what we (don't) know about nutrition,energetic aliens & date markets
CC#55 - Winner Takes it All Science, Perfect Bananas & Bolle med Ost
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.
🥗 How s got Everything about Food - Fat, Sugar and Obesity - ‘Entirely Backwards’ [🎧]
Super interesting interview with an endocrinologist on how little we know about nutrition and how it is way more complex than just calories in vs. calories out.
Today’s episode is about what Americans don’t get about food—and the historical origins of our diet delusions. Our guest is Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist who has researched and written on obesity and diet. He explains why scientists still haven't arrived at a consensus on obesity, why he thinks the conventional wisdom about calories and fat is wrong, what he thinks is really going on, and why the history of diet advice has been so wrong in the last half-century. On Friday, we'll continue the conversation on diet and obesity with an episode on the next generation of weight-loss medication, which could change the way America thinks about self-image and obesity forever.
👽 Energetic Aliens
What is it that makes extremely productive people different from the rest of us? This blogpost collects examples of scientists, authors and business people who were ‘energetic aliens’ and tries to find commonalities between them. Quite lengthy, but you can also just read some of the portraits and then skip to the discussion.
Reading biographies and observing friends, family, and colleagues has led me to become interested in what factors drive the variance in cognitive stamina and observed levels of energy between individuals. Identifying the biological, environmental, or motivational factors which produce this difference seems important and neglected. Understanding this is a research agenda’s worth of work, so my contribution will be to draw a conceptual boundary around the idea of an “energetic alien” and explore some (not selected i.i.d.) examples of eminent energetic aliens from different fields, discuss some hypotheses about the energetic alien phenomenon, and then put forth some ideas for how we non-energetic aliens can compensate.
🧪 Winner take all science
An article exploring the up- and downsides of the ‘winner takes it all’ structure that is mostly present in science (and even more so academia).
When Darwin returned from the Beagle in 1836 at the age of 27 he already had the basic idea that living beings were adapted by natural selection. But he worried about controversy and gave priority to his geological research, so he didn’t publish his theory for more than 20 years. Then on June 18, 1858, he was startled to get a letter from Alfred Wallace that proposed essentially the same thing. Darwin immediately did two things:
He organized for a joint Darwin-Wallace paper which basically stapled together Wallace’s letter with some stuff Darwin was working on. (..)
Darwin decided that he must immediately-now-ASAP publish some version of his book, however imperfect. (…)
In the book, Darwin mentioned Wallace as coming to the same conclusion independently. Overall, this is a nice story. Darwin comes off as a good egg and Wallace always defended Darwin and shunned fame despite being given every possible award and honor. But still—you learned about Darwin as a child.
Food for Thought.
💕 If you were a celebrity, how would you approach your dating life? Well, you could try starting a public date-recommendation market where people can suggest dating partners and bet on whom you will end up dating. Slightly weird, but maybe we’ll see more of this in the future…?
💬 There has been a lot of hype around Microsoft/OpenAI/Bing’s new AI chat assistant recently although it seems to be under-performing compared to expectations, e.g. it fails to realize which year it is today. Have we been too bullish on AI capabilities or is this system just still in its infancy?
😴 It seems like there is a lot of evidence that (1) teenagers sleep less than they should and (2) that this could be improved by making schools start later - seems like an easy win policy change? (I wish someone would have told my mum about this during my teenage years…)
Random Stuff.
🖼️ Stable Attribution is an application that finds the human made pictures that were used by an AI to generate a new image.
🍌 Optimization driven to extremes - not sure if this is just incredibly smart or a bit over-engineered…?
🚐 Almost all stories I have heard so far about living in a Van ‘play’ in some western country and I had never really considered that you could also do this in the Eastern Hemisphere - very interesting report about Van life in Japan.
Personal Update.
Currently a lot into interactive data visualisations - started learning D3.js and have to say its addictive (if you have any good resource recommendations for a complete beginner, send them my way!)
Also, testing my way around cafes in Copenhagen - on a mission to find the spot that has it all: (1) a good ‘working environment’ (aka nice seating, light, wifi…), (2) real good coffee and delicious BMO (apparently this is a valid abbreviation to refer to the famous Danish ‘bolle med ost’ [Bun with Cheese])
There is also a homepage that has a BMO ranking for Copenhagen.Other than that not really an exciting updates but something is cooking 👩🏼🍳