Twitter thread of people’s suggestions for how to break “executive function death spirals”
In the 2019 paper "Knowledge and Sentiments of Roe v. Wade in the Wake of Justice Kavanaugh’s Nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court", the authors surveyed 2557 US residents and found that 65.7% of them incorrectly believed that “If the Supreme Court overturned (got rid of) Roe v. Wade, it would be illegal to get an abortion everywhere in the United States” (h/t Marginal Revolution I think)
What percentage of readers (by looking at Goodreads users posting reviews) are male vs female for different book genres? Top of the graph is highest proportion male, bottom is highest proportion female. (via @a_centrism on Twitter, original source here I think)
In "Brand Truth Narrowly" , Robin Hanson writes:
"McDonalds is a famous food brand. Not everyone likes what they sell, but many do, and under this brand they can reliably find a kind of food they like at a predictable price which is below their value. Imagine you were hungry and came across a Capitalist Food joint. ...." (see link for more)
In "I believed the hype and did mindfulness meditation for dumb reasons-- now I'm trying to reverse the damage" , Holly Elmore writes:
"I overdid it with mindfulness and meditation. I probably never needed to practice them in the first place. Like yoga, I was drawn to meditation because I was already good at it— I quickly saw the benefits because for me they were easy to reach. ...." (see link for more)
In “Aspartame, once more unto the breach”, dynomight writes:
“Look, I get it. Diet Coke tastes sweet because it has aspartame in it. Aspartame is a weird synthetic molecule that’s 200 times sweeter than sucrose. Half of the world’s aspartame is made by Ajinomoto of Tokyo—the same company that first brought us MSG back in 1909.
If you look on Wikipedia, you’ll see that aspartame is a methyl ester of the aspartic acid phenylalanine dipeptide, which isn’t, like, comforting.
It’s normal to have a prior that aspartame would be bad for you. Certainly, that was my prior. Without looking at any evidence, any reasonable person would think like this:
This makes the decision theory pretty simple: Consuming aspartame has little upside, but substantial downside.
The thing is, we do have evidence. We have a lot of evidence. The FDA calls aspartame “one of the most exhaustively studied substances in the human food supply”.”
They go on to summarise the evidence and say that it’s pretty overwhelming in favour of aspartame being safe especially compared to e.g. sugar. I am happy and bought a sugarfree creaming soda to celebrate. Though actually I didn’t check if the sweetener was aspartame lol.