con-templative

Who proposed the precautionary principle and whether they've acted in accordance with it is irrelevant when the considering the matter of whether it should apply to GMO food.

Reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRMok0gslpA

> Windows 8 has great UI.

This usability expert disagrees, and explains his position in detail: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usab...

The US did poorly in 2014 Press Freedom Index, falling 13 places to 46th in the world: http://rsf.org/index2014/data/index2014_en.pdf

The BMJ have run a campaign to make more clinical trial data about Tamiflu public, along with questioning its effectiveness given the large sum of public money spent on it. It seems to me that their reporting is the main reason this story has seen the light of day.

There are lots of BMJ articles about it here: http://www.bmj.com/tamiflu

> Still, I think the fact that the fastest man in the world at the time had tried multiple times to beat it and could not definitely puts a damper on anyone else trying to break a record.

It didn't put a damper on Bannister. In fact, you could argue that the press coverage around the limit motivated more people to try to break four minutes for the acclaim. Without that narrative, maybe Bannister wouldn't have been motivated enough to do it.

> Clearly technology and social forces were at work. Believing you can do something does not make it so. But NOT believing you can do something sure as hell isn't going to help you make it happen.

You may be right, but the 4-minute-mile anecdote doesn't show this. In Landy's case, it wasn't new-found belief, but technology and knowledge that pushed him under four minutes.

"In 1954, Roger Bannister set a world record, running one mile in 3:59.4. The 4 minute mile had become a white whale, with medical experts arguing that the human body wasn’t capable of completing it. Prior to Bannister, the previous one mile record had stood at 4:01 for nine years. Less than a year later, someone else ran a sub 4 minute mile. Today, hundreds of American runners, and likely thousands around the world have achieved this feat."

This is often noted as a mental breakthrough, but what isn't told about this story is that Bannister had the advantage of a better running surface and pacemakers. Those that broke the 4-min mile after Bannister did it because they too took advantage of a better running surface and pacemakers.

http://sportsscientists.com/2014/12/2-hour-marathon-4-min-mi... "The difference that track surface makes is enormous – biomechanists estimate that modern synthetic tracks are worth 1.5% compared to the cinder tracks that Bannister and Landy ran on (some cinder being better than others, of course). And that’s why, as my friend David Esptein so elegantly presented at TED, of the 1,034 men who have broken 4-min for the mile since 1954, only 530 would remain if you applied that “correction factor” that predicts that synthetic tracks are worth about 1.5% per lap compared to the cinder tracks of the 1950. It means only 10 men per decade have joined the club since Bannister created it, and that should give you some context to this argument that “Four minutes used to be impossible, and now it is easy”."

Amen. I imagine they'll have a post on the Telegraph article in a week or so.

> Really it's just not worth even reading whatever the popular press has to say about a particular strand of research, especially when lines like "regenerate the entire immune system" are thrown around.

To look at it from the opposite perspective, here's a helpful guide for scientists on how to get a health study into the UK news: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/12December/Pages/your-guide-to-h...

My artist friend didn't seem too worried by it. I have no idea if this is common in the industry, but he was saying that much of the artwork is already outsourced to cheaper foreign artists.

I cannot speak to this study in particular, but it is worth noting that a recent meta-study found that the science supporting meditation isn't as strong as people tend to believe: http://www.tricycle.com/blog/meditation-nation

Meditation has been touted as a cure for practically everything, a reputation it cannot possibly live up to. This reputation is already creating a back lash -- this article is one example: http://www.salon.com/2014/12/06/mindfulness_truthiness_probl...

I think meditation has something genuine to offer, but it's going to take some time before there are enough quality scientific studies for a true picture about meditation to arise. And before that happens, I wouldn't be surprised if the pendulum of public opinion swung over to the other side.

For example, vulnerable individuals with a history of trauma may approach meditation thinking it will cure all their problems and then be surprised by intense memories of their trauma resurfacing, preventing them from going about their day-to-day life. Such people rightly feel that meditation has been incorrectly advertised.

I think if we attempt to look past her poor explanation, she appears to be experiencing something that she has no obvious rational concept to communicate, and so when asked to relate the experience in rational concepts she does know, she has unhelpfully hit on "color".

To be fair to her, she does say several times that she cannot explain it. It reminds me of this passage from Lord of Light: http://people.nas.nasa.gov/~pulliam/lord_of_light.html

> Teicholz begins her examination by pointing out that the Inuit, the Masai, and the Samburu people of Uganda all originally ate diets that were 60-80% fat and yet were not obese and did not have hypertension or heart disease.

> The hypothesis that saturated fat is the main dietary cause of cardiovascular disease is strongly associated with one man, Ancel Benjamin Keys, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. He was clearly a remarkable man and a great salesman, described by his colleague Henry Blackburn (whom I’ve had the privilege to meet) as “possessing a very quick, bright intelligence” but also “direct to the point of bluntness, and critical to the point of skewering.”8

> Keys launched his “diet-heart hypothesis” at a meeting in New York in 1952, when the United States was at the peak of its epidemic of heart disease, with his study showing a close correlation between deaths from heart disease and proportion of fat in the diet in men in six countries (Japan, Italy, England and Wales, Australia, Canada, and the United States).9 Keys studied few men and did not have a reliable way of measuring diets, and in the case of the Japanese and Italians he studied them soon after the second world war, when there were food shortages. Keys could have gathered data from many more countries and people (women as well as men) and used more careful methods, but, suggests Teicholz, he found what he wanted to find. A subsequent study by other researchers of 22 countries found little correlation between death rates from heart disease and fat consumption, and these authors suggested that there could be other causes, including tobacco and sugar consumption.

Not necessarily. It has been found that radically changing your running technique quickly alters where the majority of the load on your skeleton occurs, which may lead to injury: http://sportsscientists.com/2007/10/pose-running-reduces-run...

The same blog has a whole series of posts on running technique, much of its opinions supported by the scientific studies: http://sportsscientists.com/running/running-physiology/runni...

> Appeal to authority (as a fallacy) refers to advancing the opinion of a prominent figure for something on which they themselves are not an authority.

This is incorrect. An appeal to authority is when an argument is claimed to be true because someone of authority has stated it. It is a fallacy when the authority of the person has nothing to do with whether the argument is true or not. For example, if a maths authority makes a maths claim, that doesn't mean their claim is true since their authority in maths doesn't determine the validity of their claim. The truth of their claim is determined by looking at the maths itself.

> Citing Schneier on computer security is not an appeal to authority.

It could be, if you're arguing that it's true because Schneier said it. Obviously something relating to computer security isn't true because Schneier says so.

That said, appeals to authority are somewhat necessary in discourse, since we don't have the time to explore all arguments on their own merits. I believe that claims that Schneier has made in the past are truthful, and therefore conclude that I can place some trust in other claims he makes without fully exploring them, but that trust may be misplaced.

> According to a Gallup International survey of more than 50,000 people in 57 countries, the number of individuals claiming to be religious fell from 77% to 68% between 2005 and 2011, while those who self-identified as atheist rose by 3% – bringing the world’s estimated proportion of adamant non-believers to 13%.

The World Religion Database disagrees, saying that the percentage of the world's population that is religious increased from 87.1% in 2000 to 88.2% in 2010. They suggest that growth is continuing due to the spread of Islam in Africa and Christianity in China: https://web.archive.org/web/20131020100448/http://media.john...

> "Yes, and in his email he seems to believe that his dick pics app is "revolutionizing personal communication". Ok guy."

I don't know whether I believe it, but the argument for Snapchat is that it encourages user engagement. So if you're a photographer who wants attention, it's better to have someone's dedicated attention for a few seconds on Snapchat than it is for them to glance it while scrolling through their feed on Facebook.