An assessment of the Paleo Diet

Nothing too new for people already familiar with the Paleo or other low-carb diets and their supposed benefits, but this survey of the low-carb diet trend is a good 10,000 foot flyover.

In the midst of all the claims and counterclaims, there is a single clear piece of common ground. Experts of every stripe ask dieters to avoid refined sugars and grains. ‘Losing body weight on a plant-based diet is much less likely to occur if the diet includes too many refined carbohydrates,’ writes Cornell’s T. Colin Campbell in his book, The China Study , based in part on his Cornell-Oxford-China study research. Esselstyn instructs his dieters to consume only whole-grain products and avoid fruit juice. And McDougall urges his readers to eat complex carbohydrates instead of refined sugars and flours.

In essence, these scientists and doctors are recommending an Atkins diet that replaces the meat and fat with plants and certain complex (but never refined) carbohydrates.

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It’s also safe to say that carbohydrates as we eat them today are indeed ‘unnatural’ for us. Even though our Paleolithic ancestors almost certainly enjoyed occasional treats of honey, they weren’t having Entenmann’s crumb coffee cake for breakfast; the technology to refine grains just wasn't available then. It’s likely that our bodies are not well-suited for such a regimen, either.

So Paleo dieters might be right – we could be more evolutionarily in tune with a diet like that of our ancestors, which almost certainly includes fewer refined carbs. We can’t say, based on today’s evidence, that carbs are the root cause of all our chronic ailments, but scientific evidence suggests that we might stay healthier if we take flour and added sugar off our plates. Still, human nature is a moving target. Cookie by cookie, we might be forging humanity into new evolutionary territory, re‑shaping our genes to handle our new dietary indulgences. Along the way, we will undoubtedly ease our problems with new medicines, technologies and lifestyle adaptations – the supine lifestyle depicted in the 2008 film WALL-E comes to mind. But we will undoubtedly have a smoother road ahead if we change our dietary ways, instead of letting our dietary ways change us.
 

Less sugar, less refined carbs, sure. But I don't think our paleolithic ancestors had wine or beer, either, and that's a problem for me. After a long day persistence hunting a saber-toothed tiger or wooly mammoth or whatever it was they were chasing, I think my ancient brethren would've appreciated a glass of the good stuff.

Life of a condom

When MetroCard meets GameStop PowerUp Card Jordi Hirschfeld, he looks at me and says, No wonder Jordi Hirschfeld not yet use you. I become confused. Use me for what?

That night, MetroCard tells me many strange things about myself. At first, I do not believe what he says. But he insists all is true. When I start to panic, he laughs. He says, What did you think you were for? I am too embarrassed to admit truth, which is that I thought I was balloon.
 

Simon Rich, son of Frank Rich, is one of my favorite humorists. I wrote here about his great four-part comedic story “Sell Out” a while ago (you can start with Part One), and another of his comic masterpieces “Guy Walks Into Bar” has been atop The New Yorker's Most Popular list for much of the time since they opened their archives for the summer.

The excerpt above is from his short “Unprotected: Life of a condom.” It reminds me of this Google commercial.

The state of the romantic comedy

Richard Brody, perhaps the most interesting film critic working now (ironically he is relegated almost entirely to the online blog or Talk About Town sections of The New Yorker while colleagues David Denby and Anthony Lane split the weekly movie reviews), discusses romantic comedies with an aside on the new movie Sex Tape.

The modern romantic comedy is stretched on the rack of a dichotomy, one that I wrote about here a few years ago: the possibility of a polar disconnect between love and desire, between a meeting of the minds and a connection of the bodies. The classic romance, whether comic or tragic, is built on desire igniting a conflict that has to be resolved for a relationship to grow; modern romance is based on the premise of emotional and intellectual compatibility, the effort to kindle the sparks of love from friendship.
 

From the article linked in that excerpt:

In our time, the problem isn’t finding a reason to act on attraction (though Eric Rohmer has given us plenty of reasons not to), it’s whether there’s a point to having a relationship afterwards—it isn’t getting together but staying together. We’re forthright enough about desire to distinguish it from the many other things that life is made of; it’s necessary but not sufficient. The twist of “Knocked Up” is that desire quickly yields to practicalities; the terrible pathos of “Funny People” is that fierce mutual desire turns out not to be enough. The title of “The Royal Tenenbaums” could be (with apologies to Hal Hartley) “Surviving Desire.” What makes modern romance complicated is that our expectations are surprisingly high—they take in desire and four-syllable words, a meeting of the minds as well as an erotic charge. And the wisdom of our modern-day romantics, whether Judd Apatow or Wes Anderson or Noah Baumbach or James Gray or Peyton Reed, is not Hitchcock’s but Joe E. Brown’s (rather, Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond’s): “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
 

The increased expectations for marriage is a topic I've covered here before:

• Esther Perel on infidelity
• Marriage is now all or nothing
• Hedonic marriage
   

Our expectations of our spouses have been lifted to new heights, and it's only natural that the romantic comedy would start to reflect that.

Incidentally, Grantland spent all of last week on romantic comedies, and a related piece of note is Wesley Morris' essay Knocked Out: Have romantic comedies become obsolete?

The downside of telecommuting

Robin Hanson on why telecommuting hasn't become more prevalent:

The standard proximate cause, described in the quote above, is that workers and their bosses get a lot of detailed emotional info via frequent in-person meetings. Such detailed emotional info can help to build stronger feelings of mutual trust and affiliation. But the key question is, why are firms willing to pay so much for that? How does it help firm productivity enough to pay for its huge costs?

My guess: frequent detailed emotional info helps political coalitions, even if not firms. Being able to read detailed loyalty signals is central to maintaining political coalitions. The strongest coalitions take over firms and push policies that help them resist their rivals. If a firm part adopted local policies that weakened the abilities of locals to play politics, that part would be taken over by coalitions from other parts of the firm, who would then push for policies that help them. A lack of telecommuting is only one of a long list of examples of inefficient firm policies than can be reasonably be attributed to coalition politics.

Minecraft as platform

Fun appreciation of Minecraft by Robin Sloan.

To play, you must seek information elsewhere.

Was it a conscious decision? A strategic bit of design? I don’t know. Maybe Markus Persson always intended to create an in-game tutorial but never got around to it. If so: lucky him, and lucky us, because by requiring the secret knowledge to be stored, and sought, elsewhere, he laid the foundation for Minecraft’s true form.

Minecraft-the-game, maintained in Sweden by Persson’s small studio, is just the seed, or maybe the soil. The true Minecraft (no italics, for we are speaking of something larger now) is the game plus the sprawling network of tutorials, wikis, galleries, videos—seriously, search for “minecraft” on YouTube and be amazed—mods, forum threads, and more. The true Minecraft is the oral tradition: secrets and rumors shared in chat rooms, across cafeteria tables, between block-faced players inside the game itself.
 

When I first started working on the Amazon Web Services team in 2003, one of the things Jeff Bezos hammered home to us was the importance of building everything at the most atomic level possible so they could be reassembled in ways unimaginable even to us. I had lunch with him once and we were talking about our interests outside of work, and he mentioned his love of this book Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand. The book discusses, among other things, how complex things can be built if you have the right building blocks, and one of the most important attributes of those building blocks was that they be defined as simply and atomically as possible.

So, for example, when we discussed a payment web service, Jeff didn't want a security layer built in. That was something separate from the core of an atomic payments service which should just be about sending and receiving money. 

I have not played Minecraft before, but Sloan's article gives me the sense it has that same atomic nature that characterizes generative platforms for really creative work.

My favorite networked services all have that quality, but capturing value from these building blocks in the form of revenue is a trickier problem and often involves building products and services on top of that very platform.

One of my favorite and most beautifully atomic building blocks of the web, Twitter, is grappling with that same issue. I've been meaning to share some thoughts on some possible ways forward for Twitter because the possibilities are fun to contemplate and it's a service I really love. That's a subject for another post, but suffice it to say that they have huge potential given their elegant architecture, and that can be both a blessing and a curse as some Chinese proverb goes.