Consumption Weeks 50
My notes from some of the media I consumed this week.
Contents
MASTERY: Outperform 99% of people and become the best//Robert Greene (book summary)
- Life’s task → What “work” doesn’t feel like work? What is your passion? What can you talk incessantly about?
- Apprenticeship → learn from others (e.g. mentor, company) instead of self-studying
- Deep observation → passive
- Skill acquisition → practise
- Experimentation → active
- Develop social intelligence
- Dimensional mindset → original/creativity + conventional/skill
Tags: Success, Happiness, Purpose, Life, Work, Skills, Mastery, Book Summary
[The James Altucher Show] The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life | Hal Elrod
- Affirmations: “I am committed to” + speak aloud with conviction to truly change your mindset.
Tags: Success, Habits
[Modern Wisdom] #719 - Ali Abdaal - How To Stop Procrastinating For Good
- Motivation/energy/fun (often with other people) underpins productivity. How can it be play?
- Half-arsing a job is more tiring.
- Have a low number of high-priority activities. Have a daily top thing.
Tags: Productivity, Success, Motivation
Visual Anagrams: Generating Multi-View Optical Illusions with Diffusion Models
https://dangeng.github.io/visual_anagrams/
Tags: Illusions, Anagrams, AI
Hyundai Motor and Kia Unveil Snow Chain-Integrated Tire Technology Using Shape Memory Alloy
- More innovation from Hyundai-Kia.
Tags: Innovation, Cars
Cop28: highlights and lowlights so far
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/07/cop28-first-half-un-climate-conference-dubai
- The $700m (£557m) so far pledged by wealthy nations [for the loss and damage fund] most responsible for the climate emergency covers less than 0.2% of what is needed every year. Estimates for the annual cost of the damage have varied from $100bn-$580bn.
- [COP President] Sultan Al Jaber had said in a video call last month that there was “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels was needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C (2.7F).
- More than 2,400 [fossil fuel lobbyists] – four times more than were registered the previous year.
Tags: Climate, Corruption
Honest Government Ad | Visit the UK! 🇬🇧 (2024 election)
- thejuicemedia comes for the UK election!
Tags: Politics
I removed most of the syllables from english and it’s 30% faster now
- Using the sonority sequencing principle and sonority hierarchy to simplify English.
Tags: Language, English, Optimisation
How couples meet in the US
https://twitter.com/ichthys30/status/1734953685451460712
Tags: Dating, Relationships
As a Therapist, I Know What’s Breaking Couples Up
https://thewalrus.ca/what-breaks-up-couples/
- We’ve normalized [smartphones] being intrusive and taking precedence when people are lying in bed, playing Wordle or scrolling through TikTok rather than talking to each other.
Tags: Relationships, Technology
The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-cause-of-depression-is-probably-not-what-you-think-20230126/
- An international team of scientists led by Joanna Moncrieff of University College London screened 361 papers from six areas of research and carefully evaluated 17 of them. They found no convincing evidence that lower levels of serotonin caused or were even associated with depression. People with depression didn’t reliably seem to have less serotonin activity than people without the disorder. Experiments in which researchers artificially lowered the serotonin levels of volunteers didn’t consistently cause depression. Genetic studies also seemed to rule out any connection between genes affecting serotonin levels and depression, even when the researchers tried to consider stress as a possible cofactor.
- “Just because aspirin relieves a headache, [it] doesn’t mean that aspirin deficits in the body are causing headaches,”
Tags: Health, Mental Health, Disease, Science
[The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway] Conversation with Dr. Peter Attia — The Pillars of Healthspan and Longevity
- Exercise: 150mins zone 2, 30mins zone 3-4 + 3-4x 45-60mins strength
- Habits: Additive - start small (e.g. 5mins run/day); subtractive - environmental controls (e.g. don’t have snacks in house)
- Biggest life advice: have a child
Tags: Life, Health, Exercise, Habits, Happiness
[The James Altucher Show] How to Make It in the NBA | Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
- Example of monetising data: Collect car info (reg, vin, purchase date, owner) to predict when someone will change cars and to what car, and then sell the data to car selling organisations.
Tags: Business, Entrepreneurship, Data, Data Analysis
How some people get away with doing nothing at work
https://www.vox.com/money/23733244/bullshit-jobs-work-employment-lazy-jobless-employed-nothing-to-do
- “I feel like I’m falling behind,” he says. “I definitely want to move to a different company, and I’m hopeful that when I do that, my work and my mindset will change.”
- “It’s like being on vacation all the time, with occasional scrambling to do a thing, then doing the thing for a couple of hours, then going back to the rest of my life,” he says. “Even though I feel guilty about it sometimes … it’s not really my job to tell a multinational company how to run a business or manage their employees.”
- He’s not concerned someone will notice what he’s up to because he can just close his office door. Plus, he’s got a mouse jiggler. “What’s ironic is that I’m seen as the high performer on the team, and I’m also confused,” he says. “I think it’s because they’re also just making up stuff to do as well.”
- “If you go in and say, ‘Hey, I’m underutilized right now,’ you’re basically putting a target on your back,” Creely says. “It sounds good on paper — you get paid to do nothing — but especially if you’re not well-connected, eventually that’s going to come to an end.”
- “You get managers who are either so disengaged that they truly are oblivious to the situation, they’re so disconnected from the work that they don’t have any sense of what the person is or isn’t doing or results they should be getting that they’re not getting,” Green says, “or you get a manager who does have a general sense of it that is so passive and nonconfrontational that they can’t bring themselves to do anything about it.”
Tags: Work
Your stuff is actually worse now
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23529587/consumer-goods-quality-fast-fashion-technology
- “People don’t exactly want to pay more for all that stuff,” Harrington says. “So what has to happen if everything is more expensive and the customers still want to pay the same price, something has to be cut and that’s often going to be the quality of the garment.”
- “In the design of objects, they’re trying to reduce the amount of labor, and that changes what the object is,” Bird says. “That produces cheaper goods, but it doesn’t necessarily produce better goods.”
- Even if you do want to hop off the treadmill of constantly buying and keep what you already have, companies have made that harder too. Your goods probably have a shorter life span than they did years ago, and if you want to repair them — especially tech — you’ll come up against major barriers.
UCKG: Church pastor tells boy ’evil spirit’ hides in him
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67592961
- “When they found out I was gay, they started telling me that it was a demon causing it, that I needed to attend the Friday services where they would perform exorcisms,” he says. Mark says the prayers were performed every week for more than four years and that he tried to convince himself he was attracted to women. “I would cry myself to sleep,” he says. “And it was a really hard time because the amount of self-hate was huge.”
- “They say, ‘Do you remember that assistant who was sitting here? Well, they left the church and now they are getting a divorce. Now they have cancer.’”
- Sharon says she was shown a graphic video about a former member who was in a motorcycle incident that showed “all their organs out”. She adds: “They said this is what happens when you leave the church, the devil will come and take your soul.”
Tags: Cults, Religion
The Vaginal Microbiome May Affect Health More than We Thought
- Of the 28 bacterial species common to the vagina, scientists identified 135 unique combinations of strains of those species, each of which has different functions and cohabits with other strains.
- Early research suggests that probiotics designed to promote growth of good bacteria may also influence the protective abilities of the vaginal microbiome—Ravel’s lab is currently involved in developing probiotic therapeutics for urinary tract infection and bacterial vaginosis.
Tags: Health
How I rewired my brain in six weeks
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230912-how-i-hacked-my-brain
- Over six weeks, Barnhofer modified a mindfulness research course for me to try out. For 30 minutes a day, either as one single session or two 15-minute sessions, I practiced a guided mindfulness meditation by listening to a recording. In addition, I had one weekly meditation session with Barnhofer, who guided me over Zoom. I didn’t increase my normal levels of exercise, but I did to push myself to run faster.
- One half of my amygdala – an almond-shaped structure important for emotional processing – had reduced in volume on the right side. When we experience increased stress, the amygdala grows.
- The other change was to my cingulate cortex, part of the limbic system that is involved in our behavioural and emotional responses. It is also important for the default mode network, a region that becomes active when the mind wanders and ruminates. In my brain, it had slightly increased in size over the six weeks, indicating increased control of that area.
Tags: Meditation, Stress, Brain, Plasticity
What colour do you see?
https://aeon.co/essays/the-moral-imperative-to-learn-from-diverse-phenomenal-experiences
- More light entering the pupil causes it to constrict. But simply imagining something bright like the Sun also causes (a smaller, but still measurable) constriction. Aphantasics show perfectly typical pupillary responses to actual changes in light. However, their pupils do not change to imagined light.
- When asked to lie in the scanner and stare at a cross on a screen, the brain responses of the hyperphantasic group had greater connectivity between prefrontal cortex and the occipital visual network, compared with the aphantasic group.
Tags: Reality, Aphantasia
Hanako (fish)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanako_(fish)
- Imagine being a fish for 226 years.
Tags: Life, Lifespan, Longevity, Animals, Nature, Fish
Jogging gingerbread man surprises Calne drivers
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-67626070
- “I lost my daughter to suicide nearly four years ago and this is my way of getting people to have that moment of happiness.”
Tags: Fun, Funny, British