Geoff's Miscellany

The demographic that reads this blog is likely the demographic that either is tempted to look at pornography, wishes to quit pornography, or knows people who wish to quit pornography. When I was a college minister (and even now), the most common questions I received from people were:

1. How can I get somebody to love me?
2. How can I/Why can't I quit pornography? 

The questions, of course, are connected. But this persistent page exists to make helpful links, tips, and evidence against using pornography available.

This page is dedicated to an uncommon piece of knowledge for which there is tremendous evidence: resistance training the most efficient way to keep your body strong, young, durable, and healthy. So, take the iron pill.

Why Should You Lift?

1. Resistance training makes you stronger (this is obvious) and as Mark Rippetoe has observed, "Stronger people are harder to kill and more useful in general."
2. Resistance training improves your image by making you seem more mesomorphic/healthy/self-controlled/organized: sex appeal, competence, and general favorability.
3. Resistance training improves cardiovascular function.
4. Resistance training is anti-aging, as many symptoms of aging are the result of decreased muscle mass:
   1. The greatest risk factors for the aged are muscle loss and frailty.
   2. As America becomes more obese, muscle loss along with obesity is even more serious.
   3. As cells age, they become less efficient. But resistance training reverses the cellular aging process in muscle cells.
5. Metabolic syndrome is more a function of body composition than purely of weight. In other words, being skinny-fat still leaves you at risk for diabetes, heart disease, and so-on despite not being obese by weight. Strength training improves insulin resistance and reconfigures your body-composition.
6. Resistance training is good for reproduction.
   1. Long distance running has harmful effects on sperm quality. In cyclists, the sperm quality decrease is connected, not to the endurance training but the nature of cycling's jostling effect on the testes.
7. Resistance training is counter-cultural
   For those who have an anti-authoritarian bent, strength training goes against our lazy, soft, and self-indulgent culture. Now, strength training would be good even if this weren't so, but being counter-cultural is appealing to many. If that encourages you to get your butt into the gym, then go.  
   1. For instance, as many as two billion people are obese.
   2. Millennial men have weak grip strength, which is associated with more depression and support for distributive economic policies that are internally inconsistent at best and are insanely murderous at worst.
   3. The majority of American's are overweight and over 1/3 are obese.
   4. The average obese woman gets less than an hour of exercise a year and the average obese man less than 4 hours. In other words, something like 33% of Americans exercise or train their bodies less than one minute per day!
   5. Masculinity is practically defined by physical strength.
      In the linked study, data is compiled for the apparently innate capacity for men to develop and display physical strength, "Upper-body strength in adult males is a crucial variable that appears to have impacts on a wide range of mental mechanisms that were designed by natural selection at a time when personal physical aggression was far more common and individual differences in fighting ability were far more relevant for the resolution of conflicts, the deployment of anger and aggression, the calibration of political attitudes, and the consequences of warfare."
8. Resistance training is good for your mind
   1. It improves cognition/brain function for the elderly and everybody else.
   2. Resistance training contributes to the psychosocial development of youth.
   3. Resistance training improves anxiety measures among populations with chronic illness.
   4. Exercise, in general, improves depression and anxiety symptoms.
   5. In several populations, resistance training improves self-control.

How Can You Get Started?

There is a wealth of useful information for getting started with strength training. But the multiplication of choices sometimes creates analysis paralysis. I recommend using a few key exercises:

None of these tell the whole tale of any particular topic. Some of them don't even represent opinions I agree with. But the point is that they provide good evidence for alternate points of view which may be closer to the truth.

1.  Politics
   1. Mexifornia and Mexifornia (five years on).
   2. The Flight 93 Election, while Trump (as of 12/18) hasn't managed to accomplish all his campaign promises, this essay is still a fairly good case for "The Trumpening." On the other hand, 
   3. Left Wing Authoritarianism
      1. Crushing on the Crushers: Theodore Dalrymple explains the troubling legacy of left-wing academics and their quasi-romantic attachment to authoritarian and fascist regimes.
      2. Left-Wing Authoritarianism is not a myth, it's actually a persistent an frightening reality.
   4. The arguments for gay-marriage are logically fallacious. One may need to copy and paste excerpts into google.com/translate.
   5. Are conservatives less scientifically literate than liberals? The answer is basically, no. The correlations and associations between scientific literacy and political orientation are trivial and given sample sizes used, could disappear or break opposite.
   6. Here is Jason Richwine's dissertation that argues that immigration policy should be based on IQ. It's been treated as controversial, but I honestly don't know how it could be. Other countries prefer immigrants to have difficult to acquire skills, many of which require a high IQ to even approach mediocrity in. 
   7. There is evidence that identity politics along ethnic lines is what one might call an optimized survival strategy, or in other words, it appears that it may be something selected for. See "The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation." Often conservatives decry black and Hispanic voting blocks for voting for policies to benefit their kin. Similarly, liberals tend to decry white voters for doing the same. But if this model and other similar models (like GST) are to be believed (maybe they aren't), there could be nothing more natural and perhaps just than the expression of such in-group preferences in political circumstances. 
2. Education/College
   1. Doctoral Programs either select for individuals with or trigger mental illness The survey cited in the article can be found here. I suspect that a combination of factors: the desire to delay entry into the work force, a lifestyle built around a skill that can only be performed in short bursts (studying), the proliferation of fields whose work feels meaningless (rarely cited papers), fear of future joblessness, and poorly adjusted role models working as your supervisor all contribute to data like this.
   2. Academic papers in the humanities are rarely cited/read. Academia, as it is commonly understood, is nearly worthless.
   3. Biologists don't read papers with hard math This is alarming, but unsurprising since one of the greatest biologists of all time thinks hard math should be excised from the biology curriculum.
   4. Most social psychologists are liberals (no viewpoint diversity) Jonathan Haidt found 8 of them who were conservative, not 8,000 or 800.
   5. Many students show no improvement of critical thinking skill after college.
   6. The Myth of Digital Natives show that young people don't know how to use electronics well and multitasking is impossible.
   7. Belief in microaggresions, trigger warnings, and so-on weaken students' minds
   8. Young People are less physically active than ever The study they cite is here. This is connected, of course, to our technology. But I think a major association we're leaving out is the nature of the public school system as well. Making young people sit for 6-8 hours a day sure contributes to this. And while public schools existed in the past, the things young people did and were encouraged to do were radically different in the past.
   9. Peter Thiel's criticism of higher education.
   10. High School curricula are typically just liberal indoctrination.
3. Ethics
   1. Giubilini, Alberto, and Francesca Minerva. “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” Journal of Medical Ethics (2012) In the article above, the claim is made that infanticide is just as moral as abortion (and the authors approve of abortion). Get ready for practical questions of hospital behavior to be answered based on reasoning like this, for instance: Hospitals can pull life support on sick babies now.
4. Random but Alarming Science
   1. Why Most Published Research Findings Are False This is one of the most alarming studies I've read, but it's an important reminder to use an engineering mindset with respect to appropriating scientific findings into your life
   2. Fluoride Consumption and IQ Deficits
   3. Vegetarian Diets Decrease Sperm Count and Motility This probably should have been obvious.
   4. The HPV Vaccine may decrease fertility.
   5. The growing evidence of demonic possession. This is either alarming evidence that science if bogus or alarming evidence that materialism is false.
5. Crime

   1. The association between county-level IQ and county-level crime rates

1. Mindset and Philosophy
   1. Virtuous Minds: Intellectual Character Development by Philip E. Dow
   2. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
   3. Gorilla Mindset by Mike Cernovich
   4. The Mountain of Silence by Kyriacos Markides
2. Academic Theology, Philosophy, and Ethics
   1. The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers by Eleonore Stump
   2. All that the prophets have declared by various
   3. Jesus Christ and Mythology by Rudolf Bultmann
   4. The Didache: Text, Translation, Analysis, and Commentary by Aaron Milavec
3. Psychology, Social Science, and History
   1. Intelligence: All that matters by Stuart Ritchie
   2. The Curse of the High IQ by Aaron Clarey
4. Education and Parenting
   1. Virtuous Minds: Intellectual Character Development by Philip E. Dow
5. Finance
   1. Simplify by Paul Borthwick
   2. Poor Richard's Retirement by Aaron Clarey
6. Health
   1. Brief Thoughts on Two Books (Squat Every Day and Body By Science)
7. Popular Theology
   1. Mere Churchianity by Michael Spencer
   2. The Gospel of Happiness by Christopher Kaczor
8. Fiction
   1. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
   2. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
   3. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
9. Year End Book Snaps
   1. 2013

My own opinion about the relationship between the Bible and science is complicated. It is, by genre, nothing like a scientific treatise and several of the core truth claims made in Scripture are not testable in a strictly experimental sense (though they are in some sense falsifiable). I generally think it is a bad idea to wed Christian truth claims to this or that scientific paradigm or major theorem. But, on the other hand, it is fun to see how scientific claims can seem to provide evidence that certain observations of Biblical authors are, in fact, true or reasonable. Now, I don’t think that this is a good way to interpret the Bible and I don’t even think that some of the connections I’m about to make below are based entirely on fair assessments of the science nor careful readings of the Biblical passages. But, since many love science and many dorky atheists tend to be science fetishists, it is my pleasure to present this list of ever-growing connections between the Bible and science: