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Jack Dorsey Is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley
- cnahr 7y agoWhile Dorsey is rather extreme, his lifestyle is a lot healthier than the average American’s or most everyone’s in the developed world. Eating junk food around the clock is really bad for you. Note that Dorsey isn’t fat and diabetic like so many people these days.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoCool, you also just described Gwyenth Paltrow.
- cnahr 7y agoOkay, now tell me what’s wrong about not being fat and diabetic. Note I certainly don’t endorse veganism where you’re missing out on essential fats and proteins.
- filoleg 7y agoThere are many many ways to not be fat and/or diabetic, and some of them are more wrong and ridiculous than others.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoYou just said that anyone who isn't fat or diabetic has a lifestyle that is automatically better than someone who does. That's not the case.
- cnahr 7y agoAre you for real? This is ridiculous. Obesity is a serious proven health risk.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoYou're arguing from a point of attacking the opposite instead of boosting your own point. Do you remember Heroin Chic?
- fredsir 7y agoVeganism don’t require that you miss out on essential fats and proteins.
- rosser 7y ago"Not as bad as", aka The Fallacy of Relative Privation, is a "red herring" fallacy. It is a distraction, a diversion, and, in so many words, whataboutism.
- hshshshshss 7y agoyes its veganism that is the extreme part of this...
- gvand 7y agocnahr, it's the average American that is extreme in the opposite direction. You can be extremely healthy following some basic and well tested advices (the HN crowd have contributed to great threads on this) without eating iridescent Himalayan thunder berries juice every full moon like Dorsey could sooner or later recommend.
- cnahr 7y agoYes, of course. I don’t disagree with that at all.
- duxup 7y agoThis doesn't seem all that different than say typical celebrity culture followers (Paltrow falls into that category) who adapt it to a sort of lifestyle. I find it a bit weird as I've not found any folks who I want to emulate what they eat or emulate their lifestyle in general. Granted I'd like to be healthier but that's a thing, not a person.
- peteey 7y agoAre being healthy and not unhealthy the same thing? For example not smoking is "not unhealthy" in the sense it does not hurt your lungs, but I would not consider standing around not smoking as being healthy. Similarly drinking water is not unhealthy compared to the harms of soda and dehydration. The traditional form of healthy is avoiding harm; avoiding less than normal health. Ice baths and fasting seem like an attempt to be above the baseline normal healthy. Its an addition instead of avoiding a subtraction.
- duxup 7y agoI'm not sure I understand, but I'm also not concerned with the definition of what healthy or "not unhealthy" are either way as far as my comment goes.
- wpietri 7y agoThis is really a perfect title. As somebody who grew up in Michigan not far from Battle Creek, I've always been interested the history of wacky self-improvement regimes. (You may remember "The Road to Wellville" as one look at that. [1]) E.g., the inventor of Graham flour believed in all sorts of self-harshness: "Graham created a theology and diet aimed at keeping individuals, families, and society pure and healthy - drinking pure water and eating a vegetarian diet anchored by bread made at home from flour coarsely ground at home so that it remained wholesome and natural, containing no added spices or other 'stimulants' and a rigorous lifestyle that included sleeping on hard beds and avoiding warm baths." [2] I know these things are cyclical, so I expected it to come again. And as a someone who's currently trying eTRF [3] I think there's real value in self-experimentation. But it's really weird to see a full-blown health fad complex turn up in the tech industry where we see ourselves as so very rational. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wellville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wellville [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Graham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Graham [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29754952 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29754952
- komali2 7y agoAh, Battle Creek! Also where the Kellogg brothers got up to their weirdness. John Harvey Kellogg was involved in the weird dietary movements of the era as well. Ran a sort of spa / psych hospital thing, recommended people eat super plain food and chew each bite 45 times, that sort of thing. Tried to make "pre-digested" food which led eventually to Corn Flakes. Lots of weird health anecdotes out of there. Anything from one of the Kellogg brothers leaving the table during a meal and coming back with a pail of his own fresh shit, inviting others to smell it and describing it as "as if it were a warm loaf of bread," to recommending circumcision in young adults as a preventative measure to masturbation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harvey_Kellogg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harvey_Kellogg
- gvand 7y agoThey made a movie out of it: "The Road to Wellville"[1]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111001/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111001/
- jonny_eh 7y agoShows that engineers in Silicon Valley aren't any more skeptical than Hollywood. We may consider ourselves smarter, but we're just as susceptible to bullshit as anyone.
- bazooka_penguin 7y agoAmericans, especially young men, are looking for a leader. We see similar phenomena with politicians and social figures like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, and Musk as mentioned. It's less about the bs and more about the leader, and maybe its just due to visibility but guys definitely tend to congregate around men with strong images or strict rules for living. I have to wonder what their home lives looked like.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mieseratte 7y agoI'd had an engineer recently fracture his foot running in a race. He took a day off, went to a doctor and was told he need to wear a boot, stay off his foot for a while, etc. He proceeds to come into the office, proudly informing everyone how he knows better than the doctor, and that he only needs to rub peppermint oil and wear a compression sock. All while hobbling around the office, clearly in pain. Everyone pleaded with him to heed to the doctor's advice, and I even showed him how I have a messed up arm from a childhood incident that improperly healed and tried explaining the necessity of heeding basic medical guidance. Didn't matter, this engineer "just knows" better than a doctor. This is a weird world.
- gojomo 7y agoThis sounds like a delusional person who happens to be an 'engineer', rather than someone who who is 1st & foremost, or archetypally, an engineer.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
- AimForTheBushes 7y agoCan't read the article without making an account but the first paragraph is a real zinger. >Young men are staggering around, hungry for days. They are throwing themselves into ice baths and cryotherapy pods. There are not enough beds at the silent vegan meditation centers to accommodate them. They need more near-infrared bulbs.
- CharlesColeman 7y agoThe NYT paywall is far more porous than the WSJ one (you might just need to browse incognito), but here's a bypass anyway: http://archive.is/HOP4M http://archive.is/HOP4M
- AimForTheBushes 7y agoThanks! I don't want to pass this one up.
- username223 7y ago> The NYT paywall is far more porous than the WSJ one (you might just need to browse incognito) They started doing something recently that occasionally throws up a popover in incognito mode, so that might not help. I haven't bothered to look into how it works, but clearing cookies or disabling JavaScript still seems to reliably get around the paywall. I really should subscribe, though, since they do a lot of good reporting, and it would be great if more online publications became less dependent upon ads.
- spinach 7y agoReading this comment before the article I thought this was describing some near future dystopia, but it's actually things he does and prescribes, albeit with some hyperbole (I fast, and 'staggering around, hungry for days' ain't it). He gets points for being interesting I suppose.
- thousandautumns 7y agoToo many excellent excerpts in this article. > “It’s such a strange service — who wants to be in the cold? You need to hear about it from someone you trust,” said Michael Garrett, the head of Reboot, a spa that offers cryotherapy around the Bay Area. (Cryotherapy is when you make yourself get cold.)
- mc32 7y agoIt’s sad how people cargo cult imitate the people who inspire them to such a degree it becomes disconnected and degenerate. At least with Steve Jobs there was a certain distance to the admiration. (They admired the accomplishments, rather than his persona —maybe it helped that he was “mercurial” and gruff), but with smooth talkers like Dorsey or Paltrow who look so wholesome, much reason is thrown out the window. At least Paltrow is excusable because she’s just taking advantage of a culture centered on “celebrity”. But the cargo culting of Jack has little excuse.
- wpietri 7y agoI'm sorry to say that Jobs had a lot of people throwing reason out the window as well. Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of the cargo cult around his style and management methods. And when he died, people literally built an altar to him: https://surjgish.com/2011/miscellaneous-fun/dia-de-los-muertos-san-francisco-2011/ https://surjgish.com/2011/miscellaneous-fun/dia-de-los-muert...
- kevinconaway 7y agoI don't believe those are "altars" in the sense that you're implying, as if people are worshipping him. They are ofrendas [0] which are part of the Day of the Dead celebrations. My understanding is that they are usually reserved for loved ones but beloved public figures are included as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofrenda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofrenda
- wpietri 7y agoThey are also called "altares de muertos" in Spanish, and are generally called altars in English. And yes, I think "worship" is not a bad way to describe how people often treat celebrities, Jobs included. We call it "cult of personality" for a reason, after all.
- fwip 7y agoI'm sorry, but Jack Dorsey doesn't look wholesome. True story, I saw a drunk homeless guy at my bus stop this morning and was like "wait, I recognize him..." for about 30 seconds before I realized I was thinking of Jack.
- 0xfeba 7y agoWell, scratch Twitter off the list of places I'd work. What bizarre behaviour.
- duxup 7y agoHumans are weird. Steve Jobs had some weirdness / bad choices. I still wouldn't mind working for them. It's not like you have to do those things or are endorsing them by working there. Weird folks come up with some good ideas sometimes. I think of myself as very boring and normal, I'm not coming up with great ideas...
- Larrikin 7y agoSo long as he isn't forcing his employees to follow that lifestyle, it seems totally fine to me as well. Now WeWork is a place I would never think about working. All catered lunches are vegetarian only and they won't let you expense any meals unless you can prove they were vegetarian. No thank you. https://www.fastcompany.com/90202356/wework-is-a-vegetarian-now https://www.fastcompany.com/90202356/wework-is-a-vegetarian-...
- duxup 7y agoHumm yeah that's a bit different from WeWork there...
- gvand 7y agoFor some time I've searched a way to define him (that didn't include insults) and this one is quite good. Can't understand how people can follow this guy and his trivial/dumb advices. To me, he is just like that person that can't stop blabbering about stuff that has been around for decades but that he has just discovered or one of those people that blindly follow every popular trend (see the ones listed in the article) without even thinking if they really should.
- farquaad 7y agoComparing Jack Dorsey to Gwyneth Paltrow is unfair because she made money by recommending Goop products. Dorsey, on the other hand, is being open about his lifestyle because people ask him about it.
- duxup 7y agoI'm not sure "because people ask him about it" is a very clear line here or means much. People might ask Paltrow too...
- dragonwriter 7y agoThey are being compared as sources of cultural influence, not in terms of their personal degree of responsibility.
- elliekelly 7y agoI'm glad someone said this. As far as I know Dorsey just discusses his love of pseudo-science while Paltrow actively shills it for profit.
- andreilys 7y agoCurious which of Dorsey's practices you consider pseudo-science? Both meditation and fasting have been practiced for thousands of years and have plenty of scientific studies backing up their benefits.
- joelrunyon 7y agoI'm curious how they compare "fasting" - which people have been doing for thousands of years and has traditions in nearly every major historical + religious culture and cost nothing with "jade eggs." Doesn't quite seem equivalent...
- jerf 7y agoI've been doing some fasting lately, and what has deeply shocked me is precisely that I'm not "staggering about hungry for days". It's surprisingly easy once you get over the initial hump. (Note: I'm not saying it's necessarily easy in an absolute sense; I'm saying it's surprising how easy it is. Based on my upbringing I would have guessed after hour 4 I'd be in constant serious hunger, and it's not like that.) I've come to understand that what I interpreted as "hunger" in the past was basically a sugar craving. I don't know how long it would take real hunger to get to that level, but even in a two-day fast I'd only gotten up to more-or-less "I could eat, yeah"... still a long ways from the hunger I've had in the past. (Also, my interest in it has actually been coming from the scientific side, rather than the traditional side or crazywhack theory or any sort of Puritan impulse. I have an autoimmune disease, and there's been a lot of interesting work on those and fasting lately.)
- joelrunyon 7y agoFor a lot of people - what they think is "hunger" is really just "boredom." That - or a carb addiction. Once you start reading about autophagy, fasting doesn't really seem that crazy after all.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoIt's almost as if pre-modernity humans didn't have infinite supplies of hyper-palatable food available 24/7...
- paulcole 7y agoYes, religions have never accepted money for perceived benefits or relied upon physical symbols of faith.
- Jerry2 7y agoLast time I visited my parents I noticed that my mom had Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook on her shelf. She mentioned how pretentious and crazy it was. I flipped through it and I couldn't identify most of the ingredients. Yahoo News calculated it would cost you $300/day to feed your family from her cookbook: https://web.archive.org/web/20130719034903/http://shine.yahoo.com/shine-food/gwyneth-paltrow%E2%80%99s-300-a-day-it%E2%80%99s-all-good-no--it%E2%80%99s-not-meal-plan-211506395.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130719034903/http://shine.yaho... And speaking of Dorsey, this is another crazy article about him: >Why are Silicon Valley billionaires starving themselves? >Dorsey recently appeared on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast to explain his monkish lifestyle in more detail than the 240 character blasts he's known for sending out to the less biologically enlightened universe. He says he eats only one meal a day in the week and doesn't let any foodstuff pass his lips at the weekend. He also starts every day with an ice bath. "Nothing has given me more mental confidence than being able to go straight from room temperature into the cold," he says. https://theweek.com/articles/835226/why-are-silicon-valley-billionaires-starving-themselves https://theweek.com/articles/835226/why-are-silicon-valley-b...
- gipp 7y agoWhile I hate to defend any of paltrow's nonsense, the numbers in that article are bullshit, unless you're using a full can of olive oil spray for an omelet or 3 pounds of flour for a couple muffins.
- golemotron 7y agoCalling Elon Musk hyper-masculine is just funny. Masculine is enough. I suppose it's like how "right" because "far-right."
- pcbro141 7y agoNever understood the disdain for people for trying wacky sounding self-improvement techniques. Just like I wouldn't make fun of the 17% of Americans who take antidepressant pills to feel happier, I'm definitely not going to make fun of people fasting or using sauna to feel happy.
- _bxg1 7y agoI think the disdain comes from seeing marketing outweigh science. What people really disdain are companies that offer snake oil in bad-faith, but they secondarily disdain the people who fall for it. The benefits of antidepressants are backed up with science; the benefits of faraday tents are not. Of course, it's still not really right to disdain people for being overly-optimistic to the point of being gullible.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Veen 7y agoIt’s not the doing of these things by people that’s annoying. It’s the conviction that it’s their duty to make sure that everyone else 1) knows that they’re doing it and 2) is doing it too.
- rchaud 7y agoAntidepressants undergo clinical trials and are prescribed by medical professionals. There is no glamour or publicity in that at all. The comparison would be closer if you were talking about IG fitness influencers selling 'fit tea' and 'all-day energy BBCAs'.
- rhinoceraptor 7y agoI'm sure the fasting market is really going to take off soon, there's a killing to be made selling absolutely nothing.
- rchaud 7y agoThe "fasting" is the "nothing". The "fasting prep" is where the money will be made: - sleep optimization products (white noise machines, blackout curtains, lucid dreaming BS guides) - fasting-friendly recipes and nutritional guides - branded water flasks etc. etc. I've seen college kids on IG sell "workout guides" which are basically a Word doc they converted to PDF. They look like models, so polish and presentation of the final product isn't nearly as important as the polish and presentation the influencer put on themselves before going on camera.
- Notorious_BLT 7y agoI'm firmly of the opinion that a lot of wellness fads spring up fields like tech because its a field where traditional religious views are rarer. People latch on to these new belief systems that are like religion in most ways beside name. They all have a set of rigid rules to follow and rituals to perform, and they all have some type of self-denial or sacrifice as one of their core values. Fasting, temperance, Whole30, gluten free, even modern fitness culture all share elements of denying yourself things you enjoy or putting yourself through unpleasant situations in search of some kind of enlightenment or transcendence. I often see the same people falling into fad after fad, first telling me how EMFs are poison and will be looked at like cigarettes in a decade, and how singing bowls realign my spirit, and trying to insist on the power of visualization can cure chronic pain. I'm curious what it is that causes this.
- abakker 7y agothis is kind of flippant, but I suspect that a big part of it is that remaining rational and skeptical, and trying to be belief-free is exhausting. Rituals - even things like having morning coffee or an after work walk are things that I can say calm me down because they require little mental effort. The more you aim for variety the more effort it takes. Beliefs are like the mental equivalent to acclimating to consistent and unvaried exercise. It stops requiring thought and no longer pushes you to improve. given the breadth of ideas we are always exposed to now, I'd say that these semi-religious tendencies are defense mechanisms.
- ajtulloch 7y agoThis is very close to the argument Alain de Botton makes in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_for_Atheists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_for_Atheists.
- fsagx 7y agoI've also come to the same conclusion. Many people, if they are not attached to a traditional religion, will similarly attach to something else. The human mind may have a god-shaped or religion-shaped hole in it.
- komali2 7y ago> “It’s such a strange service — who wants to be in the cold? You need to hear about it from someone you trust,” said Michael Garrett, the head of Reboot, a spa that offers cryotherapy around the Bay Area. (Cryotherapy is when you make yourself get cold.) Love the author's snark. >He said the cold therapy gives him a high, as blood rushes to his head and chest, and he believes practitioners are addicted. “I’m addicted straight up, it’s a high and I love it,” Mr. Garrett said. I never understood paying for cryotherapy - can't the same be accomplished by a cold shower? I definitely love a good cold shower occasionally, seems cold enough to get the blood rush effect (recommended to me by my cardiologist for this exact reason).
- _bxg1 7y agoI think it's on a whole other level of cold. People have died from cryotherapy. And of course, not-dying is part of the service (hopefully) being provided.
- joelrunyon 7y agoPersonally, you feel cold showers + ice baths you feel wayyyy more physiologically than cryo. Cryo isn't bad if you only have 3 minutes, but if you run the numbers on cryo + add in the tech appeal angle - it's a GREAT business.
- fwip 7y agoWhen you pay for something, you justify to yourself why it's better than a free or cheap alternative. "I'm really glad I paid extra for USB-C, it's so nice to plug it in the right way the first try." I can't remember the exact phrase for this, maybe "cost bias?" Related to, but distinct from, the sunk-cost fallacy.
- sxates 7y agoIf you live in the Bay Area, I think a quick dip in the ocean will do similar things for free.
- RandallBrown 7y agoI think cryotherapy generally provides temperatures well below those found in nature. Whether or not that actually does something beneficial is another question, but it's different than a cold shower. I would like to try it sometime just to see how it feels.
- _bxg1 7y agoAll of these fads center around one fundamental trait: the sense of having control over your life. It doesn't matter whether they work; they sell you on the experience of "I'm successfully doing this hard thing to make myself better". And it just so happens that Silicon Valley is full of people who are addicted to the sensation of improvement. Eating disorders stem from the same psychological mechanism, just a different definition of "improvement".
- michaelchisari 7y agoI also wonder how much of it is people desperately trying to undo the damages of stress. What people might really need is shorter work weeks and more time off (including time away from social media and other non-work related stressors). But that's not something out culture really allows for or encourages. So we look to miracle cures so we can continue feeling productive.
- GuiA 7y agoI’d put it even further than “just” attempting to undo the damages of stress. The local community, where you’d buy your meat from your local butcher that had been in your neighborhood for 15 years, vegetables from the farmers’ market where the produce is all from within a 50 miles radius, where you go to church/temple/etc with the same faces every week, where the teachers and doctors that took care of you now take care of your children, etc, is pretty much dead. What has replaced it? Amazon Prime, precarious contractor jobs, cheap replaceable crap brought in by cargo ship, startups claiming that they are just like “a family”. Of course this leaves a gap in people’s need for a sense of place and community. Of course it’s the perfect opportunity for charlatans who know how to tap into exactly that.
- _bxg1 7y agoI don't really see how saunas, supplements, and fasting stand-in for "a sense of place and community". Maybe meditation retreats, but not most of the things mentioned in the article.
- hammock 7y agoIs Jack Dorsey really "tech's biggest manfluencer"? He didn't invent [ed: start a trend in pop culture] keto, cold showers, intermittent fasting, or meditation. There have been (modern, trend-driven) communities around each of these for 10+ years. And there are loads of people who ALL of these together, just like Jack. I wouldn't be surprised if Dorsey is only 2 degrees removed from Joe Rogan, for example. And in between those 2 degrees there are A LOT of influencers. My own journey started with leangains (IF) leading into slow carb/keto, Starting Strength, a tourist trip to Iceland, some rabbit hole about xenoestrogens, another one about pesticides (actually that one goes back to Ruth Winter), Joe Rogan, Rhonda Patrick, etc. Something about it lends itself to forming strong opinions, but I know my journey is not very unique and many of you reading can probably relate.
- jonny_eh 7y agoInfluencing isn't about inventing, it's about… influencing.
- hammock 7y agoPoint taken, I just don't know anyone who does what they do because of Jack (anecdote of one). They do it because of the same people who probably influenced Jack. Re-reading my comment I'm also using "invent" colloquially to mean, "start a pop culture trend" - not literally.
- Jtsummers 7y agoAn influencer doesn't invent, they promote. They adopt (or appear to adopt) some item, practice, or philosophy and promote it to others (not necessarily explicitly, perhaps just by juxtaposing it with themselves or other artifacts).
- elliekelly 7y ago> They adopt (or appear to adopt) This is a really good point. I wonder how much of the nonsense extolled by Dorsey & Paltrow is something they've tried more than once, if at all.
- bshoemaker 7y agoReminds me of Tom Brady's TB12 idiocy
- nimbius 7y agoAs someone with a firmly blue-collar perspective on the world, these weird sacred cows of the city that people elevate to the status of guru are as mysterious for me as they are asinine. I read up on Gwyneth Paltrow after reading the article, and checked her website where I found idiotic products that made my heart stop with some of their claims. When my heart finally started again I cursed god for letting me live to see things like $300 leather sandals, a $75 candle to "clear my energy" and a $70 crystal drinking straw that radiates heart opening...whatever the hell that means. Now theres a guy telling people how to eat in Silicon Valley, and I cant help but remember how this ended last time. Steve Jobs was essentially a station of the cross at the holy church of silicon valley who could do no wrong, speak no evil, and walked a path of enlightenment akin to a god of knowledge... until he died from trying to cure a common cancer with fruit cups and meditation, instead of medical science. Thats the part we dont seem to talk about very much, and I feel like it would do wonders to scale the wind back from the sails of these quacks. Being directly attributed to the cause of death for a diet related disorder would give these self-proclaimed lords of the human body a chance to reconsider their podcast --or at least hire a lawyer-- before they click upload.
- tomcam 7y agoHang on. I am the last thing from a Jack Dorsey fan. However, I see nowhere in his somewhat grotesque tweets where he tells me what I should do. As near as I can tell, he is simply telling us what he is doing.
- d136o 7y agoThat's part of how this all works, if you wield influence it's not necessarily by way of telling people exactly what they should do, rather you convey your vision and others work to make it happen. And I think that this can yield very effective teams, but it can also result in cult like herd behavior. Two sides of one coin?
- smacktoward 7y agoThe Master doesn't talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say, "Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!" -- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 17, Stephen Mitchell translation (http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=17&a=Stephen+Mitchell http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=17&a=Stephen+Mitchell)
- rubicon33 7y agoEveryone is looking for a shortcut (even billionaires) When it comes to health, there isn't one. The solutions aren't glamorous, or easy, nor do they guarantee you'll live to 100. In general, eat less. Whether it's 1 meal a day, or 20, the amount of food you consume now is probably more than you need. When you do eat, eat more vegetables. Eat less meat. Eat healthy fats, less saturated, and trans fats. Exercise, sometimes vigorously (as age permits). Sleep well. That's it. Lemon salt water and infrared bulbs aren't going to move the needle.
- rchaud 7y agoWhere does Tim Ferriss fit into this culture? Wasn't he a SV god at one point for his 4hr work week and workout books?
- crsv 7y agoTim hasn't made enough money or amassed enough power to be on the NYT scale of comparison. He's similar in terms of insanity but more niche in his influence. Similar to Joe Rogan (though less entertaining by an order of magnitude, at least imho).
- atemerev 7y agoDrugs are hell of a thing.
- jeanlucas 7y agoOkay, that headline made me laugh out loud.
- crsv 7y agoI really did enjoy this framing of Jack Dorsey as a foil for Elon Musk (I mean I didn't think of this prior to the article, but it was an entertaining comparison). I think for the spectacle of it all, Elon really does need some sort of rival that's not the SEC, but a man with a face and a name and a personality and to paint it as Jack Dorsey is just wonderfully entertaining as an idea, despite being from a practical standpoint pretty irrelevant.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- XaoDaoCaoCao 7y agoFasting, cold showers, and meditation? Can't read the full article but remember another article painting Dorsey as "extreme". But to be honest, it's a reasonable reaction to stimuli that are unique to human history. The 24 hour propoganda news cycle, density with increased stressors, cognitive fragmentatiom due to the number of distractions, and an absolutely horrible dietary culture that will lead us to squandering trillions on treating entirely preventable diseases. Not merely monetarily but literally reducing the cognitive potential of entire populations! I don't see the quackery in adopting working strategies against these challenges. Note, working strategies. Personally implementing the above 3 along with with weightlifting has been like feeling a cold mountain breeze after living in a swamp. Nietzsche's remarks, on how the priests of the world have ignored and (gravely) trivialized the 3 things that give arise to daily moral/cognitive judgement: Climate, Diet, and Habit, have been in my mind years after reading them. And their validity seems to flower the more experience life throws.
- andreilys 7y agoAbsolutely. I think a lot of people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. The infrared bulbs may be gimmicky but the rest of his routine seems pretty standard stuff that if more people adopted would lead to an increase in their quality of life.
- stcredzero 7y agoAs Twitter’s head, he spends his days navigating issues around free speech for white supremacists, online abuse and the spread of terrorist propaganda The phrasing seems designed to imply that Free Speech is only for bad people and terrorist propaganda. The reason why Free Speech is a fundamental human right, is that it keeps powerful people and authorities from squashing dissent. We can't just have "Free Speech, so long as we like it and the speaker," precisely because biased parties can then smear their opponents to squash their speech. (Witness the behavior of the SPLC of recent years. Witness the false smearing of Ben Shapiro as a "white supremacist.") This does mean that we need to let bad people speak as well. No one can be allowed to arbitrate Free Speech. Not only the government, but also powerful people, press conglomerates, and private organizations. This is precisely why the ACLU in the 20th century often defended the right of (the same) bad people to speak. Because what must be defended is the right of everyone to speak.
- sparkpy724 7y agoI couldn't agree more. I'm surprised you haven't been downvote brigaded though. Judging by many threads I've seen on HN most(many?) SV types tend to disagree with you. Googlers especially seem to favor the opposite point of view. Not to harp on this specific point but SJW types unironically calling Ben Shapiro, a yarmulke wearing Orthodox Jew and someone I disagree vehemently with on most topics, a Nazi is incredibly prevalent on Twitter and Reddit and totally bewildering to me. Edit: Thank you to the downvoters for proving my point lol.
- CM30 7y agoAgreed. Unfortunately, it seems freedom of speech has become one of those things a disturbing number of people only seem to see the negative side of. In a certain sense, it's in the same quagmire as capitalism, IP laws, and to some extent privacy; easy to see the negatives and abuses in, but also something that helps or protects everyone else too.
- gambler 7y agoThis is a cheap hit piece and part of the ongoing NYTs campaign against social media. I am saying this as someone who hates Twitter and thinks Dosey is either a mega-hypocrite or a victim of his own brainwashing. (Talking about his views on human communication here. I utterly don't care what kinds of saunas he uses.) And "manfluencer"? Really, this is New York Times now? Rhetorical question. Of course it is.
- likeaj6 7y agoAs someone working on making these health & wellness strategies and protocols more data-driven and evidence based through more structured experiments (see https://mementolabs.io https://mementolabs.io), I'm very much pro on pushing for more people trying these "fringe" strategies in a more informed manner, so take my following thoughts with a grain of salt: - Many of our current, preexisting beliefs about food and nutrition are proving to be extremely flawed and contrived, having essentially been pushed by big-food to drive more consumption of sugar and carbs in our meals as opposed to actually being research-based (just look at the USDA Food pyramid, that puts carbs, almost all simple, as a staple). The emerging research around restricted eating, fasting, and autophagy (research that won a Nobel Prize in 2016) is extremely promising albeit still developing. - There's real value to proper self-experimentation for helping you discover and build better individual habits and determining what uniquely works for improving your health and wellness, as well as challenge your thinking on your existing beliefs, particularly around nutrition & dieting that tend to be ingrained in you during development. [See gwern's self experiments for some interesting ones](https://gwern.net https://gwern.net). - IMO, the core issue at the root of this rise of the "cult-like influencer" is a lack of accessible academic research (i.e the average person will opt to read blogs over a long, hugely technical research paper) which creates more and more noise and proliferation of misinformation and conflicting health advice.
- NerdyDrone 7y agoI think there's a lot of value of curating the best of "Biohacking" for average people. Then also being data-driven in determining if those hacks are actually improving your sleep, weight or productivity. I also agree there are too many "gurus" out there, and not enough evidence-based places like www.examine.com
- padobson 7y agoSome of this stuff definitely seems weird to me, but at the same time I think the weird stuff is built on true stuff. I'm definitely skeptical of people selling home designed cryochambers, but cold stress seems to have real benefits[0], and I've found that a cold shower or a cold jog (15-30 degrees F) seems to have the benefits described by the adherents. Similarly, I doubt I'll ever go on any sort of meditation retreat, but I really enjoy using Headspace[1] and I find it helps me focus when I'm otherwise scatterbrained. Finally, intermittent fasting seems to get a lot of flack for being a veiled eating disorder, but so far as I can tell, putting your body in ketosis through calorie restriction is the only way to reduce body fat. You can cook three low-calorie meals everyday, but that's time consuming and expensive and terribly inconvenient for family meal planning. It's much easier to eat one normal-sized meal and skip the extra meal planning, grocery shopping and preparation required to eat healthy. So have I drank the Kool-Aid on this stuff? Maybe. But at this point I'd need more evidence to push me off of it, because the evidence that pushed me on to it has been validated by my own results. [0]https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/cold-stress-hormesis https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/cold-stress-hormesis [1]https://www.headspace.com/ https://www.headspace.com/
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y agoI've been ending my showers with cold, basically washing off a lot of the excess heat from the previously hot shower. It honestly feels pretty good & def makes me happier about stepping out of the shower.
- finkin1 7y agoI personally find this to be a pretty ridiculous comparison. Paltrow runs a massive organization that makes absurd claims about products she sells and she profits significantly from making these unscientific claims. Dorsey isn't doing any of this. All he does is have his personal way of living in the world (not that I personally agree with a lot of the things he does). He doesn't sell anything related to his silly behaviors. He doesn't profit from any of his silly behaviors. He's just sharing how he personally lives in the world with other people. To me, this is VERY different than what Paltrow is doing and the comparison is not a good one.
- tvanantwerp 7y agoI feel dumber for having read this article. The journalist is just pointing their finger and shouting, "Hey everybody, look at this weirdo! He does things we don't do--isn't that so WEIRD?!" I lost interest in that kind of "information" after middle school.
- markhalonen 7y agoI think this is a story submitted by a PR firm on behalf of HVMN. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html changed how I view the "news"...
- iheartpotatoes 7y agoIf I was worth almost $100,000,000,000 dollars I'd be batshit insane and think the world revolved around me, too.
- martythemaniak 7y agoHacker News is rapidly becoming the National Enquirer for Silicon Valley. """ Hacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. """ I guess our collective intellectual curiosity now amounts to shitting on Dorsey's pretty unremarkable diet.
- moretai 7y agoHe’s rich stop talking about him
- luord 7y ago> manfluencer Was unsure if the article would have any substance after that and, indeed, no substance.