The main part of training your body is obvious enough. You just do it. You push on. You sweat. You fight through the pain (or enjoy it). The other part, equally important, is not so obvious – the recovery. Your body needs to rebuild itself after training. And guess what? It’s gonna have a very difficult time doing so if you’re neither sleeping plenty nor eating properly. Real foods such as vegetables, grains, and fruit go a long way to help the body repair itself (as well as to optimize performance during training). There’s no sense in doing another training session if you’re cutting short your sleep for it. Wasted effort at best.
The Way We Live Will Sabotage Health Care
Whatever new healthcare changes we have are ultimately doomed. It’s not that the reform ideas are bad ones; they’re actually outstanding and much needed changes. It’s just that the American way of life is very incompatible with this system. We Americans are health destroying machines and there’s no way our healthcare system can pick up the slack. We put very little means into taking care of ourselves and that has very serious, painful, and expensive consequences. Imagine if every unhealthy person in the country, which is to say most of the population, was covered by insurance. There’d be no way to pay for all of their medical expenses.
Unless we start eating better and doing more physical activity, among other things, we’re heading for a total disaster. We could very well bankrupt the country in trying to pay off health bills or fees for insurance. So take care of yourself. In doing so, you build your own “insurance” – one of your own wellbeing. I know it’s not easy as it does have its own costs, including time. But it’s one we’re better off paying now than the huge costs we’d incur in the future instead. We also need to approach our food system as we’re doing our health system, as food writer Michael Pollan has stated. With this, we will make eating healthier easily attainable goal.
Buying Time by Living Vitally
Get a full night’s rest. Eat healthily. Be physically active. Spend time with friends and family.
Many people skimp on these things because they’re so busy doing work or other supposedly important things. This strategy is only good in the very short-term, like when you’re eager to finish up some exciting project. However if, on a regular or even semi-regular basis, you aren’t getting enough sleep, are eating crap, aren’t moving very much, or not seeing those close to you, you’re wasting time. Simply put, your body and mind are considerably less efficient when you’re not treating them well. How productive will you be when you’re tired every day? Obvious not very much. The consequences are apparent in the short term time of days.
The long term impact is even more striking. By not living vitally, you also trade your future health for extra time now. Surely you’d cut off years from your life in a strict sense. But it’s even worse that because you’re also cutting off productive and enjoyable years from your life because you’re busy treating health problems in the latter part of your life.
Irony and Deception in Super Bowl Ads
While much advertising in general is chock full of irony and deception, a high profile event such as the Super Bowl deserves some special attention.
First up, we have a Snickers ad where taking a bite out of a candy bar transforms you from a weakly granny (literally) to a young man proper for tackle football. The ad is correct in stating that “you’re not you when your hungry” but what does this say about our society? That we should eat candy bars when going out to play football because we don’t have the understanding to eat a decent breakfast? And I’m sure that a candy bar will go a long way to power a football-playing body. It probably works as well as McDonald’s for a slam dunk contest.
Next is one of the several ads by Doritos where a man crams a handful of the chips (from the looks of it, about 1/2 a serving size which is 75 calories) in a gym! It’s just totally absurd. Now I know what you’ll tell me, that it’s just a commercial and one that’s supposed to be absurd. Still, the image is disgraceful to gym rats and I find it frightening that it doesn’t seem completely implausible.
The greatest irony goes to the CBS ad on women’s heart disease awareness. The ad itself is a good public service announcement. However, I find it outrageous to see this message from CBS after seeing ads from Snickers, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and several by Coca-Cola and Denny’s. Those last ads, by the way, were to inform us that Denny’s is giving away free Grand Slam Breakfast meals (that’s two eggs, two sausages, two pieces of bacon, and two pancakes). I’m sure your heart will appreciate that. And thank you CBS for letting us know that you care about women’s heart health.
Am I reading too much into this? Or do you also see the ridiculous ironies present in these ads?
Forget Exams and Grades, Use Projects
I’ve never been a fan of exams or grades while in school. While I typically did well, I found them annoying and rather pointless. Of course, they had a purpose: to determine whether or not we actually learned something (how well this correlated is another discussion). But this created another problem in that our academic history was represented by a bunch of letters and numbers. And students worked to game the system as it was most certainly in their interest to do so. Someone who crammed for an exam could typically do nearly as well as someone that knew her stuff. In the end, it wasn’t true knowledge that mattered, but rather just the grade. Especially bad are the standardized tests which created a large business in gaming the exam (Kaplan does quite well these days).
I propose a different method for evaluating academic ability: projects. I use this word in a loose sense. A project can be a written work (perhaps a thoughtful paper [that goes beyond summarizing] or a few blog posts), or something more “projecty”. A project exhibits critical thinking and most certainly shows if understanding is present. A project is also something tangible, something alive. It shows thought; it shows creativity; it shows work ethic. With our current technology propelling the information age, showing off projects is feasible and inexpensive. This is so much more meaningful than a letter or a number that represents a grade. Speaking of grades, there should be only two: pass and fail. If a project is sufficiently satisfactory, it passes. All other commendable aspects of a project should stand for themselves.
Of course this is not feasible in some class styles – particularly those that are based on memorization. And this touches a root of the problem. Memorization based classes do not require one to use his brain. They don’t require having insights or critical thought. And in that sense, they are utterly useless. Now I’m not saying memorization is a bad thing. It is actually essential to form new ideas, which in turn can be exhibited in projects. I haven’t thought through very many cases at this point, but this does appear to be a more personal and honest way to display academic ability.
I’ll have more to say in future posts but do share your thoughts on this idea.
Industries and Interests
Many of my posts (present and future) discuss the “insidious” things that those in the industry do. This gives the impression that everyone in the industry will only act in their own interests and there seems to be little hope out there for humaneness. From an economic perspective, each company should do whatever is in its better interest. This is especially important for them becuause it is a matter of survival. If they don’t behave selfishly, and potentially insidious to others, they’ll be put out of business by another competitor. This is what happens within industries and the consequence is that industries are full of companies that keep pushing their own interests even if it harms others.
Here is a simple example that drives home this point. Suppose there are two companies manufacturing a certain good. Suppose Company A is can make their product with lesser cost to themselves, but it pollutes a river (or exploits foreign land, or uses child labor); Company B refuses to be so heinous, and thus has a higher price to its product. Company A will likely be more successful than Company B, and in the high stakes of business, all companies like Company B will be put out of business while only Company A types will remain.
It is futile to try to convince companies to act outside of their interests. However, there is still a way to persuade companies to act differently. The key is to shift their cost-benefit ratio so that acting in the interests of others is also acting their own interests. One way is through enforceable laws. A strict punishment, like for polluting the river or exploiting others, imposes a cost on the company and thus the company’s best self-interested strategy is to not break these rules. Another is by social economic enforcement. A company can punished by its consumers if they do not agree with the manner by which it operates. This works well when reputations are very important (they usually are) and it’s especially crucial that there is transparency to the company’s actions. It’s difficult to punish a company when we’re unaware of its awful tactics.
I believe most companies out there really want to do the morally conscious thing. Unfortunately, this often does not bode well for survival in the economic world and companies are left with the choice to either stand by its principles (and suffer great economic consequences) or to play along with the immoral game. Do you see other ways we can persuade companies to act in the interests of our global world?
Why We Don’t Understand Our Behavior
There’s a simple answer to this: “proximate psychological mechanisms”. Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound very simple. Among the clearest examples of this, a favorite of Professor Paul Bingham’s, is below:
Suppose you ate a sandwich. If someone asked you why you did that, you’d probably say because you felt hungry. That feeling is a proximate cause; it doesn’t fully answer the question and is actually a restatement of the question. So we could then ask, “Why did you have this feeling of hunger?” The ultimate (as opposed to proximate) answer to this question is that because we need energy to survive, we evolved the feeling of hunger to persuade us to obtain more energy as this was beneficial. This feeling of hunger is a proximate psychological mechanism.
There are a few important points here. First, proximate psychological mechanisms serve as a proxies for the ultimate causation. This means that we don’t need to understand the ultimate goal in order to fulfill it. This becomes especially apparent when you consider other species. A male lion doesn’t need to understand why he should mate with as many females as he can. He just does it. And a hydra just flips around and eats without understanding why.
Second, because the world we live in today is vastly different than the one our proximate psychological mechanisms evolved for, many of our behaviors are ill suited for our contemporary society. So while many of our behaviors are beneficial, many others are actually causing harm. The scary part is that we could be doing this completely blindly because we act on our proximate psychological mechanisms without understanding why we do so.
Third, these mechanisms can be manipulated and it’s not an uncommon occurrence in our modern world. Companies, advertising, lawyers, and even significant others represent a few sources of manipulation. I’ll have more to say on that in a future post.
Fulfilling Self-Interest
It’s a law of life (which is based on the laws of chemistry and in turn physics). All creatures, including humans, seek to fulfill self-interest. Though technically, it’s the genetic information of the individual that is “seeking” self interest (there’s no conscious thought here of course, but in the competitive world, where resources for survival are limited, the ones that don’t seek self interest don’t survive while only self-interested genetic information survives). Still, for the most part, this means that an individual is generally seeking his or own her interest.
But wait; aren’t humans are known to be an altruistic species!? It is true that humans help out other humans on an unprecedented scale, but it’s under the guise of self-interest. An essential component to the uniqueness of humans is that their best self-interested strategy is to cooperate with and help out others. This doesn’t mean that we consciously or intentionally behave selfishly. Most of this behavior is hidden beneath our mind as subconscious processes.
One exception to self-interested behavior is when evolved mechanisms malfunction because they’re operating in a different environment than intended for, as is sometimes the case in our modern human world. Other than that, the rule of fulfilling self-interest will always remain. It scales beyond genetics, to other levels such as cultural information and especially entities within industries. While we sometimes find the behavior morally offensive, we should understand that it is completely rational.
Technology and Generation Gaps
There’s no question that technology creates gaps between generations. Simply put, this occurs when one generation of people uses and understands technology in a very different way than another generation.
AÂ NYT article brings up the interesting point that our technology is evolving so rapidly that the years between generation gaps is dwindling. A very illuminating example is that of the author’s 2-year-old child calling her father’s Kindle a book. The child sees the device for the purpose it serves, not for its physical design. One friend, upon hearing this story, said that “that’s wrong” while another said “…but I like the feel of the pages”. When making these statements, these friends (who happened to be in their early 20s) didn’t understand that they were already falling behind in the way technology was understood. The next generation of people, scarily only a decade or two younger than us, will define how technology is used. Physical books will be archaic. Virtual keyboards, like that of the iphone, will be the only ones that make sense.
But what if you like the feel of a physical keyboard better? Too bad! The next generation will have no such attachment (and will have difficulty understanding why you do). The only way to keep up with technology is to adapt. That means throwing away all your early notions and preferences and taking up new, better technologies (carefully of course) the way younger people do. The stakes are higher than ever because the changes are occurring faster than before. You won’t be middle aged before you’re out of the loop. You’ll be in your twenties!
If you see this coming, then what emerging technologies must we be quick to adapt? Or if you think this is all wrong, share your counter-arguments below.
The Bad Rap of ‘Exercise’
I don’t like the word exercise. It sounds like work. It sounds boring. It sounds like something I don’t want to do but am forced to do. A lot of people see exercise this way. They don’t realize that physical activity can and should be fun. But the word exercise remains. We need a better term for the incredibly fun ways we move, and show expression through, our bodies. Physical activity doesn’t cut it. Being active doesn’t seem specific enough. I’m at a loss here. Does anyone have a better term?