Web Notes: December 2022

Article: Food that can spike your blood sugar

And that in turn leads to metabolic dysfunction.

• Repeatedly eating too much of any kind of sugar can cause several forms of damage to the body. Whether consumed in “natural” foods such as honey, fruit, or milk, or as added sugar, your body breaks down the carbohydrates from food into smaller sugar molecules (such as glucose, galactose, and fructose). Glucose is then sent directly into the bloodstream. There, it triggers the pancreas to release insulin, which shuttles glucose into your cells for immediate fuel, or into your muscle or fat cells for storage, where it becomes glycogen, so that your body can call upon it when circulating glucose is low. Foods high in sugar and carbohydrates, especially in the absence of fiber, protein, and fat, tend to cause sharper elevations in blood sugar and subsequent insulin responses that can be damaging over the long term when eaten frequently.
• Whole wheat flour. While it does contain some fiber (it’s added back after milling) to help slow digestion slightly, whole wheat flour, just like all wheat flours—including bread flour, pastry flour, all-purpose flour, and cake flour—has a high glycemic index(GI), a measure of how quickly and how much a food raises your blood sugar.

Blog: Writing what is useful

On the career paths writing can open up. "Many people believe you get a job in academia by going to college, getting a doctorate, and then applying for work. In my case, my academic appointments at William & Mary and then at Landmark College were a direct result of the power of my written words.  No doctorate was involved.  That may seem unusual today but 100 years ago it was common.  Words have a power that transcends more ephemeral things like a college degree. A degree cannot convey your powers of reason the way your words can."

Comment: John Carmack, in a Slashdot comment from 2002

"Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."

Blog: Writing to learn

A major point the author makes is to curate well: picks the books you want to invest time in carefully.

• So knowledge has gotten cheaper at the same time that it is gotten more valuable. If you’re reasonably intelligent, curious, and motivated, an hour a day of reading could really add up to a comprehensive summary of much that has transpired and been thought and discovered in history. - People don’t engage with the ideas in book, say by writing a book review or reading books and articles with a different thesis on the same topic. It’s incredibly easy to forget what you read (or to fail to absorb it in the first place). Again, I suggest in my barbell strategies post: - > You could read a book a week, but you’ll inevitably end up forgetting even the main thesis of most of the titles you pick up (the auxiliary ideas and information will be gone even faster). Here’s another idea. Don’t read a book the following week but instead spend your allotted reading time writing a Scott Alexander type book review, where you explain the book’s main points and think carefully about its weaknesses, implications, and lessons. Go on Wikipedia and Google Scholar goose chases for all the interesting topics which the author didn’t go into enough detail on. For extra brownie points, start a podcast and invite the author on for an interview. It was only after I started my podcast that I learned to read with judicious skepticism of the author’s claims and deductions, sensitivity to his message and intent, and genuine openness to his explanatory models and challenging conclusions.

Article: Focusing as a tool to battle addiction

"Experiential Focusing can be quite useful for allowing the spiritual program of the Twelve Step Recovery process to be experienced and realized in a bodily way. Actual change in one’s life of recovery goes faster and is realized at a deeper level than without Focusing. This article examines how Focusing allows personal growth to occur and how the Experiential Focusing process parallels the 12 Step Recovery process."

Also, a primer on what Focusing is.

Blog: The only productivity advice one needs

"Do the work. That's all the productivity advice you need, and the only useful productivity advice you're ever going to get. You can direct your attention to a million optimizations— email, meetings, notes, calendar, time tracking, goals, todo lists, time estimates, prioritization frameworks, quantified self sensors, analytics, apps, documents, journaling. But don't. Ignore all this, and do the work. When you do the work, everything else optimizes itself."

Talks: Go positive, go first, and be constant in doing it

"How do you want to spend your one lifetime? Do you want to spend your one lifetime like most people do, fighting with everybody around them? No. I just told you how to avoid that. And in exchange have what? A celebratory life. Instead of an antagonistic fighting life. All you have to do is go positive, go first, be patient enough. You know we have to be patient for a week with this puppy. Do you know how long it usually takes for a human being to do all the probing and testing that Emily was going to do and to find out that you’re for real? It takes six months."

Blog: Keep shipping

Another post making the claim that writing a blog is the most important thing they have done in their entire career. This is in the golden age of blogging, still an interesting data point.

"I wrote this blog for a year in utter obscurity, but I kept at it because I enjoyed it. I made a commitment to myself, under the banner of personal development, and I planned to meet that goal. My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing. Not every post was that great, but I invested a reasonable effort in each one. Every time I wrote, I got a little better at writing. Every time I wrote, I learned a little more about the topic, how to research topics effectively, where the best sources of information were. Every time I wrote, I was slightly more plugged in to the rich software development community all around me. Every time I wrote, I'd get a morsel of feedback or comments that I kept rolling up into future posts. Every time I wrote, I tried to write something just the tiniest bit better than I did last time."

Blog: Financial independence as a software engineer

• Interviewing elsewhere every ~3 years. This requires effort in interview prep and dealing with rejection, but you can secure significant pay increases and promotions. Practicing your interview skills is the best financial investment you can make.
• Tell recruiters what compensation you’re expecting, not what you’re currently making. As a rule of thumb, whenever I switch jobs, I expect a 30% compensation increase. Anything less than 20%, I would recommend waiting for something better to come along.
• The higher your compensation expectations are, the more you’ll have to impress them during interviews and on the job. So this is a double-edged sword. Be prepared to deliver on what you’re asking for

Article: Awareness practice to increase surface area of luck

• You probably already use some tricks to expand your awareness when you need to. Setting a reminder reflects the fact that something important probably won't be in your awareness when it needs to be. A to-do app puts tasks in your awareness at the right moment, while regular reviews encourage you to notice things that you wouldn't normally engage with day to day. Similarly, journaling shows you parts of your mental and emotional lives that may be hidden, which can help reduce internal conflicts, while outside perspectives from friends, coaches and therapists can snap you out of stuck loops of familiar thoughts, emotions and beliefs.
• Finally, for a bit more fun, start paying attention to the state of other people’s awareness, particularly in conversation. As highly social creatures, we’re sensitive both to what other people are paying attention to and how aware they are of us and the wider world. You’ll be surprised by just how much you can pick up on and what you can learn. You can notice, for example, whether you’re really in someone’s awareness or not. Are they talking to you or just projecting sounds into space that you happen to be in? Having someone in your awareness is what creates a true sense of connection and makes the conversation come alive.

Blog: Rust over Go

• Over and over, every piece of documentation for the Go language markets it as "simple". This is a lie.

Blog: Twitter is a waste of human potential

"The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals."

Article: Religion and meaning

"...one clear implication of this research is that a person’s sense that their life is meaningful depends on their perceptions of their own significance. But a person can be significant in various ways. Hence, those seeking to lead more meaningful lives would do well to seek out ways in which they can matter – whether that means mattering to other individuals, to their communities, or perhaps even in the grand scheme of the Universe."

Article: The way of Dharma

• Dharma, Krishna suggests, is not a programme to achieve moral perfection but rather a practice to live better with each passing day, contingent on where we find ourselves in history and society.
• His is a form of radical conservatism – conservative because he values the preservation of a traditional social order, and yet radical because he enjoins the individual to see beyond the world and its accompanying despair, and sublimate one’s ego unto a theophanic vision of god. And, amid these socioreligious valences, Krishna is also an embodiment of an ancient idea of dharma that is of this world and beyond it, a way of being in which, as Arindam Chakrabarti put it in 2020: ‘one lives, with a wonderful lightness, without any interest in world-affirmation or world-denial’.

Blog: Women, religion, and patriarchy

• "Culture - I quickly realised - mediates the rate at which women seize opportunities created by development and democratisation."
• It presumes that farm-work raises women's status as well as social acceptance of their labour market participation. By studying the global history of gender, I realised this is incorrect.
  • Farm-work does not guarantee women's esteem, autonomy or protection from violence. Even if women work long days harvesting crops, pounding grain and fetching firewood, their labour may be unrecognised and unappreciated. Ethnographies, focus groups, and surveys all tell us that rural women's contributions are scarcely considered 'work', even by women themselves. As a 19th century Haryana saying goes, "jeore se nara ghisna hai": women as cattle bound, working and enduring all.
• Before Islam, gender relations were diverse across MENA. In Ancient Egypt, women had equal rights under the law. Queen Zenobia (of what is now Syria) led 70,000 men into battle against the Roman Empire. The Amazigh (Berber) revered women leaders: goddess Tanit, warrior queen Tin Hinan, and military commander Dihya. Seclusion only became normative after the Arab-Islamic conquests and subsequent influence of Ghazali.
• North India's low female employment is sometimes attributed to its loamy soils which enabled the plough. But gender relations were once significantly different – as indicated by 2nd century CE statues of naked goddesses in Uttar Pradesh.

Blog: The dishonesty of Tamil intellectuals

• "But the fact remains that Periyar’s fulminations against Brahmins (emphatically not Brahminism as the Periyarist liars want us to believe) is just a milder version of Nazism, pure and simple. Like the Nazis, he too did not believe in democracy. When the Venmani massacres took place he said without mincing words that kings should return in order that people are kept under the heel. It is all very well to say that he wanted all Tamils minus the Brahmins to remain as one. Hitler too wanted all Germans to unite minus the Jews. His annexation of Sudetenland and Austria are cases in point."

Blog: First we shape our social graph then it shapes us

• Two-and-a-half-year-olds can extract knowledge from people just by watching them move about a room. They start to desire what those around them desire. They pick up tacit knowledge. They change their dialect to match their peer groups. And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies—these tiny, soft-skulled creatures—can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat.
• You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture.
•  But what has struck me, more than anything else, is the insane__quality of the cultures they internalized. The pedagogies their guardians employed differed radically; they had differing temperaments; they mastered different disciplines, but they all had this in common: they spent their days around highly competent people.

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