> waist went down
OK good - all we need now is your height
The standard method to measure waist is with lungs neutral (neither full nor empty) and measure at the point of the belly button. E,g, not necessarily where your belt goes. I assmume you did this.
> I'm in my forties
OK that makes it more impressive.
>Cacao (chocolate) not the precursor to cocaine
That is also a stimulant but not so much as coca.
> weight scale
Waist circumference is a pretty good proxy or you can work out Body Shape Index which is far better than the very broken BMI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_shape_index
> potatoes tasty
They can me made tasty indeed. Though the fact you have to do things to make them tasty suggests they are not inherently that tasty. Monotony can also be a factor in how motivating-to-eat a diet is.
Two pieces of information that would really help me to unterpret this post
1. How old are you? Weight loss seems to get exponentially harder with age (up to about 70 years old)
2. Were you able to assess how much fat was lost as opposed to how much weight was lost? No-one cares about losing weight, the goal - which is what should be measured - is fat loss.
Comments:
Potato only diet sounds a lot like Shangri-La diet - nothing tasty. I did lose weight on the SL diet but it takes away much of the pleasure of consuming food.
A lot of the other things you mentioned seeme to be stimulants (e.g. LSD, Cocoa). These do help weight loss but at a cost.
My only update was the thought that maybe more people will see the problem. The whole debate in the world at large has been a cluster***k.
* Linear extrapolation - exponentials apparently do not exist
* Simplistic analogies e.g. the tractor only caused 10 years of misery and unemloyment so any further technology will do no worse.
* Conflicts of interest and motivated reasoning
* The usual dismissal of geeks and their ideas
* Don't worry leave it to the experts. We can all find plenty of examples where this did not work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
* People saying this is risky being interpreted as a definite prediction of a certain outcome.
As Elon Musk recently pointed out the more proximate threat may be the use of highly capable AIs as tools e.g. to work on social media to feed ideas to people and manipulate them. Evil/amoral/misaligned AI takes over the world would happen later.
Some questions I ask people:
* How well did the advent of homo sapiens work out for less intelligent species like homo habilis? Why would AI be different?
* Look at the strife between groups of differing cognitive abilities and the skewed availability of resources between those groups (deliberately left vague to avoid triggering someone).
* Look how hard it is to predict the impact of technology - e.g. Krugman's famous insight that the internet would have no more impact than the fax machine. I remember doing a remote banking strategy in 1998 and asking senior management where they thought the internet fitted into their strategy. They almost all dismissed it as a land of geeks and academics and of no relevance to real businesses. A year later they demanded to know why I had misrepresented their clear view that the internet was going to be central to banking henceforth. Such is the ability of people to think they knew it all along, when they didn't.
In line with the maxim "read the textbook first" I offer metaethics:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/
https://iep.utm.edu/metaethi/
Nietzsche claimed that "there are no moral facts at all". It does seem that any moral system requires some axiom that cannot be derived from facts about the world, or logic.
Famously Kant's Categorical Imperative is one such axiom.
Your AB should ideally be:
I would add
d) A person who does not have RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria). This is a pretty common condition. A lot of people are just very averse to any feedback and such people do not make good accoutability partners. Such people may to be looking for cheerleaders not accountability partners.
Related ideas around immunity to change in this book https://www.amazon.com.au/Immunity-Change-Overcome-Potential-Organization/dp/1422117367
"Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization" by Robert Kegan
> Our youngest (15m) has recently started sleeping through the night
Initially I was going to point out that letting them cry themselves out sets the scene for neediness and insecurity down the track. But at 15 months it is a different story and what you are doing is fine. You must be at your wits' ends. Ours slept through at 6 weeks which was bad enough.
>Function of REM sleep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep#Deprivation_effects
I had a Zeo sleep monitor and I noticed that I had more REM sleep when doing hard intellectual work or deliberate practice, or after emotionally intense experiences. I had more deep sleep when exercising hard e.g. sprints or resistance training. This suggests to me that these forms of sleep are respectively associated with learning and body repair.
I also notice that I can learn a lot faster when I have naps and/or ample sleep. And that I recover from hard exercise more quickly.
OK this is all a bit uncertain but not just vacuous speculation.
I would like to see some evidence that orexin does not detract from these alleged effects before using it. Edit - the EA article does provide some evidence for this.
For any of those who are not big fans of CBT, ACT is very different
My gripe with CBT is that it tends to resolve to telling yourself that your feelings are irrational, make no sense etc. This is OK if your problem is primarily due to thoughts that are just merely cognitively wrong but I find this is rarely true. The problem is usually at the emotional level and in that situation CBT basically only papers over the problem.
One extreme case of this was a relative of mine who was given CBT for an anxiety condition, which turned out to be due to a cortisol-secreting tumour. It had virtually no benefit as you might expect. A problem needs to be addressed in terms of the causal structure that creates and maintains it.
ACT on the other hand does work at the emotional level - helping you to accept 'bad' feelings and deal with them, and then decide on / commit to your goals and accept that working on them will likely come with bad feelings like boredom, frustration etc.
So to my mind ACT is far more powerful and deep than CBT.
Other techniques that work at deeper levels that I found useful include Internal Family Systems Therapy, Memory Reconsolidation techniques (book "Unlocking the emotional brain") , Holotropic Breathwork*, and Trauma Release Exercises.
*inb4 woo woo
> Every case I get requires me to deploy a microscope and retrace the cops’ steps to see if they fucked up somehow (spoiler: they haven’t).
At the risk of stating the obvious, even according to the link provided, not all defendants are guilty.
And there is indeed tremendous pressure to plead guilty given the draconian penalties that some with a guilty verdict after a not guilty plea, versus a plea deal.
The book "Evil Angels" about the Lindy Chamberlain case in Australia illustrates some of the things that can go wrong and lead to innocent people being charged.
See also the reports from the Innocence project.