Among many things that the post-industrial modernity inflicts on people. Not only it caused disease by confining people into buildings without the sunlight. It also causes the shift in the natural bi-modal sleep pattern. Again this is something I wrote about before but now even BBC magazine came around – The myth of the eight-hour sleep.
paleo
A while ago on the advice of Paul Jaminet I stopped wearing any shades outside. And now there is the mounting evidence about the importance of the natural sunlight – NYT. In this context it’s time to ponder why, for over a hundred years, buildings and especially work environments have been deliberately designed to ignore and even block out windows and the natural sunlight? Just another crime of modernity.
When people speak they tend to swap elephants with mice. They say religions are about “beliefs” but they forget to mention that the practical, day-to-day religious emotion is guilt. Every religion as it’s method bans or objects to one of the natural human drives and desires. This creates the fundamental tension as a mere human has to summon all the energy on the manufactured guilt. The flip side of this arrangement is that it opens the back door for the real elephants to comfortably walk in.
Take the western nutritional habits. Look at people around you, they are constipated with the manufactured guilt about fat, eggs, red meat, etc. In other words all the nutritional foods that out body craves because humans evolved to digest these foods easily and they pack the vital nutritional punch. No, these foods don’t make you fat; instead carbs, glutenous bread, sugars and the processed, chemically enhanced food make you fat. At the same time while the “consumer” is preoccupied with stripping his food of the most flavorful and nutritious morsels, at the same time the elephants of the processed, sugary junk walk in unmolested. And there is a lot of it, pretty much everything on the inside of a supermarket. On the perimeter there is fat, meat, fish, fresh produce but on the inside is mostly poison, guiltless poison.
Food in Dizengoff Center, Tel Aviv. Photo by Juan C García Lorenzo.
Two important EconoTalk podcasts by Russ Roberts:
- Art De Vany on Steroids, Baseball, and Evolutionary Fitness (skip the part about steroids).
- Gary Taubes on Fat, Sugar and Scientific Discovery.
photo via flickr/juancarlosgarcialorenzo
I was running the Harvard Steps today after listening again to the EconoTalk podcast and somewhere between the sections 38 and 27 of the stadium it all connected for me.
Investing:
When writing the Black Swan Taleb invented the terms Mediocristan to Extremistan to designate the areas (“quadrants”) of divergent volatility. The middle ground between the Mediocristan to Extremistan being exposed to the unexpected Black Swans. Hence the investment advice is to allocate most of portfolio to safe Mediocristan investments, i.e. bonds and still leave a small percentage of a portfolio to highly speculative investments in the Extremistan quadrant (extreme upper and lower bound). In that podcast Taleb extends this advice to managing a company. I.e. a very safe cash flow and very small but very aggressive allocation to risk.
Career and Creativity:
Following the same logic the middle class is the most unsafe career proposition (as in the last recession). Instead analogous to the investment advice, the wise proposition is to chose a safe stable profession and leave an allocation for the creative endeavors. That would be a government job for example, a plumber, etc. Taleb mentions there Kafka who wrote while working as a clerk and Einstein who created the theory of relativity while he was a patent officer. He mentioned there french aristocrats who enter a diplomatic career to leave time for writing, etc. This actually answers the queastion that bothered me for decades, why was there so much creativity in the CCCP compared to the “free world”? (as pointed out by Zizek). You see the CCCP system is the Taleb distribution by default, a government job and an ample room for experimentation.
Procreation:
Again in the podcast. Women’s strategy is to marry an accountant and have some random sex with a rocks star. You see the same idea of avoiding the unstable middle.
Exercise:
Here Taleb borrows from Art De Vany, the father of the Paleo movement. Our ancestors sprinted and walked a lot. Hence do not jog! Use the combination of walking, sprinting and lifting heavy objects. I.e. marathons (and sustained low impact workouts) are bad for you.
I cut out the last incredible segment of the This American Life, Poultry Slam podcast. Ira Glass essentially re-hacks the two-year old TED presentation by Dan Baker. The story is about Eduardo Sousa, the Spanish farmer from Extremadura and his unlikely method of raising wild geese for Foie Gras. (about 20 min) ►click to continue
Chris Masterjohn writes about the sexual mores of the Massai – Freedom From Monogamy Comes at a Price.
To get a handle on the state-of-the-art understanding about Dairy it is worth listening to an hour long lecture at the Ancestral Health Conference by the Portuguese researcher Pedro Bastos. As a matter of fact I will listen to it again sometime this week.
Two decades of medical profession misguiding millions about the correlation between cholesterol and heart disease. Damning perfectly healthy foods (eggs, meats and fats) and most importantly, selling billions worth of dangerous statins by the evil big pharma, after all that there is a study that says there is no correlation between cholesterol and mortality risk and no one is talking about it. No one expect Chris Kresser at the beginning of his podcast.
I would like to comment on the new seminal book by Dr. William Davis: Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health
The original wheat of the Fertile Crescent, i.e. Shippon served by Abraham to his guests is Einkorn, still grown here in Massachusetts by Elisheva Ragosa at the Heritage Wheat Conservancy. You can bake a loaf of bread from Einkorn but not a pliable pizza pie, cookie or even Challah. Gluten (derived from glue) the principal poison of the wheat is much lower in Einkorn compared to the modern varieties. Throughout history people bred the new wheat to be more pliable, in other words to have a higher content of that retched glue. The development of the “mutants” started in earnest in the last 50 years, primarily by the aforementioned Norman Borlaug who worked on his rouge experiments in Mexico. First they developed the wheat with a heavier seed head. Then they realized that the traditional four foot stalk buckled under the weight of the heavy head, so they developed this Mutant Dwarf Wheat variety. The Dwarf Wheat can’t grow without a fertilizer, yes allegedly it fed billions but it also starved many, even this year in India. Not to mention the central Dr. William Davis accusation of the being responsible for the epidemic of diabetes, heart diseases and the countless western ailments. This mutant wheat now accounts for 99% (no pun intended) of the wheat grown worldwide.
If you design websites, your immediate challenge is that people feel their website is their identity. And since most correctly sense that no object can adequately express their personality and lofty aspirations, the web design is by definition gravitates to the feeling of the unfulfilled. But this is not only about websites. People on the sell side of every product – cars, religions, politics, lipstick, etc., want you to identify with the object or and idea, to feel like a “Volvo” man, etc.
This is easily the main contaminate of our lives. It not only explodes the value of a product for the benefit of the sell side but it almost inevitably robs the product itself of the proper and prime utility. Identity is like wheat of this civilization, it is as ubiquitous as it is toxic (here is what I mean about wheat).
The Progressive Vegetarianism as a Religion
by Ben Atlas on 02.11.2012.10:27am · 0 comments
Most western vegetarians tend to be progressive, idealistic and ideological. They object to the consumption of animals on the “humane” grounds. Which is a sort of a contradiction. It presumes that animals should be treated like humans but at the same time rejects, for cultural and ideological reasons, the animal nature of the human being. Peculiar attribute swap works only one way. And this denial of the animal nature of the man, the insistence that we are the elevated above the animals creatures, is the point where Vegetarianism betrays its religious roots. At least in India it’s a pure religion. But in the west we must adapt to the post enlightenment language and thinking. The enlightenment was a radical change unable to rid itself of the religious ideas that the transformative light of the human mind is destined to rule the earth and nature and the belief in the perpetual “progress”. This is what western vegetarians borrow from the enlightenment. The reason why the proclaimed atheists can still get away with being clearly possessed with the flamimg religious intensity about the animals.