Surprised he didnt mention anything about alcohol.
Productivity
171–180 of 428 posts
Re: Productivity
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
This will one day be as obvious as cigarettes cause cancer is. Prolonged fasting (consuming only water for 10 to 40 days) is a highly effective treatment for many diseases, including Crohn's, most other IBS related, diabetes, MS, and many more. At some point in the future we will consider pharma companies, government agencies and other entities hiding this fact to be criminal. Edit: my personal hope is that water fas…
Do you partake in any sort of sports? As someone who is avidly into strength training, I can't imagine the damage that does to gaining and maintaining muscle mass, and sabotaging your ability to push hard and perform well in the gym.
As with so many things in health and nutrition, there is a lot of contradictory advice out there. I can't tell you which one is right, but I have heard many people say never skip protein, because you need it every 2 hours, and others say:
https://www.bodybuilding.com/content/intermittent-fasting-ev...
Re: Productivity
#173Hey Sam! Regarding sleeping, I've had really bad sleep problems since I was a kid, to the point where I pulled all nighters a couple times a month just because I knew I wasn't going to get to sleep that night. I fixed all of my sleep problems over time by taking a low dose of melatonin (1g, low doses are more effective than high doses) and wearing orange glasses at night to block out blue light. It took a while for m…
Do you mean 1mg? I find that 250 micrograms is the right melatonin dose for me so I figure you must mean 1mg not 1 gram..
Re: Productivity
#174Surprised he didnt mention anything about alcohol.
When he said not eating and not drinking helps you sleep, I thought he meant not drinking alcohol.
Re: Productivity
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's really only two things you need to do in order to be really good at basically anything: 1. Care a lot. 2. Work on continuously improving your skills. That's pretty much it. Yes, there is such a thing as natural ability, but outside of the true outliers, natural ability is a pretty small factor compared to caring a lot and continuous improvement. And, even if you're an outlier in terms of natural ability, cari…
What if you have an IQ of say 90 and want to be really good at theoretical physics? I don't see caring a lot and working continously as enough to overcome IQ here.
IQ can be changed, if you work hard enough:
http://www.businessinsider.com/actually-you-can-change-your-...
This is true especially in your teenage years. It could change by more than 20 points. Can someone with high motivation and with an IQ of 110 make useful contributions to theoretical physics? I fail to see why not.
IQ is determined by a test that's ultimately measuring skills. And skills can be learned. Even if the intent of the test is to measure some sort of innate, unchanging capacity.
Re: Productivity
#176Instead of being wowed by Sam Altman's title (president of Y-Combinator), you should look through his previous posts to gauge whether his advices are worthy. some gems from before: On China: "The other stark contrast is how much harder people in China seem to work than people here, and how working hard is considered a good thing, not a bad thing." http://blog.samaltman.com/china On Speech "Earlier this year, I notice…
Isn't it possible to be proficient or even prophetic at a thing while being not so good at another? I agree those comparisons to China border on wacky while I feel he is right on target about the fundamental, critical, beating-heart importance of free speech in all things. Maybe he also has valuable thoughts to share on productivity. Or maybe not!
How then should an employee act under a strongly anti-semitic or anti-asian or homophobic boss? Should they just endure it because quitting or complaining is censorship? Is driving people out by bigotry acceptable but firing the bigots who drive employees away is not?
If bigotry is allowed in the workplace, why not nudity: isn't that free expression too?
Re: Productivity
#177I really like that its so easy for successful and productive people to share their thoughts on what got them where they are and their advice on how others can get there too. The part of the essay I liked the most was perhaps his comment about having strong convictions on things. This is incredibly important. To get to a level of knowledge on anything to get that conviction though, requires a lot of deliberate reading…
Just curious, is your life better for having spent that time learning more about politics? What prompted you to get started? Asking as somebody that doesn't care much about politics but not averse to the idea of making an effort to understand it if the benefits>cost.
Certainly I'm biased since I put in that effort into learning more about these things. I'm an introvert and certainly didn't care much for politics in general. For better or for worse, I do live in a society and am dependent on it for sustenance though and that is what prompted me to delve into politics.
From my understanding, it seems like its much easier for charlatans and snake-oil salesman to cast themselves as able politicians and that is a bad thing. To debate them, or the ideas they promote, in a reasonable way does require some understanding of the underlying factors and reasons for why things are as they are. e.g. initially I was very anti-welfare state. But after learning more about the systemic reasons for poverty, the discrimination against minorities etc. this has greatly softened my views about these things. Which is important because.... its hard to be sympathetic to e.g. homeless people when the only interaction you have with them is usually negative (I've often been heckled by them, even followed, which is rather scary) until you realize how many of them suffer from mental illnesses that they don't really get treatment for.
Essentially, I think its beneficial if you want to truly understand the society you live in and its problems. Politics is all about allocating societies resources towards common benefits by enacting policies and such. But you can only be effective if you understand what problems your society is really facing, and try scientific approaches to solve those problems.
So in conclusion, I think it has been largely beneficial. I do hope more people get involved in politics instead of dismissing it as a useless effort: it does seem very often to consist more of rhetoric rather than actual productive work which we engineers prefer. But that's how our society seems to work.
Re: Productivity
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting about the espresso. Does a cappuccino with ~4oz of whole milk count as interrupting the fasting then? What about a macchiato?
Depends but usually the short answer is yes. The insulin response is what is going to take you out of a fasting state. Milk contains a fair bit of sugar (lactose)
What about amino acids?
Re: Productivity
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's really only two things you need to do in order to be really good at basically anything: 1. Care a lot. 2. Work on continuously improving your skills. That's pretty much it. Yes, there is such a thing as natural ability, but outside of the true outliers, natural ability is a pretty small factor compared to caring a lot and continuous improvement. And, even if you're an outlier in terms of natural ability, cari…
What if you have an IQ of say 90 and want to be really good at theoretical physics? I don't see caring a lot and working continously as enough to overcome IQ here.
IQ can be raised by a full standard deviation with a few months of training [1]. IQ is only stable over time because most people don't work continuously to improve it. IQ can be learned, just like everything else.
[1] Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160801...
Re: Productivity
#180I agree that productivity is key, then you don't have to "overwork"! I can accomplish something in about 3-4 hours in an 8 hour work day, of what used to take me the whole day when working 12+ hours. That, to me, is productivity.
Exactly. Productivity is the opposite of working hard. You can't work smart and work hard, you have to choose one.