Assuming his hypothesis is true I find this rediculous from the article:
"The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over," Sapolsky said. "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."
How is it made more so. We have no free will over how we reward or punish people. If the world is screwed up and his hypothesis correct then its exactly as screwed up as its supposed to be and our lack of decision neither make it worse or better. It just is.
That is a very good point. It seems like his argument is that, since we have no free will, we should stop trying to do anything to control others' actions... which in itself is suggesting to control others' actions. Furthermore regardless of whether we have free will or not, however you want to define it- punishing bad behavior discourages it and provides better outcomes for the world at large. It's like he's saying people just blindly act according to some non-free-will principle without taking in any environmental input, which just seems ridiculous. And implying that specifically applies only to bad behavior, which just seems like he's being smugly pessimistic as a gotcha. "Ha ha, the world is bad, if you disagree with me you're just a hopeless optimist" sort of thing.
While our lives are largely dictated by situation and environment, this doesn’t equate to a complete lack of free will. We are constantly making decisions based on reacting to information we receive.
Even if we don’t actually have free will, it’s not really a useful argument to make. It just feels like an excuse to dismiss the problems of humanity and ignore opportunities to learn and change.
Sapolsky, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will…
Theirs is very much a minority viewpoint. Sapolsky is “a wonderful explainer of complex phenomena,” said Peter U. Tse, a Dartmouth neuroscientist and author of the 2013 book “The Neural Basis of Free Will.” “However, a person can be both brilliant and utterly wrong.”
This article mentions scientific studies that support its myriad factual claims but doesn't cite any of them. There is a lot of low-quality, tentative research about the health benefits of various diets. A serious discussion would need to include the limitations of such studies for the food in question.
This post seems to have little to do with science at best. At worst it invokes pseudoscience "superfood" health nonsense.
This is missing the biggest piece: phylogenetic analysis. They aligned a selected group of mutations and then eyeballed the alignments and then speculated.
Given what we know about the infectivity of Omicron, the combinatjion "Omicron was around in 2020" seems pretty astonishing. Combine this with "Omicron variants were formed by an entirely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biolog" and I'm going to suggest that the most likely explanation is that they cocked up their data somewhere.
I'm not qualified to peer review this - and it looks like no-one else has yet.
Researchers used statistical methods to adjust for confounding variables. “We found that about half of the excess risk with red meat consumption was explained by excess body weight,”
Fun fact: there's a name for the phenomenon of instantly recognizing the number of objects when it's fewer than five. It's called "subitizing."
There's a pretty interesting overview of what we know about math on the brain (or at least knew as of its writing) in the book "Where Mathematics Comes From" by Lakoff and Nuñez.
Well which neurons immediately decide to shove it off to the 4 or less neurons or the 5 or more neurons? Because they must be the ones running the show.
Talking out of my ass here but I guess the initial information from the eyes goes to many pathways and reaches both and more. It's just a question of which ones react.
The study is very clearly talking about non-diabetic patients, too..
These are almost certainly people who want the weight loss primarily for aesthetic reasons rather than health ones, and may face these terrible health complications as a result. Makes it even worse, I think.
You're almost certainly better off somewhat "fat" than skinny by way of a drug like this. Especially given that "fat" is an entirely subjective measure and the "objective" measures like BMI overweight/obese are not based on points of any kind of phase change in health outcomes but are just somewhat arbitrary statistical variations. Dramatic interventions like these should be reserved for people that have dramatic need, at least until we have such an intervention safe enough and with few enough side-effects for over-the-counter sale.
Yes, I understood that. Sorry I wasn't clear. I have experienced gastroparesis a couple of times, and I'm saying that it is worse than a chronic illness in my experience (I also have a couple of chronic illnesses). It's extremely unpleasant. Sure can lose weight since you can't eat anything, though.
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