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.
I actually just read The Road to Wellville for the first time a couple weeks ago, and was struck by how much it reminded me of the modern-day startup scene. A profusion of tiny health-food companies, all making extravagant claims and so desperate to raise money that they hawk shares to travelers getting off at the train station. All these companies crowding into tiny Battle Creek, not so much because there was any practical reason for them to be there as because Battle Creek is where health-food companies are supposed to be. A "move fast and break things" attitude that leads to patients getting killed by such "treatments" as bathing in pools of electrified water and prolonged exposure to radium.
The book was written a quarter of a century ago, so it's not like this is a parallel T.C. Boyle explicitly set out to draw. It's just striking how these patterns seem to repeat themselves.
Having been around hospitals a bit, I have a feeling some percentage of the population just don't want to deal with the medical establishment. Whether it's because of bad experiences from the past or what their families have been through or just pure fear of treatment, they just look for answers else where.
Ah, 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.
It's not a coincidence that Graham and Kelloggs were both doing weird dietary stuff in Battle Creek. The Seventh Day Adventist Church was - and to an extent still is - a major presence in Battle Creek. They place a great deal of emphasis on health in general and diet in particular. I believe all of those men were Adventists.
Can an outsider move into a place like that or anywhere that is heavily influenced by a cult like figure or mentality and avoid being forced into their community/cult?
Maybe not "perfect." I don't think Gwyneth Paltrow is a fascist sympathizer. At the very least, she hasn't been as spectacularly complicit in providing a safe harbor for white supremacists as Dorsey.
I'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.
In my religious studies classes there was a point made about separating "high religion" and "low religion." High religion refers to the abstract, philosophical components of a religion: like the belief in a benevolent creator who became man. Low religion refers to the rituals and superstitions of the religion: like going to Church every Sunday, taking communion, etc. All religions consist of a both pieces, and it often makes sense to consider them separately. European pagan superstitions persisted for centuries after the population had converted to Christianity, for example. I think you could argue what you're describing are examples of the creation or transfer of low religion into atheism and agnosticism.
this 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.
I'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.
Is 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.
An 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).
Point 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.
Some 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.
I'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.
As someone working on making these health & wellness strategies and protocols more data-driven and evidence based through more structured experiments (see 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).
- 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.
I 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
I 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.
All 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".
I 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.
I’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.
> 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.
Long ago, I read this quip: (paraphrased) "Factory farming took a working integrated solution (use livestock waste to fertilize crops on the same diversified farm) and neatly turned it into two problems (where to dump the concentrated livestock waste from one specialized farm, and where to find fertilizer for the crops of another differently specialized farm)."
Seems like a lot of modern "solutions" have the same character.
I 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.
You buy the supplements, get on the company’s mailing lists, go to the lectures, join Facebook groups with people following the same thing to share experiences, attend meetups, etc. Of course it’s a social, shared experience first and foremost.
Don't be needlessly incendiary. Whether or not it's an eating disorder is contextual. It's not just about not eating food for a while; it's about things like the presence or absence of an addictive pattern, and the benefits or detriments to a person's physical and spiritual well-being. I would say in the context of the article, it probably leans towards eating disorder.
I'm not an expert on eating disorders, so I will have to give you the benefit of the doubt. In my mind, I always put it in the context of something like anorexia or bulimia which has obvious negative physical and psychological effects.
However, I fail to see how daily intermittent fasting can be placed in the same category, maybe you can give me some more context here?
For 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.
I'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."
I'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.)
> “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).
I 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.
When 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.
I 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.
Fasting, 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.
Absolutely. 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.
It’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.
I'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-muert...
I 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.
They 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.
I'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.
Comparing 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.
Never 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.
I 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.
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.
It’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.
Fair point! But imagine the reaction if Dorsey was stocking Twitter lunch rooms with anti-depressant pez dispensers. There's a difference between personal choice and advocacy.
Everyone 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.
Last 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:
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.
While 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.
I 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.
This 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.
This 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.
Are 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.
So 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.
I 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.
Hacker 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.
Tim 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).
Shows 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.
I'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.
Its so common for engineers to have excessive confidence in their opinions about subjects far beyond their areas of competence that there's a term for it: engineer's disease (or engineer's syndrome).
This is true for the general population though. The only reason why the term exists is because other engineers expect it not to apply to engineers. Really the concept says more about us and our expectations of educated engineers rather than the engineers with bad opinions.
You could even go so far as to say those wielding the term also fall under the term: outside of your expertise, you're assuming engineers shouldn't have bad opinions. There's evidence abound that this is wrong - engineers can have bad opinions just like the general population. Yet some still insist on calling it out as "special" despite presenting no studies showing they're more likely to have these bad opinions.
Not really. Engineer's disease is specific to engineers, because at its core is the implicit belief that engineering (and science/math) is the ur-discipline whose mindset and techniques are universally applicable to all problems. That often comes with the attitude that other mindsets and techniques are inferior (e.g. those from the humanities in particular) and/or that engineers are more competent and can easily master needed parts of other disciplines when they choose (and thus the practitioners of those disciplines have little authority).
You might find this study interesting[1]. The paper sensationalizes it a bit IMO by classifying people as "bullshitters" when it seems to me more like "overconfidence" in their knowledge. Quality of the study/headline aside, I do wonder if there's a selection bias for knowledge overconfidence in engineering as parent comment suggests. I would imagine people who make good engineers are the type who aren't intimidated by "knowledge gaps" and they assume (rightly or wrongly) that they'll be able to figure out a solution even where they have little or no expertise.
I'd need to see some rigorous comparisons to other professions to conclude it's "so common".
The mere act of naming an "engineer's syndrome" could arise from the fact it's peculiarly remarkable against type, or satisfying to resentful observers - rather than actually common. And, once named, such a designation would tend to collect confirmation-bias-feeding anecdotal examples.
I've encountered cranks from every walk of life. I see more engineer cranks, too, but that's simply because professionally, I interact with more engineers than, say, hairstylists or bricklayers or actresses. And have you ever let a taxi/uber driver just expound on their confidently-expressed theories-of-the-world?
I've met a number of very smart engineers who believe that because they can think through engineering problems rationally and solve hard challenges, that they can apply that skill to biomedical / sociological / other complex problems (and that the experts in that field are less intelligent than they are). The problem is when they lack the academic background and rely on what they already believe to be true, regardless of whether it's factual.
But without a comparison to the base rate of "off their rockers when it comes to alt medicine" in the general population, that 'many' doesn't mean much. And alternative medicine is very very popular across many populations!
Sounds like this person confused advice for a sprain with his fracture. In case of a sprain (ligament injury), the standard of care has changed over the years: whereas the advice was to immobilize the injury and rest, now it is to start using it again as soon as possible. Of course, I’m not a doctor and there might be all sorts of exceptions to this.
A fracture is totally different and needs different care.
In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.
Judging by HN comments, engineers in Silicon Valley seem to be the kind of people who need infinite amount of proof that meditation works, but readily believe in the Singularity. This is skepticism-as-a-brand, where your vocabulary and the sense of belonging to some intellectual elite outweigh all other considerations.
Selectively enforced skepticism is not real skepticism.
Is any one group particularly skeptical in the greater scheme of things? Even in various scientific fields you see people believing insane things about subjects they're not experts in. Like say, believing anti vax theories, creationism/intelligent design, etc.
Two of the smartest semiconductor process (physics) engineers I met in my 30 year career were both Evangelicals who were preparing for the rapture. Let that sink in.
Americans, 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.
Read the article and ask yourself which one of the things described would seem out of place in one of those sad gossip magazines targeting low-income housewives.
E.g. water mixed with Himalayan salt and lemon in the morning.
And since I'm mentioning it, Himalayan salt is not better than normal salt. It could also contain more contaminants and it has no iodine (that could not be desirable in some countries).
Himalayan salt contains iron, calcium, iron, and magnesium.
Lemons contain vitamin C, potassium, fiber, etc.
If you are fasting, it may be a good idea to get those electrolytes. Even if not, this seems like a healthy drink; certainly better what I people see drinking at my office.
People might not want to macro dose iodine, so that rules out table salt.
And as far as taste go, I can just taste the lack of iodine.
If I had to recommend an alternative, for those that are not doing IF, eat a kiwi (double the amount of vitamin c, way more fibres) and some nuts (magnesium and potassium).
“For 10 days a year, he sits in silence at a meditation retreat. Before getting dressed each morning, he experiments with using his home infrared sauna and then an ice bath, sometimes cycling through both several times before he leaves home.”
Salty lemon water? Why would that be lavaging? Perhaps if the concentration is extreme. Otherwise I doubt it would have more of that effect than coffee.
I dunno about this. Many medical professionals encourage heart and high blood pressure patient to drastically limit salt intake because salt causes you to retain water.
What does this mixture of himalayan salt and lemon do that causes the diuretic effect?
I don't think that there is disagreement on the existence of healthy routines. But we should be skeptical of the benefit of "Himalayan salt" and equivalents. Have you tried switching the salt to just common salt in a blind experiment? Have you tried only lemon water? Himalayan salt is a luxury, and there is not particular reason to believe that it does anything more than a placebo.
I drink just water in the morning and I am out to empty my bowels right after. I don't think that has much to do with Himalayan salt.
As 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.
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.
Can'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.
Reading 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.
> “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.)
> 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.
I can read it just fine, without an account. Maybe it's because I have JavaScript disabled (via NoScript)? If so, someone else's comment here that the paywall is porous is quite true.
As 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.
Hang 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.
That'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?
I agree. Which points to a similar problem with this article. Dorsey suggests saunas, and Bowles takes it further, talking about "Faraday Saunas", making Dorsey seem more asinine when Dorsey never mentioned that in the first place.
Battle Creek, Michigan is to the cereal industry as Detroit is to cars. Both Post and Kellogg were started there.
Cereal was originally pitched as health food, something that was good for you.
The need for spirituality and search for deeper meaning is not going away with secularism. It transforms into purifying or self actualizing behaviour using certain foods, doing certain exercises, asceticism, meditation, being part of movements and scenes (congregations). Singularity or life extension are the ultimate nerd rapture.
I speak as secular fanatic myself. I have meditated 20 years now. 2-4 hours per day and have done maybe 50 week long retreats (over a year of my life meditating 8-10 hours a day) I teach newcomers. I'm worried of all this startup and commercial mentality around meditation. The beat and hippie generations had similar eastern spirituality fad and false prophet phase where vulnerable people were abused and taken for a ride. There are better ways to relax, there are better ways to fix anxiety and mental problems or become more productive citizen. I would not recommend meditation as alternative to therapy. The goal of really fanatical meditation is something completely different.
Reading the article here are the things Jack does:
1) 10 day meditation retreats
2) Sauna and ice baths
3) Walking 5 miles to work
4) Daily intermittent fasting
5) Drinking salt juice
Could you point out which of these activities would be deemed 'quackery'? These all seem like fairly benign things, with backing from scientific studies or centuries of tribal knowledge being passed down.
I doubt we will ever escape the cult of idolization, that seems to be a recurring pattern no matter the century. Jack encourages a healthy lifestyle that if more people adopted in moderation, would end up being a net positive. The current norm of over-consumption, over-medication (1 in 6 Americans are given psychiatric drugs), and over-stimulation is one that has had a noticeably negative effect on society. Anyone that bucks this norm and encourages a more mindful approach to life is alright in my books.
> Could you point out which of these activities would be deemed 'quackery'? These all seem like fairly benign things, with backing from scientific studies or centuries of tribal knowledge being passed down.
You conveniently omitted the parts that aren't backed by science. It's not just a sauna, it's a "near infrared" sauna. Saunas aren't quackery but a near infrared Sauna is. It's also probably dangerous. The article also mentions his use of cryotherapy which isn't backed by any solid science and also conspicuously absent from your list.
Your last six comments are some version of this same question so I suspect you aren't asking because you're genuinely curious but rather because you dislike the conclusion others have reached.
Cryotherapy is mentioned in the article, but this is merely a sly sleight of hand by a journalist with an anti-tech bias, I would encourage you to reread it. If you actually search Jack Dorsey + cryotherapy, nowhere does he endorse or talk about using cryotherapy. He does espouse the value of cold ice baths though (which have shown to have several positive benefits)
From a quick Google Scholar search it seems that there are plenty of studies showing the efficacy of near-nfrared light treatment, so I can see why he would upgrade his sauna with one. Whereas I haven't seen you back up your claim of the danger of infrared saunas (Done in moderate dosages, not in extremes).
1) A Controlled Trial to Determine the Efficacy of Red and Near-Infrared Light Treatment in Patient Satisfaction, Reduction of Fine Lines, Wrinkles, Skin Roughness, and Intradermal Collagen Density Increase
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3926176/
"RLT and ELT are large-area and full-body treatment modalities for skin rejuvenation and improvements in skin feeling and skin complexion. The application of RLT and ELT provides a safe, non-ablative, non-thermal, atraumatic photobiomodulation treatment of skin tissue with high patient satisfaction rates. RLT and ELT can extend the spectrum of anti-aging treatment options available to patients looking for mild and pleasant light-only skin rejuvenation."
IR appears to be more versatile than other electromagnetic wavelengths (such as visible light) as it can induce neural stimulation effects as well as promoting a wide range of therapeutic benefits in cells or tissues. An increasing number of new reports in recent years have indicated that different forms IR application have clear clinical benefits, and the mechanisms of IR are becoming clarified. Moreover therapeutic levels of IR can be delivered using devices without any external power source, simply by using the heat production of the human body to drive emission of FIR from materials containing minerals.
"As a potential complementary therapy, FIR radiation had both thermal and non-thermal effects. The thermal effect of FIR therapy could increase blood flow and vasodilation by heating the tissue (hyperthermia), similar to ordinary thermal therapy composed of heat pads or hot water.87 In addition, FIR treatment with low levels of delivered energy (non-thermal effect) also had biological activities.88,89 A study of patients receiving HD treatment had shown decreases in stress and fatigue levels by FIR stimulation rather than thermal treatment (heat pads), which was probably attributed to the non-thermal effect.10 An explanation of non-thermal effect of such low energy levels was that nanoscopic water layers got disturbed by low irradiances, leading to the change of cellular membrane structure, then made the therapeutic effects.87"
While 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.
cnahr, 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.
Okay, 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.
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
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Graham
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29754952