I wrote that piece a few months ago when I was taking time off. Now that I'm back at work (I work for O'Reilly Media's Radar group) it's like being an alcoholic working behind a bar. I'm having a much harder time with it. I try to do intermittent fasting and I still won't touch my phone/email before about 10am - I even got a separate alarm clock so I wouldn't be relying on my phone for that.
You have a similar problem to food addicts (I was/am one). You can't completely abstain, so you have to find strategies. Things that have helped:
Planning: Determine in advance what you will consume and when.
Support: Find others like you that you can use for support (just not on Twitter ;).
Self-empowerment: 12-steps call this your "higher power", but I think that brings too many religious overtones (even though they explicitly say it's not meant to). Regardless, there is a power we have (or are given, if you are religious), but you have to dig for it. The journey is what provides the power.
While that is certainly true, I, personally, would never do that because it would put me in a situation that the combination of biology (real hunger) and emotion (haven't eaten in a day!) would put me in an extremely dangerous place. Instead, I go for routine: regular, small meals; don't ever get really hungry; etc. Couple that with eating high quality food that you actually want to eat, and it has served me well.
You are in a different boat. You physically can abstain forever, but your career doesn't allow you to. I could see how abstaining would be a very helpful option there.
Wow, I had a very similar thought when I first read about infovegan - that it was a poor term for what he was trying to describe. I posted this comment on the "Why Infovegan" page a few months ago:
>I wish the term gave more clues as to its meaning. Dozens of diets are about intentionally restricting foods for health reasons. Veganism doesn't have a monopoly on dietary restriction. Nor does it imply avoiding processed foods or additives. In fact, several other diets have those guidelines baked right into their core philosophies (e.g. raw diets). You're probably too invested at this point, but I think "infoforager" would be more indicative of the meaning here (carrying a lot less baggage too, but perhaps that is a disadvantage for you).
>Once that basic idea — that in the timeline of human history and pre-history we simply haven’t had time to adapt to our new circumstances — took root in my brain it seemed natural to apply it to other domains besides food.
Indeed, it's an incredibly powerful and flexible idea (exhibit A: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html)! Unfortunately, many circles (e.g. skeptical community) will dismiss it out of hand because it smells like the naturalistic fallacy... also because skeptics tend to treat anything other than unquestioning embrace of new technologies as anti-science.
You should check out Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not A Gadget. Very thoughtful philosophical treatment of digital technology and its limitations.
Personally, in the last year I've drastically cut back on my time online and upped the time spent in the real world, whether visiting with friends & family, playing pool at the pub down the street, biking in the city, whatever. It's a much more immediate, and in many ways richer, source of information than Twitter, Facebook, etc. Oh, and I've gone back to a feature phone from a smartphone after realizing it was basically a shiny tracking device in my pocket with an expensive monthly upkeep ;-)
I've read it and found myself nodding a lot while I dug through it. However, I felt like his points were scattered and, what am I trying to say here, a bit instinctual. I found myself instinctively agreeing but thought that his points were mostly assertions without basis.
I hear you. I just started working for a startup, and have a lot more email to deal with, and web forums to monitor.
I've got to work out a plan to deal with it productively. It's important and necessary, but carries a high potential for inefficiency if not managed well.
I feel this is going to be an inevitable practice for us. Just as the switch to white collar jobs have forced us to confront our sedentary lifestyles and allocate time specifically for exercise, the constant stream of information brought to us by the internet is going to force us to get away from our computers for an hour (and hopefully more) a day and get some bloody contemplation.
Our distraction is a full-blown epidemic — a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. It can be compared to smoking: People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes, in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.
There's potential for a huge industry built around "regrowing attention spans" and "info diets" and so forth. It will be partly a continuation of the efficiency/simplicity lifehacking practices of the last decade, except to a whole new level.
I think that is a most excellent analogy! I will now use that myself the next time the conversation comes up. Everyone is always so doom and gloom about any technology relating to the future of the human race but I think everyone adjusts, just as they always have. Thank you, sir! Or ma'am!
Local in values and principles is precisely what leads to an echo chamber. Of course, an echo chamber is very much the state of the paleolithic human...
I didn't think about this koan for more than three minutes.
I don't follow this very well myself. I also don't do paleo for that matter. I'm a baker. I think pies and pancakes are awesome, French bread is the height of human civilization, and while I try to moderate these things I wouldn't give them up unless they were killing me painfully. (I live in fear of gluten intolerance and eat a muffin every time I think about it.)
When I wrote "local" I tried to find the better word. In the end, "local" is pretty good because it captures the paleo theme; our pre-literate ancestors were always local. But this is 2012 and we shouldn't read that word literally. Think of "local" as "among your friends, family, and neighbors".
This "echo chamber" concept deserves its own essay. Here I will say that the word "mostly" is there for a reason, as it was in the quote I stole it from: Michael Pollan is no more opposed to French bread than I.
And I wish I could give the same loving attention to the words of seven hundred diverse people, or seven thousand people, or seventy thousand people, which would bring me up to almost 0.001% of the people currently alive - but of course I should save some time for the great works of people now dead - but this is impossible, just as my living until 2170 is impossible, and the era has come where we need to face that squarely, because the technology is there but the human capability is not. You can meaningfully hear the words of a few hundred people per day, tops, and if those people are all different each day it isn't good for your personality.
Yeah, obviously giving every voice equal weight isn't practical, and whatever filter you apply is likely to introduce some kind of bias. I'm not saying that the fact that you get echo chamber effects devastates the whole notion, just that it is a failure mode you should be aware of if pursuing something like this, and that "local in values and principles" is worse than "local geographically" as pertains to this specific effect.
Edited to add:
In fact, "mostly local" helps address a failure mode we see presently - if you only hear news from your tribe and a little from neighboring tribes, things you hear about are far more likely to be significant.
This reminds me of Paul Miller's ongoing "Offline" series. http://www.theverge.com/label/offline (older articles at the bottom) He's a writer for tech blog The Verge, but he's taking a one-year break from the internet. He's also really good at writing about it.
Mr Miller's associates have published a P.O. Box address where he can be contacted. I sent a congratulatory postcard some weeks ago. With some surprise, I realised that is the first time I have sent a postcard or letter by airmail for something like a decade.
I think as the ubiquitous network and personal clients become familiar, that there will be an adjustment so that it (and they) just shrink back into normalcy, and attention will be distributed between the network and other closer things.
Yep. Great experiment. My thinking was also influenced by a book I read a few years ago. Better Off by Eric Brende published without irony, if I remember correctly, by MIT Press.
Better Off inspired me to move to a small cabin on Vancouver Island; for the past year and a half (and the past order of magnitude of revenue and team size growth!) I've lived and worked in this cabin.
That book helped me stay sane during an extremely hectic time of life, I highly recommend it. Nice to see it getting a plug here :)
If by "cast-offs" you include the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky; Managing Editor Nilay Patel; several other editors and the other personalities who made the Engadget Show: Paul Miller and Joanna Stern (who now primarily works for ABC network); etc.
I think people are judging prawks a bit harshly here with all the downvotes.. doesn't seem like he mean 'cast-off' with a negative connotation to me. More like a 'previously-associated-with'.
I try to do the same thing, but it is not easy with a Samsung Galaxy S III in my pocket :-)
Instead of starting right in on work this morning I had coffee with three friends and then went fishing on Oak Creek near my house. I was going to say that I was offline for 90 minutes but I just remembered that I emailed a picture of the creek to my Dad while I was fishing. Oh well...
I know this is slightly off topic and I apologize but I'm rather obsessed with the topic at the moment.
First, vegan isn't a necessarily a moral choice. I'm vegan and my primary reason for being so is for one animal: me.
Second, the China Study shows overwhelming evidence that animal-based foods are terrible for you. I'm no expert in the field of nutrition but it seems to me the paleo diet falls straight into the animal food based diet category and therefore into the greatly increases your risk of multiple kinds of diseases category.
(If anyone knows of any real criticism of the China Study, I'd like to read it. All I can find boils down to "I like me therefore it's good for me")
In my personal, anecdotal experience, every vegan I know has serious health problems. Literally every single one. Never anything that can be traced directly to their diet (e.g. one of those I'm thinking of mostly has severe eczema), but it's such a sharp correlation that I can't help thinking there's something to it.
While I haven't looked at that particular study, the result you're claiming seems implausible; one would expect humans to be optimized by evolution for living on the ancestral diet. While there are specific reasons why certain parts of our traditional diet are unhealthy (e.g. the ancestral lifestyle burned far more calories than current), in the absence of a specific mechanism like that, "I like me therefore it's good for me" is a perfectly reasonable inference.
And if you're really only interested in health, it seems implausible that that would be 100% correlated with animal vs. non-animal. There are so many different possible food molecules and no reliable common factor that differentiates where they came from - even more so when it comes to the animal byproducts that make vegans different from vegetarians, such as honey.
Again, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I've felt much better since going vegan. I'm willing to grant that may be a placebo effect, but my acne seems to also have improved a bit as well.
Hence room for the correct answer: we are built to consume both plants and animals, but different people respond differently to particular combinations thereof and thus have individual reasons to tailor their diets differently.
Apart from what afterburner said (vegetarians going vegan because of health problems), was there really a single ancestral diet? I have read that foraging was actually more efficient than hunting, so maybe it wasn't all meat after all?
When we look at human prehistory we're talking about a small number of individuals living in a small area, so a single ancestral diet is a reasonable approximation. Foraging was indeed more efficient than hunting in terms of calories, and yes the majority of food consumed would not be meat - I certainly wouldn't advocate an all-meat diet. But obviously meat was a valuable or even vital source of some nutrients (the very fact that humans continued to hunt when foraging is more calorie-efficient suggests that meat was necessary in some way), and I find it hard to believe that a diet that eliminates meat entirely could be healthy.
Having lived in China and know a lot about its history for the past 60 years, I can't help but shudder at anyone trying to compare health between Chinese and Americans on a longitudinal basis. A Chinese person that is 40-65 years old (the ages when cancers tend to crop up) has experienced a life that is wholly incomparable to the life of an American of the same age in so many different ways besides a meat vs plant based diet.
For example, a large portion of adult Chinese people likely experienced a calorie restricted diet for from 58-61 during the Great Leap Forward that was so severe that it led to millions upon millions of excess deaths. This was just one of the many things impacting diet that happened during the life of a 40-65 year old that would have participated in the China Study.
The China Study took place from 1983-2003, so it is likely that all the numerous food issues China experienced under Mao most likely impacted the study's results in ways that can't even be imagined.
IMHO at best it's a correlational study comparing apples and orangoutangs.
Read Denise Minger's extremely thorough review of The China Study (note, the book and its conclusions by T. Colin Campbell as opposed to the actual China-Cornell-Oxford Project). His cherry-picked evidence is extremely fallible and unsupportable.
Denise is now a fairly central figure in the neo-paleo movement, so she may appear biased, but she started as a vegan whose particular inspection of the book played a big role in her conversion.
Professors Frank B Hu and Walter Willett of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, wrote in a letter to the editor in 2000, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, that the China-Cornell-Oxford Project did not find a clear association between animal-product consumption and heart disease or major cancers, although in 2010, in an article, "Healthy eating guide," Willet encouraged people to choose plant-based proteins over animal sources.[30] Willett is the principal investigator of the "Nurses' Health Study II" (established 1989). Campbell is highly critical of the first Nurses' Health Study (established 1976), calling it one of the chief sources of public misinformation about nutrition.[8]
In a written debate with Campbell in 2008, Dr. Loren Cordain, a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University, argued that "the fundamental logic underlying Colin's hypothesis (that low protein diets improve human health) is untenable and inconsistent with the evolution of our own species," and that "a large body of experimental evidence now demonstrates a higher intake of lean animal protein reduces the risk for gout, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, obesity, insulin resistance, and osteoporosis while not impairing kidney function." Campbell responded by questioning the implications of the evidence Cordain noted, and argued that "diet-disease associations observed in contemporary times are far more meaningful than what might have occurred during evolutionary times—at least since the last 2.5 million years or so."[31] Cordain's rebuttal countered that contemporary hypothesis regarding "what modern day humans should and shouldn’t eat must be consistent with the system and the ancient environmental selective pressures that engineered our current genes," and that "there is no credible fossil, archeological, anthropological, anatomical, ethnographic or biochemical evidence to show that members of our genus (Homo) routinely consumed low protein diets. In fact, without the inclusion of energetically dense animal food into the hominin diet, starting at least 2.5 million years ago, our large energetically active brains would not have evolved."
> the China Study shows overwhelming evidence that animal-based foods are terrible for you
I analyze data for several research departments of a large hospital and I would quite literally not trust 99% of the studies you read about. Even if we ignore all of the issues of statistics misuse, most studies in nutrition and similar areas have flawed designs to begin with. You can't just ignore what incredibly complex systems humans are and just study effects of a substance/action/whatever on the human body as an isolated thing, and that's precisely what most studies do. Frankly it's hard for me to think of a feasible alternative, would probably make a great HN thread ;)
The China Study is supposed to have taken a more comprehensive view. I've not read any criticism of it (which is why I asked for some). But he cites more than one study that demonstrated the ability to "turn on and off" cancer growth in rats exposed to a particular carcinogen by raising and lowering their animal protein intake. That seems like pretty damning evidence against that particular protein.
(Edit: Assuming of course, said studies are accurately being described to me. I haven't read the actual data.)
I'm a Paleo/Ketoer and my primary reason for being so is for one animal: me.
It has been proven to be the best diet for me. By a huge margin. I eat less, I have more energy, I can work and exercise for longer without feeling tired, I can write code (be in the zone) for longer and I help the local economy.
You make me remember Steve Jobs. Yes, the same one who died from pancreatic cancer and only believed in extreme vegan diets. The same diets that probably caused said cancer.
For a start, follow the money. Monsanto wants you to believe grains and legumes are the best food anyone can eat. And the Monsanto executives hold very important government positions.
Second, gluten is bad for you. It has been proven, that even if you are not celiac, gluten will cause inflammatory responses in your guts and the rest of your body. The more gluten you eat, the more stress your immune system gets, until it snaps at some point, and you become celiac, or worse.
Third, quinoa and potato peels have saponines, which basically means you are eating soap. And soybean has lots of estrogens.
Fourth, cooked eggs are very good for you. No other food will be absorbed as much by your guts (highest biocompatibility of all foods), which means we should be evolutionarily adapted to eat eggs (I think this applies to all mammals, not just humans).
Right now we are just tiny little specs of dust in the current ongoing grand internet debate about diets. Both sides have their blogs, studies, etc. The list is long.
I have my reservations about the paleo diet that mostly have to do with the amounts of meat that its adherents consume, but out of curiosity, how can a food group that we are undoubtedly evolved to eat, even if it's probably as part of a diet rich in other food groups, be "terrible" for us?
I wouldn't place too much weight on a single study, even if it is the china study. It's very difficult to apply the scientific method to nutrition. However, if you look at the subject from many many angles and learn to evaluate the quality of the methods and procedures of different studies then may find some trends.
You may be interested in the work of doctors Caldwell Esselstyn, Joel Fuhrman, John McDougall, Dean Ornish, and their colleagues. Fuhrman's Eat to Live book is a good place to start; it cites thousands of studies for you to spend your hours in a university library reviewing. ;) It is a "diet" book but mainly because that is the format one must use to get a nutrition book published.
I was working towards vegetarian. Long story short, I'm now working towards the Dr. Terry Wahls diet: 9 cups of vegetables per day, please meats, legumes, supplements. Think troglodiet, cave man diet, super Atkins (which I prev thought was bullshit).
My health's improved. My psoriasis is going away.
Ditto my gf, a full vegetarian for years. Muscle pain and inflammation going away. Other benefits.
I'd probably be a vegetarian if I had more time. 9 cups of veggies per day is a lot of work. To completely give up meat, I'd have to work even harder to get the proper nutrition.
"The circuit" gets me all the time. Sometimes I don't even know why I'm checking email/twitter/reddit that I checked only a few minutes ago. I just blocked reddit and youtube as an experiment to see if I can be more productive without them.
My own personal situation is that I've completely given up on Twitter. It was just too much noise.
G+ is a once a day thing, maybe 30seconds.
Facebook is a twice a day thing, mostly to respond to friends messages. 5 minutes, probably on average. 10 on busy days.
I don't RSS anymore either. 0seconds
Email is open most of the day.
I'm more or less sick of it all and I feel better not having it clutter up my life. I've tried hard not to substitute anything for it either, which means I just have more free time. Kind of like when you stop watching one TV show, don't replace it with another, just have one less you watch (or stop all together). Over time, you'll end up with much more free time to do useful and productive things.
Another benefit that your friends filter out what they consider noise, they will only communicate what is worth communicating (putting in the effort) by their standards.
Well done Jim, you've made Hacker News. Now go eat a Twitterburger. ;)
Knowing that you've reduced you media restrictions somewhat, I'm curious if you're now of the believe that, with all things, a balance is appropriate and too much of anything is bad.
I still struggle with managing the overflow of data that is Twitter, at least to a point where it's not a huge distraction. I wish I could, but I can't.
I think the question of balance is difficult if you really believe in addiction. For people that aren't addicted, moderation / balance is a great strategy. If behavior crosses into addiction the moderation strategy is much less realistic. That's the crux question for me.
That's an interesting point. I wonder how many people of are regular "socialites" are truly addicted, versus just think that's what you're supposed to do these days. Much like HSN, gambling, etc...I bet the percentage of the former is pretty high.
I aspire to "be in the moment" as well, but being an INTJ I live in my head almost all of the time.
If Stogdill is spending his time daydreaming or thinking about other things (I do this as well) then ignoring his phone is not helping him live in the present anyways.
You aren't the first to mention that, and it's a good point. But I am not just day dreaming when I'm not looking at my phone or whatever. I spend a lot more time with people these days, and I'm loathe to pick the damned thing up when I'm with them.
I would reserve the idea of "attentional High Fructose Corn Sugar' for just some specific user-experiences, rather than the internet as a whole.
There are some interface patterns that tend to heighten the sense of importance/urgency/novelty... without any real substance. Those help create the overstimulation-crash-craving cycle like dietary sugar binges.
The interleaved Twitter/Facebook streams are one form of attentional sugar. But the HN format is, too: mixed topics, jittery time-influenced rankings, random arrival of comments/karma-deltas.
"the way we are eating now is poorly aligned with our biology"
This statement seems unambiguously true. More than half of the population is overweight, we suffer from chronic diseases that don't afflict hunter gatherers, and there are clinical studies supporting the harmful effects of processed sugar.
It doesn't follow, from the statement you highlighted, that paleo is the answer. We'd need evidence in support of that particular answer to the problem.
But there clearly is a problem. We're not meant to eat the way we are eating - the evidence is all around us.
The flowering of fad diets is an attempt to deal with this. It has its flaws and incorrect theories, like all experiments.
You're also using an ad hominem fallacy. You say that a diet is wrong, because the reasons for it are wrong. But that isn't evidence about the diet itself. You should address whether the diet works.
Edit: parent post deleted. Well, now I just look irrelevant.
I'll note so-called overweight - BMI 25-30 - is the longest-lived cohort, followed by normal (18-25), obese (30-40), underweight (<18), morbidly obese (40+).
True. Those are good points. I'll just say the piece isn't really about paleo diet so I didn't make any effort to justify it there. I only mentioned it because my lifestyle choices wrt food got me thinking along parallel lines for my technology addictions.
I don't know if "paleo" is the answer. I'm not sure there is "an" answer. I do know that eight months into a significant lifestyle change my HDL is up, my LDL is down, my body fat is 13% (down from > 22%), I don't crash in the afternoon, and I'm wearing a pant size I last saw when I was 22.
Of course, none of that says anything about longevity - which is the primary reason I started my fitness and dietary changes. To address that question I'm cloning a thousand instances of me and will feed 200 vegan, 200 paleo, 200 atkins, 200 standard american diet...
Obviously I can't know with any certainty that what I'm doing is the "right" answer, all I know is that I feel good and am no longer manifesting the typical pathologies of the standard American diet. That makes me happy.
