minimal trust, eat better faster & map art
CC#26 - when life gives you a blank canvas, cost of coffee & good exam questions
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.
🧐 Minimal Trust Investigations [Audioversion]
Mostly its best to trust what experts say, but sometimes it can be good to investigate yourself. Even when you are not familiar with the topic.
I brush my teeth twice a day, even though I've never read a study on the effects of brushing one's teeth, never tried to see what happens when I don't brush my teeth, and have no idea what's in toothpaste. It seems like most reasonable-seeming people think it's worth brushing your teeth, and that's about the only reason I do it.
I think it's completely reasonable to form the vast majority of one's beliefs based on trust like this. I don't really think there's any alternative.
But I also think it's a good idea to occasionally do a minimal-trust investigation: to suspend my trust in others and dig as deeply into a question as I can.
🏠 Your house is holding you back -- seriously
Big changes are opportunities to break with old habits - let’s make good use of the situations where life provides us with a blank canvas.
Then, something big happened. I moved. I packed up my computer, my bed, and my shorts and went across town—to a cozy part of the city called Duboce Triangle.
That’s when my turnaround began. Before I knew it, I was going to the gym 6 days a week. My shirts got small, my abs started to protrude, and my protein powder budget went through the roof. Another successful habit!
At the time, I was kind of confused. I wondered why I was able to so easily become a gym rat in my new place when all my previous efforts had resulted in failure.
Then it hit me: It’s because I was in a new context.
Natural > Processed, Slow > Fast, Artisanal > Industrial, Home-Cooked > Store Bought. But is it really? 90% of people don’t enjoy cooking - so if we can find ways to provide quality meals faster & cheaper, can we increase overall life quality and productivity?
And really, aren’t people who cook from scratch the ones being irrational? Economist Ryan Murphy argues that the desire for “DIY” is a manifestation of evolutionary intuitions that make us unduly skeptical of our current technological and institutional environment. This makes us prone to doing costly things ourselves instead of just paying someone else who is better at it to do it for us. Frozen and pre-prepared food seems unnatural, so we take questionable health and moral claims about them for granted. Even claims about home cooking being less expensive are more complex than they might appear, once the opportunity cost of one’s time is fully accounted for — if you don’t enjoy doing it, cooking uses up scarce leisure time that could be spent with family, or watching TV, instead.
Food for Thought.
☕ From a £2.50 cup of coffee, the grower gets £0.01.
🤒 COVID clearly becomes worse during winter. Same goes for the flue. But what is actually the reason for this seasonality? (Related: Excess Winter Deaths)
📸 Seems like there is a true upside to knowing some locals when traveling.
Random Stuff.
🤓 If I ever get to design an exam again, I might add this question.
🥰 2021 saw more smiling faces with hearts, more loud crying, less heart-eyes and less smiling eyes
🤝 Would you agree?
My Update.
Seems like I have now turned into a person that does coding projects for fun (thanks Copenhagen winter + COVID).
I really enjoyed following this great tutorial that shoes you how to plot your personal location history. Below you can see my routes through Vienna in 2020 (in red). Planning to make some more maps for other cities I’ve lived in previously, print them and hang them on the wall 🖼
If you’d like such a map for yourself and trust me with your data - feel free to shoot me a message & I’ll do my best to send you an early Christmas present 🎅