Carl-Richard

But being (now very likely if not undoubtably) a malicious liar, is probably not so irrelevant: "I'm a perfectionist with a massive IQ who also lies and cuts corners and delivers sloppy work". Does this summarize Mike's legacy?

They claim it wasn't an edit but a software quirk when "comparing documents" (unsure what they are referring to). But it makes no sense to edit it and then post it online if you are going to get the university to confirm and upload the latest version themselves. That would be a very not-160 IQ move by Mike IsVerySmart. They probably posted it online, without editing it, to get it out as soon as possible to at least quell some suspicion. And then we can confirm later whether the one they posted and the one the university posted are identical. You can do better than simply feeding into the outrage. EDIT: Ok what the fuck: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPdoieaDZnh/?igsh=MWpudjl6ZjBzb2drYg== Well, considering I currently don't see how he now didn't just lie about the entire thing and edited the document while trying to pass it off as the real version, that's pretty- wow.

What if isolation isn't always a good thing? There is a point to be made that you're trying to strike the balance between "moving the weight" and stressing the muscle, and it might lead to a different outcome than simply moving the weight. But there is a way of doing that which is more informed by your own body, by what feels best, by what is conducive to flow, and then there is doing it in a way that is more inhibitory and mind-focused. The science is not out on which is best, but my intuition and general knowledge about lifting and sports tells me it's likely the former that wins out for a majority of exercises (probably especially compound movements). When did "isolation" become an axiom of bodybuilding? Bodybuilding is about building muscle, not isolating muscles during exercise. Isolation can be a tool for sculpting your physique and working on your weak spots and targeting muscles that are maybe harder to activate in compound movements, but that's about it. It's true a sprinter is not a bodybuilder, but I simply used it to make a point. I think you're possibly taking Mike's frankly very obscure ideology for granted.

There is a range of intensity within that, but the fact of the matter is the more restrictions you put on a movement, the more inhibited your movement will be. More inhibition, less power output, less muscle recruitment, less intensity. If you tell a sprinter to "deep stretch" and "pause at the bottom of the rep", they will have a horrible workout. A sprinter is taught techniques to remove inhibition of movement, to optimize the fluidity of the movement, to open up for the most efficient expenditure of energy. The same principle can be applied to weight training, and I believe it could easily be better for hypertrophy than simply grinding out lower intensity exercises. Please acknowledge that the types of techniques Mike has arrived at are the results of studies with FLAWED research designs for the claims he are trying to make; to say they're merely limited is an understatement. If you want to make statements about what is optimal training, make your study participants train under optimal conditions. It's that simple. Is it easy to execute such studies? Not necessarily. Are there trade-offs compared to other studies? Sure. But if you care about this very specific statement "optimal training for hypertrophy", at least get the "optimal training" part right for the study itself.

You essentially told all of philosophy "use your Fi, not your Ti", and "evolve", not "arrive there by logic". Not that it's wrong or anything, but it's like preaching spirituality to 2 year olds; sometimes you have to engage with the frame and do some rough-and-tumble play (And are you just waiting for them to evolve or do you have a solution for speeding it up?) It could be a mix of both. Because both were happening and it's not easy to dissociate them causally retrospectively.

And let's see what kind of intensity he is training at there. I'm not saying only training with super low rep ranges is necessarily what builds more muscles. I'm saying training with intensity, not the nerd shit Mike pushes, could very easily do that. I'm just pointing out that even when you focus on low rep ranges, and you don't try to fit a weight class and you try to become the strongest as possible, you also end up becoming some of the biggest human beings on the planet. Even in that "weaker" case, you see enormous effects on hypertrophy. So in the stronger case, as with Ronnie Coleman and the like (and really most top bodybuilders in history), you shouldn't be surprised if it's the best alternative.

Of course a junior will be smaller and will also lift 328kg and not 500kg. But do you think Eddie Hall did "hypertrophy phases"? He simply trained to become the strongest man, and consequentially, he became some of the biggest men to walk the Earth. Eddie Hall weighs 196.5kg in that picture. A huge chunk of that is muscle, he is actually rather lean in that picture. Ronnie Coleman, probably biggest bodybuilder to walk the Earth, insanely strong, trained extremely heavily. "But genes". Well, their training style apparently didn't stop them from becoming that big, and maybe, just maybe, it wasn't just a coincidence.

The world's strongest man is big:

Let's actually take Mike's PhD conclusions that more muscle leads to more strength. What about the other way around, more strength leads to more muscle? Surely the relationship is reasonably two-way. So then, shouldn't one try to become as strong as possible, lift as intensely as possible, such that one builds as most muscle as possible, not lift with this punctuated movement deep stretch bullshit? Or do we pick and choose which studies to trust, i.e. the ones with bad ecological validity where people lift in awkward ways that you would never lift in an actual gym session (one arm with one technique, other arm with another, researcher breathing down your neck and controlling every rep) vs those where the people actually try to lift at highest intensity and thus as close to their usual training as possible? Hmmmm.

@Xonas Pitfall This is what that "does your mom know you're gay" dude calls an exponible statement by the way (unless it only applies to propositions 🤓).

Nanananana. Na. 😂

🤔🧐🤔🧐🤔🧐 I used those words lately. Now it's when you tell us you did not read that comment prior and only picked it up associatively from the collective mindspace 🙂🙂👍👍

@Scholar @zurew When I think about veganism (or environmentalism for that matter), I think like if you want to make a big change, be an activist, otherwise the impact you can make relative to the rest of the world is relatively infinitesimal. And then the question also becomes in what other ways can you make a change, in what other ways can you spend your limited time? What is the moral calculation there? Then there is also the thought that any act of wrongdoing (especially with respect to animal suffering) should be minimalized, irrespective of any global comparison, just like you don't kill people on the street just because so many people die anyway on a global scale and it's a drop in the ocean (maybe a relatively bad example because killing someone in your community will not be a drop in the ocean, but anyways, you get the idea). I would like to hear Alex O'Connor try to reconcile these two positions (I've heard him endorse a version of the first one; that veganism must be fought on an activist and collective level, not an individual everyday level). There is also of course a problem of what qualifies as fighting it on a collective level, at what point is your contribution big, and also, at what point is your contribution to animal suffering small enough? Is it simply the intention that matters, not the execution? If you simply intend not to kill people on the street, is that good enough?

Not everybody wants to be just an effective gym rat. Some people want to be the best gym rat, the gym rat most aligned with "truth"

Wars happen because wars are built on wars. History didn't start yesterday. It's a through line of conquest, suppression, domination. Wars don't stop until someone breaks the cycle of violence, usually the ones with power and will. That's essentially what the critiques are about. When will the ones with the power stop the violence? Not that violence will stop after that, not that one must not respond to attacks, but will violence be kept to a minimum, will one fight to de-escalate tensions rather than build them, will one express temperance and tact, and seek diplomatic solutions, compromises. Israel has lately chosen the path of extermination, of utter domination, the same path that Hitler took, although debatable in scale. And we see the cycle of violence. Even if Palestinians get a win at some point like the Jews did after WW2, will they not return the same? Will they not perpetuate the cycle of violence? Or will they choose not to?

They do actually claim it says new things, but yes, it's very "autistic" or concerned with minutia and going way and beyond reasonable doubt and using rigorous methods, but so is science. If somebody claims hitting yourself with a hammer can lead to tissue damage, it's one thing to say that and say "yes, that makes sense" and it's another thing to measure that damage (how much, how hard, etc.), define the different types of damage and standardizing them, control the use of different hammers and different forces, and of course doing controlled experiments, actually putting it to the test. Whether increased muscle actually leads to increased strength was actually a debate going on in sports science at the time, and Mike contributed to that debate with his PhD. I'll stay with my earlier critiques of Mike Israetel and his ilk and say that the hard-hitting critiques of current sports science, and especially when trying to use it to claim "this is the optimal way to train", is not that it's substanceless bullshit, but that there is a severe lack of ecological validity in the research designs. Working out with one arm using one technique and the other arm using another technique, is absolutely a ridiculous basis for making claims for what is optimal training, because none of that is optimal. That's just one example. I could speak about it for days, faster and with more fervor than Mike talks about his totally non-ironic ironic homoerotic intrusive thoughts.

Mike should make sure the real thesis is publically available (for those with access of course) through the same university library systems. If he doesn't, that's highly suspect. But we're still only a few days in and we'll probably see more on that soon (or it has already been addressed in the video I linked).

Let me caveat that I haven't watched the review in full, but the guy who reviewed his PhD does not have a good non-ad hoc grasp of what PhD theses are like in general. The fact that he felt comfortable reviewing what to me is highly likely a draft (I haven't watched much of that video either, just a few seconds from some parts), as if it was a finished version, is indicative of that, but he is also of course just a university (graduate?) student. Now that his formatting error and statistical slip-up arguments have most likely all collapsed, all that is left is whether or not the findings are novel (as far as I know about his review). And judging that requires in-depth knowledge of the literature. Scientific research is very autistic in what it considers novel: sometimes you only need to look at one slightly different variable than other papers to be considered novel. And PhD programs will push students to fill in those gaps if they exist. Very rarely do you get an Einstein level PhD thesis that revolutionizes the field, even in a sub-section of the field. And a PhD is also just the beginning step of your research career. So I don't think the review says much about the value of his PhD now that it's highly likely he reviewed a draft. I would say wait this one out until he actually responds publicly in more depth (which he actually seems to have done in the video I linked but which I again haven't watched much of ).

Allegedly, the university uploaded an unfinished draft of his PhD, not the final version. That's the one Solomon reviewed. Firstly, IQ is not all of intelligence, it's more like the speed and capacity of your "cognitive CPU" (mostly; you can throw some other concepts in there as well like pattern recognition). Secondly, yes. IQ doesn't mean you necessarily bullshit less, just faster and "more" (which adds up to clever). Top politicans tend to have pretty massive IQs (maybe Trump is an exception, and I've said before he is certainly above average, but I would caveat it's hard to know how much because his level of bullshitting is just too much so he comes off as more fluent than somebody who actually says substantive things).

Mhm. The reason it's looping so much is it's primarily about fear, and your ideas about it, rather than one's experience, as @theleelajoker pointed out. "I don't want to be alone, that's scary, that's isolating, that's lonely". Had the discourse around solipsism been about accepting reality as it is, approaching reality with love, rather than fearing what it might mean for you and your ideas and notions about reality, then it would be less loopy, it would instead be people writing about their waking up experiences, not the fear of what waking up might entail.

Why not become a materialist?

What's my perspective? 😆 It's mostly made clear in this thread, which people (not me) abandoned. This comment probably sums it up:

Sick man. Get Animals As Leaders and Meshuggah vibes :,) I wrote something at 17 which is the main thing that stands out in memory. It's on the forum somewhere. Found it: it's actually in your thread lol. Holy shit the sound quality is shit 😂 Also, this one was kinda sick ngl (granted the utter lack of tone and the final chord of the progression containing an unintentional note lol): https://voca.ro/11DYAHJLi7wM Anyways, sorry for derailing thread 👉👈🥺

You're a musician so you're halfway there 😜

I think I've experienced telepathy, many times.