Pollan's famous "maxim" manages to be condescending, unhelpful and inaccurate - all at the same time.
Eat food: duh
Not too much: again, thanks?
Mostly plants: Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet.
Pollan is the prototypical Bay-Area insufferable foodie. His documentary was a cringe-fest of pseudo-spiritual fawning.
Rene Girard talks about how food has become a new status symbol as people compete for bragging rights about how good they eat; Pollan is their patron saint.
Oh you mean like, sugars and starches - the most toxic constituents of the modern diet.
You jump pretty readily to a conclusion that isn't in what's said. "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.
You can eat nothing but potatoes, which are filled with starch, but a diet filled with plants is much more likely to involve a rich variety of very healthy foods. Some of these foods would be things like spinach, kale, carrots, beetroot, beans, sweet potatoes, blueberries, apples, bananas, strawberries, buckwheat, avocados, courgettes, onions and peppers.
There's definitely starch and sugars in these, but you'd be hard pressed to eat them to anything like a toxic degree. To get them to a toxic degree, you'd need to eat processed food in quantity, which isn't what the maxim, which is undoubtably glib, is suggesting you do.
I agree with your comment about food being used as yet another status symbol, and I generally find that a particularly unpleasant and tiresome way to treat something as essential as eating. I'd disagree that Pollan is the patron saint of foodies, though. He's perhaps the patron saint of plant-eating, slightly ascetic or vegan foodies. He's certainly not the patron saint of the paleo or keto crowd, both of which are very vocal and often produce very obnoxious members of the "food as status symbol" group.
Out of interest, what would you recommend as a good, healthful diet? As you can probably guess from my reply, I think Pollan's maxim, which is certainly glib, offers a good working basis for a healthy diet.
> "Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.
That's some meme. Which ones exactly? The most nutrient-dense foods (per gram / per kcal) available to us are livers, other organs, eggs and ruminant meat --- even before accounting for the latters' vastly superior digestability and bio-availability, and even before accounting for the formers' countless antinutrients. Fresh not processed/salted/cured/etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpxqGa1PQc8
The widespread micro-nutrient-power fantasies about vegetation come mostly from back when they discovered ascorbic acid (aka "vitamin C") and how meat doesn't have it but plants do. Quite the feast for marketers! By the time they found out we don't need ascorbic acid per-se, just generally "a sufficient source of ascorbate" (which fresh meat is but preserved isn't --- hence the frequent scurvy back in the day with the 'limeys'/sailors/arctic explorers who insisted on their biscuits and canned meats rather than the game/fish around them), nobody cared for such pesky details..
At no point did I state that any of the foods you mentioned were nutrient poor -- I just said that some plants are among the most nutrient dense foods available. This can be true without dismissing other foods as nutrient poor. That even fits in with Pollan's maxim, which simply states most of the food you eat should be plants.
Since you asked, here are some nutrient rich plants from memory: kale, spinach, blueberries, garlic, lead, raspberries, asparagus, lentils.
All of these make great additions to any diet, aren't loaded with toxic levels of sugar and starch. They go great with liver, eggs, fish, or meat. I don't really understand where your hostility comes from, or why you simultaneously try to downplay the nutrients available in plants as some kind of conspiracy against other forms of food.
"Plants" covers a diverse group of foods, some of which are the most nutrient rich available to us.
Yet the ones he recommends for us to eat -- grains -- are toxic and not suitable for human digestion.
He's perhaps the patron saint of plant-eating, slightly ascetic or vegan foodies.
Vegans are precisely the people who ascribe a lofty moral status to their dietary choices, in my observation.
He's certainly not the patron saint of the paleo or keto crowd, both of which are very vocal and often produce very obnoxious members of the "food as status symbol" group.
I don't share that experience; the discourse of paleo and keto, in my perception, is people seeking personal results in their health. Keto people may "brag" about the results they've gotten, but not their high moral status, like vegans, or how people who disagree with them are to blame for all the world's problems, like vegans.
You're wilfully misrepresenting Pollan's argument. He gives specific definitions of "food", "not too much", and "plants" that directly address your objections. And the fact that these recommendations are somewhat generic is exactly his point: don't listen to the latest fad specifying the exact relation of n-3 to n-6 fatty acids, but concentrate on heuristics that have remained unchanged for 60 years+.
I'm not. His argument is very simply that we should eat less meat and more grains. From TFA:
it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat.
most of the plants we have come to rely on are grains
Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores
All of this is garbage. Grains (eaten to the scale we do in the industrialized world, which is as the bulk of our calories) are poison. Yes, he does say a few things that are not false, such as "eating leaves is good". However I think you'd get better dietary advice by saying "eat things that begin with letter S".
do you really interpret "mostly plants" as "eat a lot of potatoes and raisins" ?
"Eat fruit and vegetables" has been the suggestion every doctor I've seen gives, and until now I assumed everyone interpreted that to also include leafy greens and legumes.
But they don't contain a lot of the fats/acids that come from meat that are hard for the body to synthesize/metabolize. I'm not saying only eat meat/fish, but there's more than just protein.
I did not claim that legumes are some kind of wonder food with the ideal balance of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.
Of course you need to eat different kinds of vegetables/fruit/plants.
As for fats, nuts are a good choice. But you can also buy all kinds of oils, if you are afraid that an all vegetable diet will leave you with too little of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vegetable_oils
> The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
You're already lost if you're relying on the worst schools to get better. We only need a tiny fraction of the population (1% or less) to be the leaders of the next generation. Focusing on improvements within that group is likely to have far greater impact on society than trying to move the "bottom" group to the "next group up from the bottom".
If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society. Leaders usually spend all their resources reinforcing hegemony. And many of the people having the most positive effect on society will do it in a totally inconspicuous way. And many of those folks will come from bad schools, succeeding despite lack of institutional support. I suspect interpersonal support is a better predictor of positive contribution than institutional support.
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention. I think one kid can have a very large effect, and I see no reason to believe the kids at "good schools" have a bigger net positive effect. They will probably have more hard power, because if they are in a good school in means their parents have more hard power. But hard power doesn't equate to positive contribution. If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
If we're trading intuitions, my intuition is that "the leaders of the next generation" will have mostly negative effects on society.
It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously. You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people. Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
For me, if even one kid has a strong desire to learn and is hampered by a bad school, I think that's worthy of attention.
You seem to miss the point that everything is relative. Badness of schools is relative; there is always a "worst" school out there hampering someone. Attention is also relative; giving attention one place means taking it away from somewhere else.
If anything, hard power tends to corrupt teenagers.
> It's hard for me to take what you're saying seriously.
Feel free to browse my comment history if you suspect I am trolling.
> You are disagreeing with the idea that leaders should be well-prepared to do their jobs, because you think they mainly are going to harm people.
No, I think we should prepare them just like we prepare everyone else. And I think many of them will make valuable contributions. I disagreed with your assertion that they are the only people who will contribute substantially and therefore the only people whose educations matter.
> Therefore, you reason, we should not attempt to improve their education, because (by your argument) we want them as incompetent as possible, to minimize the damage they can do.
I didn't say anything like that. I think you assumed that because I disagree with your premise (only the education of the elites matters) that I must therefore believe in the opposite conclusion (we should only educate non-elites). But I believe in universal education.
I don't mind correcting you, but this conversation would go a lot faster if you responded to my actual words rather than what you assume I must think because I am disagreeing with you.
> Who is suggesting giving power to teenagers?
Neither of us. I was saying teenagers who are already destined to be given hard power, because their parents have it, will tend to get into good schools, and will also tend to reinforce hegemony, which I consider a negative thing.
> I disagreed with your assertion that they are the only people who will contribute substantially and therefore the only people whose educations matter.
Wrong. I did not assert this. I asserted that resources should be focused on improving the abilities of the group most likely to be in key positions in the future.
But schools are made up of the children that attend them.. If a gifted child ends up in a bad school, he can certainly boost their esteem and encourage competition among intellectual thoughts.
One good seed can really foster a lot of inspiration.
It is indeed proprietary because it does indeed have an owner. But I use the word in the context of its design and implementation, which is basically that of the not so benevolent dictator, or the possessive or territorial.
> It is indeed proprietary because it does indeed have an owner.
You are using the term proprietary incorrectly, probably out of simple ignorance. The software does not have an "owner" who has power of the users; the LGPL means all users have complete control over the software.
Please read this carefully before spreading more misinformation:
Anecdotal evidence: Kurt Vonnegut's son Mark wrote a fascinating book ("The Eden Express", 1975) about his experience being schizophrenic and a prolonged psychotic episode triggered by marijuana consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eden_Express
The term “creator” as applied to authors implicitly compares them to a deity (“the creator”). The term is used by publishers to elevate authors' moral standing above that of ordinary people in order to justify giving them increased copyright power, which the publishers can then exercise in their name. We recommend saying “author” instead.
I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand.
To support your point, there's a press release circulating from Google and Facebook right now. They've launched a program to share hashes (fingerprints) through a database identifying offending ("extremist") content so it can be more efficiently removed from the web. Yet, we aren't allowed to comment on this - I just posted it and the story was flagged.
There's a huge difference between saying "No more gratuitous flamebait about the US Election", and "no technical discussion permitted about any topic that could possibly be controversial."
- how this is needed to create a safer online community
- something about how this ties in with the views of the MSM (and likely some misrepresentation of polls)
- something about how this wouldn't be an issue if the results of the election would have been otherwise
- something about the difference between the EC and the popular vote
All of these points have been discussed ad nauseum in other threads with no appreciably constructive discussion.
And for the life of me I can't think of any technical discussion that would be made on the topic other than possibly on how calculating all of these hashes/signatures isn't really going to be technically effective to catch everything.
What's useful about that?
mini-project idea: HN discussion generator, maybe markov chain based. Provide a topic, out comes a full-fledged HN-style discussion, complete with vote/flag estimates (not for posting to HN, of course)
Personally, I've been struggling with the question of, are mega-services like Google and Facebook compatible with an open Internet? This helps to clarify my thinking.
Up to now I've been thinking about what evil they might do individually. Now I see the obvious: just like in any other industry, the objective is to reduce the market to a few major players (3-7). Then these become the only companies who can get "copyright clearances" or "non-fake news certification" in exchange for supporting their patrons' programs.
Which is literally what satisfied means (Latin satis "enough")