whether there are 100 or 100 million applicants.

Let's assume it takes about a year to figure out if a longterm partner is The One, and you have a budget of 10 years or 10 LTPs. I'll assume a typical age range for "serious" relationships as somewhere from 25-35.

In that case, 10/2.72 is about 3.6, so you should go for about 4 steady relationships where you heartlessly break up, and then snag the next person who happens to beat all the ones that came before on whatever metric you care about. Unfortunately, you've spent 6 of said years, so not only did you break her heart, you did so in a less than optimal way :(

However, if I was in her shoes, I wouldn't even consider taking you back, someone who is willing to end an otherwise happy relationship over this isn't someone you wish to settle down with, not that I haven't felt the same way you did. However, when I did break up with my girlfriend of 5 years, it was something we both knew was coming for unavoidable reasons, and not a mere whim.

At any rate, good luck finding someone else, or at least having her take you back.

In that case, 10/2.72 is about 3.6, so you should go for about 4 steady relationships where you heartlessly break up, and then snag the next person who happens to beat all the ones

I do not think this is the right way to frame the Secretary problem result. The optimal solution to the secretary problem is that you should reject the first 1/e proportion of applicants and then accept the next best one to turn up. That would suggest you should spend 10/2.72 = 3.6 years searching for people and then selecting the first person after that point who happens to turn up better than everyone else, not that you should have 3.6 relationships where you break up, unless you're assuming that each relationship lasts exactly 1 year and that you immediately find another relationship after ending your current one. For instance if a relationship would last 3 years on average the 3.6 relationships here already put you outside the age range of 25-35.

Under this paradigm you should search around until 25+3.6 = 28.6 and then accept the first person who turns up who is better than everyone you've managed to get a relationship with between 25-28.6. This also has the benefit of being scale invariant to how easily you can find relationships, as if you can find relationships very easily you'll have lots of people in your 25-28.6 sample so will have a high floor for who you settle down with, but that's fine because you find relationships easily, while on the other hand if you were able to have no relationships between 25-28.6 this would suggest you accept the first person who turns up, which again sort of makes sense for you to do because you're probably not getting anyone else if you turn them down.

I am assuming each relationship lasts 1 year. Real life has enough additional complexity that I doubt that simplifying conclusion makes any difference, and on average, a year seems like the rough amount of time needed to know if things are going to work out in the longterm with a new partner.

There are all kinds of wrinkles in a real life context, such as being exposed to additional evidence regarding the quality of one's partners before "interviewing" them, not having to see strictly serially, not needing a strict amount of time for each relationship, having each relationship change your SMV and so on.

But either approach shows that OP wasn't being sensible in how he handled things.

Does it feel bad to make love in a relationship you already know is ending?

I've felt worse things, like appendicitis.

Actually, not particularly, it was when cuddling and being sweet that that the pain of separation chose to time travel back and hit me when it hurts.

I'm just about finished with a bulk phase and now doing a cut phase. That is, dieting.

My problem with dieting is that the person who decides to begin the diet., me, can be overruled by the future me through non-compliance. I cannot make decisions that bind my future self.

If I get a DEXA scan done, and weigh myself, and have blood test and take BP measurements, that puts me into a mode to really focus on my health. The problem is after a few months of it the dread sets in and I avoid weighing myself. Or I stop logging my calories. Some time has gone by and I don't want to see my BP anymore.

Biomarkers are great for me for motivation, but they rely on me to get them done, and sometimes I run out of motivation to have them done.

One idea I had writing this: when I get my DEXA scan done, immediately schedule the next one for 3 months out. There's probably not much health utility to getting them done so frequently, but I imagine it would be super annoying to pay for one and see fat gain. Looming persistent motivator.

Anything else along these lines? I could imagine a boutique health app leveraging similar persistent motivator things like this.

Alternatively, can I create a personal psycho-social environment that puts extreme pressure on me to strive for low body fat? You know, like what the Japanese have going for them.

I commented scolding you for exposing yourself to an unnecessary and repeated dose of ionizing radiation, but it turns out it's not that bad. About the equivalent of a single high altitude flight really.

Depending on how strongly that motivates you to lose weight, it might even be worth it, but goodness knows you're the first person I've seen who does it electively to motivate themselves to diet.

Write a post-dated check to an organization you loathe for a sum large enough to sting. Give that check to someone you trust. If you don't weight 'x' with 'y' bodyfat on Jan 1 2025, they mail the check. This is a semi famous commitment device. YMMV.

But when it comes to diet, its really up to you and your habits. There is no end to dieting until your habits keep you at a healthy weight. You might be tempted to crash diet at the end following the above, but its an interesting idea.

Depending on how strongly that motivates you to lose weight, it might even be worth it, but goodness knows you're the first person I've seen who does it electively to motivate themselves to diet.

If you're skinny-fat it's actually extremely helpful. For years I had people telling me, including health care workers, that my high BMI was probably an over-estimate. I finally got a DEXA done and it revealed my BF% was actually much higher than I thought; my BMI was actually under-estimating.

The key is to give yourself some mild body dysmorphia around the major problem area. I don’t have “abs” in the six pack sense, but I have a flat stomach and I’m extremely sensitive to noticing even a slight increase in fat, which happens maybe two or three times a year, whereupon I channel the resulting self hatred to immediately cut my food intake by ~40% for a few days and quickly return to baseline. This has kept me skinny for a long time with minimal discomfort.

It seems to me the classic gym bulking/cutting regime makes things more difficult because you really have to suffer through a pretty substantial weight loss at calorie deficit for a long time a couple times a year. Better to avoid gaining the fat at all if you can.

Better to avoid gaining the fat at all if you can.

Yeah.

I was as high as 260 at my worst following SAD with no exercise, 190 at my best through extremely rigorous dieting and exercise. My dysmorphia kicks in at 220 but that's still too high. I think the reason is I start to see it in my face when I reach 220, and that triggers disgust. Ideally I would have earlier "I'd better fucking deal with this" signals.

Perhaps an opt-in fat shaming subreddit? :thinking:

pants get tighter, number on scale go up = time to lose. no need for such frequent scans.

My understanding is that DEXA scans aren't really that reliable and that headline bf levels are not very useful. Personally I just go by how tight my lifting belt is. Unless you're very obese fluctuations in your body fat should be apparent.

And it seems like fixating on the scan right now is hurting more than it helps. You're unable to start cutting now because if you lost weight now, it would go unmeasured.

Does anyone have recommendations for audiobooks like those written by Malcolm Gladwell, except without the wrong conclusions? I like a lot about Malcolm Gladwell. He's got a good voice for narration, he can tell a good interesting narrative, he does a lot of research into fascinating real world cases. But I've got a big issue with him that he'll then draw very sweeping conclusions off those few anecdotes, and those conclusions are usually exaggerated at best or the complete opposite of actual reality at worst.

I liked the Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, it was similar, except instead of trying to present some unifying theory of human psychology, each chapter basically just ended with "yep, humans really can be terrible sometimes" or "yep, humans really can be awesome sometimes". Without trying to present some simple fix to completely solve enormous social ills.

, he does a lot of research into fascinating real world cases.

his research is poor, like regarding IQ. Poor research often leads to poor/wrong conclusions.

He's pretty bad at identifying which studies are good and which are bad, and at properly looking over all the studies. But he's great at finding interesting anecdotes.

I find Steven Pinker very easy to read and extremely informative. No idea if his audiobooks are as entertaining (though he's also a great public speaker, so, perhaps!)

Bonus: his brutal takedown of Malcolm Gladwell is super entertaining https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html

IMO, best Pinker books are Enlightenment Now and also Better Angels of our Nature. Also The Blank Slate, but that's preaching to the choir in the rat community.

Great essay, basically my exact thoughts on Gladwell. I've seen Pinker recommended before, but I think there's a lot of overlap with stuff I've already read. I'm sure it's all great stuff, but idk really the point of reading a book if I'm already fully convinced on its conclusion.

Couple of reasons to read a book still:

  1. Learn how other people build arguments to reach the conclusion you already are convicted of. It can help you with additional arguments that can help bolster your defense of that idea, or if the argument is poor you now know in advance how others might want to dismantle your conclusion.
  2. Someone else put the effort into compiling a bunch of sources that can count as evidence, statistics, stories, etc that can be a good reference point, especially if you don't have those yourself already.
  3. The style of the writing itself is interesting/entertaining enough to warrant reading.

Pinker's books are quite lengthy though, so it'll take a month to get through his books via audio if you do like 1-2 hours a day. That being said, you could just look at the chapter titles and skip to the parts that might be of interest to you. You might miss some of the context/previously established ideas but the nice thing about nonfiction work is that you don't have to read the whole thing in its entirety.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has some interesting ideas in his books (The Black Swan, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game were three I listened to). He comes off a bit arrogant to me but I think his books leave some interesting ideas to ponder on. Funnily enough, Pinker and Taleb also have some beef:

  1. https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf
  2. https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker_1.pdf

Okay next workout question - where can I read about getting high quality protein and getting proper macros etc? Just looking for a general overview that’s well sourced and legit.

High quality protein means animal sourced protein, meat or dairy. Some plant protein is pretty good too, I think pea protein and soy protein are supposed to be the best.

'proper macros' is a bit of a chimera. Though most people are in agreement that you need a certain minimum amount of fats (like 30g), the rest is very dependent on who you listen to. If you're lifting weights or interested in building muscle, 2g/kg of bodyweight is a reasonable target. Beyond that, it's probably better to experiment and find what balance of carbs and fats works for you.

I think this is a good article on the subject of diets for lifting https://www.strongerbyscience.com/diet/

Ty sir! I’ll check it out.

And it’s funny that high quality protein is a euphemism for meat hah. Those vegans are stronk.

Commitments time for the next year. New desk job and long commute messed up my habits and now I weight about 10-15kg more than I would like to. Also my lifts (very decent but not overly high number) haven’t increased during this time at all. So it’s almost entirely fat that I put on. Any suggestions? Is it sensible to try to get an ozempic prescription for a relatively little amount of weight like this? I am not doing so far with losing weight via simple self discipline.

I've heard that a lot of the people on Ozempic ended up losing quite a lot of muscle, in fact more than fat. That's not some inherent property of the drug, but the reality that for normal people, suppression of appetite can lead to someone cutting out the normal healthy food from their diet and leaving the hyper palatable junk food. So I think it's maybe a little bit soon to try it.

there is no consensus about this. Often, lean mass is conflated with muscle mass. not the same.

Well, if not muscle, what kind of lean mass did you think they lost?

Have you tried intermittent fasting? Limit yourself to just the catered lunch meal for the day.

I haven’t thought of this at all. Going to research about intermittent fasting

I've founded skipping breakfast and having a light lunch to be great. You are less hungry all day.

Don’t you feel weak and hungry if you don’t have breakfast? I could skip lunch or dinner but not breakfast

At first I was hungry, then it went away. It takes a couple weeks to get used to it.

It works well for me, having one sinful meal every 24 hours optimizes for my gourmand tendencies, the state of my wallet, and the diameter of my belt.

It takes a few days to get used to it, but I manage just fine even with a hectic schedule.

While I can empathize with people that have repeatedly failed at weight loss resorting to pharmaceutical options, I really don't think mind-altering substances should be the first resort for simple problems. Weight loss really isn't all that complicated and developing good dietary and fitness habits is character-building in its own right. Fix your habits before reaching for the drugs.

If someone has repeatedly failed at weight loss, then drugs aren't their first resort, by definition. I myself am hesitant to try a pharmacological solution to a willpower problem, but I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to go "I keep trying and failing, it's time to see if this helps because it may literally save my life".

how many calories/day you eating now?

Can’t count because I rely on work catering for the big meal of the day (lunch). I had a period of strict calorie counting for fun a couple years ago and realised how many calories I was getting from snacking. I think if I break that habit I can have a consistent calorie deficit. But really difficult to break it honestly

work catering

Do they order from outside restaurants? Many of them are required to post calorie counts somewhere, and many who aren't required do it anyway. See if you can find them. It probably won't be as 'pristine' as when you make your own, but it'll get you in a decent enough ballpark.

I was going to suggest tracking calories and avoiding calorie dense foods, but it sounds like you already have an impression on where your calories come from. Habits by their nature are hard to break at the start, but it gets easier over time. I find you have to psyop yourself a little. Figure out which low calorie density snacks you enjoy. Tell yourself you can have as many carrot sticks as you want, instead of framing it around restrictions. Try being mindful and asking if you're snacking because you're hungry, or just because you've conditioned yourself to eat at a particular time or setting.

If all else fails, try croissants or potatoes.

https://fireinabottle.net/introducing-the-croissant-diet/

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/12/lose-10-6-pounds-in-four-weeks-with-this-one-weird-trick-discovered-by-local-slime-hive-mind-doctors-grudgingly-respect-them-hope-to-become-friends/

Something I've never seen mentioned but am curious if it works for others is choosing to only walk to the grocery store. It seems to align a lot of things the right way, and seemed to help me lose weight. It's basically the only exercise I do and fitbit says I'm burning like 1500 calories a day (not sure how accurate that is). But you do buy less groceries, and what you do buy you are carrying back all the way, and you also generally are making more trips since you can only carry so much.

Dedication-wise I think it's nice as well because you only have to stick to one choice, instead of a bunch of different will-testing choices.

Edit: Forgive me, I am a noob at calorie counting, so scanning through walking calories burned online, with weights etc. I think it should be around six hundred for my particular route.

I don’t have a car and already walk or cycle everywhere unfortunately so not much I can improve in this regard

It's basically the only exercise I do and fitbit says I'm burning like 1500 calories a day (not sure how accurate that is).

Active calories or total calories per day including your basal metabolic rate? Burning 1500 calories is typically a couple hours of running, much more for walking.

Yeah I edited with what I think is a better estimate, I don't know where the app is getting calories from, possibly just adding to some baseline. Never really bothered double checking the number since I was losing weight anyway but now I know!

It's basically the only exercise I do and fitbit says I'm burning like 1500 calories a day

I doubt you're burning anywhere close to that amount walking to and from the grocery store. There is no 1-1 relationship between calories burned with exercise and the "CO" in CICO. Just because the app says you burned 400 does not mean you can eat a 400 calorie cookie and not gain weight. Or that you will lose .1 pounds. it's impossible to know. Research shows that the body compensates by burning fewer calories after exercise.

Research shows that the body compensates by burning fewer calories after exercise.

Perhaps if you're already active enough to be in the plateau regime.

fitbit says I'm burning like 1500 calories a day

How far’s the grocery store lol?

Man's going uphill both ways, on Mount Everest. Skookum would be proud.

New Swedish twin study just dropped[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10274991/

Maybe exercising doesn't matter all that much?

Results

We identified four classes of long-term LTPA: sedentary, moderately active, active and highly active. Although biological ageing was accelerated in sedentary and highly active classes, after adjusting for other lifestyle-related factors, the associations mainly attenuated. Physically active classes had a maximum 7% lower risk of total mortality over the sedentary class, but this association was consistent only in the short term and could largely be accounted for by familial factors. LTPA exhibited less favourable associations when prevalent diseases were exclusion criteria rather than covariate.

Conclusion

Being active may reflect a healthy phenotype instead of causally reducing mortality.

I both want this to be true (because it would be a relief, in a way) but also don't (because it means your mortality isn't really modifiable by exercise). Any good analyses/critiques available?

  1. On Jun 5th 2023. So not that new.

I once looked into animal studies on exercise and I remember there were papers showing a similar result. Mouses that exercised did not live longer, but they were healthier: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2046-2395-2-14

It’s not impossible IMO that exercise is a consequence of a healthy organism, whose energy is so abundant that it wants to get rid of the excess through physical expenditure. Anyone who has experienced childhood or owned a young dog should be familiar with the phenomenon. Exercise intervention studies would have been compromised by the fact that the already-healthier people would have been more keen to sign up, or if it were randomized more keen to accept, and more keen to remain in the study. When I was young, randomly running required about 5% of the willpower it does for me now — because I was a well-trained athlete as a child? No, just an organism with a lot of health energy to spare.

One obvious confounder I just thought of: if a twin dies isn't the other twin going to feel, like, super bummed and like their life isn't worth living anymore?

According to ChatGPT4

Twins, particularly identical ones, often have a very close emotional and social bond. The loss of a twin can lead to significant emotional stress and grief, which might impact the surviving twin's health. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the "twinless twin syndrome," where the death of one twin can lead to deteriorating health in the other.

An alternate title for this study could perhaps be: Twinless twin syndrome kills more than good lifestyle habits protect

The same thing keeps being suggested:

  • Propensity to live an extremely long life (longer than 90, certainly than 100) is almost entirely genetic. If your family mostly checks out at 80 it’s unlikely going full Bryan Johnson is going to get you to 100.
  • Regular checkups can help avoid unexpected but curable conditions that can lead to not reaching your genetic life expectancy (most historic examples of these like appendicitis and pregnancy are no longer major issues in developed countries, and others like diabetes and breast cancer can usually be managed/treated to allow for many additional years of life).
  • Healthy lifestyles do nothing to raise your genetic ‘cap’, although they might improve your quality of life (range of movement, ability to play with the grandkids, to go on walks, to attract the opposite sex etc).
  • Extremely unhealthy lifestyles can lower your life expectancy because of eg. medical complications of morbid obesity.

Regular checkups can help avoid unexpected but curable conditions that can lead to not reaching your genetic life expectancy (most historic examples of these like appendicitis and pregnancy are no longer major issues in developed countries, and others like diabetes and breast cancer can usually be managed/treated to allow for many additional years of life).

colon cancer screening is a big one. lots of middle-aged ppl dying from this now.

What are latest thoughts on when the begin screening and how frequently to repeat? My physician thinks we shouldn't start earlier than 45 and I feel like he'd laugh if I suggested every 5 years.

I have used Cologuard even few years, at my doctor's recommendation.

Depends heavily on family history and other risks, but 45 is the new standard.

Propensity to live an extremely long life (longer than 90, certainly than 100) is almost entirely genetic. If your family mostly checks out at 80 it’s unlikely going full Bryan Johnson is going to get you to 100.

I'll admit a fairly huge part of my skepticism of study results like this is because I assume the world is full of haters who don't want Bryan Johnson (and other longevity types who rub like 50% of the population the wrong way) to succeed in living longer: https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1727742379522949433

The guy just reads like a fitness influencer for nerds

One thing that I don't understand how to deal with is

Alcohol use was based on average alcohol consumption (g/day) in 1981 of beer, wine and spirits[25] and classified as never, former, occasional (>0.1 and <1.3 g), low (≥1.3 and <25 g), medium (≥25 and <45 g), high (≥45 and <65 g) and very high (≥65 g)[26].

Body mass index (BMI) (kg/m2) was calculated based on self-reported height and weight in 1981. BMI based on self-reports has been shown to agree well with BMI based on measured values[23].

They assessed these in 1981 and maybe tried to control for them? But the study ran through 2020? Why only check these once? What's the impact either way? I flip between "maybe this doesn't matter at all" and "doesn't this render the study findings highly suspect enough that you should feel bad for submitting it for print at all?"

Being active may reflect a healthy phenotype instead of causally reducing mortality.

Not surprising. Munger and Kissinger lived to 100, neither were 'active'. No '10k steps/day' for either of them. Same for Warren Buffett: at 93 he plays bridge all day when not counting his money and still fully healthy. These wealthy sedentary guys live forever. My granddads died at 78 and 80; the sedentary one lived longer. I think it's almost all genes. That is not to say excercise doesn't help, it does to some degree when controlling for genes, but genes do most of the heavy lifting, and also just dumb luck like not getting in a car accident or murdered. Also, helps to avoid drugs , smoking, and alcohol .

Makes sense. Can't smoke, drink alcohol and do drugs if you're too busy exercising.

(Unless you start running with the Hash House Harriers)

I assure you that runners and cyclists are generally not a light-drinking group.

As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_House_Harriers

The Hash is humorously known as A Drinking Club With A Running Problem, with the preferred beverage of consumption being beer.

But I just meant that if you gave the population 30-60 minutes of busywork a day, like exercise, that made it really hard to do self-destructive things like drugs, drinking or smoking at the same time, that might be a significant health gain even if there was no direct benefit from the exercise itself.

after adjusting for other lifestyle-related factors

Same problem as ever. Controlling away things that are mediated by exercise ensures that they aren't actually testing what the headline says they're testing.

In any case, the main reason to be fit isn't to maximize the length of life, but to improve quality-of-life. Even if I became convinced that a sedentary individual, flabby and skinny-fat though they may be, does not suffer a reduced length of life, I would still suggest that being fit improves quality-of-life significantly.

I don't fully understand all of the lingo being used in the paper, but it looks like the lifestyle factors they controlled for are smoking and alcohol use. Isn't that the right thing to do to here?

I hoped to make it to 2024 before my first case, but I finally got COVID.

I have been extremely happy to see my assumptions confirmed about how mild it is and how little these vaccine boosters matter. I went on 1,000 calorie workouts the first two days, was laid pretty low the third day with chills and sleeping, then did woodworking/construction/mild workouts the next 2 days. I am planning to get back in the proverbial saddle today, though I still have a dry cough.

Being in a crowded house with a contagious disease sucks. Even with how mild it was, I feel bad for probably having spread it, not to mention having to cancel visits to other family.

I consider myself in good shape (I work out a lot and lift) but even a cold seems to knock me on my ass and exercising through it seems to set my recovery back. Feels like it's the new normal where I just lose 5 points off my VO2 max during winter respiratory ass-kicking season and gain it back in early spring.

I haven't tested positive for COVID yet though. Kinda suspecting it's a scam at this point... /s

i was hoping to get it again since i lost a lot of weight after getting it in 2022. felt like a somewhat worse than usual cold.

Related: my brother has got COVID right now. He is having a worse time of it than you are, and I'm pretty sure that that's because he's a big fat lazy man who has not exercised since the Bush II presidency. I am really hoping that this wakes him up and makes him take his diet and overall health more seriously; if it doesn't, I don't know what would.

Fwiw the 1-2 days of the peak were intense. Napped two times in a day which is unheard of. Eating 2 Advil Cold + Sinus at a time.

I don't know about that. I'm in alright shape and COVID had me on my back for a day. I recall someone at my gym who was 20 and in amazing shape and he said he had fever for nearly a week.

About to go on a one-month "digital declutter" in the style of Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. 6/10 book, worth reading if you're suffering from screen addiction. Dovetails well with Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head.

I've definitely been considering this for the New Year, or rather something like "No PC/cellphone use when I get home from work." I always seem to find ways to replace bad habits with other bad habits, but this should make it harder. Hopefully I can find some good habits to work in there instead; I have a list somewhere that I pre-prepared for this.

I can recommend a minimalist phone launcher like Before for Android. That, combined with an ad-blocker for the browser (which allows you to block certain sites) has turned my phone into a device that I can't scroll on. It still does everything I need a smartphone to do, but it's a tool, rather than a distraction.

Just installed Before, it's super neat! Working on configuring it.

He has apparently booked a flight to Fairbanks on 10 February.

Damn I respect his dedication. Still think it's extremely foolish, but if he survives this, massive respect.

Can he be unbanned?

Did he request a ban? if so then yeah he can be unbanned.

If his behavior got him banned, then no he is staying banned.

He was banned for annoying people by hockposting constantly. I do wonder if perhaps he could be merely throttled instead.

I very strongly feel that he should be unbanned until after the Hock. It's less than two months, and while he was pretty one note, it's not like he was trolling or wrecking havoc at large. In this one weird scenario, he's put enough real world skin in the game to be given a bit of leniency for a month and a half.

Only if he completes the Hock.

What proof will the mods require?

Can’t believe it’s happening. Wish I had that willpower, grateful I don’t have that naïveté.

Does he have a satellite phone or something?

Huh?

One of the other members of this forum (I can't remember his name right now, stupid brain) is utterly convinced that he is so ugly that he can never have any success with women unless he settles for a literal meth head or someone so obese that he would be her caregiver more than her boyfriend/husband. He has further convinced himself that the way to solve this is to undertake a somewhat dangerous trek through the Alaskan wilderness ("the hock"), because apparently women will be able to subconsciously sense that he is the kind of man who risked his life and lived to tell the tale. He believes that this is a quality women value, and that this is the best way for him to attain it (other ways are being a soldier and living through war, shit like that).

This dude has had basically everyone (myself included) tell him that he's full of shit, that he has perfectly reasonable prospects with women as it is, that even if he didn't this won't fix them because women don't actually value men risking their lives, etc. He does not ever listen to anyone, but continued to post about his ideas every single week in the wellness Wed threads without a word of our advice getting through to him. He eventually got banned for this, because it was really obnoxious (though he was a good enough poster outside of this single topic, it came up a lot).

Anyways, as I recall dude is planning to do the hock in February, so this is basically @benjaminikuta giving us a "he seems to be really going through with it you guys" sort of update.

Thanks for the backstory. That's pretty wacky, but it sure beats sitting inside doompoasting all day.

Edit: read through some archives and man, that was kind of a bs ban. I hope he makes it and tells us all about it.

a somewhat dangerous

No, it's a very dangerous trek.

Does anyone actually know any details at all about what he's trying to do?

One might even say suicidal.

because apparently women will be able to subconsciously sense that he is the kind of man who risked his life and lived to tell the tale. He believes that this is a quality women value, and that this is the best way for him to attain its

From what I remember, his justification was slightly different from this. I think that his argument was something like “Any woman who is dating me is going to be making a huge sacrifice, as her quality of life will drastically be lowered by having to date someone as unattractive as me. Therefore, because it is morally wrong to expect something of my partner that I would not expect of myself, I ought to embark on a life-threatening, grueling journey, so that I may suffer to the same extent that my girlfriend will be suffering by dating me.”

There are a ton of problems with this argument (that I’m way too tired to even begin addressing), but it at least seems more consistent to me than “the best way for me to get laid is by impressing chicks with a tale of the Hock”, which is just utterly and obviously incorrect. If he ever said the latter, then I’m even more baffled.

If he is that physically repulsive (which I don't believe, most people can look better than average simply by putting in effort because most people don't put in effort) he could just have plastic surgery. Women use makeup all the time to look better, I don't see why men can't use similar measures if all else fails.

I never got a response though, probably because he was banned soon after but I'm 90% sure he just downvoted without responding. It's as if his looks aren't the root of his problem.

One of the other members of this forum (I can't remember his name right now, stupid brain) is utterly convinced that he is so ugly that he can never have any success with women unless he settles for a literal meth head or someone so obese that he would be her caregiver more than her boyfriend/husband.

I recall it began with "Skookum," but there was a 2nd half of the word.

To rudely psychoanalyze someone online, there's something about his constant coming back to the phrase "Choose where to park the ambulances" (or something of that sort) that strikes me as something in his brain that has him caught in a loop obsessing over the fear of the domestic harm caused by people with low impulse control (more specifically women whose low impulse control have made them sufficiently unattractive as to have to settle for him). I wonder if there's some trauma beyond the anecdotes he told about seeing some shit as a med student.

SkookumTree

Skookum: a Chinook jargon word meaning something like "strong", "big", "brave", or "monsterous". See "Skookum House", slang for jail.

Is he from the Pacific Northwest? That's the main place the world would be used in conversation, though the word did get somewhat popularized through the selling of "Skookum Dolls" : these were dolls of Indian characters that sold fairly widely in the first half of the 20th century. They stopped making them in the 60s.

He definitely had some kind of fixation. I think maybe it was one of his friends that got stabbed badly by his girlfriend or something that he kept bringing up.

I recall it began with "Skookum," but there was a 2nd half of the word.

Tree. It's SkookumTree.

Ah, thank you, that jogged my memory. Dude's name is SkookumTree.

Praying for him, honestly. He's still young enough to grow out of his weird ideas if he just avoids dying.

If.

You cannot control other people's choices, nor their lives. You can only offer them the truth; they have to decide whether to accept it.

I am very talented but I lack passion. I don't feel the urge to do or create anything. I don't want to express myself. I do absolutely nothing, and this has started to bother me.

Occasionally, I am motivated to make something, but it's because I see someone else's work and think I can easily do better. I always do.

Due to circumstances, I am going to be stuck in a limbo state for the next year, unable to pursue the only goal that I do have. During this time, what can I do to earn extra money online?

Game development seems like a good enough grift, right?

And, to be honest, what actually bothers me isn't that I don't do anything, but that I don't seem to have the natural urge that would lend itself to monetization.

I am a designer, I make all of my money from selling things I design online. The one thing I sell the most is not that exciting to me, so I spend a little time on that, then spend the rest of my time exploring other projects that I enjoy but don't make money from. I like to think that I'm funding my passion projects with money from boring shit I make that people do buy.

Occasionally, I am motivated to make something, but it's because I see someone else's work and think I can easily do better. I always do.

This is sort of a driver for me, as I'm a competitive person. Maybe try to tap into that energy for whatever you want to work on.

My dad's family had lots of alcoholics and mental disorders yet many successful business people, I really think that the addict genetics help me with the "natural urge" to monetize that you seem to lack.

How much money do you want to make in your year off? Do you need to make money or just feel bad that you're being lazy and want to challenge yourself? If you don't need to make money, honestly, I would just try to enjoy the time off. Once I got my passive income to a livable place I traveled for over a year and not thinking about making anything was great.

Thank you for a thoughtful response!

This is sort of a driver for me, as I'm a competitive person. Maybe try to tap into that energy for whatever you want to work on.

For me it's not even competitiveness, but this weird ego-strocking need that drives the little creativity I have. Once that need is satisfied, I am done. But producing something of worth requires sustained creativity.

Even just to grift, I would have to commit more fully than ever before. Without passion, all that remains is dedication. And the absence of an immediate need to make money removes any sense of urgency or survival instinct that would typically drive a person.

If you don't need to make money, honestly, I would just try to enjoy the time off. Once I got my passive income to a livable place I traveled for over a year and not thinking about making anything was great.

This is very good advice and something I will most likely end up doing. This whole issue seems like something I picked up through osmosis -- the creative hustle grindset mind virus.

Thank you again.

Game development seems like a good enough grift, right?

If the objective is to make money fast, this is probably not an ideal path . Game dev. is saturated beyond belief

To add some context, over half the games on Steam (which is a higher bar of entry than all games) never made more than $5,000. If you exclude AAA and AA games, that number drops to $4,000.

There have been plenty of game developers who say that if you account for time spent versus profits, for most of them it's significantly lower than minimum wage. You'd have to be turning out large volumes extremely shitty games with very little time invested to grift game development and at that point you might as well grift something else that could make you more money and doesn't flood the already saturated video game market with more crap.

If you want an easy grift with CS skills you need to stay away from anything self actualizing like video game development. Your best bet is to try to find a local company that needs a legacy system maintained.

Anything that seems cool or develops hot skills will have devs pounding at the door. Propping up an older business critical system where young devs don't want to learn the stack is a steady income for a solo dev.

Finding local companies who need your help is the major issue.

My advice to engineers looking for employment is that you can pick at most two of good pay, good work-life balance, and working on things that are cool.

There are some nuances with respect to "cares about quality code" or "incredibly change-averse," but broadly it's held every time I've found myself looking.

This extends much further than engineering. If you're willing to do something that's just kind of boring, that no one much cares about, but that brings utility, you have a much better chance at good pay and good hours. The higher the ratio of usefulness to interestingness, the better.

I don't disagree but what are some examples outside of engineering? Boring legal work?

Accounting, actuarial work, project management.

Don't fall for the passion meme

https://80000hours.org/articles/dont-follow-your-passion/

most people do not even have passions to begin with

The 80,000 hours guys largely did follow their passion, though, the founder is a philosophy prof and the site essentially exists to encourage future SBFs to work in finance so they can maximize their contributions to Effective Altruism charities. Besides, the site generally just tends to say ‘become a software engineer, a quant or an investment banker’, both easier said than done and as easily derived from a conversation with a high school guidance counselor to whom the question “which jobs pay the most” is posed.

the site essentially exists to encourage future SBFs to work in finance so they can maximize their contributions to Effective Altruism charities. Besides, the site generally just tends to say ‘become a software engineer, a quant or an investment banker’,

This is not true and in fact they have been saying for years and years that you probably shouldn't earn to give.

https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-a-small-proportion-of-people-should-earn-to-give-long-term/

Yes, they backtracked a little, but only because the numbers suggest that unless you go into a handful of the most elite jobs you’re not taking to be earning to give any substantial amount. The new advice is also especially ridiculous becuase there aren’t huge amounts of well paid effective altruism jobs, there are barely enough for a handful of AI researchers and philosophers graduating from like the top 5-10 universities in the world. Your average grad, even ambitious and from a great college, isn’t getting an “EA job”. And almost all the valuable AI policy jobs go to middle aged people or certainly people with 10+ years of startup/VC/AI research experience and/or lobbying and political connections. Even your average competent Oxford PPE grad can’t just become an EA researcher easily, at least not with any hope of owning a home in Britain.

Yes, they backtracked a little

Your claim: "the site generally just tends to say ‘become a software engineer, a quant or an investment banker’,"

Actual recommendation: only about 20% of people should earn to give

It's not a bit of backtracking, it's a total reversal.

only because the numbers suggest that unless you go into a handful of the most elite jobs you’re not taking to be earning to give any substantial amount.

Interesting claim. Let's check what the reasoning actually is.

Effective Altruism organizations are generally reporting that they are more talent-constrained than money-constrained.

Some effective altruists who are earning to give are doing so very successfully, and indeed can each already pay the salaries of a number of other people doing directly valuable work; this will only increase as they progress in their careers.

GoodVentures is looking to spend most of its multi-billion dollar resources over the next 30-40 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if other multi-billion dollar foundations also got explicitly on board with effective altruism. This would create a pressing need for talented people to spend this money well, rather than raise more money.

In general, important ideas seem to get funding: GiveDirectly has scaled up to moving $7 million/yr in cash transfers in just a few years; research into the responsible development of artificial intelligence now has major donors, including Elon Musk and Open Philanthropy, putting millions of dollars behind it, despite being an extremely niche area just a couple of years ago. Many people (i) want to make an impact, but only in a way that they also find personally enjoyable or which doesn’t disrupt their other life plans; (ii) don’t find many careers with direct impact enjoyable or practical; (iii) do find a particular high-earning career enjoyable and compatible with their other plans. For those people, earning to give can be a great option. But it potentially means that people who are open to pursuing any career path should pursue a different and more neglected option than earning to give.

In fact the reasons mostly revolve around the fact that there is simply a greater need for people actually doing work than more money. Perhaps you can spin this into what you said, but it strikes me as misleading and disingenuous.

Let's also take a look at the earning to give example on their [career guide] (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/high-impact-jobs/).

He decided to train up to become a software engineer, and eventually got a job at Google.

We're not talking about one of a "handful of most elite jobs" here.

The new advice is also especially ridiculous becuase there aren’t huge amounts of well paid effective altruism jobs, there are barely enough for a handful of AI researchers and philosophers graduating from like the top 5-10 universities in the world.

This is a confusing pivot from the earlier claim that the site still mostly exists to get people to become SBFs. Nevertheless, let's look at their shortlist of career types.

  1. Earning to give
  2. Advocacy and communication
  3. (Fundamental) research
  4. Government
  5. Work for a nonprofit

There's plenty of career paths here that don't require you to become an AI philosopher. They constantly harp on global health concerns. None of these are going to make you rich, but then again, that really means you can't complain about them focusing exclusively on lucre.

Is this an autistically long response? Yes. However, it really grinds my gears when people make totally unsubstantiated and contradictory complaints about 80000 hours. There's plenty of legitimate disagreement to have, but this line of argument just has no basis in reality.

Yes sure, it's funny when Will Macaskill tells you not to do philosophy.

https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/philosophy-academia/

EA no longer suggests earning to give as a top career option. They are talent constrained so they'll tell you to work for an effective organisation. So now the meme is to become an AI safety researcher.

Ben says he thinks the right person in the right role is worth the equivalent of $3-10M/year

https://80000hours.org/2021/07/effective-altruism-growing/

EA and 80k hours are not there to help the average student with career advice. They exist to recruit top tier talent into the ecosystem. That's why the EA hubs are in London, Oxford and Cambridge.

All that said, I agree with the passion article. I don't think it's a good frame to think about things.

I have a suspicion that ‘real world’ businesses are much easier to make money in than the internet. Consider that online you’re competing with every smart autist in the third world, some of them are undoubtedly smarter and more informed about the market than you, and many are much more driven for the reasons you outline anyway, plus at least some will have much more capital for ads etc. By contrast in a local business, the trades etc you only compete with a few guys of modest intelligence in your town or whatever.

A few smart guys in Cambodia can sell gacha slop to Americans, make YouTube videos with LLMs, market crypto scams etc. What they can’t do is work for a local car dealership or become a plumber in small town USA, the richest society on earth. That’s your advantage. (If you don’t live in the rich world, disregard the above.)

I have a suspicion that ‘real world’ businesses are much easier to make money in than the internet. Consider that online you’re competing with every smart autist in the third world, some of them are undoubtedly smarter and more informed about the market than you,

Doubt it. A 'real' business , as in a brick and mortar business, can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions to set up. Employees are time consuming and expensive, and you're always a lawsuit away from being shut down. Making money online is not easy, but it is cheaper. Once you find a good nice or method, the money rolls in easy. It does not even have a be a business--for example, take $50k and park it into 3x tech funds and make $500k as one guy on Reddit did[ 1] , and no competition from Cambodian guys either. Anyone can do this. A tangible biz can easily cost $500k to set up, and good luck increasing your $ by 10x in a few years.

  1. https://old.reddit.com/r/LETFs/comments/18qy7c8/my_net_worth_hit_530k_this_month_thanks_to_fngu/

Just because a sector has done well in the near past, it doesn’t mean it will keep doing so in the future as well. There is already a huge amount of future growth priced in the tech stocks. This is basically gambling with your money. Starting a business at least means you are putting your money on your own personal skills, network and competence as well as access to local information.

ust because a sector has done well in the near past, it doesn’t mean it will keep doing so in the future as well.

the goes same for regular biz. look at all the people who started contracting or landscaping businesses in 2005-2009 housing boom

for example, take $50k and park it into 3x tech funds and make $500k as one guy on Reddit did[ 1]

That's not exactly what happened there. Guy kept investing throughout: 8k/month in 2022 and 12k/ month in 2023 (and by implication, several thousand amonth before that as well). He did not just park 50k.

https://old.reddit.com/r/LETFs/comments/18qy7c8/my_net_worth_hit_530k_this_month_thanks_to_fngu/key8dzh

So if the guy started the 2022 with more than 113k (and we have no clue how much investment it took to get here, except that this is down from a high) He could have piled in 200k from 2019 to get to 113. For the next half a year, he kept losing money, WHILE piling in 8k/ month for half a year. But from 2022 to the end of 2023, he's contributed 240k plus his >113k starting point. So over 2 years he invested 353k+ to get to 537k. Still a FANTASTIC gain in 2 years, but not remotely parking 50k as you suggest.

It does not even have a be a business--for example, take $50k and park it into 3x tech funds and make $500k as one guy on Reddit did[ 1] , and no competition from Cambodian guys either. Anyone can do this.

That's just market-timing and sector-concentration with extra steps, aka gambling. On average, volatility decay crushes broadly-diversified triple-leveraged equity ETFs, much less sector-specific triple-leveraged equity ETFs, especially since leveraged equity ETFs typically reset daily.

they both have risks . market crash vs. not getting enough customers, lawsuits, or changing economic conditions

I know this is your thing but putting all your money into highly leveraged sector-specific funds isn’t always such a genius strategy.

You're only risking $50k. If the market crashes, maybe you lose 3/4 of it, but it can still recover. According to the stats , most small businesses fail within a decade. I would not say it's less risky --probably more risky because you are putting up more capital, with a 50% chance of a total loss (or even more if you continue to add money) within 5-10 years, going by the stats. Or in terms of risk, this is a highly skewed strategy in which the mean is boosted by a few outliers (like founding the next Starbucks) but the median is negative. Rental properties are probably better than $500k in business, imho, in terms of maximizing risk-adjusted returns and good median vs. mean returns.

This guy did not only risk 50k. He invested several thousand a month throughout. 8k/month in 2022 and 12k/month in 2023

Thank you for the advice.

You are correct. First world labor, even at minimum wage, will most of the time beat whatever you're likely to make online.

However, online work is my only option currently.

You can still exploit being legally and culturally American to find online remote work much much more appealing to anyone who is not

Read The World Beyond Your Head. Might get you out of your rut, might, not, either way it's interesting thought on the topic of discipline, motivation and flourishing.

I really don't know how the idea that having passion for the way you make money is an important trait. If you do have it, more power to you, but pretty much everyone for all of human history creates economic value because it's what you need to do to survive and thrive. I don't actually care about my current income source, but it's a good income source, so I take care of business.

Save the passion for hobbies.

Game development seems like a good enough grift, right?

You'll compete with a million autists who do it for free.

I'll compete with them regardless of what I choose to do. That's the problem with a lack of passion. The only question now is what should I do? I was also thinking of setting up Youtube slopfarms by training Loras for local LLMs to generate scripts. These would be much more entertaining compared to what GPT-4 generates.

I'll compete with them regardless of what I choose to do. That's the problem with a lack of passion.

No, because there are lots of more boring software jobs which don't have a million autists who want to do them for free. If anything, not having passion is a career strength, not a weakness. It leaves you free to pursue opportunities which pay well but aren't sexy.

Number one advice for regular motte life advice request post should always be avoid getting nerdsniped. Such a useful term

Not to mention the thousands buglike mobile game companies who do it for the majority of the market share.

Alright tell me about creatine. Is it good?

Also BCAAs. Do I need to eat this stuff? Are all these exercise supplements total BS?

Creatine is great, I'd take it everyday if it not for the two times I used it (a couple of months) I noticed thinning on my hair and hairs on my pillow after I wake up. There's a lot of anecdotal data on the internet confirming this, even though the studies do not support an increase in DHT, probably something else is causing the thinning. So beware if you have a genetic predisposition to losing hair.

Get more glycine, it helps with recovery.

I would be worried about supplementing BCAAs.

I've personally never noticed a difference when taking creatine or not, whether it be bad things like bloating and cramping or good things like better swoleness and gym performance.

However, I take at least 5 grams each day because why not? Creatine is cheap, might as well satiate the placebo effect. From The ScienceTM and gymbro word-of-mouth over the past 25 years or so, creatine is possibly the most effective legal supplement, aside from protein-supplementation. Gun to my head, I would estimate it has, on average, a mild positive effect.

It's also likely diet-dependent: Creatine is naturally found in red-meat, so there may be diminishing marginal effects if you eat beef. There's been some studies suggesting that creatine-supplementation can be especially good for vegetarians, including for cognitive ability.

Creatine is very well studied and has a real but pretty small effect. It's also been linked to reductions in depression.

Most other supplements seem like scams. BCAAs are not a 'scam' because it's just a fancy word for certain proteins that are present in your diet already, but additional supplementation is completely unnecessary if you are already getting adequate protein from high quality sources.

I will pile on with my regular creatine + weighlifting period being when my muscles looked and performed their best.

Hilariously, the hassle of dosing the powder into a cup and remembering to stir/chug the grit before a workout is my main limiter on taking it effectively.

I just take a few grams after each meal. Still an annoying trivial inconvenience, but harder to forget that way.

I always wondered what would happen if you just put it in the coffee grinds when making coffee. Almost certainly nothing, but man, that would be handy.

Creatine is actually interesting. It inflates your muscles. Also it binds to simple sugars and draws them into your muscles. You can actually add creatine to dishes to make them taste less sweet.

BCAAs are essentially pre-digested protein. You can drink them in the morning to get quick energy, but if you're on a high protein diet they aren't really needed.

Ephedrine is useful, it's a stimulant that opens up your airways. Just stick with one or two 8mg tablets. Some people take large does and that gets scary.

Creatine is good. I ran out of creatine once and noticed a small, but significant dip in my performance. The rest of the supplements are bullshit or steroids.

This article cites multiple studies about the benefits of creatine for strength-building.

https://legionathletics.com/creatine-monohydrate/

I have taken 5g creatine daily for several years. I've never noticed any ill effects; I feel pretty much fine in general all the time. I have made gains in strength that are commensurate with the amount of work I put in. In general it's so affordable, and so well-supported by reputable commentators, that I think you should go ahead and use it. That was the conclusion I reached for myself.

In the opinion of the same guy from above, BCAAs are overrated. He found that the evidence supporting their supposed benefits is very flawed, and that in general there appears to be no particular benefit vs. just consuming appropriate amounts of normal protein and carbohydrates. See below.

https://legionathletics.com/bcaa-supplement/

It's been a while since I looked into it, but IIRC, creatine supplementation having positive effect on strength training was very well supported by the scientific evidence. For BCAAs, I recall learning that there's basically never any reason to seek out supplements with specific types of protein or amino acids as long as you're already getting a typical high protein diet needed for strength training with regular food. The total protein intake matters, and supplements can help you meet that goal without having to eat a ton of meat or other stomach-filling foods. "BCAA" sounds fancy and science-y, making for a good marketing gimmick, I guess.

Creatine works. It increases your maximum short burst strength by a small but noticable amount. It's worth trying. Drink plenty of water to avoid the kidney risk.

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