That was my impression as well after doing some research in this area a while back. Although I looked specifically at longevity and cardiovascular studies there was a peak benefit at about 2hrs per week after which virtually no more benefits were observed.
That would mean heart rate around 126 to 153 for me, evidently. Which, actually sounds low. Which I guess is good for me? :)
I was using "zones" per the Strava app lingo. I rarely make zone 5, which would be 174+ heart rate. I spend a fair bit of time in the 160 range, though.
As an ultra runner I can tell you 130-150 is "vigorous" in medical literature. Actually for anyone over 30, maintaining 150+ is probably threshold and providing you different kinds of adaptation. Ideally you spend 80% of your training time in Z3. You use Z4 to train VO2 max and Lactate Threshold. VO2 max is not very trainable. Lactate Threshold is. Z5, once you are "trained" and can run in Z3 for extended periods of time (30+ minutes) is almost purely for speed work and learning to run faster. It helps develop coordination and push through barriers. It is mostly anaerobic, so some amount of intervals in Z5 is good. Z4 is longer tempo work and fast/hard intervals.
Marathons are meant to be run at the edge of Z3 so you avoid hitting your lactate threshold. Think of your ability to run in each zone as separate gas tanks. Your Z5 gas tank is very small. Your Z4 gas tank can be trained, but is still relatively small. Your Z3 gas tank is basically unlimited (ultra marathon pace, 50+ non stop miles possible for almost any healthy human). Cardio is not about suffering.
Most people should be fast walking to maintain Z3 rather than suffer it out in Z4 and Z5 when they are getting started.
Is it the same for biking as running? My hunch is I was silly and looking at distance when I thought I could get more out of cycling. That is, I know I can bike 30+ miles with fairly little effort. Running 2 miles near kills me. (Granted, some of that is hernia related. Fixing that, but not expecting it to be easy any time soon.)
Checking my last long bike ride, I see I maintained 120 heart rate for majority of it. Which means I spent most of the time in zone 2, and makes sense that would be easy to maintain. (Contrasted with my last commute, where I cover 270 ft of elevation in about 7 minutes, mostly at about 160 heart rate...)
A few years back when I was looking at Tour de France stats, IIRC a lot (most?) of those guys spend all day around 120 bpm too. The difference is that they are putting out pretty much twice the power that I do for that same effort.
And probably you too, given I have a hill around the same size on my commute that takes me around 7 minutes too.
https://www.strava.com/segments/622627 is the hill I'm talking about. Agreed that they are likely putting in much more power than I can at that heart rate.
My naive understanding is that I can push more time in higher heart rates and slowly pull up what I can do in the lower ones. That said, I'm just aiming to be consistently in the 6 minute time frame for that hill by next year. As things are, I'm quite winded if I hit the low 7 minute time frame. So, trying to pay attention to any methods I could use to make that better.
AFAIK your 'naive' understanding is pretty right on. I subscribe to the philosophy of spending as much time as possible in the "sweet spot" (search on that term), which is toned down just a bit from the best effort you can do in an hour.
Yep. Cycling has some different terminology, but the basics of zone training are the same. How much time per zone, intervals, training cycles, it all works the same in terms of adaptation.
If you're just using a formula your heart rate zones could be quite far out.
For example, 220-age suggests my maximum HR is 178 and my threshold HR (85% of this) is 151, but in fact my max HR (determined empirically) is 188 and my threshold HR (based on an actual threshold test) is 162.
Thanks! I'll have to consider doing a test like you describe downthread sometime. Most of my biking is just getting home from work. And, well, that is only 20 minutes on the bike. Large hill, but still just 20 minutes.
The canonical running test is to run an all out 5K. You can then derive pretty simple training paces based on tables. See: Daniels Running Formula. Or any number of training calculators on the Internet. A 5K is a very good measure if your overall running fitness and a pretty good predictor of race performance from 10k to Marathon. It helps you set up good training paces. Then it just comes down to volume. When you find your HR creeping out of zone don't be ashamed to walk to chill it out.
You can definitely go out too hard in a 5K, it isn't a 400, 800, or 1600M effort, but if you aren't hurting and questioning your life choices the last mile you weren't going hard enough :)
For cycling, I do a long warmup then ride as hard as I can (uninterrupted) for 30 minutes and take the average HR for the last 20 of the 30 minutes. There are online calculators you can plug this value into to give you the 5 zones.*
I do a test every 3 months, as the zones can shift as you get fitter.
Running might use a different protocol, but the same principle applies.
* These days I base my training on a 3-zone system: low intensity, below aerobic threshold; medium intensity, between aerobic and anaerobic (lactate) threshold, and high intensity, above lactate threshold. This is the system preferred by researchers, as it's based on real physiological markers.
Translating the 3 zone system into the 5 zone: low intensity equates to zones 1-2, medium is zone 3 and zone 4 up to your (lactate) threshold value, and high intensity is everything above this, i.e. the top part of zone 4 and all of zone 5.
So 'vigorous' per the Mayo Clinic would be medium intensity on the 3 zone system.
Personally, I define vigorous exercise when I hit 95% of my maximum heart rate (220-age) non-stop for 30 minutes. 100% is doable but a bit too extreme. I think I've seen similar definitions in health literature.
Worth noting that the various "max heart rate formulas" are just guidelines. Plenty of people routinely hit above their predicted rate, and plenty of people cannot get there.
Yeah, the "based on age" makes it tough. I would love for there to be something more prescriptive. That said, I suspect just trying already puts me in a decent position.
Weight training tends to be moderately cardiovascular. Not an out-and-out replacement for cardio, but your heart will be pumping hard at higher weights/reps. Same thing for a long session in a hot sauna. Just throwing some nearly-as-good alternatives out there for people who hate treadmills.
Just to throw in some new terms, weight training tends to be more anaerobic, where things like distance running are more aerobic (where oxygen provides most of the energy). It's not an either/or, but more of a scale progressing from aerobic to anaerobic. Lifting more weight is generally more anaerobic than lifting less weight. And the downside of anaerobic exercise is that you can generally only do it for short periods of time.
Since I don't have a Science subscription, I can only read the summary, and they do not explain what type of exercise they required the mice do. So if someone with access can clarify, please do. But from what I know of similar "cleaning out" studies, the exercise is generally distance running. So weightlifting for a short period of time is probably not going to give you the benefit this study refers to, even if you're burning the same number (or more) calories, because you didn't do it for as long of a period of time.
In particular, dead lifts wind me every time. After a set I feel like I just ran up a few flights of stairs. Other lifts not as much, but man I have respect for the dead lift. Works damn near every muscle in your body at the same time.
Gotta be more careful with your words. There's some component of aerobic metabolism in weightlifting, even if we colloquially think of lifting as anaerobic exercise. If you start breathing harder when you lift stuff, it's because your body needs more oxygen to provide energy to your body.
Technically you're correct (the best kind of correct!) but I don't know if I'd be under the opinion that somehow doing a 5x5 (or, whatever) of Deadlifts is going to positively effect your cardiovascular system in a training sense, to the point where doing separate cardio is unnecessary.
Depending on the exertion you put forth, a different energy system is going to be utilized by the body.
I suggest you read Tactical Barbell and TB 2 the conditioning guide(search for PDF). Contrary to popular wisdom, the two systems are not independent of each other
No, I didn't say they were. The point being is that you're not going to get great aerobic conditioning from deadlifts when compared to any other specific aerobic activity, like running.
That shouldn't even pass the sniff test, yes? If you would like to test the theory, I'll run for 5 weeks, you deadlift, then we'll test our aerobic thresholds (or whatever else you'd like to do!) :)
Because it’s easy to set targets and measure them while in the gym, but it’s not easy to fit that kind of exercise into the day to day.
People often live too close to work for the bike ride to really be considered exercise, or too far, where they couldn’t feasibly fit it into their day.
I get it, doing exercise for free seems like a no-brainier, but not everyone’s life and exercise needs converge neatly to make it easy.
There's another article on the front page that pollution increases the risk of either getting or accelerating Alzheimers, I forget which. Either way, if you live in a city, getting aerobic exercise out of doors is probably counter-productive when done for the purpose of cleaning your brain. In that case, indoors at a gym might be an option, if it's well ventilated and fresh air is filtered first.own.
Probably for the same reason people go to the gym to exercise yet don't do any pushups at home: we pathologically avoid exercise, so we often must compartmentalize it away from our life to actually do it.
1. Start with the intuition. (The big concepts i.e. for BigO trying to figure out the best, worst and average number of steps it takes to run a function as the input size grows). Make sure everyone gets the big picture, core concepts, and intuition before moving on.
2. Use as many graphics and visual aids as possible.
3. Let people work step-wise up to getting the full solution i.e. get them to just sort one element in a list. Then change the algorithm to sort two elements, etc..
4. Start very easy, I mean very easy (like sorting a list of 1,2 and then 3 elements), then let people slowly step up in difficulty until they implement full algorithms and data structures. Also make sure everyone can at least describe, draw, and sketch out solutions that may not necessarily be precise but cover the "gist" of what the algorithm is about.
5. Use Stories: If you can tell them stories with algorithms / data structures its even better. (For stacks I like using the example of the professor grading essays on his desk, or a person browsing the internet, for binary search I like looking for a book in the library, etc)
6. Use Lots of Examples: When explaining the mathematics be sure to have exercises/examples which let them play a lot with the parameters (RStudio or jupyter is nice for this), make sure each expression is clearly broken down and clarified. Also having positive examples (for how it should work) and negative examples (for common mistakes and when things are incorrect) can help improve understanding too.
> until you need to upgrade, then you have months of no business value delivery and need to bring...
This is not the case in my experience. I've upgraded pretty decent sized apps (hundreds of models,lines of routes, etc) and in my experience it would take a couple hours a day spread out over a few days a month and then I was done (for versions: 3-4 and 4-5, never done 3-5).
I would say most of the problem is making sure everyone on the team just keeps all functionality as-is. It can be tempting for team members to refactor as they go through but this then becomes a huge time-sync. Anyways, thats my exp on rails but I have no other frameworks to compare it to.
Has anyone migrated a massive app from some PHP Framework like Symfony or from a java framework like Play, or any framework with a large code base?
I have had to upgrade massive systems that were not done with any framework and full of one-off solutions with in-house developed libraries and it was an absolute nightmare, but I'm sure this depends on the language and team. However, in general I think an open-source library used by millions or even hundreds of people is going to have better documentation, bug coverage, support, etc. than something done in house, just IMHO.
So I guess my question would be, what does the alternative look like?
What I think people like the author who are arguing about inequality are missing is that inequality is not the fundamental issue or put another way I think that tackling it is the wrong goal to have. For instance, if we are all rich, it doesn't matter if some even richer people can have flying cars and homes in the sky. In fact, I would prefer this scenario to a perfectly equal situation in which everyone lives in the same abject poverty or almost as bad, we have a crawling rate of innovation and don't get around to making market ready medical devices, human-AI biosembiotic interfaces, etc. for another century or so.
Our goal should be to increase wealth in general and ensure that the median wealth per capita increases or steadily increases for various segments of the population. Ideally, you would have faster median expansions in lower income segments of the population but in my mind, even if the top %1 had an increased wealth per annum of say 0.05% and the lowest had a lesser increase of 0.02%, I would still prefer that (assuming we've controlled for PPP, inflation, etc) than a system where the poorest increased at 2% a year, the richest dropped -2% and our overall economic productivity declined or stayed roughly the same year after year.
Overall, though I agree with the author in that too much emphasis (in the news at least), is put on GDP. Its still a useful indicator of productivity in an economy and from an investment perspective, but there are as he rightly mentions many qualitative properties left out of this one measurement. Which is kind of always the case is it not? Every time we measure something it measures a specific thing which we decide to interpret in a particular way, its funny how often we generalize that act to areas for which the original measurement was never designed.
Inequality doesn't matter, in theory, but it does matter in practice. Like it or not (and I don't like it, FWIW), people measure themselves against other people. A large delta between the rich and the poor shouldn't matter, as long as the poor are doing well enough, but it does matter. We are social animals who evolved in small communities. There is a built in sense that many of us have that those doing better should share with those doing worse. And when things get too out of line, it undermines political instability.
> We are social animals who evolved in small communities
I agree with you. First, historically speaking, large disparities have led to revolutions and countless atrocities. Also our neural cortex isn't so highly evolved that it doesn't bow to the will of our chimp brain most of the time anyway, which is just to say we have a plethora of evolved intuitions and feelings. However, just because we have some innate biological sense of right or wrong or good or bad, that doesn't necessarily mean we should advocate for that in a normative way.
That was kind of my point. If we are going to build a better society I think it is important what normative values we strive for since we are not completely controlled by our impulses and those values will certainly have an effect on the systems we design and the relative effectiveness or lack thereof.
1. we aren't all rich. most are poor. 1/7 have trouble affording food. some people can't even get clean water. meanwhile, the rich enjoy unprecedented influence over politics, the market itself, and more luxury than they can even consume. they can afford to think long-term, whereas the poor cannot. inequality is an issue in and of itself.
2. wealth is expanding the fastest for the higher income brackets. the lower income brackets are barely holding ground.
3. i already hinted at this: relative wealth equals relative power. if everyone has $1 that they can disposably donate to a politician's election campaign, the guy with $2 has twice the influence of a person with $1. this means that the guy with $2 has a much higher chance to affect the rules of society such that their $2 becomes $3 at the expense of everyone else. this is the way things work. the higher the economic inequality, the higher the political inequality.
Its hard to discuss any of the things you mention since it all depends on what particular system you are looking at. If we constrain ourselves to the US system we're still going to have massive differences even within states and within counties within states. That doesn't mean many of the subjects you mention aren't issues, but you're confusing a state with a cause IMHO.
We could make ourselves all almost perfectly equal tomorrow by destroying all wealth and living as hunter-gatherers again. That wouldn't solve any of the problems you mention though. So clearly, inequality is not a fundamental issue underlying all these problems.
Personally, I think the major factors will vary depending on the context and problem domain. For access to healthy affordable foods, it could be something as complex as subsidizing or taxing various agricultural products, or as simple as removing all subsidies and tariffs and letting cheaper foreign made produce flood the markets.
With your third point, that certain people attempt to use power - which is a function of many factors not just wealth - to manipulate the laws and the system to their own advantage is something that is remarkably well documented in the political science and sociological literature. I'm not sure what the best approaches are towards mitigating this. Certainly, high degrees of transparency and accountability as well as a swift and well functioning judicial system would be my first guesses at the largest factors, based on my experiences with South American and European economic data. Personally I think the more checks and balances i.e. decentralization of the concentration of power mechanisms (i.e. ability to tax, ability to imprison, etc.) the system allows for is another key factor.
But everybody is rich relative to practically any time in our entire species existence. Ready access to clothes, food, fresh water, indoor plumbing, and so many other things are things that we take completely for granted, but they aren't a given. I would much rather be an aristocrat in ancient Greece than a poor person in America due to the ability exert your ideas, but in terms of niceties a poor American has our ancient Greek aristocracy looking like they were living in some nicely decorated slums. Ignore non-material components, and I'd take the poor American in a heartbeat.
People sometimes look to Star Trek as an example of a utopia, but think about what would really happen. Have you ever thought about the rank and file that spend their life merely taking orders from the captains and admirals, unable to ever make their way up to ever being able to be anything more than redshirts? And we're already talking about the elite there! Imagine the people that couldn't manage to get through Star Fleet! A tiny minority of elite individuals get to spend their days seeking out strange new civilizations and boldly going where noone has gone before, while the rest of society tries to provide some meaning to an empty life in a fake reality in the holodeck before going home to consume fake food from their replicator. There would be huge movements against the inequity and against the privilege of these elite. Star Trek did briefly hit on this issue, once, in the episode Tapestry. A brief clip of it. [1] A longer cut of the ending scene there. [2]
... between the greek aristocracy and a poor person in america, who has more political influence? who can make political efforts that could better their position in the world more?
more importantly: who would be the one going to war if the political situation called for it?
inequality isn't something to be brushed off, it's the primary issue assuming we're a democracy. absolute wealth doesn't grant you influence.
I'm confused by how your desired situation is compatible with a capitalist market. If everyone is rich, prices just rise to the point where everyone isn't rich anymore. Unless we're talking about a post-scarcity or post-labor economy, which isn't really useful to guiding economic policy today.
> If everyone is rich, prices just rise to the point where everyone isn't rich anymore.
Rich and poor are always tied to purchasing power which itself is tied to productivity, efficiency and innovation within an economy. (as well as the traditional price theory, demand/supply, etc.) I used rich/poor because those are simple terms everyone can understand more easily than PPP or Genuine Savings, etc. (however, wealth is a better term I should have probably used in its stead)
For instance, the phone you can buy and hold in your hand today for $200 is vastly more powerful than the most expensive IBM mainframes of just 20 years ago - A CEO of those times could not even afford the simple phone many refuges have in their Rucksacks these days. Are they rich because of this? It depends on what particular measurement for "rich" you are using.
To answer your question. Yes, ceteris peribus if everyone gets more money instantly (i.e. money supply increases) all prices will rise accordingly and there is a net null effect, however, and this is key, if that increase is in wealth i.e. capital assets, productivity, everyone is better off and prices will increase according to traditional demand-pull.
Great, wealth is a much better term to be using here, but you're still hand-waving away the method by which increasing capital assets, productivity, etc. would happen under a capitalist free market. The traditional way you increase these things for everyone is by collective bargaining (unions) or collective ownership of businesses (employee-owned companies). These two things are pretty much directly at odds with American-style capitalism.
Do you think we should be aiming for something more akin to the labor situation in Europe, or do you think there's a different method by which we could create wealth for everyone more equally than today?
Even the poorest people in the US have electric lights that are brighter than anything even the richest of 200 years ago could have. The cost to run those lights is also significantly less as well. That is just one example of the types of things that improve life for everybody.
So long as everybody is improving their life, and can see things improving (or say they are not interested in the improvements - like the Amish)
Poor/working class today have electric lights, yes, but they also have automated scheduling systems telling them when to work, night shifts and multiple jobs, obesity and malnutrition (instead of starvation and malnutrition), dental cavities, alcoholism, opioid addiction...
The poor today have different problems than medieval peasants. Their lives are better in a lot of ways but not all ways. Medieval peasants had a much better idea of their place in the world, their relationships to their friends, family, community, and church. Today so many people are isolated and dying of depression.
Just thought I'd provide some counter data here. I've built small services in Sinatra, which did not warrant the usage of Rails and never had to change anything, having them in fully functional operation for years.
I could have built these little apps in Rails, but I did not need it, never did, and my code/deployment/etc. is cleaner and smaller because of it.
Also these services have always been quite small (a few endpoints or functions), which is what I think Sinatra is best for.
I second this. I use sintra for all those sites that are 75% static pages and few dynamic parts here are there and could not be happier.
Non optionated means that I can really easily setup the model that I want/need without having any framework in my way. Love it.
One caveat: I am a senior engineer 7+ years of experience. I would not have been comfortable having to do those design choices earlier in my career and Rails would have been better suited then.
The primary utility of money is this: it is the good that best lends itself to exchanges for other goods.
Its been clear to me for some time now, and I'm not alone in this, that as the properties of Bitcoin have moved further away from its primary function as a useful unit of exchange that its usage would decline.
There are other crypto-currencies which are now much better suited as a medium of exchange, which ones people will prefer as time progresses remain to be seen, but unless Bitcoin takes a major corrective path, I would be quite surprised to find Bitcoin in that final set of widely utilized currencies.
It's more than 21 millions since bitcoins can be divided.
And no, it could serve as a digital gold / long term investment, and others crypto currencies could be used for day to day transaction
What? That's like saying it's okay if there's only 21 million US dollars, they can be divided into pennies.
Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Gold does. There's no long-term investment there when even pizza places and Steam think the "currency" is bunk.
It's one thing if Goldman Sachs thinks the currency is worthless, but another issue entirely if the digital equivalent of Circle-K won't accept your virtual dollary-doos.
Let's see, would I rather invest in a company like Intel whose processors are in every American home, or McDonalds whose an international brand, or in Bitcoin whose sole usage is relegated to druggies and sole investment limited to grandmas and millennials who think they're going to strike it rich?
I didn't say it was "okay". It was not an argument. The fact that there are max 21 millions bitcoins is known to everybody but doesn't say much about the total supply since it can be divided. And it cannot be divided into infinity, the smallest unit is the satoshi, so why not talk about the max number of satoshis if you want to make an argument about the max supply of unit of currency ?
Given that it’s a pure fiat currency, why would it retain value if it cannot be used as a currency? The early adopters who get rich if enough people buy in want that but that’s a tiny number of people and for everyone else it’s cheaper and easier to use something which actually solves a problem.
Bitcoin can serve as both digital gold and cash. The Lightning Network (a network of bi-directional payment channels) supports instant sub-1-cent micropayments.
It's not like an IOU. They are literally signed (by both parties of the channel) transactions that have yet to be broadcasted and included into blocks. You aren't sending something that is worthless to the counterparty. You both agree what the channel balance is. If there is a disagreement to the state of the channel, the base layer is the ultimate arbiter.
I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?" I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things. Consciousness and the origin of the universe get place 0, and the others all get place 1 because they're solvable but we don't know in which order.
I very much share that sentiment, in that I rate "the nature of consciousness" and "why does the universe, why does anything at all even exist" as fundamental questions of a completely different class, perhaps even unsolvable.
"I would bump the origin of the universe to the top, because no matter what universe-generating physics you come up with I can always ask, "but what set things up to work that way?""
Except that it might not be possible to get outside of consciousness to have any testable way of explaining what set it up to be that way.
It seems that we are hard-limited by our consciousness, and have no way of going outside of it to peek at "the universe" beyond.
> I'd also put consciousness up there, because it's fundamentally distinct from measurable things.
No one knows that it is not measurable. Is love measurable? is hunger? happiness? they seem to be as measurable as consciousness, that is to say we can at least measure them in binary as either present or not.
How do you know everyone else is not a "p-zombie", indistinguishable in any external way from a human such as yourself, but devoid of internal "consciousness"/"subjective experience". Even the mere logical possibility of p-zombies indicates that consciousness is unmeasurable.
Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world. But if you argue for solipsism then I say you have much bigger problems than consciousness because you basically rejected everything that has ever been "known" or experienced.
If you reject our "shared reality" then anything is possible, including paradoxically, the "shared reality".
If you accept the shared reality on the other hand, consciousness is measurable to some degree. So the real question is do you or do you not accept we share experiences?
As an addendum, if it is all up to me as you suggested, I just made consciousness measurable so there is no need to keep arguing about it.
"Solipsism is basically the only defense against the conclusions from the evidence of the "real" world."
Far from it. There could very well be an external world, and one populated by plenty of other and fully real human beings even, but your own personal view or understanding of it could be distorted or false.
This could be simply because you're hallucinating, or insane, or your brain could be injured, or could be living in a virtual reality (which itself exists in some other "real" reality), or you could be the proverbial brain in a vat, or aliens (or god or a demon/devil) could be deceiving you, etc.
All those options are the same: they are either part of a shared experience or they are not. Nothing is preventing a demon from deceiving me right now, in fact one can come anytime I'd love to meet him, preferably her.
If experiencing something that's not shared is the only qualification for solipsism, then we're all solipsists, as (arguably barring the possibility of telepathy) our experiences are all private.
But that's not what solipsism typically means. Solipsism usually refers to the position that only you (or perhaps only your own mind) exist. By that commonly accepted definition, one could be mistaken or deceived in any of the ways I laid out earlier without them entailing solipsism.
Even if there is some sort of "shared context" (more commonly known as "objective reality") your view or understanding of it could still be deceived, hallucinating, simply mistaken, insane, etc. These are not solipsism. What they are are possible obstacles to your connection to any shared context or objective reality.
"Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail)."
Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?
This might be a religious question to some, or perhaps involve a religious answer, but religion need not be involved. It's possible that in some not yet understood way an individual might exist before they're born and are somehow incarnated or embodied in to matter or the world as we know it when they're born.
Sure, it might sound kooky or something that science might never be able to answer (or maybe it could, who knows?). But the point is that that's all part of the mystery of life, and the answer could be a metaphysical or ontological one, not necessarily a religious one.
Another question regarding the nature of life is what exactly does it take to go from a non-living substance to a living one. In some way this is a question of definitions (which is difficult enough and controversial enough on its own), but even given an agreed-upon definition of life, it might not be clear how exactly the process from non-living to living take place, or at which point the non-living becomes living.
It says a lot that you felt the need to hedge against the assumption that you were talking about religious beliefs. These days it seems like there’s a materialist mindset that assumes anyone who questions certain assumptions about consciousness (e.g. that it is a creation of the brain that begins and ends when the brain does) has ventured into the terrain of religion, the supernatural, or “magic” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature. These assumptions people have are based on faith (yes, faith) in a hypothetical explanation that has yet to materialize. Until scientists cross the Explanatory Gap (which is more like a chasm), nobody has the right to tell anyone that their speculation about consciousness is kooky or unscientific or whatever. The only thing that’s unscientific is letting one’s thought be constrained by rigid dogma regarding what is and isn’t possible.
I feel your pain (if I’m understanding you correctly, that is). It sucks to be trapped in a no-man’s-land between scientific dogma and religious dogma. We need a better way forward.
The problem is one of humility. If you admit that something is at this point inexplicable then that is where you should stop explaining it. Sometimes I don't know is the only real answer. Because if you want to make this statement:
> It doesn’t seem to occur to people that consciousness itself is completely inexplicable and therefore all bets are off regarding its true nature.
Sure, but the problem is that many people don’t demonstrate this humility when they act like it’s ridiculous to wonder if consciousness exists prior to conception or after death. Ruling these out requires an unwarranted assumption about the relationship between consciousness and the brain.
I agree that people should show some humility and admit that we have no idea if or when consciousness begins and ends. Anyone who makes definitive claims about the temporal limits of consciousness should, as you said, provide an explanation of how they know this.
It goes both ways. If you claim there is an unwarranted assumption about the relationship between consciousness and the brain you have to prove it. All I see is consciousness is highly correlated with having a brain.
> I agree that people should show some humility and admit that we have no idea if or when consciousness begins and ends.
I think our understanding of it is not as vague as you claim. We can see consciousness develop in all kind of animals; infants are less conscious than adults and elders show a higher degree of loss of consciousness. Furthermore, it is linked with brain activity somehow, as damaged brains show erratic consciousness related behavior. There is a lot more to learn, a lot, but to say that we know nothing is very dishonest in my opinion.
That is assuming we are talking about the same kind of consciousness you and I. But I've got a feeling we are not.
> Not only that, but do you have an existence before you are born?
If you are inventing mysteries out of thin air why stop there? What if you will yourself into existence? What if it is you that is making "time" perceivable for the rest of us? Do your half-existing-yet-unborn-brother dies every time you are reborn into this plane but not if you will yourself to be born into another parallel universe?
I didn't invent that question. It's a been a question that people have had for millenia.
Some people believe that one has a soul that exists before one is born in to a body. So in a way that's an answer to this question -- an answer that's been around for thousands of years. Clearly many people are concerned about it. I'm far from the only one, much less the first one.
I was talking about the royal you: we. But more importantly, "when" the question was first asked doesn't change the nature of the question. Sure, you (we) can ask it, but it is no more insightful that the myriad of other metaphysical questions that have been asked through history that will never be answered because they lack a fundamental grounding in the shared experience we call "reality". Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it.
"Are there any blue reds? We can spend a millennia thinking about it."
It's pretty obvious that you can have blue reds: they're called purples or violets. Just squeeze some blue out of a tube of paint, and then some red, mix them together and you get a blue red. You can also have a black white: it's called gray.
Anyway, I'd agree that one could ask any number of metaphysical questions, but it could be argued that only some of them would be considered "great". One (arguable) measure to use for the greatness of questions is how many people do they occupy, and how critical do they consider those questions. Whether one exists before birth or after death would be considered "great" by this measure, whether there's a blue red would not.
Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red.
You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics.
And greatness is in the eye of the beholder. To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer. That implies a pretty bad question that is not grounded in reality, or at the very least not "grammatically" grounded in reality.
"Violet is not blue and it is also not red. I'm not asking for a bluish red but for a 100% blue color that it is also red."
If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).
"You are misusing the language, or rather I am in this case, to ask a paradoxical question. Where are all the cat dogs? This is a never ending game because we don't agree on the language. This is exactly the realm of metaphysics."
It's the realm of semantics (ie. definitions), but I'm not convinced that every metaphysical question could be reduced to a semantic one.
If you take the question of whether one has some sort of existence (like, say, as a "soul") before birth, I think that question would still exist even after we'd agreed on the constituent definitions. Also, I don't see anything paradoxical in that question. Even were it paradoxical, its paradoxical quality would in no way disqualify it for me. Perhaps I'd be even more interested in examining it, as examining paradoxes has been a very fruitful approach throughout human history.
"To me greatness could be quantified by how much progress has been made in answering the question. After a thousand years and possibly millions of lives wasted trying to answer "is there existence before this life?" we are not one single iota closer to an answer."
There have been answers, they just haven't satisfied everyone. The same could be said of pretty much every other great question, no matter whether the answers come from science, religion, philosophy, intuition, or elsewhere.
> If you're asking if there exists something that's 100% X at the same time as being 100% not-X, I'm not sure there's much to debate about it, as there clearly isn't (at least not in this world, where things can't seem to be themselves and not themselves at the same time).
You found the loophole! Sad to see you abandoned so swiftly your own logic when the time came to evaluate your own statement. This is exactly why the metaphysical deals in the realm of ambiguity: once you define it in a clear and concise manner all the mystery disappears, and that to some, is no fun.
That is also why a question like “is there life after death?” is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death.
"a question like "is there life after death?" is uninteresting: by definition life comes before death."
You're not being charitable to the questioner by interpreting it as a paradox.
Clearly, what most people intend to ask by that question is whether one can exist in some form (as a "spirit" or as "soul", or maybe come out of the VR that is the world, or in heaven even in a body like the present one or a more perfect one, or in hell, or maybe reincarnated in as another lifeform, etc) after your physical body stops functioning. There is no paradox in that.
Not so clear, because you see, that is another question. This is why we need to define things very explicitly and then accept the implications of those definitions or we’ll never get anywhere.
Now that you accepted that there is a paradox in the original question (“is there life after death?”) you reformulated it in a way the paradox is no longer present and your meaning is less ambiguous:
“Is there something not physical that continues to exists even after the physical body no longer does?”
And that is a very interesting question, but first we have to acknowledge that it is a different question and because you asked it in a non paradoxical way it opens up avenues for exploration unavailable to the original question. I would personally start simply by asking “is there something not physical, ie. a soul, “in” a being?” That is in itself is own can of worms because even if there are “souls” they might “die” when the body does so it is not as clear cut as one might initially think, but at least is a start. I’m sure there are other approaches, but at least we should all agree: it is a different question.
My point is only unparadoxical questions can have a shot at being answered. Most of the “great questions” are paradoxes; “what came before the beginning?” sounds very profound but it will never lead anywhere, as centuries pondering it have already proven.
Then you could argue that question P (and all "metaphysical" questions) amounts to or really has the structure of something like question Q, and that it's therefore paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting because the answer is obviously "no" ("by definition", as you point out).
I would disagree for the following reasons:
First, if you interrogate people who ask question P what they mean by it, you're likely to find out that they're not asking anything like question Q, but rather something like the following question:
R: "Can one continue to exist in some form after your physical body stops functioning?"
Now, it's true that question P and R are different on the surface, but when most people ask P what they mean by that question is R. So underneath the surface, at the meaning level, they intend to ask R. Question R is not paradoxical, trivial, or uninteresting, and it has no obvious answer that could be arrived at "by definition".
Second, I believe even trivial-seeming questions and paradoxes are frequently much deeper and more interesting than they appear. Careful study and analysis of them could yield profound insights and areas of future research. Witness all the progress in logic from studying paradoxes and other "trivial" corner cases (like the Liar's Paradox[1], Russell's Paradox[2], etc). From such study you get things like Paraconsistent logics[3] and dialetheism,[4] which can fruitfully deal with contradictions.
Third, even things that are "true by definition" can be useful and interesting. Wittgenstein argued that all logical truths are tautologies. Well, if so, they're still worthy of study and have proven to be interesting and useful.
Finally, I am not convinced that all, most, or even many "metaphysical" questions can be charitably reduced to paradoxes, nor that they are trivially answerable "by definition".
It seems to me you are more interested in the question than in the answer. You agree with me, and then spend two paragraphs justifying why you don't want to agree with me because somehow asking the wrong question still has value. It may have historical value, poetical value, emotional value, and that of course is valuable. But as to the question itself, when everyone means something else either the question is malformed or the language is useless.
And it is not so obvious what they actually mean as everyone interprets it in a different way. Some people mean still existing in this "plane", some in some other reality, some mean to be reborn, some mean to trascend, some to reincarnate, some a mix of two, or of all.
If we keep pretending the question is right when it obviously lacks meaning and all the information necessary to be able to answer it we are never gonna find out.
But again, that is what some people want, for some things to always remain a mystery, so they ask paradoxical questions.
I'm not quite sure if it works for blue and red or only certain color combinations, but it's possible to create images where an item in the scene is obviously one color, yet the light hitting the eye is another color. The brain automatically adjusts for "that's what a red object would look like in that environment," when the light coming from the photograph is actually blue.
In that way you can have a picture that's "blue red" due to perspective rather than semantics. E.g. the car in the picture is really red and the color of the ink depicting it is really blue. The red is blue.
That is interesting, but it is also an answer to a different question. The question is "are there any blue reds?" not "can we see in some circumstances reds as blue?".
Not true, what we call the color red is an electromagnetic wave with a wavelength between, according to wikipedia, 625 and 740 nanometers.
And if you are looking at a picture on a computer, the computer will call red a pixel with an rgb value of (255, 0, 0) even if nobody is looking at it.
The light coming from the car in that image would be concentrated around 450-500 nm, not 625-740 nm. Viewed in isolation, that's blue, but in the context of the rest of the image, it is red. The "redness" of the car exists only in the brain of the viewer, which has evolved to produce stablility of color in a variety of lighting conditions.
That's also why RGB monitors display more than three distinct colors. The colors are synthesized in the brain. If we were orbiting a brown dwarf, we might talk about colors within the infrared part of the spectrum as if they were intrinsic properties of light.
i would add morality to this -- at least problems in physics have a scientific framework within which they can be investigated. but why should we care? why should we be nice? of course there is plenty of rich philosophy on the subjcet
Also, what exactly is it that we mean by "free will"? Even just that question can get ugly, fast. I think I've only ever heard one definition of the concept sufficiently precise to even have a meaningful answer.
(In short, it was this: If we our model of the material universe is essentially correct, and if we assume that it is closed and that the material that we see is all there is, or at least all that can ever influence us, then suppose we define free will as the inability of any real external predictor to ever perfectly predict our actions in advance. I emphasize the word real to highlight that we are emphatically not talking about some abstract god, or something vaguely sitting outside of time, but the ability of a real device constructed out of real materials in real spacetime to predict your actions. We assumed away hypothetical infinite beings or math games at the beginning. In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!). By this definition, it can be concretely answered: Yes, you have free will. Interestingly, this turns out to be true even if the universe is 100% deterministic, which definitely conflicts with most people's ideas about "free will"... but then, there's another demonstration of how rare it is for anyone to carefully define it before endlessly pontificating about it.
Also, while I consider this a valuable contribution to the field that any interested philosopher should ruminate on, I am not claiming that I 100% believe it, nor that it "solves" the problem. It is simply as I said at the beginning, the only sufficiently careful treatment of the problem that one can actually say it has an answer. Personally I find the presuppositions it is based on to be highly questionable. But it is at least worth pondering for a bit.)
> In that case, it can be mathematically shown that you are simply too complicated to be fully correctly simulated by any system that attempts to build a model of your actions simply by external observation of you; you do not produce enough bits in your external actions to uniquely identify the state space of the inside of your head, not even if you turn the entire rest of the universe to the task (literally!).
Really? Which mathematical result is this?
Do scanning techniques such as fMRI and EEG count as external?
# I guess you could put ["YAML"] if you need it as an array and not a string
no.body.wants.to.write=YAML
Easy to type, is on a single line, only breaks once you're so many layers deep that you need to scroll horizontally - but let's be real - if that happens the config isn't the problem but why is your program so complex? is the problem.
Drawbacks of this are when the program is inconsistent. Was it `nobody.wants.to.write` or `no.body.wants.to.write`? Or alternatively, why is it `nobody.wants.to.read` but `no.body.wants.to.write`?
It's a bit of a strawman, since none of your examples actually resemble valid config files and you're forcing them all to have the same indentation, when significant whitespace only matters in YAML.
none of your examples actually resemble valid config files
Neither does the YAML one? So?
you’re forcing them all to have the same indentation
I don’t know about you, but I always pretty-print JSON, just like I always indent my code no matter which language I’m using.
In fact that’s one of the arguments in favour of significant whitespace -- you’re going to be indenting anyway, so why bother with the brackets? It’s not an argument everyone buys, but everyone still indents their code.
> > you’re going to be indenting anyway, so why bother with the brackets?
> Because brackets are explicit. Whitespace is implicit and difficult to distinguish without editor support.
I'm with parent on this one. Most people who complain about python's reliance on indentation still indent their code, and rely on the visual & editor hints (ie. they're profoundly confused when they muck up their indentation, but their brackets are still correct).
But I digress.
Whitespace is explicit in some (markup) languages, and there's nothing *plicitly wrong with that. If you're trying to do any kind of editing of a (markup) language that relies on sensible indentation with an editor that doesn't understand whitespace then you've probably got bigger problems.
> Whitespace is explicit in some (markup) languages, and there's nothing plicitly wrong with that.*
Whitespace is never explicit. It only exists as the gap between other characters. You only perceive its absence.
> If you're trying to do any kind of editing of a (markup) language that relies on sensible indentation with an editor that doesn't understand whitespace then you've probably got bigger problems.
Which is why they should not be used for configuration files.
More seriously, the earlier comment complained that the indentation for the non-significant-whitespace examples was artificial. I’m saying it’s not artificial because in practice you would indent it.
That, not too mention how often do you actually write data files by hand? Maybe a small sample file for testing, but beyond that all data is going to be read in from files or come from an API.
JSON is not bad to write by hand. Simple XML isn't too bad either, but I still prefer JSON.
JSON doesn't have comments. If I want to know why a config has a particular value, I can write a comment to explain it in YAML or xml, just like I would do in code. Lack of comments is the primary reason I would not use json for anything that needs to be written or read by humans.
> Usually oppressing a major marginalized group with blunt, heavy-handed approaches only serves to intensify local support.
I think that is at best fragile as a general statement. I would argue that increases in local support are dependent on other factors besides heavy-handedness or harshness, and that these vary on a case by case basis. For a plethora of counter-examples see:
The history of the Jewish people, Native Americans during colonialism, the anabaptists or the calvinists in European history, the Muslim populations after the conquest of Granada.
I'm amazed at how much this person's philosophy for learning mirrors my own. Even down to the details, building habits, pushing yourself to the edge always, deep focused flow based work.
What I would add is you should feel a little bit of stress from the difficulty of the task. As an example, recently, I did research and in an unknown field both for the first time. I was a little tense, it forced me to focus every minute. If I didn't know what a formula or term meant in a paper I had to figure it out, because I had to be able to evaluate and possibly implement it.
I had to look at papers and evaluate them on their quality b/c I was using those to mold my own. I made many,many mistakes and failed hard many times. It was often very unpleasant (like running when you're fit but still not quite getting enough air on the last leg). But I kept pushing through. At the end, I learned more on this project than I had in a very long time.
Anyways, hope my experience can help someone else to push through and see the light on their project.
yeah, it's not really that special, I suspect a lot of people share this knowledge from innate sources. I always looked up derivations in Discrete Mathematics(again, innately as my primary-mode of understanding) and to this day... Anyways, not very special at all.. I bet you too love office hours to discuss the professor's dissertations and enjoy long distance running too?
That was my impression as well after doing some research in this area a while back. Although I looked specifically at longevity and cardiovascular studies there was a peak benefit at about 2hrs per week after which virtually no more benefits were observed.