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All of mad's Comments + Replies

Why you maybe should lift weights, and How to.
mad10

I think the reason I worry about injury is because I am far, far more clumsy than average, am really bad with form in general (I am in a theatre troupe and we often have to learn choreographed movement or rarely simple dances and I'm always the worst at it), and when I did running I ended up with a hip injury that still gives me grief (that said I am trying to build back up to hopefully running 10-20k a week again as I did really love it).

So, yeah, essentially, I'm terrified of baking in poor form and then injuring myself over time, as well as terrified of... (read more)

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5samusasuke
Those are great goals.  If you want to be "lifting your husband" strong, look up the starting strength squat and deadlift guides.  For upper body exercise suggestions, I think the list above is great. For injury risk, I would really not worry, given the injury statistics are so low, and they are from people who DON'T focus on technique. The median gym goes is a 30yo guy swinging as much weight as possible around, and he's mostly fine. As far as technique goes, define failure as "I can't do another rep without changing technique" and you reduce your chance of injure drastically.   For the exercises you're doing now, I'd say there is a lot of "redundance / over-optimization", e.g. the leg press will train both your adductors and abductors. If you want to do 2 leg exercises instead of just one (like I suggested in the post), I'd pick one form each category): [squat] : Leg press, Back Squat, Front squat, split squat, hack squat, smith machine squat, dumbell-on-shoulder squat, goblet squat [hinge] : Deadlift, Romanian deadlift, good Morning, reverse lunge.  
Why you maybe should lift weights, and How to.
mad40

I've been lifting once a week for 20-45 minutes for two years and have noticed that I am stronger in everyday life and my body looks better (arms/shoulders/etc). There's definitely a benefit to be had even if you think 45 minutes twice a week is too much. 

Here's my questions:

  • I only use machines because I was intimidated by the risk of injury with free weights. What are your thoughts on machines in general?
  • What is your advice for someone who wants to move from machines to free weights?
  • How do you track your progress? I use a very bare-bones android app
... (read more)
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4samusasuke
If your gym has a good selection of machines, you can totally get really jacked just using them, see my above comment for Barbells vs Dumbells. My first questions to you would be how you're training your legs and abs since machines for those can be rarer. I should double down on the point that injury should not be on my mind. Here are some factoids since I can't tread them into a coherent narrative very quickly: * When the median american lifts weights, aka someone who is much more careless than yourself, he gets injured way less often than in any other sport. * Even for injuries that happen in the gym, accidents like tripping and weight falling on you make up a bigger share than what we think of as "injuries". Wear shoes, don't walk around weights looking at your phone, be sensible etc. * Injuries are most often not a consequence of "misperforming an exercise once". They are rather the result of bad programming. Every rep you do with your legs hurts your knee a little bit, and it can heal some amount per week. Injury comes when you do more (load, reps, sets, speed) in aggregate than you can handle, which is really difficult for a beginner, and for someone training for not that much per week. * Acute injury, aka when you break something during a lift, should be a worry only for the strongest among us. It's just math. Your muscles can produce some amount of force, which your tendons must be able to transfer without snappin. For normal humans, your muscles are nowhere near strong enough to do this. WIth years of strength training (and PEDs which strengthen your muscles without strenghtening your tendons), you can maybe get there.  My advice is to be mindful of technique when learning a new lift, film yourself or ask someone to watch if you can, and make sure it looks the same as in the video. Advice for moving from machines to free weights? Pick like 2 or 3 free weight exercises that look cool to you / are hard do do with machines and swap them into your program. R
2Jonas Hallgren
I can't help myself but to gym bro since it is LW. (I've been doing lifting for 5 years now and can do more than 100kg in bench press for example, etc. so you know I've done it.) The places to watch out for injuries in free weight is your wrists, rotator cuffs and lower back.  1. If you're doing squats or deadlifts, use a belt or you're stupid. 2. If you start feeling your wrists when doing benchpress, shoulder press or similar compound movement, get wrist protection, it isn't that expensive and helps. 1. Learn about the bone structure of the wrist and ensure that you're trying to hold the bar at the right angle with the hand. (this is a classic for wrist pain otherwise) 3. Do rotator cuff exercises once a week Finaly generally, start with higher reps and a bit lower weight , 8-12 is the recommended range (but you can do up to 20 as post says) and get used to the technique over time, when things start hurting you know you're doing it wrong and you should have someone tell you what you're doing wrong. 
The Type of Writing that Pushes Women Away
mad128

Thanks for posting this, it's not something I talk about but (As A Woman) I have noticed the same things.

I'm trying to be the change I wish to see in the world but I'm not inclined to the sorts of contributions that do well on LW.

That said, I did write a rational vampire romance novel (Vampire Flower Language) as I noticed the same trends with the rational fiction craze (HPMOR et al).

So yeah, please make more posts, about whatever subjects come to mind for you.

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How great is the utility of "saving" endangered languages?
mad10

I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn't require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it's just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up. 

There's plenty of research showing that bilingual children have some small advantages, e.g.: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/advantages_of_a_bilingual_brain 

Then there's the cultural value of language that I raised in my prev... (read more)

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1SpectrumDT
It maybe easy for the child, but it can take a lot of effort and energy from the parents. I am the father of a sort-of bilingual child. I am Danish and we live in Denmark, but my wife is Chinese. Our 4-year-old son speaks good Danish, but his Chinese is very weak. My wife tries on-and-off to insist on speaking Chinese to him, but it is a struggle because he does not like it. So it is hard work for her, and she often does not have the energy and falls back to speaking Danish to him.  I speak nary a word Chinese. I could of course study Chinese so I could contribute, but that would be a huge effort.
How great is the utility of "saving" endangered languages?
mad84

Generally speaking, people who speak endangered languages also speak the majority language - otherwise it wouldn't be endangered. Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language. Being bilingual has been linked with a lot of benefits, and the only downside is that it slightly slows initial language acquisition (but children quickly catch up).

Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language. I w... (read more)

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2AnthonyC
Culture is important, I absolutely agree. This is not the same as claiming that there is a way to save the culture by way of saving a language, in a way that preserves the important bits long term. I think that most of the value is reflected in the language but mostly contained in the living traditions and experiences and practices of the people who generated the language. Preserving the culture is a whole lot more complicated than preserving the language, and we don't really know how to do it effectively. So what's the long term goal? Do you raise native speakers living mostly in the culture from which the language originated, partly isolated from the outside world so they think in the smaller culture's language and memeplexes? Raise bilingual speakers who mostly think and speak in the dominant culture's language and memeplexes but abstractly know bits of their ancestors' cultures? Train non-native speakers in an attempt to document stories and practices that are no longer a living tradition? How much value do the different options preserve, and for whom? Who should be responsible for making and paying for the decision to try one method or another? Consider ancient Greece. It's a pretty good example, since without the language and a comprehensive knowledge of the culture there's a huge range of meaning you lose out on when reading (or hearing) the surviving works of literature/philosophy/history. Millions of person-years have been spent trying to improve and advance our understanding in this field. In the Middle Ages, this was really important: reintroducing Aristotle to Europe (via the Middle East) was a huge gain in value. In the modern day, it's really cool and helps us understand history but is otherwise mostly a curiosity; the kind of thing you put a little effort into for the really impactful dying or dead languages. We don't even attempt that for most of the other languages that existed in Britain in Chaucer's time, because the value just isn't high enough
2Viliam
It is plausible that bilingualism somehow exercises the brain, but it seems to me that a much stronger case can be made in the opposite direction -- smart people are more likely to successfully learn multiple languages. I agree that it is good for children to grow up in a bilingual environment, because they get the other language for very little opportunity cost, if the other language is naturally around them.
1SpectrumDT
If the minority cultures can fix the problem themselves by teaching their children, great! Far be it from me to stop them from that. And of course the dominant cultures should not actively oppress minority languages. But when outsiders are expected to put in extra effort to preserve minority languages - that is when I balk. Important, sure. But other things are much more important, such as eradicating diseases and getting people basic education and preserving the environment. If I had the choice between saving just one (decent quality) human life and keeping an endangered language alive for another generation, I would sacrifice the language to save the human.
3RHollerith
Being bilingual is AFAIK a strong signal of cognitive competence: given a choice between 2 applicants for a cognitively-demanding job, one bilingual and one not bilingual, I would heavy favor the bilingual one. But that does not mean that investing effort in making a person bilingual increases the person's cognitive competence to any significant degree. One thing we don't need studies or complex arguments for is the fact that it takes a lot of study and practice to learn a second language -- time and mental energy that can be used to learn other things. Our society has accumulated an impressive store of potent knowledge, knowledge that takes a long time for people to acquire, but which clearly improves their lives and their ability to contribute to society. I'm very skeptical that the benefits of spending an hour learning a second language outweigh the benefits of spending an hour learning, e.g., history, geography, chemistry, physics, statistics, computer programming, practical human physiology, cooking, sewing, woodworking, accounting or the basics of public speaking or performing in front of an audience. I'm anticipating that you will reply here that there is more to culture than knowledge that has obvious practical benefits. And my reply to that is that I don't see why an hour spent on second-language learning would outweigh the benefits of an hour spent watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Desperate Housewives or browsing https://tvtropes.org/. Those 3 things are products of the dominant culture, and I suspect that most of the effort to save endangered languages stems from a perceived need to fight the dominant culture in any way possible (but I don't perceive any need to fight against the dominant culture).
Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
mad7-1

It's a real horses / zebra kind of thing, though.

The situation: a hiker goes missing in an area where hikers are known to go missing (and, sadly, die).

The problem: eyewitnesses report the hiker's truck being in one direction, then not present at all, then in another direction.

Solution 1: eyewitnesses were mistaken about whether they saw the car / what direction it was facing

Solution 2: someone stole the car, took it away for a bit, and then returned it to the trailhead

Occam's razor requires only one additional assumption for solution 1 (eyewitnesses someti... (read more)

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Adam Marsland417

OK, I was gonna stay out of this, but I have to call b.s. (respectfully) on your take.

Solution 1 was indeed always the most likely but I have just as much an issue with the bias towards the unexpected solution as the bias towards the mundane one when the latter does not fit the facts as known.

Your comment is a perfect example of this. Your Solution 3 sounds comfortably mundane except that it's impossible.  The ranger reported his information in real time, not after the fact.  Solution 4 is likewise virtually impossible because of the timeline and... (read more)

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Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
mad111

For the record I'm the same person who brought it up in 2022 on reddit when he was found and objected to it when you posted the original blog to unresolvedmysteries in 2018, so I think this is a case of one particularly annoying person who follows you around chanting "U-Haul! U-Haul!" :)

Thank you for all your hard work on the case, I actually had no idea you were the same Adam on the search and the blog.

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7fearlessiron
I think the U-Haul theory was still a valuable contribution, even though it was debunked thoroughly. It honestly tried to make sense of the facts known at the time. Adam's contributions to the case were considerable, even though he always insisted on Tom's contributions being more important.
Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
mad62

Thank you for posting this. I'd been following the Bill Ewasko story and Tom Mahood's blog for years so it's interesting to see it posted here.

I think the "Death Valley Germans" is another very good series of articles from the same blog, with a much more conclusive (but equally sad) ending.

What strikes me is before 2022 there were a lot of people posting theories, and there was one person who posted to /r/unresolvedmysteries that the discrepency between the reports of whether and how Bill's truck was parked could be explained by... someone putting it into ... (read more)

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9eukaryote
Yeah, if anyone reading this liked this, I also really recommend Mahood's search for the Death Valley Germans. It's another kind of brilliant investigation. Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that before! Hah, so that guy, KarmaFrog, is the same guy as Adam who posted the videos I recommended. He makes fun of himself in the video about the U-haul thing, which he has now, er, moved away from as a hypothesis.
Cat Sustenance Fortification
mad120

I don't know if you've seen this, but I feel it'd be right up your alley. It's the story of a war between a human who knows how to weld and a cat who wants to thwart their automatic feeder.

https://blondihacks.com/furiosas-cat-feeder/

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3jefftk
That is very impressive!
Benefitial habits/personal rules with very minimal tradeoffs?
Answer by mad51

"Drink only water" is a good one. Depends if you think forgoing deliciousness, or other effects (alcohol, caffeine) counts as a tradeoff. 

Given you don't think forgoing the convenience/enjoyment of using your phone in bed counts as a tradeoff, I'm guessing this likely is the sort of thing you're looking for.

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2melolay
As for drinking enough water: my kitchen worktop is usually empty, except for an empty glass. My rule: I drink water as soon as I consciously notice the glass. It's okay to drink just a few sips, but I usually drink more. Overall, this rule makes me drink much more often than I used to.
1Slapstick
Oh that's a good one! I mostly follow that one already although I do find value in some unsweetened teas and smoothies. I find personally that the immediate trade-offs to consuming alcohol are enough to ensure I only really drink when it's actually aligned with my interests. Although I do have a rule for alcohol which is "don't consume any alcohol unless people who you're currently being social with are already drinking," I'm not sure exactly how much that rule has helped me because I've followed it all my life and I don't really like alcohol that much, but maybe that's partially because of the rule. But yes I think the rule you gave is a really good one, especially when it comes to things like refined sugar. A sugar craving could be satisfied in other ways, so there's relatively small trade-offs in that sense, whereas it's very beneficial not to drink refined calories because it's so easy to consume so much that way while not bringing in any significant nutrition alongside it. Thanks!
mad80

From a traffic engineer's perspective:

... (read more)
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2bhauth
Right. That's another name for the "through roundabouts" I mentioned. On the other hand, there are no points where traffic has to cross/merge 2 lanes at once, like in a turbo roundabout.
Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad30

I think I'm making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn't tell you much about my uncle's actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. "has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers"?)

Then again, my example here seems to have failed because people do study tallness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000291499390523F , but they crucially define tallness as above the 95th percentile. Other studies I'm glanced at use height as a continuous variable, so who the heck knows. 

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Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad10

Yeah, okay. 

Look at me thinking like an engineer - "but it's not useful from a practical point of view because we don't have access to that data".

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3Said Achmiz
Sure, that’s a reasonable view. Of course, the flip side of acknowledging that nonetheless there is such a thing as a “cautious driver” (and even aside from the logic described in the grandparent, it’s clearly much too intuitive a concept to give up—witness the fact that you use it yourself!) is realizing that although we might not have access to that data now, there is no principled reason why we couldn’t have such data…
Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad40

I think the thing you're missing is you're still exposed to crashes because of some maniac doing something extremely risky and hitting you.

I'm also a very cautious driver (as you can imagine in my line of work), but I do make mistakes all the time. 

This paper seems like it might be interesting for you to read: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1513271113 

I've just had a skim but here's some of my impressions. I might read it in more detail when I get to work today.

It doesn't deal with fatalities (just crashes) but having a quick look at ... (read more)

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1Bezzi
Yes, but this is true even when I'm not driving. An out-of-control car could crash into me even when I'm walking or sitting inside a bus (and in some cases even when I'm at home). Anyway, thanks, I'll look into this paper.
Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad10

"Passenger mile" is not a stat we use in my jurisdiction (we use VKT, vehicle kilometres travelled), but if I'm interpreting it right, then you need to know the average number of passengers to know the number of crashes the driver is involved in. For example, say that each bus has 10 passengers on average, that would put the fatalities per passenger mile at 0.80, which given this is OOM seems pretty similar to cars.

That said, following that to its conclusion you'd end up with trains having some horrendously high rate of crashing, which doesn't pass the sniff test. I think I might be having a failure of logic somewhere here.

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6Joachim Bartosik
I wanted to say that it makes sense to arrange stuff so that people don't need to drive around too much and can instead use something else to get around (and also maybe they have more stuff close by so that they need to travel less). Because even if bus drivers aren't any better than car drivers using a bus means you have 10x fewer vehicles causing risk for others. And that's better (assuming people have fixed places to go to so they want to travel ~fixed distance).
Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad43

I mean it doesn't describe something objective/measurable unless you define it explicitly in terms of behaviours. People can do research on e.g. crash rates for drivers who never drink and drive vs frequently drink and drive, people who speed and people who don't, etc. 

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3Said Achmiz
Are you suggesting that there’s no correlation between such behaviors (e.g. between frequency of drinking and driving vs. frequency of texting and driving, or vs. frequency of speeding, or vs. frequency of failing to use turn signals properly, etc.)? (Because if there are such [positive] correlations, then a “carefulness” factor would emerge, such that we could give the value of the factor for a given driver and it would predict behavioral metrics we hadn’t measured yet. That would be objective and measurable.)
Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad30

I can't believe you've never heard the stereotype that taxi drivers aren't safe drivers.

I don't know about proxies for "careful driving". That is not my area of expertise. 

That said, it's well-known that professional race car drivers die in car crashes at higher rates during their general driving (I don't fancy digging up a citation; you can google it yourself).

I always think of the old chestnut that something like eighty percent of people think they're above average at driving. 

I attended a training course recently that stated that educating dri... (read more)

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5jefftk
This is a silly tangent, but I'm not sure that they're wrong. If I think driving well means getting there as fast as possible and you think it means getting there safely as possible we can each (correctly!) think we're better at driving than the other. So for 80% of drivers to correctly rate themselves above average all we need is 30%+ of drivers to value different behaviors in driving.
Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad70

https://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/RS050099.pdf <- there's a paper that covers your exact question (comparing crashes in taxis and passenger cars. in case you don't know the terminology, "fleet vehicle" refers to cars that are registered as work cars for an organisation, so more likely to be people on their "best behaviour" as far as drinking/speeding/etc)

Table 5 in particular, per 100 million vehicle kms travelled you have taxis having about half as many fatal crashes as cars but about 50% more injury crashes and maybe 10% more towaway crashes (eyeballin... (read more)

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5Bezzi
WTF!? Ok, I suppose I have to update my priors on taxi drivers (man, they even write "There is considerable anecdotal evidence that taxi drivers around the world drive in a manner the rest of the public considers to be unsafe"). Do you have suggestions about other proxies for careful driving?
Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad81

"Cautious driver" is not a real category. It's not something my crash database can filter on. 

You make mistakes when you drive. We all do. It is human nature, and driving is a complex chain of tasks.

If you never speed, never drive after even one drink, never break a single road rule, know every single road rule (in my jurisdiction the road traffic code is some 400 pages long!), never take gaps in traffic that are too close, never go through an orange light too late, never jaywalk, always ensure your car is mechanically up to date, etc etc etc, then yo... (read more)

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-3Said Achmiz
What makes “cautious driver” “not a real category”? You don’t mean that it’s “not a real category” just because you don’t have data on it in your database… do you?
1Bezzi
Yes, obviously it is not a well-defined category, I mostly hoped that you could filter for taxi or similar. Anyway, I am not claiming to be the best driver in the world (although I'm 100% safe at least w.r.t. drinking since I don't drink at all), I'm just claiming to be at least as good as a taxi driver, and I would be really really surprised if it turned out that taxi drivers crash their vehicles with the same frequency as the general population.
Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
mad402

Hi! This is my area of expertise - I work in the road safety field and spent 9 months investigating fatal car crashes. You are right that there are definite "Darwin Award" candidates but there are also deeply relateable ones that could happen to anyone. 

Some anecdotes off the top of my head:

  • A person accidentally had their car in reverse instead of forward when manouvering after leaving a parking spot. This resulted in their car falling into the ocean and the passenger dying.
  • A very common crash type that usually results in very little damage: two vehic
... (read more)
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Bezzi108

The thing about human error is that you make errors ALL THE TIME. You, or other road users, should not die because of your errors. And the errors that tend to result in fatal crashes are not "I was drunk and on meth and speeding" (though those obviously do), the ones that more commonly result in fatal crashes are "I looked away from the road for a second to adjust my GPS and hit a pedestrian". 

Well, averting your eyes from the road and your hands from the wheel at the same time in order to touch the screen (rather than reaching a calm spot and stop th... (read more)

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I think Michael Bailey's dismissal of my autogynephilia questions for Scott Alexander and Aella makes very little sense
mad237

As a cis woman I experience both autogynephilia and autoandrophilia and I agree this should be talked about more. For me it's part of more generalised "power fantasies", with the power of being attractive to men (as any gender) being exciting in the same way e.g. the idea being worshipped as a goddess is exciting. 

One of my oldest and strongest fantasies is of going to a frat party and being the most beautiful woman anyone there has ever seen. I'd imagine for other people it is less about power and more about whatever their personal psychology enjoys.

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Somerville Roads Getting More Dangerous?
mad209

I'm a traffic engineer and this sort of thing is more or less my area of expertise. I feel weird posting "I have nothing to add, seems legit" but I feel like if I wrote a blog post like this as a layman I'd like to know I wasn't completely off my rocker. 

My only suggestion would be if the data allows you to also get "serious injuries" - those are a bit less variable than fatalities and will be able to give you a better picture of the trend, because there's also going to be more of them.

I used to do fatal crash investigation, and fatalities can be very... (read more)

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Iron deficiencies are very bad and you should treat them
mad31

Sorry I only just saw this post. I would not classify myself as "in the field", for what it's worth. I would consider "my field" to be traffic engineering, as I have 10+ years experience in that (not including undergrad). My experience in the field of nutrition is less than that (a 3 year undergrad degree).

The main part of my post is a blog post I made aimed at an intelligent lay audience, so I did leave some nuances out. I do not consider the fact that the NRVs are published by a body that doesn't (and with current technology can't) know the "true" RDI to be the major shortfall that you clearly think it is.

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COVID contagiousness after negative tests?
Answer by mad10

I mean, you don't? You can look it up but recent advice was something like 10 days after first symptoms is when contagiousness reduces.

Anecdotally, my husband was sick on Friday and took rapid tests on Friday and Saturday (when he was very sick) and got negative. Then on Monday his rapid test was positive (followed by a positive PCR on Tuesday). So he was no doubt contagious on two days when he gave negative tests. 

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Iron deficiencies are very bad and you should treat them
mad390

I have always respected your posts so when I saw your title was about iron deficiencies I was buckled in. You know that old adage, "when the newspaper reports on your area of expertise it's crap, and yet you believe the rest of it" - I always pay special attention to what people I trust/respect say about things I know a lot about, especially when there's a lot of misinformation out there.

I have just completed the requirements for a bachelor's degree in Nutrition with a focus in biochemistry. I am not a dietitian and will freely admit I know less about iron... (read more)

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2Kenny
IIRC, RDIs (and I would guess EARs) vary quite significantly among the various organizations that calculate/estimate/publish them. That might be related to the point ChristianKI seemed to be trying to make. (Tho I don't know whether 'iron' is one of the nutrients for which this is, or was, the case.)
4Elizabeth
What's your opinion on reference ranges? My understanding is that they're often too wide, that the minimum is what you need to avoid deficiency diseases but won't get the average person to optimal function (although there exist outliers for whom it's exactly the right amount). So the RDI is set too high for most people but the reference range too low for most people. But I've never dug into this besides my research on iron not turning up anything on optimal functioning, just deficiencies. Which is maybe fine because knowing the average optimal amount isn't that informative about your personal optimal amount, that requires self experimentation?
0ChristianKl
I'm not sure whether or not to take this post as evidence that the field of nutrition is diseased or not.  The RDI is not what is enough for X amount of people but what is thought to be enough by a given authoritative body that published the RDI. While I do hope that there's some correlation between what's recommended and what's actually needed, people in the field confusing their abstractions and ignoring a portion of their uncertainty is a bad sign. 
Effective ways to find love?
mad96

I'm a straight woman who for whatever reason seems to date a lot of men who have never had a girlfriend before (as I get older it is happening less for obvious reasons) - but these include two men who had never been kissed in their mid-30s. I tend to mostly date "rationalist" type guys.

The other advice given here is useful as general advice, but I would advise you to ask for specific advice/feedback about yourself / your dating profile / etc. I'm happy to provide that if you want it, but an appropriate subreddit or facebook group would likely be better.&nb... (read more)

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What key nutrients are required for daily energy?
Answer by mad110

Uh, I don't know where to begin. This is like, the entire field of nutrition.

Vitamin D does not need to be obtained from the diet, it is primarily produced in the skin (from cholesterol, which you don't need to eat; your liver produces all you need from any food) after sun exposure. The amount of sun exposure required depends on the time of year, time of day, cloud cover, and amount of skin exposed. VitD can be obtained in the diet but pretty much only from fish and food that has been supplemented. I assume you are now taking high-dose supplements, because... (read more)

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(Link) I'm Missing a Chunk of My Brain
mad30

Apparently the extent to which Phineas was affected by the injury is exaggerated, see: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4744

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Help figuring out my sexuality?
mad40

What you are saying in all your comments is perfectly consistent with how I've heard people say about their experience as asexuals. Have a read of asexual literature, maybe post on a few asexual forums with your experiences. 

At the end of the day, I am 100% sure there are people with similar experiences to you who call themselves asexual and also who call themselves allosexual (not asexual). 

At the end of the days, these labels are a personal thing, like deciding how to cut your hair. There's no right or wrong way, just what makes you feel good.

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Help figuring out my sexuality?
Answer by mad340

My advice is don't stress too much about labels. 

I'm a woman who dates in kink-adjacent circles, and I'm a dommy switch so I have seen a lot of subby guys' profiles. You seem pretty normal, you seem like the sort of guy I date, down to the social awkwardness/lack of experience. I have a goddess kink so your specific fantasy is right up my alley. There are lots of women like me.

I've dated men who have been pretty normal but just didn't enjoy vaginal sex, we still had sex but just not PIV. I've dated men with fetishes who also enjoyed sex. 

If you W... (read more)

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1Centhart
Ah I was maybe a bit sloppy with this analogy. Like, I enjoy looking at paintings sometimes, and I enjoy looking at women I find attractive, but these experiences do not feel the same to me. Like, I'll get a boner looking a woman I find attractive. The analogy to paintings was just to say that like, I enjoy the experience of looking at attractive women without necessarily feeling any kind of "call to action".
1Centhart
Hm no, this isn't me at all. My sense of whether I'm attracted to someone or not is a pretty immediate reaction to mostly just how they look physically.
4Centhart
So interestingly FWIW I also don't feel like I have a super strong desire to act out kinks with other people. I did a bit with my ex, which felt good, but generally I feel pretty satisfied keeping my kinks private and just masturbating.
Which booster shot to get and when?
mad10

Why don't you phone around GPs and ask to find one who will give you AZ? My brother is 29 and in Perth and was able to get AZ in early July that way. I'm sure you'll find a doctor who will do it for you, unless you live remote.

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Book summary: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
mad250

Something I found very interesting/important in the book that you skipped over was the bit at the very beginning where children were asked what they wanted from their parents, and rather than asking for more extracurriculars or later bedtimes or anything like that they said that their parents seemed stressed/sad and they wanted their parents to be happier. I found that very lovely/compelling.

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Answer by mad20

I played mafia on the xkcd forums for a while (and it's restarting on the new xkcd forums: https://ramenchef.net/nxf/viewforum.php?f=6 ) and I quickly came to realise that I wanted to have fun, and attempting to do everything optimally to have the best chance of winning wasn't necessarily the most fun (because it has a huge cost in reading pages and pages of game content). 

I enjoy the logic puzzle aspect (how to best use powers/resources, what can contradict each other, etc) but not the social deduction. Same with other games I play, like SH or The Re... (read more)

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Is there a beeminder without the punishment?
Answer by mad100

Why don't you just use beeminder, but set your goal to be flat? So say you're brushing your teeth, you can tell it you want to brush 0 times a week, when really you want to brush every day, and you end up with a normal-looking graph with no problem if you forget to log (because you can just backdate the data!)

Also has the advantage of letting you use it the "traditional way" (with a slope and a pledge) for a goal that can be done automatically (e.g. duolingo, word count on a writing project, whatever). 

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Questions about multivitamins, especially manganese
mad10

You are almost certainly getting enough iron in your diet as a person who (presumably) doesn't menstruate. If you are not feeling fatigued or dizzy on the regular, you almost certainly have enough iron. If you are worried, get a blood test, don't just supplement willy-nilly. 

I would recommend you do a food diary for 3 days and enter into chronometer or myfitnsespal. You are probably getting 10-15mg of iron a day and the RDI for adult men is 8mg. Yes, vegans get non-heme iron, but the iron in meat is something like 80% non-heme, so most people actually... (read more)

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Suspected reason that kids usually hate vegetables
mad200

[epistemic status: i have formal education in nutrition, and this is remembered impressions i got from professors/experts, but may not be correct, and is almost certainly simplified and lacking in nuance]

In our parents' generation, boiling or steaming was considered the most healthy way to prepare vegetables: fat and salt were the enemy, and especially steaming left the vitamins in (rather than allowing water soluable ones to leach into the cooking water). 

Our parents cooked vegetables in this way because they learned it was the healthiest and they wa... (read more)

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Participating in a Covid-19 Vaccine Trial #2: We pretty much knew it would work the whole time
mad20

I think as well as what others have said, an ethical consideration with placebos is that they are treating someone with something that they know doesn't work. Like, basically, on some level, it's ethically dubious to make you go to all the effort you outlined, interact with medical staff, receive an actual injection, etc, and deliberately not treat you. That's why many many trials have "stopping rules", where if it turns out the treatment is working really well, the placebo group gets it, too. 

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How do you optimize productivity with respect to your menstrual cycle?
mad80

My impression is that my period symptoms are maybe in the top half of severity, but not the top quartile? 

 

Don't compare yourself to others. It's a very common problem that apparently women especially have. You have symptoms that are distressing to you and are more than you want to experience AND THAT IS ENOUGH.

FWIW, I would definitely say based on your description you would be in the most severe 5-10% given when I am bitching about periods with friends who menstruate none of them talk about being out of action for 4 hours a month. 

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How do you optimize productivity with respect to your menstrual cycle?
mad130

It took me like 3 doctors before one of them suggested the medications I'm trying now, and that was a doctor at a sexual health centre. This included one doctor who, when he saw I had low iron and I told him it was probably my frequent, long, heavy periods gave me a PPI (in case I had some stomach issue stopping iron absorption - because when he asked me if I had heartburn I said once every 2 or 3 months after eating like crap I have a little bit that an antacid fixes immediately), an endoscopy (in case I had, idk, a digestive issue? this required sedation... (read more)

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How do you optimize productivity with respect to your menstrual cycle?
mad90

I'm one of the many women who can't take estrogen due to a history of migraines. It makes things... interesting.

I use nexplanon, which gives me extremely long, heavy periods (and I am not joking: three 5-10 day periods in a row with 3 days in between) but I had a bad experience with an IUD, am bad at taking pills and the mini-pill is extremely sensitive to timing, and will probably have children within 2 years so the jab is not for me. 

So what I've been experimenting with is two medications my doctor has given me to stop my period (only one at a time)... (read more)

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7just_browsing
Wow the long and heavy periods sound insane and exhausting. Yeah I have asked doctors about ways to mitigate period pain—seems like "4 hours of pretty bad cramps" was not enough for them to recommend anything beyond going on the pill.  I have not been explicitly collecting data on productivity vs period. I do track my cycle and (when I remember) my symptoms throughout the month. I have a few reasons to believe that my menstrual cycle greatly influences my productivity:  * The obvious fact that I can't do anything productive during the first 4 hours of my period. * For me, minor physical symptoms like stomach ache, headache, bloating happen during certain points of my cycle. These symptoms make me slightly worse at concentrating / socializing, which decreases my productivity. * Sometimes there are days where I am unusually productive. They never happen during or right before my period.  I think the conversations here have inspired me to track more data more reliably!
How can I find trustworthy dietary advice?
mad10

Setting aside the absolutely horrific ethical problems with experimenting on imprisoned people, imprisoned people do have access to commissary, would have access to special meals for religious or cultural reasons, and are likely to exchange food amongst themselves. 

And as said in the other reply, coma patients are fed through tubes and don't do things like exercise, so you wouldn't be able to determine the effect of protein intake on muscle growth or whatever, and they also have whatever condition put them in a coma in the first place, and I believe long term comas are rare. Oh, and no informed consent, because they're in a coma.

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2Stuart Anderson
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How can I find trustworthy dietary advice?
Answer by mad170

I'm studying nutrition at a tertiary level for pretty much this exact reason and what it has taught me from speaking to dietitians who teach my course and from doing the course is:

a. Advice for the average person with a typical western diet boils down to "would it kill you to eat a damn vegetable?"

b.  There's a lot of organic chemistry that despite me being 3 years into a 4 year degree hasn't paid off (I am doing the degree that feeds into a masters of dietetics, so I'm sure that's where it was going to pay off. Alas, I'm not going to do that masters ... (read more)

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2Viliam
I heard a hypothesis that all "diets that work" have one thing in common (which is probably the only reason they work) -- they recommend eating more vegetables than you were eating previously, but they achieve it mostly indirectly, by banning something else. Also, they indirectly make you eat less, by making you pay more attention to what you eat, and banning some of your previously favorite meals. For example, vegetarian or vegan diet seems like an opposite of paleo diet, but the one thing they have in common is that they ban something other than vegetables (meat in case of vegetarian or vegan, grains in case of paleo). If you take your previous eating habits, and just remove that one component, it increases the relative proportion of vegetables in what is left. This makes me think about a diet, not sure if someone else invented it first, that would go like: "each day, first eat this amount of vegetables, and then eat whatever you want, how much you want, until 6 PM". (Probably would go with specific list of vegetables, like "one cucumber, one tomato, one carrot...", but ultimately the exact list doesn't matter, it just makes planning easier.) Could the masters degree open for you possibilities other than working as a career dietitian? For example, would it make legal for you to provide expensive private diet advice? For mere 20% of profit, I would let you use my magical diet explained above. :D
3methree
Indeed, since each body is a different ecosystem and each body exists inside larger, distinct ecosystems, you'll have to decide what your objective about health is and be satisfied with "good enough" and letting your body do its thing. To illustrate the complications, people who descend from groups adapted to particular regions and who have now migrated or been forcibly relocated to others may have different dietary needs than the adapted, local groups. For example: someone living away from the equator traditionally consumed a lot more fish and milk derivates, which helped compensate for the lack of sunlight in winter. Skin colour and the composition of the microbiome in their gut also played a role. Once you select an objective (live longer, reduce the chances of developing a disease you are genetically or environmentally disposed toward, reduce impact on environment, reduce animal cruelty, etc.), you can go the "literature" and find information. I like nutritionfacts.org, among others. Collecting data on a regular basis will be helpful in tuning your diet; I'm thinking blood lab work and the recently en vogue microbiome DNA reports. Lastly, in my opinion, you should only consume supplements when you have identified chronic deficiencies, like vitamin D or B12.
4ChristianKl
To be more exact, doing that is basically outlawed. You could run those studies in prisons but that wouldn't get past the ethical review board.
2Stuart Anderson
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Bet On Biden
mad130

Hey OP - 

Just want to say thank you for this post. This along with the failure of the rationalist community to buy bitcoin led to me betting $150 AUD on Biden, and Sportsbet Australia called the election for him already (no, I don't understand why either - I guess the publicity), so I got $235 in my bank account now (win: $85 AUD). 

I would not have done this without your post. 

https://www.9news.com.au/national/us-election-2020-sportsbet-pays-out-early-on-joe-biden-win/a722588b-85ec-4a87-a524-a1e592123691

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The bads of ads
mad10

To be honest, I don't care how things will go in the future: at the moment, I'm paying, now, to not experience ads, and I'm hoping that my purchasing decisions in this vein will encourage the sort of behaviour I want. If hosts start incorporating ads into their patron podcasts they'll lose my $5/mo and receive a polite but firm note explaining why.

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The bads of ads
mad120

It bothers me on a fundamental level that we've been conditioned to accept ads as "the price of the internet": I want to pay $5 for an app with no ads/IAP, not be advertised to forever. I want to pay $5 a month to listen to a podcast without ads, not have my precious time taken up with podcast hosts (aka People I Trust) telling me about how much they love whichever meal box kit is paying them this year. 

I put my money where my mouth is, btw: I support ad-free podcasts, or podcasts with unlockable ad-free versions, on Patreon (as ad-free is becoming a ... (read more)

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3AnthonyC
I'm curious if there is any reason we should expect paying for ad-free media and software to ultimately go any better than cable TV did. Being ad-free was one of the original promises of paying for a TV subscription in the first place, and now we ended up with both ads and subscription fees in ever-increasing amounts. Well, up until the point that many of us are cutting cable and getting everything online. Right now there's a lot of competition among streaming providers targeting different parts of the spectra for media access, payment, and advertising exposure, but I suspect it's partly a matter of the Powers That Be not yet having found strategies to lock up the market in some way.
COVID Strategy 101
mad70

Interesting that elimination isn't discussed - my jurisdiction (Western Australia) targeted this, and with strict border closures, mandatory 2 week quarantine for new entrants, we've not had a "wild" case in 6 months now (we have regular cases in hotel quarantine, but these don't 'escape' into the wild). Life is normal here: music festivals, dine in restaurants, cinemas, service industry/economy has time to recover, no need to wear masks, and of course no deaths. 

New Zealand is another example of this, as is the rest of Australia (Victoria has, in 2 m... (read more)

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Cryonics Cost-Benefit Analysis
mad50

I spent time working in fatal car crash investigation (reading crash reports and doing engineering analysis, nothing as gory as you're probably picturing), and car crashes often involved massive head trauma or would, at a minimum, require *hours* of lag time before the cryonics team could make it there. I'd say at a complete guess that only about 10% involved people dying in hospital later on (i.e. under circumstances that a cryo team could get to them in time to prepare the body).

My impression of the technology is that it's too much in it... (read more)

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How to stay concentrated for a long period of time?
mad80

I think the answer to your question is "people don't concentrate for 2 hours at a stretch". That's why the pomodoro technique is so useful!

I'm very focused in general, and I find 45 minutes to an hour is the longest I can sustain my attention on a task, especially if it's boring. Contrary to the other poster I don't think that I have ADHD (though I don't doubt I'd be able to focus for 3 or 4 hours straight if I took dexies, since my husband *does* have ADHD and the medicine does that for him).

You should look o... (read more)

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