I read around five main topics. What’s frightening is that the prevailing paradigms are usually based on incorrect assumptions:
– Training for hypertrophy/strength
– Nutrition for body composition
– Learning and memory
– Religion and spirituality
– Personal finance
Nutcases, we salute you
There’s an unwillingness to change, to shift to a new paradigm. The early adopters are considered crazy, then the masses follow much later. It’s a delayed process: a well known concept in product innovation and technology adoption:
If someone told you in 1995 that TV and newspapers would crash and burn in a decade you’d look at them funny.or death of the physical book.or online dating.. early adopters seen as creepbags, now you’re a grandad if you don’t have a tinder profilePosting our family photo albums publicly?Or that best friends could sit together in a room in silence for hours absorbed in their phones…
The same thing happens with ideas: the innovators and early adopters are the weirdos until it becomes commonplace. The earth isn’t round. Don’t be silly.
Otherwise known as ‘correlation does not equal causation’.
We do things a certain way, and get a certain outcome.
Naturally, we retrospectively think all of our behaviour was necessary to achieve the goal.
We think our diet worked because of our impeccable nutrient timing, or we got bigger arms because we did our curls with a little twisty.
We don’t challenge at the status quo, because we don’t have the time, inclination, or perception of expert knowledge.
If we’re particularly unfortunate we’ll even start to defend and justify our viewpoint violently. That’s when we’ve really imprisoned ourselves.
Worse still, we start to see data that would prove us wrong, so we start doing this.
Ego gets involved, then it becomes even harder to say
‘I was wrong’
It takes a certain kind of gall to say ‘you know what? In light of the newer evidence, I can no longer see a causal link between vaccinations and autism’
To call yourself a scientist, you need to know when you’re wrong, swallow your pride and admit it.
But it’s easier to just shout louder rather than risk your reputation…
The video above outlines what is effectively ‘mount stupid’ in fitness, and how to see past it.
‘Mount stupid’
Another example is in assessment of risk. This is most commonly in a situation where an unsexy threat (heart disease) doesn’t stir up much emotion compared to a more dramatic, sexier one (terrorism). Here’s the data:
So let’s start with some things that we used to get horribly wrong:
1) Hypertrophy and strength
Status quo:
– Training to failure: drop sets, forced reps
– Take a pharmaceutical grade preworkout and ‘destroy dem biceps’
– Declare war on your legs and squat til you puke
What the data suggests:
– Puking is not anabolic.
– Training response is a result of adaptation to stimulus, not punishment.
– Just because a workout is ‘hard’ has no bearing on the gains without progressive overload.
Recommendations:
– Focus on total volume, not muscular failure.
– Skip the occasional workout if you need to.
– If you want to do more, train with more sets or higher frequency.
A classic case of ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’. And yet we fall for it hook, line and sinker.
Further reading:
1) No pain, still gain – focus on regardless of failure:
2 – Nutrition for body composition:
Current paradigm:
– There are ‘healthy’ foods and ‘unhealthy’ foods. Eat less unhealthy foods and more healthy ones, and you’ll lose weight
– Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and needed to kickstart your metabolism
– Carbs are evil
– Fat is evil
– Everybody is gluten intolerant, and it’s making you fat
– Eat every 2-3 hours to prevent metabolic slowdown
– Superfoods are especially magical.
– Alkalise your body with the right nutrients to lose fat
What the data suggests
– There’s no such thing as ‘clean’ food
– Low carb vs high carb diets
– Carbs/fat are not the problem, stupidity is
– ‘Gluten intolerance’ is mainly fear-mongering
– pH balance is incredibly tightly regulated without the need for your kale and spirulina intervention.
Occams razor: supposedly ‘alkaline’ foods (i.e. vegetables) are more filling, so you eat less food. More to do with volume than alkalinity – let’s not overcomplicate things.
Occams razor: supposedly ‘alkaline’ foods (i.e. vegetables) are more filling, so you eat less food. More to do with volume than alkalinity – let’s not overcomplicate things.
We all seem to be moving in the right direction in nutrition, but we’ve taken our bloody time about it.
3 – Learning & memory
Current paradigm:
– Schooling of independent pockets of data in unrelated subjects.
– Didactic, linear teaching
– Massed repetition: cram for your exam, then stop and move on to the next subject
– Learning by rote
– Teaching facts in isolation
What data suggests:
– Active processing/engagement with subject matter
– Comprehension and conceptual links
– Visual associations
Image source: GMS
Memory recall is produced from the base elements of the brains analytical system. Images are generated upon request from a stimulus via the principle of resonance (adding energy to a system at a given frequency increases amplitude of that frequency).
Teaching unconnected facts by rote does not account for a fundamental principle of memory that it is impossible to learn pure data in isolation without an association. As a result, things are learned by attrition with a low success rate. Therefore the ‘attrition’ approach effectively causes learning by accident, where the raw data is inadvertently associated with a sound, the phonological loop of the words, or some other incidental circumstance that coincided with the learning event.
4 – Religion & spirituality
A debatable metric to use, but at least a measurable one: Happiness.
Assuming the goal of religion is to make humans happier through union with God, then it doesn’t appear to produce a clear advantage in the data[1] [2] [3]. In some cases using religion as a coping mechanism is associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms.[4]
Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21480378
Those with an intrinsic religious orientation appear to be happier than those with an extrinsic one. ‘…and happy people see their religion not so much as something they “do”, as what they “are”.
Perhaps this explains the murkiness of the data. The amount of religiously motivated violence in the world relates to an extrinsic focus, suggesting someone maybe misheard the instructions along the way.
So it seems like there is a missing link, distinct from religious ‘belief’ or ritual alone.
It’s no coincidence that ‘the world’s happiest man’ Mathieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk
Worlds happiest man according to University of Wisconsin MRI metrics
The happiest people, the enlightened characters [5][6][7][8] often sing the same tune: that anthropomorphising a deity is literalising what the holy men of history have tried in vain to communicate. “The map is not the territory”.
“Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?” – Huineng
Eastern philosophies, including Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and Sufi approaches, are sophisticated and elegant. They can provide, particularly for the Western mind, powerful new tools to deconstruct or reconstruct the heavily-conditioned mind into a more holistic model and potentially even to transcend it completely. Unfortunately, what often results is yet another religion with rigidified beliefs, certainties and practices far from the understanding of its founder(s). It does, however, provide many opportunities for new, exciting and endless philosophical discussions. Philosophy can be a great ally on the path to awakening, but it can be a terrible master. – Gary Weber
They consistently state that doctrine is a pointer to encourage introspection and meditation to cultivate our own happiness. So in my opinion, intrinsic focus is the missing link between happiness and religion. Something critical to well-being, yet missed by the majority.
5) Personal finance
Status quo:
– Live for payday, maybe even go for a payday loan at 2000% APR
– Multiple credit cards, maxed out
– Buy your car on finance
– Always looking for a pay rise
– Salary as the main source of income
– Invest in actively managed mutual funds, chosen by a financial advisor, got to leave it to the experts ey?
What the data suggests:
– In the long run, 86% of actively managed funds underperform their benchmark before fees. The ones that do outperform the benchmark often erode profits with fees. I’ve worked for a fund manager – can confirm it’s a very labour intensive process operationally to run. Management fees bleed away returns.
A typical credit card charges 18% APR. Find an asset that pays you 18% and I’ll give you a million pounds. (lol if you find that, you won’t need the million pounds).
Via Robert Kiyosaki
Further reading:
– “Winning the losers game” – Must watch documentary on active vs passive funds.
– Robert Kiyosaki has some excellent books on flipping the above model on its head.
Conclusion:
There’s a few from us. I’m sure all areas of knowledge are prone to folklore, error and cognitive bias – I’d love to hear about where you see this in your particular area of expertise.