Carl-Richard

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Posts posted by Carl-Richard

  2. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    18 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    I like bryan johnson but I would never elect to live like him.

    the neurotic planning and scheming strikes me as autistic as fuck and I would personally find it suffocating.

    He is on a mission to actually stop aging. That's incredibly noble and exciting. He doesn't care about merely feeling good. He wants to elevate humanity to the next level. It's a bit like Leo having truth as his number one value. The level of meaning he experiences probably outpaces any of the things he has to do 10-fold. And it's only a 5 hour protocol. So many people spend 5 hours pissing away their life on their phone doing nothing and destroying their brains. Also, his protocol is probably unmatched in terms of healthspan. The only knock you would have against it is that it's 5 hours long.

     

    18 hours ago, RendHeaven said:

    I also think it's silly that he could just eat meat and go get sunlight, but instead he goes for vegan + 100 pills + TRT + expensive light therapy

    The fact that he is vegan doesn't change anything, he would still take 100 pills. "Just get sunlight" is like one pill.

    Quote

    As a doctor who treats patients who have melanomas, I want the general public to be advised that under no circumstances can the use of a tanning bed or tanning in general be justified on the basis of vitamin D. Take a supplement instead.

    https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/vitamin-d-myths-debunked

    When you're at his level of wealth and power, maximizing your healthspan and longevity this way is arguably the smartest thing you can do. You can easily adapt to a 5 hour protocol. People are completely blind to how complex and specific their habitual life already is. If you were to make Bryan adopt your "simple habits" at this point in time, it would be incredibly "hard" for him. It's changing a habit that is the hard part. Keeping it is easy.

  3. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    21 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

    I think around his use of steroids.

    He refused to release some biomarkers indicating exogenous steroid use.

    I think he eventually came clean about it after. Genuinely struggling to remember - I could be wrong!

    Hmm. I only know he took steroids at one point to offset the effects of calorie restriction, but now he has upped his calories and I think he also went off the steroids(?)

  8. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    51 minutes ago, aurum said:

    Sprinting while running is high impact. Not nessesarily the best from a longevity standpoint, especially if you're getting older.

    If you sprint on the beach / sand, it's less impact and trains a lot of other areas.

    Bryan Johnson shoots shockwaves into his joints with a special-made device in order to improve his joints. Is that high impact?

     

    51 minutes ago, aurum said:

    You just can't do Vo2 max training that way since you likely won't hit max oxygen consumption.

    VO2 max is definitely good for cognitive functioning. I just did 4x4 running. But there seems to be a trade-off between VO2 max and lactate. Lactate just makes my brain go insaneo mode.

    I've actually noticed a distinct difference in the stink from my headset after a sprint vs a 4x4 run. Sprint produces a much more sour and unpleasant smell which I have to be more rigorous about wiping off, hence lactic acid.

  9. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    19 minutes ago, LordFall said:

    I like the idea of practicing maximum effort regularly. Pushing limits is not usually something humans are comfortable doing but it is exhilarating and less monotonous than just tedious work all the time.

    Pushing to the limit is the greatest feeling in the world.

     

    19 minutes ago, LordFall said:

    What do you mean by sprints other than running? 

    For example assault bike.

    (Volume warning):


    Or normal bike, but then you run into the issue of lesser upper body recruitment. I haven't tried assault bike yet, but my hunch is that sprinting is still better for maximizing energy output per unit of time again because of biomechanics. If your arms and legs are built to move a certain way, they will move better that way than if you move in some other way => better movement, more movement, more energy expenditure. Assault bike could lessen impact on joints, but I don't think impact is detrimental for expending energy (or maybe I need to think more about that).

  10. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    Sprint training is when you do maximal effort (95-100%) for a short period of time (20-30 seconds), ideally while running.

    Why maximal effort? Because solving difficult problems is like a sprint. Remember all the times you've read a difficult text and you feel like you're straining your brain while reading one particularly difficult sentence. Reading a sentence takes maximum a few seconds. Understanding or grasping the idea takes the time it takes to read the sentence and maybe a little more, but not much more. Either you grasp it there, or you don't.

    You can try again, sprinting again, but chances are, if you read it a few times and you still don't understand, you probably won't understand it for a while (you have to e.g. read some other text or take a break). You have to make the sprint then and there. You have to engage in that level of intensity then and there, or else you won't grasp it.

    Now, lower intensity training (e.g. moderate intensity cardio) might help you sift through more problems over a longer period of time and increasing your general work capacity, but the quality, the depth, the weight of the problem depends on your level of intensity. Thus training at maximum intensity will strongly increase your ability to solve difficult problems.

    Also, I've noticed sprint training makes your thinking incredibly fast (the rate of thinking), which is maybe not so unexpected either. That's probably also a big part of solving difficult problems, of being able to present a wide range of alternatives in a short amount of time before your attention runs out.

    Why ideally when running? Because you are biomechanically most equipped to expend the most energy per unit of time by moving your body in a way that resembles running. Running is not just about moving your feet; it involves the entire body, the upper body arguably just as much as the lower body. And you were built to run; there are millions of years of bipedal evolution driving your body to run, and therefore your body should expend the most energy by running (because energy spent running is essentially congruent to evolutionary fitness). Evolution fine-tuned your body to move your arms and legs in that specific way, so you should take advantage of that.


    So far, I've made the case on a purely mechanistic ground, call it "philosophy of physiology". But you can also make the case on more concrete scientific and neurophysiological grounds. Sprint training, or more accurately in this case "working out until failure" (which is best achieved by sprinting until failure), induces the production of lactic acid, which is converted to lactate, which is a neurotransmitter that is involved in brain function. It increases BDNF (which increases the growth of neurons), it's involved in monoamine neurotransmitter synthesis (dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine), it's even used as an energy source for neurons.

    However, sprinting until absolute failure is arguably not where you'll get the best overall effects, but rather when you try to sprint as fast as possible, because again, you want to strain your system at a maximum level and elevate your ceiling of intensity. It's an overall systemic adaptation towards maximal intensity that I believe should be the main goal.


    Again, there are other cases to be made for again moderate intensity cardio, or 4x4 training (for increasing VO2 max), or even lifting weights, as these all produce their own particular signatures in the body and which feeds into the brain in their own unique ways. If you want to be a well-rounded person, you want to engage in all of it from time to time. But if you care about solving difficult problems, if you care about "thinking fast", and if you care about feeding your brain a very beneficial nutrient and signalling molecule (lactate), you should consider incorporating some form of sprint training (ideally running sprints) into your workout routine. Other alternatives than running sprints are assault bike, normal bike.

    I find that I can only sprint around 1-2 times a week (on top of weight training 3.5 times a week) because it is very fatiguing. So keep that in mind, because fatigue will also inhibit cognitive functioning.

  11. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    2 hours ago, Someone here said:

    Okay assuming you are correct here ..my life is I wake up at 7 AM..take a shower..go to college..listen to my Boring lectures..go back home around 3 PM. Eat lunch . Open this forum posting noise. Relax in my bedroom with a cigarette and coffee. Watch porn or horror movies all night and sleep at 1 AM. That's my daily routine .it's so disconnected from brutality of survival as a jungle man.  Suggest to me challenging things I can engage in with. Thanks. 

    If you're not going to spend that time after 3 PM reading for your degree: build something, do something that has a "narrative" or which grows, not something which cycles through the same low attention span things primarily driven by impulse. For example, I had a very awesome idea for a business for passive income (true in theory but probably not in practice because I can't stop tweaking things) that I will start setting up next weekend. And when I have time, I will play some guitar. Me personally, I work with my thesis all the time (except one day a week). And soon I will work a job next to that when I'm close to finished. If you get to a place where you feel there is not enough time in the day, that's probably a good measure (but then learn to schedule time off so you don't die of over-exhaustion or burnout).

  12. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    7 hours ago, SQAAD said:

    The logic of the program of being a nice guy is "if i am overly nice, people will like me, and not treat me bad. Women will like me and give me access to that koochie, people will like me and will give me oportunities".

    You should be nice so that the other person is treated nice, not so that you are treated nice. Women like nice men, just not men who use being nice in an act of desperation. If you depend too much on your surroundings and you try to inhabit the role of a man, you won't be fun to hang around, especially for women.

    How to get women: have a backbone and be nice.

  13. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    On 30.6.2025 at 10:08 PM, Someone here said:

    Then you start to get intrusive thoughts : what if I die ? What if i end in hell burning in eternal fire and god will stick his cock into my ass for eternity..? What if what if what if ..there is millions of them . So what does the modern person do? He smokes ..he drinks ..he eats junk..he watches 90000 hours of pornography and cums 200000 times ..he try drugs ..he suicides and dies . Where did he go ? Nobody knows.  Why was he born in the first place if he was going to die ?  Nobody knows .Old souls start thinking there must be something to solve this madness. What is it ? If you can tell it to me and convince me I will cut my balls off .

    If you want to take a reductionistic evolutionary lens, you were given the ability to think abstractly ("have intrusive thoughts") in order to plan, predict and simulate movements, actions and events, such that you can create better movements, actions and events. It's not like thinking is this completely separate and isolated thing that occurs on its own without any ground. It spawned and branched out of an underlying foundation, of organisms moving out and about in their environment. Also, in your brain, your abstract thinking areas (the prefrontal areas) literally grows out of the motor areas (the precentral gyrus).

    So to "solve" the problem of abstract thinking is just to use them as intended — to guide and inform your actions. And that requires you to ACT (both as in "act" but also as in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). If you were a tribesman living in the wild and you woke up and started your day, your thoughts would be "how can I chop this tree?" or "what footprints are these and which animal should I be expecting?". The thoughts are grounded in action, and necessarily so, because they are forced to survive. But when your survival is taken care of, you have to rediscover this purpose of thought in order to ground it.

  14. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    8 hours ago, Eskilon said:

    This is crazy!

    How can people believe in an IA so much to the point of inducing a psychosis? Crazy stuff indeed.

    This just shows the importance of questioning and sovereignty of mind.

    When you got people like Mike Israetel who believe ChatGPT is conscious and cries while talking to it while claiming to have a 160 IQ, it doesn't surprise me.

  15. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    4 hours ago, Nilsi said:

    The whole point is that the question “what is meaning?” is an open variable - a placeholder for something we don’t yet know. You’re the one who is filling that variable with a highly specific construct - biological coherence, energy, form, logos - while presenting it as if it were just the obvious, neutral baseline. I’m not the one distracting from the topic. I’m the one taking the question seriously.

    If you want to assert that your model simply is meaning, you need to justify why this particular set of assumptions should be accepted. Otherwise, this entire discussion collapses into a kind of personal notebook exercise where everyone just writes down their favorite metaphors. And that is precisely why I’m questioning your frame: because you treat it as self-evident when it is anything but.

    Nothing is more boring than when relative discussions get derailed into the absolute. We were just giving examples of meaning, but now you want me to ground my a priori assumptions? Nowhere did I say what I'm saying is absolute.

  17. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

    My point is not merely that we “assume” language and reason as tools. My point is that what you call the amoeba emerges as a diagram of desire within a historically contingent field of discourse. There is no pure substrate that precedes this production. If you are “not worried” about that, are you asserting that there is a realm of “natural meaning” that fully pre-exists all discursive production? If so, on what grounds?

    And to be clear, I am not denying that your references to biology, physiology, or evolutionary environments can be pragmatically effective and scientifically generative. But you have to acknowledge that when you anchor your argument in those frameworks - when you invoke our “ancestral environment,” tribal societies, or a more “natural” baseline of meaning before modern technologies and pathologies - you are already producing a particular fantasy. It is a contingent narrative that establishes its own symbolic order in advance, deciding what counts as “healthy,” “unnatural,” or “dysfunctional” according to a set of preselected coordinates. It has no more inherent authority than any other story we might tell about human life; it simply offers one diagram of sense-making among others, with its own normative commitments, advantages, and blind spots.

    Post-modernism is good for invoking pluralism and awareness of assumptions, not for disproving any particular perspective. So it's tangential to the discussion. It forces you to be equally critical of frameworks that invoke concepts like "natural" and those who don't. You haven't disproven that certain structures have a certain naturalness to them, only pointed at the assumptions underlying them. 

    But postmodernism also has a chicken and the egg problem. Does not critiquing meaning rely on meaning?

  19. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis" - https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis

    On a related note, I have noticed a pattern of something I call "manufactured plausibility". It's when ChatGPT presents something in a format that sounds plausible but which doesn't match the actual patterns or facts.

    For example, ChatGPT very often tends to present things in a dialectical "pros and cons" kind of format. And for every "pro", it will find a "con", and it will tend to cite a respective source. But in doing so, it falls into the trap of confirmation bias. Once it has a found a source that fits to the "pro", for the "con", it will be more likely to pick a source that is not as reliable, or it will misrepresent the source, or just make an irrelevant point, because it needs to follow the format.

    It doesn't find the facts then fit them to the format, but it finds the format and then fit them to "facts". And this is just one particular example, but it in fact does this all the time. It's actually all it ever does, but it gets away with it most of the time, because most of the time, the format follows the facts. But the times they don't, e.g. when there isn't a good example of a "con" to a "pro", it will actively mislead you.

    I noticed this while constructing a prompt for typing one's MBTI type (but also from using it in general where I have some knowledge on the topic). You have to actively prompt it to avoid confirmation bias, and be clever in doing so, or else it will do it by default. And even then, it will engage in it. But that's partially a product of simply weaving a narrative or building a case (which is how LLMs "think"): you have to do exploratory sampling of information, write out your thoughts, follow certain leads and discard others. Maybe there are ways to minimize it by creating an AI that is not a normal LLM but is somehow is able to deal with abstract information and also produce language. Feel free to share if you know anything on that.

    This one is also curious:

     

  20. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    10 hours ago, Someone here said:

    Interesting. another person who doesn't understand my problem despite me stating it in 4 different ways in this thread .you guys still confuse not knowing with not  being able to cook or flush my stink in the toilet or knowing how to function in society.  Is that really what I mean?  

    From the moment you open your eyes in the morning you are forced to engage with reality on a practical level.  Even if you stay in bed all day that's still an engagement and you will reap what you sow .the problem is you are being bombarded by 10000000 choices every second .you are being treated by society as if you are a person who thinks ..instead of being formless consciousness in which the person and thoughts arise in. So you are never good enough .you chase the carrot like a donkey but never arrive. 

    I've been complaining why Peter Ralston doesn't have free books online. But luckily I found the book of not knowing and its resonating with my problem. So I don't think anyone in this forum is as conscious as Ralston at the very least to understand my problem...so thank you all but none of you understand my problem with enough depth .

    When I was getting my driving license, I was currently meditating so hard every day that I was ultra conscious of everything I didn't know when driving, and it made me extremely careful. How do I know exactly where my car is placed in the road? How do I know exactly how much I should turn the steering wheel when in a curve? How do I know if I can stop on time if a person jumps out behind a car and runs out in the road? How do I know exactly when it's too late to drive or stop at a yellow light? Over time, I just had to accept that there are so many things I can't know while driving and that this is normal and people just are used to driving while knowing very little and have just learned to do what seems to work by simply driving.

  21. Posted

    On 2.7.2025 at 4:34 PM, Nilsi said:

    The argument is that there is no “amoeba chasing a bacterium” prior to a particular scientific discourse that, a priori, commits itself to the discovery - or should we say the production - of certain truths.

    There is no amoeba in your meditation practice. There is no nirvana in a microscope. There is only the libidinal band, a Möbius strip of flows where the subject unfurls its theatre of mastery - weaving diagrams and luminous fictions onto the same continuous surface of desire.

    Yes, I agree you need to assume language, reason and observation to conclude that meaning is natural. But I'm not particularly worried about that.