why does time feel to pass so quickly?

 why does time feel to pass so quickly? between 20 and 36, nothing has changed. we need yo make life choices to give us the same sense of progression we had growing up.

Difference between left and right

 (1) Equality vs. Liberty - the more free people are the more inequality there will be. the more freedom you have to work Raj, the greater the inequality at the office as you set yourself apart. When Charlie suppresses your project, he is ensuring equality.

(2) Free Speech vs. Censorship: The left believes some speech should be censored. Some believe some words are objectively bad or do greater harm for the community. The right believes there are no ethics, and thus rights, without free speech. Rights need defending and people to take responsibility which they can't do without free speech. Also hate speech is arbitrary.

(3) Moral Responsibility: The left hold institutions responsible whereas the right holds individuals responsible. Bad stuff comes from corrupted humans whereas the right believe bad stuff comes from human. These stem from differences in human nature.

(4) Feelings are the source of ethics vs God: the left believes people are good so their feels are a great guide of ethics

(5) Rights come from the government: the left believes rights are whatever the people in power or the state say it is whereas the right believes rights come from God or a greater power

(6) The economic goals of society. The left believes in economic equality whereas the right believes in economic prosperity.

(7) Wealth distribution: the left wants to redistrute wealth whereas the right wants to create more

(8) the role of governance: the left believes the gov't ensures equality whereas the right believes the gov't ensures liberty

(9) Who takes care of the family, you and community: the left believes it should be state to take care of humans by ensuring equality. the right believes the individual takes care of ourselves.

(10) Size of government: the left wants a big government and the right believes in small government and big individual

(11) Authority in a child's life: the left believes the state (e.g. the education system) is the primary authority whereas the right believes the the parent is the primary authority

(12) the ideal family: the left believes the ideal family is any group of loving individuals whereas the right believes in the nuclear family. Implicitly the right believes in ideals.

(13) primary categories of human: the left believes the major division between humans is by power reduced to gender, race and class. the right believes in categorizing by moral beliefs.

(14) gender/sex: the left believes gender is a societal construct whereas the right believes sex is in nature

(15) the most important trait for children: the left believes in cultivating self-esteem whereas the right believes in cultivating discipline.

(16) good and evil: the left believes in moral relativism whereas the conservatives believes in moral absolutes

(17) the moral status of America: the left believes America is not a net gain to humanity whereas the right believes America is obviously a positive gain for the world

Economic growth is required for sustainability

There are 2 methods to grow the economy: (1) increase resource consumption or (2) produce more benefits per unit of resource consumption (i.e., increase productivity)

A lot of people think producing oil & gas grows the economy exclusively by method (1). It's easy to see how they come to this belief: we take barrels out of the ground, sell them on the market and count the sale price towards GDP. The more barrels we take our of the ground, the more we grow GDP.

However, if we consider what the world would be like without oil & gas production, it's clear that producing oil & gas grows the economy primarily by method (2). If the world stopped producing oil & gas in the world, the vast majority of the world would clear cut forest to heat our homes, cook our food and grow food without the help of fertilizer which is what we did for thousands of years. So oil and gas production grows the economy by producing 1000s of times more energy per unit of land than we would without it.

If oil and gas workers didn't go to work everyday, there's no way we would be able to set aside vast tracts of land for recreation because we'd have to clear cut and farm it to avoid famine. So contrary to popular belief, oil & gas production is not detrimental but essential to environmental conservation.

Obviously, oil & gas production is not harmless but it's far better than the alternative and it also provides society with the wealth it need to feed the minds that will invent and discover even better energy sources. Maybe we could have stable nuclear fusion powering our society in 50 years if we had 500 million more healthy and educated humans contributing the economy instead of starving to death.

So economic growth is NOT about increasing consumption for the sake of consumption. Economic growth is about producing the means for us to feed people, raise families, conserve nature, explore space, create art, build cathedrals, solve math problems, cure disease and essentially reach potential as individuals and a society. GDP stands for gross domestic "product".

Corporate Games

Life is too complicated for humans to understand in full so we play games in hopes that it'll lead to good outcomes. Every company has a game and we should all be very interested in figuring out that the rules are. Rules of the game outline how a player wins or loses, gains points and how they can be disqualified from the game. How is it possible to be playing a game without being aware of it? It's not. If you're not playing the game you are part of it as an NPC.

Communism and Capitalism are games.

What is the Capitalism game? People organize themselves into hierarchies governed by contracts with aim of producing some good or service for the sake of generating as much profit as possible (max profit = PQ - c). A successful firm will develop a game for its participants to play that generates profit. There might be a game that serve the firm better but the firm knows the current game has worked in the past. Firms may fail when the game no longer generates the desired benefits. A firm must evolve the game it plays if it wants to continue to succeed over the long term. We all live longer, eat better and are generally happier when we play the Capitalism game. There's another game, Communism, that can also be played. Taking it too seriously leads to tyranny, mass starvation and arbitrary imprisonment.

Firms within the same industry play similar games.So what is the finance game? Small aspects of finance require high level math and deep familiarly with thousands of financial products and regulations but the majority of the money in finance is in safest and most boring versions of the following: stocks, options, bonds and mutual funds. Unlike in manufacturing, revenue are not unlocked by overcoming design, engineering and logistical obstacles. The most common obstacles in finance are take form of prisoner's dilemma game series. Both sides agree to a board set of actions and outcomes but the details are left vague to allow all parties to fulfill their commitments to the best of their ability - however that also means that both sides are left vulnerable to the quirks, incompetence and character flaws of the other once a deal is signed. If both sides cooperate in good faith, the deal is done and everyone splits the benefits. If either side shirks for any reason, the other side will lose trust and shirk as well. Both side will then be locked in a series of low benefit uncooperative equilibriums.

The game is getting projects done and the most important factor for getting projects done is trust because it's the only way to obtain true competency when everyone has large incentives to lie. You need to have trust in-order to procure the project, you need trust among the working teams in-order to execute the project and you trust to get the advice needed to prevent a disaster.

So networking is about getting the relationships and competencies you need to get shit done. It's also about advertising your competencies and willingness to form relationships to others. A firm with a well networked and competent workforce can execute on a lot of deals and make a ton of money. MS expands its network it gets to make more deals and make more money.

So interesting.

Topic: Fasting is the Obvious Answer to Obesity

The most obvious solution to losing weight is to stop eating and obesity is one of the most deadly diseases. Yet so few people would ever consider fasting for losing weight. People across all cultures fear not eating which is very odd humans evolved to survive without regular access to food and fasting is recommended by the all the great world religions. Fasting is easy. Literally anyone obese can do it and it does not require any medication, trainers, restriction of activities, shopping, cooking and cleaning. To the contrary, fasting will save time and money. 

Humans are built to fast, they’ve chosen fating to make themselves healthier for thousands of years and they will save substantial amounts of time and money. So it’s very odd that we have come to fear it when it’s needed more than ever. 

On one hand it’s obvious how fasting works. A person doesn’t consume any calories, their body burns fat which leads to weight loss. But why doesn’t consuming less calories work? The same logic applies but millions of earnest people have failed to lose weight using that strategy. The devil is in the details. Fasting used to be imposed on humans by nature. Vegetables and fruit aren’t always available in all places and successful hunts are sporadic by nature. We are adapted for feast and famine cycles. It’s why we so easily put on fat. 

The human hormone insulin drives fat storage. High insulin levels stores fat and blocks the conversion of fat stores to energy. This fact apparent when insulin is artificially increased in diabetics and fat storage increases even under the most restrictive of diets. The relationship is so tight, fat accumulation appears right in the area where insulin is injected. When humans stop eating for a couple days and they body has figured out it’s not eating anymore, insulin levels drop and it stays low. The body stops storing fat and actively converts fat into ketones and glucose. Essentially, human fat stores are turned into water and carbon dioxide. When it comes to weight loss, that’s it. Reducing calories does not work because insulin levels stay high when we eat numerous small meals. High insulin levels blocks the body’s access to fat - even when there’s limited caloric intake to support regular activities. So when a person is on reduced calorie diet, they do not have access to calories in their fat stores. Their metabolism adapts by ramping down and decreasing the amount of energy available for daily activity. The dieter becomes tired and irritable. They may still lose weight but at a much slower rate than simply by fasting and a higher proportion will come from the break down of muscle. 

Fasting, on the other hand, opens up vast caloric reserves for the body to use. Metabolism will remain high, facilitating weight loss and the faster will experience only limited changes in their mood. Their daily activity will not be impacted. The brain prefers ketones as an energy source and the liver is able to easily convert ketones to glucose for muscles. Hunger is also not a problem because the hunger hormone ghrelin also drops and stays low when fasting whereas it stays high on a calorie deficit and the dieter lives daily starvation. 

Autophagy is another benefit of fasting. The energy expended in digestive can be redirected towards cellular repair. When insulin declines, glucagon increase and stimulates autophagic processes. At the same time, fasting also increases growth hormone which stimulates the creation of new cells. 

So fasting and calorie deficit dieting seem like they should be equally effective until we look at what is happening at the hormonal level inside the human body. When we take into account hormones, fasting is vastly superior to dieting. 

The hardest thing about fasting is the social alienation. Fasting was societally regulated in religious societies. In Christian societies, intermittent fasting was required on for the 40 days of Lent, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday for most denominations. Muslins fast during Ramadan and Buddhist fast during periods of extended mediation. Fasts were balanced by societal feasts. Everyone fasted and feasted at the same time.  

In modern life, there are only feasting seasons like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fasting is done alone and the practice itself comes off as judgemental and/or abhorrent. Fasting also opens up a lot of time and humans like to think about food when they are bored, whether or not they are fasting, but it makes fasting seem extra difficult. Ideally, fasting takes place during a busy time during the year when it is easy to forget to eat. Fasting should also be balanced with feasting to rejuvenate social relationships, replenish exotic nutrients and build new cells. 

Topic: Is self-esteem a valid psychological concept?

Topic: Is self-esteem a valid psychological concept?

Self-esteem is fake news. Meta analysis of over 10,000 studies have only found weak evidence that higher levels of self-esteem result in better life outcomes like teen pregnancy, substance abuse or delinquent behaviour This means that educators have wasted an enormous amount of time and resources over the last 30 years developing self-esteem. The losses are not limited to the education system. Generations of students will continue to waste an order of magnitude more time and resources seeking self-esteem for no benefit throughout their life. The bleeding could have been stopped if psychologists, educators and promoters would have waited for more evidence and quickly dropped the concept when it was clear it wasn’t objectively valid. 

“The associations between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant, or absent. The nonrelationship holds between self-esteem and teenage pregnancy, self-esteem and child abuse, self-esteem and most cases of alcohol and drug abuse. . . . If the association between self-esteem and behavior is so often reported to be weak, even less can be said for the causal relationship between the two.” (https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/truth-self-esteem)

Was self-esteem ever a valid psychological concept? Validity is a binary evaluation. A concept is either valid or it’s not at any moment in time. A concept can be valid at one point in time and invalid at another. From an objective point of view, if a concept is found to be longer valid, it was never valid to begin with however. This means that most valid concepts that we have today, will likely be shown to be invalid later which means that most concepts we have today are likely to be invalid. That the sun revolves around the Earth was always an invalid concept. However, it was subjectively valid a thousand years ago. So what do we mean when we say a concept is valid? A psychological concept (or model) is objectively valid if when all humans across all time and space assume it true they are are able to successfully predict and manipulate the external world. A psychological concept (or model) is subjectively valid if when individual humans it is true they are able to thrive. 

Self-esteem failed on both counts. It neither led to scientists being able to predict outcomes nor have individuals who believed in self-esteem flourished. It may have been once subjectively valid. If life is terrible enough, applying methods to develop self-esteem will not do much more harm and some of the methods might coincidently be very similar to methods recommended by a better concept. So some people starting a certain place will flourish and concept will be subjectively valid for this people for a time. A concept stops being subjectively valid when the subject becomes aware of another concept, that when assumed true, would lead to continued and greater flourishing - and it will be closer to an objectively valid concept. 

Is there concept that is more subjectively valid and more likely to be objectively valid? The Big 5 personality model which has stronger evidence behind its predictions and is theoretically more sound. Its current objective validity means that individuals aware of the model are more likely to flourish due to the principle that accurate and precise perception of the external world will better empower a conscious mind to replicate itself. At least - that has been my experience. 

So self-esteem is no longer a valid psychological concept for most people because its supporting evidence is weak and they are aware of the Big 5 model of personality. It’s an interesting conclusion that bad ideas can be subjectively valid for people unaware of better ideas which means the point of education is to offer concepts that the educators finds valid and persuade the student to find those concepts valid as well so that they can flourish - and their flourishing is our flourishing.