andrewla

53 ms·

811.
by andrewla 4y ago
I acknowledge my hyperbole. My point is just that while you try to convince a patient that they need to improve their willpower, they are suffering from the effects of obesity, which has innumerable other comorbidities. Every day that they
812.
by andrewla 4y ago
Okay -- what is your idea for how to get people to practice moderation and self-discipline? I don't think anyone would disagree that these would be effective if they were accessible, but practically speaking, telling people that they n
813.
by andrewla 4y ago
There may be some very small subset of obese people who religiously count calories and check nutrition labels whose lives would be improved by this advice, but I don't feel like I'm going out on a limb when I say that the overwhel
814.
by andrewla 4y ago
This is similar to condoms -- condoms are nearly 100% effective in preventing pregnancy. But as a method of birth control (that is, as a medical intervention), they are only 80% effective in preventing pregnancy because people don't al
815.
by andrewla 4y ago
> Unintuitive till you move your hand from here to there Continuity does not require the notion of a continuum. There need not be a "minimum length" even in a non-continuum approach. The rational numbers are perfectly fine for
816.
by andrewla 4y ago
First off, even assuming that your thesis is correct, are overweight people expected to just wait until we can fix our entire food system? Secondly, while I think it is unquestionably true that the composition of our diet has a significant
817.
Why aren’t medical breakthroughs in obesity a bigger deal?(grid.news)
31 points by andrewla 4y ago|113 comments
818.
by andrewla 4y ago
There are a lot of important ongoing developments in obesity research. At the core, diet (mostly) and exercise (somewhat) are voluntary steps that you can take that will mechanically, thermodynamically, guarantee that you lose weight. But b
819.
by andrewla 4y ago
The mathematical notion of "discrete" does not require that there be big gaps, or that there be fundamental limits to precision. The rationals are discrete (i.e. they are countable and have measure zero) but they are "continu
820.
by andrewla 4y ago
If by "discrete" you mean rejecting the continuum, then I don't think it's as scary as it sounds. The rationals do not form a continuum, but they are "effectively" continuous -- between any two of them there i
821.
by andrewla 4y ago
This comment is great because it is a Rorschach test, and you can see it in the replies. Some people read this as "conspiracy theorists will continue to believe despite being proven wrong" and some read it as "conspiracy skep
822.
by andrewla 4y ago
At one point I spent some time in a very similar space, modelling how you would make a fair 4-sided or 5-sided die, by varying the depth of a d6 and appropriately labeling the faces. You would end up with 2 square faces and 4 rectangular fa
823.
by andrewla 4y ago
That's the problem! I can't tell you what is difficult because it seems so incredibly obvious to me now. When I was ~12, I had a lot of trouble with it, and the only thing I remember from those times is various attempts to figure
824.
by andrewla 4y ago
Pointers are by far the most insidious thing about C. The problem is that nobody who groks pointers can understand why they had trouble understanding them in the first place. Once you understand, it seems so obvious that you cannot imagine
825.
by andrewla 4y ago
Well, obviously don't get me started on psychological classification and diagnostic criteria. Those only work because a trained practicing psychologist can tell the difference between the ordinary form and the pathological form of thos
826.
by andrewla 4y ago
The thing about operational usage is that they don't need a definition, nor do they purport to be absolute, but strictly context-dependent. That's what operational means in this context. For a Christian worried about a congregant
827.
by andrewla 4y ago
Well, I wouldn't say "mired", but I do agree that I'm the only one directly addressing the distinction between substance and semantics. I do not agree about the list. That list is there to win semantic arguments about wh
828.
by andrewla 4y ago
So you list a bunch of bad things that NXIVM did. How does labeling it a "cult" add or detract from that list of bad things? Sure, it did bad things. If a member were a Christian, did it force them to denounce God or renounce thei
829.
by andrewla 4y ago
No, define away! Descriptivism is a wonderful way to examine artifacts of human activity. But be wary of prescriptivism -- because you have defined a category does not mean you have provided a test for membership, especially if there are co
830.
by andrewla 4y ago
Exactly this! The attempt to reduce "cult" to a strict rule-based definition means you can be endlessly mired in semantic debate rather than actually address the operational parameters that make an organization or association unat
831.
by andrewla 4y ago
> Also, not all cults are religious Now we're well into the map vs territory. In the attempt to define a cult (something which we intuit) we end up fixated on the boundary between what is a cult and what is not a cult, and try to cr
832.
by andrewla 4y ago
Here #2 is really the key, together with making sure that the exchange actually allows you to withdraw your money in a timely fashion (which not all of them do). Given that, even #1 is of marginal importance.
833.
by andrewla 4y ago
It was The Dead Past [1] The idea of it was that it was known that the technology existed, but the government went to great lengths to imply that it could only see into the far distant past. The reality was it could only see 20 years back o
834.
by andrewla 4y ago
Strongly agree -- this is where tabs as artifacts becomes useful. I don't necessarily feel that we need to eliminate tabs in favor of "virtual" tabs but that we can contain the "tab explosion" problem. One thing I d
835.
by andrewla 4y ago
I've increasingly found that my use of tabs is closely related to the fact that back/forward navigation is unworkable in many cases. The most typical case is that I am looking at a list of things, and I want to click on a result b
836.
by andrewla 4y ago
Don't play this game! All you're doing to creating free training data for the next generation of adversarial face generation.
837.
by andrewla 4y ago
This is exactly what the article seems to be talking about -- how to identify the emergence of leadership where no formal hierarchy exists, and how to coach those individuals to find leaders.
838.
by andrewla 4y ago
I don't think this was the main thrust of the article. The "leaderless team" concept was used to identify individuals within that group that were well-suited to leadership, specifically by identifying (and coaching) those ind
839.
by andrewla 4y ago
The OP specifically mentioned using z-lib to get electronic copies of the books. I agree that physically picking up the book is a satisfying experience; I find myself often browsing in physical bookstores or libraries in order to find mater
840.
by andrewla 4y ago
Although I have grown increasingly frustrated with the Kindle ecosystem, I don't think this is a fair complaint. Amazon lets you download a sample of any book in their library, which is usually pretty substantial -- can be multiple cha

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