tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4905788026020216812024-03-14T07:12:02.670+10:00Learning on the Curve - t = 21Lifetime learning in limited timeLobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-4344814620505089712016-02-24T12:00:00.000+10:002016-02-24T12:00:17.813+10:00Sadly, You Should Ignore Non-Peer Review Nutritional OpinionsI was genuinely disappointed today with what I thought were some reliable sources of nutritional information in the blogosphere. The tipping point came when I was reading an article from (self-titled) "Authority Nutrition" <a href="http://authoritynutrition.com/top-5-reasons-why-vegan-diets-are-a-terrible-idea/" target="_blank">against the adoption of a vegan diet</a>. The first argument was a deficiency argument and the claim was that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...B12 deficiency is very common in vegans, one study showing that a whopping 92% of vegans are deficient in this critical nutrient (<a href="http://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/176565">1</a>).</blockquote>
I admit that, in the past, I have had a poor track record of actually checking references. I guess I was just too trustworthy, but because of all my recent pub-med crawling, I thought I would click on the reference. And I was sad. The claim made by Authority Nutrition only resembled what the reference said and a clearly <i>crucial</i> fact had been omitted. What the reference actually says <i>in the abstract</i> (in other words, all I had to do was click on the reference, without even reading the article):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Among subjects <b>who did not supplement their diets with vitamin B12</b> or multiple vitamin tablets, 92% of the vegans (total vegetarians), 64% of the lactovegetarians, 47% of the lacto-ovovegetarians and 20% of the semivegetarians had serum vitamin B12 levels < 200pg/ml (normal = 200–900 pg/ml). However, <b>their complete blood count values did not deviate greatly from those found for nonvegetarians</b>, even though some had been vegans or lactovegetarians for over 10 years.</blockquote>
<br />
It is surely quite a different figure when those bolded statements are made clear. I am far from a representative socialite, but among vegans that I know, <i>all</i> of them supplement with vitamin B12 in some form. I am not sure whether it is more charitable to impute ignorance, carelessness or willful manipulation of the reader to the writer of the article, but it does not matter.<br />
<br />
The unfortunate truth is that nutritional "facts" from these sorts of sources, as it turns out, are almost always misleading at minimum and plainly false in the worst of cases. Even the ones that claim to be based on facts, from people qualified to give advice on the area, can be wrong or misled; the diet advice you can receive on a popular platform in a small readable chunk will almost invariably lack the nuance of the original research and will equally invariably over-generalise. Studies are often not even done on humans, or are done on particular segments of the population in particular controlled environments. There are studies done, in fact, that demonstrate how poorly the results of other studies generalise to other portions of the population.<br />
<br />
Even more unfortunate is the fact that the nuance and precision employed in the scientific literature often makes reading that literature inaccessible to the layperson. It is certainly <i>possible</i> to pick up the technical know-how to read and research the literature by yourself - but it takes a lot of practice to even break into one small subfield of the literature. Trying to get a good grip on a single topic is an excellent exercise if only to understand the complexity of even simple nutritional issues and why the researchers can do this as a full time job (without any of the glamour of a popular nutrition personality). Even after becoming proficient, there are few truths in nutrition that manage to actually transcend the bounds of the demographic studied to the general population, and fewer still that can be conclusively tied to some reductionistic element of a food. For example, the blood sugar effects of different foods cannot be tied to a single macronutrient (<a href="http://nutritionfacts.org/video/if-fructose-is-bad-what-about-fruit/" target="_blank">this video explains the research on berries and blood sugar</a>). This implies that reductionistic accounts of nutrition of the ubiquitous "this was shown to be good so eat these other foods containing the compound" fail to account for the richness and complexity of foods as whole substances. The ineffectiveness of supplemental antioxidants compared to food-derived antioxidants is further evidence of this.<br />
<br />I sadly have to admit to myself that, not only is most of my popular level nutrition knowledge probably vastly over-simplified to the point of uselessness, but I am also unable to learn by going to popular sources. They are too unreliable and too simple. If I want to know what to eat - and I do! - I have to do my own homework. I may well post some of my findings here, but if you believe anything I have said, you will have to check my references for yourself.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-51383998343001242442016-02-17T20:24:00.000+10:002016-02-17T20:24:00.716+10:00Paleo is Illogical but Maybe it is Still HealthyWhen I first heard about the paleo diet's motivating principle, I was several notches short of impressed. The idea that we should eat what our ancestor's ate because it allegedly worked so well for them seemed to me to be a great joke. Here are a few reasons.<br />
<br />
First of all, life expectancy back in the good old dietary days was quite a bit shorter than today. It's not like they lived an optimal lifestyle and now, with the addition of bread, we can barely live to middle age; the life of our paleolithic ancestors was best described by Hobbes as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (though he was not exactly talking about nutrition). It is true: modern humans live in a globalised community, are on average far richer, have developed more pro-social behaviour and live substantially longer than our cave-dwelling ancestors. But, if you would rather go back then, go for it. Of course, I am under no illusion that paleo dieters want to actually live like cavemen, just eat like them. But still, they were hardly paradigm cases of longevity, granted they did eat healthier than the standard Western diet.<br />
<br />
Even if they were extraordinarily healthy, are paleo dieters willing to go authentically paleo with their lifestyle? I can guarantee that paleolithic humans did not sit around counting calories, but I can also guarantee they burnt far more than almost anyone. There is quite a difference between scavenging and hunting for every morsel and scrap of food in their time and sneaking in a quick trip to the gym between bouts of sitting at a desk or on the couch. Maybe the paleo diet is the healthiest diet around <i>if you spend almost all your waking hours walking, hunting, crawling and moving about</i>.<br />
<br />
So people do not live paleo lifestyles. Actually, they do not eat paleo diets, either. Apart from the more obvious cases (does anyone really think <a href="http://paleogrubs.com/muffin-recipes" target="_blank">paleo muffins</a> grow on treas?), the cartoonish version of paleo diets that is emulated by contemporary paleo dieters never really existed. Let me give an example from the first result I got when I searched for "<a href="http://thepaleodiet.com/what-to-eat-on-the-paleo-diet/#.Vqc4BCp94dU" target="_blank">Paleo Diet</a>:"<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: 'Noticia Text', georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.7px; margin-bottom: 15px;">
<em><strong>Daily Sample Straight from Dr. Cordain’s <a href="http://thepaleodiet.com/paleo-answer/" style="color: #993334; outline: none; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;" title="Books">The Paleo Answer</a>:</strong></em></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: 'Noticia Text', georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.7px; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<li style="background: url("images/bullet.png") 0px 5px no-repeat; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 12px;"><strong>Breakfast:</strong> Omega-3 or free ranging eggs scrambled in olive oil with chopped parsley. Grapefruit, or any fresh fruit in season, herbal tea</li>
</ul>
<ul style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: 'Noticia Text', georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.7px; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<li style="background: url("images/bullet.png") 0px 5px no-repeat; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 12px;"><strong>Snack:</strong> Sliced lean beef, fresh apricots or seasonal fruit</li>
</ul>
<ul style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: 'Noticia Text', georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.7px; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<li style="background: url("images/bullet.png") 0px 5px no-repeat; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 12px;"><strong>Lunch:</strong> Caesar salad with chicken (olive oil and lemon dressing), herbal tea</li>
</ul>
<ul style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: 'Noticia Text', georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.7px; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<li style="background: url("images/bullet.png") 0px 5px no-repeat; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 12px;"><strong>Snack: </strong>Apple slices, raw walnuts</li>
</ul>
<ul style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: 'Noticia Text', georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21.7px; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 20px; padding: 0px;">
<li style="background: url("images/bullet.png") 0px 5px no-repeat; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 12px;"><strong>Dinner:</strong> Tomato and avocado slices; grilled skinless turkey breast; steamed broccoli, carrots, and artichoke; bowl of fresh blueberries, raisins, and almonds; one glass white wine or mineral water. (Clearly, wine would never have been available to our ancestors, but the 85:15 rule allows you to consume three non-Paleo meals per week.)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Somehow, Dr Cordain seems to think that our ancestors got up, wandered over to their ancient stove and scrambled from their abundant stores of eggs (?) with their recently pressed olive oil (?) and parsley that happened to be on a nearby bush. Remember, the whole idea is that our diet went downhill when we started raising our own crops and animals. But it gets worse: practically every meal is a meat-lovers dream, indicating that our ancestors managed to find and kill a cow, a chicken (not before getting plenty of unfertilised eggs) and a turkey. Let's ignore that our ancestors probably couldn't have a cheat meal on the diet they were forced to eat by food availability.<br />
<br />
In reality, we are entirely sure what they ate because they forgot to bequeath us any food logs. Our best bet is to guess from non-westernised populations that exist today and try and evaluate what remaining hunter-gatherer populations still survive. Of the ones that survive, it is crucial to remember that <i>they survived</i>. They were not wiped out by food shortage, a major feature of their lives which made agriculture so revolutionary.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the closest population to paleolithic diets (in plural: their undoubtedly existed major variation regionally) is <a href="http://www.staffanlindeberg.com/TheKitavaStudy.html" target="_blank">the Kitavan people</a>. Whilst, as I said, their life expectancy is short (around 45 years of age), the ones that do live longer seem to enjoy a high quality of life into old age. But unlike Dr Cordain's suggestions, the Kitavans eat minimal (if any) land-based meat and around 70% carbohydrates coming from fruit and root vegetables primarily. They eat about 10% protein, a shockingly low amount compared to the above suggested "paleo" diet.<br />
<br />
It might be objected that there are plenty of high-meat populations eating non-western diets, like <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM197104012841304" target="_blank">the Maasai</a>. This population seems to be polar opposite to the Kitavans (remember how I said that ancient diets would have been incredibly diverse?) with plenty of meat and milk (woops! Did they not get the memo that <a href="http://thepaleodiet.com/qa-with-dr-cordain-milk/" target="_blank">milk is non-paleo</a>?). Even ignoring the crucial importance of non-paleo milk in their diet - mind you, <a href="http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.no/2008/06/masai-and-atherosclerosis.html" target="_blank">their milk is unlike wimpy Western milk</a>, with way more fat, cholesterol and protein, with less lactose - one important feature of the Maasai diet is that it contains barely any vegetables. Still not what today would pass for a paleo diet.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/" target="_blank">Perhaps a diet derived from our ancestors would have been basically vegetarian</a>? I could go on with other populations that may be closer to the paleolithic times than us, but the point is that none of them ate what would today be considered a good paleo diet. Nor could we hope to emulate it in any practical sense today, since our food is not the same anyway. Just like the Maasai milk is not like our milk, our domesticated animals are not like paleolithic animals, our soils are not like the more nutrient rich paleolithic soils and our crops have been genetically modified by natural breeding for so long that we might not even recognise their paleolithic precursors - for instance, did you know that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot#History" target="_blank">carrots were originally not orange</a>?<br />
<br />
At this point, paleo aficionados might be screeching that I am completely ignoring their main argument: nobody is saying to go back to the paleo diet <i>just because</i>, rather, the claim is that the paleo diet is better because we have evolved to eat it. This is problematic on all sorts of levels.<br />
<br />
The first thought I had when I originally heard this claim was "<i>so we must have evolved to love McDonald's</i>" and I stand by that thought. Highly processed sugar and fat laden foods must be good for us, on this evolutionary view, because we evolved to want it so much. We never evolved to want dirt because dirt wasn't nutritious; our taste buds evolved to give us pleasure when we eat foods the body wants, and is at least neutral - if not disgusted - by foods we should avoid. The correlation between poisons and bitterness is not accidental, it is evolved. So given any possible food, this line of evolutionary thought would lead us to conclude that the standard Western diet is the best one, because only in the developed West with our panoply of culinary choice in supermarkets do we get close to being able to choose any possible food.<br />
<br />
It is exactly this desire for the so-called unhealthy foods that led us to develop these foods, and at bottom, it is why the much maligned agricultural revolution took off. Granting the obviously true point that it is only now that we have been able to create these Frankenstein foods which mess with our in-built biology, agriculture <i>cannot</i> have led to a diet that kills us because we have been using agriculture for years without dying.<br />
<br />
It is a trivially true evolutionary fact that the populations which developed agriculture out-competed the ones that did not. In other words, nature has cast her vote: agriculture beats non-agriculture in an evolutionary sense. However, even this is not an argument for agriculture being the best basis for a healthy diet because evolution is complicated and an enormous number of other variables exist.<br />
<br />
It is crucial to understand how evolution works to see how misguided evolution-based arguments are for establishing nutritional facts. Evolution is slow - that is exactly the point raised - and it is so slow that it never reaches its end. Paleolithic humans were not built for whatever diet they ate, necessarily, since they evolved themselves from more primitive creates - ultimately, we all come from single-cell organisms! Natural selection works with what it gets and adaptations slowly add up to provide the best system given the circumstances.<br />
<br />
One thing we learn from our evolutionary past is that, at bottom, humans are experts at making do with what we get. We are not built meat eaters, or vegans, or anything of the sort; we are scavengers. That is why so many varied diets seem to work. It is true that milk is not a staple of evolutionarily ancient diets, but we adapted to digesting lactose and some groups have managed to thrive from it. It is true that grains were not mainstays of ancestral diets, but most people can tolerate proteins like gluten <i>just fine</i>.<br />
<br />
Paleo logic might work in cases like eating more fiber (because our digestive system would be adapted to "assuming" a high fiber intake), it successfully predicts that we might not have a limit on our sugar appetite (because sugar was scarce and all natural anyway back then) and it may imply that we are less likely to have defences for newer toxins than for older ones.<br />
<br />
At the end of the day, the paleo diet <i>may still be the healthiest diet</i>. I am far from arguing against people eating the paleo diet. If what I say is true, in fact, you may do just fine on it. At bottom, whether or not the paleo diet works, it does so regardless of whether paleo <i>logic</i> is sound.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-63836185924158870642016-02-10T12:00:00.000+10:002016-02-10T12:00:00.773+10:00Success is Failing a Little LessAt bottom, all success is failure. In sports, even a world-record breaking, gold medal winning performance against a stacked field is a failure to go faster still. In business, the most innovative and successful product could have been even more so. In life, you could always have done better. If this were not true, no progress would ever occur anymore: if nobody could go faster than Usain Bolt in a 100m sprint, nobody would bother trying.<br />
<br />
That sounds pretty bleak. But if you have been on the road for a while, perhaps you realise something: almost every important success came with a bunch of times of falling short of that win. So if we are honest with ourselves, the path to success is pretty bleak anyway.<br />
<br />
Often it is hard to quantify how well or badly we do, but one benefit of swimming is how reliably merciless the clock is in doing it for me. After touching the wall at the end of the race I can always look up to see what time I did. At the end of the day the difference between a successful swim and an unsuccessful is entirely in my head: did I achieve what I wanted, the bar I set for myself? If not, it was a failure. Even a personal best could be a failure if it was not as good as I wanted.<br />
<br />
But a personal best, even if it is below what I wanted, is <i>still</i> better than last time. I failed a little less. Let me put it in a slightly geeky way: nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum). Therefore, the best upper limit for how fast someone can swim the 100m breaststroke is that nobody will <i>ever</i> exceed the speed of light (which means a time of about 333 nanoseconds, which is way below the 0.01 second accuracy of swimming clocks). So in a sense, anything more than that fastest time possible is a failure.<br />
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Not getting to the speed of light in breaststroke is probably something you can be forgiven for, but such an insane "goal" highlights the point: standards are artificial. Real success is falling short a little less than before.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-25266418546286934692016-02-03T12:00:00.000+10:002016-02-03T12:00:16.754+10:00Chatting to God in Secular AtheologyOne of the most recognizable religious practices is prayer. Prayer is in some way a communication between the person praying and the supernatural, where in major monotheistic religions that supernatural reality has a decidedly personal existence. Prayer hence has many elements: it can be supplication (asking for something), thanksgiving, adoration, confession (as in, statement of belief) and reception.<br />
<br />
Though prayer is multifaceted, I want to single out one sort at the moment as particularly important: prayer as <i>dialogue</i>. Personal, unscripted prayer is a key element in the life of the devout believer and forms the basis of what is referred to as a "relationship with God." Indeed, relationship is often said to be the essence of a believer's religion, or even the substitute for any religion at all; to be spiritual but not religious can sometimes be seen as a relationship with God unmediated by any formalization in religion.<br />
<br />
I claim that this type of prayer carries huge benefit because of the character of the communication to a being that is decidedly different from any that can be otherwise encountered. In particular, God has the "omnis" which distinguish God from other human beings and confer that unique place to prayer.<br />
<br />
God is <i>omnipotent,</i> keeping the believer in a position of empowered humility, as they both recognise their inferiority to someone all-powerful (leading to humility), yet have direct access in communication to that person (and are thereby empowered). God is <i>omniscient</i>: praying to God necessarily requires honesty, because it is clearly understood that God cannot be deceived. This entails that prayers are even more honest than the believer's own thoughts, since self-deception can be substantially mitigated by actually putting into words (whether said aloud or not) what would otherwise be an unexamined thought.<br />
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God is <i>omni-present</i>, which means God is reachable at any time and in any place, allowing unrestricted access, also providing constancy to this process of prayer. Finally, God is <i>omni-benevolent</i>, meaning that once again the believer comes to God in humility (since they are not only inferior in power but in goodness), they come empowered (because God cares about the believer's interests) and God draws out the goodness in the person.<br />
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These characteristics make belief in God an incredibly powerful tool. This capacity of God to bring out the best in people is probably part of what is behind the various studies showing that <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25673322" target="_blank">priming a person with religious language can lead to pro-social (or in general "good") behaviour</a>. But unfortunately, the effect is only reliably found in those with religious background. Probably my favourite aspect of prayer in this sense is the capacity to honestly self-reflect, make decisions and set goals. Lacking, however, such an omni-excellent being, how can secular theology provide a suitable alternative?<br />
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The most basic first step is to externalise your thought process and the things you want to "pray" about. When we externalise things by saying them out loud or writing them down, they can more easily pass from being unexamined and subconsciously affecting our ideas through to examinable. Writing can be particularly helpful in this regard because not only does writing slow us down to think about what we write, it is also easy to review once we finish writing or some time later, allowing us to more critically examine our thought process. On the other hand, vocalising our prayers provides a much more "real time" option, avoiding the tidying up effect that writing something down provides. Playing around with which works best for you, or combining them in different ways, will yield the best results.<br />
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Whilst externalising can provide the full benefit of this form of prayer for some, others are more skilled in self-deception, so will need to make the prayer more external still. This does not mean that you need to talk to another real person, you can talk to the same "person" that the believers do. After all, on secular atheology, the believer only <i>thinks</i> they are talking to God. In reality, they are speaking to a figment of their imagination. What stops you from doing the same? Imagining speaking or writing to God, once you have built up the practice, can be just as good as the "real" thing that theists do. It does take practice and an element of honesty with yourself to do this, because you will need to temporarily conjure up in your imagination a being that does not exist. Once you have practice, however (and this is essentially all that theists have: <i>practice</i>), you too can have your own fictional deity. Whatever your view of some other religion's God, your temporary religion is going to have whatever you think of as an all-good, all-powerful and all-knowing being.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-67814692612180423892016-01-27T12:00:00.000+10:002016-01-27T12:00:02.227+10:00The Diet for YouMaybe you made a New Year's resolution, and as part of that, you thought to go on a diet. Maybe you have a bit of flab around the midsection to move or barely any fat anywhere on your body - but no muscle, either. Perhaps your blood results came back with high cholesterol or pre-diabetes. Whatever the reason, you decided to go on a diet.<br />
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So you go online, to a magazine or a diet book and you are floored by the possibilities: <a href="http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/high-carb-no-cardio-dieting-part-1.htm" target="_blank">high carb</a>, <a href="https://www.atkins.com/how-it-works/atkins-40" target="_blank">low carb</a>, high protein, <a href="http://www.fruitarian.info/" target="_blank">low protein</a>, <a href="http://www.e-health101.com/2013/07/the-lettuce-diet-short-weight-loss-plan-with-few-calories-and-lots-of-vitamins/" target="_blank">lettuce only</a>, <a href="http://www.cabbage-soup-diet.com/" target="_blank">anything as long as its cabbage soup</a>, <a href="http://www.ketogenic-diet-resource.com/ketogenic-diet-plan.html" target="_blank">high fat</a>, <a href="http://www.lighterlife.com/" target="_blank">low fat</a>, <a href="http://www.shape.com/healthy-eating/meal-ideas/clean-green-food-drink-cleanse" target="_blank">only green foods</a>...what do you choose? How do you pick among such an enormous array of options? They all promise to give you whatever you want in life, from living to a hundred through to winning Olympic gold and cover-model looks. They all promise great results...but they are not compatible. There is no way to go high and low fat at the same time.<br />
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Most of these diets <i>sort of</i> work: if you only eat lettuce, you <i>will</i> lose weight. But you won't live to be a hundred (you'll probably die much sooner than that), you won't gain muscle (you'll lose it), it won't be easy to follow long term (try it for a week and report back, if you like), and so on. For all that, though, if your goal is very rapid weight loss and you have the capacity to eat only lettuce for the (necessarily short-term) time required, then maybe it is the right diet for you at this point.<br />
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There is no such thing as the "best diet." There is only the "best diet <i>for your current goals and where you are at right now</i>." This implies two crucial questions: (1) what are your goals? and (2) how do you relate to food?<br />
<br />
<b>Your Goals</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
It makes no sense to adopt a diet for weight loss if you want to gain weight. Similarly, it is unreasonable to expect good results from a diet aimed to lower blood pressure if your blood pressure is low. So the very first question to ask yourself before embarking on a dietary change is what it is you hope to achieve from it - and <i>that</i> will rule out the vast majority of diets which offer differing or even opposite goals. Do you want to lose, gain, or maintain weight? Do you have some kind of malady which you hope to address with the help of improved nutrition? Is there some fitness or performance objective that would guide your diet?<br />
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These are the sorts of questions that you need to ask yourself before you can decide on an appropriate diet. There is no use in simply deciding to eat "better", because the very word implies that you have some goal that the diet is better <i>for</i>. Your goals set up a framework within which you can start making value judgements about whether or not a food put in front of you is good or bad. Just as a clocks can be good for telling the time but are terrible for building a house out of, so too is a food good or bad depending on what you want it to do.<br />
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<b>Your Relationship with Food</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
There is more to a diet than whether or not it works on someone generically in your state; will it work for you? There are two important elements to each person's relationship with food which need to be thought of when trying to make dietary changes: how a person relates to food <i>physiologically </i>and <i>psychologically</i>.<br />
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Your body may just react differently to one diet compared to another. As an example, for those of us who are lactose intolerant, it would be a pointless (and needlessly painful) experience to increase our high-lactose dairy consumption for our goal, completely independent of whether or not some identical person without the food intolerance would benefit from more dairy. You may have some other food allergy or intolerance. Yet there are finer details to your body's reaction to foods which are less obvious and perhaps even more important; factors such as your own gut microbiome, your sensitivity to (and secretion of) key hormones and even your genes can have crucial roles in how your body responds to food. Not to mention whether you are younger or older, fitter or fatter, male or female, what foods you grew up with and have eaten in the past...your uniqueness and individuality mean that even things that work for <i>most</i> people may not work for you - and the converse can be true! - things that do not work for most people <i>do</i> work for you. One thing you should always remember is that you are not a rat. So there's a good chance the highly developed field of what happens to rats - medicine's favourite test case for doing all sorts of things that would probably not pass an ethics committee for humans - does not apply to you. Keep that in mind next time you hear "science says that..."; science is probably not talking about humans anyway.<br />
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It is unlikely that all the myriad of relevant factors will ever be able to be accurately read off from some simple test, but there are ways to figure out what is more or less likely to work for you. You can get blood tests done to measure insulin sensitivity, which may give you some insight into how your body metabolises carbohydrates. The new field of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrigenetics" target="_blank">nutrigenetics</a> can give an idea of what your body was built for, so getting a gene test from companies like <a href="https://www.nutrigenomix.com/" target="_blank">Nutrigenomix</a> or <a href="https://www.dnafit.com/" target="_blank">DNAFit</a> might help you - or it might not, I have never been tested myself so cannot comment. The idea at least is good.<br />
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Much more neglected but just as (if not more) important as your physiological relation with food is your psychological one. Even if your body would respond in the way you want it to with the new diet, can you keep to it? Some diets, even if reasonably healthy, seem impossible to some. Some diets seem objectionable on moral or religious grounds to some. Others may find that a particular dietary strategy does not fit in with their current lifestyle or schedule. For purely psychological reasons there may be differences in how frequently and how much a person wants to eat. These examples of psychological differences do not even begin to scratch the surface of possibilities when it comes to the plethora of ways that we relate to food; socially, culturally, as individuals, and so on.<br />
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I, for instance, have a minutely fine-tuned and considered diet when I have the liberty to pick and choose by myself, and work pretty well even when food supplies are not quite what I want - but I struggle to be healthy when eating with others. Others I know need to follow dietary plans which allow for less-than-ideal foods from a physiological perspective because, if they fall short in a rigid plan, they are inclined to engage in highly counter-productive behaviour like binge eating. Not everyone is inclined to the all-or-nothing mindset of binge eating, however, so should not be a consideration for everyone.<br />
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<b>The Bottom Line</b><br />
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No diet is perfect <i>as such</i>. When making a dietary change, it is important to make a diet that fits your wants, your needs and your unique peculiarities. You should not feel forced into dietary choices because they worked for someone with different goals or because they worked for some statistical average; as an individual, if something is going to work it has to work <i>for you</i>.<br />
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The last caveat in closing is to note that, whatever your goal, chances are the reason you have not already achieved what you want is because it is difficult. For all the individual tailoring that must go into a diet for it to work, one thing that is close to guaranteed across the board is that finding and sticking what works for you is going to take effort. Perhaps the biggest reason unsustainable and impractical fad diets are popular is that they promise quick results for everyone in a short amount of time - and the biggest truism about a fad diet is that it fails. Find the diet for you. Stick to the diet for you until you reach your goal. Refine and repeat.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-67510784203273038022016-01-21T11:40:00.000+10:002016-01-24T16:10:50.946+10:00Secular AtheologyReligion, whether you like it or not, has been around for a very long time. If you believe in a particular religion (whatever that might mean) then you probably believe that your particular religion gets a lot of things right because of some sort of divine or supernatural assistance. Some deity may have revealed elements of that religion or inspired a prophet to speak authoritatively. But even if you do not believe any religion to have this special status of truth, I contend you should still believe in religion.<br />
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Religion, as an old artifact, has managed to amass in itself a large amount of time-tested wisdom; so much so, in fact, that it has stood the test of time. Religion has stood the test of time - but not all particular religions have. Why did the ones that have survived from ancient civilisations endured to this day? What has made Abrahamic religions, for instance, or Hinduism, so successful? These are religions that have managed to thrive across hundreds or even thousands of years and so, I contend, they must have something to them.</div>
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This argument is basically evolutionary: let us assume that it is, for whatever reason, a natural inclination of human beings to be religious. That seems fairly obvious from the global nature of religiosity. What makes one religion more successful than another? The first point to note - the crucial one, in fact, for the non-religious - is that the natural selection of ideas relates to behaviours and perspectives. If some religion were to assert without any knowledge of the content of the statement that "God is asdfghjk", then (without the enterprising theories of theologians that might say that God is fundamentally randomness on a keyboard or a mystery of technology - both of which were entirely unintended by my gibberish) it seems like that would have no actual practical content. That dogma would not have stood the test of time because of what those religionists believe or did as a consequence of it.</div>
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Take, on the other hand, the command to evangelise in Christianity. This is clearly a doctrine with important consequences for the lives of Christians. Or the need requirement to abstain from particular foods, or pray in a certain way at a certain time, or go on pilgrimages, or observe sacred periods in a prescribed manner - these are clearly doctrines with practical consequences.</div>
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The question about why religions thrive has to do with what flows from its dogmas and doctrines, not necessarily (or directly) from the dogmas themselves. Religions could be seen in this light as intellectual organisms of a sort with complex interweavings of orthodoxy and orthopraxis which evolve, thrive or die out in the intellectual space of human beings.</div>
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What makes a particular religion thrive? Part of it must have to do with its capacity to propagate. For some religions, creating a very strong sense of inside community within an ethnicity may prove a vital element of a religion's survival. For others, the fundamentality of spreading the religion may be its lifesource. The study of these different models might be very interesting for those wanting to work in marketing, for instance - time tested ideas for how to propagate a product and create consumer loyalty to it.</div>
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And yet, there is more to a religion than the fact of its transmission in time. I believe that part of why religion is such a worldwide phenomenon is that it helped in our own evolutionary past to aid the survival of human groups. Religions, it can be seen from basic sociology of religion, produce communities that operate in particular ways: church communities run differently in Catholicism and Protestant denominations, and Christian communities are different to Hindu communities. What elements of Christian thought and practice lead to successful communities? What elements of Hindu ones lead to their success? Focussing more on individuals, what is the role and benefits of personal religious practices?</div>
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<br /></div>
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The contention I am making is that religions have wealths of wisdom derived from their organic growth over time. There is no need to think of religions as fundamentally true to derive some kind of value from its practices and beliefs, and the traditional wisdom of communities may well provide a sort of cheat sheet for avoiding mistakes that have been costly for communities and individuals in the past. This does not mean that even a highly successful religion even has largely useful practices independent of that religion. Much like in biological evolution, it may well be that religions have largely obsolete, vestigial practices and survive mostly because of their enormous social capital. But I think much knowledge can be derived from religions to be secularised to suit our own needs and aims, and in the coming weeks I will write about many of the practices and beliefs - from prayer and yoga through to Trinitarian theology - which I think are worth our time to adapt. That adaptation of theology to secularity is <b>secular atheology</b>.</div>
Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-26099645023053017162016-01-17T16:57:00.001+10:002016-01-17T16:57:52.680+10:00Right and Righteousness in UtilitarianismOne of the problems in utilitarianism is that the rightness of an action depends solely on the actual consequences of the action, rather than foreseeable or probable consequences of it. This means that a sincere utilitarian may try to increase overall happiness and end up doing the wrong thing, and conversely, someone describable as having a repugnant moral character might "accidentally" increase overall happiness by their actions and so have done the right thing both unknowingly and unwillingly. Given that our actions have repercussions into the far-flung future that are arrived at by long and complex causal-chains, it seems impossible even with hindsight to accurately determine whether an action is right or wrong - and trying to use foresight is even worse.<br />
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This problem of utilitarianism whereby the consequences of actions are so complicated that it is seemingly impossible to use utilitarianism as a practical ethical theory can be called the <i>epistemic</i> problem, because it is a problem with our knowledge of the world. It is much like trying to predict the weather far into the future: even if it may be possible <i>in principle</i> to do, it seems unattainable in practice with any modicum of precision.<br />
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So, it seems, it is impossible to declare any action to be right or wrong, even what may seems like obvious goods or evils. Only simple, isolated scenarios can even hope to be evaluated by utilitarianism and these only occur in our imaginations. From this it is straightforward to conclude that utilitarianism is perfectly useless in practice.<br />
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I disagree, but let me grant that argument for the sake of exploring a concept related to moral rightness which is usually wrongly lumped with it: moral character. Rightness is a concept that applies to actions but <i>not</i> to persons, whereas both persons and actions can be immoral. In English at least this distinction is clear, since describing someone as moral gives them a moral judgement (unsurprisingly) whereas describing someone as right seems to give them a judgement based on the content of their beliefs or assertions.<br />
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Utilitarianism gives in itself no grounds for describing the moral character of persons; it is a more conservative theory describing actions. However, our use of language allows us to ask another question: what makes a person good? A utilitarian <i>may</i> say that such a concept is undefined except by saying that a moral person is a person that does good. This seems unsatisfactory, however, because it seems obvious to most that describing the character of a person should have something to do with what they are like as persons, not whether their actions happen to be good (from the vantage point of some omniscient observer who can foresee the consequences of all possible actions in a scenario).<br />
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Confining utilitarianism to the description of actions, it can be defined that a moral person is someone who <i>intends</i> to maximise happiness. That is to say, they choose their actions based on what they perceive to be the action that would most increase happiness. Their righteousness, to use an unpopular term, is determined by their intentions and not the actual consequences of their actions.<br />
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I contend that this view of moral character is upheld sufficiently by our use of language without the need of further metaethical argumentation. What people <i>mean</i> when they say of someone that their character is good is that they intend to do good. This is illustrated clearly in the fact that people readily ignore that actual consequences of actions when they are suitably convinced that the agent did not <i>intend</i> them to come about.<br />
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This allows for one of the most important concepts in ethics: responsibility (and the corollary blame). A person is responsible for the consequences of their actions insofar as they can be reasonably expected to have foreseen them, and not responsible otherwise. Hence, a doctor is responsible for the known effects and side-effects of a drug they administer, but not for whether the life he is saving turns out many years down the line to be a serial killer. Similarly, the serial killer is responsible for the deaths of those they kill, but not responsible for the prevention of a terror attack that may result from their unknowing of a terrorist.<br />
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With this in mind, I think shift could be enacted from trying to maximise happiness to attempting to be a moral person. Where other theories have doing right and being righteous as the same thing (notably virtue ethics), utilitarianism may always have a decided tension between these two. Nonetheless, this line of reasoning can still provide the basis for moral function in a practical sense within a community.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-5997936839184071512016-01-10T11:09:00.000+10:002016-04-05T13:39:46.809+10:00All You Need to Know about Fundamental Quantum MechanicsQuantum mechanics has got to be the hottest physics theory ever. Every successful theory in science is popular within that science - and quantum mechanics is the most accurate scientific theory of all time to date - but the popularity has decidedly left the Ivory Tower of academia. From <a href="http://shop.coles.com.au/online/national/finish-quantum-dishwasher-tablets-lemon-7554543p" target="_blank">quantum dishwashing</a> to <a href="http://www.quantumgroup.com.au/" target="_blank">quantum real estate</a> and practically everything in between, quantum mechanics seems to be the brainy version of adding sex appeal in marketing.<br />
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I can only imagine that advertising is the main reason for the flamboyant use of the word quantum, since it is essentially a fancy word for "smallest amount of some physical entity." For something to be quantised means that it is made up of small indivisible quantities - for instance, spin of particles is quantised such that, for instance, electrons can only have some integer multiple of a half spin. So either these quantum products are "quantum" for their sexiness, or they are somehow quantised in such a way that is don't-ask-me-how relevant to the consumer. I suspect the former.<br />
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The other side of quantum mechanics (QM) in popular culture is not on the market but in the way people use QM to intellectualise their odd views about the world. For instance, there is esoteric views of "Quantum Healing" espoused by Deepak Chopra or wacky New Age perversions of the theory. Of course, to a physicist, all of that misuse of science amounts to a grand "quantum flapdoodle" (to use <a href="http://physicsandphysicists.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/god-of-quantum-flapdoodle.html" target="_blank">Murray Gell-Mann's term</a>). In general, it is wisest to follow the advice of xkcd on this point when speaking to someone who has no background in actual physics:<br />
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<a href="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/quantum_mechanics.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/quantum_mechanics.png" width="216" /></a></div>
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But what if you do not want to be in the riff raff ignorant of quantum mechanics and rise to the lofty heights of someone who can honestly claim to not understand it? The fact of the matter is, quantum mechanics is weird because it operates on a different logic to what we are used to in "classical" physics. By all means, baffle your brains out by trying to picture interference patterns from double slit experiments with buckyballs (sixty carbon atoms arranged like a football) in terms of it acting like a wave and a particle. When you are suitably confused by that, perhaps you will appreciate that understanding the logic of QM gives far more insight, I think, into why QM <i>seems</i> so outlandish to us.<br />
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For those that are averse to mathematics, a career in quantum mechanics is not for you. Like most theories in physics, quantum mechanics has two parts:<br />
<ol>
<li>Equations. </li>
<li>Interpretations which explain how the symbols in the equations relate to real world phenomena.</li>
</ol>
But before you run away screaming that there are equations in physics, there is still some insight you can glean without actually looking at equations directly (something which some people avoid as much as looking at the sun for fear of burning their eyes). To begin with, the equations of QM are pretty well established. Unfortunately, the second element is not fundamentally agreed upon. Certainly, physicists can use the equations to make extraordinarily accurate predictions about the world from a "plug-and-chug" point of view, but there are wild divergences over what exactly is happening under the quantum mechanical bonnet. So a truly and absolutely conservative argument about quantum mechanics should probably only involve what the theory predicts - which unfortunately, has absolutely nothing to do with dish-washing, real estate, healing or, the darling of many quack worldviews, consciousness.<br />
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Still, the basic structure of the equations of quantum mechanics explains why we find it so un-intuitive: in QM, systems are described by states in Hilbert space. By contrast, classical systems are described by points in phase space. Even without really understanding what the Hilbert and phase spaces are, the underlying point is that the way we have to think about the inner workings of quantum compared to the more intuitive classical mechanics is fundamentally different. It would be, to use a crude analogy, like asking a car mechanic to work on a space shuttle: there are obviously certain similarities, but at the end of the day, car engines run off explosions which move pistons whereas rockets shoot fuel out their rear end to go forwards; they are incommensurate.<br />
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Let me finally state all the fundamental postulates of quantum mechanics:<br />
<ul>
<li>Physical systems are described by states in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space" target="_blank">Hilbert space</a>.</li>
<li>Those systems evolve according to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation" target="_blank">Schrodinger equation</a> (or equivalents, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_mechanics" target="_blank">Heisenberg matrix mechanics</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation" target="_blank">Feynman path integral formulation</a>), given some Hamiltonian for the system (where the Hamiltonian is the functional of energy).</li>
</ul>
That is all. There is a rule for defining what something is and a rule for explaining how it changes in time. The state in Hilbert space is called the wavefunction and Schrodinger's equation is a wave equation, must like the one you would use in classical mechanics to describe a wave on a string, for instance.<br />
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Some physics-literate people may protest that I am missing an extra postulate. You see, part of the charm of quantum mechanics is that Hilbert space is mysterious and hidden. This means that you cannot actually measure wavefunctions - and this is quite the problem, because if you cannot measure wavefunctions and you hold that wavefunctions are what describe physical systems, then it would seem that physical systems cannot be measured. That has to be false, though, because we clearly measure things all the time. So they add in another postulate which explains measurements:<br />
<ul>
<li>The probability of measuring a system to be in some possible state is given by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_rule" target="_blank">Born rule</a>, which "collapses" the wavefunction - in other words, measuring a system makes the wavefunction look like a very sharp spike at the value you measured.</li>
</ul>
<i>Side note: I will not go into why I think the Born rule is an unnecessary addition to the theory other than to say that I think the Everettian Quantum Mechanics is correct.</i><br />
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You can write that all in terms of the mathematical formalism, which is of course a necessary step, but if you leave this blogpost understanding nothing more than that fundamental difference between quantum and classical mechanics (ie, Hilbert vs. phase spaces), you will understand more than practically anyone outside of science. But why leave maths out of it when you can put it in for good measure? Here are the postulates in their mathematical glory:<br />
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Physical systems are described by states in Hilbert space which are written in Dirac notation with "bra"s (1) and "ket"s (2) (which together make bra-kets, or brackets):<br />
$$\begin{equation}\label{eq:bra}\langle\phi\rvert \end{equation}$$ $$\begin{equation}\label{eq:ket}\lvert\psi\rangle \end{equation}$$<br />
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The bras are just the Hermitian conjugates of the kets - they correspond to the same vectors in the opposite sides of dual space.</div>
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Observables are the things you measure, and in quantum mechanics, they are described by Hermitian ("self-adjoint") operators such that: $$ \hat A = \hat A^\dagger$$</div>
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The possible results of measuring some observable are the eigenvalues of that operator. In other words, if you take the momentum operator: $$\mathbf {\hat p} = -i\hbar\mathbf{\nabla}$$</div>
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These systems evolve (change over time) according to the Schrodinger equation:</div>
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$$\displaystyle i\hbar\frac{\partial \psi}{\partial t} = \frac{-\hbar^2}{2m} \nabla^2 \psi + V \psi$$</div>
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Or compactly and in terms of bras and kets:</div>
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$$i\hbar\frac{\partial\lvert\psi\rangle}{\partial t} = \hat H \lvert\psi\rangle$$ </div>
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Finally, the Born rule can be written as (where x is just standing in for any observable, not necessarily an x coordinate):</div>
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$$P(x=a) = |\langle\phi(a)\rvert\psi(a)\rangle|^2$$</div>
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There you have it; that is all there is to fundamental quantum mechanics. Use your knowledge for good.</div>
Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-11041245282662924332016-01-03T13:30:00.001+10:002016-01-03T13:30:37.555+10:00Implicit Bias and ScepticismI listened to a fascinating lecture given by Jennifer Saul at the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK which brought up an excellent link between the psychological study of implicit bias (for which she gave numerous examples) and its implications for epistemology, in particular, scepticism. I recommend giving the talk a listen (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_FqrHs9S-s" target="_blank">YouTube link here</a>) because it goes into much greater detail than I will here. I am going to focus on the fascinating link Saul made between the fact that we know we have these ingrained biases with our inability to overcome them by willpower and its implications for knowledge and rational thought.<br />
<br />Saul tentatively defines the term implicit bias as the collection of largely unconscious associations which people are prone to which affect how we perceive and interact with the world. The biases are not quite beliefs, they are not conscious, and yet they affect our thought processes. They are not mitigated by stated beliefs: for instance, the famous African-American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson said:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
“<i>There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody White and feel relieved.</i>” (<a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/IATmaterials/PDFs/AT.psychinquiry.2004.pdf" target="_blank">citation</a>)</blockquote>
That is implicit bias in action, and the painful experience of Jackson is not only common, it is practically universal. Unlike in Jackson's case, it is almost always sub-conscious. This presents an unfortunate sceptical problem: we have good reason to believe that our faculties are deficient when it comes to decisions that we believe are made rationally.<br />
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Jackson's example is one of a feeling produced, but others may bring out the force of the problem more clearly if they highlight how it is our conscious decision making that is affected by these ingrained biases against people of particular races, genders, sexual orientations and so forth. But the research is clear that there are pervasive and insidious cases of discrimination among self-labelled egalitarians who, try as they may to make calm, reflective decisions when choosing between biased options, still tend to make the biased on - whether it be gender, racial or even height discrimination, among countless other features to discriminate upon.<br />
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The social problem is clear in that these implicit biases produce stagnant structures of discrimination. However, there is a more philosophical problem that Saul highlights:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />"<i>I will be arguing that what we know about implicit biases shows us that we have very good reason to believe that we cannot properly trust our knowledge-seeking faculties. This does not mean that we might be mistaken about everything, or even everything in the external world (so it is weaker than traditional scepticism). But it does mean that we have good reason to believe that we are mistaken about a great deal (so it is stronger than traditional forms of scepticism). A further way in which bias-related doubt is stronger than traditional scepticism: this is doubt that demands action. With traditional scepticism, we feel perfectly fine about setting aside the doubts we have felt when we leave the philosophy seminar room. But with bias-related doubt, we don’t feel fine about this at all. We feel a need to do something to improve our epistemic situation.</i>" (<a href="http://www.disputatio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Saul_Jennifer-Scepticism-and-Implicit-Bias.pdf" target="_blank">citation</a>)</blockquote>
I recommend giving a long and hard think to the paper she delivered (cited just above) because unfortunately, this is not a problem that exists external to us as individuals: the problem is me, the problem is you.<br />
Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-83228466157049468232015-12-24T13:34:00.000+10:002015-12-24T13:34:17.293+10:00Laws of Nature as PatternsAn old definition of science could be that science is the study of cause and effect in nature. The idea that causality is the central idea in knowledge goes back at least to Aristotle's four cause analysis of the world and in many ways this is what people believe science does today. Instead of directly citing cause and effect, it seems to me that the intermediate notion of the "laws of nature" is interjected; science studies the laws of nature, which are about cause and effect in nature. Simple, right?<br />
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I want to propose an alternate idea based on how I view science and in particular, based on how I see modern science handling data. There's a caveat before I begin: as usual, I think much more about the canonical status of physics in science than I do of other equally legitimate branches of natural science. So what I say relates <i>most</i> to physics and (perhaps) the applicability slowly decreases as we move towards more qualitative sciences. Or it might not - my point is that I am making a stronger case for science as most exemplified in the hard, mathematical sciences.</div>
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Scientists do experiments and get data. This data is put often into tables or graphs and analysed, whereby models are produced which explain the correlations in the data by causal mechanisms. The model, if it is a good one, will make other predictions which can be tested to see if it is correct, and the more it passes those tests, the more credence it is given. That is the scientific method of observation, hypothesis, testing, conclusion. There are two very similar problems I see with this process: an error in data analysis and a deeper philosophical issue that Hume would have noted.<br />
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It is drilled into every data analysis/scientific statistics student that a correlation does not mean a causation and yet this explication of the scientific method clearly makes that jump. The justification is simple: eliminate as many variables as possible and the remaining correlations <i>must</i> be causation. That is simply mistaken and the history of science is rife with examples of deeper explanations being found of natural phenomena which destroyed the previously perceived causal mechanism.<br />
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Hume would have heartily agreed with this objection and would defiantly disagree with anyone who tried to maintain that, whilst correlation does not equal causation, <i>a lot</i> of correlation does, in fact, equal causation. His problem was two-fold: the assumption that the correlations of the past will hold in the future is only based on the observation that the correlations of the past have so far held true in the future. But that is circular, since in effect it says that the future is causally equivalent to the past because the past is causally equivalent to the past. But again, Hume had a deeper problem that simply the problem of induction. His biggest reason for scepticism is that causality was not a superficial relation between objects, in fact, we never really perceive causality at all, we perceive effects and infer causation. He called this "customary conjunction", or basically, correlation. For all this scepticism (and Hume unlike others branded with this title really was a sceptic), Hume did still believe in cause and effect, he simply thought it was beyond our knowledge.<br />
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I am not sure if I believe in cause and effect, but I propose right now the weaker claim that science does not study it. Science studies data to produce laws of nature which are expressed mathematically because, at bottom, <b>the laws of nature are patterns in observable variables or parameters</b>. In other words, the laws of nature are patterns of numbers that describe nature. Let me give an illustrating idea to stir the intuition of this proposal and consider how this relates to epistemology and the metaphysics of causality (if causality exists at all).<br />
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Think of the positive integers: 1, 2, 3, 4, ... They form a nice set whose properties can be analysed to yield fascinating mathematics. Relations can be defined on this set giving it order, taking a pair of numbers to another in the set by multiplication or addition, and so on. The tools of mathematics are about seeing mathematical structure in the integers, seeing what symmetries it might have, trying to see what patterns it has. A simple pattern in the integers is that the numbers are alternating odd, even, odd, even.<br />
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What if we tried to apply the tools of old fashioned science to the integers? It would yield fictitious language about causality to something which exists independent of causes: the fact that 2 is even is not <i>caused</i> by the fact that 1 is odd, even though we could conceivably speak of it that way. Many of the properties of the positive integers can be spoken of in terms of causality, but it is a fiction of our language, not a fact about the set itself.<br />
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So, I claim, it is in science. Equations like Newton's laws are mathematical statements which should not be thought of in terms of causality but in terms of patterns. It is still possible to make <i>if-then</i> statements: If a force is applied, then an acceleration will occur. That is a statement about what the second law predicts and codifies. It is also important to note that I am not simply saying "science produces equations that have no necessary connection to what really exists." This view is not scientific anti-realism, it is congruent with a critical realism about science.<br />
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It is important to dispel the objection that I am merely playing with words and the if-then statements are exactly equivalent to causality statements. But I refer back to the case of mathematics: it seems clear that "if you add one to an odd number you get and even number" is not equivalent to "adding one to an odd number causes an even number." The first is true, and the second uses perverted language to try and express, it seems, the first statement.<br />
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The pattern view has several advantages: for starters, it is epistemically conservative and codifies what the science actually shows rather than trying to make it jump over the correlation-causation barrier in the data. It is robust to quibbles over the meaning and nature of causality, in particular, it allows for a less stringent requirement on the necessary conjunction between a state of affairs and its antecedents; the pattern view may allow, once specified, the derivation of if-then statements, but it does not have to. Patterns can in principle be random or ordered.<br />
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It also avoids infinite causal regress problems. It seems intuitive to some (though not all) that causal chains must have a beginning (whether the causal series be <i>per se</i> or <i>per accidens </i>as Thomists would distinguish). But it does not seem to be obvious that patterns need to have a beginning: sure, the pattern of odd, even, odd, even in the positive integers has a beginning because it has a first member. But the integers have no first member because they stretch from negative infinity to infinity - and yet they still have the pattern of odd, even, odd, even. What is not definable is whether the first element was odd or even, because <i>there is no first element</i>.<br />
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But even if we take the positive integers, it <i>still</i> does not need for there to be something <i>before</i> the first member for the pattern to continue <i>ad infinitum</i>. To ask "what caused the first member of the positive integers" is a senseless question. Similarly, it may very well be the case that nature had a beginning and it is self-contained. The objection that "<i>but it had to have had a cause, science demonstrates that!</i>" is simply not true. The universe could be just like a set which starts at time zero and continues to infinity without quibbling over whether there was anything at t = -1.</div>
Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-86327102519633321052015-12-18T11:06:00.001+10:002015-12-18T11:06:45.407+10:00Periodization in SwimmingI was swimming at UQ for a month or so before I noticed a pattern: Wednesdays were a lot tougher on me than Tuesdays. I quickly then figured out that the regular squad training sessions followed a week-long plan of sprints on Monday, technique focus on Tuesday, heart-rate set on Wednesday and aerobic set on Thursday (see <a href="http://learningonthecurve.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/the-types-of-sets-in-swimming.html" target="_blank">here</a> for a bit on different types of sets). That was my introduction to the idea of periodization: a one week repeating cycle hitting the major systems in turn.<br />
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Since then my training periodization has developed a lot more depth and the one week repeating cycle no longer suffices. Periodization is about creating a plan for the training season with variations of focus in training. Before discussing periodization it is useful to define a few of the key words.<br />
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<i>Macrocycle:</i> the longest type of cycle, for many swimmers the macrocycle is about a year, or encompassing the whole season (of whatever length that may be).<br />
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<i>Mesocycle:</i> the mid-length cycle, mesocycles are around four to eight weeks and are based around the idea that it takes about six weeks (give or take) to produce significant adaptations to a training regime.<br />
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<i>Microcycle: </i>the shortest cycle, microcycles are usually a week long. In my experience, the biggest reason for incorporating the idea of a microcycle is to ensure that swimmers have sufficient rest - by the time I get to Saturday morning training, for instance, I am giving the last of what is in my training-tank for the week, so I really need the weekend rest to recover for the next week of training starting Monday morning.<br />
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All coaches use some kind of periodization unless the training sessions are literally random. Even the simple week progression I started with at UQ's adult squad sessions were a (basic) form of periodization. But periodization has benefits far beyond making it easier for the coach to pick what kind of set the swimmers will endure! As I see it, there are two main features of periodization:<br /><br />1. Training is about overloading a system so that it adapts for the better, and a single training session cannot achieve this. So a benefit of periodization is to decide that the first mesocycle of the season can be dedicated to, for instance, endurance work. This provides enough of a stimulus for the swimmer to positively adapt and improve.<br />
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2. Periodization allows the coach to plan when the swimmers will be at their peak. Often there will be some kind of end-of-season meet where the swimmer will want to achieve their maximal performance, and intelligent planning allows the training schedule to produce a well-timed peak.<br />
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Having noted the importance of good periodization, what is a coach to do? A plethora of periodization plans exist, but they tend to fall into one of two camps:<br /><br />- Linear: This is your most intuitive kind of periodization plan, where you take each mesocycle and dedicate it to a particular system. A coach might start with a mesocycle dedicated to endurance, then another to V02 max training, then heart-rate, then speed work and finish off with a week long taper before peaking at the end of the season. The major benefit to linear periodization is that it incorporates an ideal length of overload and allows the swimmer to peak at the right time of the season. This comes with drawbacks, however: the idea behind linear periodization is to peak at the end, so in-season racing is going to be decidedly subpar. Additionally, there is the possibility of atrophy of systems as time progresses and it has been ever-longer since that system was worked - in the example, endurance might be flailing by the time speed work is begun. Finally, what if injury or personal circumstance leads to missing a few weeks of practice? Suddenly an athlete may have missed training an entire system crucial to their race performance.<br />
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In an attempt to mitigate these factors, the other camp suggests:<br /><br />- Non-linear: Instead of linearly progressing through the systems, the non-linear plan says to focus on multiple at a time, whilst still varying over the course of the season. Sometimes referred to as an undulating periodization, this type of plan rotates through more frequently over the course of a season, and so allows for multiple peaks (whilst some kind of maximal peak can still be achieved by taper at the end of the season). It also allows for more flexibility when swimmers miss blocks of training. It seems, however, to have mitigated one of the major benefits of the linear plan: there may not be enough training stimulus for highly trained athletes to improve. Furthermore, some types of systems' training are hard (if at all possible) to combine: sprint sets and endurance/aerobic sets are fundamentally different, so producing training adaptations in both seems difficult.<br />
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Added to these considerations, the coach needs to address the particular needs of the individual swimmer. I, for instance, would probably benefit from an increased focus on endurance work. This would allow me to have a greater capacity for training, so provide a platform for training the other systems. I furthermore breakdown in breaststroke over too long a distance, so it would give me the ability to push through fatigue with proper form (particularly turns).<br />
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Outside the pool, there is also much to be said for the periodization of dryland activities. That in itself is a universe of controversy - some coaches even reject the need for dryland!<br />
<br />Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-20348315839908791852015-12-11T14:49:00.000+10:002015-12-11T14:49:00.013+10:00How to Elegantly Refute Astrology with Quantum MechanicsMost people reject astrology out of hand these days, saying that the alignment of the planets does not affect our lives whatsoever. If pressed, they would defend themselves perhaps by claiming that astrology is unscientific or stubbornly say that it is <i>just wrong</i>.<br />
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The idea that the alignment of the planets has no effect on us is, in fact, wrong. It is very much a scientific point of view that these sorts of celestial bodies and their positions can influence us from afar and we have known that this is the case for quite some time. A point for the astrologers. Unfortunately for astrology, the known effect of those celestial bodies is from their gravitational fields and the influence that their gravity has on us is <i>vanishingly small. </i>Sure, it's not <i>zero</i>, but it is dwarfed by the gravity from the table closest to you, and does not act at the moment of birth in particular. No astrologer could therefore point to gravity as a means of affecting your life by the alignment of planets.<br />
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But, the astrologer might come back with a certain scepticism of the science. Sure, they might say, science knows of no forces that can act at that sort of range outside of electromagnetism and gravity. Sure, there is no contribution really from electromagnetism or gravity. But that does not mean that science will not one day discover a new force which shows that the planets affect our lives in meaningful ways. So, the astrologer says, we should remain agnostic of astrology.<br />
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Sean Carroll has supplied to me the insight to finally put to bed that claim. He points out that, with the discovery of the Higgs Boson, we now know all the fundamental physics relevant to our lives. Sure, there's dark energy and dark matter - but that does not affect our everyday lives. Sure, there could be forces operating below what we can detect - but if we cannot detect them, they cannot influence us. If they could exert some kind of cause on us then we would be able to detect it. Is it really possible to make that claim?<br /><br />It relies on a very simple idea: the world behaves as described by quantum mechanics and we know that if there were some other force we would have found it. In fact, the physics relevant to our lives has been condensed beautifully to a few particles and forces. We are made of the kind of stuff (neutrons, electrons, protons) that are affected by certain forces (gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear). Could there be other forces? Definitely. But they would not interact enough with our ordinary matter to be of causal significance. Are there other particles? We know for a fact there are. But we are not made of those other particles. Nor is any of the stuff we commonly use.<br />
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Carroll explains by means of a quote from Donald Rumsfield that there are three levels of knowledge: the known knowns, the unknown knowns and the unknown unknowns. These are the things we know that we know, the things we know that we don't know and the things that we don't know we don't know. The beauty of this refutation of astrology is not in pointing out that astrology is not a "known", because we already knew that. The beauty is that we now know how far our knowledge extends and the range of our knowledge excludes astrology.<br />
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The claims of astrology are like claims of an elephant in my kitchen. I know that the microwave is there, I can see it - a known known. I do not know whether there is any salt in the pantry (a known unknown). But despite all the things I do not know about my kitchen, I know there is not an elephant. There is no astrology in the universe. Astrology is wrong.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-11691324580147412532015-12-07T16:19:00.001+10:002015-12-09T14:57:29.160+10:00Relations as Sets<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="304" src="http://mathforum.org/mathimages/imgUpload/Venn_Diagram.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none;" width="320" /></div>
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I recently came across a powerful idea in maths which could have far-reaching consequences for how I conteptualise things even in every day life (insofar as I think about things logically in every day life!) The idea is really simple: relations between two things form a set of ordered pairs. These can be numerical, conceptual, whatever you want! Let's get started on some examples to illustrate what I mean:<br />
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<u>Simple maths case: Fractions</u><br />
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Fractions are relations between two numbers, the numerator and denominator. Take the simple example of a half, \(\frac{1}{2}\). This is the ordered pair $(1,2)$. In this set (currently just containing $(1,2)$) the first number indicates the numerator and the second number is the denominator. In fact, you can easily create an infinite set full of halfs by defining the equivalence class as all those ordered pairs which give \(\frac{1}{2}\): \(\frac{2}{4}\), \(\frac{4}{8}\), \(\frac{-8}{-16}\), etc. This would form the set of ordered pairs: $(1,2), (2,4), (4,8), (-8,-16),$ ... So you can see that something simple like \(\frac{1}{2}\) creates a whole set based not on numerical equivalence but on the relation between the first and second number - the denominator is double the numerator. Relations make sets.<br />
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But it's more than just mathematical relations which produce sets. Any relation does.<br />
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<u>Real life cases: Friendships</u><br />
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You could create a friendship set with all the different pairs of friends. Say Alice and Bob are friends - then there would be an element in that set: $(Alice, Bob)$. Maybe you think all friendships are reciprocal - so if Alice is friends with Bob, that implies that Bob is friends with Alice. Then if $(Alice, Bob)$ is in the set, so is $(Bob, Alice)$. That's true for Facebook friends, at least - there are no one-way friends on Facebook. That's not the case for followers on Twitter, though: you can have the follower set $(Follower, Followed)$ where $(Alice, Bob)$ but not $(Bob, Alice)$.<br />
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I find this kind of interesting because it means friendship groups and networks can be thought of in terms of sets and analysed accordingly. So far though, I have only described ordered pairs. It is pretty simple to generalise this to sets with relations between any number of things. This would increase the dimension (ie, the number of elements within the brackets of each object). Let me list an example of sets of different dimensions to do with friendship:<br />
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Dimension 1: The set of all my friends is not a set of pairs but of individuals. So my friendship set might look like ${Me, Pillow, Brother, ...}$<br />
Dimension 2: As before, the set of friendships has two elements (even if they are the same element - I am one of my best friends, so $(Me, Me)$ is an element of the friendship set).<br />
Dimension 3: An example of a three dimensional friendship set could be friendship triplets, but it would probably be more interesting to create a set which included some different relation about three people. Three people in a love triangle might make a three-element per object set. It could be $(Lover \#1, Lover \#2, Beloved)$. So the set of all love triangles is a three dimensional set. Or another might be an introduction set, where Alice introducing Bob to Catherine would be the element $(Alice, Bob, Catherine)$.<br />
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And so on. No matter how complicated the relation, I suspect it could somehow be represented as a set. This is just a curious way of looking at relations when it comes to everyday life, but it holds particular significance for computer science. Here's an example:<br />
<u><br />Functions and their Plots</u><br />
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A function can be thought of as the relation between an input and an output. Viewed that way, functions create sets of ordered numbers - say you have $y = f(x)$, then over all the domain of $x$, there is some output y which creates all the points $(x,y)$. If the function is something simple, like $f(x) = x$, then the set would contain elements like $(1,1), (2,2), ( \pi, \pi)$, ...<br />
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Just like before, you can get higher dimensional sets from functions by just having more input variables. If $z=f(x,y,t)$ then the element would be $(x,y,t,z)$. This is exactly how a mathematics software like MATLAB/Octave graph their functions. You define all your $x$ and $y$ and you enter the command $<i>plot(x,y)$</i> to give you a plot with the mathematical relation of the ordered pairs $(x,y)$. You could ask Octave to just give you $(x,y)$ as a matrix specifying all the elements of the set (discretely, of course - computers do not deal with continuous functions when doing numerical calculations).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq6tINT1svbn0KFPDTk6DcU96umej_OzLkYHjkZCypf02OIjDDeSkWuF09lT4PC2cfACJ3PgQf6-Q0AhCFOxJxtzMihs7pudy-xeHYa_DLEWtMU0-ENRF3x-4i1gcMVnTOsPan9L4G_JU/s1600/Relation1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq6tINT1svbn0KFPDTk6DcU96umej_OzLkYHjkZCypf02OIjDDeSkWuF09lT4PC2cfACJ3PgQf6-Q0AhCFOxJxtzMihs7pudy-xeHYa_DLEWtMU0-ENRF3x-4i1gcMVnTOsPan9L4G_JU/s1600/Relation1.png" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwwevf2GW3x6vllEwg2FNvJLnO8X0MWxHgeOiSzGy8g_cDFeC2sYNymj0UghzqIGr2PXCLN6njB5ZP9DJJwKMZr9xttIIACNu_jMB93a_NBcGSydQZaFTtQU1VEQD3kafjQxqPF8q7EVs/s1600/Relation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwwevf2GW3x6vllEwg2FNvJLnO8X0MWxHgeOiSzGy8g_cDFeC2sYNymj0UghzqIGr2PXCLN6njB5ZP9DJJwKMZr9xttIIACNu_jMB93a_NBcGSydQZaFTtQU1VEQD3kafjQxqPF8q7EVs/s320/Relation.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<u>Why Cares?</u><br />
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Most people will not care, and will just be happy to know that the mathematicians, scientists, engineers and computer scientists will use this idea when necessary. However, I think it does offer a cool way of looking at relations between objects and it gives a formalised representation of the relationships, which means it is easier to analyse formally and mathematically. It is a lot harder to be logically sloppy when dealing with set theory directly!Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-61119790903781994682015-12-04T15:37:00.000+10:002015-12-09T15:04:42.528+10:00The Types of Sets in SwimmingTraining at an elite level, or to achieve an elite level, is not easy. It is incredibly taxing physically, mentally and socially. In terms of time, swimming training is particularly intensive - for me, it involves two swimming sessions a day from Monday-Friday, around half an hour of dryland (every form of exercise not done in the pool is referred to as "dryland") each of those days before the evening training session, plus an hour in the gym working on strength on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then on the weekend, there's a slightly longer morning training on Saturday, half an hour of core-specific work right afterwards then and I'm done for the day. On Sunday, I go to another couple of dryland sessions, one focusing on mobility and flexibility in the morning, the other a faster-paced strength session in the afternoon.<br />
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So even if you include the daily half-hour dryland into the evening session, that's sixteen distinct training sessions a week. Which is a lot. But swimming training is not just about hard work; it's also about smart work. I do not think coaches are given enough credit for the time and expertise that goes into structuring and implementing a training program: in the past, when the science was ambiguous, coaches trained their athletes in the dark - quite the challenge - and now there is so much science that a great coach is a very intelligent person having invested enormous time resources resulting in significant expertise in all sorts of sports science ranging from bio-mechanics to psychology.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="266" src="http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/sallyportal/assets/images/assets_c/2012/10/pool_jennmcneal.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Swimming sets are probably a little less complicated than metaphysics.</td></tr>
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Not being such an intelligent coach (or a coach at all, for that matter), I cannot claim to know that much about the complicated thought-process that for some coaches has become second-nature in creating a training schedule. There's an aerobic season and a speed season - but you're always training aerobically and speed within both seasons. There's the complicated taper time. There's all sorts of types of training and with each, a range of opinion among the swimming community as to what works best - is USRPT really all that it's cracked up to be? Should garbage yardage be the backbone of a swimming regime? How much time should be spent on dryland? I might have opinions but I do not have answers.<br />
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I want to start a series of posts explaining the logic behind the training program that my coach(s) implement with me. To start off with, it's important to understand the kind of sets that make up training in the pool. In the pool, I would say there are really four distinct categories of set and a fifth miscellaneous set which combines elements from the others. These are:<br />
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- <b>Drill sets:</b> Here I work on the technical aspects of the stroke and of the race, focusing on making sure the technique is conducive to the fastest times by reducing drag, ensuring that the stroke is effective, and so on. Whilst usually less physically demanding, they are important to set the stage for optimal swimming. Water is an unforgiving medium with much more drag than air to slow me down, and an intense training schedule means poor form repeated over hundreds of kilometers is bound to result in injury. So perfecting technique is crucial to swimming.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/cameron-van-der-burgh-doha-2014.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/cameron-van-der-burgh-doha-2014.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Perfecting the breathing yawn face is a lifelong process.<br />
Alas, no medals are given for how bored snapshots of swimmers' faces look.<br />
(<i>Photo: Swimming World</i>)</td></tr>
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- <b>Aerobic sets:</b> These are longer sets where, as I understand it, the aim is to be at 70-80% of my maximum heart rate and keep it there for a prolonged period of time. This improves both my aerobic and cardiovascular capacity, or in other words, improves my lungs and my heart. Even though I am a breaststroke specialist, I do not have special organs for breaststroke as opposed to every other stroke, so I will almost always do aerobic sets with freestyle. This allows me to rest the breaststroke specific muscles, develop a more rounded body, and still train my ability to use oxygen and my heart effectively. But for the heart there is also...<br />
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- <b>Heart rate sets:</b> These are some of the toughest sets, in my opinion, as they are mid-to-high intensity in terms of speed with minimal rest in between. Heart rate sets are about getting the heart rate up and keeping it there, so as to maximise the ability of the heart to work effectively under physical duress. They may not be as long as aerobic sets, but they are significantly faster.<br />
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- <b>Sprint sets:</b> My personal favourites, sprint sets are about going fast for a short amount of time and distance. Part of the reason I like sprint sets so much is that I can vary elements of my race and get instant feedback on how it impacts my performance - as the coach says, the clock is your best friend, who is always there and never lies to you. More than just testing fields for subtle technique changes, sprint sets are about putting together the rest of the training to make sure that it all comes together in an effective and fast end-product. Drill sets may be important, but two-kicks-one-pull breaststroke will never be an Olympic event!<br />
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- <b>Combinations:</b> Whilst I think the above four categories cover the main types of sets, it is important to understand that they can be combined. Heart rate sets, for instance, can be made longer (more like an aerobic set) or shorter (more like sprints). Sprint sets need not be full-stroke, they could be sprint kick sets, for instance - and kicking is basically a drill. Similarly there could be aerobic drill sets.<br />
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A typical session in the pool will, for me, usually involve some sort of drill set and usually one other element from these categories (sometimes two). How do you arrange the focus of a training session over the course of a season and its off-season? That's another question.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-35857356406543745662015-12-02T19:44:00.000+10:002015-12-09T15:02:31.001+10:00Hacking Life: Gamify with Habitica<div style="text-align: left;">
About half a year ago I reflected for a moment on a video game I was playing, Hitman, and noticed something about myself which was pretty illogical: Hitman seemed to have this irrelevant point system which graded the player on how well they player passed a level. Super-stealthy and tricky kills with no collateral gave a high point score and the worse you scraped through the level, the less points you got. There was nothing useful about the points you got, you still got to the next level if you managed to get through, and I do not even remember whether the points were tallied overall when I got to the end of the game. I knew full well that the biggest thing was to complete the game, but I was compelled to repeat the levels over and over again to get as many points as possible. From a game design point of view this was a genius move: there was no need to create as many levels if you entice the player to do the same level many times. The total game play time would be the same. From my perspective, I was sucked into a system where my satisfaction depended on a contrived point system with no value whatsoever outside the satisfaction of earning the points themselves</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img class="irc_mi" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ng5PePZQrU0/UT1YWSw5BQI/AAAAAAAAAgU/B49Ue_1gJeQ/s400/jcjaur_hitman_absolution_review_9.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 46px; text-align: center;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Example of a possible Hitman game result.</td></tr>
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Whether I like it or not, I like doing the best possible at games. Highest score. All achievements unlocked. All skills fully trained. Game completed. Do I realise that the little twang I get from unlocking some achievement on the Playstation is valueless? Yeah, absolutely. Does that mean I do not care about it? Absolutely not. A well made game will easily fool me into valuing whatever it wants me to value, and more importantly, it will get me to do things I would normally not do. One example is the silly number of hours I spent playing Runescape when I was much younger. I would spend ages clicking on pixelated rocks to get ores to get my mining level up so I could make money and mine different colour pixelated rocks, and make more money. Is mining experience in Runescape actually valuable? Of course not. Is Runescape money valuable? Not really. Is mining fun? No, it's pretty dull. But Runescape managed to make me value something that I knew was valueless.<br />
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Gamification is the process of transforming something into a game to unlock that kind of gamer mentality. It is the basis of the educational games I enjoyed as a kid, for instance. I was pretty familiar with the concept of applying game mentality to learning from my teacher-mother. But I have more recently discovered a brilliant platform for gamifying my life, or at least a big chunk of it, by using <a href="https://habitica.com/">Habitica</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://habitica.com/marketing/screenshot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="215" src="https://habitica.com/marketing/screenshot.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Habitica gives you a way of transforming your life into a role playing game. You add the habits you want to develop, daily activities you want to do and any items on your to-do list. When you complete these, you get experience points and gold. When you do not, you lose health. Experience allows you to level up so your character is stronger, and it allows you to unlock extra features of the game like quests and the like. You can collect pets and unlock them all, you can upgrade your weapons and armour, you can team up with other Habitica users to go on challenging quests together - it's an RPG! But unlike other RPGs, to get better you need to be good at doing what you set out to do.<br />
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I would heartily recommend giving Habitica a go. One of its most convenient features is that it does not take long to get up and going and, whilst rewarding, you do not have to spend much time interacting with Habitica itself - instead, you do your dailies, carry out your habits, and tick off the items on your to do list. To win at Habitica is to win at life. Isn't a double win worth it?<br />
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You're welcome to join me with the following codes, which will make more sense once you start up:<br />
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<i>Group ID: ef3f50dc-f481-4630-a443-af8c442621e8<br />User ID: 1be6fedc-399a-42ff-bea2-595be6e9b6e7</i>Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-28329402452990816062015-12-01T15:18:00.000+10:002016-01-03T12:32:58.136+10:00My Theory of Truth and JustificationMy views on truth and justification (my epistemology more generally, in fact) has undergone quite a change in recent times. With my apostasy from Catholicism, I stopped having a view I had termed <i>Christian reliabilism </i>(sketch <a href="http://via-verdad-vida.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/reason-experience-and-christianity.html">here</a>), and I could have easily just moved from a peculiarly Christian version of it towards a secular form by subtracting truths that were justified on the basis of divine revelation.<br />
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Instead, I recently had my interest piqued by a pragmatic theory of truth via the physicist Sean Carroll which says that "we should always act as if A is true" implies that A is true. Whilst I previously held a correspondence theory of truth, I found it hard to justify much knowledge at all because it was difficult to see how I could justifiably access that exterior world to check if truths corresponded. But, as interesting as pragmatism was as an alternative, I strongly disliked how under-determined it was: as far as I could tell, it offered no resources for distinguishing between ontologically distinct but empirically equivalent beliefs. I could also conceive of it having difficulty with "inconvenient truths" and "useful falsehoods." Could they be smuggled in as false or true respectively when it would seem obvious that they are false? Someone who believed that free will did not exist may still hold that it is better to act as if it does, for instance, but that would imply that free will does exist (or technically, "is true").<br />
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There is an interesting feature of the definition of truth that pragmatism has which may have consequences I do not currently foresee: it is based on an <i>ought</i> statement. If someone believes strongly in the is-ought gap, then defining that something <i>is</i> true based on what <i>ought </i>to be done/believed is going to be a problem. Or alternatively, one can think of this definition as the beginning of a solution to the is-ought gap's related problems. It is at least conceptually odd, even if true(!), that an ought statement gives a definition of truth. If, like me, you think oughts may imply teleology, then an important question to ask would be: we ought to...if what? We ought to believe A if we want to be come billionaires? Win a Nobel prize? Colonise Mars? Have seventeen children? I would refine the imprecise definition that Carroll suggested he was partial to by adding in something along the lines of "ought to...if we want to make accurate predictions about the world" or perhaps "...of our experience of the world." There is then subsumed into the theory what we originally found to be an important part of the definition of truth, that is, that it has something to do with how the world is.<br />
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Pragmatism about truth avoids a substantial amount of scepticism which seems to follow from a correspondence theory of truth, but perhaps one of its most appealing consequences is how you can get shades of truth and falsehood. Whilst something is only true if we ought <i>always</i> to act as if it were true, it is relatively easy to add in provisions about partial truths by saying that they refer to propositions that we should sometimes act as if true. For instance, it is relatively easy on this view to say that classical mechanics is partially true insofar as their is a classical regime in which we should act as if classical physics is true, even though that classical regime is not the most general regime possible.<br />
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However, that under-determinism aspect of it jars at me a lot, so eventually I clicked on a compromise: we can have pragmatism as a theory of justification and keep some kind of correspondence as a theory of truth. This would say that a person is justified in believing A if they should always act as if A is true, and yet, A is only actually true if it corresponds to how the world really is. This benefits from avoiding scepticism and explaining how we can have partially justified beliefs without allowing that there are a possibly infinite number of contradictory "truths" which count as true because they are empirically equivalent.<br />
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Obviously a lot more refining needs to take place, but I think this understanding of truth, justification and their interplay may even get me out of my most begrudgingly sceptical position: scientific anti-realism. If justification via pragmatism is a reasonable position, then it seems to follow that scientific realism is a reasonable position, and as someone that aspires to work in the natural sciences, that would be great.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-77789560643491524422015-11-30T15:49:00.000+10:002015-12-08T22:30:08.406+10:00Hundreths and ThousanthsIt is undeniably true that as a swimmer, Michael Phelps is the greatest Olympian of all time. His swimming record is unparalleled to such an extent that it makes winning a gold medal at the Olympics into a feat worthy of a polite nod of congratulations in comparison. History may give rise to someone that rivals the dominance of Phelps in 2008's Beijing, but for the moment his record stands tall and seemingly insurmountable. What history will no doubt forget more easily is how close Phelps came to coming second with his seventh gold medal. The finish was so close between Phelps and the Serbian Milorad Cavic that the Serbian team filed a protest which FINA dismissed after a review of the finish. By the smallest possible margin in swimming, 0.01 seconds, Phelps won.<br /><br />That same review showed why Cavic lost to Phelps and eventually granted him the wreath of fame with eight gold medals: Cavic broke his streamline for the finish to look up. Had his head remained down until he reached the wall, he would have out-touched Phelps and denied him his honour - something he hoped would happen, saying it would be better for the sport if he did not make it to eight medals.<br /><br />Cavic could have made that hundredth of a second. Swimming is full of those seemingly infinitesimal fractions of time; the possibilities to gain them hover endlessly from the moment the starting beep goes to the touching of the wall, in every stroke, breath, kick and turn. The margin for error in swimming is relentlessly small, as Cavic learnt: having his head up for just one stroke was the difference between gold and silver. If his coach had drilled into him for two minutes a day the importance of that streamline in the finish, perhaps he would have made it.<br /><br />Those fractions of a second are everywhere. They are not only the difference in incredibly tight races like Olympic finals, they determine every race, because those hundredths add up. Bad reaction time? There goes 0.1 of a second. Start kicking underwater off of the start too early or too late? 0.2 of a second, maybe. Never trained a proper high elbow catch? 0.1 per stroke, possibly. Forgot to develop strong hypoxic skills? Your turn lost you half a second because you could not keep up the underwater phase. Legs fatigue in the first fifty? Your splits just lost a few seconds.<br /><br />Enough training and those issues can be ironed out. The problem arises when we expect to be dropping seconds off our PBs every time we jump into the pool or walk into the gym. If every time we jump out of the pool we expect to be instantly gratified with our results, disillusion will quickly become our constant companion, so much so that despair and quitting will eventually become inevitable.<br /><br />Every set in the pool or in dryland is about improving a thousandth of a second, or a tenth of a thousandth. These amounts go unnoticed by the clock (which measures to the hundredth) and yet we jump in knowing that they are there. In fact, training can be so draining at times that it might seem by the end of the week that we have gone backwards; only tapering reveals how far we have come.<br /><br />Once one approaches with realism what one does in training, one can dive in confident that the improvements will come, even though slowly. Hours and hours of staring of that black line, after accidentally drinking our body weight's work of chlorinated water, only then can the real results come to shine. By then, those fractions of a second have added up to seconds: <i>voila</i>, we got the gold.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-59590904836054593382015-11-27T20:29:00.000+10:002015-11-27T20:29:41.766+10:00Abstracting to Engineering SimplicityAbstraction is about taking particulars and getting a generality, and in doing so, ignoring non-essential elements. For example, a drawn square can be abstracted into mathematical object, but in doing so you ignore all sorts of things: what the square was drawn with, the thickness of the lines, any irregularities, and so forth. I <a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-002-circuits-and-electronics-spring-2007/video-lectures/lecture-1/">recently learnt</a> that you can apply this concept to cross from physics to engineering and then within engineering, up the ladder of technology.<br />
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The example used was within the discipline of electrical engineering, where the lecturer summarized the physics relating to electrical engineering as Maxwell's equations. But Maxwell's equations, he pointed out, are an abstraction of electromagnetic phenomena. What you actually start with is a very large data set and what Maxwell's equations do is abstract that data into a pattern by grabbing the essential variables and ignoring the incidental things. Not everything about a system is relevant to its electromagnetic properties: the colour of the things is irrelevant, what it smells or tastes like does not matter, the material's tensile strength is beside the point (in fact, it could be a liquid, gas or vacuum, which are not things where you often talk about tensile strength). So you abstract from data to physical equations. Actually, if you were being really precise, you could think of Maxwell's equations as abstractions of the more basic quantum theory of electromagnetism; take the physics of the relevant size, speed and so forth, and you get Maxwell's equations by ignoring the quantum corrections.<br />
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But Maxwell's equations are actually pretty hard to work with if you're working with circuits. So abstract a bit more. The next step is the lumped circuit abstraction where you make two basic assumptions about the system: you assume that there is no charge build up within a wire (charge in = charge out) and you assume that the change in the magnetic flux outside the element is zero. This allows you to easily define the current (denoted I) and the voltage/potential difference (V), and ultimately gives you Ohm's law: <i>V=IR</i>.<br />
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There is no need to stop at the physics-engineering boundary, either, and it will make the life of an engineer much simpler if we do not. From the lumped circuit abstraction we can go on to the simple amplifier abstraction. Then we can abstract digitally or analogically, all the way up until we get programming languages, operating systems and videogames, or whatever else electrical engineers make. In a videogame, pressing a key like "up" sets a whole code in motion and has all sorts of effects - that key abstracted an enormous range of commands. You can see a table of abstractions in his lecture notes on page 5 of <a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-002-circuits-and-electronics-spring-2007/video-lectures/6002_l1.pdf">this pdf</a>.<br />
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The crucial thing here to learn for me was how important the idea of abstraction was in engineering as a concept, and it has helped me to understand how you go from simple things like Ohm's law through to computers: take what you want and ignore the rest. Make things simple. Abstract. It's a great tool for making anything complicated simple, really, not just engineering.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-86537607383013835632015-11-13T12:34:00.000+10:002015-11-13T12:34:15.636+10:00What Special Relativity Taught Me About the Incredibly Diverse Phenomena in the World (And my Explanation of the Twin Paradox)The genius of special relativity is the derivation of far-reaching consequences from a small group of postulates. In a sense, Einstein's proposal was simply that Maxwell's equations hold in all reference frames, which in turn means that the speed of light in a vacuum is measured to be the same value <i>c</i> in all reference frames. From this you can derive Lorentz transformations for the standard Galilean transformation. From this you naturally arrive at the idea of a 4-vector, and from there all sorts of profound physical discoveries follow - the equivalence of time with space dimensions, the famous formula E=mc^2, the twin paradox, and so forth.<br />
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This semester I took a course (<a href="https://www.uq.edu.au/study/course.html?course_code=PHYS2100">PHYS2100</a>) where the first three weeks where focused on introducing special relativity in a mathematically heavy way. It is important to approach SR from two angles: conceptually, so as to properly understand the uniquely relativistic way of thinking of physics problems, and mathematically, to understand the consequences of the theory beyond the surface level. With this in mind I have found that the best introduction to special relativity is the course offered by Leonard Susskind as part of the "<a href="http://theoreticalminimum.com/">Theoretical Minimum.</a>" I should be clear, however, before someone takes this comment as a slam on Dr Plakhotnik who gave the SR lectures for my course, that I never went to any of his lectures, I looked only at his lecture notes.<br />
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You can reduce the postulates of special relativity from the usually-quoted two to only one by saying "all laws of physics (including Maxwell's equations) are equally valid in all inertial reference frames." As I said, what is exciting about special relativity is how diverse the consequences of such a simple assertion are, how much that idea changes how we have to view our world. It is not at all obvious from that statement that we can no longer operate in a Euclidean geometry, that we live consequently in Minikowskii space. But it is a consequence. It's not clear at all that this implies that two twins separated, one staying on earth and the other going for a very fast trip around the solar system, should have aged by different amounts upon the twin's return. But it does follow. All sorts of amazing phenomena in the world really <i>do</i> arise from simple postulates.<br />
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The beauty of physics is perhaps entirely contained in the elegance of explanation that physics has. There does not need to be a plethora of different mechanisms and explanations for all the different occurrences in the world, complex phenomena result from simple rules. The mystery of emergence in science is exactly the emergence of complexity from simplicity. That means that, most likely, physics will never give a model for some complicated object like the human brain - and yet! That does not at all imply that the intricate operations of the human brain are not somehow (unbeknownst to us) reducible to simply physical laws. I think biology <i>is</i> complicated physics, but it will almost certainly never be studied or taught as such.<br />
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Plakhotnik writes at the end of his notes that everyone that teaches or studies SR should have an opinion on the twin paradox (that weird age difference between the twins that I noted above) so I will end with mine. Both the mathematical equations and the experimental evidence demonstrate that it is correct, but why? How can one interpret such an occurrence? His answer is more rigorous but for the same reason probably loses most people. Here is an answer which helps think of it more intuitively (even though, when the rigour is re-introduced the answer is the same): given that the time and space coordinates in space-time are equivalent, the fact that the travelling twin moves more through space means that she moves less through time. They start at the same spot and end up together again at the end, so if you include time then they must have traveled the same "space-time distance", one more through space, the other more through time.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-35473601862229450702015-11-11T21:50:00.003+10:002015-12-08T22:28:41.489+10:00David Hume's "An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding" Defending Philosophy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The most recent book I have been reading is an old philosophical classic of the Western tradition, perhaps David Hume's most succinct and readable book. As it is often said, even if Hume was an absolute philosophical lightweight himself, he is credited with bringing none other than Immanuel Kant out of his self-acclaimed "dogmatic slumber," and Kant is probably the single most influential philosopher of the modern era. But Hume was no lightweight and his <i>Inquiry</i> is a pleasure to read for its clarity and charming prose.<br />
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Of what I have read so far there are two primary sections and the first section is what concerns me here: his defence of philosophy and the endeavour he is about to embark on. It struck me several times how consonant Hume is with my current mode of thinking in this apologia if only because of how steadfastly his dismisses claims made purely out of alleged common sense. He laments at one point:<br />
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It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have the preference above the accurate and the abtruse; and by many will be recommended, not only as more agreeable, but more useful, than the other. (<i>Section I: Of the Different Species of Philosophy</i>)</blockquote>
But he also is aware of another common variety of philosophy which is in a way the opposite of easy but nonetheless completes the same task of justifying pre-conceptions without rational inquiry:<br />
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Here, indeed, lies the justest and most plausible objection against a considerable part of metaphysics, that they are not properly a science, but arise either from the fruitless efforts of human vanity, which would penetrate into subjects utterly inaccessible to the understanding, or from the craft of popular superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these entangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness. (<i>ibid.</i>)</blockquote>
Yet Hume is determined that philosophy does have a place in human thought and he does so in a way that would possibly satisfy even those who today would say that philosophy has lost to science, for Hume considers philosophy to be a mode of thought based on reason rather than a branch of thought. He is part of the old school who would consider the natural sciences to be sub-species of natural philosophy rather than separate disciplines. His defence of philosophy, even if it would lead to all manner of subtlety of idea, has several benefits as far as Hume is concerned and he expresses it thus:<br />
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Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy fitted for all persons and all dispositions and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners and gives it the air of science and wisdom. (<i>ibid.</i>)</blockquote>
His defence of philosophy is a defence of rational thought over intellectual carelessness and complacency. I consider Hume to be quite right in his prizing of rationality above popular superstition, though I think he was overly optimistic: as everyone who has argued with another of quite clearly erroneous opinion has learnt, even accurate and just reasoning fails in the more extreme cases of ignorance and stubbornness in error.<br />
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<br />Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-6953276450324325002015-11-11T20:38:00.001+10:002015-11-11T20:38:08.999+10:00In Youth We LearnI know very little about Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach other than her quote "<i>In youth we learn, in age we understand.</i>" Being on the more youthful side of that quote, I figure I should place a great emphasis on learning. After all, my life as a student, as an athlete and work-wise is all about learning and training. This stage of my life is entirely focused on learning about a variety of things and as such I learn all sorts of interesting things everyday - from complex mathematical formulae and arcane physics equations through to technical know-how and street smart skills, through findings in sociology and psychology, philosophy and history, bio-mechanics and nutrition; in short, I get exposed to a lot of information which can be really interesting and exceedingly fruitful if applied correctly to my life. Like most people, very little is retained and mostly disconnected facts that can hardly be considered knowledge because oftentimes what has been forgotten is the context that makes facts meaningful.<br />
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I am on a learning curve at twenty-one years old. I will probably always be somewhere on the learning curve. But to make the most of the ride I thought I should do something to keep it all in place - and what better way than to make available what I happened to learn as a resource for anyone else to read? So this blog is about putting what I learn each week into words to help me remember it, understand it, be able to explain it...and in the process, help anyone who might chance upon a post they wanted to know more about.<br />
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Like I said, I am privileged to be surrounded by a vast array of resources and gifted with a rather wide curiosity (that quite escapes my capacity to learn, most of the time). So nobody should expect any consistent topic; today I was learning about general relativity, David Hume and historical Jesus studies. Yesterday I learnt about army policy on all sorts of things. The day before I was fiddling with tensor maths and learning about swimming biomechanics.<br />
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I will not, obviously, blog about every little thing I learn. I will also post much less about mathematics, in part because a lot of learning in maths is found by solving maths problems but far more because I have thus far not found an opportunity to properly sit down and learn how to use any typesetting language that would make writing out all the mathematical symbols a less arduous task. Nonetheless, since I learn a lot about maths all the time, I might end up writing about it. Who knows?<br />
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Here's to the pursuit of knowledge through all of life, to learning new things every day and growing from them. Most of all, to follow Lord Acton when he exhorted: "<i>Learn as much by writing as by reading.</i>"Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-62272400462932129162015-10-28T11:39:00.000+10:002015-12-08T22:30:08.397+10:00Stop Relying on WillpowerWillpower is finite. Some people have more, some less, it can be increased and decreased slightly by what we do, but in any case, willpower is finite. Every time a decision is made, no matter how small, willpower is used.<br /><br />I have no idea what willpower would be measured in, but say it has units of "decisionites" [D]. Let me also say for argument's sake that I have 10 D at the start of the day. It takes 0.2D to make the decision as to whether or not I press snooze to give myself five more minutes in bed. I press snooze twice most mornings, so I have used 0.4D to get out of bed. Picking what to have for breakfast might take another 0.1D to account for a few variables I might encounter in the kitchen. Deciding whether or not to watch the news or check emails in the morning whilst eating breakfast might take another 0.1D, or it actually might take 0.2D, because whilst I find responding to emails and such more productive, it is also more likely to make me tarry and get to training late. Add in another few decisions (such as whether or not I pack to stay at university after swimming or intend to come home) and I may have expended a reasonably large percentage of my decisionites before I even leave the house for the first time. Add to that consideration the fact that I have pretty routine mornings anyway and it becomes clear that the variation from everything that comes after swimming training will be much more draining.<br /><br />Willpower is also kind of like limited internet plans: once the 10 GB (or whatever figure it is) of data is gone, you can still surf the internet, it is just incredibly slow. Decisions can be made with no willpower left, the only problem is that they will favour instant gratification over the pursuit of longer term goals (the things that, at the end of the day, we actually want to have accomplished).You can get by but it is far from ideal.<br /><br />This matters because there are a myriad of variables that come into play to be an excellent swimmer: nutrition, strength training, technique, aerobic training, recovery, anaerobic training, flexibility, and so on, and so on. They all require consistent behaviour patterns that are far from easy to maintain. Waking up before the sun rises gets easier, but I do not find it easy. Eating the right foods (in the right amounts!) is a little bit harder than it is to eat junk or convenience food. Getting to dryland sessions on time, well fueled, in the right mind set and ready to push yourself out of comfort and into straining positions for an hour or so - not the most pleasant thing to do with my time. And so on, and so on.<br /><br />There are such an enormity of small and big decisions that go into making the most of the day for the purpose of swimming excellence that it must take someone with an iron will of hundreds of decisionites a day to shine in the pool. But it does not. Nobody who seems to have such a steadfast will is actually relying on willpower and literally making the decision to go to training every day, two or three times a day; they are not deciding whether or not to eat well every time they see food. They are not weighing up alternatives in pushing themselves hard in the gym or in the pool. They just do it.<br /><br />The key to conserving willpower is to stop making decisions. Just do it. Go back to my hypothetical decision making process in the morning: I may have expended energy on what to eat for breakfast but I never had to decide whether or not to eat breakfast. I simply do. I have to make decisions about things that are not part of my routine, things that are not habits. Any time I have to jump off autopilot, I begin relying on willpower to make the best decision. And when it runs out, I make poor decisions.<br /><br />The secret, then, to consistently making the right decision is to create a habit of making the right decision. If you struggle to wake up early in the morning, just wake up early in the morning regardless of circumstance. That way there is no decision as to whether or not you get up when the alarm goes off: you do, and that is all. You will soon learn what it is that makes it difficult to get up - maybe you go to bed too late, and maybe you go to bed too late because scrolling through a Facebook feed seems fascinating at midnight and it's almost wake up time when you get to bed. Change that habit too.<br /><br />To rely on willpower, on motivation or inspiration is a recipe for failure. Rely instead on good habits to make the right decision by default.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-28844795615799657932015-10-05T17:18:00.000+10:002015-12-08T22:30:08.385+10:00Taking CriticismMark Twain once claimed that he could live two months on a good compliment, and whilst your landlord might not accept compliments instead of cash to pay the rent, practically everyone enjoys receiving compliments (even if the receiving is awkward).<br /><br />That's because at the core of every person is some play on the desire to be valuable and the desire to be valued. In other words, we want to feel like we are worthwhile and we want others to consider us worthwhile. Compliments act on both by boosting self-esteem and making us feel like we are being valued and recognised for our virtues.<br /><br />From experience we know that it is much better to received a more measured compliment, however; neither generic niceties nor something obvious. By obvious I mean things that are positive but say nothing insightful. It is certainly true that Einstein was good at physics or that Cesar Cielo is a fast swimmer, but neither of them is likely to be over the moon if you told them - they were already aware. If compliments feel good based on how much they achieve those core desires, this makes sense: generic compliments and obvious ones fail to help us feel valuable because we either find them insincere or we are already comfortable in that area. Generic and obvious compliments fall like water off a duck's back because they seem to lack insight into ourselves. Nobody had to pay much attention to Cielo (the current world record holder in both the 50m and 100m LC freestyle) to realise he was a fast swimmer, but a comment on his business wisdom might make him smile. You'd have to know a bit more about him to say that.<br /><br />If all that is basically right, then it follows that there should exist a spectrum of pleasantries from measured compliments being the best through obvious/generic ones to measured criticism at the far, unpleasant end. In our pursuit of a self-and-other-valued life, criticism detracts. To be criticised carefully is to be examined and found lacking. The failure to live up to scrutiny is the worst outcome.<br /><br />In the pool, however, I have never found this to be the case. My value as a competitive swimmer, if we are being honest, is measured to the hundredth of a second by high precision touch pads or stop watches in competitions. For example, Adam Peaty was a better swimmer than Cameron van der Burgh in the breaststroke events this year in Kazan at the World Championships. Peaty knows that. Van der Burgh knows that. I know I am not even close to being that good because I can compare my times to theirs. All compliments directed my way about swimming are either going to seem false to me (because they contradict the clock) or obvious (because the clock already told me). I am far from claiming that the clock tells me my value as a person - but in the narrow domain of competitive swimming, the timepiece is king.<br /><br />Criticisms, on the other hand, are supremely useful. A good, constructive criticism exposes <i>why</i> Peaty swims faster than I do. Once I know that, I have a fighting chance at narrowing the gap. Careful criticism of every element of my being as a swimmer - from technique to aerobic fitness to strength and power - allows me to improve. It is not true that being weak makes me strong - but without knowing my weaknesses, I can never be stronger. Criticism makes me excited because it means opportunity. Is my work ethic poor? Maybe if I change that I can be faster. Do I need stronger forearms for a better catch in the pulling phase? That could drop a whole couple of seconds from my personal best.<br /><br />The reason I find criticism so positive is that I have a goal I want to achieve. Being told I had a poor work ethic if I was comfortable where I was in life would just sting because it would mean that there is yet another thing wrong with me. Criticism only becomes opportunity when it is reformulated as clarity: the path to achieving what I want to achieve is clearer now that I have been criticised. I always knew there was going to be obstacles, now I know better what they are.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-87042224368356445592015-09-04T10:24:00.000+10:002015-12-08T22:30:08.409+10:00Over-Training is Under-Recovery<span style="font-family: inherit;">Elite athletes log some impressive training hours, and because the water helps prevent overheating, swimmers are notoriously hard-training even among the already hard working athletes of other sports. However, no matter what the training advantages of the environment, the human body has its limits. Overheating is not the only limit to training; muscles need to repair themselves, energy stores need to be replenished, joints need to have a break. Push the limits too far and the athlete stops improving and the excessive hours of training go to waste - that is <i>over-training</i>.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Your burning out or reaching the plateau of over-training is only going to help the competition. For all the fitness and motivational advice on constantly working hard, because the body rebuilds and improves itself <i>when resting</i> as adaptation to all the hard work, rest is a crucial part of excelling. If your body can take six hours in the pool a day, then good for you, but for those six hours to count, you have to spend the other eighteen in such a way that allows your body to adapt to the exercise stress.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">I would personally burn out at less that six hours of moderately high to high intensity work in the pool, so I am better of maxing out at around four <i>at most</i> (maybe only three and a half if I have an 70-90 minute long dryland session). It is pointless to try and rack up hours of training by going too easy on yourself just as it is pointless to burn out and not be able to finish a set. As Jason Statham said: </span>"<i>Your body is like a piece of dynamite. You can tap it with a pencil all day, but you'll never make it explode. You hit it once with a hammer: Bang!</i>"<br /><br />There is a balance to be found, then, between working too lightly and working too hard. The bomb has to explode and yet you need to stay intact. The key is to transform the whole day into training. In other words, I am not only training when I am in the pool, in the gym, doing cross-training or the like; I am also training when I am sat at my desk, on the couch, walking around, preparing myself some food, asleep, in a lecture theater or at a friend's house.<br /><br />As weird as it might sound to think of all time as training time, the perspective is insightful. Seeing the whole day as a period in which to further your goals allows you to frame your lifestyle in a way that is conducive to success. It provides the paradigm in which making the whole-of-life commitment becomes intelligible. I daresay it is not as absurd as it might appear.<br /><br />Think of a standard training set, in the gym or in the pool. I'll take the a swimming set as an example to make it concrete: whether it is a sprint set, a drill set or any other type of training set, there are times when you are swimming and times when you are resting. It is usually not useful or helpful to subtract the rest periods from the overall time in the pool to come out with a figure for how long was being trained - most people understand that the rest periods within a set are simply there to facilitate the proper completion of the set. Nobody can do ten sprints with a couple of seconds rest and expect to be hitting consistently good times. If you tried to, you would quickly find that your times were getting progressively worse, your technique faltering and, whilst you may have trained your heart with the high cardiovascular intensity, you have largely wasted your time in terms of improving the attributes a sprint set is meant to target. Or, too heavy a drill set and you get poor technique from exhaustion. Much the same happens in the gym: if you do five sets of pullups, the rest period in between sets is what allows you to challenge your muscles again with the next set.<br /><br />Extend out that image of resting between sets and you see how the time between jumping out of the pool and jumping back in is just one long rest period, provided solely for the purpose of being able to manage the next load of work. The period between a morning session and an afternoon one is reclassified as "intra-workout."<br /><br />Skipping the rest periods within training reduces the utility of the training. Ignoring the rest period given between training sessions reduces the utility of the training. The first might be called over-working and the latter is called over-training, but they are both essentially the same thing: under-recovery.<br /><br />To recover properly from training there are all sorts of strategies that complement one another. Stretching, taking up a Pilates class or one involving the physical postures of Yoga, taking care of nutrition (particularly when it comes to getting enough high quality nutrients and antioxidants), getting adequate sleep. The more these are incorporated into the inter-workout period the better the workout intensity can be. These do not need to all be taken on board at once to see results, as each can have some limited effect outside of the others. These can also be taken to excess, much like training - the average person does not have issues with over-training, but rather, over-resting!<br /><br />Transforming the day into 24 hours of training takes commitment to training. It means preparing for the next session from the moment we finish the first. If the goal is worth achieving, however, a commitment to recovery is invaluable to success.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-490578802602021681.post-47583547912405111892015-08-08T19:49:00.000+10:002015-12-08T22:30:08.388+10:00When the Stats are DiscouragingAs a breaststroker getting into the sport comparatively late, I have taken as my swimming hero a fellow Queenslander, Christian Sprenger. I do not actually know too much about him; all I know is that he swims my breaststroke events, he swims them very fast and he is older than your average breaststroke world champion. This is an enormous consolation to me as a late comer because it shows that perhaps, if I do train for the next five years ferociously (something within my control, to some extent) then I can achieve far-fetched goals that being a late comer (something not within my control) puts me at a disadvantage for.<br /><br />Honestly, though, it should not matter to me whether Sprenger will be 30 years old or not for the Rio 2016 Olympics. It should not matter to me that he became world champion in the 100m breaststroke at age 28. Since I am not Christian Sprenger, it is actually entirely irrelevant. It seems to bring me consolation because, in the swimming sense, he is <i>old</i> and that appears to buy me time until I get to his age. But given that there is no link between him and I, there is no real gain for me. It is <i>not</i> true that "<i>if he can do it, I can</i>." Even if he proves the more general point that a slightly older athlete can still climb to the pinnacle of the sport, that should be no great encouragement either because I already should have known that.<br /><br /><b>Statistics do not determine the possibilities</b>. Even if it were true that everyone who has accomplished some goal of yours has been of some particular characteristics, all it proves is that <i>in the past</i>, everyone who has accomplished that goal has been of those characteristics. Whatever the goal, the past cannot determine the possible future. Proving that someone of your characteristics can achieve the goal is up to you.<br /><br />This point seems starry-eyed to the average person but is common knowledge for those at the edge of human advancement, sporting or otherwise. Imagine if physicists gave up research because they were not as smart as Einstein, and so exclaimed in frustration "<i>how am I supposed to discover anything new if I am not so intelligent?</i>" This angst would be ridiculous to any physicist, since they would know that every PhD thesis worthy of a pass grade contains something that literally nobody else in the world has discovered. Nobody of the characteristics of the PhD candidate had ever discovered anything new - until now.<br /><br />What has been accomplished in the past does not determine what can be accomplished in the future. No world records would ever be broken if the limits of possibility were not pushed. So if there had never been a sub-minute 100m breaststroke from someone who started their rigorous training at 20 years old, why should that mean I could not do it? It can have nothing to do with Sprenger, or the next world champion in breaststroke, or anybody. It may well be up to me to prove to the next poor guy thinking about swimming that it is possible.Lobihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17750315168241342706noreply@blogger.com0