Humanitarian technologist & big data wrangler, on a quest for evidence-based policy. Rational optimist, post-statist, contemplative humanist, mystery enthusiast, bardo tourist.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Core strengthening can help with back pain, but in this case it’s different. Walking on soft or variable surfaces causes less impact pain to sensitive nerves. People with poor flexibility or damaged discs in their back feel more pain from walking on hard, flat surfaces. The quality of shoe support / insoles can help with this too. If you have back pain when you walk, you start to compensate for it with an uneven gait, turning your pelvis inward or outward or tightening your hips. Over time this will cause tight muscles that will pull your spine out of alignment and exacerbate pain. Uneven terrain will force a break in these habits and encourage mobility and stretching in tight hips, hams and back muscles. This can be improved off a trail by doing mobility exercises like 3d lunge matrix, kinetic hip flexor and hamstring stretches. I would add that while you can prevent most back pain by doing core strengthening, wearing supportive footwear and doing these kinds of flexibility/mobility practices, it is always better for your body to have variability in how it exerts itself, than doing the same exercises over and over. Hiking is great for this because the terrain and the way you tackle it changes a lot each time you hike.


  • OP dweller here!

    I will add that indeed these suburbs are designed for driving, even if there are good sidewalks and parks everywhere. Where I am at, everything feels like a 5 to 15 minute drive away. Banks, pharmacies and lots of restaurants have drive-thrus. Major intersections are typically one mile apart on a squared grid. The major stroads are often lined with big stores and restaurants with giant parking lots, while the interior parts of those grid blocks are housing colonies, schools and parks. Different suburbs are connected to each other and the city with arterial highways. And compared to Europe, fuel is very cheap. Cartopia.


  • Make a small spray paint stencil or vinyl sticker that represents your crew, or inspires people to think differently, and put them around your town or natural areas in subtle, cleverly inconspicuous locations.

    Explore your area with Alltrails, or a similar app, finding new hiking or biking trails.

    Urban exploration: creep through abandoned buildings, climb fire escapes to reach the rooftops, use catwalks under bridges to cross roads and rivers, scurry through large water drain pipes and abandoned steam tunnels.

    Start a lucid dreaming competition with your friends, and share your experiences every morning. As you all develop more dreaming skills, you can share them with each other, and slowly become the masters of your dreams.

    Come up with scavenger hunts that guide people into the coolest, hidden areas of your town, using clever clues, and share them online, similar to geocaching.

    Pick up rubbish off the ground, one area at a time.

    If it doesn’t exist publically in your country, get equipment to either test air or water quality at several spots around your community, and then share them online through posts, or by hosting an Ushahidi map. Encourage others to chip in.

    Get your gang to volunteer together to help homeless, elderly or disabled people once or twice a month. You will both bond with your buds and gain new perspectives from the people you work with.

    Arrange spontaneous dance parties in public with little flash mobs made up of your mates. Try to get strangers to join in on the fun. Disperse after one song, so you don’t get in trouble.

    Learn to identify the 10 most common trees in your area, then the 10 most common flowers, the 10 most common weeds, the 10 most common birds and the 10 most common insects.

    Explore local theater, try to find weird niche performances at churches, swingers clubs, primary schools, corporate retreats, futurist festivals, government events, and street corners. Make sure to cheer loudly and throw flowers.






  • Short answer: Yes! Partially!

    Long answer: Belief is a feature that humans have that can give you confidence both in proven outcomes and in the unknown. It stems from our prefrontal cortex survival capabilities to remember past experiences and simulate future experiences. Aka imagination. We can believe in anything we choose to.

    Yes belief is psychologically comforting. Certainly a lot more than worrying about the unknown. It’s even more comforting if the belief is shared by a social group, reinforcing it to each other.

    Other aspects of religion make life easier too. Rituals, traditions, stories and social ties.

    Those things can help with depression! Depression is a cognitive-affective response to a body that isn’t living the way our bodies were evolved to live. Key factors of that include: Daily socialization, getting the right nutrients, sleeping well, getting enough exercise, getting enough sunlight and having strategies to keep our minds from worrying. Belief can do the last one, as can meditation, or triggering flow states by engaging in activities. Religion can also help with the socializing one.

    Hope this helps!





  • I understand your point, but I think that magical and mythical thinking are fully part of how our minds evolved and still work, and if we fully develop our faculties of rationalization, almost everyone still thinks magically. Think about ideas like luck, or a fear of something improbable, or most of our expectations in life. Or why many masters of logic still believe in mythical beings and afterlives.

    If you talk to someone from an animistic culture, they don’t need to question or have a structure of reasoning in place to explain why the waterfall has a spirit. It just does, it always has and it’s obvious. However, if a person who lives in a wealthy country today, had public education and believes that vaccines are dangerous. They will believe it rationally, not irrationally, and have a slew of rationalizations for the belief. These are two types of magical thinking, but the former has a magical worldview and the latter does not.

    Rationality is weak against many types of thinking and motivation, and there are many more steps in the maturation of a mind. I do personally agree that a solid foundation in rational thinking should underlie whatever beliefs, morals, ethics, and insights a person adopts. But it is also highly likely that in my examples the former person is healthier and happier than the latter person, and both could be just as gullible.


  • I prefer this view. Limiting the definition of cults to “small” or “based around a person” is missing the point that all religions are self-preserving in-groups that offer “truths” that will limit your worldview by excluding others, and practices that differentiate followers behaviorally.

    But also beliefs can be useful. For example, the idea of an afterlife or reincarnation can help reduce the fear of death. The belief of forgiveness for sins, can offer redemption. That random events have meaning. That we are not alone when we are alone. All cognitively useful and therapeutic.

    Opposing beliefs can be held at the same time. I can know that probabilistically, or based on personal experience, or empirical evidence, that death is either an ending or an unknowable, and still choose to believe in reincarnation because it does give more meaning to my actions and reduce fear of death.

    And cult practices are often as good for the individual as the beliefs. Having community and regular social interaction is critical to human health. Conducting rituals and ceremonies give structure, meaning and comfort to the parts of our days and lives. Praying and meditating. Charity and service and on and on. These are all useful, healthy to the individual and to society.

    When we can learn to adopt these things without closing our minds to other worldviews and possibilities, without in-group fear and defensiveness, without superiority and proselytization we’ll be in a better world that’s still full of cults




  • The main problems I have with it now are sometimes there are still issues with loading between browser and apps. Like it might open multiple tabs trying to open an app, and it leaves the app redirect pages open in your tabs list. Additionally, sometimes (like 3% of the time) website scaling doesn’t always work, especially on older sites or those made with janky CMS’s, and I’ve also rarely had problems with some dynamic content like inline forms and graphs.




  • I moved from the US to Italy, where everything is cheaper and better quality, and we get free healthcare, free college, retirement pension and six months paid maternity leave. All this on a 35% tax rate. Public daycare is about $300 a month, housing expenses are about half of what I paid in the US, and while groceries are about the same, they are all local, organic, non GMO and -get this - crops are grown for flavor rather than weight. Houses are smaller here and wages are usually lower, but working hours are less and less intense, and the pace of life is much chiller.