In preparation for an upcoming talk, I’m revising a now five-year-old presentation on “paleo fitness” – what we can learn from our evolutionary ancestors about how to live longer, perform better, and look good naked.
While my thoughts have shifted just a bit on the final third, the first two sections stand up exceedingly well. So, preemptively, I’m posting both of them again here:
Once I finish revising, I’ll re-record a final installment to complete the trifecta.
I spend a lot of time these days (arguably more than is useful) following the world of politics, in large part through Twitter and podcasts like Vox’s The Weeds, FiveThirtyEight’s Politics Podcast, and Crooked Media’s Pod Save America.
Recently, I’ve been trying to expand that circle, to include cogent thinkers and writers with whom I wildly disagree. As John Stuart Mill put it, “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Indeed, based on conversation with family and friends across a wide array of issues, it’s rare enough to find people who can articulately justify their own positions, much less make the strongest possible case for the opposing perspective.
Most political arguments – online and off – tend to be adversarial. Which, research, shows, is a terrible way to actually change opinions. Once people engage emotionally, opinion becomes tied to identity, and people quickly discard facts that don’t align with their already-held beliefs.
Instead, the science backs a more nuanced approach: start from a place of agreement (to avoid thet emotional roadblock), then reframe the problem and introduce a new solution. Given a different point of view, and then reasonable evidence that supports it, the other person doesn’t have to be ‘wrong,’ just simply accept that, given the problem’s new definition, a different decision might be right.
To make that style of argument work, however, you need Mill’s deep understanding of both sides. And, to that end, I’m especially impressed with economist Bryan Caplan’s proposed gold-standard objective: being able to pass an ideological Turing test.
A traditional Turing test is meant to demonstrate a computer’s human-level intelligent behavior: a judge engages in a typed conversation with both a human and a machine; if the judge can’t reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.
In turn, that leads to (libertarian) Caplan’s ideological Turing: put him and some liberal Ph.D.s in a chat room, let liberal readers ask them questions for an hour, then vote on who isn’t really a liberal.
That level of ‘passing’ is a high standard indeed, and one for which, on the issues I care about most, I still doubtless fall short. But it remains a useful goal, especially if you’re following politics not just as entertainment (cf., Eitan Hersh’s great recent paper on ‘political hobbyism’) but rather to change minds, and thereby make change in the world.
My parents were in town last weekend, babysitting my nephew. One of those evenings, after my mother had read about a dozen children’s books to put him to bed, she pointed out something I’d never previously considered. While most of the near-universal children’s book themes – numbers and letters, say – are the building blocks of future learning, there’s another classic that makes much less sense: animal noises.
Indeed, while there are literally thousands of books on Amazon that cover the topic, unless you’re one of the less than half a percent of Americans who will one day work farming animals, I’m totally unclear on the purpose that knowledge serves later in life. What, exactly, are children meant to take away from it? As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once observed, “all the brute animals have the vowel sounds; only man can utter consonants.”
Ignoring public outcry, the FCC begins dismantling net neutrality.
In the last week, the politically-minded fitness world has been abuzz with the theory of exercise that Donald Trump shared in a recent New Yorker feature:
There has been considerable speculation about Trump’s physical and mental health, in part because few facts are known. During the campaign, his staff reported that he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty-six pounds, which is considered overweight but not obese. Trump himself says that he is “not a big sleeper” (“I like three hours, four hours”) and professes a fondness for steak and McDonald’s. Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.
Like many of Trump’s science-minded proclamations, this one is mind-bogglingly stupid. And it reinforces my long-held belief that massive heart-attack is the likeliest way for 45 to serve out less than a full first term.
But what really caught my eye was a piece about the quote in GQ, which ran through the exercise habits of recent presidents past: Obamas pick-up basketball games, W’s “100 Degree Club” (waiting until the temperature hit 100° before heading for stacks of 7:00 miles), Clinton’s pokier lopes in 90’s jogging suits.
The real kicker, however, is a reference to an episode I think I knew about obliquely, but had largely forgotten:
On the campaign trail in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt stopped in Wisconsin for a campaign rally. There, a crazed assassin (who later claimed to have been egged on by the ghost of William McKinley) sprung from the crowd, and shot Roosevelt in the chest at point-blank range.
The bullet, however, simply got stuck in Roosevelt’s pec muscle. Though doctors wanted to bring him immediately to the hospital, Roosevelt explained that he was not mortally wounded, and would go ahead with the speech. Blood still dripping from the wound, Roosevelt told the gaping crowd, “I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!”
So, in short, Donald is definitely being a wuss. And Teddy Roosevelt, who I also think of whenever I visit New York’s American Natural History Museum, full of taxidermied fauna he gunned down on hunting trips during his spare time, is undoubtedly the original Most Interesting Man in the World.
Political commentary in a nutshell: winners and losers of the recent nuclear holocaust.
A good problem? The coming shortage of shelter dogs.
This time of year, as the weather turns, and people start thinking about having to appear in public in a bathing suit, there’s a sudden uptick in diets and gym trips. With a sense of deadline looming, they tend to jump in full-throttle.
But here’s the bad news: you didn’t get out of shape in six weeks, and you’re probably not going to become a cover model in that amount of time either. I see a lot of people who don’t want to face that reality, cutting their calorie intake in half, hitting the gym seven days a week. And, for about two weeks, it works like a charm. By the third week, they’re overtrained, nursing a summer cold, and entirely burnt out.
Harvey Penick, the legendary golf coach, liked to say, “when I tell you to take an aspirin, please don’t take the whole bottle.” Just because something is helpful doesn’t mean five times as much is five times as helpful. In fact, overdoing it often has entirely negative effects; an aspirin may cure a headache, but a bottle of it will kill you.
So if you want to kick off a summer fitness push, I think that’s a great idea. You can set reasonable goals, make a plan, and see solid results over the span of the next few months. Or you can take the whole bottle, and set off on an unsustainable beach countdown crash approach, which, after a few weeks, will similarly probably be dead.