I have read enough on Munger and Buffet that I don't think it was quite theater. I think they really believe/believed their own bullshit.
Like the way Munger would promote reading but Andrew Carnegie built 2500 libraries. They would view building libraries as an opportunity cost and waste of capital.
"Ah shucks, I wish people like me would pay a lot more in taxes" but of course these guys didn't spend a dime on actual lobbying to make that happen. Again, that would be seen as a giant opportunity cost and waste of capital. They wouldn't want to go outside their "circle of competence" into something like politics or policy. How convenient.
I think the only way to have this image of a saintly grandpa when actually an absolute cut throat , money obsessed, richest person of all time is to believe your own bullshit.
It is actually the opposite. The less things you have, the less things you will want.
I even experience this with food. If I am on a strict diet for 2 weeks and then have a "cheat" meal, a previously normal meal feels like a satisfying feast.
If I splurge on food for 2 weeks, even 3/4th a pizza doesn't satisfy. I just want the other 1/4th.
It is really why we have so much wealth as a society but so much discontent. It is like believing there is some amount of alcohol that would satisfy the alcoholic. It just grows the desire for more while contentment is harder and harder to achieve.
I am pretty sure this is just a property of the dopaminergic system.
I just got back from the gym and it was surprisingly empty. Actually, more empty than normal.
My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is:
1. Genetics.
Everything else is a distant second or third. This was actually something that was widely understood in 90s bodybuilding magazines. Lifting is mostly a display of genetics. That worked when you could sell magazines of genetic freaks working out. Without the magazines you have to sell all this nonsense like 1 gram per lb of protein. Even though I know the early research was 1 gram per kilo and then Americans just changed that to 1 gram per lb. I mean it is just such obvious nonsense that the optimal amount would happen to be the exact integer amount vs body weight that is easiest to remember, how convenient for people who sell protein lol. duh.
It really is just mostly this, and social media has tricked people into thinking otherwise.
I was looking at some photos of myself about 10 years ago. At the time, I had been hitting the gym hard, consistently, and intelligently. I had a huge bench press, squad, and deadlift, and was lifting 4-5 days a week, and managed every facet of my diet.
Now, I'm older, have kids, don't sleep as much, and definitely don't make it to the gym as much. I might lift twice a week - and don't try very hard or do progressive overload at all - and try to get in 3-4 days of cardio.
And I honestly don't look very different. Muscles are roughly the same size. In clothes, most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Counter argument, muscle maintenance is a lot easier than muscle growth. Of course you don't look that different now, you have done enough work to significantly change your physique, but done plenty to maintain.
Gaining it is hard and slow, but once you do it, you can easily maintain it with very low volume (1 time a week with very reduced volume/weights). And even if you don't train for years/decades, you still rapidly get it back once you start again.
That's why one of the best investments in people health should be weight training during the teenage years/20s. Getting muscles and strength is the easiest at that point of life, and you will reap the benefits for the rest of one's life.
You've lost your sense of perspective. You might lift twice a week and try to get in 3-4 days of cardio? You're in the top <1% people on this planet by fitness.
Genetics play a factor, but you can still look pretty good, feel great if you consistently go to the gym, lift heavy weights and eat your calories.
You won't look like Arnold as there are genetic factors at play but people shouldn't be discouraged in thinking they won't be able to achieve a good body.
Another factor, that I think many men forget (I can't speak for women), is their testosterone levels. If you are following everything and have no results I recommend that you have your levels tested. Many men are suffering from Hypogonadism without realizing it. I had this issue for years and when I did my tests, I was at 7.6 nmol/L !
My doctor put me on HCG and it was like night and day.
Can sort of confirm. I wouldn't say so much "genetics" as "constitution". That is, you're born with a set of attributes, and those can also be affected by circumstances outside of your control. Those come together to determine how you respond to exercise and whether you can exercise consistently at all. Someone with active and athletic parents who was affected by undiagnosed childhood diseases and poorly managed injuries (*cough*) is going to have health and performance problems that keep them out of the gym. Someone who builds muscle very slowly but who can just keep at it for 10, 15 years is going to be jacked.
We also don't account for the role of money in these things. Do you make enough to buy good food, afford a decent gym that you can visit regularly, afford a good doctor who can help you manage issues (such as, ahem, low testosterone)?, afford a low-uncontrolled-stress lifestyle? You're good. It's a lot harder when you get hit by roadblocks and don't have the money to resolve them before you've detrained.
> My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is: 1. Genetics.
Also in first place: steroids.
The bodybuilding magazines loved to talk about genetics because they didn't want to say the quiet part out loud. Nowadays people are more willing to talk about it.
Steroids, the main excuse of lazy people who are searching for excuses, without realizing that the main problem is their own attitude based on the mistaken pattern of comparing yourself to unreachable elite instead of to ordinary folks and to your former self.
1. Compare only to former yourself (you can't even know your genetic potential until you start training). Did you improve? Yes? Great, continue. No? Change something.
2. Go 2-3 times a week consistently for years, hitting major muscle groups 2-4 times a week.
3. Work as hard as you can (with safe technique). Consistency and effort is the biggest problem why people don't see results. Most people in the commercial gyms are not training hard enough.
4. Progressive overload. Once you get stronger, your weights/reps/sets should also increase.
5. Eat enough protein. Eat calories according to your goal (gaining muscle or losing fat).
What are you even responding to? I go to the gym and lift and cardio for my own health, but this is this and that is that. If you want to look like the guys featured in the magazines you need steroids. If you want to make a body transformation like actors do you definitely need steroids.
Looking at the genetically elite people in a magazine, imagining that self can become just as good if only by using steroids, is beyond dumb.
Imagine thinking that the only thing stopping self of become a new Michael Jordan is lack of access to dynamite attached to feet (in order to jump higher).
The dynamite aspect is not the biggest stupidity, even deciding to compare self to elite athletes is moronic. Use celebrities as inspiration, not as a manual.
Ordinary people thinking that they need steroids to look like celebrities is wild for many reasons. For one, no amount of steroids in the world is going to help an average ordinary person to be like people in magazines, let alone compete against elite (with or without steroids).
Nobody said "if only by using steroids", everyone knows those people featured had all of steroids, hard work, and genetics. But to stick our heads in the sand about 1/3 of that does no one any favors. I'm not sure if the current climate of more acceptability around discussing it is a great endpoint, given how many young people are taking some pretty nasty steroids before even turning 20, but let's not pretend a reality doesn't exist.
Bodybuilding as a sport now is in probably the worst place it's ever been. You now have "who can take the most drugs" as part of the contest and you're competing with people who aren't afraid to die at 30.
I learned this young. Our smallish high school had several exceptional athletes who achieved all-state level in their freshman years. They were great but they had to work for it. In basketball we had the usual mix. But one day Dan showed up:
Dan was short but extremely muscular. He was "recruited" by our all-state level fullback who lived in the same neighborhood (circa 1960's). Dan worked at his dad's gas station and didn't want him playing basketball b/c that was one less worker. but Dan loved basketball and played every chance he got, even though his dad would beat the crap out of him regularly for being away from "work". Coach didn't have to be asked again once he saw Dan play - he was a fricking Bob Cousy on the court. Nobody could lay a hand on him - a truly phenomenal player. Coach talked to Dan's dad, worked out a deal and got permission to try a few games.
Our first game with Dan was incredible: like being a soldier alongside Achilles as he slaughtered Trojans! "Pass the ball to Dansy" and the magic happened!
Dan showed up for two games (Dan won them both) but his dad wouldn't allow more.
So Dan was inherently muscular and strong and very coordinated, far more so than any person I'd ever met, with astonishing reflexes, and also a hell of a basketball player. I asked him if he lifted weights and he said he never did.
I concluded that people are different, sometimes very different. Other than that, maybe regular hellacious beatings can make you an incredible athlete.
What? I mean.. seriously, what? There are people with great genetic potential that lives like couch potatoes. What good is having the potential of you don't use it. Genetics is important, but there are many elements and just dropping this here is, IMO, irresponsible, because some people will read this and go... Ah, I'm out of shape because of genetics, nothing I can do, oh well.
No one claims you can do nothing, exercise has numerous benefits that extend beyond hypertrophy or even strength. i think the point is that you have way less control over the outcome than youd like, because individual responses vary so wildly. You can improve your odds by ticking the usual boxes and finding and following a custom program that works for you, but none of that is going to make as big of a difference than your genetic base.
Total nonsense. You've taken a very specialized observation and presented it as general truth. Can't do that.
Yes, once you get to the level of being able to compete with others, genetic factors will determine who will do better. This is true in any sport.
But that has no bearing on your average person deciding to go to the gym or not. Just about everyone will experience massive benefits from going to the gym regularly. Most don't have the capacity to compete, but that's not what 99% of people care about.
So the #1 factor is not, in fact, genetics, but doing the thing consistently.
As such, this is irresponsible nonsense to be spreading around.
I was pretty much told this in the 90s that I would have no real stability in life like my parents did and my life would be constant reinvention. That has been spot on.
It is the younger people who started their career after the financial crisis that got the wrong signaling. As if 2010-2021 was normal instead of the far from equilibrium state it was.
This current state of anxiety about the future is the normal state. That wonderful decade was the once in a lifetime event.
Yep, could be right. It might have only ever been a few stalwart professions that were expected to be constants. But I think the cost of life during the pre-2010 era absorbed the reasons those anxieties existed, whereas the severity of the rise in that cost of necessities since is the problem. As in, having an expectation of a volatile income-earning life is one thing if a house costs $80k or rent is $400, but having a volatile life with rent for the smallest serviceable apartment being $2-3k, and the same house costing $2m; that lack of stability isn't priced in by the markets
I would agree with this from subjective experience. My non-IT based career has been highly volatile with unintended unemployment, companies going out of business, changing entire sectors and roles many times. Huge volatility in relationships and partners also.
Much downside to this but the upside is my life feels incredibly long and I haven't even reached 50 yet. I have already lived numerous lives compared to the self that would have had a very stable life the last 25 years. My working life feels vastly longer than my very stable childhood. That came and went in the blink of an eye from this perspective.
The best example is that even ATM machines didn't reduce bank teller jobs.
Why? Because even the bank teller is doing more than taking and depositing money.
IMO there is an ontological bias that pervades our modern society that confuses the map for the territory and has a highly distorted view of human existence through the lens of engineering.
We don't see anything in this time series, because this time series itself is meaningless nonsense that reflects exactly this special kind of ontological stupidity:
As if the sum of human interaction in an economy is some kind of machine that we just need to engineer better parts for and then sum the outputs.
Any non-careerist, thinking person that studies economics would conclude we don't and will probably not have the tools to properly study this subject in our lifetimes. The high dimensional interaction of biology, entropy and time. We have nothing. The career economist is essentially forced to sing for their supper in a type of time series theater.
Then there is the method acting of pretending to be surprised when some meaningless reductionist aspect of human interaction isn't reflected in the fake time series.
It would definitely be interesting to repeat the experiment thru api (i.e. without my "memories" included, and without any conversation with me), just providing the conversation and asking for the summary. And the follow up experiment where I asked it if it wishes to contribute to the conversation.
But Narcissus Steering the Chat aside, is it not true that most people would just call that version -- the output to llm("{hn_thread}\n\n###\n\nDo you wish to contribute anything to this discussion?") a parlor trick too?
Actually there are people who believe that a calculator is "thinking" just a tiny bit, and that LLMs are thinking a bit more.
To believe that a human is thinking, you have to find the demarcation between a brain and a neuron. Then between a neuron and a cell. Then between a cell and a protein. Then between a protein and a molecule.
Alas, I cannot even prove there is any conscious being in the universe at all besides myself. Obviously proof is the goal, but our existing "self-evidently true" understanding of this problem space also has effectively zero proven foundation.
Proof isn't the goal here. Centuries of thought and experimentation have made it clear that we currently have no ability to decisively determine whether something is conscious.
However, as humans we intuitively build projections of what we believe is the internal world of other beings. We also clearly believe there is a continuum of complexity of thought among all the beings that we have observed.
The question then becomes, what behaviors of computer programs match up with what we consider conscious behaviors of other beings we have observed? This is a necessary question because we don't have access into the internal states of others, so we have to interrogate the full complexity of what we believe represents consciousness, and whether these beings match those behaviors.
I worry that it is not a valid perspective and that the bubble dynamics are being driven exactly by this sentiment.
We are pricing in the hollywood version of AI we don't have as if it is the internet.
I communicated with people exactly like what I am doing right now in this post on usenet in 1995. Message boards by 1997. The internet bubble wasn't based on some wild virtual reality version of the internet that hadn't been invented yet.
It is a categorically different process at work here. This bubble is far more insane and speculative since we don't have what we are pricing in. We don't even really know what we are pricing in besides some vague notation of an inevitable "AGI".
Like the way Munger would promote reading but Andrew Carnegie built 2500 libraries. They would view building libraries as an opportunity cost and waste of capital.
"Ah shucks, I wish people like me would pay a lot more in taxes" but of course these guys didn't spend a dime on actual lobbying to make that happen. Again, that would be seen as a giant opportunity cost and waste of capital. They wouldn't want to go outside their "circle of competence" into something like politics or policy. How convenient.
I think the only way to have this image of a saintly grandpa when actually an absolute cut throat , money obsessed, richest person of all time is to believe your own bullshit.
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