Whatever your political views, the ellipses in the quote are deeply misleading, and in fact make his quote seem to say something Joel emphatically did not say.
Here is the full quote:
>It’s impossible not to see the parallel: the only way to build a successful world today is to allow the contributions of everyone. Carving up the world into us vs. them, building walls, and demonizing religions, nations, and refugees is both morally repugnant and counterproductive, and it goes so much against the spirit of Stack Overflow that as a community we must speak out.
That doesn't make it better in my opinion. The politics of nations, strong border controls and vetting for refugees are nuanced there are pros and cons to all angles in that debate.
Whereas, Joel dictated that if you supported "carving up the world" you were against the sprit of Stack Overflow, no matter how that might impact you as a non-American.
It's actually a fairly complicated and can be quite difficult for people to break out of, even people who desperately want to change. When people follow the standard guidelines (which are beginning, slowly, to change) to avoid fat and reduce calories, they end up feeling hungry all the time, and have to white knuckle their way through. This is not a state that people can maintain long-term.
Starvation studies from the University of Minnesota have been described this way: "During the semi-starvation phase the changes were dramatic. Beyond the gaunt appearance of the men, there were significant decreases in their strength and stamina, body temperature, heart rate and sex drive. The psychological effects were significant as well. Hunger made the men obsessed with food. They would dream and fantasize about food, read and talk about food and savor the two meals a day they were given. They reported fatigue, irritability, depression and apathy. Interestingly, the men also reported decreases in mental ability, although mental testing of the men did not support this belief."
In addition, there is evidence that the body begins to reduce energy output in response to reduced energy input, thus making the advice every overweight person hears from nearly every source to "eat less and move more" a load of nonsense. That can work short-term, but the combination of reduced energy output and constant hunger make that recipe very ineffective long-term.
There is even more to complicate the story (e.g. it is common for overweight people to feel hungry even with massive amounts of energy stored in fat due to some of the effects of what's now being called variously, metabolic syndrome, syndrome X and diabesity).
In short, when people become overweight, which is a progressive condition of insulin resistance that grows slowly over time, or in other words and emergent hormonal dysfunction because of diet, they cannot "eat less and move more." To that extent it is not self-inflicted especially since millions of Americans are doing exactly that as told by their doctors and it is having no effect.
The only way to really change body composition long-term, is to change diet in a way that is at odds with what doctors learned twenty years ago in the two days they studied nutrition in medical school, which, as it turns out, is wrong.
> Starvation studies from the University of Minnesota have been described this way: "During the semi-starvation phase the changes were dramatic. Beyond the gaunt appearance of the men, there were significant decreases in their strength and stamina, body temperature, heart rate and sex drive. The psychological effects were significant as well. Hunger made the men obsessed with food. They would dream and fantasize about food, read and talk about food and savor the two meals a day they were given. They reported fatigue, irritability, depression and apathy. Interestingly, the men also reported decreases in mental ability, although mental testing of the men did not support this belief."
Those people were actually starving. Their fat stores had dropped to 4% or less, which is very dangerous when not on a strictly controlled and supervised diet. People with normal or above normal stores of body fat can be hungry and malnourished, but will not be starving (in the medical sense of the word, which is what the Minnesota experiment was testing).
> In addition, there is evidence that the body begins to reduce energy output in response to reduced energy input, thus making the advice every overweight person hears from nearly every source to "eat less and move more" a load of nonsense. That can work short-term, but the combination of reduced energy output and constant hunger make that recipe very ineffective long-term.
I would like to see this in reputable studies, because everything I have read on the subject rejects the hypothesis that there is a physiological change in energy usage as a result of lowered intake. In fact, it a) doesn't make any sense since fat is supposed to be a store of energy for lean times and b) if the body could function at its current level on less energy, it would.
On the starvation study it's merely one example that highlights how calorie restriction affects people. Yes, it's an extreme version, but it is different only in degree from any other calorie restriction, and when people try to reduce by X calories, it's probably a linear effect; more restriction, more of these effects. Oddly though, fasting tends not to have these effects, it's only in sustained calorie restriction, so fasting in various forms is one of the tools people can use to lose weight.
As for the lowered energy output Jason Fung wrote (pg. 53 of the Obesity Code, "One major problem is that the basal metabolic rate does not stay stable. Decreased caloric intake can decrease basal metabolic rate by up to 40 percent. We shall see that increased caloric intake can increase it by 50%."
> On the starvation study it's merely one example that highlights how calorie restriction affects people. Yes, it's an extreme version, but it is different only in degree from any other calorie restriction, and when people try to reduce by X calories, it's probably a linear effect; more restriction, more of these effects. Oddly though, fasting tends not to have these effects, it's only in sustained calorie restriction, so fasting in various forms is one of the tools people can use to lose weight.
No dude, you are ignoring the fact that these people did not have ample fat stores. It is completely unreasonable to expect that obese people would behave the same while restricting calories than people who are already borderline starving (4% BF). These aren't effects of caloric intake restriction, they are effects of caloric restriction in general, which is a state obese people are not, have not been in for years and will not be in for years.
> One major problem is that the basal metabolic rate does not stay stable. Decreased caloric intake can decrease basal metabolic rate by up to 40 percent
This is basically unrelated to your statements about insulin though, so don't conflate the two. This statement does not support the idea that obese people cannot harvest energy from their fat stores, it supports the idea that you get less energy output from less energy input which is almost tautologically true.
> "No dude, you are ignoring the fact that these people did not have ample fat stores."
I don't think I am ignoring it. You seem to be asserting that their issues with calorie restriction were lack of body fat. There is no evidence for that I am aware of. A simple rejoinder based on anyone's experience, do fat people get hungry? If they do, why? They have all that energy available. But I don't need to rely on arguments like that, since in the vast corpus of research on this at this point, it's pretty well established that calorie restriction by itself (even with exercise) does not work long-term. The failure rate is astronomical and it is in part due to what plain old calorie restriction as we've been told to do it does to metabolic energy and also due to the psychology of hunger. Also, and this is very important, a full fast does not have these effects according to the evidence. People can totally abstain from food for very long periods of time (depending on body fat), with very little hunger. It is smaller scale calorie reductions, without breaks (like the breaks intermittent fasting provides) and without much dietary fat since fat is highly satiating, that cause these reactions to calorie restriction.
> "This is basically unrelated to your statements about insulin though, so don't conflate the two."
Again, I'm not. I was responding to the request for a source on the idea of energy output reduction in response to lower calories. I'm not claiming there is a link between energy output reduction and insulin.
Fat people can get energy from fat stores, just not in the way we are typically told. If it was impossible to get energy from fat no one would ever lose weight, which is trivially and obviously not true.
> You seem to be asserting that their issues with calorie restriction were lack of body fat.
No I'm asserting that what happens to people's bodies at 4% body fat when in severe caloric restriction is very different than what happens to people's bodies at 40% body fat with severe caloric restriction, and so we can't apply the metabolic damage/starvation models to fat people. Fat people just need to eat less, and the issue basically comes down to compliance. How do we get people to stay on a healthy diet long term?
> do fat people get hungry? If they do, why?
Because, as even you have shown, hunger is not a reflection of your bodies actual caloric needs, it's hugely a reflection of blood sugar levels, among other htings. Given enough time (in the order of magnitude of minutes to hours) in an obese but otherwise healthy person fats will be broken down and blood glucose will increase and hunger will decrease. It's getting through that period that is a mental compliance issue, but not otherwise physiologically challenging.
> The failure rate is astronomical
Again, this is a compliance issue. People absolutely lose weight on caloric restriction, and starvation issues like low metabolism do not become an issue until you are very low body fat. You simply do not see obese people going into so-called "starvation mode." In fact there are a few cases, though admittedly not many, of obese people that abstain entirely from eating for months at a time without long term "metabolic damage."
> People can totally abstain from food for very long periods of time (depending on body fat), with very little hunger.
I think we basically agree, then, that it's mostly a compliance issue and not an issue of caloric restriction working or not, and also that hunger is not a reflection of the body's actual metabolic state (especially in obese people).
> Fat people can get energy from fat stores, just not in the way we are typically told.
Fat people get energy from fat stores in the same way skinny people do. Very skinny people on severe caloric restriction are not a good model for the general population.
> "Fat people just need to eat less, and the issue basically comes down to compliance.:
On oversimplification, but the crux of the issue. The astronomical failure rate is because of compliance. The prescription you seem to be suggest is "comply more! comply better!" but the biology of this is exactly why it fails so often. The type of food you eat is what sets you up for sustainable long-term success or its opposite. What you wave away with a wash of the hand--compliance--is the reason people fail and more willpower is not the issue and not a solution. It's a dysfunction of the hormones brought on by high insulin resistance brought on by excessive sugar and flour, which becomes a hunger trap, unless you add fat to your diet, which is exactly what people are told not to do. So, I do think hunger tends to differ when you suffer from fatty liver disease and insulin resistance. People can endure calorie restriction and lose weight for a while doing low-fat but they do not stay on it. Saying that people should just comply more is like telling someone with sleep apnea to sleep better. They need a different intervention.
edit--A failure rate of 80-90% is not an anomaly, it's a colossal failure. It's not something to be overcome, it's an indication of wrongness. By asking for more compliance you are asking people to fight their biology and they will lose this fight. Instead the intervention should be to employ their biology as their ally, and lose weight more easily and without much hunger and that's possible. It's just not helpful to tell people to eat less. We've been telling them that for forty years.
(Side note. The 4% bodyfat in the UofM study you mention is an assumption of yours, and not the starting weight of the people in the study. I think you're unfairly dismissing the study and presenting it as if it's a binary condition between starving/not starving, and that may be a thing, but it's not certain that it is. I'm merely cautiously using it as evidence that calorie restriction is difficult (actually more than difficult) to maintain, which anyway we all know from experience. It would be good to explore other studies on the topic). Intermittent fasting, for example, is vastly easier than consistent calorie restriction, and you're consuming the same number of calories as calorie restriction (if you design it right). That's not a matter of willpower, that's a different intervention).
Unfortunately I don't have time to continue the conversation, but take the time to explore some of the links I posted (there are tons more)--they go into way, way more detail and make the argument better than I have.
I don't really disagree with a lot of what you are saying. Note that you've backed down from low calorie diets cause metabolic damage to low calorie diets are mentally difficult to sustain which I agree with.
You've offered introducing fats as a way to stave off hunger (aka increasing satiety) but introducing fats are far from the only way to increase satiety. Introducing fiber, for instance, is another way.
You also seem to be in favor of a ketogenic diet. Let me say that I totally believe that a keto diet is a great way to eat healthily and boost compliance for some people. Others have a really hard time tolerating large amounts of fat, and so we still need to find alternative solutions for them.
I agree that simply telling people to have more willpower is not the solution, but I think it's important to recognize that the diet is not causing physiological damage to the vast majority of people (it's not the insulin spike in and of itself that causes damage, it's what happens after that, ie: more food intake). So maybe we can attack this from the pure will power front and leave the diet alone (or maybe not, but let's be deliberate about what we are doing).
Regardless, the UofM study is heavily discredited and I still maintain that it is not relevant to what you are arguing either way: the study is designed to study extreme starvation and famine. Brink of death type stuff. Obese people who feel hungry are not that. We know this because if you don't feed them they don't die.
FWIW I actually have read/watched all the links you've posted (I had before this conversation as they are all relatively well known), and I still hold by all my points.
> I would like to see this in reputable studies, because everything I have read on the subject rejects the hypothesis that there is a physiological change in energy usage as a result of lowered intake. In fact, it a) doesn't make any sense since fat is supposed to be a store of energy for lean times and b) if the body could function at its current level on less energy, it would.
This is still talking about near starvation mode. People who stop menstruating and who grow lanugo are doing stuff that reduces their need for energy.
(I'm not sure it's accurate even for this extreme state though. Re-feeding is risky, but I don't know if "starvation mode" is part of the cause of that risk.)
> When people follow the standard guidelines (which are beginning, slowly, to change) to avoid fat and reduce calories they end up feeling hungry all the time, and have to white knuckle their way through. This is not a state that people can maintain long-term.
I don't think there is anyone recommending reducing fats and calories as the only thing. Both of those are positive things to do to your diet, but if taken while ignoring the rest of the actual "standard guidelines" (which include eating more fiber and fruits and veggies), then yes, you are basically simply reducing calories (which is good) and increasing glycemic index (which is bad, for some).
> In short, when people become overweight, which is a progressive condition of insulin resistance that grows slowly over time, or in other words and emergent hormonal dysfunction because of diet, they cannot "eat less and move more."
I don't believe this is true but would be interested in seeing a study.
> To that extent it is not self-inflicted especially since millions of Americans are doing exactly that as told by their doctors and it is having no effect...The only way to really change body composition long-term, is to change diet in a way that is at odds with what doctors learned twenty years ago in the two days they studied nutrition in medical school, which, as it turns out, is wrong.
People have success with every kind of diet program, and it's a bit of a strawman to argue that the medical profession is advocating a diet that is only low in fat, but still high in sugar (which is what produces the results you're talking about). In fact, millions of Americans are following only a small portion of their doctors' advice (ie: lowering fats) which has the effect of lowering satiety, increasing overall glycemic index of their consumption (while ignoring the advice that they should eat more fiber and less sugar). There is no doctor out there recommending that as long as you eliminate bacon you can drink all the gatorade you want.
It's not a straw-man. Look at the adoption of the low fat/high carb diet by medical professionals in america. Now compare that to the prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes.
No offense but you literally just ignored everything I wrote and restated the original argument, which I see all the time, which is "medical professionals don't understand diet and don't recommend the right thing," which is, frankly, bullshit.
Let me repeat: There are zero (0) medical professionals advocating for a high sugar diet. The "high carb" part of the recommended diet is meant to come from vegetables and whole grains (which contain a fair amount of fiber).
There isn't any evidence I'm aware of showing people eating a calorically balanced, low fat, high carb, low sugar, moderate fiber, micronutritionally balanced diet and having diabetes. I understand that's more complex that saying "low fat/high carb" but again, there aren't doctors out there recommending cutting out fats and subsisting on sugar. So yes, it's a complete and total straw man, but when you only consider large macronutrient groups and ignore the rest of nutrition it's easy to see why that seems ignorable.
> "there aren't doctors out there recommending cutting out fats and subsisting on sugar"
That's true as far as it goes, but the internal fight inside the medical research community was whether it was fat or sugar that was the culprit in a host of physical problems. Fat won in a slam dunk, even though it turns out to be wrong. Doctors are largely not researchers, and they are taught what was the conventional wisdom. There is no suggestion of malice, just bad (or at least overturned, but it was actually bad in this case) research that has been promulgated in the medical community. A lot of doctors think fat is bad and pay less attention to sugar.
> That's true as far as it goes, but the internal fight inside the medical research community was whether it was fat or sugar that was the culprit in a host of physical problems. Fat won in a slam dunk, even though it turns out to be wrong.
The idea that you can isolate it down to fat vs. carbs is "not even wrong." It doesn't ask the right questions, and ignores many other confounding factors. I don't really want to keep restating this point.
There are healthy high fat diets. There are healthy low fat diets.
If you want to talk about bullshit, how about ignoring evidence and resorting to ad-hominum attacks?
I was not ignoring your argument but rather pointing out that there is data showing a correlation between doctors advocating low fat/high carb and obesity in America.
Now, what is a straw-man is to put forth a theoretical/never seen in reality diet and claim that no one has ever gotten fat eating it. Sorry, but an extrapolation from a population of zero to 350 million is a bit much for me.
I think the one point we do agree on is that this is a complex issue. So, you can blame fat people for not listening to their doctors, doctors for not checking the research or food companies for bastardizing what doctors actually recommended to sell low fat/high sugar food and label it "healthy." But it's quite obvious that the advice doctors have been giving for the past few decades has not had the intended effect.
Sorry but I made zero ad-hominem attacks in my post.
> data showing a correlation between doctors advocating low fat/high carb and obesity in America
No there isn't because no doctor advocates that without the other nuances I provided in my post. I still feel like you are ignoring my posts, because my last post was literally entirely devoted to addressing this nuance. The simple fact is that there is not a large group of people eating according to the medical communities recommendations who are obese. The rise of obesity in America is people largely ignoring medical recommendations. Yes, low fat was in fad for a while, but there is plenty of evidence that a low fat diet can be healthy, and that a high fat diet can be healthy, so, as I've repeatedly said, it depends.
> I think the one point we do agree on is that this is a complex issue.
100%
> But it's quite obvious that the advice doctors have been giving for the past few decades has not had the intended effect.
When you radically simplify their advice, sure. When you actually follow what is recommended, no not really.
Start spending some time reading Cal Newport's blog. You still have the problem of deciding which things are important to you, but just immersing yourself in how he approaches focus and deep habits, about how he prioritizes his work, will send you in the right direction.
If you time block your available time as he does, you're forced to make choices--there is only so much time available, obviously--and the discipline starts to emerge by that simple process.
Start here, but spend an afternoon going through his articles when you have a free chunk of time. If it resonates with you, and you adopt some of these strategies your focus and productivity will both improve.
I use the iOS app Kan-Do to budget my time to different projects/activities and work on them pomodoro-style (i.e. in timed chunks). Lets me set goals of time spent for the week and track where I've spent my time and how much.
(You don't have to do everything in 30 min chunks as you go, you can also manually record other blocks of time spent.)
Using pomodoros as well. Vitamin-R on the mac, to start the pomodoro. Have used the pomodoro method in the past, but just this year took it seriously. Using it everyday and for all tasks. It has helped me focus on the high-value tasks and especially the tasks I want to procrastinate on.
I've used it on and off since it was in beta, almost a year. (I should have added a disclaimer that the developer is a friend.)
It's good if you want to set goals for N pomodoros on task area A, M pomos on project B, etc. and then work predominantly in pomo-mode and track your progress on your goals. If you don't use the timer mode, hand-entering time spent probably will get tedious quickly. It's designed to help particularly with time-boxing (i.e. when you're budgeting out a limited amount of time across projects), though I don't use it that way.
I think it's pleasant to use in day-to-day use, decent UI.
Cons: I find that I have a hard time doing my planning (time allocation) on a mobile device screen. I want to do it on a big screen where I can see everything, or on paper. I'm not good at regularly triaging the list and adjusting it, so the goals tend to grow stale and I start ignoring them a bit.
Agreed. The key for me is the blocking structure. On the calendar, the next hour, X. Nothing else unless you finish it. Oddly the trigger for me was World of Warcraft where you could hop online to spend "5 minutes checking auctions" and end up 3 hours later wondering what the hell?
Hacker News is not a bookmarking service, here are some I know of:
* https://delicious.com/ - Discover, share, and organize the hottest links online
* http://pinboard.in/ - Pinboard: social bookmarking for introverts
* http://www.xmarks.com/ - Xmarks | Bookmark Sync and Search
I would have down-voted you for casting your way of thinking on me while being a smart-ass. It is not your call to say what is the "appropriate" way for _others_ for editing cat pictures or managing bookmarks.
Your second edit shows that you care enough to raise your level so here you go.
If you're on a mobile device, do what I do: "share" or "send" the url to your email app and then mail it to yourself. It goes directly to my inbox, and I don't mark it as "read" until I've "actioned" it.
I use this approach as well, but I also have a filter in my mailbox that sends those mails to a folder 'notes to self', to avoid excessive notifications and inbox clutter.
At 52, he had no such notion at all, I can virtually guarantee it. That employment model, predicated on strong unions in most cases, was well on its way to oblivion in the mid 80s, and by the time he was actively working, say in the late 80s/early 90s it was on life support. By that time there were vanishingly few people who though they were going to GM or US Steel for a lifetime job with a pension. This millennial vs. the 50-year-old thing is crazily ahistorical.
It's about combating injustice and miscreant behavior where we find it. You don't act that way. Super. Neither do I. Criticizing the behavior in others (which, make no mistake, is all motivated by gender) doesn't push you into some sort of solidarity of villainy. The instant recourse to "not all men" and "not my friends" is a kind of solipsism that's not helpful. Yes, a two-year-old can tell you "not all men." Now that we have that observation out of the way, what's next? Are we done? Are you more upset at the tone of the article you don't quite like, or at the rape threats?
This is built on so many bad assumptions. At best the "rules" it's trying to enforce are training-wheel rules, the sorts of rules given to novice writers to help them avoid flabby, purple writing.
But the assumption that short sentences are better than long sentences, or that simple sentences are better than complex sentences is just wrong. There are all kinds of reasons why you might use one type of sentence over the other or vary them for effect. You might be concerned about rhythm, or you might be attempting to establish a certain tone, distance, closeness, formality, or lack of.
We have this weird cultural obsession with the clarity, brevity, and simpleness of writing. Jacques Barzun even wrote a writing manual called Simple and Direct, as if these are the only virtues to be found in writing.
But I think you want as many tools as possible to achieve the effects you want. There is a huge rich tradition here, that we've largely lost, a tradition that teaches about hypotactic and paratactic sentences, that teaches about periodic and loose sentences, that teaches how to make left and right branching sentences, that teaches subordination, that teaches rhetorical devices, and that advocates (at times) longer, more complex sentences for richer and denser writing.
Thankfully there are a number of books out (some of them) recently that seem to be fighting back against the austerity view of writing.
They include, if you're interested:
- Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences
- Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence
- Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences, Syntax as Style
- Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose
I'd just add, there is nothing wrong with being simple and clear. There is nothing wrong with cutting out needless or weak adverbs. But there is something wrong with worshiping the austerity style as, at all times, the best and the only way to go. There are lots and lots of reasons and occasions to deviate from it, but the style orthodoxy these days is the one assumed by that (admittedly cool) website.
I thought it was ironic that the first two sentences were very well-written, but highlighted. As if to show an example where the app would be useful. The sentences are excellent and don't need changing.
The one thing this country (I'm speaking here of the US) doesn't have any discernable lack of is massive herds of people who are desperate to make more money. Lots of it. Piles of it. Mountains of it. And right now. If there is a clear and unambiguous, nearly universal, practically uncontested value in this country it's to make more money.
That's not necessarily bad, but it often is, and frequently has both bad personal and economic consequences.
Of course it's not even clear what we're talking about since "making money" isn't really defined in the article, and the kinds of salaries that are easily within reach of, I would assert, most professional HN readers (who are programmers), are airily dismissed with the claim of heavy taxation (which are actually near historical lows), and the costs of "maintaining a certain lifestyle" which is more or less a personal choice. If you are a person living in NYC or SF and you make $125,000 a year, and are unable to max out your 401k AND save at least a grand a month, then you are making extremely poor decisions. Now, that may not be the kind of money the author has in mind, but it ain't bad, and you can lead a decent lifestyle and save at the same time without much effort.
There is, I think, some small truth to the claim that there is more talk of changing the world in SV than at, say, Lehman Brothers, but I think it's slightly naive not to see that this is often a thin tissue over the desire to make money. Not too many people go into to business and don't want to make money and a lot of it if they can. Talk of changing the world is prevalent precisely because the current software revolution makes it astoundingly more likely that you can make money AND change the world. That's certainly not true if you start a bodega and probably not true if you start a hedge fund. But in software it is. Software companies are changing the world in ways that are both trivial and profound, and some of them are even making a boatload of money at it. I don't see a lack of people who want to make money anywhere. I see a set of people who recognize that they can potentially have an outsized impact on the world and make a lot of money because software makes this massively more likely than at any time in the past.
It just seems to me that the author both assumes a problem that doesn't really exist, and proposes an answer to said problem that is presented as more sure and easier than it actually is. But anyway I think the confusion is because we shift from getting rich at the beginning to "make enough money to be comfortable" at the end, so it's slightly confused: it's not about all out self-interested greediness he tells us, except at the end it is. And the social consequences of that mindset are just conveniently ignored. In the end there just doesn't have to be strong competition between the desire to make money and the desire to also do decent things in the world. It only seems that way when one of those desires (the first one) is grossly out of whack.
I think the author is talking about a very tiny bubble of, not just Silicon Valley, but also further limited to recent grads who are still living the college life and just starting companies.
If you limit your world view to that group then I'm sure it seems like everybody is in it to change the world, and a goal of making money is not noble.
I'm not a part of that group, so I don't really see that at all. Nobody that I personally know has any problem with making money. Not that we're all chasing money either, just that there's certainly no conflicting feelings going on.
But your physical form w/r/t a sport isn't really a matter of controversy since no one thinks a 5'7" person is going to become a basketball great, although it's not totally impossible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spud_Webb
What I mean is, of course there is "natural talent" in being 6'7" that pushes you towards one sport and away from another, but that's not that interesting I don't think. What's interesting are those things-- chess, music, writing, film making, etc.-- that aren't tied to physical types, and so far the evidence seems to be that talent is largely a myth.
Now, the interesting question you raise is why do some people keep going and others give up.
> What's interesting are those things-- chess, music, writing, film making, etc.-- that aren't tied to physical types, and so far the evidence seems to be that talent is largely a myth.
Its not clear to me that you actually read what I wrote, since I addressed this exactly, albeit in the domain of programming. There is significant reason to believe that, at least in that domain, talent is innately important in the same way that physical structure is in sports - that is, that it can eliminate a majority of people (but doesn't really differentiate between the significant minority that remains).
Oh I read it, but since it was confined to programming only, leaving out the vast domain that is the rest of the world, and with the weight of evidence so far is on the other side, it didn't seem as interesting to me. In addition to the possible methodological problems mentioned in the Ars article. In any case, the state of the evidence, always subject to revision of course, is that innate talent is largely not in play.
Here is the full quote:
>It’s impossible not to see the parallel: the only way to build a successful world today is to allow the contributions of everyone. Carving up the world into us vs. them, building walls, and demonizing religions, nations, and refugees is both morally repugnant and counterproductive, and it goes so much against the spirit of Stack Overflow that as a community we must speak out.