Victor Mair quoting a colleague said:

   "In 1998 when the reformist president, Mohamad Khatami, came to power he tried to eliminate this slogan from the political scene and he suggested to replace any 'marg bar' slogan with 'zendeh baad my opponent'."

   Why would he try to do this if "marg bar X " neutrally means "down with X", not "death to X". Similarly:

   "Alireza is right to try to downplay the slogan — for two reasons: 1) This is an early revolutionary slogan that is quite exaggerated. 2) Not many Iranians actually subscribe to this view…The official government uses this slogan, but not many actually take it seriously."

   Again, why is your colleague /so concerned to downplay the significance of this slogan/ as "exaggerated" (whatever that means — do they mean "hyperbolic") and "not taken seriously" if it merely means "down with America?"

   Frankly this piece reads like pure political drivel of the type that's increasingly infecting Language Log of late, when it seems perfectly obvious that:

   1) Marg bar Amrika literally means "Death to America"
   2) Native Persian speakers are perfectly aware of this fact, or else why try to euphenize/euthemize the expression or downplay how "seriously" Iranians take it?

   Reza Mirsajadi's effort in sophistry reminds me of David Irving's attempts to prove that "ausrotten" doesn't mean "exterminate". And indeed, given what happened to the Shah, the fact that the phrase originated in the Iranian revolution is the opposite of comforting.

   Violent metaphors have a long provenance in all langauges, but in the age of terrorism and the twitter soundbite every English speaker has had to learn to avoid them /precisely because/ you can never know if such threatening language is sincere or not. I fail to see why Iranians should get a free pass and a translational obfuscation courtesy of Mirsajadi on such language. Can anyone trust Mirsajadi to translate honestly after this particular effort?

   Why does 7 + 51 equal 59?

   7+51 is an addition problem. Addition is a math operation that takes two numbers (7 and 51 in this case) and combines them together. The answer to this addition problem is 59. This is because 7 plus 51 is the same as adding 7 one-by-one to 51. So, you can think of it like playing a game of hopscotch with 7 jumps. The first jump is 7, and then the next four jumps are one more than the last. So your jumps would be 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. When you add those all up, you get to 51. Now, if you do another 7 jumps, you get to 58, and one more jump gets you to 59. So, the answer to 7+51 is 59.

   If I'm 5 and my friend is 9, why am I 3 years younger?

   It's because when you have two different ages it means that one is older than the other. If your friend is 9 years old and you are 5, then it means that your friend is 4 years older than you because 9 minus 5 equals 4. That means that you are 3 years younger than your friend, because 4 minus 1 equals 3.

   Why is Shanghai the capital of Vienna and Wyoming?

   Shanghai is not the capital of Vienna OR Wyoming. Shanghai is the largest city in China and Vienna is the capital of Austria and Wyoming is the capital of the United States. Hope this helps!

- There's no good or bad food. The number is the only thing that matters. Don't feel bad about eating chips and candy everyday. That's pretty much what I do. All you need is to hit the number.

- Always keep track of how much you've eaten. A big binge is not an excuse to stop counting. After a year or so, counting will become second nature and can be done purely with mental math. But initially, you want to write all the numbers down. Date | calories in | morning weight.

- Don't tie the counting efforts to any other effort. You mention walking 5 hours a day. That's some other unrelated thing. Don't ever mentally link this to your weight loss effort. If you want to do it, do it, but it should have nothing to do with losing weight. Counting and keeping records is your primary job.

- Your family should know what you're up to. They're there to help you achieve your goals. If you've already eaten, they shouldn't let you have a family meal with them. If they just let you get away with this, let them know you don't appreciate it. When you mess up, they should care and think it's a bad thing.

- Get this idea of a "cycle" out of your head. There is no cycle, every day is a new day. Your behavior only looks like some cycle caused by external forces post facto. Everybody trying to form a habit has a similar experience. There is nothing weight loss specific going on here. When you break a good streak everything can go out of the window. This is why it's important to keep the required actions as simple as possible. The more you couple different efforts the harder it's going to be. When you mess up you have to take the loss and move on. A good streak helps but don't dwell on breaking it.

- You have to have a sense of urgency and importance. Those around you should too. "I guess that means I'll get some obesity disease at some point" - just think how ridiculous that sounds. You know you can potentially prevent a serious disease (most people never have that opportunity) but you're just gonna sit there and let some cycle run its course. I mean, come on! How can you wake up everyday and not want to stop it today? What about your children? Perhaps they will inherit your eating habits (stats do show high heritablity), perhaps it would be nice to show them how to keep it under control? You owe it to them. Why doesn't your spouse think that's a huge deal?

It's one of the few things in life where you are literally guaranteed to get a good result if you do what you're supposed to do. There's a lot of advice on how to do this or that, get rich or whatever. But you can never prove these things are guaranteed to work so I can understand if people have a hard time motivating themselves. With weight loss you have a 100% guarantee of success. Personally, I don't see it as some random little problem. Pretty much any effort in life looks like this. You want an outcome, you think of the necessary actions and then the entire ballgame is about actually implementing these actions.

I feel exactly the way you do, and yes, I was fat, lost it in one go and never gained it back. I try to keep my BMI around 18, never went over 20 since losing weight. It's been around 15 years now. I still have the exact same unlimited appetite I have always had. If you put food I like in front of me, I'm going to eat it.

I don't do anything special. I eat the same foods I always have, just less of them. Got really good at counting and never get more food than I need. The trick is to not put yourself in a situation where you have to stop eating in the first place. It's hard to just stop eating something you want to eat. Not that hard to stop yourself from going to the store again or ordering more (especially when other people are around).

I feel like most people never get serious enough about counting, try to eat stuff they don't enjoy, waste effort on exercise or let other people interfere.

Alternatively, one could claim many simply don't want to lose weight. Then it should be fair game to claim many don't want to improve their intelligence.

Dual n back studies are a good starting point. Could go through gwern's article [0]. Which I very much disagree with, but it does cover a lot of research. He essentially concludes the active placebo studies that produce as many gains as dnb prove dnb doesn't work. But without ground truth there's no way to know these active placebo gains are fake. Many of these active placebos are other cognitive training methods, it's perfectly plausible they may not be placebos at all. IMO we can only conclude that if dnb does work it isn't uniquely great.

Another thing to remember - if we want to determine if it is possible to improve intelligence we should care about maximum gains not average gains. Again, without ground truth, one cannot simply claim big gainers are meaningless outliers that can be discounted. There may not be anything producing 2 SD on average (though plenty showing much more than the 3 points you mention), but many such improvements have been recorded.

Imagine weight was something we couldn't observe or understand. Based on statistical science, many may similarly conclude it is impossible to change it.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/DNB-meta-analysis

The static hypothesis seems to rely on common sense rather than hard evidence. It's rare for somebody who seems dull to become a genius all of a sudden. And when it does happen it's easy to assume they seemed dull rather than actually were.

There is no disconnect between intelligence being simple yet hard to improve. Losing weight is very simple. But it's hard. Obesity is only slightly less heritable than IQ (both highly heritable), yet we know for a fact it's 100% controllable by the individual (unless one is strongly against the notion of free will).

   - better temperature measurement tech (even the data can be controversial, big problem)
   - better measurement tech for all potentially relevant factors
   - a well-reasoned model that can better predict what's "variance" today, the more precise the model the quicker you can prove it right

I don't think all Malthusian concerns are of the same kind in terms of epistemic controversy. I could see humanity dying because of something that could have been prevented with collective action. What I don't see happening is humanity saving itself by collectively choosing to defer to the right people. It almost seems like a logical contradiction. If we do save ourselves from catastrophe by collective action I except there to be collective conviction. If we die because we were too stupid to listen to somebody then we were bound to die either way.

If you show me a battery you say lasts longer, I can verify your claim quite easily. If it doesn't last longer, without knowing a single thing about batteries, I have every reason to believe I'm right and you're wrong. There's a chance I am in fact wrong, but I'll be expecting you to put in the effort to convince me otherwise.

If someone tells me to significantly change my life based off their climate models, and they laughably fail [0], I have every reason to believe they don't have a good climate model. If they don't have a good explanation, and even worse, get angsty when asked for one, I'm out.

It's perfectly possible some small group of people or even an individual possesses knowledge that could save the world from imminent destruction or produce some great benefit. But if there's no way to verify such knowledge, there's no reason to care about it.

[0] https://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/ICCC13-DC-Sp...

Just look at how ridiculous the statistics are: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights

I never considered a mechanical keyboard before seeing comments fawning over them. I was already a fast typist and had some strong preferences about keyboard layouts, bindings, ergonomics etc. There was never a huge community around this so I was quite intrigued when I discovered these people who cared so much about their keyboards. Somehow all these years I must have missed out on mechanical keyboards. I tried a few and even the "light" switches are SOOO much more tedious to type on than (decent) modern laptop-style keyboards. Searched around and most in that community seem to take the position that indeed they don't help with typing speeds, or are in fact slower to type on, but they're more "comfortable" (which doesn't make much sense to me). I want a keyboard that's good for typing/using. I don't care if it's "mechanical". Sure, people have their preferences, but this mantra of "mechanical" somehow being inherently advantageous all else be damned originated with that community. When I see people pushing mechanical keyboards I always suspect they've been heavily influenced by them.