I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten mentally sharper since I’ve been working out. It’s quite apparent. Didn’t realize how much that mattered. Won’t make that mistake again.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Previously, it was going to be about how to learn quickly and with accuracy, and about how to find valid information and then how to use it. The idea first gestated when one of my colleagues at work who was quite intelligent herself asked how I learned things so quickly, after she watched me go from almost no knowledge to near-expert on something in about a week. I told her part of it was just that I was pretty intelligent by accident of birth but another part is that I’d taught myself over the years how to learn effectively. This book, then, is to be for a general audience, not intended for academia but rather for people who recognize that one can improve one’s abilities in this area (I certainly have, so I know others can, too).

But after the past few months working out and realizing that it’s caused me to level up cognitively a great deal, I don’t think just writing about how to sift through the vast piles of information our society throws at us is enough. If you’re not training your body and your brain at the same time, you’re shorting yourself and won’t be able to reach your full potential.

And I want the title to be “offensive.” That has the benefit of automatically sorting my readers out. With the right title, those who don’t want to improve won’t even pick it up; those who do want to better themselves will be drawn to it. So it’ll probably be called How Not To Be Fat and Stupid.

I have no interest in making money off this or getting it traditionally published. It’s just something I’d like to do because I want to, like this blog.

The weightlifting community has better diet and nutrition advice than 99% of nutritionists and those who are “experts” in this area. If you want to learn how to eat the most healthily, that’s where to look.

The reason is that they care about results and the results are obvious. And they have skin (and muscle) in the game. If you are eating correctly, you’ll be able to lift 150 pounds this week and 170 pounds a few weeks later. If you aren’t eating correctly, you won’t. In fact it’s likely you’ll even get worse in many cases.

I discovered this in the army when I worked out a lot and it’s really obvious when you get back into it again.

I read this piece and found this line.

How the fuck do you actively work to ensure the world’s a more dangerous place for your beautiful little kid?

The Boomers and Gen X (to some extent) have been doing that for a while now. By working very diligently to take away from their own children and grandchildren all the boons and benefits they enjoyed, and doing absolutely nothing about climate change, they’ve made the world more perilous for their own progeny and furthermore increased the likelihood of that danger worsening greatly in the future.

It has been a command performance of bother utter self-absorption and contempt for those they profess to love.

I was looking back through history for similar episodes and I really couldn’t find any. The “Children’s Crusade” is mostly a myth, and other instances don’t involve an entire generation abandoning the next few. Perhaps WWI? But then, those who perpetrated that great atrocity didn’t actually know how bad it’d be. They thought it’d just be a small war of months, not some gruesome affair that lasted years and killed tens of thousands in single battles.

So I think we might be witnessing something fairly unprecedented in history where a generation deliberately consigns its progeny to misery and despair.

I’m only a bit into it, but without intending to be this is a decent précis of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:

The modern struggle

Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower,

fasting, meditating, and exercising,

up against armies of scientists & statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, & medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games & addictive drugs.

— Naval (@naval) January 14, 2019

Quite describes the modern condition, yes?

Tried to get a McGriddles with just egg and cheese. After explaining myself five different times and eventually having to order “a sausage McGriddles with no sausage,” they gave me two pieces of bread with nothing in it. Good shit!

— Jeff Gerstmann (@jeffgerstmann) January 16, 2019

Fast food workers aren’t paid much, and most rely on a mental script of sorts to put in orders. When you deviate from that script, putting in an order is exponentially more difficult mentally and since most don’t care as they are paid jack, bizarre things like this happen.

One time at a Burger King I spent half an age attempting to get something other than American cheese on a burger (as that is not cheese and is fucking vile), as I knew they had it for some other meal, but it was nearly impossible so I just gave up.

If the workers (the same workers) were paid $20 an hour, I bet these problems would not exist. It’s hard to care for $7.50 an hour.

The explosion of conspiratorial thinking, including among liberals and the far left, is one of the most troubling developments of the last few years.

I’m so accustomed to bizarre conspiracies being almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon that I’m really discomfited by this new era of liberal and progressive conspiracy-mongering. Unfortunately, their conspiracies aren’t as fun as the kooky right-wing conspiracies of lizard people and such, just chants about Russia and how neoliberalism doesn’t exist, but if it does, it’s Russia.

Ads for women: Be thin, be thick, love your body, your boobs look bigger in this, dye your hair, embrace your grays, these pants are slimming, be feminine, wear makeup, look natural, hide your age…

Women: K.

Gillette: Men should be less shitty.

Men: Don’t tell us what to do!

— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) January 15, 2019

No, it’s more like for men in ads or outside of them:

Note that I am not saying this is true of all women or men and their expectations of men, but as she was talking about general societal and social expectations, I chose to as well.

I know women don’t have it easy, but it’s hilarious how many women don’t realize what’s going on in the lives of men while believing they have perfect knowledge. This is why the MRA movement was born, in large part. (No, I am not an MRA as I don’t have any disdain or hatred of women, which is part of that movement’s DNA.)

I have been thinking a lot lately how easy it is to find evidence that Microsoft is tracking you and your operating system usage and also how widely this is denied in many quarters. I have been trying to understand that strange phenomenon — what causes the willful ignorance and why many people are so eager to deny all evidence that it’s occurring.

This bit from Shoshan Zuboff’s new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, gets closer to the heart of it than anything I’d syncretized so far.

Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified. It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness. In this way, surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first-century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains.

This disputation of the bleeding obviousness of Microsoft’s pervasive surveillance in their new OSes (and retrofitted into older OSes) is I think one of those excuses that operate as a defense mechanism. “Oh, Mike is crazy, he thinks Microsoft is gathering data all the time. Ha, loser!” This despite the fact that it really is not hard to intercept and log DNS requests and do packet captures to see all the data that is being actively exfiltrated.

Mockery and denial is also a method of avoiding responsibility and useful for breaking out of paralyzing cognitive dissonance. If they really were able to make themselves believe the clear truth of OS-level surveillance, they might have to do something about it, to take some action. It’s just easier to believe what they wish to rather than the evidence; seems a common state of human affairs.