Off-topic, but I was interested to read Carl's Twitter bio[0], "I’ve spent a lifetime switching my Special Interest every year or two. By now I’m surprisingly knowledgeable in a lot of fields— a skill now obsoleted by AI."
It's a text about non-duality, among other things. Like the Heart Sutra, or the Diamond Sutra, or 101 Zen Stories, it's not supposed to make sense in an ordinary way. A successful translation is, like the original, intended to catalyze a shift in awareness.
EDIT: For those with a nerdy or scholarly bent, I suggest Red Pine's translation[0], which includes translation of historically relevant commentaries.
Brad Marshall[0] makes a case for the benefits of stearic acid (C18:0), which is predominant in beef tallow and cocoa butter. It acts as a beneficial metabolic signal that promotes mitochondrial fat oxidation, higher energy expenditure, and leanness—counteracting the obesogenic effects of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs), especially linoleic acid.
We all know there has been a replication crisis across many different disciplines of science. I think that the set of things we actually know about nutrition and health is a lot smaller than the experts think.
However, the problem is that the public has also come to that conclusion. The public has gone on to decide "that means my incredibly weakly-evidenced idea is just as good as the expert opinions" which does not follow and is often disastrously wrong.
So I'm also sympathetic to the idea that the saturated fat picture is more complex than a blanket ban suggests. But I know better than to treat things like Brad's arguments as anything other than "interesting hypothesis" as opposed to "something we actually know about nutrition."
The public are presented with things that are weakly evidenced as scientifically proven. After all, the one study that says something is good or bad for you was published in a peer-reviewed journal and the university PR people blogged about it and the newspapers reported it uncritically.
A lot of experts are very bad at differing between different levels of evidence and probability: "my personal (if expert) opinion", "a consensus in the field" and "backed by reasonable evidence" and "proven" are very different but all often get presented the same way.
Experts are usually very good at differentiating between levels of evidence. The process of becoming an expert tends to thoroughly educate a person in just how little they actually know.
The problem is that a bunch of talk about weak studies and probabilities and personal thoughts is not what grabs attention. The few overconfident loudmouths end up being the ones everybody hears from. And you don't even need to be an expert, you just need to sound like one.
If you're a nutrition scientist who really knows their stuff and knows how to talk to people so that they understand just what is really known and how well it's known, how in the world do you compete with someone like RFK Jr.?
> Experts are usually very good at differentiating between levels of evidence. The process of becoming an expert tends to thoroughly educate a person in just how little they actually know.
They know, and are clear about it with their peers but many are very bad at communicating it to the public. There are also experts who are overly attached to their pet theories, or biased, and communicate those things to the public as fact.There are experts who are patronising enough patronising enough to think its not even worth trying to explain things properly to the public.
> The problem is that a bunch of talk about weak studies and probabilities and personal thoughts is not what grabs attention. The few overconfident loudmouths end up being the ones everybody hears from. And you don't even need to be an expert, you just need to sound like one.
All true, Which is why I blame the media as well.
> If you're a nutrition scientist who really knows their stuff and knows how to talk to people so that they understand just what is really known and how well it's known, how in the world do you compete with someone like RFK Jr.?
Good question! The only real solution is better science education, and to keep on plugging away.The most harmful thing is the common perception that experts hand down the truth, rather than understanding the nature of scientific evidence.
>but it seems like a really good high flash point oil.
On what basis? Using the list of smoke point table someone else linked[1], tallow does indeed have a high smoke point, but it's unclear how it's better than many other oils in that list (peanut, sunflower, soybean) which are far easier to procure.
Most people do not live near "beef operations". Moreover processing tallow is part of procurement. If you value your time at the prevailing minimum wage, it's pretty hard to beat a gallon of vegetable oil for $10.
The entire concept of "lived experience" is, bluntly - absolute bullshit. You take all the worst aspects of both conscious and unconscious biases as well as anecdotal 'evidence', and wrap it up in the fact that the average person is simply not capable of objectively analyzing themselves[0], and you end up with people saying that demonstrably false things are true simply because that's how they [incorrectly] interpreted their "lived experience," or how their "lived experience" supports their decisions. This last part is particularly true with politics and nutrition, where people make decisions not based on objective data but based mostly on how they were raised and what they like.
I can spend decades eating junk food and lose weight as long as I work out long enough and hard enough. My "lived experience" tells me that junk food is fine simply because it hasn't killed me yet.
[0] 80-90% of people describe themselves as an "above-average" driver.
> [0] 80-90% of people describe themselves as an "above-average" driver.
What shape is the distribution of driving ability? It seems entirely plausible that most drivers are decent and a smaller population are bad enough to pull the mean down well below the median.
Taking one fatty acid out of a complex fat like tallow and therefore extrapolating that "tallow is good for you and everyone" is a huge mistake.
Does Brad Marshall mention that Palmitic acid is the dominant fatty acid in tallow? And since Palmitic acid is the most abundant SFA in the U.S. diet, can we draw a conclusion that it may partially play a role in poor health outcomes?
PUFA suppress lipogenic gene expression so I do not know where anyone is getting that polyunsaturated fats have and obesogenic effect. [1]
Fallacy of composition. It does not logically follow that given Palmitic acid is the most abundant SFA in the US diet (objectively true), and given the US diet directly leads to poor health outcomes (very likely but not proven at least not to the level of the prior claim), that Palmitic acid contributes to poor health outcomes. It's entirely possible Palmitic acid is great for you and if we had less we'd be doing even worse. The statements are simply not connected at all.
I was replying to someone who was suing the fallacy of composition.
But if you really want to talk about fallacies, why is no one talking about how genetics can determine who these fatty acids are good and bad for? making blanket recommendation for a specific food without knowing someones genetics and heritage is foolish. But do a search for nutritional genetics on HN....nothing.
> > Does Brad Marshall mention that Palmitic acid is the dominant fatty acid in tallow? And since Palmitic acid is the most abundant SFA in the U.S. diet, can we draw a conclusion that it may partially play a role in poor health outcomes?
I don't know the answer to question #1 but the answer to question #2 is "no, we cannot draw that conclusion" because of the fallacy of composition.
I was a grad student in Dave Akin's lab from 1994-2003. Like many labs, we had a journal club. Once a week (Wednesday, I think) somebody would give a presentation over lunch on a paper they'd read. We would get takeout Chinese and eat while discussing the paper.
On this particular Wednesday the presentation was on a failed spacecraft program. It's been a long time, but I think it was probably this paper:
which is the initial failure analysis of the Mars Climate Orbiter (1999), which famously crashed into Mars during its orbital insertion burn because JPL specifications were in metric, but Lockheed wrote code in imperial units, and as a result there was a failure to properly convert between newtons and pounds. One fact of note was that the the team responsible for spacecraft navigation had already observed anomalous trajectory data but their reports were ignored because they didn't follow program guidelines for filling out the paperwork to document the observations, so the insertion burn went ahead heedless of what the spacecraft's behavior was trying to tell them.
Ultimately, the loss of mission was a result of unclear responsibility for ownership of the orbital maneuvering software, including the mission requirements that traced to the software, the development of the software derived from those requirements, tests to validate the software, and reports from users of the software that it was behaving unexpectedly.
I was trying to be funny, and turned the statement around from "clear lines of responsibility" to "clear lines of blame".
I think he's saying that he (GlenTheMachine) is Glen Henshaw, "space roboticist", and (understandably) was a bit excited that a somewhat famous document contains a "law" bearing his name as attribution was posted by this water cooler. A way to get some minor attention for it in a comment thread full of like-minded users, and probably offer a genuine (and also maybe coy/tongue-in-cheek) offer to answer questions about that specific line item law.
I like that he waved from the crowd in this way, if only for the "huh. Small world" moment I had reading his comment.
Kenneth Mejia, our progressive, data-driven controller audited LAPD helicopter use, and published his findings.
"The ASD program costs nearly $50 million annually while most of the flight time is not devoted to high priority events. Our audit found that the estimated annual cost to operate the helicopter program is $46.6 million (i.e., $127,805 per day or $2,916 per flight hour). There are 14 City departments whose annual budgets do not reach this amount;"
> Like dosing on ketamine then getting up on stage and making Nazi salutes.
It's much more likely to be the Adderall.
"One reason that narcissists so commonly abuse drugs and alcohol is because the substances amplify their feelings of grandiosity and invulnerability. More so, narcissists often get stuck in the cycle of drug abuse because drugs readily cause the brain to deny there is a problem." https://illinoisrecoverycenter.com/narcissism-and-addiction/
Impulsivity mediates the association between narcissism and substance-related problems beyond the degree of substance use: a longitudinal observational study "A grandiose self-enhancement strategy should be reflected in motives of self-enhancement, such as increasing confidence through substance use."
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...
Personality Disorders, Narcotics, and Stimulants; Relationship in Iranian Male Substance Dependents Population "correlation between stimulant use and histrionic personality disorder (P < 0.001) and antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders (P < 0.05)"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4553170/
> you take that at sunset and let it reinforce your normal cycle
Yes, the way Michael Grandner explains it in this podcast[0], melatonin is an ancient molecule that signals, "it is dark." If you give it to nocturnal species, it wakes them up!
This is an interesting detail I had not heard. Can you link to a backstory on this? Why would such a contract ever be signed (especially for a technological product)?
Basically they were looking for an edge against Airbus and a really big one was being able to promise that pilots wouldn’t need a separate certification from the existing 737, which is where that MCAS software came in trying to make the new hardware behave like the existing planes. The allegations about Southwest in particular got the most attention in this lawsuit:
What are you trying to say with this, that you disagree, or that it's an intelligent perspective afforded to those who are not hopeless? I don't see how anyone can disagree that the aggregate actions of your parents, your locality, your culture, your nation, play the largest role in the cards you are dealt from the beginning.
I think the point is that this only works in the aggregate. Individuals in a group/organization/society can make small positive decisions that improve the likelihood that any individual in that same group will get "lucky".
There's a sort of "freeloader" problem, though, which is that the ones who get "lucky" don't themselves have to be making positive choices. In fact, being a selfish individual in a group of generous ones can be an easy way to get ahead - as long as you can get away with it without being noticed or punished.
I read it as in alignment with the previous definition of luck; meaning that a number of previous conscious decisions have created a world where they could come to this understanding of luck
That hits a bit close to home!
[0] https://x.com/carl_feynman/
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