ajscherer

I am arguing that they were responding to the public's demand for cheap, tasty, convenient food driven by... people liking cheap, tasty, convenient things. The "bad science" didn't do much harm because the science didn't have much influence over what people ate anyway.

Given what I've quoted you saying above, and the fact that you don't have to scroll down very far to hear the suggestion of lowering one's fat intake called "the greatest scientific fuck up of all time", I don't think I'm arguing against a claim that isn't being made.

The research I have seen indicates that high carbohydrate intake (particularly sugars) is more likely to make someone obese than high fat intake. The research I have seen in no way indicates that the reason people select high sugar foods is because those foods are believed to be healthy by virtue of their low fat content.

No doubt companies use "low fat" as a marketing tool. The same can be said of "low carb", "low sodium", "sugar free", "all natural" and any number of other phrases that sound healthy. I don't think this is a significant factor in the obesity epidemic. People aren't choosing Snackwells in preference to a handful of walnuts (to they extent that they are choosing Snackwells; I've never seen anyone purchase them). People are choosing Snackwells in preference to Chips Ahoy.

I think this idea that the dietary advice of 20-30 years ago (low fat) is the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the result of a desire for a dramatically satisfying narrative (Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.).

Ponder this: the Atkins / Low-carb craze started over 10 years ago. All the advice I see in online fitness forums acknowledges the value of high-protien low-carb eating. "Low-carb" is becoming a ubiquitous phrase on food packaging. Yet the obesity epidemic continues unchecked. To me this indicates that the people who choose foods based on macronutrients are choosing low-carb, but that most people are not involving macronutrients in their food decisions.

If everyone around you is behaving in varied ways with respect to food, you may be more likely to make decisions based on price, convenience, or the "food buzz" you get from eating something. It may also be that buying everything based on price and convenience is itself a cultural norm in the U.S.

It might be economic factors as well. If the U.S. is the world leader in corn production and industrial-scale agriculture, the market for food products in the U.S. might just be very different from what exists in Europe.

Finally there is the possibility that the U.S is not alone in the obesity epidemic, merely ahead. I'm not totally sold on that, but it's a possibility.

My view of what has happened is this: technologies and ingredients were invented by food manufacturers over the past half century. Foods manufactured using these technologies have the following advantages: cheap, high mouth appeal, non-perishable, convenient. They also have the following disadvantages: calorie dense, difficult to metabolize, addictive for some people.

For most peopele not explicitly making food decisions with a mind to control their weight, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

At the same time as this was happening, most of the reasons for people to expend calories vanished. As far as I can think of, the only reasons left to burn calories are pleasure and weight control.

In this sort of context most normal, perfectly rational people will end up getting fat. The only people who won't are: athletes, people with strong metabolism (this usually goes away with age), and people who dedicate themselves to not being fat.

The second part of their finding is more interesting to me, although I'm still trying to fully understand it. I think they are suggesting that innate heritable intelligence isn't as predictive of life outcomes as previously thought because part of what was being measured was motivation to do well on IQ tests.

In other words, two people could be born with the same innate intelligence, but one of the two could be more motivated and do better in both IQ tests and life outcomes. Previously people would've attributed the difference in life outcomes to a difference in innate intelligence. It still seems like IQ would be an interesting number to look at, but it isn't quite measuring what people believed it was measuring.

Life expectency is now 67 years. I'll take the extra 40 years and deal with the lack of "essential" amino acids.

Of course the real problem with this essay is the nonsensical premise. Agriculture can't be a mistake because it wasn't a decision. There may have been some individual people who decided to switch from hunting to agriculture, but there was no species-wide vote. There is no reason to imagine that there could've been such a vote, or that today there could be a decision for humanity to switch back.

Of course individual people can decide to embrace the hunter gatherer life. I find it interesting that the author is reaching for pen & paper and not loin cloth & spear.

In my experience pundits spend the majority of their time explaining their agreement or disagreement with the arguments of other pundits, so it seems odd to define that as second-order punditry.

The author of the OP probably included some overdramatic language, but I thought the meat of the post was about why he disagreed with Gruber on a specific point. That may not be interesting to you, but I don't think it is categorically a waste of time either.

On the other hand, maybe it's okay that people don't really understand what math is (as mathematicians understand it). I don't see any evidence that society is falling apart due to lack of appreciation for pure math.

Why? That certainly isn't the type of response that would cut it in mathematics, since it is just an assertion without even a hand-wave to support it.

Also, I'm not sure you really understand her argument. Her point isn't that we should to make math classes easier so that people feel good about math; her point is that students might be more interested in math class if it contained some mathematics.

The primary aim of math class up through calculus is to teach kids to perform the calculations needed to do physics, which is needed to do engineering, which is generally perceived (correctly I think) to be greatly beneficial to society. This is fine, but there is a huge chasm between this and the types of things that actual mathematicians study. (My brother once commented that if people had any idea what was actually going on in the math department, there is no way in hell they'd fund it).

The best counter to Vi's point, I think, is "why would we want to make kids appreciate pure math?" It's really fun and really interesting, and personally I would love for more people to get to experience math, but I'm sure the same could be said of classical music, or poetry, or knitting or pretty much anything else that people find stimulating. There may be some benefit to it, but I don't think that benefit has been quantified.

btw... sitting down and memorizing vocabulary is an awful way to go about learning a language. Communicating in a langauge every day, reading a ton and trying to think in that language are much more effective.

I'm not sure why people think there is any particularly high amount of noise to break through in the app store. If you write a book and get your local bookstore to carry it, there is almost no chance you are going to sell a lot of copies just by putting it on the shelf. The same would apply to records or PC software if people actually bought either of those.

If you don't have people coming to the app store specifically to buy your app, you aren't going to sell very many copies. That isn't a grim reality of the app store, it's a grim reality of selling anything anywhere.

It seems pretty unlikely that two screens on a tablet would be viable in terms of power and cost, but I can totally see it being a superior experience.

That said, the treadmill can be a fine tool for training. It allows you to totally ignore weather conditions, and actually for speed workouts it can have the advantage of forcing you to stay on pace. A common rule of thumb is that a 1% incline on the treadmill compensates for the lack of wind resistance.

I can't stand the damn things myself, but there are runners, including some guys I know personally, who train exclusively using the treadmill and still do well in races up to marathon distance (I've never heard of any ultramarathoners who train exclusively on the treadmill).

In my estimation "unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing" needs to be said once for every time unauthorized copying is referred to as stealing, plus one or two additional times for good measure.

Your argument seems to be akin to "History shows that every tyrant who ever existed has died." Yes but if one or more new tyrants has been born for every one that died, what consolation is it? Different corporate overlords isn't the same as no corporate overlords.

You must have a mind that can be blown by a light breeze.

Dollars to donuts the situation the author is describing has never actually happened to him.

"Evolution operates predictably" do we know this because scientists have a track record of reliably predicting evolutionary outcomes, or do we think this because evolution seems like it should've been predictable standing in 2011 looking back? Don't a lot of unpredictable things look predictable in hindsight?

Furthermore, I can't think of any practical benefit of having done this study. If aliens don't exist, the study was a waste of time. If aliens exist and intend to kill us, we are probably fucked anyway and hence the study was a waste of time. If aliens exist and are nice, the study was wrong and thus a waste of time.

Anyway, as far as I can tell resturants are all about experience, and maybe forcing the customer to prove they can pay would degrade the experience to the point where the resturant makes more money by just accepting the occasional dine & dash.

Also in a real resturant if a customer was sitting there baldly refusing to pay, you could probably just call the police (I dont know, I've worked in resturants and have never even heard of this happening).