> Which is why I find it pretty funny that Ozempic is arguably the biggest weight-loss breakthrough in decades - and all it does is make you…eat less. Billions in R&D, and the answer was the platitude the whole time. Ha.
The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.
I would push back and say that a lot of people didn't actually know that. They came up with elaborate reasons why eating less doesn't work, but keto works, or paleo works, or eliminating sugar works, or vegan works, or it's just physically impossible to lose weight.
I am constantly arguing with all of my friends and family who believe primary way to loose weight is to exercise more.
Exercising is great, absolutely, but eating less is the actual primary method. While acknowledging complications of metabolism and psychology and weird states body goes through when it's hungry, primary part is to reduce calory intake vs expenditure.
So as snide and silly as it may be, in my neck of the woods, I would agree, lots of people don't believe eating less is the primary method of losing weight.
A bag of doritos is 200+ calories. The exercise involved to burn that off is running or walking multiple miles. It’s way easier in terms of physical expenditure to just not eat the doritos, or skip the sugary soda.
When I go hiking for a couple of weeks (with significant elevation gain each day), I eat like a pig. I mean, something like 5000 calories a day. I lose weight over that time. So it's possible to lose weight through exercise, however you really do have to spend a very significant chunk of each day doing it for it to work.
Not eating as much takes much less of your busy day.
this is not true; I do extended bikepacking trips nutrionally similar to the GP's experience and you feel amazing. Maybe your first time or the first day can be tough but the human body loves to move and consume. I think a good frame of mind is you're a high efficiency furnace pumping out the heat on a very cold day. but this machine actually heals & improves the more it's used!
it's so much faster to do both at once though, and you retain more muscle mass during it and so on
so long as you can live like a monk and hit the gym every night for a few months it's pretty good. this is dependent on you being able to stand being hungry and cranky and going to bed exhausted for all that time though
I do agree that losing weight is easier at first with just eating less, but to play the advocate role: you need a gap of about 3500 calories to lose a pound, but there's a hard daily floor of zero calories. You need to eat less over a long period of time (ideally the rest of your life) and exercise (or medication more commonly) is what keeps you going.
If I eat less, I feel shitty, tired and passive. I move less naturally, because it sux. When I exercise, I feel good, eat as much as I feel like and am keeping/loosing weight.
I mean, these things are multimodal. For most people it's easier to cut enough calories to lose weight than it is to exercise enough to lose weight (though both are physically possible). But, of course, if you are losing weight you should be exercising! It's the best way to retain muscle mass, which is vital for health.
I am sure that when I've lost weight it's more the portion control than the exercise - but the exercise is a critical component. When you go from being sedentary to doing even casual exercise you feel better and get more energy - which you can then use to be more active. Without some kind of virtuous lifestyle-change cycle you are likely not going to shift your body mass, kind of no matter what ultimately puts you over the edge.
The problem, as it is for a shitload of women, is that the delta between "Minimum amount of calories needed to not be somewhat malnourished" and "calories you eat now without losing weight" is sometimes zero. Short women working desk jobs are fucked
I was with a girl that barely ate, and couldn't get her weight down for about a decade because of that. Eventually she got really excited about a local dance studio and suddenly her weight dropped like a rock. She had to exercise more, but that was miserable until she found exercise that was effective and actually clicked, then it was trivial
Meanwhile it was trivial for me to eat less, because my budget should be around 1800 calories a day, and I was eating 3000. It's easy to cut out an entire bag of doritos. It is less easy to literally starve yourself.
People seem to forget as well that when you cut calories, your body will scream bloody murder until it re-adjusts. My body was convinced I was starving while I was 50 pounds overweight and eating 2000 calories because I had previously eaten more. Your body did not evolve in an environment where that was ever the wrong thing to feel! "Please eat more or we die" is one of the most powerful biological signals.
That these medications cut that signal is entirely why they work! If people just "couldn't stop eating" then not having hunger or appetite signals wouldn't have worked either.
Correct - feeling hungry is part of it. It's the biggest (And only notable one IMO) downside. It's temporary, while the loss is happening. Stops once you stabilize.
Getting down to 1200 or 1400 calories is pretty restrictive yeah. You can't do it without counting and meal prep the same way you can go from 3000 to 2000 by skipping snacks
As soon as the diet requires cutting out a daily meal or changing the contents of meals in really harsh ways (like no bread) it's going to get on your nerves and make you neurotic.
Keto changes the way you feel about eating if you enter ketosis for long enough.
Fasting does too, for that matter.
Paleo is just trendy keto with some woo on top.
The don't use the same mechanism as glp, nor do they have same success rate, but similar idea.
Eliminating sugar makes it harder to consume a 64oz soda at 800 calories in 3 minutes and still be hungry.
Anywho, most diets achieve some weight-loss.
But! keeping your mind and body from demanding you eat more to return to homeostasis is actually the 2nd hard part, and the part that most people fail at. And we'll see how much glp losses are sustainable (without shots) here pretty soon.
Regardless, this technology is good and we should subsidize everyone getting to a healthy weight. Searching for reasons they are actually morally inferior or stupid is counterproductive.
True that. I think that many people who use GLPs to find a healthy weight will be on them, possibly intermittently, long term. It may be possible to retrain their eating habits, but I would not bet on it for most people.
I agree sort of, but the argument here is do the simple thing, like "eat less". There; we're done - ha! My initial reaction (and also with the chose boring tech) is that's not the solution, that's where you start LOOKING for the solution! So boring is great, simple is fantastic - from a position of understanding. Too many people jump onto any "new thing" - diet, technology, whatever - because it's easy and right in front of them. Simple is often neither.
I would push back against your pushback and say nearly everyone knows that, it's just the brain is great at making excuses when things are physically difficult.
They did that because the other thing didn't work. It doesn't matter that the reason it didn't work is that they can't do it: the implication is identical.
Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.
That's true, but the fact that it wasn't easy created a huge industry of fake information regarding alternative explanations of weight loss from CICO. It's nice to have some more obvious evidence to convince people that no, your body can't magically move and exercise for free when you eat less, among other strange claims I've heard from people struggling to lose weight. People stuck in that rut of not being able to eat less were prone to being deceived by countless weight loss products when the real solution (also hard mind you, but at least more viable) would have been to focus on which activities and diets actually allowed them personally to maintain a calorie deficit.
And as a bonus, now they also have one. A lot of people didn't even believe that was the solution though, and the belief change is important.
The interesting solution to smoking was social pressure. No smoking in restaurants, no smoking on planes, general intolerance to smokers, insane taxes on tobacco... suddenly, smokers for 30 years started quitting at a certain breaking point.
The real solution to weight loss (especially in the U.S.) is to change the social norms. When everyone is hitting the buffets and going to Cheesecake Factory and buying high calorie garbage at a discount, of course to population gets fat. France, for example, makes all of that much harder. Maybe Ozempic will help reduce the Walmart-wheelchair-fat population, but truly becoming fit as a country requires significantly more friction for everyone.
Tobacco consumption still causes about one of every five deaths in the United States each year (439k).
That number won't start going down (due to alternatives) until 2030, according to AJPM.
Phillip Morris ($PM) is near an all time high, despite killing millions.
It killed both my grandfathers, it's likely killed someone you knew and loved, please get your facts straight.
And on your other point, fat people already get a lot of social 'friction', from people exactly like you who call them 'people of walmart' who eat 'garbage'.
A fat person who has exercised more and eaten less than you, and lost weight every day for a year will still be called a 'lazy fat-ass' by a person like you until they actually reach the promised land of 'normal'. (and before you ask to invalidate my opinion. No, I am not fat).
On France, Paris is a delightfully walkable city. US cities are car-or-else (excepting NYC). We're the ones who made our people sedentary.
You are on HN, most people here are hacking the attention economy to keep people seated and glued to screens.
Are you willing to vote to give up your car and a part of your future compensation to be surrounded by fitter people?
The social changes you have imagined are forms of shame/intolerance maximization (governments should not do this!), rather than designing our world around good food, human movement, and healthy habits (a thing governments can and should do!)
Regardless, GLPs are an absolute win, and once most people are a healthy weight I hope you will dial back on you reflexive disdain.
The nice thing about ozempic is that it makes people less hungry and less able to eat large portions. Once 30% of the country is on it, expect buffets to go out of business and restaurants to need to shift to smaller portions in response. So it'll make it easier for everyone not on the drugs too.
> Once 30% of the country is on it, expect buffets to go out of business and restaurants to need to shift to smaller portions in response
It's funny how a buffet in almost every other country really just exists for the self-serving simplicity/cost-savings and a broad-ish selection for customers, not to trigger overeating.
This ignores how food today isn't much like food of the past. It has all manner of added sugars and things to make it more marketable, hence higher profits, but also causes over-eating. Snack culture is pretty much an attempt to make food as addictive as possible, and many of those methods are in 'regular' food too.
Not everyone knows this and many who do can't afford an expensive farm to table whole foods diet.
Now toss in car culture and the suburban model and a culture very strongly against any sort of socialized commons like public trans and the little exercise they otherwise would get isn't available anymore. I live in a walkable neighborhood and take public trans, I know my health would be much worse if I didn't get all those steps, fresh air, sense of community, etc in everyday.
Pretty much everything Americans do is wrong when it comes to food, diet, walkable communities, and transportation. What we need to fix this is not putting everyone on ozempic, but a frank look at how our society is organized and figuring out ways to move to a saner society.
Reducing the (frankly near-miraculous) host of effects that GLP-1 medications induce in the human body to "make you eat less" is grounds for instant mistrust. There is so, so, so much more that goes into them than just reducing appetite (whether it's helping your brain modulate dopamine signals, smoothing out glycemic control, reducing inflammation more generally, the list goes on). I think the pharmaceutical industry is as guilty of time and money wasting as anyone, but billions in R&D did actually yield quite a coup this time!
After reading this sentence, I don't trust the author. Misleading as hell.
The success of GLP-1 is based on the fact that the patient can eat less without suffering. No food noise, reduced feelings of hunger, smaller stomach capacity.
Saying that the platitude works is like saying that "just stop doing fentanyl" is the recipe to solve the fentanyl crisis in the US.
But the people claiming that they were some special case that just "couldn't lose weight" no matter how little they ate were bullshitting you. They couldn't handle the suffering, and as such the calorie intake was larger than the calories burned. They wanted you to believe eating less wasn't the solution. The drug proves that it WAS the solution, suffering aside.
"No matter how little they ate" was always ridiculous, obviously everyone knows that literally not eating anything would result in weight loss.
To me personally, the drug proved that people really ARE special cases.
Before Ozempic, I lost about 80 pounds "naturally", by suffering immensely, then kept it off for years, again by suffering immensely. Every day, hunger was at the forefront of my mind all day, every day. It was the #1 concern in my life.
I eventually gained back about 40 pounds, then went on Ozempic.
It has been an eye opener because I now realize what it's like to not suffer from hunger. I realized for the first time that this is how "normal" people feel, all the time! The only way I could get fat now is by eating junk - so in a weird way I started to understand the judgement about being fat.
Some people are just "calibrated" correctly, and that was absolutely mind blowing to me.
This. 1 Million billion times
this. Your story exactly mirrors mine and good
heavens I would never loose weight via the suffering route ever again. Losing weight normally I'm in constant pain and literally can't think of anything else-it's all consuming. I do not say this as exaggeration I would rather go through chemo again. At least that you can make the suffering go away sometimes
with meds.
Different people experience different levels of suffering.
I just started on a GLP-1, and it has already been an interesting lesson in the subjective nature of food drives and hunger.
I've heard for literally years the advice "just drink some water it will trick you into feeling less hungry".
And I've always suspected this was some bullshit placebo, because that OBVIOUSLY doesn't work (so I thought). Water doesn't replace food, it just fills up your stomach so that eating becomes somewhat more unpleasant. But the food/hunger drive is still there unabated.
Well, except after taking a GLP-1 I actually experienced the sensation of drinking something and having my hunger go down. Whatever that circuit is, it has been broken in me for at least my entire adult life. So giving me that advice had been like trying to explain the color to a blind person.
Which, oddly, ties a lot more into the subject title than the example the author gave...
I'm far from being an expert on this specific subject but, I have the impression that Ozempic does a lot of things in one's body in order to reduce the appetite and result in eating less. Which is to say that, the author sounds like he's implying that the solution to this was trivial all along, by deliberately omitting the underlying mechanism that makes it work.
I will poke at the last sentence a bit, as it's important to understanding the phrnomena you described. There was and is a lot of FUD about this. Many people knew it's true, including from first hand experience.
Discussion about it in news, conversations would get it mixed up into stories of genetics, free will, macronutrient balance, personal identities, culture etc. Call it nuance; complexity, or bullshit. People had/have a hard time accepting "eat less to not be fat".
This is one of the things you actually can change about your body, appearance and health outcomes! There are many things that are immutable - people would try to convince you the biggest mutable thing is also out of reach.
>People had/have a hard time accepting "eat less to not be fat".
It's kind of like saying "Smoke less to avoid lung cancer". You can say eating is a fatal addiction. If you stop you die. The hard part is is balancing it so you keep on living and avoid the negative health outcomes.
Why is this hard? First the cause and effect are separated by a lot of time. If I eat a sweet fat sugary treat I get the good feeling RIGHT NOW. The negative health effects are way later.
Other reasons it's hard is our eating habits are mostly created in our childhood and very hard to break as an adult. If your parents fed you poorly you're at a significant health disadvantage.
The last one I'll list is crap food marketing. The most unhealthy crap seems to have the brightest packages to catch our eye. It has huge amounts of salt, fat, and sugar, things our evolutionary body craves because the number one thing it wants to avoid is starvation.
So yea, it is reachable, but it is not trivial at all.
The whole irony is that quote is making the exact mistake his post is about: "eat less" is great advice for people where eating less isn't that hard, but it's not helpful advice for people who struggle mightily with eating less and who live in an environment of calorie rich, nutrient poor foods. I've naturally always been skinny, I often find eating a chore. Eating less is incredibly easy for me, but eating right and exercising enough to maintain muscle is the hard part for me.
I mean, we've been telling people "eat less" for literally decades and Americans are fatter than ever. The only thing that finally brought down societal-wide obesity stats was GLP-1s.
“Eating less” is the bottom line, but the road there can be fraught.
Many people don’t understand what the high calorie drivers in their diet are, many wildly mis-estimate how much they’re eating, most people inflate the weight loss impacts of training and neglect the appetite rebounds, and the interplay between insulin and appetite and how to manage satiety signals is voodoo for even a lot of doctors. Availability of proper food and time to prepare it are hurdles on top of hurdles.
My estimation is that a lot of people are using way, way, more energy and willpower in their ‘diet’ cycles than necessary but tragically getting poor results because of miscalibration. Our society is geared around profitable food delivery, not healthy dietary wisdom.
It is literally crazy how many people, (particularly women, just an observation) have told me that they are some sort of special case, where eating less food will not make them lose weight. Earnestly told me to my face that “calories in, calories out” is simply not true for everybody. “Where do you think the matter that makes up your body comes from??” I ask incredulously, already knowing that this is just going to get me into trouble.
Obviously there are dozens of completely legitimate social and physiological complicating factors, but at the end of the day, you are what you eat; but there is a certain segment of the population who refuses to believe it. They hold sacred the food they consume and the weight they gain.
This one has a super simple answer. They eat too many carbs.
When carbs spike their blood sugar, insulin swoops in to convert the excess glucose into fat. When they try to restrict calories, they focus on cutting the wrong macros. Calories from carbs are hard to avoid and easily miscounted/underestimated unless you're literally weighing the food and know every ingredient used.
You're not even wrong that women are more likely to have a sweet tooth and fall for crap diets like "low fat" or "plant based". It's decades of evil marketing at play here. The result is not only that they stay fat, but then lose muscle and the number on the scale doesn't budge.
You know what's a whole lot easier to eyeball and get full on? Meat and veg you cooked yourself. That's the easiest solution by miles, but people will continue serving themselves way too much pasta and bread (because it looks right on the plate), adding sauces that are smuggling even more carbs, eating ultraprocessed junk loaded with sugar you can't even taste or filler carbs to cut production cost, and saying their occasional piece of "fun size" candy or favorite drink "doesn't count".
In the first place, the focus on weight loss is missing the point. Weight loss is just a side effect of metabolic change, and ideally you want to lose the fat instead of muscle.
Any means of positive metabolic change is fine, but some are better than others. Ozempic is definitely on the lower tiers of success because the body recomp and more meaningful habits never happen.
To be fair, we also knew how to enable it long before Ozempic arrived. We had hundreds of thousands of years of successfully "eating less" to look back upon for answers.
But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.
Basically every diet program for the last 4 years, every change to food or social habits at least in the US, failed to curb it. So in a pretty real sense we did not know how to eat less successfully, emphasis on successfully.
Yes we do. We toss out the technology and go back to substance farming or hunter/gathering. You'll have no trouble "eating less". But that requires social coordination and humans much prefer to escape society through the use of drugs. Always have, always will.
I think the revolt you'd get from trying to move everyone back to subsistence farming (and also getting conquered by some other group who didn't do this) also means we don't know how to do that successfully. You're ignoring that last word again.
What I'm saying is that "knowing how to do something" requires knowing how to actually implement that solution, how to get people to agree to do it. You might as well say "we know how to get to tau ceti".
Are you saying that Ozempic allows you to escape society or that all the fat people are actually just druggies? Like, either way it's wild, but I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable take.
Plenty of options exist that enable the solutions around weight loss. The issue is that 99% of those are difficult to either start and/or maintain consistency with. Ozempic just happened to address both of those issues in one swoop because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives.
I'm sure your comment is made in good faith and I agree with it (in meaning), but this:
> because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives
...somehow makes me picture you saying it with a smug expression and instantly dislike the whole comment. Maybe it's the broad, catch-all "because people" generalisation, I don't know. But again, I agree with the comment... in meaning ;(
The phrasing could have been chosen better but the meaning still stands. Amongst all of the valid and accessible options for weight loss, society will without a doubt choose the weight loss pill/shot bar none. All for the simple reason of minimizing friction above all else.
There are so many podcasts where "successful" people (within a narrow definition of success) give advice.
The issue there, is that for every "successful" person, there are thousads who did the exact same things and didn't make it. Arguably a better thing would be to interview the ones who failed, and learn lessons from them.
Secondly, the person themselves can be selective in what they share, they may talk about the risks they took to get where they are, but not about the backstop of a wealthy family to fall back on if it all goes wrong (for example).
This is a common sentiment but I don’t actually know if it’s true. I feel like a lot of people claim they did exactly the same things, but when you get down to the details, it turns out they didn’t really work as much, didn’t spend time meeting the right people, etc.
Saying “it’s all just luck” is just a defensive mechanism, in a lot of ways.
Here's the thing, take all personal testimony as false unless you witness it and record what happened.
There you go, I just made life much simpler for you.
There is an interesting effect in weight loss, but it applies to so many more things. That is when a lot of people diet they record particular things like how much they ate at a meal, but not how much they snacked. When you have a third party observer record everything that observer gets a much different calorie intake amount than the person dieting.
This is also true for almost any human claim that is not backed up by outside observation. We do all kinds of things subconsciously. We cut out any information that may look bad. The words we say have huge amounts of assumptions build in for 'us' but may not apply to anyone else on the planet. This is why science quite commonly finds reality is in direct opposition to how our minds think it works.
I honestly think this is some fundamental limit of single observer based intelligence.
For this reason, I think it's important to listen to testimonies from both: people who've succeeded at the thing you want to do, as well as people who failed. That way, you can get a grasp of the common traits of successful examples while also understanding the most common failure modes.
imo, the easier and more likely-to-be-successful podcast idea is to press successful people on times they failed. Very few are going to be "first at bat, hit a homerun"; those people are not as interesting anyways to interview.
You solve the credibility problem (they ended up successful) while still distilling down the more valuable failures.
A ton of YC advice (e.g. I remember a Mondo co-founder) is "We did X, and it really worked, but it was a really bad and dangerous idea, so don't do X" without stopping to think whether X might have been the reason the company survived in the first place. Basically: do as I say, not as I do / did.
Case studies are of very limited utility regardless, especially when studied by the subject themselves.
The most informative are rigorous population studies. Unfortunately, those tend to reach depressing and not necessarily useful conclusions like "the most likely way to achieve wealth is to have successful parents."
I came here to check someone has already made this comment. I tend to pay more attention when someone lists 'luck' as one of the first reasons for their success. I find it's a good indicator that their advice will come with humility.
I had some skepticism from a friend when I told him that graduate school is significantly easier than undergrad. It's not that the work is "easier" in any kind of objective sense, it's that almost by definition if you're going to graduate school it's for a topic that you think is interesting, and as such you're going to have more interest and/or aptitude for it.
I had trouble with university the first time around, but it wasn't for the stuff that I thought was interesting. I did fine in my math classes and physics courses and the like; the thing that I struggled the most with were my "easy" courses (e.g. multicultural film). I just did not care about anything that wasn't math or computers, and as such I had trouble forcing myself to do the homework or study and of course I did poorly in the courses.
I've gotten a lot better at forcing myself to do boring work now, but ironically once I decided to do grad school and get my masters, I found it a lot easier. I didn't have to do any courses that I thought were boring. I got to focus on data structures and math and programming languages. You know, fun stuff! As such the masters was (comparatively speaking) a breeze for me because I didn't mind spending hours studying every day.
It occurs to me, though, that this advice might just be about me specifically, which I suppose is the point of the article.
Counterpoint example, I've yet to do grad school but I did take some graduate level classes as technical electives my senior year. While they were the most interesting in the abstract, the professors that taught them also seemed to assume that interest alone will drive you and you therefore need less structure. I found this lack of structure extremely annoying and difficult to mange, expectations were always vague. What's the point of the professor if I have to define everything myself? I ended up saving everything to the last minute as my more structured undergrad classes demanded more immediate milestones, which just produced a ton of stress and some shock when I ended up with a B in Compiler Design when I was hoping to just barely scrape by with a C- or something, given the relative lack of time and effort I'd put into it.
Taught me that I'm just not well tuned for academics or pure research. I'm extrinsically motivated, I need a real-world problem to anchor to, and if that problem requires me to learn Brainfuck then I'll enthusiastically learn Brainfuck, but I would never learn Brainfuck for fun.
To each their own, and I guess it goes to the point of the article even more.
Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.
I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.
Could be I'm the weird one, at least in this community. There's at least one thread on here every day about how some language or platform is better/worse due to some esoteric feature or other and every time I try to read one of those I just can't bring myself to care. Seems like the same tasks can get done in roughly the same amount of time, most of the time. I'm also the only one of my coworkers who uses vi/vim daily, strictly because some variety of vi/vim is on every machine I could ever possibly need to access and I hate having to ask permission to install things just to do my job.
Just offering the perspective from someone for whom grad school (or at least my taste of it) was more difficult in aggregate. I'm glad people like you exist, for all the time you waste navel gazing you occasionally stumble across something incredibly useful that people like me would probably never find. :)
I really like this piece - but it points to a wider truth. All advice is contextual.
- It's contextual to the advice giver: Is it specific to them? Do they have an ulterior motive or are beholden to someone with an ulterior motive, e.g. getting you to support their agenda or getting you to buy or vote.
- It's contextual to you: Does that fit the way you operate? Does it play to your strengths?
- And it's contextual to your ...well... context: Are you in a country where this advice applies? Do you have the financial means to execute on it, etc...
Bottom line - there are very few pieces of truly universal good advice.
Although I agree with your comment but your comment is naturally making me wonder what are the very few pieces of truly universal good advice that you are mentioning.
What do you think such advice could be/is and the definition of finding such advice and to differentiating it from other advice which is still contextual?
My favorite bit of advice ever (poorly paraphrasing Nassim Nicholas Taleb): If you want to be rich or famous - meaning you want to succeed in a field with the potential for exponential growth but a low probability of a large payoff - your best strategy is to maximize your exposure to opportunities with scale potential.
That means: secure a basic level of subsistence that allows you to keep trying, then focus on repeated attempts at activities that can scale exponentially. Think of writing a book, building a SaaS product, or recording a song: things you can sell repeatedly at little or no additional cost, rather than selling your time or labor.
This is equally good advice for an aspiring Punjabi musician in the slums of Lahore and a hopeful software founder at Stanford.
Generally supportive of this blog post (with the caveat on "eat less" but that's addressed by another commenter). It addresses a pain point for me and I appreciate it. It's particularly painful for those of us who tend to be self-critical. No matter what some asshole is telling you you're doing it wrong. I wish people giving the advice would read this as well. I found the "say yes" vs "say no" thing in particular very funny and I'm surprised I never noticed it.
If I have to choose between hearing advice (which I can ignore), or not getting any advice at all, I’d much rather get the advice. I’ve ignored a lot of advice in my time, but every once in a while a diamond sneaks through, and often I get an idea or two for a different way of looking at things.
While mostly true, there is definitely such thing as advice fatigue and generally easy for our brains to conflate advice and criticism which can be detrimental in large doses from my experience. Not to say that it's bad to receive advice/criticism but it has to be ideally in the right dose and with the right intention.
You don't ask for advice to have someone else make your decisions for you, rather in the hope that you learn about options you didn't otherwise realize were open to you. You ask for advice to "get out of your head".
It may not be right for you, but you'll have made a better decision for having considered it.
There's a scale to this as well. When you take advice from something in a book, that isn't specific, its general and meant to appeal to many. When you take advice from a colleague or friend, its more specific, they know more about your context and situation, the advice fits better.
Everything OP said though still applies, figure it out for yourself.
>Don’t value the experiences of others over your own.
Eh, this is kind of messy. There are some people that have lived objectively bad lives. Horrible parents, terrible abuse, no education, etc. These kinds of lives can easily lead to traps of "the world is shit, don't even try". Worse you've only ever been taught detrimental things, so your own advice/experience is bad.
Really easy to end up in generational traps this way.
Usually when I'm in a crappy situation, I try to pretend my best friend is in that situation, and I'll give him advice. Often helps me come up with good ideas and kinda strips away all the bs and excuses I'm telling myself. That being said, the more deeply held the excuses and bs are, the harder it is to actually do this.
We should distinguish between 1:many advice and 1:1 advice.
An interviewer is really asking "how do you recommend people replicate your success?" which grounds the response in the hard lessons that person learned on their own journey.
Personalized advice can be equally useless, but if that person really understands you and your situation you might be surprised how specific and valuable good objective feedback can be.
"good objective feedback" - right, I think advice in general is bad because it tries to bite size a complex system, that is society/humanity. Feedback is giving someone information they can act on, along with the rest of context they have of their situation. No need for you to know them deeply, just the interaction.
There are things that can work, and things that likely won't work, and most people know these. Then there is a space of things that usually work and things that may not work, and you can't fit these into a person without knowing a lot of variables about them and the environment around them, like what and who they know, their personality, their competence (not just their resume), and many, many other variables. So advice defaults to guessing most of these variables to find some direction.
And I think it boosts advisors' ego, makes advisees feel temporarily better, even motivated, but YMMV by a lot.
This is why the good advisors also change the variables in your favor, like introduce you to their network, coach, etc. And often this costs you something. Like money, equity, whatever.
> We trust confident people, even when they're wrong
I think this idea can be expanded on, and it is to separate the merits of the idea from the delivery of the idea. I see this frequently with:
- neurodivergent people (of whatever variety)
- ESL speakers
- cultural clashes (eg Dutch / American meetings)
If you can separate delivery and the merits of a discussion, you can benefit both ways -- taking a skeptical view on the best pitches (eg from anyone on a Forbes 30 for 30 list) and an optimistic view on the worst.
This is especially appropriate for HN and other software engineering forums where embedded/systems, frontend, backend, imperitive, functional, etc programmers all constantly yell at each other about whether the elephant is a rope or a snake or a tree.
It's easy to think your experience encompasses all of "software" and give definitive advice to others who work in a vastly different space than you do.
(My analogy for this article only): Ideas gleaned from the article.
AIs do not have all the contexts about you thus provide you guidance not fit for you.
Advisors are the same, they don't know everything about you thus not all advices fit for you.
You know about yourself the best (given you "reflect") and make trade-offs between what you know, and what you consider benficial to you.
As I always bring up about making tradeoffs in HN in my comments, the article is solid.
The X-factor of LLM AI advice is how it consists of both artificial and intelligent responses; It cannot cloud judgement by having feelings and will still think very carefully about your problem.
Sadly no one wants the truth, so folks like Jobs and Cuban have to layer it with bromides. Truth is they're both giving the exact same advice, it's just that the honest version is deeply unpopular, because it implies that there is no secret sauce.
The advice is: Work very hard on something, and you too might get lucky.
Jobs' version is just slightly modified: Work very hard on something (you care about), and you too might get lucky.
Another variation of this: Advice is what the person giving it needs to hear for themself.
This is oddly evident in beginner influencers trying to become gurus on social media. They try to write life advice from a position of superiority, but when you look closely they’re given themselves a little pep talk about how they want to be or what they need to hear. It doesn’t mean the advice is wrong, but you can see through the illusion that you’re hearing sage advice from someone who figured it all out long ago.
In what way are they opposing thoughts? Steve Jobs said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. Mark Cuban also said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. The exact word choice may have differed, but they both expressed the exact same thing.
The mode is completely different. You have to twist Cuban’s words to make him say the same thing as Jobs. Because he didn’t say “find the thing you love” he said spend enough effort on what you’re doing until it becomes the thing you love. Jobs is about an actual search, which takes effort, for sure. Cuban is about transformation in place.
Not at all. Jobs is not implying that you should, like, jump from minimum wage job to minimum wage job until you find one you like. He is suggesting that if you put in effort, like learning deeply about something, that will close the gaps that are necessarily closed to find true love. Which is the same thing Cuban is saying.
Perhaps you can interpret Jobs' statement that way in a vacuum, but fortunately we don't need to evaluate what Jobs' said in a vacuum. He also said a lot of other things that allow us to build up context around his intent. He spoke a lot about how he found his love.
> Which is why I find it pretty funny that Ozempic is arguably the biggest weight-loss breakthrough in decades - and all it does is make you…eat less. Billions in R&D, and the answer was the platitude the whole time. Ha.
The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.
I would push back and say that a lot of people didn't actually know that. They came up with elaborate reasons why eating less doesn't work, but keto works, or paleo works, or eliminating sugar works, or vegan works, or it's just physically impossible to lose weight.
I am constantly arguing with all of my friends and family who believe primary way to loose weight is to exercise more.
Exercising is great, absolutely, but eating less is the actual primary method. While acknowledging complications of metabolism and psychology and weird states body goes through when it's hungry, primary part is to reduce calory intake vs expenditure.
So as snide and silly as it may be, in my neck of the woods, I would agree, lots of people don't believe eating less is the primary method of losing weight.
It’s just physics, really.
A bag of doritos is 200+ calories. The exercise involved to burn that off is running or walking multiple miles. It’s way easier in terms of physical expenditure to just not eat the doritos, or skip the sugary soda.
When I go hiking for a couple of weeks (with significant elevation gain each day), I eat like a pig. I mean, something like 5000 calories a day. I lose weight over that time. So it's possible to lose weight through exercise, however you really do have to spend a very significant chunk of each day doing it for it to work.
Not eating as much takes much less of your busy day.
If you are exercising on a caloric deficit, you are going to feel constantly tired and shitty. I find it way easier to just be on a caloric deficit.
this is not true; I do extended bikepacking trips nutrionally similar to the GP's experience and you feel amazing. Maybe your first time or the first day can be tough but the human body loves to move and consume. I think a good frame of mind is you're a high efficiency furnace pumping out the heat on a very cold day. but this machine actually heals & improves the more it's used!
That’s only true over a relatively short period.
Stuff you can do for a week doesn’t automatically extend to maintaining that over the next 50 years.
it's so much faster to do both at once though, and you retain more muscle mass during it and so on
so long as you can live like a monk and hit the gym every night for a few months it's pretty good. this is dependent on you being able to stand being hungry and cranky and going to bed exhausted for all that time though
I do agree that losing weight is easier at first with just eating less, but to play the advocate role: you need a gap of about 3500 calories to lose a pound, but there's a hard daily floor of zero calories. You need to eat less over a long period of time (ideally the rest of your life) and exercise (or medication more commonly) is what keeps you going.
If I eat less, I feel shitty, tired and passive. I move less naturally, because it sux. When I exercise, I feel good, eat as much as I feel like and am keeping/loosing weight.
"you can't outwork a bad diet"
“You can’t outrun the fork.”
I mean, these things are multimodal. For most people it's easier to cut enough calories to lose weight than it is to exercise enough to lose weight (though both are physically possible). But, of course, if you are losing weight you should be exercising! It's the best way to retain muscle mass, which is vital for health.
I am sure that when I've lost weight it's more the portion control than the exercise - but the exercise is a critical component. When you go from being sedentary to doing even casual exercise you feel better and get more energy - which you can then use to be more active. Without some kind of virtuous lifestyle-change cycle you are likely not going to shift your body mass, kind of no matter what ultimately puts you over the edge.
The problem, as it is for a shitload of women, is that the delta between "Minimum amount of calories needed to not be somewhat malnourished" and "calories you eat now without losing weight" is sometimes zero. Short women working desk jobs are fucked
I was with a girl that barely ate, and couldn't get her weight down for about a decade because of that. Eventually she got really excited about a local dance studio and suddenly her weight dropped like a rock. She had to exercise more, but that was miserable until she found exercise that was effective and actually clicked, then it was trivial
Meanwhile it was trivial for me to eat less, because my budget should be around 1800 calories a day, and I was eating 3000. It's easy to cut out an entire bag of doritos. It is less easy to literally starve yourself.
People seem to forget as well that when you cut calories, your body will scream bloody murder until it re-adjusts. My body was convinced I was starving while I was 50 pounds overweight and eating 2000 calories because I had previously eaten more. Your body did not evolve in an environment where that was ever the wrong thing to feel! "Please eat more or we die" is one of the most powerful biological signals.
That these medications cut that signal is entirely why they work! If people just "couldn't stop eating" then not having hunger or appetite signals wouldn't have worked either.
Correct - feeling hungry is part of it. It's the biggest (And only notable one IMO) downside. It's temporary, while the loss is happening. Stops once you stabilize.
Getting down to 1200 or 1400 calories is pretty restrictive yeah. You can't do it without counting and meal prep the same way you can go from 3000 to 2000 by skipping snacks
As soon as the diet requires cutting out a daily meal or changing the contents of meals in really harsh ways (like no bread) it's going to get on your nerves and make you neurotic.
> People seem to forget as well that when you cut calories, your body will scream bloody murder until it re-adjusts
When the body does not scream that murder, it is called anorexia. And it is much worst for your health then obesity.
"Eating less" as a strategy for losing weight is like "make a lot of money" is a strategy for becoming rich.
It certainly works, it is just an unhelpful strategy.
Nah, the better analogy is "don't spend more than you make".
Keto changes the way you feel about eating if you enter ketosis for long enough.
Fasting does too, for that matter.
Paleo is just trendy keto with some woo on top.
The don't use the same mechanism as glp, nor do they have same success rate, but similar idea.
Eliminating sugar makes it harder to consume a 64oz soda at 800 calories in 3 minutes and still be hungry.
Anywho, most diets achieve some weight-loss.
But! keeping your mind and body from demanding you eat more to return to homeostasis is actually the 2nd hard part, and the part that most people fail at. And we'll see how much glp losses are sustainable (without shots) here pretty soon.
Regardless, this technology is good and we should subsidize everyone getting to a healthy weight. Searching for reasons they are actually morally inferior or stupid is counterproductive.
isn't it widely accepted that supressed appetite (i.e. what makes glp work) is ONLY sustainable on the shots, and that you're on them for life?
This is true for diets too. You have to keep doing whatever the new behavior is to keep it up.
So maybe the goal is use the drugs to shift your lifestyle to eating less, having less food in the house, and being more active and then wean off it
True that. I think that many people who use GLPs to find a healthy weight will be on them, possibly intermittently, long term. It may be possible to retrain their eating habits, but I would not bet on it for most people.
> we'll see how much glp losses are sustainable (without shots) here pretty soon.
Will we?
The idea is to be on them for life; I don't know that I've seen anyone recommend differently.
I agree sort of, but the argument here is do the simple thing, like "eat less". There; we're done - ha! My initial reaction (and also with the chose boring tech) is that's not the solution, that's where you start LOOKING for the solution! So boring is great, simple is fantastic - from a position of understanding. Too many people jump onto any "new thing" - diet, technology, whatever - because it's easy and right in front of them. Simple is often neither.
I would push back against your pushback and say nearly everyone knows that, it's just the brain is great at making excuses when things are physically difficult.
They did that because the other thing didn't work. It doesn't matter that the reason it didn't work is that they can't do it: the implication is identical.
Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.
Classic case of "simple != easy". Things can be simple, yet hard, and that's an underrated measure of difficulty in my experience.
That's true, but the fact that it wasn't easy created a huge industry of fake information regarding alternative explanations of weight loss from CICO. It's nice to have some more obvious evidence to convince people that no, your body can't magically move and exercise for free when you eat less, among other strange claims I've heard from people struggling to lose weight. People stuck in that rut of not being able to eat less were prone to being deceived by countless weight loss products when the real solution (also hard mind you, but at least more viable) would have been to focus on which activities and diets actually allowed them personally to maintain a calorie deficit.
And as a bonus, now they also have one. A lot of people didn't even believe that was the solution though, and the belief change is important.
The problem was always about enablement. We know the solution to smoking too, the problem is enablement.
The interesting solution to smoking was social pressure. No smoking in restaurants, no smoking on planes, general intolerance to smokers, insane taxes on tobacco... suddenly, smokers for 30 years started quitting at a certain breaking point.
The real solution to weight loss (especially in the U.S.) is to change the social norms. When everyone is hitting the buffets and going to Cheesecake Factory and buying high calorie garbage at a discount, of course to population gets fat. France, for example, makes all of that much harder. Maybe Ozempic will help reduce the Walmart-wheelchair-fat population, but truly becoming fit as a country requires significantly more friction for everyone.
Nicotine addiction has not been 'solved'.
Tobacco consumption still causes about one of every five deaths in the United States each year (439k). That number won't start going down (due to alternatives) until 2030, according to AJPM. Phillip Morris ($PM) is near an all time high, despite killing millions.
It killed both my grandfathers, it's likely killed someone you knew and loved, please get your facts straight.
And on your other point, fat people already get a lot of social 'friction', from people exactly like you who call them 'people of walmart' who eat 'garbage'.
A fat person who has exercised more and eaten less than you, and lost weight every day for a year will still be called a 'lazy fat-ass' by a person like you until they actually reach the promised land of 'normal'. (and before you ask to invalidate my opinion. No, I am not fat).
On France, Paris is a delightfully walkable city. US cities are car-or-else (excepting NYC). We're the ones who made our people sedentary.
You are on HN, most people here are hacking the attention economy to keep people seated and glued to screens.
Are you willing to vote to give up your car and a part of your future compensation to be surrounded by fitter people?
The social changes you have imagined are forms of shame/intolerance maximization (governments should not do this!), rather than designing our world around good food, human movement, and healthy habits (a thing governments can and should do!)
Regardless, GLPs are an absolute win, and once most people are a healthy weight I hope you will dial back on you reflexive disdain.
Nicotine addiction isn’t the problem though, you’ve just shifted the goal posts. A nicotine pill is not giving someone lung cancer.
The nice thing about ozempic is that it makes people less hungry and less able to eat large portions. Once 30% of the country is on it, expect buffets to go out of business and restaurants to need to shift to smaller portions in response. So it'll make it easier for everyone not on the drugs too.
> Once 30% of the country is on it, expect buffets to go out of business and restaurants to need to shift to smaller portions in response
It's funny how a buffet in almost every other country really just exists for the self-serving simplicity/cost-savings and a broad-ish selection for customers, not to trigger overeating.
Could be they shift formats, but I'm not sure Golden corral will still exist at least
Ironically, nicotine suppresses appetite. Maybe the solution was chain smoking all along.
That was my approach, for too long. Lots of coffee and cigarettes. Helped with brain function, too.
It’s a real shame it was literally killing me the whole time.
This ignores how food today isn't much like food of the past. It has all manner of added sugars and things to make it more marketable, hence higher profits, but also causes over-eating. Snack culture is pretty much an attempt to make food as addictive as possible, and many of those methods are in 'regular' food too.
Not everyone knows this and many who do can't afford an expensive farm to table whole foods diet.
Now toss in car culture and the suburban model and a culture very strongly against any sort of socialized commons like public trans and the little exercise they otherwise would get isn't available anymore. I live in a walkable neighborhood and take public trans, I know my health would be much worse if I didn't get all those steps, fresh air, sense of community, etc in everyday.
Pretty much everything Americans do is wrong when it comes to food, diet, walkable communities, and transportation. What we need to fix this is not putting everyone on ozempic, but a frank look at how our society is organized and figuring out ways to move to a saner society.
Reducing the (frankly near-miraculous) host of effects that GLP-1 medications induce in the human body to "make you eat less" is grounds for instant mistrust. There is so, so, so much more that goes into them than just reducing appetite (whether it's helping your brain modulate dopamine signals, smoothing out glycemic control, reducing inflammation more generally, the list goes on). I think the pharmaceutical industry is as guilty of time and money wasting as anyone, but billions in R&D did actually yield quite a coup this time!
After reading this sentence, I don't trust the author. Misleading as hell.
The success of GLP-1 is based on the fact that the patient can eat less without suffering. No food noise, reduced feelings of hunger, smaller stomach capacity.
Saying that the platitude works is like saying that "just stop doing fentanyl" is the recipe to solve the fentanyl crisis in the US.
But the people claiming that they were some special case that just "couldn't lose weight" no matter how little they ate were bullshitting you. They couldn't handle the suffering, and as such the calorie intake was larger than the calories burned. They wanted you to believe eating less wasn't the solution. The drug proves that it WAS the solution, suffering aside.
"No matter how little they ate" was always ridiculous, obviously everyone knows that literally not eating anything would result in weight loss.
To me personally, the drug proved that people really ARE special cases.
Before Ozempic, I lost about 80 pounds "naturally", by suffering immensely, then kept it off for years, again by suffering immensely. Every day, hunger was at the forefront of my mind all day, every day. It was the #1 concern in my life.
I eventually gained back about 40 pounds, then went on Ozempic.
It has been an eye opener because I now realize what it's like to not suffer from hunger. I realized for the first time that this is how "normal" people feel, all the time! The only way I could get fat now is by eating junk - so in a weird way I started to understand the judgement about being fat.
Some people are just "calibrated" correctly, and that was absolutely mind blowing to me.
This. 1 Million billion times this. Your story exactly mirrors mine and good heavens I would never loose weight via the suffering route ever again. Losing weight normally I'm in constant pain and literally can't think of anything else-it's all consuming. I do not say this as exaggeration I would rather go through chemo again. At least that you can make the suffering go away sometimes with meds.
Different people experience different levels of suffering.
I just started on a GLP-1, and it has already been an interesting lesson in the subjective nature of food drives and hunger.
I've heard for literally years the advice "just drink some water it will trick you into feeling less hungry".
And I've always suspected this was some bullshit placebo, because that OBVIOUSLY doesn't work (so I thought). Water doesn't replace food, it just fills up your stomach so that eating becomes somewhat more unpleasant. But the food/hunger drive is still there unabated.
Well, except after taking a GLP-1 I actually experienced the sensation of drinking something and having my hunger go down. Whatever that circuit is, it has been broken in me for at least my entire adult life. So giving me that advice had been like trying to explain the color to a blind person.
Which, oddly, ties a lot more into the subject title than the example the author gave...
"suffering aside."
This is precisely the thing that cannot be put aside without making the solution much less useful / efficient / solution-esque.
What percent of obese people were saying that? Who exactly are you arguing against?
I'm far from being an expert on this specific subject but, I have the impression that Ozempic does a lot of things in one's body in order to reduce the appetite and result in eating less. Which is to say that, the author sounds like he's implying that the solution to this was trivial all along, by deliberately omitting the underlying mechanism that makes it work.
I will poke at the last sentence a bit, as it's important to understanding the phrnomena you described. There was and is a lot of FUD about this. Many people knew it's true, including from first hand experience.
Discussion about it in news, conversations would get it mixed up into stories of genetics, free will, macronutrient balance, personal identities, culture etc. Call it nuance; complexity, or bullshit. People had/have a hard time accepting "eat less to not be fat".
This is one of the things you actually can change about your body, appearance and health outcomes! There are many things that are immutable - people would try to convince you the biggest mutable thing is also out of reach.
>People had/have a hard time accepting "eat less to not be fat".
It's kind of like saying "Smoke less to avoid lung cancer". You can say eating is a fatal addiction. If you stop you die. The hard part is is balancing it so you keep on living and avoid the negative health outcomes.
Why is this hard? First the cause and effect are separated by a lot of time. If I eat a sweet fat sugary treat I get the good feeling RIGHT NOW. The negative health effects are way later.
Other reasons it's hard is our eating habits are mostly created in our childhood and very hard to break as an adult. If your parents fed you poorly you're at a significant health disadvantage.
The last one I'll list is crap food marketing. The most unhealthy crap seems to have the brightest packages to catch our eye. It has huge amounts of salt, fat, and sugar, things our evolutionary body craves because the number one thing it wants to avoid is starvation.
So yea, it is reachable, but it is not trivial at all.
And we laugh at AI for being simple minded
The mind is always the biggest battle
The whole irony is that quote is making the exact mistake his post is about: "eat less" is great advice for people where eating less isn't that hard, but it's not helpful advice for people who struggle mightily with eating less and who live in an environment of calorie rich, nutrient poor foods. I've naturally always been skinny, I often find eating a chore. Eating less is incredibly easy for me, but eating right and exercising enough to maintain muscle is the hard part for me.
I mean, we've been telling people "eat less" for literally decades and Americans are fatter than ever. The only thing that finally brought down societal-wide obesity stats was GLP-1s.
“Eating less” is the bottom line, but the road there can be fraught.
Many people don’t understand what the high calorie drivers in their diet are, many wildly mis-estimate how much they’re eating, most people inflate the weight loss impacts of training and neglect the appetite rebounds, and the interplay between insulin and appetite and how to manage satiety signals is voodoo for even a lot of doctors. Availability of proper food and time to prepare it are hurdles on top of hurdles.
My estimation is that a lot of people are using way, way, more energy and willpower in their ‘diet’ cycles than necessary but tragically getting poor results because of miscalibration. Our society is geared around profitable food delivery, not healthy dietary wisdom.
It is literally crazy how many people, (particularly women, just an observation) have told me that they are some sort of special case, where eating less food will not make them lose weight. Earnestly told me to my face that “calories in, calories out” is simply not true for everybody. “Where do you think the matter that makes up your body comes from??” I ask incredulously, already knowing that this is just going to get me into trouble.
Obviously there are dozens of completely legitimate social and physiological complicating factors, but at the end of the day, you are what you eat; but there is a certain segment of the population who refuses to believe it. They hold sacred the food they consume and the weight they gain.
This one has a super simple answer. They eat too many carbs.
When carbs spike their blood sugar, insulin swoops in to convert the excess glucose into fat. When they try to restrict calories, they focus on cutting the wrong macros. Calories from carbs are hard to avoid and easily miscounted/underestimated unless you're literally weighing the food and know every ingredient used.
You're not even wrong that women are more likely to have a sweet tooth and fall for crap diets like "low fat" or "plant based". It's decades of evil marketing at play here. The result is not only that they stay fat, but then lose muscle and the number on the scale doesn't budge.
You know what's a whole lot easier to eyeball and get full on? Meat and veg you cooked yourself. That's the easiest solution by miles, but people will continue serving themselves way too much pasta and bread (because it looks right on the plate), adding sauces that are smuggling even more carbs, eating ultraprocessed junk loaded with sugar you can't even taste or filler carbs to cut production cost, and saying their occasional piece of "fun size" candy or favorite drink "doesn't count".
In the first place, the focus on weight loss is missing the point. Weight loss is just a side effect of metabolic change, and ideally you want to lose the fat instead of muscle.
Any means of positive metabolic change is fine, but some are better than others. Ozempic is definitely on the lower tiers of success because the body recomp and more meaningful habits never happen.
To be fair, we also knew how to enable it long before Ozempic arrived. We had hundreds of thousands of years of successfully "eating less" to look back upon for answers.
But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.
Basically every diet program for the last 4 years, every change to food or social habits at least in the US, failed to curb it. So in a pretty real sense we did not know how to eat less successfully, emphasis on successfully.
Yes we do. We toss out the technology and go back to substance farming or hunter/gathering. You'll have no trouble "eating less". But that requires social coordination and humans much prefer to escape society through the use of drugs. Always have, always will.
I think the revolt you'd get from trying to move everyone back to subsistence farming (and also getting conquered by some other group who didn't do this) also means we don't know how to do that successfully. You're ignoring that last word again.
Protip: Read right up to the end of the comment before pressing reply. You missed a whole lot of context by rushing to respond midway through.
What I'm saying is that "knowing how to do something" requires knowing how to actually implement that solution, how to get people to agree to do it. You might as well say "we know how to get to tau ceti".
Is it helpful to point out solutions for problems facing society that don't apply to "humans"?
Yes, mass starvation is an extremely effective weight loss technique. However, some feel there are downsides to this approach.
There is an implicit requirement of "while not making survival chances significantly lower".
Are you saying that Ozempic allows you to escape society or that all the fat people are actually just druggies? Like, either way it's wild, but I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable take.
Both are true.
> We had hundreds of thousands of years of successfully "eating less"
Ah yes, our old friend starvation.
Plenty of options exist that enable the solutions around weight loss. The issue is that 99% of those are difficult to either start and/or maintain consistency with. Ozempic just happened to address both of those issues in one swoop because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives.
I'm sure your comment is made in good faith and I agree with it (in meaning), but this:
> because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives
...somehow makes me picture you saying it with a smug expression and instantly dislike the whole comment. Maybe it's the broad, catch-all "because people" generalisation, I don't know. But again, I agree with the comment... in meaning ;(
The phrasing could have been chosen better but the meaning still stands. Amongst all of the valid and accessible options for weight loss, society will without a doubt choose the weight loss pill/shot bar none. All for the simple reason of minimizing friction above all else.
There are so many podcasts where "successful" people (within a narrow definition of success) give advice.
The issue there, is that for every "successful" person, there are thousads who did the exact same things and didn't make it. Arguably a better thing would be to interview the ones who failed, and learn lessons from them.
Secondly, the person themselves can be selective in what they share, they may talk about the risks they took to get where they are, but not about the backstop of a wealthy family to fall back on if it all goes wrong (for example).
This is a common sentiment but I don’t actually know if it’s true. I feel like a lot of people claim they did exactly the same things, but when you get down to the details, it turns out they didn’t really work as much, didn’t spend time meeting the right people, etc.
Saying “it’s all just luck” is just a defensive mechanism, in a lot of ways.
Here's the thing, take all personal testimony as false unless you witness it and record what happened.
There you go, I just made life much simpler for you.
There is an interesting effect in weight loss, but it applies to so many more things. That is when a lot of people diet they record particular things like how much they ate at a meal, but not how much they snacked. When you have a third party observer record everything that observer gets a much different calorie intake amount than the person dieting.
This is also true for almost any human claim that is not backed up by outside observation. We do all kinds of things subconsciously. We cut out any information that may look bad. The words we say have huge amounts of assumptions build in for 'us' but may not apply to anyone else on the planet. This is why science quite commonly finds reality is in direct opposition to how our minds think it works.
I honestly think this is some fundamental limit of single observer based intelligence.
For this reason, I think it's important to listen to testimonies from both: people who've succeeded at the thing you want to do, as well as people who failed. That way, you can get a grasp of the common traits of successful examples while also understanding the most common failure modes.
I found it refreshing when I heard Sam Altman "refuse" to give advice on Lex Fridman's podcast a few years ago:
"I tell people not to listen to too much advice. Listening to advice from other people should be approached with great caution ..." [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/L_Guz73e6fw?si=J7iKIBd5h9Avdu5S&t=8329 (timestamped)
imo, the easier and more likely-to-be-successful podcast idea is to press successful people on times they failed. Very few are going to be "first at bat, hit a homerun"; those people are not as interesting anyways to interview.
You solve the credibility problem (they ended up successful) while still distilling down the more valuable failures.
A ton of YC advice (e.g. I remember a Mondo co-founder) is "We did X, and it really worked, but it was a really bad and dangerous idea, so don't do X" without stopping to think whether X might have been the reason the company survived in the first place. Basically: do as I say, not as I do / did.
Case studies are of very limited utility regardless, especially when studied by the subject themselves.
The most informative are rigorous population studies. Unfortunately, those tend to reach depressing and not necessarily useful conclusions like "the most likely way to achieve wealth is to have successful parents."
I came here to check someone has already made this comment. I tend to pay more attention when someone lists 'luck' as one of the first reasons for their success. I find it's a good indicator that their advice will come with humility.
Solomon's paradox is the observation that people can give reasonable advice to others, but fail to apply this advice to their own situation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon%27s_paradox
I had some skepticism from a friend when I told him that graduate school is significantly easier than undergrad. It's not that the work is "easier" in any kind of objective sense, it's that almost by definition if you're going to graduate school it's for a topic that you think is interesting, and as such you're going to have more interest and/or aptitude for it.
I had trouble with university the first time around, but it wasn't for the stuff that I thought was interesting. I did fine in my math classes and physics courses and the like; the thing that I struggled the most with were my "easy" courses (e.g. multicultural film). I just did not care about anything that wasn't math or computers, and as such I had trouble forcing myself to do the homework or study and of course I did poorly in the courses.
I've gotten a lot better at forcing myself to do boring work now, but ironically once I decided to do grad school and get my masters, I found it a lot easier. I didn't have to do any courses that I thought were boring. I got to focus on data structures and math and programming languages. You know, fun stuff! As such the masters was (comparatively speaking) a breeze for me because I didn't mind spending hours studying every day.
It occurs to me, though, that this advice might just be about me specifically, which I suppose is the point of the article.
Counterpoint example, I've yet to do grad school but I did take some graduate level classes as technical electives my senior year. While they were the most interesting in the abstract, the professors that taught them also seemed to assume that interest alone will drive you and you therefore need less structure. I found this lack of structure extremely annoying and difficult to mange, expectations were always vague. What's the point of the professor if I have to define everything myself? I ended up saving everything to the last minute as my more structured undergrad classes demanded more immediate milestones, which just produced a ton of stress and some shock when I ended up with a B in Compiler Design when I was hoping to just barely scrape by with a C- or something, given the relative lack of time and effort I'd put into it.
Taught me that I'm just not well tuned for academics or pure research. I'm extrinsically motivated, I need a real-world problem to anchor to, and if that problem requires me to learn Brainfuck then I'll enthusiastically learn Brainfuck, but I would never learn Brainfuck for fun.
To each their own, and I guess it goes to the point of the article even more.
Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.
I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.
Could be I'm the weird one, at least in this community. There's at least one thread on here every day about how some language or platform is better/worse due to some esoteric feature or other and every time I try to read one of those I just can't bring myself to care. Seems like the same tasks can get done in roughly the same amount of time, most of the time. I'm also the only one of my coworkers who uses vi/vim daily, strictly because some variety of vi/vim is on every machine I could ever possibly need to access and I hate having to ask permission to install things just to do my job.
Just offering the perspective from someone for whom grad school (or at least my taste of it) was more difficult in aggregate. I'm glad people like you exist, for all the time you waste navel gazing you occasionally stumble across something incredibly useful that people like me would probably never find. :)
I frequently used the same argument to show why university is easier than high school.
Is life defined by what you do, or what you don't have to do.
I really like this piece - but it points to a wider truth. All advice is contextual.
- It's contextual to the advice giver: Is it specific to them? Do they have an ulterior motive or are beholden to someone with an ulterior motive, e.g. getting you to support their agenda or getting you to buy or vote.
- It's contextual to you: Does that fit the way you operate? Does it play to your strengths?
- And it's contextual to your ...well... context: Are you in a country where this advice applies? Do you have the financial means to execute on it, etc...
Bottom line - there are very few pieces of truly universal good advice.
Although I agree with your comment but your comment is naturally making me wonder what are the very few pieces of truly universal good advice that you are mentioning.
What do you think such advice could be/is and the definition of finding such advice and to differentiating it from other advice which is still contextual?
My favorite bit of advice ever (poorly paraphrasing Nassim Nicholas Taleb): If you want to be rich or famous - meaning you want to succeed in a field with the potential for exponential growth but a low probability of a large payoff - your best strategy is to maximize your exposure to opportunities with scale potential.
That means: secure a basic level of subsistence that allows you to keep trying, then focus on repeated attempts at activities that can scale exponentially. Think of writing a book, building a SaaS product, or recording a song: things you can sell repeatedly at little or no additional cost, rather than selling your time or labor.
This is equally good advice for an aspiring Punjabi musician in the slums of Lahore and a hopeful software founder at Stanford.
Generally supportive of this blog post (with the caveat on "eat less" but that's addressed by another commenter). It addresses a pain point for me and I appreciate it. It's particularly painful for those of us who tend to be self-critical. No matter what some asshole is telling you you're doing it wrong. I wish people giving the advice would read this as well. I found the "say yes" vs "say no" thing in particular very funny and I'm surprised I never noticed it.
If I have to choose between hearing advice (which I can ignore), or not getting any advice at all, I’d much rather get the advice. I’ve ignored a lot of advice in my time, but every once in a while a diamond sneaks through, and often I get an idea or two for a different way of looking at things.
While mostly true, there is definitely such thing as advice fatigue and generally easy for our brains to conflate advice and criticism which can be detrimental in large doses from my experience. Not to say that it's bad to receive advice/criticism but it has to be ideally in the right dose and with the right intention.
You don't ask for advice to have someone else make your decisions for you, rather in the hope that you learn about options you didn't otherwise realize were open to you. You ask for advice to "get out of your head".
It may not be right for you, but you'll have made a better decision for having considered it.
There's a scale to this as well. When you take advice from something in a book, that isn't specific, its general and meant to appeal to many. When you take advice from a colleague or friend, its more specific, they know more about your context and situation, the advice fits better.
Everything OP said though still applies, figure it out for yourself.
“Best advice I heard was don’t listen.”
- Cousin Stizz
Don’t value the experiences of others over your own.
You’ll end up in a never ending loop of trying to change instead of working on your own path.
People largely don’t give a crap about you.
For myself I had to leave my hometown to be happy. And like that everything was easier. I had an amazing partner and a better commute.
You don’t need to validate yourself vs the opinions of others.
>Don’t value the experiences of others over your own.
Eh, this is kind of messy. There are some people that have lived objectively bad lives. Horrible parents, terrible abuse, no education, etc. These kinds of lives can easily lead to traps of "the world is shit, don't even try". Worse you've only ever been taught detrimental things, so your own advice/experience is bad.
Really easy to end up in generational traps this way.
Usually when I'm in a crappy situation, I try to pretend my best friend is in that situation, and I'll give him advice. Often helps me come up with good ideas and kinda strips away all the bs and excuses I'm telling myself. That being said, the more deeply held the excuses and bs are, the harder it is to actually do this.
We should distinguish between 1:many advice and 1:1 advice.
An interviewer is really asking "how do you recommend people replicate your success?" which grounds the response in the hard lessons that person learned on their own journey.
Personalized advice can be equally useless, but if that person really understands you and your situation you might be surprised how specific and valuable good objective feedback can be.
"good objective feedback" - right, I think advice in general is bad because it tries to bite size a complex system, that is society/humanity. Feedback is giving someone information they can act on, along with the rest of context they have of their situation. No need for you to know them deeply, just the interaction.
There are things that can work, and things that likely won't work, and most people know these. Then there is a space of things that usually work and things that may not work, and you can't fit these into a person without knowing a lot of variables about them and the environment around them, like what and who they know, their personality, their competence (not just their resume), and many, many other variables. So advice defaults to guessing most of these variables to find some direction.
And I think it boosts advisors' ego, makes advisees feel temporarily better, even motivated, but YMMV by a lot.
This is why the good advisors also change the variables in your favor, like introduce you to their network, coach, etc. And often this costs you something. Like money, equity, whatever.
In Buddhism/Taoism, it's said that teachings are like someone pointing at the moon: If you just look at their fingers, you'll not see the moon.
Or "playing the fiddle for a cow" (though we know some animals can appreciate music in some way)
The point being that advice depends on the listener's capacity to understand the intent of the advisor.
I guess that's where the saying "playing the flute in front of the water buffalo" comes from
When you want advice, ask for money.
When you want money, ask for advice.
> We trust confident people, even when they're wrong
I think this idea can be expanded on, and it is to separate the merits of the idea from the delivery of the idea. I see this frequently with: - neurodivergent people (of whatever variety) - ESL speakers - cultural clashes (eg Dutch / American meetings)
If you can separate delivery and the merits of a discussion, you can benefit both ways -- taking a skeptical view on the best pitches (eg from anyone on a Forbes 30 for 30 list) and an optimistic view on the worst.
This is especially appropriate for HN and other software engineering forums where embedded/systems, frontend, backend, imperitive, functional, etc programmers all constantly yell at each other about whether the elephant is a rope or a snake or a tree.
It's easy to think your experience encompasses all of "software" and give definitive advice to others who work in a vastly different space than you do.
(My analogy for this article only): Ideas gleaned from the article.
AIs do not have all the contexts about you thus provide you guidance not fit for you. Advisors are the same, they don't know everything about you thus not all advices fit for you.
You know about yourself the best (given you "reflect") and make trade-offs between what you know, and what you consider benficial to you.
As I always bring up about making tradeoffs in HN in my comments, the article is solid.
The X-factor of LLM AI advice is how it consists of both artificial and intelligent responses; It cannot cloud judgement by having feelings and will still think very carefully about your problem.
Most advice given by people unaffected by whatever comes out of whatever you do with the advice given is garbage (Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game).
Best advice I ever received was to learn to take good advice.
Still not sure how to do that...
Sadly no one wants the truth, so folks like Jobs and Cuban have to layer it with bromides. Truth is they're both giving the exact same advice, it's just that the honest version is deeply unpopular, because it implies that there is no secret sauce.
The advice is: Work very hard on something, and you too might get lucky.
Jobs' version is just slightly modified: Work very hard on something (you care about), and you too might get lucky.
Another variation of this: Advice is what the person giving it needs to hear for themself.
This is oddly evident in beginner influencers trying to become gurus on social media. They try to write life advice from a position of superiority, but when you look closely they’re given themselves a little pep talk about how they want to be or what they need to hear. It doesn’t mean the advice is wrong, but you can see through the illusion that you’re hearing sage advice from someone who figured it all out long ago.
Scott Alexander has a great post on this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any...
In other words: communication requires empathy.
some people are terrible at it and can only consider another person's experience through relating it to their own.
Is it just me, or is this just an ad with a headline that is trying to make common sense sound profound?
No support for the assertion in the title.
There is something related to meritocracy and sharing back in all these ideas. But i can't pinpoint extractly what is it....
> Mark Cuban says the opposite
In what way are they opposing thoughts? Steve Jobs said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. Mark Cuban also said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. The exact word choice may have differed, but they both expressed the exact same thing.
The mode is completely different. You have to twist Cuban’s words to make him say the same thing as Jobs. Because he didn’t say “find the thing you love” he said spend enough effort on what you’re doing until it becomes the thing you love. Jobs is about an actual search, which takes effort, for sure. Cuban is about transformation in place.
Not at all. Jobs is not implying that you should, like, jump from minimum wage job to minimum wage job until you find one you like. He is suggesting that if you put in effort, like learning deeply about something, that will close the gaps that are necessarily closed to find true love. Which is the same thing Cuban is saying.
Perhaps you can interpret Jobs' statement that way in a vacuum, but fortunately we don't need to evaluate what Jobs' said in a vacuum. He also said a lot of other things that allow us to build up context around his intent. He spoke a lot about how he found his love.