21,390 karma · joined September 22, 2017
I am willing to accept some inconvenience in order to be aligned with my goals, which I am learning puts me very much at odds with the average person.
The first few times you mindlessly look at your phone after doing something like that are a real eye opener. You pull it out, unlock it, and stare at a screen full of nothing and ask yourself why you took it out in the first place.
My mood has improved significantly, and I find I suddenly have time for all those things I've wanted to get done but "haven't had the time for". Without a mindless dopamine trickle to default to I am forced to engage in actually meaningful and satisfying activity most of the time to alleviate boredom.
Do not kid yourself that the behaviors these things induce aren't intended. Marketers don't care about your quality of life, or the health of society itself, they just want your money and they will manipulate you into doom scrolling a bunch of barely interesting bullshit in order to shove ads down your throat without a second thought.
There is anecdotal evidence that eating less is, in itself, so much more healthy that it doesn't really matter what you eat. Nutrition professor Mark Haub ate nothing but "convenience store food" for 10 weeks at a caloric deficit and all of his health metrics improved while he lost 27lbs.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
I had to reconfigure my entire life around it. I kept barely enough food in the house to meet my calorie target for the week. I once fell asleep while driving home from work and ran off the road because my blood sugar was so low. I spent 9 hours a week doing intense exercise and pretty much any time I wasn't doing that or working I was just sleeping. I basically had to have no social life, because socialization around here pretty much mandates large quantities of food.
Is something physically wrong with me? Probably, but good luck getting an American doctor to give a flying fuck. My thyroid stopped working when I was a child and it went undiagnosed for two years because doctors just keep telling my mother I was lazy. Ultimately a toll booth attendant diagnosed it because her dog had similar symptoms and my mother had to go full Karen to get the simple blood test to happen. American physicians are fucking useless.
Even treated, to this day I have to eat well under the caloric requirement that I "should" be eating and constantly feel like shit in order to lose weight, which makes me perform worse at work and apparently require 3-4 hours extra sleep every day.
I can guarantee you "willpower" people aren't doing that. Your body isn't fucked up and constantly demanding more calories than you need, so it comes easy to you and you probably just take any excuse to feel like you are better than other people.
The hilarious thing is that if we remove the context from this statement it applies so broadly that you could mean just about of our systems.
Having absurd systems is pretty much our defining characteristic.
And they are all asking the same question. Will they accept an answer like "because you're only a 7 minute commute from my house", "I think the work will be easy in relation to the salary", or "I think I can get away with barely doing anything for an indefinitely long time period because your org is large and dysfunctional"?
You ask for a performance, you get a performance. Or maybe you're just asking for a rube?
And we wonder why society is so fucked up.
Internet? I think you mean everything. The whole everything is bloated with ads right now. Look around you, I bet you can see at least a dozen brand names without even leaving your chair.
People who work in marketing and ads should quit their jobs if they care at all about society, but of course they don't or they wouldn't be in marketing and advertising. Alternatively, we should just stop putting up with their bullshit because they have a long history of abusing every inch they are given.
When you're not actually well versed in a domain, all sorts of completely simple, elegant, compelling, and utterly wrong ideas make sense. I couldn't find any fault with The Many Directions of Time, but that doesn't mean it is a good model of cosmology[0], it's just the result of me not really understanding the domain sufficiently. It is completely rational to doubt my judgement under these circumstances.
Therefore, knowing that I lack the ability to judge the work's validity, I employ a heuristic: do people who are qualified to judge it say it is valid? And the answer appears to be "they don't even consider it worth their time to look at", which I find to be particularly strong evidence that I shouldn't take it seriously either.
The alternative is employing my own flawed understanding to judge validity, which is of course going to produce garbage results.
As a proponent of this idea, you have asserted that you think it is valid, and despite not disagreeing with the assertion that you yourself are not a domain expert, continue to assert that because you understand it, it is valid. You are free to believe that all you wish, of course, but it isn't going to sway any of us. Especially when, heuristically, the things you're saying are a close match the language employed by conspiracy theorists, flat earthers, and the like.
If your goal is not to convince us... then what is the point of this discussion?
If your goal is to convince us, I'm telling you that you're doing a particularly unimpressive job of making your case by refusing to engage with the heuristic reasoning in any way, or even offering an alternative other than "watch the video and it will convince you". I will note that watching a video of a conman or magician can be pretty convincing too, so that's not exactly good evidence either.
If what you're trying to say is to trust in scientific method, then we still can't trust our own reasoning with the argument and need to rely on the objective analysis of others including testing of hypothesis... none of which has happened. If it had, I'm sure you'd have brought it up by now.
So, again, this all heuristically looks like bullshit. We have a supposed "one neat trick solves one of the most mysterious things in modern physics" that, unsurprisingly, "physicists don't want you to know about" or whatever, and the resident proponent of the concept refuses to do anything but point people at the source video they aren't qualified to objectively analyze, and said proponent refuses to explain why it all looks like bullshit even if it supposedly isn't.
Since we seem to be miscommunication to a significant degree, I will try and summarize this:
-Mayer has an idea that looks compelling to laymen
-The experts in cosmology have apparently not even bothered to engage with it
-While this does not mean Mayer is wrong, for those of us who are not experts in cosmology it certainly looks like we shouldn't take it seriously
-You're asking us to ignore that and pretend that our layperson judgement is somehow good enough
If I had a time machine and had to take a relatively naive crack at the problem, I'd make IPv6 really really simple: it'd just be IP-in-IP.
On the internet you're routed with an outer address, and the local router forwards it using the inner address. Speaking v6 over v4 is free because v4 routers ignore the inner packet. Speaking v4 over v6 just doesn't include the inner packet. Other local hosts are just contacted through v4.
It was years ago, and I only gleaned the high concept really, but it has been around for nearly two decades now (though mysteriously not mentioned at all by Mayer's site) and, you will note, makes some pretty big claims about the fundamental nature of the cosmos including the ones I mentioned.
> Bandwagon.
Hand waving. You say that others are not doing the work by looking at the video you posted yet insist on this dismissive justification for ignoring that the qualified professional physicists of the world don't seem to think Mayer has accomplished what he claims.
> Ad hominem.
Hand waving, and wrong. I'm not insulting you, I'm pointing out the facts: we are not qualified to give an informed appraisal of this material. Drawing conclusions about its validity because it makes sense to us is pretty much exactly the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Look at what you're saying: somehow this guy has explained galactic rotation curves with high school level physics while practically all other physicists over the last nearly a century clung to some obviously wrong idea instead? And your explanation for this is that they're all in a bandwagon? This is the same community that said high-temperature superconductors couldn't exist, and then someone proved them wrong and won the fastest nobel prize in history.
Please explain how that is even remotely a rational conclusion, because it sounds like the same level of discourse one gets from flat earth conspiracy theorists.
Frankly, the idea that you are arguing in good faith is becoming harder to believe.
It took a while, but I think I found the PDF of the book I was talking about [0].
> fundamentally you are making an ad hominem argument, effectively saying, "this guy is a crackpot, why should we listen to him?"
Kinda, not really. I'm saying that if my recollection is correct this guy has expressed wild ideas before that were also ignored by the physics community and therefore it is worth viewing his works with suspicion because we are not qualified to evaluate it, but people who are have apparently decided it wasn't worth much.
> It doesn't matter who he is. One must examine the assertions and findings detailed in his lecture, and only if flaws can be found there can his tidal theory explaining galaxy rotation curves be defeated.
Sure, admittedly. So, why aren't any physicists giving this idea the time of day?
As I was pretty clear about in my post, I do not consider myself (nor you) qualified to assess his work in anything more than an armchair manner. The fact that his ideas don't seem to be something other physicists take seriously is something of an indicator that maybe I shouldn't either.
> Mayer's explanation for galaxy rotation curves is simple, elegant, and compelling, and it is interesting that no one at HN wants to take it head on
Because we are not physicists, as I assume you aren't either. Go to a forum full of physicists if you want a real assessment of its worth. We, being not physicists ourselves, can only judge its merit by proxy and intuition. The latter of those is especially dubious and especially prone to liking simple, elegant, compelling, and utterly wrong ideas.
> but instead will employ the all too common hand wave and other fallacious arguments. Look at it. Figure out why it is wrong or don't.
Strong words for someone who's response to all of this is "watch the video and you'll understand". Hand wave indeed.
[0] entitled The Many Directions of Time: http://www.5ision.org/GTR/amayer_the-many-directions-of-time...
His work is attractive to laymen like myself, but any rational person has to wonder why, if his claims have any validity, he has been ignored completely by the wider physics community (which is to say, people who actually know shit, unlike most of us).
Your call to "watch the video and you'll never talk about galaxy rotation curves again" sounds a whole lot like similar statements made about such nonsense as "There are no forests on Earth", so if you honestly believe this guy should be taken seriously for some reason I would suggest a change in approach.
Your abstraction ignores all the sterile men and women too, by the way. That's because it is a particularly bad one.
I'm not convinced this is an innate property of humanity, rather I think it is a conditioned behavior to keep us buying things. Pay attention to what marketing tells you, what it really tells you, behind the ostensible message. It is not telling you good things about yourself or your life, and it is bombarding you constantly with these intrusive thoughts.
I certainly don't hold it up for any gatekeeping nonsense, and frankly I despise that anyone even uses the word "normies". What I like about this site's UI is that it places function over form and isn't built on a pile of trendy garbage and designed by people who never use it.