wdewind

The "starvation mode" idea is thrown around a lot but is categorically not something that overweight people ever go into. The premise came from a study done on a tiny sample size in the 1950s of severely malnutritioned soldiers. It is an extreme, near death state.

> A caloric deficit eventually forces the metabolism to slow down, hence the yo-to effect afterwards, whereas fasting doesn’t, not when implemented correctly.

Citation needed, specifically on the second part. Isocaloric diets with different compositions have not been shown to have any difference in weight loss amounts.

> So by eating multiple meals per day, you’re stimulating your pancreas to trigger insulin in the bloodstream multiple times per day. Thus the body will not have access to its fat store while that happens. As long as your insulin is high, no matter how much fat you have, you’re starving without eating food.

No, this is a misunderstanding of the metabolic system. The body is very good at storing and using fat, and there is zero evidence that an isocaloric diet prevents your body from accessing fat stores. If you eat the same amount of calories, you will supplement (or not) the same amount of energy from your fat stores regardless of when or what those calories are made up of. There may be small statistically significant differences here, but there absolutely has not been a study showing clinically significant differences. Every study that has shown improvement in metabolic markers has not compared isocaloric diets, as I mentioned in the comment you are replying to. I'd be happy to look at any study you think does, but this would be a massive shift in the current understanding of metabolism and so it is unlikely such a study exists.

> When you’re doing keto or fasting, the insulin goes down. Again, this is a fact.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the insulin goes down" but basically this is not a fact because it has not been showing in isocaloric diets.

> This allows the body to consume energy from its own fat deposits. This means that the metabolism shouldn’t slow down, when implemented correctly.

Again, this is a misunderstanding of the metabolic system.

> And btw, the reason for why keto hasn’t taken off in the medical community is due to perverse incentives. Nobody wants to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in proving that a diet works, because a diet doesn’t generate profit. The cold, harsh truth is that it’s more profitable to sell statins and synthetic insulin.

The medical community is extremely messed up, but the part of it that focuses on treating obesity regards keto as a way to build compliance, but has largely read the studies and come to the same conclusions anyone else who understands the basic biology has: the premise that keto or IF produce metabolic changes outside of the ones that come from caloric deficits brought on by increased compliance is extraordinary and requires extraordinary evidence, which has not been produced.

It is on the list, and now that I look closer, yes the stock they are using is from 2009 when Slim Fast openly advertised that they used sibutramine. They have since stopped, so this list is somewhat suspect.

> We demonstrate for the first time in humans that eTRF improves some aspects of cardiometabolic health and that IF's effects are not solely due to weight loss.

It fails to do so because it does not measure food ingested, only food served, and so we have no idea if the diet was actually isocaloric (hint: it wasn't).

Keto and IF proponents both want to see a metabolic advantage that simply is not there. Compliance is huge, but there is no existing study showing a metabolic advantage that doesn't also have a caloric deficit.

The study, like all similar IF studies, showed that people who do IF sometimes are able to use it to consume fewer calories. That is important from a compliance standpoint: it means you can use this diet to treat obesity for some portion of the population for whom it is going to be effective because it will get them to comply with not eating too much. Not eating as much is associated with weight loss which is associated with all kinds of good outcomes. That's awesome, but it doesn't mean that metabolically there is something significantly different going on outside of eating less.

This is an important discussion in nutrition in general, and shows up in IF as well as keto discussion frequently, with proponents of each arguing that beyond the compliance aspect, there is also something special going on with your metabolism (ie: insulin sensitivity and other metabolic markers). The problem is that all of these are things that improve when you are in a caloric defecit, and the studies never disambiguate between the effects of a caloric deficit and the meal timing itself.

Fung makes the same mistake the authors of the paper do in interpreting their own results too optimistically. The dietary controls are set up in a way to make it seem convincing in an abstract if you are familiar with this area and what the current core issues are, but it is not at all if you dig in.

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/sda/sdNavigation.cfm?...

Literally the only surprising one on the list is Slim Fast, and it's so surprising I'm wondering if they are using extremely old stock or something. The rest of the "supplements" are dick pills with names like "Sexy Monkey."

It's just not even the same market as the weekend warrior crossfit bro who takes whey protein and maybe gasp creatine.

This one, mentioned in this context:

> This was a randomized crossover, isocaloric and eucaloric study. That is, all patients did both arms of the study eating the same foods and the same calories and then compared against themselves. The two arms of the study were eating between 8am and 8pm, and the eTRF strategy of eating between 8am and 2pm, but remember, both groups ate three meals per day of the same foods. Some would start with the conventional diet, then cross over to eTRF, and others did the opposite, separated by a seven-week washout period. Subjects were men with prediabetes.

> The benefits were huge. Mean insulin levels dropped significantly, and insulin resistance dropped as well. Insulin is a driver of obesity, so merely changing the meal timing and restricting the number of hours you ate, and also by moving to an earlier eating schedule, produced huge benefits even in the same person eating the same meals. That’s astounding. Even more remarkable was that even after the washout period of seven weeks, the eTRF group maintained lower insulin levels at baseline. The benefits were maintained even after stopping the time restriction. Blood pressure dropped as well.

Specifically this sentence:

> so merely changing the meal timing and restricting the number of hours you ate, and also by moving to an earlier eating schedule, produced huge benefits even in the same person eating the same meals

is incorrect, and is basically the lynchpin of the entire IF idea.

The study takes 150 random products and finds issues with 20% of them, I guarantee those 20% are not sold at GNC, VitaminShoppe etc.

This is just really not a big problem for normal every day people.

Besides that the standard: this is done on 8 people over a very small period of time, so it's at best a pilot study anyway.

IF may be a great way for some people to comply to their dietary goals better, but there is still not a single study that shows it actually does anything besides that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

There's this narrative that the major cause of improvement in conditions (civil rights, workers rights, child rights etc.) comes from government regulation. This is called legal prescriptivism. Another narrative is that things generally improve as the economy does, and are then codified into law. This is legal descriptivism.

Typically history moves forward with a mixture of both, but it should not be taken for granted that prescriptivism is always the only way progress happens, nor that prescriptive progress always positive.

The "group of people I hang out with" you're referring to is actually the Federal Government of the United States, and it's not one that I'm particularly fond of, but they are who is in charge. As I mentioned in another post, the US government could easily shut down the effective use of every crypto currency inside of the United States. They have the legal and physical ability to do that today.

There is very little evidence that the crypto community understands the systems they are so eager to destroy and rebuild (often with worse solutions, that have already been tried and failed, to the same problems). This doesn't mean the current banking system does not have faults, but those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Voting which is heavily centralized to a few massive owners is not a significant improvement on The Fed, I'm sorry, that's just ridiculous.

> Also a fair point against Bitcoin, but I think the future is PoS.

PoS has huge numbers of different problems, mainly that it is a system designed around plutocracy.

> I'm just saying that crypto privacy can be as good as cash.

And I'm saying that if the crypto currencies that actually allowed for cash-like privacy levels (ie anonymous transactions etc.) actually reached any level of scale FINRA would immediately shut them down. Anonymous transactions are not a technical feat, they are a political one. Again, the guys with guns already decided we don't get anonymous transactions so just writing the code for it isn't going to change things.

> I doubt low-inflation currencies would actually change spending/hoarding behavior significantly. People who want to hoard wealth can do so already, with gold, land, TIPS, etc.

Right, and the thing those things have in common is that they are "Not Currencies."

Right, that's what I'm saying. The technology will yield to the government, not vice versa, so if you want this technology to take off you will need to change the political foundations upon which it lays. This isn't an argument about what should be, this is a description of what is.

> You're just not acknowledging the existence of people with political views different to your own.

Sorry, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the differences coming out of the cryptocurrency community are extremely sophomoric and reflect people who have thought deeply about technology and almost not at all about the political or economic systems in which this technology exists. It's not a matter of having a different opinion, it's a matter of not being able to contribute to the conversation because the crypto community doesn't even know what it doesn't know.

To go back to the accredited investor example: we don't need cryptocurrency to enable companies to raise money from a wide variety of sources. It's not even close to the best solution if that's your goal.

What's frustrating to me is watching people built technology without knowing anything about economics and thinking that they've built new economic ideas, when in fact they are extremely late to the conversation and don't have a real sense of what the state of the art is, nor the important moving parts are.

It's not clear to me that this is meaningfully different than our current financial system.

> Granted, it defeats some of the benefits, but not all. E.g. most crypto has low inflation compared to USD. Even though CPI inflation is ~2%, the money supply inflates around ~10% per year, whereas most crypto will inflate <1% long term.

It's really not clear to me that this is a benefit, and even if it is was, there is nothing stopping the Bitcoin network, for instance, from deciding it wants to inflate after it has mined all the coins. The fact that the vast majority of mining is controlled by a handful of Chinese companies and that this is seen as preferable to The Fed for deciding whether or not to inflate seems crazy to me. But it's possible, even probable, that the people who make real money selling bitcoins will vote to make more bitcoins after they run out of bitcoins to sell, ie: squeeze blood from the stone.

> With something like Cardano, I don't see what governments could do, apart from banning its use within their own jurisdiction.

You're talking about a government that reads literally every single piece of internet traffic and likely has backdoors into many encryption products.

> That's a fair criticism of Bitcoin etc., but future iterations of cryptocurrencies will surely include ZeroCash-style privacy at least as an optional feature, if not for every transaction.

No, because anyone who wants to make a serious business out of these will be required to become a Money Services Business, and have a Know Your Customer (KYC) process. As I mentioned in my previous posts: we've thought about this problem before, we don't want money floating around that isn't easily traceable, and so we already have laws governing this stuff. It's not a matter of "design the right mathematical system to create anonymity." The Dudes With the Guns do not want that so it will not happen. These systems cannot meaningfully exist outside of the current political system without a real, guns and explosions, revolution.

> I'm not saying it's a sure thing at all, but it seems somewhat plausible, no?

There is literally no upside for the vast majority of the actors in your proposal. If a currency is truly deflationary consumers wont want to spend it, if it's not it's not meaningfully different. Consumers also want a layer of protection, which credit cards offer them. Big vendors (Microsoft, Valve/Steam, Overstock etc.) who accepted crypto have already decided to stop, and transaction volume is plummeting so I think your proposed series of events is extremely unlikely.

The market is surely irrational, and there are a ton of things that exist that shouldn't, so who knows. But this stuff is not a good idea, there isn't any "mystery" left to it. We understand what's being proposed, it's basically all been proposed before, and it's an idea filled with huge problems that have only begun to surface because it is a nascent system.

One reason cryptocurrency "wont work" (admittedly vague term, but I'm happy to shoot down any definition of "work" you have because I think they are truly useless outside of a tiny portion of people with very specific needs) is simple specialization of labor: people do not want to be engaged in the process of running a currency or a government, which is why, among many other reasons, banks and representative governments exist. And you see this pattern already repeated with crypto where any meaningfully large currency has extremely concentrated ownership. This is just swapping one set of large, monolithic bankers for another one.

Another reason cryptocurrency "wont work" is that everything it depends on is completely derivative of political and technical systems that are designed to prevent decentralized control. The internet exists on networks owned by companies like Verizon, on computers owned by Amazon, and is regulated by the US government. If cryptocurrency was going to be truly revolutionary in anyway the US federal government (and others) already have multiple built in kill switches for it. Sure you can cold store your hashes (even though we all know most people just have Coinbase wallets), but the utility of the network is trivial to compromise or destroy for a state level actor. And as an aside: most crypto is actually regressive from a privacy/personal liberty standpoint when compared with cash, or even the current banking system in many ways.

One more reason crypto "wont work" is that I just haven't heard a single use case for it. The classic "remittances" use case makes no sense because you still have to change the crypto for real currency, which is where the cost is, (yes, only until the currency is meaningfully bootstrapped, let me know when that happens). You don't pay Western Union 15% to flip bits in their servers, you pay them 15% because they put a guy with a gun next to the actual money in the relatively less safe country you are sending money to.

I will remind you that Lehman Brothers was worth about $70B at its peak, in a highly regulated market. $100B is big but far stranger things have happened than an unregulated public market being wrong about things this size. The incentives to pump something like this up are massive, and the market is irrational in the short and medium term. There are a LOT of really rich people out there who feel like if they hadn't missed "the internet" they could be even richer, and we managed to convince them crypto might be the next internet. To your point: that in and of itself, from a sociological perspective, is fascinating.

I do have strong opinions, but they are held loosely and they are ones I hope to be wrong about, so I'm open to discussion.

Almost all countries that have public markets have a similar form of regulation.

> ICOs in the USA only take accredited US investors now. That has been standard practice for a year now.

Right, which makes them not significantly politically different from regular securities.

> Finally, I would not agree that the political system has perfect solutions to everything and therefore cryptocurrencies are irrelevant. The financial crisis alone is proof that things can go terribly wrong.

I'm not here to defend the law, I'm saying the decisions weren't made because crypto currency markets simply weren't possible then, the decisions were made because no one wants this, really. If you want to change the financial system you need to do it from the regulation side, this is not a "build it and they will come" situation. These aren't new ideas, people just forgot we already decided we don't want them. Maybe that's changed, but it's not clear why or how.

Honestly these questions have all been considered before, answered, and codified into law, and the crypto communities are full of people who have no idea what is going on around them. The banking systems we have are the result of us considering these questions, deciding politically we want something very different, and then building the technical systems that match that design.

The classic example is investor accreditation laws, and why, as far as I can tell, there isn't a single ICO that doesn't violate them. It's not that no one considered whether or not you should be able to raise money from many different people, and it's not been logistically complicated to do that for at least three decades. The reason is that the political will does not exist.

In the situation where Linus is far more qualified, and obviously so, and someone is trying to get him to "approve" a patch, there's no way it's ever really going to be a truly collaborative dynamic.

This doesn't mean Linus has to be a dick about it, but it's definitely not collaboration between equals.

If you're a startup this is not clear and changes frequently. Practicing TDD in this environment has very real downsides that exist less in mature companies with clearer understanding of business requirements.

We're right back to confederation. No one wants to deal with this shit otherwise they already would, hence federation instead.

> And by employees owning corporations. I mean 1-person-1-vote, instead of 1-share-1-vote. Managers and CEOs can still exist, but is not permanent. Employee-owners can recall them anytime, and they can agree for a quarterly or semi-annual evaluation. Employee-owners also decide how much to pay Managers and CEOs, how to use the profit. You may ask if this company can survive? This has been done in large scale by Mondragon, a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. Not perfect but it has done good progress.

No one would ever agree to this except employees. Mondragon works because it pays basically what would be paid regardless. The actual executives managing the Mondragon foundation are not constrained to the same pay structures that the people working in the coops are. The number of non-owning employees is also growing fairly rapidly.

Yes, that's definitely true. There's a no true scotsman element to this, I know. What I meant by that was that the artist communes were meaningfully decentralized in terms of individuals artistic contributions (even then, only some of them are), not entirely, politically etc. I would still argue that they can be more "meaningfully" decentralized than email based on how much easier it is for the government to control email than physical space, but this stuff is difficult to discuss without lossy abstractions as you've pointed out.

> I actually suspect that any significant regulation of Mastodon would in fact increase decentralization. Since the software itself is open source, it will be hard to regulate, if not impossible (is code speech?). That means regulators have to go after hosts of instances. Perhaps some instances will comply with regulation, but I suspect many will not. The largest of the non-complying instances will be shut down.

This is true, but only until physical server location becomes the relevant attribute for jurisdiction. Mastodon instances within the US will be hosted on AWS, Azure etc., and will have no choice but to comply with regulations.

> Some of these instances will be outside of the centralized authority's jurisdiction (for example, after SESTA, many sex workers flocked to a mastodon instance that was specifically set up for them; this instance is hosted outside the jurisdiction of the US).

I keep seeing this pointed out, but I don't think it's a positive. Not only are you still aggregating vulnerable people on a service not designed for secure communications, that can certainly be surveilled by US law enforcement even if it can't be shut down, you're also increasing the incentive for the government to regulate the international internet.

Sometimes humans make networks in which this is no longer true, that is content is produced basically equally among all, or at least most, members of the network. These are decentralized networks.

These types of networks are not sustainable or large for a broad host of reasons, and so they form only temporarily. But they are desirable, and valuable, which is why they still form at all.

Email exists well within our very centralized federated political and cultural system, and so no, it is not meaningfully decentralized. We do have some small, decentralized networks (artist communes, maybe qualify?) within the US, but they do not scale. Mastodon will also fall prey to the same issues: as soon as it is big enough for anyone to care about, regulation will come, and regulation will require significant centralization.

No, it's that if you observe that power laws are the norm, as you stated, then you start to see decentralization as a process, not a state of being. The idea that a network (or governance structure) "is decentralized by design" makes no sense. If you know decentralization is temporary, it's hard to take Mastodon etc. seriously.

> The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one.

This is so spot on! It's easy to say Mastodon is solving all these problems, but the reality is that it's just not big enough that it has faced any real challenges, and the challenges it really faces are mostly philosophical, not technical. AFAICT it hasn't scratched the surface on the philosophical governance issues.

I think you're missing the point. All of these are examples of successful centralized networks. The idea that mastodon will not fall prey to the same incentives facebook did is based on it being meaningfully decentralized. It is extremely unlikely to me that as the network scales (it has 100kish DAUs right now) meaningful decentralization will continue to exist.

> -What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit?

It doesn't, in a meaningful way, because if the government wants to shut something down on reddit they contact reddit, not the moderator of a subreddit.

> -You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor?

I would agree with that in most cases, depending on your goals, and would wish the twitter competitor the best of luck.