MayCaesar

I started running ultras 2 years ago. Prior to that I had been doing regular morning runs for nearly 20 years and my typical daily mileage was 3mi; I felt great and woke up every morning refreshed. However, in order to run ultras, I had to increase my weekly mileage considerably, and ever since I have been having trouble recovering from my runs.

Basically, whenever I run 5 or more miles twice in a row, or 10 or more miles at once, my legs remain sore for the next 2-3 days even if I do not leave my home. In practice it means that I always feel sore and drained, and every time I get outside to run, I have to put in serious mental effort to get started, and the runs are not very enjoyable. A c

Something I have noticed is that a lot of people routinely use emotional arguments in support of their position. Let me first clarify what I mean by this.

A logical argument is an argument with a coherent logical structure: it posits a set of assumptions and, through a series of logical steps, establishes a set of conclusions. For example: "If the total money supply increases, while the total money value stays constant, then the value of a given raw monetary amount decreases". The validity of this argument stems from basic properties of numbers which are taken as unspoken assumptions and are established in elementary school mathematics.

An emotional argument, on the other hand, is an a

Watching the recent Sam Harris' conversation with Lex Friedman on consciousness got me thinking about the nature of rights. In virtually all liberal (in the classical sense) philosophies conscious beings have rights, while unconscious ones do not. Hence, for example, a human has rights, a rock does not, and a cow may or may not have some limited rights.

The problem, however, is that science still has nothing to say about what determines consciousness. One of the popular theories, for example, suggests that consciousness arises in any system containing more than one particle - so even an atom consisting of multiple electrons, protons and neutrons is conscious. So is planet Mars. So is the An

In discussions of various issues affecting large numbers of people, almost always the concept of "power" is invoked at some point. Some people, the argument goes, have power over other people and, as such, get to control their lives, and those other people have no choice but to comply with the demands of the powerful.

In these discussions, something essential is lost: the idea that power has many different manifestations, and not all of them are necessarily comparable. Let us consider a few examples:

1. The dictator of North Korea has power over all North Korean residents.

2. A beautiful woman has power over a gentleman infatuated with her.

3. A band of highwaymen with swords and bows ha

It is very common to hear the following phrase in the modern political discourse: "It is no one else's business what two adults do in a bedroom". With the clear implication that the government should not regulate sex and reproduction in any way; that it is a private business of individuals.

Yet those same people, for some reason, do not apply this reasoning to many other types of private interaction between individuals. When I negotiate a job contract with a potential employer, it is exactly the same thing: two adults figuring out a private matter. Why is this anyone else's business but the two involved adults?

As such, I propose a better, more comprehensive slogan:

"It is no one else's

Something strange is happening in the US politics: it seems that people are completely giving up standing for something, and instead increasingly often choose to stand for someone. They select a "tribe" to belong to, and then tweak their views based on the actions of and changes within that tribe.

Here is the most recent example. When Trump's term as president began and he started issuing large numbers of executive orders, a lot of people in the Democratic party were accusing him of abusing his powers and introducing authoritarianism into the executive branch - and they were absolutely right. Now, however, on the very first day of his presidency Biden, a Democrat, introduces 17 exec

This is going to be a bit of a philosophical post, but I hope that for someone this will be a valuable insight into how intellectual-minded people often think.

Having spent over a decade in academia, the primary "breeding ground" of intellectuals, in multiple very different countries, I have noticed some interesting patterns in how people produced in that environment tend to think. One of the interesting patterns which, in my opinion, explains largely why intellectuals tend to be so authoritarian and state-loving in their political views, is their adoration of sophistication. They do not like simple solutions, simple systems, simple rules. They tend to believe that, to achieve a great outco

I have gotten to live in multiple different societies over my so far short life, and I have observed something interesting. It appears that every society has certain predominant ideas that are so ingrained in their culture, that the attempt to ever challenge them does not even enter their minds. It is not that they believe that these ideas are right and can explain why they are right; it is that they believe these ideas to be so obvious, that they do not even need to be explained.

The ideas change from society to society, but certain ideas appear to be fairly universally accepted. Take the idea of taxation, for example. While there are several countries that do not feature, say, personal in

Here is something I have always had a problem with: the concept of "trespassing" on government property. I can somewhat understand this concept applied to specific context - say, it is reasonable to not let random people into the White House, which is essentially a residence of the president and his/her stuff. However, it seems that nowadays governments around the world arbitrarily declare any lands they "own" to be closed for public.

I am an avid low-budget traveler, often staying for the night in my car on highway Rest Areas during my trips. On my last trip to Everglades I stayed on a Service Plaza in Miami (Service Plazas are essentially fancier Rest Areas, featuring some shopping opport

Suppose we have a sequence of non-negative valued functions f_n converging to some function f almost everywhere on some set, and both all f_n and f are Lebesgue-integrable on that set. Egorov's theorem allows us to split the set into two smaller sets, one of which has a measure no larger than delta for any delta>0, and on the other sequence f_n has uniform convergence.

I am interested in the Lebesgue integral of each f_n over the first set. Suppose I build a sequence of deltas: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, ..., 1/2^k, ... For each such delta I build a set of measure no larger than delta and calculate the Lebesgue integral over it. Then I take the limit of the integral as k -> infinity. Since,

Hi guys,

I have been stuck on the following graduate-level probability theory homework problem for days:

Let X be a random variable taking values 0,1,2,3,..., with expectation and variance equal to the real number C>0. Find the lowest upper bound on the probability P(X>=A) you can, where A>C is a natural number.

I can easily get the lowest upper bound possible in case when X takes arbitrary real values by applying one-sided Chebyshev's inequality; it can be shown that the resulting inequality is tight. However, the professor hinted at the possibility to improve this estimate by using the fact that X takes only non-negative integer values.

I've tried everything I can to i

Statists tend to view every economical interaction as, to some degree, a zero-sum game: one party wins, another party loses. Even in cases when both parties obviously win from the interaction, there is still a struggle between the parties over which party wins more. This is seen as undesirable, especially in light of the (questionable) idea that one party typically has a stronger bargaining position than the other party.

This view ignores the fact that the parties need each other and can only win by benefiting each other, otherwise they would not be interacting in the first place. But this is not what I would like to talk about here. There is another, darker side of this view and proposals

Hi everyone,

After a series of bad financial decisions (before I even heard of FIRE, let alone decided to follow it), I decided to pay off my debts almost by any means necessary and start saving money fanatically. I am currently approximately $30k in debt, with a ~$2.5k monthly net income, in grad school. I am an extremely frugal person now, but I was not 2 years ago when I got myself into this mess. The debt is spread across the car loan, personal loan, credit cards and the money I owe to my mother; no student loans.

Here is the situation. I am currently living at my family friends' house who are thrilled to have me. While living here, my savings rate (or, rather, the debt payoff rate) i

Do you often feel that you are speaking a different language when it comes to economics and politics than many other people?

I find that one of the problems with promoting libertarian ideals is the corruption of language in the mainstream economics and politics, leading to people being confused about the meaning of the most basic terms. For example, I recently had a discussion with overall a fairly reasonable intellectual who, however, kept insisting that capitalism cannot exist without coercion. While dancing around the issue, it seemed to me that fundamentally his position was that "private property is coercion", because lack of coercion would imply that anyone can take any piece of prope

Hi guys,

I am a new full-time RV'er, having no idea what I'm doing yet, but trying to learn gradually. I am a PhD student at University of Maryland - but, since the classes in the upcoming semester are going to be fully online, I do not have to live there. I have decided to use this opportunity to live elsewhere, primarily boondocking in forests and parks near large cities.

I am going to be spending the next several months near Rapid City in South Dakota, where I have rented a mailbox for 6 months. My understanding is, South Dakota is one of the three states in which a mailbox address can serve as a permanent address for identification purposes; you only need to rent a place at a campgroun