Blech. Nothing here that's obscure or likely to alter the path of some one's knowledge. No philosophy, no history, and the list includes Gladwell. Actually, the inclusion of Gladwell probably distinctly colors my thinking on the subject.
Maybe "How to read a book" or "The Alchemist" or I don't know, something that's not just so totally typical.
I personally don't like philosophy books. I think there's more to be learned about philosophy by reading about specific topics, rather than actually reading about philosophy. Some exceptions like Plato, etc.
Absolutely agree with history being useful, though. Any particular periods of history you think are essential to know about, and any particular great books on them?
I'm not the OP, but I agree that history's an essential subject.
History has many themes. These appear in every time and place, sometimes in the forefront, sometimes in the background. I believe the most "essential" period is the one that answers your questions.
So, I'd recommend picking any period that you have a vague curiosity for. I'd go a half step further and recommend avoiding recent periods (late 20th Century).
IMO, it's too recent for there to be consensus on what constitutes good scholarship. There are obviously exceptions to this, but if you're new to history reading, it's difficult to disambiguate the good from the bad.
Examples of periods and geographies that are particularly well-studied, with good accessible literature:
- Late antiquity in the mediterranean (fall of the roman empire)
- Inter-war period in continental europe (Weimar, etc)
- Revolutionary period in France, United States
- Antebellum period in the United States
- Early Russian Revolution (there aren't many good syntheses imo, because this period was incredibly complicated)
- Europe during the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715)
- Napoleonic wars and aftermath
This list is pretty euro-centric. IMO, these are the safest place to start, as the plurality of english-language scholarship is in these places and periods. After developing a good nose here, you'll feel comfortable reading in areas where the scholarship isn't as deep.
At the risk of sounding pretentious, I very much enjoyed Herodotus' "The Histories" (Sélincourt translation). It reads like a Game of Thrones season with all its twists and turns.
(Side-note: I usually multitask a number of books and many months can pass until reading resumes. Yes, it's weird, and yes, if someone has a nice trick for this, please help, I'm running out of bookmarks)
> I'm genuinely curious why Gladwell is a negative control. The name sounds familiar but I don't know much about him
He's written a lot of bestselling pop social science books. IIRC, he's a good storyteller, but is criticized for cherry-picking stuff to create the impression that you've just learned something profound and counter-intuitive when maybe you actually haven't.
I recently bought some dry cat food from Amazon. One of my cats immediately got a massive skin infection that cost >$400 to cure. I can't prove it was from that but this is an indoor cat who has no real exposure to anything else that would have been different.
Needless to say, I totally agree with not buying anything that goes on or in a living thing.
Unrelated, but you're the first person I've ever heard who had optical migraines, which I have too. I experience them as shooting lights followed by essentially a shut down in vision in the affected eye. Never thought about Lasik making it worse but glad to never have done it if that's the same experience. It's miserable when it happens.
The manager's schedule is built around Taylorism and the idea that if she (the manager) just figures out the exact mechanistic steps for squeezing all the productivity out of the worker, everything will operate smoothly.
Unfortunately, that's not particularly useful in knowledge work where most of the time, we're dealing with a non-deterministic relationships and creatively figuring out a problem. The expression of the symptom is the manager's schedule but the actual disease is the outdated idea of command and control as a way to manage knowledge workers.
The problem is that priorities are still to be managed. And there is no such thing as 10 people decide one priority. It's always one person who decides the priority either by signing a contract, pushing a button, committing some code, etc.
For this reason there will always be command and control, since an organization becomes dysfunctional when people act against decisions based on made-up priorities which are way mis-aligned with the real priorities which were decided.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. Of course there are different types of management styles like servant leadership for example. But that still doesn't change a damn thing. Now instead of the most aggressive person signing the contract, pushing the button, etc, now a nicer fellow signs the contract, then commands every one else to follow.
And having knowledge work on the table doesn't really change the equation either. That's why almost all IT companies these days use OKRs. An objective is to be set by managers and checked upon later (a.k.a command and control).
>"The expression of the symptom is the manager's schedule but the actual disease is the outdated idea of command and control as a way to manage knowledge workers."
Read their fine print. There's still a "contract charge" of $0.65/contract. Apparently many of these players are eliminating commissions by using a different word for it instead.
As far as I know of, only Robinhood and Firstrade have true zero-cost option trading. And even then, there can be fees involved if you actually exercise options.
I guess we'll never learn from things like margarine and other lab invented foods. Beyond Meat is heavily dependent on seed oils which are terrible for us (expeller pressed canola oil is ingredient #2). Red Meat actually isn't unhealthy at the levels most people currently eat it. While it wouldn't surprise me if more people ate Beyond meat and its ilk in the future, it doesn't make it better for us and will likely just make us sicker.
There is no consensus that seed oils are "terrible for us". Though as in all things nutrition it's easy to find a fringe voice that claims a position. Canola is considered a fairly healthy oil, obviously in moderation. Some fear-monger about hexane extraction however the Beyond Meat burger expressly uses pure pressed canola with no chemical extraction.
Having said that, by far the overwhelming position on the "non meat burgers" is of environmental/reduced animal suffering positions. I've seldom (actually never, thinking about it) heard it pushed for health reasons.
Fast food has never been a cornerstone of healthy living, and I reckon few people eat hamburgers at home.
The real benefit, in my mind, is not removing the staple treat of fast food from the market, while vastly reducing our need to farm red meat.
I would posit adoption of plant based diets "under the hood" of fast food (and hopefully restaurants) is one of the easiest, most effective ways of dramatically reducing red meat consumption. This has an enormous impact. Most cropland is used for livestock feed, and 1/3 of ALL US LAND is used for pasture.
This is why a plant based diet is on the top 10 ways to fight global climate change (4. Plant-rich diet), and starts to remove incentives for slash-and-burn agriculture (5. Better tropical forest health). Growing a lb of meat requires significantly more land, water, (and therefore fertilizer, etc), than the equivalent macros from plants.
"That is, even if nothing about our energy infrastructure or transportation system changed—and even if people kept eating chicken and pork and eggs and cheese—this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target. "
Next we should tackle ethanol (1/3 of corn yields go to ethanol).
Any "well it may not be better for you" argument against this approach does seem to ignore that we believed red meat was bad for you for decades and we still spend so much of our resources growing red meat.
There are a lot of choices for hamburger in the grocery stores I go to. Both fresh ground meat, and frozen preformed hamburgers. Have you looked? Someone must be buying them.
Not many people like to talk about this point because it seems off mode but those things made me quite sick. I was disappointed because I’m always in for a good burger no matter what it’s made with. (Don’t extrapolate that on me please!)
There were several threads on r/vegan that spoke to the same symptoms, but with only vague guesses to the cause—like the oils.
There is a lot of hubris displayed in the world of nutrition when any scientists I’ve spoken to in the research (rather than product) space seem to conclude that there isn’t enough known about the complex interactions that occur in our bodies when we eat a “whole” food utilizing the variety of compounds and their structured forms/proportions to say whether or not we can realistically and safely just supplement them yet. I’ve always been told, sure go ahead and supplement but just eat the food as well. Just don’t over eat. And eat mostly real food, shy away from processed stuff.
Why respond with begging the question and then bringing up something totally irrelevant?
Olive oil doesn't have trans fat, is low in omega-6 (unlike seed oils), has a high ratio of monunsaturated fats to saturated and polyunsaturated fats, and has a bunch of vitamins and antioxidants as well. It's pretty much the healthiest fat in existence.
That's actually very incorrect and misleading. Olive oil, expecially extra virgin olive oil, can withstand higher temperatures than sunflower, peanut and the like. IIRC the smoke point for EVO is around 210C.
You could literally fry in olive oil, it's just too expensive to do so.
Where are you getting your data from? I'm an avid cook and have always thought EVOO to be a low smoke point oil, especially compared to something like peanut oil.
You could literally fry in olive oil, it's just too expensive...
Depends on where you are. If in the USA, maybe it is, and be prepared for much worse: Mr. Trump is threatening with 25% minimum tariff for our oil. Funny that it's some kind of retaliation for Airbus, while Airbus finally will be spared. In the bright side, it should be even cheaper for us.
That's patently false. There is no proof whatsoever that olive oil is not good for you. Every study on extra virgin cold pressed olive oil shows it is associted with increased longevity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17879997
The worst type of dietary fat is the kind known as trans fat. It is a byproduct of a process called hydrogenation that is used to turn healthy oils into solids and to prevent them from becoming rancid. Trans fats have no known health benefits and that there is no safe level of consumption.
There are trans fat free margarines now, but historically margarine have been a tub of trans fat.
Red meat is a likely carcinogen and processed meat is a known carcinogen.
Oils in general, even extra virgin olice oil are not health foods (which is a common misconception).
Beyond burguers are not healthy, they are junk food. Plant-based junk food, but still junk food.
If people are looking to learn how to eat healthy, the science say's its whole food plant-based. Don't eat plant extracts like oils, you need to eat the whole thing.
Eat peas and not pea protein isolate, eat olives and not olive oil. And so forth.
Just because something is plat-based does not make it healthy, Oreos are plant-based for example. Does anyone think they are healthy?
It's about the perception of the public on certain foods, that is very hard to break as its built on decades of conditioning via advertising and pop culture.
Beyond Meat has never claimed to be a healthier alternative to meat and it's a bit of a straw man to comment like they did. I also don't see many margarine induced illnesses or deaths. Everything is fine in moderation.
> Beyond Meat has never claimed to be a healthier alternative to meat and it's a bit of a straw man to comment like they did.
Not sure why you'd think that's a straw man when they explicitly state it on their website. First sentence on their Products page:
"Imagine your favorite meaty dishes like burgers and tacos delivering the juicy, delicious taste you know and love, while being better for you and the planet." [0]
Marketing speak is almost always going to be dubiously credible. It definitely can be made more healthy than red meat in future revisions of the recipe. But it’s undoubtedly better for the planet than to be “raising” and killing cattle for red meat. You don’t need 660 gallons of water to make plants for 1 pound of beyond burger like you do for one pound ground chuck.
Well, and, technically, if the world can survive longer and have better water, because of a shift in how we make food, then yes, it's healthier for you too - even if you don't eat it!
Will also suggest to look at the entire Jainism religion which is not really a religion but a way of living life. It has laid out a extremely detailed description of how the soul is totally separate entity and the different tejas body and karam bodies that make Us up
A detailed description in this article on the concept of Mind:
Philosophy of Mind: A Jain Perspective
What they learned is that solving problems with debt is bad. So they try to not have debt by saving a lot. The fact they do it with the same fiat currency system is another matter. But that history lesson is one the OP seems to be ignorant of.
