randomstudent

As a counterexample, every time I have valiantly tried to use Grit to face a challenge that's uncomfortable and hard for me naturally I have failed miserably. In all occasions, I would have been better just quitting the challenge or doing it in a different way that didn't require as much grit.

Yes, you can say that I just wasn't "gritty" enough, but that's the same as saying that everyone who injures themselves in exercise wasn't "careful" enough. You're redefining "careful" in order for your theory to be right. Sometimes bad outcomes happen even when you do everything you can.

My goal here is not only to discourage you from trying hard to achieve your goals (that's a goal, of course). The main thing here is to get ready for life to kick you in the face no matter how much grit you have, and sometimes, precisely for having a lot of grit (no, I won't go into details).

The most important skill isn't grit, it's the wisdom to decide when applying grit is worth it. And no, I don't know how you train this or even if it is trainable. It might be just luck.

Instead of relying on grit, stick to what you do best and don't try to use grit as a replacement for talent or other qualities. If someone is naturally better than you, in a competition they'll just get grittier than their baseline and eclipse you.

This is anecdotal but so is the linked article. For any aphorism there is an equally valid and opposite aphorism.

You might also find yourself buying tuberculosis with your milk, but that's your choice.

> A bloke my sister knows (she's a nurse), was diagnosed with 'hypertension not otherwise specified', at the ripe old age of 31. But they didn't catch it early because he 'felt fine'. He wasn't overweight unhealthy. But he needs new kidneys now!

It's possible that kidney disease caused hypertension in that case. It's pretty much impossible to prove which one came first in many cases. None of this argues in favor or against regular checkups, it was just something I thought was interesting to refer.

It also runs on Google's servers, which makes it unacceptable for many use cases.

Unsong is not exactly rational fiction. The author itself claims it isn't (some people claim it is despite this fact, though).

This is a major problem for me when reading digital material, especially if not on something like a PC. On the comuter I can at least Ctrl+F for the part I'm after.

Cool, thanks. That definitely answers my questions. They really should link the study!

The part about distinguishing the animals from one another is still a problem, but I think that if Pokemon were actually real animals kids would distinguish them just fine anyway.

This is very interesting. Do you know if they have any interesting misconceptions about those animals they know about but have never seen (assuming you yourself know enough about rabbits, badgers, hares and such to know that they are misconceptions)?

It's interesting when many people know about a certain phenomenon through media or things like cartoons, which obviously distort reality beyond any possibility of recognition.

The most amazing example I've ever seen is the one about bullfights. Apparently, many Americans know about bullfights from a single Bugs Bunny sketch, in which he is dressed as a Matador and kinda "dances" with the bull in the arena. This apparently made many people think that that's basically what happens in a bullfight. Then you get some nasty culture shock when people watch the real thing, as in this reddit thread (WARNING: video with blood and violence against animals, first in CGI then in real life): https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/68i332/to_those_who...

The comments were really surprising to me. I would expect most people from outside of Spain, Latin America and Portugal not to know about bullfights, but I definitely didn't expect people to know about it from a cartoon and harbor so many misconceptions about what it really is!

Spoiler: in a bullfight, the matador does nasty things to the bull (like sticking short spears with hooks so that they don't come out when the bull moves), dodges the bull's charge while distracting it with a cape, and in the end he kills it with a sword through the back. If the killing blow fails to kill the bull, they kill the animal with a knife just below the brain. Also, Matador literally means killer in Spanish, because he kills the bull.

Regarding the study they mention(the one that shows that children recognize Pokemon better than real animals and plants).

There is an important aspect of this finding that the article doesn't discuss. They don't link to the study, so I can't check for myself.

All the Pokemon names they mention are first generation. There are only 150 first generation Pokemon. It's a relatively small closed corpus. They also have bright colors and are very easy to distinguish. How many species of animals or plants does England have? Way more than 150, of course. How large was the sample from which the ones used in the study were chosen? It wouldn't surprise me if there were more than 150 relevant species that are needed to be knowledgeable in "nature stuff" in England.

Of course kids in urban environments don't know much about naming animal or plant species, that's just common sense. My beef with the study is that it doesn't seem to go beyond the common-sense notion because of the problems above... Knowing a small limited corpus of highly distinct entities will always be easier than knowing the very large (although still finite) corpus of animal and plant species that might be quite similar on the surface (e.g. cork oak vs holm oak, bee vs wasp, cat vs lynx, etc)

Do you mean CSF instead (Cerebrospinal fluid)? I'm not qualified to answer that, sorry. But my best guess is that the problem is almost 100% intracellular.

My very cursory analysis, after skimming the article follows. First, the article in general is quite misleading. It's written in a language that a layman would understand, but in a way that causes such layman to misunderstand some crucial points. I don't know if this is on purpose, or if the author is just honestly trying to address a complex topic and failing.

- Part 1. Background

> Life on earth depends on appropriate pH levels in and around living organisms and cells.

I take issue with this sentence. This is obviously true, as life must carefully control the concentrations of some substances inside and outside the cell. However, this makes it seem like pH is uniquely special. This is not true: pH is merely a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution. If this is meant to address the layman, as it's supposed to, such clarification is important. In fact, I think many of the myths around pH would be better addressed by making the pH concept taboo, and talking instead of "the concentration of H+ ions in solution".

> As a comparison, in the past 100 years with increasing industrialization, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 because of increasing CO2 deposition.

This is very important for the bisphere as a whole, but useless to understand the impact of pH changes in the body. I don't understand the reason for this section.

> This results in a diet that may induce metabolic acidosis which is mismatched to the genetically determined nutritional requirements

No. This is not true. Such diet may wreck your kidneys due to hypertension, and the kidney damage will give you metabolic acidosis. The diet itself will not give you metabolic acidosis, as long as your lungs and kidneys are fine. This is written in a very misleading way.

> With aging, there is a gradual loss of renal acid-base regulatory function and a resultant increase in diet-induced metabolic acidosis while on the modern diet

Now we're talking. I don' know if this is exactly true, but at least it makes sense.

- Part 2. The Role of pH in Various Cells, Organs, and Membranes

None of the mechanisms described here have anything to do with the systemic blood pH. The author doesn't say it, and he should. This section adds confusion and very little understanding

- 3. Chronic Acidosis and Bone Disease

This section is a little confusing. Many studies, little understanding.

The interesting part is this:

> There is evidence that in healthy humans the increased sodium in the diet can predict the degree of hyperchloremic metabolic acidosis when consuming a net acid producing diet

The study this is taken from has does have some regressions that advance this point, but the correlation is so weak I'm not sure we should take the results at face value.

- 4. Alkaline Diets and Musce

> Conditions such as chronic renal failure that result in chronic metabolic acidosis result in accelerated breakdown in skeletal muscle [40]. Correction of acidosis may preserve muscle mass in conditions where muscle wasting is common such as diabetic ketosis, trauma, sepsis, chronic obstructive lung disease, and renal failure

While you can manipulate the pH f patines with no functioning kidneys by giving them tablets with NaHCO3 (an alkali), you should never, ever extrapolate this to the diet of healthy people. Even in patients with kidney failure, doctors don't try to correct the pH with diet alone.

- 5. Alkaline Supplementation and Growth Hormone

> It has long been known that severe forms of metabolic acidosis in children, such as renal tubular acidosis,

No, no, no... Again, don't extrapolate from serious kidney diseases to healthy subjects.

- 7. Alkalinity and Chemotherapy

Some drugs work better with low pH and some work better with high pH. Again, you won't change the pH with diet, so this is useless to a discussion of Alkaline diet

> It has been suggested that inducing metabolic alkalosis may be useful in enhancing some treatment regimes by using sodium bicarbonate, carbicab, and furosemide

As you can see, even when you cant to induce alkalosis, you sue actual drugs, and not dietary changes (one of these drugs, furosemide, works by manipulation kidney function, it's not merely an alkali concentrate).

The discussion and conclusion say that the evidence is weak for lots of things. The only stroong part is the K/Na ratio. If the Alkali diet does this, then its benefits have nothing to do with blood alkalinization per se.

The K:Na balance is very interesting, especially because pre-agriculture societies usually have very low levels of hypertension, and this is probably the cause. Na+ and K+ balance does have something to do with acid-base regulation, because of urinary excretion of HCO3- and H+, but the benefits of a low sodium diet seem to be related to hypertension and not to acid-base regulation.

I haven't read the study, and I don't want to claim that Alkaline diets have zero supporting evidence. I just wanted to argue against the claim that your pH is "too acidic" or "too alkaline" or whatever. Any potential benefits of an alkaline diet are surely independent of the pH variation they induce, because the variation will be close to 0 in any case, if your body's working properly. The stress hypothesis is interesting (I'm not saying it's even remotely correct! only that it's an interesting twist on the crackpot claims I've heard elsewhere), but you'll never be able to gauge how stressed your regulation mechanisms are just by measuring the blood's pH. You'll have to find some upstream biomarker that measures "stress" directly.

This is very interesting, and I particularly like the causal test of inducing sensitization to the antigens present in the bacteria through exposure. It's probably the strongest causal link you're going to get in humans (you can't infect them with the bacteria to see if it induces nerve damage for real!).

The problem here seems to be that this doesn't measure how feasible it is to reverse the tendency for the immune system to attack the nerves. Even if you erradicate the causative bacteria, once the immune system has started to attack the nerves, it's possible that it won't stop. Maybe the presence of the antigens (the proteins that are attacket) in the bacteria is needed as the trigger that starts the attack, but once that's gone, the low level presence of the same antigens in the nerves might be enough to sustain the attack. On a more optimistic note, maybe the erradication of the bacteria leads to a lack of simulation that causes the aggressive cells tow ither and die. This must be tested experimentally.

If the autoimmune ttack doesn't stop after erradication of bacteria, maybe a case can be made for aggressive prevention with testing for those bacteria periodically, ,especially in families predisposed to the disease, and prompt erradication once they appear. Maybe there are correlations between diet and the presence of such bacteria, which we can exploit.

I think the long term impact of these studies will depend on how reversible the "state of war" between the immune system and the nerves is.

You still have gut bacteria in the small intestine, and they're probably as important as the ones in the large intestine. I can guarantee you that without both the small and the large intestine, you do notice a difference (but unfortunately for reasons more serious than just not having the bacteria). Glad you're adapting well to living without the large intestine!

Probably not. Unlike MS, which is an autoimmune disease, ALS is not autoimmune. The exact cause is only known in some cases, but it seems to stem from problems with the machinery inside the cell, not an aggression by the immune system from outside the cell.

> Apparently at the current moment the best is to keep your PH value in the body neutral. It's particularly important to prevent "acidity"

If you're talking about a neutral pH as in pH = 7.0 (the usual accepted definition of neutral), these claims are contradictory. The pH of the human blood is usually between 7.35 and 7.45. This is usually way less acicic than the neutral pH of 7.0. Furthermore, a pH of 7 is usually associated with very serious disease (and yes, it is causal: if you inject/ingest enough acid to make the pH drop to 7.0 you're in pretty bad shape, especially because it means the regulatory mechanisms aren't working as they should). I don't know who that "professional nutritionist" is, but this sounds like crackpot-level science.

Also, to the best of my knowledge, it's extremely hard to change the blood's pH with diet... The body has a multi-layered system specifically dedicated to keeping the pH in the normal range (7.35-7.45), and that's independent of what you eat. Maybe you're mistaking it for changing the urine's pH, which is much easier to do, and can be achieved through diet alone. Unfortunately, changing the urine's pH doesn't seem to achieve much beyond preventing some inds of kidney stones...

> People are not very rational. Almost all trips in cars are very short, yet people are still very concerned about range in electric cars

As they should be... What good is a car if it can't be used for the occasional long trip? I expect my car to be up to the task to go visit friends or family 200km away on a whim, after coming home from work, instead of sitting idly while my battery is charging for a couple hours... I'm sure many users have the same expectations. Are we irrational?

Yes. This Elixir library aims to have a virtual DOM on the server and send minimal diffs to the client: https://github.com/grych/drab

It can already do this for some kinds of diffs, but it doesn't have a full VDOM yet. It basically allows you to build interactive pages without writing any javascript.

Thanks. I'll read these papers he I have the time. I agree that gamma knife surgery on the hypothalamus is probably not yet ready for prime time (and it might never be if we can find something better)

> Hopefully some day we will find ways to drive repair of these circuits.

Any idea on how we may do it? AFAIK, currently we have no good mechanisms to "repair" individual brain circuits: even in strokes, we mainly exercise the affected area so that neural plasticity repurposes other neurons (usually in the cerbral cortex) to take over lost functions.

Does the hypothalamus have this degree of plasticity?

> Let me confidently assure you that inflammation in the hypothalamus is a dominant feature of obesity

I certainly believe you (I'm not qualified to agree or disagree, as I'm not a specialist like you). The point of my rambling comment is to make sure the readers understand that the kind of inflammation we're talking about here is very removed from what people usually think about when they think of inflammation.

> Please don't recommend laymen avoid reading articles like this. That's rather senseless

Hm... Here I'll have to disagree. I think medical research should be consumed rather judiciously, especially by laymen or by doctors that are not specialists in the research area in question.

I'd rather have people read distilled accounts of research (textbooks, meta-analysis, etc.) than studies in knockout mice.

EDIT: Answering your edit. I'm not discounting anything. I think the study is as relevant as it gets for a study in mice, and the role of hydrocarbons of the diet is an important one. After all, is it just calories in VS calories out or is there something else?

I do understand what the study is talking about when it talks about microglia and inflammation. I'm merely trying to answer the question about "What is inflammation IRL" in a way that laymen may understand - most people don't know that microglia are derived from cells of the immune system (in a sense, they are the "inflammatory cells" of the brain), and can't draw the parallel between neutrophils and monocytes happily blasting away through the extra celular matrix under the skin in search for pathogens and microglia killing healthy neurons.

In no way I want to be skeptical of the article or discount the importance of its findings. I only want to draw the distinction between the "naïve" idea of inflammation and the kind of inflammation the article is talking about.

EDIT2: The poster asked why he didn't feel "inflammed". He would certainly feel "inflammed" if he had an encephalities, so there is definitely some confusion here. My comparison between this "low level" inflammation and encephalites was meant to highlight that. Do you think I was unclear?

This is a very important question, which I'll try to answer as clearly as possible.

First, a word of warning: This doesn't look like the appropriate kind of article to be posted on HN. As a doctor, it's hard to understand all that's going on, and even harder to appreciate what the real impact of this research is. Laymen should completely ignore this kind of articles, and read instead clinical trials or meta-analysis that report practical outcomes people are actually interested in, like life expectancy, cure rates, exercise capacity, weight loss, etc. This paper is about some molecular mumbo-jumbo that is not very interesting in itself, unless you're a researcher in the area.

Now, to answer the question. Classically, inflammation was defined by Celsus and Galen as 5 cardinal signs (in latin):

- Tumor (swelling) - Calor (warmth) - Rubor (redness - more noticeable in light skin; don't forget that Celsus and Galen worked primarily with patients from Europe and the Middle East) - Dolor (pain) - Functio laesa (loss of function)

These are clinical signs, that is, something the doctor can observe at the bedside. Think of when you fall and hurt your knee: the area where the impact happens swells. It might become warm to the touch. The skin might become red (different from bleeding). You'll feel pain, and for a while, your knee won't work very well because it hurts (loss of function). You don't need any fancy equipment to analyse these signs.

Now, these are adaptations of the body to injury: redness and warmth appear because the blood vessels in the skin dilate in response to injury. Blood brings red blood cells, which caus redness, and heat from the inside of the body, which causes the skin to be warm to the touch. The blood vessels also "open holes", which causes the liquid part of the blood to escape the bloo vessels and get between the cells, thus causing swelling. The injured cells release signalling substances, which are detected by neurons in the skin, thus causing the individual to feel pain. Finally, some or all of these changes, might cause the limb to lose it's usefullness (because it hurts and it's swollen). The goal of inflammation is to bring white blood cells to the place of the injury in order to fight a possible infection and assist in the repair of the injured tissue. Pain doesn't help protect or repair the tissue directly, but it notifies the organism to the fact that something wrong is happening, which causes the brain to act appropriately: remove the limb from a hot surface in the case of a burn, protect a wound, etc. People that are not sensitive to pain have serious problems from childhood because they lack these indirect protective responses (they won't remove their hand from burning coals, even as they smell their flesh burning, for example)

This is the classical picture of inflammation, caused by a wound or trauma to the body. It's simple, and it's functions are (nowadays) obvious.

But we can go deeper... Let's talk about pneumonia. Pneumonia happens when a bacteria or virus overwhelms the defenses of the lungs, and starts reproducing in the normally microorganism-free lung. This causes blood vessesls to upen up (thus causing swelling), to dilate (thus causing redness), but the lung probably doesn't get any warmer - it's already pretty warm. The patient will not feel pain. After all, the inside of the lung doesn't have nerves capable of feeling pain! (the outside does, and if the inflammation gets near the peripheral part of the lung, it might be VERY painful). Maybe the lung won't get any warmer (it's already pretty warm already). You will run a fever, but that's not the same kind of warmth we've discussed. You will feel breathlessnes, that is, loss of function of the lung. So, while some things are common the picture gets murky. Also, the body is working very hard to defend itself, and is now producing lots of molecules that circulate in the blood and which we associate with "inflammation". We now need some fancy equipement to detect these molecules: our 5 senses are not good enough. Even though the swelling if the lungs can be detected by auscultation (with a stethoscope), the doctor probably use somethin like an X-Ray machine to visualize the swelling.

Let's go deeper. Some bacteria enter the bloodstreem and latch to a valve of the heart. This kind of infection is called an endocarditis. The valve has no blood vessels, so you won't get swelling. You won't get redness or warmth either (again, you ill run a fever, but that's different). The valve also has no nerve endings, so you will feel no pain! The bacteria will happily eat your valve away (and when it's eaten away you'll die), but it may take time, and meanwhile, the valve can work relatively well. So, no loss of function. Yet, your body is fighting in overdrive to clear the infection and kill the bacteria. In fact, lots of mollecules associated with inflammation are running wild all through the body, sometimes causing as much damage as the infection itself! These are the same mollecules your body produces in pneumonia, and also in other kinds of "deep" infections. So, in a sense, even though we have amost none of the 5 classical signs of inflammation, we have a response of the body that aims to defend it against infection. So we might decide to call it inflammation. Again, we can't see the inflammation here. We need some fancy machines to see the damaged valve (even though we can listen to the valve failing with a stethoscope), and fancy lab equipment to detect these molecules, as well as the consequences of the inflammation inside the body.

If we go even deeper, we'll "discover" that heart attacks (technically "myocardial infarctions") are the result of inflammation too. Even though what the patient feels is just pain, possibly followed by loss of function: breathlessness and death.

So, at each step, we get further removed from the intuitive description of inflammation, which you can feel with your hands and see with your eyes, into a scary realm only accessible with the help of lab equipement and thick books. At this point, inflammation is actually a buzzword that means little...

This paper's conclusion doesn't mean that the hypothalamus (a part of the brain) is red, swollen, warm, painful or has stopped functioning. That would be an encephalitis, an extremely serious disease that will land you in a hospital or a coffin (see the movie "Contagion" for some realistic depictions of encephalitis). It means that some cells, vaguely associated with inflammation, are producing some mollecules which in most parts of the body are associated with inflammation.

In most situations, inflammation is either bad or signals something bad. In this situation it certainly seems bad: the concrete changes that inflammation brings to the brain seems to be similar to the ones caused by diabetes (according to my cursory reading of the article). But I agree that the word has been used for so many things, that you can't actually tell whether inflammation is good or bad.

On the other hand, inflammation is a defense mechanism of the body. So what is a person with no inflammation at all? It's a person really close to death, because Nature is scary and full of bugs, and someone incapable to mount an inflammatory response is what bacteria, viruses and fungi call dinner. People like these exist (either from birth or due to unfortunate circumstances), and we can only keep them alive by keeping them in very clean rooms and pumping them full of antibiotics until their immune system (and the capability to mount an inflammtory response) recovers.

Using the same word for what protects us from infection and for what turns our brains into something similar to the brains of a person with untreated diabetes is confusing. We're at a point where when a doctor talks about inflammation, it has a dompletely different thing in mind from laymen. A doctor might even have something completely ifferent in mind from another doctor or from a researcher (which is more serious).

In the end, I have nothing to tell you except that you're right to be confused, and if it serves as a consolation, I'm often similarly confused when I read the titles of these papers (and sometimes the abstracts), even though I've been studying these things for years.

Where am I looking at this through a 21st century lens?

I'm just saying that in all of these cases, the strong won and imposed their will on the weak, thus suppressing their ideas and culture... Love doesn't seem to have been very important in any of this.

I don't understand your criticism, sorry.

> Had there been no war, the abolitionist argument probably would have eventually won out and social change may have been more rapid.

Maybe, I'm not comfortable speculating about such things. I don't know nearly enough to even start :)

> Nazism has only been suppressed in Germany

Yes, I thought it was obvious from the context. The original version of Nazism was suppressed by invading their country, killing 7 million people in the process, hunting their leaders, etc.

> the Roman Empire

Hm... They were conquered by foreigners, and the empire desintegrated, but it's debatable whether the real change in culture was internal or not. You're right and it doesn't fit here.

> Is just suppression of speech actually effective?

This is a different question then... You're asking if suppression of speech with tactics you deem acceptable is actually effective. I don't know.

I do know that killing people who hold certain ideas is often effective, and that was the point I was trying to make. Merely putting people in jail for violating the free speech laws might not be enough (I don't think just imprisoning dissidents without the threat of capital punishement or outright genocide has ever been tried at scale).

So maybe we don't disagree as much and we were actually arguing for different views, right?

Hm... Interesting :) Is there any research about this? It does seem likely, but I can certainly imagine a world in which most attempts at suppression work and we celebrate the cases where it doesn't because it's ironic. Is there any evidence that the effect is not just a case of survivorship bias?

Counter-examples: Nazism (I guess you might argue that after being suppressed it's making a comeback, but that's tenuous at best), dozens of Christian heretic faiths you've never heard about, the genocide of the Native Americans (where's their culture now?), the pre-colombian civilizations of South and Central America, the Roman Empire, Egyptian monotheism under Akhnaten...

Keep in mind that listing the ideas and ways of life that were suppressed and utimately survived is a textbook case of survivorship bias: you remember the ones who survived, and forget the ones that didn't. Some of them no one knows about because they left no records.

EDIT: the dangerous sentence here is: "All the cases I can think of". Those are not an unbiased sample of the real world cases.

> I feel like love is a better tool than hate in trying to affect social change.

Please do not argue for this position based on "feelings"... In my own country, most social change was the result of war, credible threats of violence and technological progress. Natuarally, I "feel" the opposite.

Since we're discussing the US, I'd wager that's probably true there too: white culture became dominant over Native America culture because the Native Americans were wiped out, and the survivors were sent to barren reservations.

Slavery was brought to an end because its supporters were defeated in a literal war. Also, the social change that gave rise to salvery was based on the forceful kidnapping of people, too.

Worker rights are the result of strikes and often literal violence.

Were I familiar enough with the History of the US I think I could bring up other situations.

(If I'm wrong on any of these historical points I'll be happy to be corrected)

Not saying that I agree, but some people say that the best way of making sure what you describe doesn't happen to America is by stopping the Nazis right now. Yes, you loose the high ground of supporting absolute free speech but supposedly you gain a more restricted form of free speech that is more likely to stand the test of time.

Some people believe that stopping the maniacs and crazies right now is the best way to make sure the West doesn't turn into a new Soviet Union. Whether you agree or not, it's certainly a defensible position.

Yes, you can argue that the Soviet Union didn't happen because the Tsar failed to censor enough, I'm just trying to say that thare is some substance to the argument for stopping the maniacs.

This attitude is naïve to the extreme... You're surely aware that prolonged suppression of certain ideas can and often does decrease the prevalence of such ideas in the population? And that such suppression might even make certain people change their minds?

I'm not arguing that this is the right strategy, only that it is often extremely effective.