THE BESTOF’S
If you’re not interested in the clown show that is the US election feel free to skip ahead to Best in Show.
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I wrote last month the Democrats would need a return to centre to consign Trump to a, still ridiculous, one-term presidency and this would mean a new candidate than the more-than-left-learning Harris.
Forgetting the Democrat play of recent times: claim whatever is convenient and deny all evidence to the contrary. Like:
Joe Biden is fine. No, really.
Never better, in fact.
Actually, maybe not.
Okay. Definitely not.
Joe has chosen to step aside in an act of magnanimous service to the country and, indeed, democracy. But he IS fine!
And that’s just the Biden-forget-you-musts. We now have the—has been all along— Harris the centrist. But for all the extreme excitement surrounding their new candidate, there’s still nothing of substance.
The strategy seems to be… celebratory with lots of cake and fireworks, the narrowing of the race and uptick in the polls only eliciting more cake and fireworks. Clearly, they think the switch was enough, and now they can’t lose.
Ask Hilary about that. But I’ll leave the political punditry this month to Andrew Sullivan and his short-lived hope in Kamala Harris until a textbook return to form.
The answer she had obviously rehearsed — “My values haven’t changed” — told us nothing, except that we should be skeptical of her newfound centrist tinge.
BEST IN SHOW
Not that it will matter. In the first of two AI-themed articles this month, the clown show will be a sideshow, as Yuval Noah Harari writes about the impenetrability of AI decision-making.
Many people try to measure and even define AI using the metric of “human-level intelligence”, and there is a lively debate about when we can expect AI to reach it. This metric is deeply misleading. It is like defining and evaluating planes through the metric of “bird-level flight”. AI isn’t progressing towards human-level intelligence. It is evolving an alien type of intelligence.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/24/yuval-noah-harari-ai-book-extract-nexus
The second is included for the alarming revelation' that one of the titans of tech recently dropped an AI arms race “truth bomb that’s got the tech world buzzing”.
Alarming for the fact that the ‘truth bomb’ here should read ‘stated the bloody obvious’ and, more worryingly— if it’s to be believed— the (Western) tech world is only now cracking on to the fact that the next goal wins.
…it's not just about bragging rights. It's about reshaping our entire reality.
https://www.diamandis.com/blog/ai-predicting-markets-deepfakes-superintelligence?
Gurwinder at The Prism, on those I’ve had a crack at here and here.
We don’t need to be told that war, crime, and pollution are bad, because we learned such lessons in primary school. What we need are clear, specific, and realistic plans of action. And the neotoddlers, being impulsive short-term thinkers, have only broad demands but no rational way to achieve them.
The Leftfield focus on mindset over and above other seemingly more relevant concerns like nutrition or training is because the greatest barrier to sustainable behaviour change is the power of belief.
If you are unable to even entertain new ideas, much less adopt them, you will never behave in any ‘new’ manner sufficiently to achieve and maintain any ‘new’ outcome. The obvious, yet never-acknowledged upshot, is that you can only look forward to more of the same.
In the beginning, you certainly can —indeed, should— fake it til you make it and act your way into a new way of being with motivation just one of many good things that follows action, but, ultimately, if you have any designs on keeping your desired results, these ideas must come to reflect who you are.
But this is also the problem. New beliefs can’t take hold without uprooting the old ones and, with them, our identity. So we first need to learn to let go, and this too is part and parcel of what I’ve been writing about recently—being coachable.
When you’re able to dissociate your identity from your beliefs on health and fitness and aren't quite so sensitive about defending them you can finally learn and grow.
You afford yourself the possibility of change.
Unlike almost everything you hear about fitness in the mainstream media, Leftfield Training has a scientific basis but — as detailed below—that offers no guarantees.
But it’s a good place to start and you should be willing to change your beliefs if presented with better evidence, on the understanding that the evidence you will ultimately be acting on will be yours and how you look, feel and perform.
But when things are not working for you in one or more of those departments you can hold all beliefs that might be influencing that status quo lightly while you, at the very least, audition some others.
Here’s Seth Godin on how, with the right framing, it’s not that hard.
Make a list of things you used to believe. Fervently, certainly, completely.
https://seths.blog/2024/07/the-tooth-fairy/
And Precision Nutrition on how to avoid the many common pitfalls to arrive at the all-things-considered menu described here.
..your ideas about food can end up mired in superstition or “sciencestition.” When that happens, it’s difficult to be objective. Difficult to stay curious and open-minded. Difficult to learn anything…
Superstition, Sciencestition, and How to Stop Overthinking Food
And finally a deeper look at how the process of science often becomes 'The Science that is anything but.
scientific ideas do not spread solely based on the quality of supporting evidence, and that expert consensus is not merely a function of dispassionate truth-seeking.
Dr Rhonda Patrick speaks with Dr Layne Norton - a fantastic source of evidence-based training and nutrition information and its real-world application and a perfect example of the expertise I was writing about and why there’s little reason to be banging your head against the wall in do-what-you-love land.
Note also what he says about creatine that I’ve timestamped below.
“Try to get away from something to feel good for you to do it.”
00:20:49 The profound benefits of small exercise doses
00:24:36 Why you should treat exercise like brushing your teeth (should sound familiar)
00:27:54 Benefits of resistance training for older individuals
00:57:53 Can lifting weights decrease low-back pain?
00:59:26 Injury prevention when resistance training.
01:34:01 Why total protein intake matters more than distribution
01:53:16 Should you eat more protein in a calorie deficit?
03:16:21 Why everyone should take creatine.
Dr Layne Norton - Insights on Diet, Training and Supplements.
One thing not mentioned above, here’s GMB on all things jumping and it’s not just about leaving and landing back on the ground.
Key points: If you’re not jumping, sort it out. And if you are:
…these days, most people just use jumps as a conditioning exercise, and there’s a lot of potential benefit that gets wasted that way.
Skill-based jump training builds power, precision, and full body coordination.
And if, off the back of those two, we’re still in any doubt…
But does resistance training mitigate the risks of the impact of ageing?
Yes.
It very clearly does.
Z-Health with an easy way to fix a pain in the neck.
…if you can’t fix the breath, you can’t fix anything else.
https://zhealtheducation.com/blog/neck-pain-relief-fantastic-breathing-exercise/?
While I’d quibble over the conflation of sound and (electronic) music here, this is still very cool.
But not surprising if you consider cymatics.
MISCELLANEOUS
Recommendations reflect what I’ve been reading/listening to/watching/using recently but, in most instances, and especially where music is concerned, will not have been released in the past month.
MUSIC
BOOKS
Nuclear War: A Scenario — Annie Jacobsen
She does write for TV shows but investigative journalist Jacobsen need not and does not boost the dramatics here in what would happen in a second-by-second account following a ‘bolt out of the blue’ attack on Washington from, in this instance, North Korea.
And most of which is no less insane than the initial strike, including the tidbits:
the US president—with zero discussion about this much less any training— has a grand total of 6 minutes to decide how to respond. And;
ICBMs launched from the continental United States targeted at North Korea fly over Russian airspace.
Leading to—spoiler alert:
All over —2K+ launches— in 72 minutes.
TV
Vikings Valhalla
APP
CLIP
Have a great weekend.
- OLI