The best things and stuff of 2022
blog.fogus.me
blog.fogus.me
The author, an anthropologist, argues that the fads we see tech CEOs indulging in today (nootropics, intermittent fasting, weird diets) are similar to the practices used by shamans in hunter-gatherer societies to show how special they are, making them credible interfaces with the supernatural powers they claim to channel.
Nootropics coming from a combination of more readily available sources, community effort now that internet is available to share results and lack of scientific focus/studies + with I'm sure a healthy amount of marketing spend from nootropic manufacturers.
You can come to this belief through either actual discernment or entrepreneur personality disorder. Me, I at least agree that there's a health establishment that could be a lot better at settling on truth, and that discernment is a quality that varies.
Skimming the Wired piece, the closest to the above that I saw was:
> So are CEO-shamans putting on a show? People everywhere intuit that self-denial and other shamanic practices cultivate power. Being human, tech executives presumably draw the same inferences. At least part of their decision to engage in shamanic practices, then, might stem from a sincere desire to be special.
Basically, proposing an alternate theory and seeing if it fits the data.
And, it is reasonable to argue that *the motivation of the behavior is irrelevant* if said behavior also produces said effect.
That said I have to read the article ; )
IMO many of the CEOs who do this do it more for social reasons than anything else.
There are two distinct concepts here - your life span and your health span. Your life span is the duration of your life, and you health span is the duration in which you are able bodied.
Some of us want to have a health span closer to our life span - and that is the goal of these "creative" behaviors. If you want to increase life span you have to get lucky, or find a way to stop the entropic degradation of your DNA.
> If you just wanna live long the stress of being a CEO will surely outweigh any benefits your creative dietary expression will deliver.
This is just a strawman.
> IMO many of the CEOs who do this do it more for social reasons than anything else.
You'll find that applies to literally any behavior.
It is not. Our career choices influence our life span. If your coal mining chain smoking friend told you they stop to smoke because they wanna live longer, you would rightfully think that if they wanna live longer they might want to switch careers as well.
Don't let the prestige connected to the CEO position blind you from the fact that leading that livestyle is not the healthiest choice you can make (mostly for stress reasons).
So if you as an CEO try esotheric and experimental health things the benefit those bring might be at odds with the rest of your life choices.
Many people in these circles do things like these more to create an interesting spleen (what I called "social reasons") which they can talk about with other peers or which can bring them into talk publicly.
Our coal miner that quits smoking does not do it for social reasons. He might have coughed up black stuff. and got legitimately scared for his chance of survival.
And I don't say this kind of contradictory (and therefore somewhat inconsequential) behaviour is bad or anything. Surely also a stressed out CEO should also look out for their own health. Surely quitting to smoke is always a good thing independent of your personal circumstances.
But if you use health choices to signal something to others you better make it consistent. If our coal worker chain smoker vehemently tried to convince his friends to go vegan "because it is healthier" we are not wrong to point out to him that this is at odds with his other life choices. How can we trust him that he cares for health if all other choices he made tell us otherwise?
If instead our friend wants us to become vegan because he thinks it is ethically wrong to kill animals, this would not be at odds with his other choices. You can lead an unhealth livestyle and think it is wrong to kill animals at the same time. No contradiction there.
If our friend goes vegan and doesn't tell anyone he is not doing it for social reasons. If a CEO makes odd experimental health choices and doesn't tell anyone the same is true.
Breakfast was glorified in order to sell more cereal at the beginning of the industrial age, so perhaps what they call "intermittent fasting" is more like "returning to normal" in a society where everything is coated with dangerous amounts of sugar and salt. So I'd say take those anthropology generalizations with a grain of salt.
> "intermittent fasting" is more like "returning to normal"
Careful extrapolating what works for you to all of humanity. I agree that avoiding excess sugar is good, so I do really well with a light breakfast. That's not "abnormal" or a conspiracy by Big Cereal.
People seem to go crazy in healthy food discussions. I think one takeaway I get is that different people get by with different methods. People get very preachy about their own method, without realizing how unique it is to them.
I was merely trying to remind you that healthy people's food habits are varied. So that you remember it for yourself.
I'm not claiming to be right either. I've definitely been guilty of pushing my own stuff on others. We all do that. It's easy to do. So, humility is a good thing.
Anyways, he told me they didn't have a breakfast, but instead a big meal called dinner... apparently what we now call lunch. Then a midday snack, then a late supper that was lighter than dinner. As confusing as that was, he always called lunch dinner into the modern age.
They were much more active so didn't really get fat, so I agree sofar as to say the modern diet is likely too much. I may agree they helped push the 'breakfast' idea, but not people eating more often.
This is still a thing in parts of the UK (and possibly other places):
"The divide between different meanings of "dinner" is not cut-and-dried based on either geography or socioeconomic class. The term for the midday meal is most commonly used by working-class people, especially in the English Midlands, North of England and the central belt of Scotland."
We know that they don’t for the CEOs but the shamans?
If you like this sort of weird early 1900's mystic book, be sure to also check out David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Voyage_to_Arcturus).
Armed with Madness by Mary Butts
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser
The Stone Dragon by R. Murray Gilchrist
and so many more.
I read this more than 20 years ago, and it still comes to my mind frequently. It’s haunting. Keep trying to read it again.
EDIT: And to anyone else who might consider writing one, especially if it has a Books or long-form article list, do it!
I'm going to have to read that one and very carefully. The ZX81 may the single most unstable thing I've ever come across.
My resounding childhood recollection was that if someone sneezed in the next town the connection to the 16Kb RAM Pack (required to do anything) would shift and everything would be lost.
Even Sir Clive's suggestion of using a "small piece of Blu Tack" couldn't save it.
Edit: he briefly addresses RAM pack wobble in the video - "extra blue tack", haha.
This is not to rate or devalue the efforts of Fogus in publishing these lists.
A different way of saying the same thing: I wish the first time I saw these lists, it was prefixed by something like:
"The main value of these lists is not for the general public, but for myself. Don't be afraid to have your own favorite things of the last year. Build your own lists! Go crazy. Creating is complementary to consuming and both are necessary for growth. Be Happy!"
This is my interpretation, but I'm pretty confident in this conclusion. Prove me wrong in replies! Or agree with me! Both kinds of reactions should be fun to engage with :-).
Maybe you skipped that or misinterpreted it, but he's explicit about it being just a dump of stuff he likes. But the main benefit _is_ for an audience of some sort, maybe not the general public, but certainly more than himself.
Perhaps you are right, perhaps only now I understand this, and I did not really paid that much attention to the disclaimer at the top of the site, EVER, until now.
I still think the main benefit of a list like this is for its creator. The way I know is because, even if no lists like this existed, I have been building my own list of "best things" of ... forever!
We tend to do things yearly because of society, culture, etc etc... there's no reason we should have "end of year resolutions" or "best of last year". I think lists like these encourage breadth first search and distract us from the fact that curation should be a continuous process, not necessarily something we do at end of year.
Again, I'm not criticizing or attacking Fogus in any way. In fact, I will probably take a deeper look at this list soon! But I will also try to produce more and consume less. And I will do my own research!
One complaint I do have is that I didn't like Birth of Violence at all. Chelsea's other music sounds so much better to me. BoV was the same sounds from other albums re-hashed and it felt very bland.