From Magic to Science (sort of) | Scott Adams Blog: "When I was young and trying to figure out the world, nearly every piece of popular “advice” people offered was complete bullshit. Let’s look at a few.
Advice is Useful: I used to think there was such a thing as “advice” that existed as little nuggets of valuable knowledge. If you were lucky enough to have lots of these advice nuggets you could piece them together and create and awesome plan that was likely to pay off. As an adult, I can see that generic advice for specific individuals almost never makes sense. Every situation is unique...
You’re probably thinking that some sorts of advice are universally applicable, such as the idea that hard work produces good results. But if I look around me, two of my richest friends work the fewest hours because they picked careers that allowed that to happen. I know rich people who have broken laws, become drug users, been dishonest, you name it. If you throw darts at a board with good and bad advice ranging from “get good grades in school” to “knock up your high school girlfriend” I can find examples of folks who made every situation work...
What do all successful people have in common? Beats me. I haven’t seen a correlation. I’ve seen lots of business plans in the past year and one of the best was from a guy that had a hard time getting through high school. The entrepreneurs with advanced degrees are pushing science forward and taking their 10% chance of commercializing products that can change the world. The high school graduate looked at the legal weed business and said, “I can do a lot of things wrong and still make money as a legal grower because the margins are so high.” Which entrepreneur do you bet on? If you think you know the answer, you don’t understand the nature of start-ups.
Be Yourself: You used to hear the “be yourself” advice a lot. Apparently there is some sort of “real” you buried beneath the layers of social training. And that personality you keep hiding is amazing. The reality of course is that there is no real you anywhere. You are just a coincidental outcome of nature plus environment...
Follow Your Passion: ...Passion is magical thinking. Passion can’t be managed and it can’t be defined. And in my experience, passion is what you get when something works...
Fast Forward to 2015… Today we have replaced a lot of the magical thinking of old with something that looks a lot more like science, at least in terms of testing ideas and seeing how they turn out, and not believing in things that can’t be seen or measured. Now you see more of this sort of talk…
Systems vs. Goals: Develop a system that improves your value in the world in a general way and make it easier for luck to find you.
Habit: You can rewire your brain by repetition and reward. So rewire your brain in ways that can improve your odds of success. Manage
Willpower: Willpower isn’t real in the old-timey sense that we can scrunch our foreheads and generate more of it when needed so long as our parents raised us right. But it does seem true, according to studies, that using your so-called willpower in one situation leaves you less self-restraint for the next, in any given day. So the modern view is that you manage willpower like a limited resource instead of a super power you can summon on command...
A-B testing: You keep trying different things in rapid succession and track how users respond.
...I’m telling an incomplete story here, but the general idea is that a scientific mindset is slowly replacing the magical thinking about “success” that dominated my generation."
Podcast 431 – “That Voice In Your Head”: "“The idea for me is really very simple, break the identification with the voice in your head. It’s not who you are. It’s just your language machine. And you’ll be in a much better position to evaluate your experience and formulate new actions if you language machine isn’t filling your head with a bunch of stupid, really bad ideas.”"
"Human beings are robots operationally programmed by neurogenetic templates, neural imprints and social conditioning." - The Game of Life by Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary
Pope Francis Goes Full Joe Biden, Pizza Named as Obesity Villain: P.M. Links - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "With off-the-cuff comments calling for speech restrictions, criticizing those who breed "like rabbits," and pondering giving con men "a kick where the sun doesn't shine," Pope Francis is gaining a reputation as the Joe Biden of the Roman Catholic Church." - The Pope said what?!? More stunners from Francis - CNN.com
A Brief History Of "Satanic Panic" In The 1980s: "Talk shows, the era's number-one source for dubious investigations of hot-button topics, also helped fan Satanic Panic's flames. (Check out the Oprah clip below; the technical quality isn't good, but the content — in which a calm and clear-eyed representative of an alternative religion calls out an audience member who makes vague claims of having, uh, murdered a guy as part of a Satanic ritual — is very telling.)
A Brief History Of "Satanic Panic" In The 1980s: ""It was something we didn't realize at the time, but now, it looks like a low-scale version of the McCarthy-era paranoia around communism...
In the wake of all this paranoia came a slew of high-profile cases involving day-care workers, which were a perfect storm of paranoia about Satanism, cutting-edge psychotherapy that claimed to recover the children's repressed memories, and a gathering awareness of the problem of child sexual abuse. It's important to remember that the 1980s didn't just see unfounded dread about Satanists. Prior to the late 1970s, law enforcement did very little to prosecute sexual abuse of children. But in the 1980s, the Department of Justice stepped up its fight against child pornography, with measurable success, and laws revolving around the reporting of child abuse were revamped, with an eye toward protecting innocent victims. So these allegations of ritual abuse in day-care centers came from the combination of legitimate awareness of a previously hidden problem, and completely unfounded hysteria...
Looking back, the McMartin case seems like a clear-cut case of mass hysteria. But even after it was closed, fears about Satanic ritual abuse refused to completely die. In 1993, a year before The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults found its way to VHS, the long saga of the West Memphis Three began, in which a trio of young men were accused of murdering a trio of young boys as part of a cult ritual. "[The police] had this whole thing about how the teenagers were into the occult," author Bebergal remembers. "But in the court documents, they would always make note that they listened to heavy metal. That was a key point. The music that they listened to, it was believed, would make them more susceptible to whatever Satanic conspiracy. It was a way of noting that the kids were troubled.""
Salt Is Not the Killer the Government Says It Is - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine is adding to the evidence the CDC's sodium advice is basically a superstition, that is to say, a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation. In this case, the CDC and lots of physicians are buying into what has turned out to be a false conception of causation. The new study followed 2642 older adults (age range, 71-80 years) participating in a community-based, prospective cohort study for ten years. The researchers analyzed the sodium intake of participants looking at three groups: those who consumed less than 1,500 milligrams per day; other who ate 1,500 milligrams to 2,300 milligrams per day; and those pigged out on more than 2,300 milligrams per day. What did they find?
In older adults, food frequency questionnaire–assessed sodium intake was not associated with 10-year mortality, incident CVD [cardiovascular disease], or incident HF [heart failure], and consuming greater than 2300 mg/d of sodium was associated with nonsignificantly higher mortality in adjusted models. Cardiology Today noted: At 10 years, mortality rates were lower in those with sodium intake 1,500 mg/day to 2,300 mg/day (30.7%) compared with those with sodium intake less than 1,500 mg/day (33.8%) and those receiving more than 2,300 mg/day of sodium (35.2%), but the difference was not statistically significant, according to the researchers. This new report bolsters the findings in a New England Journal of Medicine study from last August that found that people who consume less 1,500 milligrams of sodium (about 3/4ths of a teaspoon of salt) are more likely to die than people who eat between 3,000 to 6,000 milligrams of sodium per day (1.5 and 3 teaspoons of salt)."
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