Carl-Richard

Run faster. I sometimes pull up the forum between 4x4 runs or sprints, but my mind physically can't move. Do you not listen to music while running? I basically only do high-intensity running/sprints (aiming at basically max BPM) and low intensity cardio (125 bpm fast walking for 40-45 minutes). And I walk 10 minutes after every meal (but I have slacked on the evening meal). When I walk, I just mind-wander or do nothing. I like it, it's an insight generator and simply mindfulness. It feels like cleaning. Afterwards, your mind is clearer, or you get fixated on an idea which you'll explore further.

Making the forum faster might increase flow and make forum interactions more pleasant; higher state, more patience. Think about the amount of road rage incidences in congested traffic.

"Science-based lifting" is to use scientific studies to conclude which ways to train are the most optimal. It's a term primarily used in a setting of hypertrophy/bodybuilding training, and it's here it is often the most problematic. Why it is problematic can be boiled down to essentially one phrase: "moving your body is not like swallowing a pill". People tend to point to the scientific rigor of so called "high quality research designs" like randomized controlled trials by saying that is how we develop drugs and medical treatments, and these have been shown to demonstrate real effects that map on to the world accurately. Well, firstly, let's explore even that for a minute: SSRIs have been shown to be only 2% more effective than placebo. And that's assuming that the study design is accurate and can tell us something true about those effects, which can also be questioned. After all, who are the studies conducted on? Are those people's characteristics always applicable to any given scenario? Are they always relevant for you and your bodily functioning? Maybe not. That aside, you also have the problem of the replication crisis which affects all of behavioral science, not just psychology or the "softer" social science disciplines like it is often portrayed as, but it affects medicine, biology, biotechnology, pharmacology. And why that is the case could boil down to simply "humans are complicated". And what is even more complicated than humans popping a pill? That is humans moving their bodies, and maybe especially lifting weights for hypertrophy. Lifting weights is not just lifting weights. It's every cell in your body coordinating to produce complex movement patterns. To even conceive of this theoretically, forget about the empirical problems for a moment, is a wild assertion of confidence. You would essentially be claiming omniscience like a God. And that's what science-based lifters have essentially done to their analytical mind and by an even more painfully wild and confident extension their empirical capability, not just in interpreting science but in claiming to have produced valuable and truth-uncovering research designs. And this ties into the second but related problem of ecological validity and external validity. Lifting weights is not just lifting weights yes in this sense that that phrase belies an immense world of complexity that is generally not appreciated for what it is, but it's also in the sense that the weights and the movement patterns are not the only thing that is part of your training. It's the gym, the surroundings, the people, the knowledge of the person lifting the weights, the motivation and rigor of the person lifting the weights, the shape and size of the body of the person lifting the weights, the length and width of the limbs; any characteristic that you could describe as merely tangentially related, is deeply intertwined in the outcomes of training. And this is where the "soccer moms in an 8-week study" critique comes in, and it's not a trivial or merely funny or facetious critique. Do you honestly think it is a good idea to base your idea of what is "optimal lifting" on people who are on average and certainly compared to the average hyper-obsessed gym bro 1. not at all knowledgeable in lifting, 2. not at all motivated to lift (at any considerable level of intensity or rigor), 3. not the same size or shape as you, and 4. maybe most importantly generally lifting in a controlled and alien setting where a scientist is standing behind you shouting "start", "stop", "start", "stop", at every rep, where some designs use absolutely unheard of training setups like using one technique with one arm and another technique with the other arm for those 8 weeks, where even quantifying states like "true failure" vs "3 reps in reserve" is mere hocus-pocus philosophical conjecture? And you then compile various of different kinds of studies like this that mostly contradict each other in terms of the overall conclusions and you end up with a marginal number of "51% in favor of this training method over this". And this is what is "most optimal". It is an absolute charade, a circus, pure pseudo-intellectual masturbatory, below AI-slop levels of investigation and conclusion. It's not to say that all of exercise science is pseudoscience. There are valueable studies on e.g. best ways to improve VO2 max which are much more similar to a physiological "pill-taking" mechanism where dose and response are much more simply controlled. But movement patterns, hypertrophy training, based on female mid-40s RCTs, compiled into a sludge of marginally favored conclusions, and then presented as "the most optimal way to train", is not as much a pseudoscience as it is a failure of analytical thinking and logical inference. Science-based lifting is not really as much a science as it is a kind of metaphysics, a theological doctrine, that more interprets and concludes based on a set of assumptions rather than based on the actual observations. That is why "The Church of Science-Based Lifting" is a fitting and ironic name. Because that is also the kind of thinking that is associated with it: "what does the science say?" "what does the book say?" "what is the most optimal way?" "what is the answer?" "what is the thing we should follow, the one true way, the path, the one espoused by the Churchmen with the P and the H and the Ds?" It's ironic that the more "science-based", the less thinking you seem to have to do, the more you just have to listen, deny criticism, bow to authority. What is the true and honest way to train, is philosophy-based lifting; being aware of the assumptions underlying your thinking, not making poorly justified conclusions based on observation, and simply working with what you have, which in the case of hypertrophy is mainly yourself and your own experience, your sense, your own body and mind.

Tl;dr: genes. Thinking you're innately less capable is partially genetic, but you can teach yourself to not do it, because it doesn't lead you anywhere. "But you should be realistic". Yes, about what you want, about what you feel you are a capable at. But don't feed yourself poison.

It's simply if you find one or two things of the same kind, you could expect to find more. You won't necessarily find more, but the existence of those things "could indicate" more such things exist. Alternatively, finding true vision without physical sense organs could indicate that the design is itself a result of planning (that God did not evolve vision spontaneously, step by step, bottom-up, but simply made it such top-down, through will and imagination).

It's not a silly question you brute.

When your awareness stretches farther than the next immediate impulse, you immediately feel the consequences of lying. It also creates a split in the mind between what is true and what is lie, and it creates a poisonous environment. It's like you create a cancerous tumor that starts metastatizing and spreads. The organism, the whole, is truth. When you create something separate from the organism, untruth, it competes and eventually devours it.

Lying and cheating doesn't feel good.

Death caps is exactly the "thorn" in your argument. How do you know the difference between a herbal death cap, an innocuous herb and something inbetween?

Bro Connor is actually a comedic genius 😂 Watch this 😂

@Elliott This is exactly the bullshit within-person designs I'm talking about. Consider that heavy lifting could maybe benefit more from bilateral training? Maybe limiting movement patterns to just one side of the body limits power output and therefore limits the potential effects of that modality of training? Within-person designs are better if you take a lifter who is at a stable muscle mass while lifting regularly and make them experiment with each technique whole-heartedly for separate periods (preferably matching the seasons). But that's still just N = 1 if you do as in the video and use one person, so you can't necessarily generalize to everybody.

If you are watching a show, why not enjoy it? If it's a cringe show, then cringe about how bad it is. But having an existential crisis about how the show is constructed, that is not needed.

Not exactly evidence for the personhood of God, but NDEs involving actual seeing without having eyes open or a functional brain are evidence of mental and perceptual faculties existing "before" the events proposed necessary by naturalism (according to the current evidence or paradigms; evolution and development of physical perceptual instruments), which could indicate that also other higher mental faculties (e.g. planning) could exist at the bottom of reality as a part of a "personal" God.

I have a feeling young people believe they have discovered something new because when they look at their parents or the older generations, they are not in that game, but the truth is they probably used to be in that game but they just stopped caring. Like, you could definitely trace "looksmaxing" back to some dude or gal in Ancient Greece calling it by some Greek name (Looksus Maximus). Or that's just my 0.9% Greek/South-Italian genes speaking (they are carrying all my efforts towards Looksmaxing).

My bar for speaking solipsism with you without pulling my hairs out is that you know the difference between cosmic solipsism and egoic solipsism, and you know the difference between a perception and pure consciousness.

The video format of playing a bunch of random funny clips on top of a droning monologue is so cheap and deceptive. It makes the droning monologue sound more impressive when in reality it's mostly just slop. It's the same issue with food videos that use high-speed cuts and transitions. It hijacks your dopamine system and makes what you are looking at artificially more salient than it actually is.

When I see these videos, of these young people and their limited understanding, I know that I'm getting old:

In my personal opinion, "God" is not a problem for me. People have different knacks for different words. Some are allergic to "ego". Some are allergic to "solipsism" (that would basically be me). The larger lesson of "language is not it" is a good one, but individual words, that's more personal. But I will say, "solipsism" is an absolute communicative self-immolative exercise.

There is a powerful pointer attributed to Leo which goes like "You are creating everything". It resonates strongly with the notion of "God". Besides, God-realization is often used as a description of higher states of divine love not merely reducible to the pure emptiness realization.

You could stop suffering quite easily, but you don't want to, either do what is required or drop what is required, which is very straightforward: everything you value must be dropped, everything you're doing that stands in the way of this must be deprioritized. Then meditation comes quite naturally. You're lucky to do spirituality before you have built a life, to see what is there, because that is simpler than tearing it all down. But you actually want to tear it all down before you get to see what is there. That is the conundrum. People want to mess themselves up before they put themselves back together again. As for when is enough enough, it depends on the person. Some can drop it all at 14-15 years old. Some need more time to mess around. And the messing around can get very tricky, even in the later stages. Some can have many deep spiritual experiences and still believe it's not possible to let go fully of everything. Stuck in limbo, moth and the flame.

Space and form. Consciousness is the space which everything arises in. Intelligence is the forms it takes. The reason "intelligent" people can tend to be unwise is because they are stuck on a limited set of forms, so they become prone to deception, bias, inflexibility, blindspots. Yet increasing consciousness increases the perspective, breaks the attachments to any particular form, and you start seeing between the lines, seeing details some people can't see. Increasing consciousness doesn't make you automatically wise, but across time, it will. Time is an important dimension of wisdom, but again, so is space. Space and time.

I prefer the shitty version (95% oxide/5% citrate) because I think the slight laxative effect has a better effect on my cognition than the magnesium itself (or I get enough magnesium with it).

He might be. That is essentially the entire tension between contemporary non-duality, analytical idealism, the mystical but still scientifically subscribing (naturalists), and Christians, Muslims, who are more open to the super-natural (and the brilliant cross-over: Christian perennialist panentheists, e.g. Rupert Sheldrake, who studies wacky shit like whether the Sun is conscious). Threading the needle is to remain agnostic: if you're a scientific andy, not that much evidence of a God that more or less literally speaks the world into existence through his divinely ordained plan (at least that I know, maybe somebody could make the case better than I can). But it's not exactly a divine impossibility either. I can't believe I'm linking this video of all videos on this topic, but Nick Fuentes (colloquially labelled neo-nazi) presented a similar tension here (not the meta-cognitive vs non-meta-cognitive God tension but the "tendency towards mystical phenomena associated with the Third Eye" tension, sort of tangential but anyway): 1:02-1:23 (when D starts talking, the clip is over).

I think @Cred is right about this forum after all considering this abominable display of context clue awareness 😆 "I confronted Vitality [...]" "Why I confronted Vitality [...]" Besides, you kinda have to think — if between the two options, when one of them is suggested to be light, you pick the one that is not light to contest the claim, not the other person — whether or not you know the difference. In other words, I thought it would be obvious I did not mean Vitaly was light, that's why I did not care to mention it. But sure, Vitality is the first guy that pops up on the screen when you play the first video, so that makes your heuristic prone brain clued to that rather than the perhaps slightly more demanding task of reading the title of the (two) video(s) beforehand (and moving your attention to the other person and comparing their energy). In other words, shame on you for being either a) TikTok brained zoomeroids, or b) merely human.

This guy is in some kind of state. Extremely light energy, piercing eyes.