Life Without Television

Twice recently I’ve seen two high-profile blogs write about weight loss techniques which I have seen refuted by professionals. Number one: targeted weight loss, the idea that certain exercises will remove fat from only certain parts of your body, which is just false. Number two: low-carb diets, which I thought had been shown to create long term health risks.

I hate seeing the same bad ideas being brought out again and again after they have been debunked. It reminds me of crop circles, which were revealed to be hoaxes years ago and yet continue to be talked about with awe.

At times, I’m sure these things are caused by a disagreement between experts, in this case health professionals, but also they can be caused by not being rigorous enough in our research. The idea of 8 glasses of water a day is another one. I’ve heard doctors give this advice, with no idea of where it originates.

The internet makes these problems worse. A good meme travels fast irrespective of how true it is. That’s what makes Wikipedia’s [citation needed] tag so important. But this is also a matter of personal responsibility. I hear friends criticise Wikipedia almost daily as unreliable, but the facts we find there should be easy to verify. We’re putting our intellectual eggs into one basket.

There are two sides to this and one fairly easy rule of thumb to remember: if you’re repeating someone’s idea, or if you come across a new idea, ask yourself “where does this come from?” and stop taking things on face value.

I’m a sucker for this kind of relentless Japanese-style anthropomorphisation.

via Drawn!

Starting something new can feel daunting, but most problems of learning are knowledge problems. We feel unconfident because of the unfamiliar, because of what we do not know.

If you’re worried about something you don’t know anything about, learn about it.

If you can’t learn about it, it’s probably not worth worrying about.

Here’s a great post from Jon Tan about how to style paragraphs.

You can always beat the big guy. If you’re starting out in a business, there are always some people, some companies that are big names, and it looks like they’ve got all the bases covered. But you have two big advantages.

First of all, when you’re small, you’re agile. You can change quicker than the big company. When an organisation grows it has a lot invested in its existence, and risks start to look less enticing. So it starts to play safe, it relies on what has worked in the past, it gets choked up in its own bureaucracy.

Secondly, you’ve got creativity. There will always be the new. Creativity is about difference, newness or even just rearranging. Maybe Google dominates search, but what if search changes? Auction sites might find it hard to supplant eBay, but how about changing the nature of online auctions?

I’m not giving you solutions, because the answers are far from easy. But a solution is always possible.

Money is boring. When you ask people what they dream about, what they really want, they might tell you that they’d love to win the lottery. That’s no kind of answer. If that’s your answer, you haven’t really thought about want you want.

In fact, this might not be about possession at all. Why are we thinking about things we can get? What about things we can do? Things we can be? These are more important questions. And it’s easier to become someone. Most of the time, all it takes is a decision.