eating for longevity, interventions gone wrong & what to invent
CC#82 - Fighting for your Country, Practical Decision Making Advice & Why Jalapenos aren't Spicy Anymore
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🙅 Two things shape the course of your life: luck and your decisions (with Annie Duke) [🎧]
A review of decision making psychology and some practical advice to improve day to day decision making (my main take away: if stakes are low, we usually spend too much time deciding).
Should people spend more time becoming better decision-makers? What are the main things that determine how our lives turn out? What's wrong with pro / con lists? When should we deviate from making decisions based on expected value calculations? What kinds of uncertainty might we encounter in the decision-making process? Are explicit decision calculations self-defeating? How similar is intuitive decision-making to decision-making that's based on calculations? How useful are heuristics? How can we know which decisions are significant enough to warrant calculations? What makes a decision hard? What's the omission / commission bias? What lessons can we learn from monkeys and pedestals? Should decision-making strategies be taught in primary and secondary schools?
Annie Duke is an author, speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space, as well as Special Partner focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund.
🚬 How to get 7th graders to smoke
An entertaining reflection on individuals’ (and especially scientists’) attempts to change people and the reason they often don’t work out as expected. Spoiler: We have a hard time imagining other people’s behaviour’s, change often takes time and repetitions & often claims are too vague to be falsifiable, preventing us to move on from ‘wrong’ theories.
What really screws us is that it’s surprisingly hard to change people. We cook up schemes that seem like they should definitely work, then they don’t work, and this doesn’t chasten us or dim our enthusiasm for future schemes. Hansen et al., after accidentally causing seventh-graders to smoke, don’t end their paper with a long reverie on their hubris. They write a few self-exculpatory paragraphs and move on to the next project.
The problem is that our illusion of explanatory depth is so deep when it comes to human behavior that we never realize how little we understand, which prevents us from ever learning more. Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the weekend, but most people think they know how to save the children, fix the schools, reform the prisons, overhaul healthcare, repair politics, restore civility, and bring about world peace. Perhaps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those other things.
🥗 Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: How to Exercise & Eat for Optimal Health & Longevity [🎧]
I am somewhat unsure what to think about this podcast - on the one hand it features two definitely comparatively trustworthy individuals talking about the current state of knowledge about how nutrition and exercise affect longevity (and general health) through skeletal muscle. On the other hand, at times it comes across more like a fitness influencer commercial. Anyhow, it definitely gave me a lot of food for thought.
In this episode, my guest is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, D.O., a board-certified physician who did her clinical and research training at Washington University in geriatrics and nutrition. She is also an expert in how diet and exercise impact muscle and whole-body health and longevity. Dr. Lyon is a bestselling author and public educator. We discuss how healthy skeletal muscle promotes longevity, brain health, disease prevention, ideal body composition, and the health of other organs and bodily systems.
She makes specific nutritional recommendations for optimal health: what to eat, how much to eat, the timing of meals, the essential need for adequate quality protein (including animal and plant-based options), supplementation, and how our dietary requirements change with age. She explains why specific types of resistance training are essential to build and maintain muscle and overall metabolic health. She also describes how to include resistance training as part of your exercise regimen — regardless of age or sex.
Food for Thought.
🤺 Is it a bad or a good thing that less people are willing to fight for their country? (This quote is from a speech by the British journalist and politician Douglas Murray)
🇨🇳 What roles will the US/Europe/China play in science in the next decade?
💸 A speculative list of technologies that are potentially achievable to invent within 5 years but probably won’t be invented due to lack of funding.
Random Stuff.
🌶️ Apparently, Jalapenos these days are much less spicy than they used to be - the main reason is the unpredictability of spice. Manufacturers of hot sauces etc. often had trouble supplying a consistent product which is why many of those these days revert to using non-spicy peppers and adding ‘Oleoresin capsicum’ - “an extract from peppers, containing pure heat” instead.
💬 Mainly putting this here as a reference for myself - there has been multiple times where I struggled to get various LLMs to consistently reply with a specific format & spend hours trialling different approaches - good to know that there is an overview page now.
🎣 We are now -for the first time- farming more fish than we catch
Personal Update.
Spent two weeks working back in Denmark (managed to catch one week of actual summer vibes ☀️🥳 + a fair amount of April-like weather 🌦️) before heading to Switzerland for holidays.
Currently conducting a tiny-scale self-study on muscle fatigue with the amazing @amanda_bennetts_ which means I am taking EMG measurements twice a day & filling out a survey every night. Really curious what I will learn from it about myself (& and my body).
Now on my way back to Austria - will be there for a week trying to get some work done before going to Tallinn for a Summer School on Interactive Design.
