The link between animal protein was investigated in some detail in the China Study. Also in the documentary Forks Over Knives. Evidence found that there were “diseases of the west” that correlated with the western diet. Since then, the Cleveland Clinic has used plant-based diets to reverse heart disease successfully. Other programs use it reverse heart disease.
The book How Not to Die covers many of the top killer diseases in the US and what food are best and worst to eat to avoid those fates based on reviews of scientific literature. The trend thoughtout is that plant-based diets fare best. Not surprising that this correlates with Blue Zone diets.
The book Fiber Fueled looks the science of gut health and what foods are best for gut health. The answer: a variety of plant foods.
As a study size of one, I’ve personally been able to recover quickly enough to do 6 26.2+ mile runs in six months in my forties. I think that would difficult and injury prone on a high-inflammation diet.
Do any of these books reference studies that provide causation for the observations? If not, it’s hard to judge how reliable these are. Maybe more than “I saw my boy frank go vegan and lose weight” but even then…I intimately know frank and can be reasonably sure the diet helped him lose weight. Can’t say the same for all these observational studies.
This has always been a major concern for me with a lot of studies. People seem ok with it and I’ve never understood why. It’s like trying to understand a bug by looking at the broader logs / data instead of reading the code (which is absolutely a useful tool, though the more complicated the code - like with the human body - the less useful it is. And I certainly wouldn’t be advising any fixes based off of it). And far too often reading the code tells a wildly different story.
See for yourself. Plug your favorite disease that’s killed a relative into https://nutritionfacts.org/ and find related scientific nutrition studies explained. It’s associated with the doctor who wrote How Not to Die. I believe, yes, sometimes the specific nutrients at play are understood. Take some toxins and heavy metals for example. Some accumulate in animals and travel up the food chain. So it’s no surprise there are more toxins and heavy metals that have accumulated in bigger fish. Since big beans don’t eat small beans, there’s not bio-accumulation there.
Even the USDA in trying to promote fish advices choosing fish that are “lower in mercury”. Or you could not eat fish and skip a major source of mecury exposure.
Also a distance runner (half and full marathons) in my 40s. I would absolutely say that dropping meat and dairy from my diet (a few months ago) has been beneficial to my running performance. Anecdotal, of course, but I know that you and I are not the only ones.
Also, yes, all of those things you cited, and others. In particular the existence of The Esselstyn Heart Disease Program [1], founded by Dr Esselstyn of Forks Over Knives fame, at the world's top heart hospital, is noteworthy.
>Because human same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) is heritable and leads to fewer offspring, how SSB-associated alleles have persisted and whether they will remain in human populations are of interest. Using the UK Biobank, we address these questions separately for bisexual behavior (BSB) and exclusive SSB (eSSB) after confirming their genetic distinction. We discover that male BSB is genetically positively correlated with the number of offspring. This unexpected phenomenon is attributable to the horizontal pleiotropy of male risk-taking behavior–associated alleles because male risk-taking behavior is genetically positively correlated with both BSB and the number of offspring and because genetically controlling male risk-taking behavior abolishes the genetic correlation between male BSB and the number of offspring. By contrast, eSSB is genetically negatively correlated with the number of offspring. Our results suggest that male BSB–associated alleles are likely reproductively advantageous, which may explain their past persistence and predict their future maintenance, and that eSSB-associated alleles are likely reproductively advantageous, which may explain their past persistence and predict their future maintenance, and that eSSB-associated alleles are likely being selected against at present.
Giving myself the ability to take notes on how I'm feeling has helped me discover the negative patterns and reason about them with more clarity.
Ive made a ritual of it, I go to my local cafe and write. Maybe I write a few lines or several pages, I try not to be dogmatic about it. I think this lowers the activation energy: I don't expect to write anything revolutionary but rather to simply express my current state.
I guess you can think of it as a separation of logic and state! You're writing down your emotional state and then reflecting on it. Somehow when it's written down it's much easier to reason about, similar to how people give better advice to their friends than to themselves.
Good point. I historically have been weak on training, probably because it feels like so much work. I should look into investing more time and money into it. Sounds like maybe lack of training is a primary issue.
You should be able to tell from the calibre of your people if they can be “trained” to actually do what you’re asking right? It sounds like a combination of experience, intelligence, and conscientiousness. The first can be changed but the latter two hard to do much about. That may not be resolvable as a “more training” issue.
I dislike the terminology of censorship because it implies everyone starts with unbiased training data and then some censor it. I think it would be better to say it's trained with a different perspective.
There's absolutely no reason to believe training data scraped from wherever is convenient is some neutral baseline.
Imagine a human writer who grows up with certain experiences that make him biased toward a point of view. The human writer is not censored if he writes what he wants even if his writing is informed by his experiences, beliefs, biases, etc. The human writer is being censored if he knows he is not permitted to write about certain topics and, when people ask him to, he answers that he isn't allowed to share opinions of that kind.
If you agree with my take on censorship above, I find it hard to accept that the models today are anything other than censored. This is really obvious with pictures where you can tell that the model generated a picture, looks at it, and decides the generation is not appropriate and gives you a "I can't do that" message.
Censorship is also evident in the intent. When models are trained the intent is, presumably, to get the best data. When RLHF and similar methods teach the model not to express certain opinions the intent is clearly to avoid offense or violating political correctness. This is a classic case of censorship.
One way to consider how an LLM "sees" text is to imagine a character based language like Chinese - each symbol is a syllable which can be a word on its own or part of a word. If you scramble words at the character level, you are going to produce combinations of letters that don't match any known symbol. It would be like drawing a series of random strokes and asking someone who knows Chinese what it means.
If you look at the example given in the paper, the word "won" is a single token. When it is scrambled as "wno" it is tokenised as "w" and "no" both of which are unrelated to the original token "won". Somehow the LLM is able to relate these two completely different tokens "w" and "no" back to the original token "won". I think the paper is claiming this is surprising because these tokens shouldn't have any correlation with each other in its training data.
Partial counterpoint: if you were to mutate characters (by changing less distinctive components to other vaguely similar-looking ones) or to reorder the order of characters in hanzi/kanji compounds, I would imagine that a native speaker would still be able to read them with some difficulty.
I can attempt to produce a Japanese example by going to town on an example from Jreibun, but note that I am far from native:
後食に罠くなるのは生里像現なので壁けることはできないが、午後の事士の校率が干がるので木っている。
As far as I'm concerned, swapping out the radicals doesn't hurt that much (this is usually a negative, since it leads you to confuse character pairs like 候 and 侯, especially if you don't practice writing) and swapping the order of characters is a bit more annoying.
That said, a Mandarin one would be more convincing, since reordering the various markers that serve the roles of Japanese verb conjugations would be less disruptive than turning できなかった into っぎかてなた, which I did not do for that reason.
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(The original sentence was 食後に眠くなるのは生理現象なので避けることはできないが、午後の仕事の効率が下がるので困っている。)
> If you scramble words at the character level, you are going to produce combinations of letters that don't match any known symbol. It would be like drawing a series of random strokes and asking someone who knows Chinese what it means.
You can see an example of doing that very thing here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EG1ZV_tX4AALiIG?format=jpg&name=... . There is a hashtag at the bottom of the image explaining the meaning of the nonexistent character, but if you remove that from the image, people understand it just as quickly.
