Such_Saturation
Member
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2013
- Messages
- 7,370
uuy8778yyi said:so now the forum will start reccomending fish oil, kale smoothies, whey protein shakes ?
They already do that, look around.
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uuy8778yyi said:so now the forum will start reccomending fish oil, kale smoothies, whey protein shakes ?
Bruno said:... So from what I saw there was a possibility of visitors falling into an abyss of abstractions, accepting claims and subsequently ruining their health without anyone really being too aware of it, after a while they’d make a post telling people to leave the forum or that it’s all quackery.
I don’t think this is due to this or that person at all except maybe me as having made the forum, if I consider every person I saw on Peatarian they all have their story and none of them were as stiff as some of the scapegoat-seeking like to believe, still I ended up thinking people are better off moving to the more active platforms.
Ten Question Interview July 7, 2012
1. How long have you been making yourself accessible through emails?
Since getting email, about ten years.
2. How many emails do you answer per week approximately?
In a recent week, 140, many just yes or no, or a couple of words, and a few long ones.
3. When you started answering emails, did you foresee that this would involve so many questions from people and be your primary method of interacting with the public rather than formal consultations? Was it something that evolved for you or was it an intentional revolution of redefining how scientists interact with society by being so accessible and not being motivated by money?
Knowledge isn’t a commodity, especially not a fungible commodity, as the medical business sees it. Consciousness and culture are part of the life process. It is exactly the commoditization of medical knowledge that makes it dangerous, and generally stupid. Doctors buy their knowledge, and then resell it over and over; it’s valuable as a commodity, so its value has to be protected by the equivalent of a copyright, the system of laws establishing the profession. Without its special status, its worthlessness would be quickly demonstrated. When A.C. Guyton wrote his textbook of medical physiology (the most widely used text in the world) in the 1950s, it was trash; as it was studied and applied by generations of physicians, it was still trash. The most compliant patients who bought their treatment from the most authoritative, Guytonesque, doctors were buying their own disability and death.
Each time you learn something, your consciousness becomes something different, and the questions you ask will be different; you don’t know what the next appropriate question will be when you haven’t assimilated the earlier answers. Until you see something as the answer to an urgent question, you can’t see that it has any value. The unexpected can’t be a commodity. When people buy professional knowledge they get what they pay for, a commodity in a system that sustains ignorance.
4. Why do you help so many people through emails? Are there any spiritual or humanitarian motivations? Or is it more about collecting scientific data?
More than 50 years ago, I realized that the US culture had become effectively totalitarian, with decorations, and even the decorations were being fixed by the specialists (the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for example). I went through a series of graduate studies and projects looking for places where reality could influence the culture, rather than being obliterated by it. The academic culture, though, was rapidly changing for the worse. Over a period of a few years I happened to see a few people recover immediately from what doctors had considered incurable problems, using simple and inexpensive methods, and then I realized that some people were willing to discard their old ideas when those conflicted with useful facts, especially when the useful facts could save their life. I started doing evening and weekend classes in nutrition and endocrinology, seeing health as a way to get reality into the culture. My newsletter grew out of the classes, and that led to answering mail, which is cheaper and easier on the internet.
5. Are you concerned your words will be taken out of context?
I start with trying to make a context clear, because everyone’s context is different, and meanings change when they are learned. Ideally, things should make no sense until they make the right sense. People often tell me their diagnosis, and want to know what they should do for it; they want to set the context. Very often, the most important thing is to diagnose the diagnostician. When people used to come to my house for consultations, they would mention how they heard about me. When the medical society would send their agents posing as people with health problems, the people they chose were cultural clichés, who wanted “a diagnosis and a prescription.” I would tell them they should see a doctor if that was what they wanted. Sometimes they would record my classes, and the things they took out of context didn’t mean anything. Since the contextuality of communication is always in the foreground when I talk or write, you know that someone is confusing me with an authority when they talk about my “protocol” for something. Context is everything, and it’s individual and empirical.
6. How do you balance encouraging a person’s curiosity with giving them the answers to their questions? Are you guided by any motivations such as enabling our independent conclusions?
In classes, where the subject matter is an area of knowledge, I look for aspects of it that I think will be unexpected by the students, so they will sense that they are going to change as they explore the new knowledge. When a particular person’s health is the issue, I have always tried to design a short course in the things that I think they need to know. It’s usually not what they expected and wanted, but if they can see points that illuminate their experience, they might be motivated to think about the implications. I think I try to make people aware of the importance of perceiving complexity and the incompleteness of tentative conclusions.
7. What impact would you like to see your research make on society? Reaching the largest amount of people? or a certain type of person? Or are you completely detached from the outcome?
I’d like to see it lead to the disestablishment of medicine. The same general outcomes Ivan Illich worked for. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDr71LHO0Jo)
8. You put your research out there for free while others use it to make money, how do you feel about this?
When research is paid for by taxpayers, and government grant money even pays the journals to publish it, and mostly public money pays for universities to subscribe to the journals at outrageous prices, then I think it’s approximately criminal for the journals to charge for electronic access to it. If knowledge gets its value from scarcity, and the owner of the information deliberately makes it scarce, then ignorance becomes an essential part of the value system.
For a while when I was doing consultations/classes at home I would tell people that it would take an hour or two, and that they could pay me 1/1000 of their annual income, and it worked all right with most (low income) people, but high income people objected.
9. Do you have any tricks, techniques or tips for minimizing stress in dealing with the public?
I don’t think so. Perceiving the existence of the culture is necessarily stressful, and any opportunity to modify it tends to reduce the stress.
10. Do you have pet peeves regarding the nature of certain emails? Is there anything you want your emailers to know? Double spaces? Keep it short? One question at a time? More detail? Less detail?
When I’m in Mexico, sometimes the wire is so slow that it can take minutes for a letter to trickle down the wire, and under such conditions it’s best if they just read the articles on the internet, and look up some of the references; that can keep a person busy for years. Driving to Michoacan is sometimes faster than the internet.
Such_Saturation said:uuy8778yyi said:so now the forum will start reccomending fish oil, kale smoothies, whey protein shakes ?
They already do that, look around.
uuy8778yyi said:Such_Saturation said:uuy8778yyi said:so now the forum will start reccomending fish oil, kale smoothies, whey protein shakes ?
They already do that, look around.
what about cashew nut cheese ,
raw chocolate,
raw chinese herbs
and hemp/chia cereal ?
ilovethesea said:I think what's frustrating is that it now reads like an apology for Ray Peat's ideas and pretty much slanders those of us interested in him.
cantstoppeating said:narouz said:cantstoppeating said:It's about improving health and generally getting real world results...
Of course there's a few silly posts (disguised as 'critiques', 'debates' or 'discussions') but they're relatively rare...
You're saying you're for a good liberal arts education? :)
Witness above an example of a silly post -- whose author is well accomplished at such. At every chance, he enjoys 'discussions' and 'debate' on the topic of what a 'diet' is.
In general, what degrades the value of a community, as seen over at Peaterian, is often a few individuals who treat it as playground posting nonsense and drivel. They're usually the 'regulars' who post daily and appear to have no social interaction aside from the forums -- instead of an adjunct to their lives it becomes their lives and the resulting drama ensues.
Like any garden, if you do nothing, weeds will takeover. Peaterian lacked good moderation and was overrun with weeds.
Bruno said:...
Sometimes you had people talking about caries while guzzling coke, not that anyone imposed this on them but I felt like the forum could have promoted this. They would then supplement fat-solubles, minerals, etcetera, all the while never considering that they didn’t seem to need these supplements before.
...
Westside PUFAs said:I know you're insinuating that I am one of said folk. I'll remind you that nothing one enjoys is a waste of time, and your perception of "nonsense and drivel" is completely up you. That is something that is repeated ad nauseum on nutrition forums, and everytime I see it, it makes me wonder if the person who wrote it is aware of any of the following common practices that people do everyday:
Camp outside an Apple store for nights and days in effort to buy their new product (applies to "sneakerheads" who do the same thing for sneakers as well)
Go to a bar and get drunk
Go "out" on a Friday and or Saturday night to hang out with and try to impress people of whom you really don't care about and who really don't care about you, or share the same interests as you, only to stay up until 4 am and wake up at 2 pm the next day with a hangover
Buy designer clothing and apparel
Do drugs in an attempt to escape ones boring life
Go to a restaurant that serves overpriced low quality food and to add salt to the wound, gives bad service
Go to a sporting event with paid tickets in hand and jersey on back
Go to Comic Con
Play Video Games
Go to church
Stand out on a busy street and handout flyers for your religion (I see this every Saturday in "liberal" Los Angeles), or even worse, hold up a sign and yell though a loudspeaker
Go to Burning Man
Go to a Phish concert
Go to a rave, pop some E, then die from hyponatremia
Watch network TV shows (the only time I enjoy a show is while I'm eating and digesting a meal, other than that, it is a waste of time, to me.)
Solve a Rubik's cube
Go to a shrink
Spend precious time producing and editing this video: (and this persons whole YT channel for that matter)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcmT2mCimxo
Those are just a few things I can think of off the top that I consider nonsense and drivel, in my opinion, of course. There are many thousands more. But to people who enjoy such acts, I waste no time trying to convince them that they are wasting theirs.
If you don't like certain posts, I think it's because you disagree with the content of the posts, not because they really are simple "nonsense." They are ideas and concepts that were posted to bring a further conversation. Getting angry about nutritional disagreements is the leading cause of angst in forums.
I was there from the beginning, July of 12', only two months after B started it. I wasn't a weed. But I guess my antics were enough to bring IG to type her first post as seen here in the comments section:
http://beesandbutterflies.org/22199/ray ... ing-for-me
There were only about 20 people who actively participated on there anyway. Most of the usernames were spam bots, or people who saw B's posts on Paleohacks in 12' and created an account. These were mostly people who were into paleo but when they saw people saying OJ and ice cream were good, they became interested, but only temporarily.
Westside PUFAs said:video
johns74 said:Wow. What an incredible level of ungratefulness.
.... the decision to take it down makes sense to me. Your work was being associated with lower quality stuff. And it turns out, very ungrateful people as well who clearly didn't deserve it at all.
You and I may disagree with IslandGirl and others, and consider what she and others posted to be "lower quality content," but I don't see what's "cultish" about allowing that kind of attack, and responding to it on the merits.IslandGirl said:@kiwifriut,
Unlike pathetic bastards like you, I have a life. I do not need to create a new user name in order to comment on a site full of brainwashed donkeys like you.
I am not afraid of anyone here. I say what I damn well please and I do not hide.
Why is everyone here so preoccupied with me and my opinions if I am wrong about Peat? Wheat and PUFAs dedicates entire threads to me and mentions me in his comments. I give Anon nightmares and he has accused you, Kiwifruit, of being my husband, LOL.
Even your sister-bastards on Charlie's forum can't get me out of their heads. Spokey has called me a troll and accused me of being Anon, but if he were a true peatarian, he would know that Anon is really J. Haidut, the opportunistic a$$hole who has taken over Charlie's site, calls me a troll. And I don't even comment on Charlie's site, LOL.
Shouldn't the glowing health of you peatarians be enough evidence that Peat is right and therefore anyone who criticizes him is wrong and should be ignored? It is really amazing how so many peatards can't stop thinking about me when I wouldn't spit on any of you if you were on fire, LOL.
No one ever kicks a dead dog. If I were wrong about Peat, you wouldn't even remember my name.
commented Aug 6, 2014 by IslandGirl