For me, "Don't eat meat" is about as difficult as "Don't wear the color blue". It's not a large sacrifice. Yes, I may not be typical.

98% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass are humans or their pets or (mostly) their livestock. Statistics like those freak me out enough to think it's worth reducing my ecological footprint.

The optimal amount of meat to eat might be above zero, just as the most effective amount of heroine to ingest might be above zero, but resisting an alluring steak doesn't deplete psychic energy if your brain doesn't register steak as food.

I try to be skeptical of "ah ha moments" I have. However in one case I think it is logicsal for me to accept the "ah ha."

For many years I have done Zazen at a Temple (two hour drive ....) and at home. Being involved in budhism one hears alot about "the self is an illusion" or "ego-death." I personally kind of alieved they were just making things up. However one day me and some friends took a rather large dose of LSD in a park on a chilly fall day.

At one point I remember hearing this repetitive thumping noise for an hour or two and not being able to figure out what it was. When it finally occured to I burst out in hysterical laughter. The noise was my foot violently shaking and hititng what I was sitting on. I was of course shaking because I had been outside for about 6 hours at this point and was freezing cold, but it hadn't even occured to me that I was uncomfortable. My mental state after realizing I wa scold is hard to explain. I honestly conceptualized things as "there is a person outside who is very cold" but the fact that this person was me did not seem relevant at all. In general that there was one specific person associated to "me" stopped making sense.

Of course I am not claiming that this experience proves anything about budhism. But my previous "alief" was that it was impossible to lose one's sense of self, even short term. But since I had personally experienced this it must in fact be possible.

Calculus: Spivak's Calculus over Thomas' Calculus and Stewart's Calculus. This is a bit of an unfair fight, because Spivak is an introduction to proof, rigor, and mathematical reasoning disguised as a calculus textbook; but unlike the other two, reading it is actually exciting and meaningful.

Analysis in R^n (not to be confused with Real Analysis and Measure Theory): Strichartz's The Way of Analysis over Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis, Kolmogorov and Fomin's Introduction to Real Analysis (yes, they used the wrong title; they wrote it decades ago). Rudin is a lot of fun if you already know analysis, but Strichartz is a much more intuitive way to learn it in the first place. And after more than a decade, I still have trouble reading Kolmogorov and Fomin.

Real Analysis and Measure Theory (not to be confused with Analysis in R^n): Stein and Shakarchi's Measure Theory, Integration, and Hilbert Spaces over Royden's Real Analysis and Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis. Again, I prefer the one that engages with heuristics and intuitions rather than just proofs.

Partial Differential Equations: Strauss' Partial Differential Equations over Evans' Partial Differential Equations and Hormander's Analysis of Partial Differential Operators. Do not read the Hormander book until you've had a full course in differential equations, and want to suffer; the proofs are of the form "Apply Theorem 3.5.1 to Equations (2.4.17) and (5.2.16)". Evans is better, but has a zealot's disdain of useful tools like the Fourier transform for reasons of intellectual purity, and eschews examples. By contrast, Strauss is all about learning tools, examining examples, and connecting to real-world intuitions.

In Chemistry in particular, and the natural sciences in general, I find that reading textbooks is a much more efficient way to digest knowledge than reading papers. The largest advantage which reading papers confers relative to reading textbooks is that textbooks rarely cover the newest of the new advances in any field. I rarely find that I need to read a paper to learn something that I can't find in a textbook-- this is probably because, in the natural sciences at the undergraduate level, people don't often need to find information which was discovered within the last five years. The major exception to this trend is people who specialize heavily within a particular field, such as PhD students, postdocs, professors, and the like.

There are other reasons why reading individual journal articles can be helpful, but since you asked this question from the perspective of someone hoping to continue their efforts at self-education, I would advise you to stick with textbooks, for the most part.

Also, reading meta-analyses of papers, which will themselves be published in journals, is often better (in terms of efficiency and knowledge gathering power) than reading individual studies.

Cool survey!

I wish you could have answered the "how often" question for each supplement.

I too have done the survey!

And am extremely excited to see the results.

It's of course possible that this Bock guy knows what he's doing on the hiring front. But in these interviews he has no incentive to give Google's competitors coherent helpful information on how to hire people - and every incentive to send out obfuscated messages which might flatter the preconceptions of NYT readers.

Bock said ... that learning ability was much more important indicator of whether someone would be a good fit for Google than I.Q.

I have limited trust in a source which says things like that.

Edited to add: More on Bock's learning ability:

For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information.

Yeah, nope.

The only one thing that really helps is modafinil daily. 200 mg about 3 hours after I wake up.

I also take alpha lipoic acid as I think it "might" make me feel better but I am really not sure.

I don't nescessarily agree this happens in most media. Most superheros for example just have their powers for no reason (some "earn" them but most don't). In many stories if you are not born part-demon or a wizard you can never be something other than canonfodder. Even in stories where training is sueful people often get OP powers for no reason.

I actually think fiction overall presents being powerful as a two factor model. Hard work and unchangeable luck. In some domains the hard work dominates and in others the "genetic" stuff does. People randomly get very OP powers all the time in many anime (if you happen to eat a strong Logia or Lengendary Zoan fruit you are automatically very strong in One piece). the details might not match up but the two factor model is basically how skill works in the real world two. With the relative importance of the two factors differing per domain.

ec:

In harry Potter you cannot be "Strong" unless you are born a wizard. There is no getting around this. In the real world you cannot be a good mathematician with an IQ of 80. This is no way around this either.