You're also in a society that focuses on getting things done. How about not getting things done and staying up late. Let's see if that article gets to the top of HN.
> you need to win the argument about how to think like a rational adult
I was watching the flat earther special on netflix last night and I was thinking, that although its ridiculous to believe in these things, society needs people who are distrustful and challenge science/popular consensus etc... thats also part of being a rational adult.
I use to believe fat was bad for me, I need orthotics for my feet, babies need to be bottle fed in sleep in a separate crib, I need to be on all sorts of medications instead of eating healthy etc... but thats just because I was butt owned by what societies consensus was.
I watched the same documentary. They go beyond skepticism into the denial of evidence before their very eyes.
They made a big to-do about purchasing a highly accurate gyroscope to be able to prove their assertions about the flatness of the world.
When their experiment blew up in their faces and confirmed everything they thought to be false, they simply moved on saying [to paraphrase]: we won't stop until we find proof that we're right. Then they followed through a number of other failed experiments (failed in their parlance == proving their theories wrong).
These are not skeptics, as it were. Now a mind that explored these experiments and changed their mind based on the evidence, sure. That said—they're mostly harmless.
That's not what these books were doing, though. They were actively promoting some pretty unhealthy, potentially very dangerous, methods on helpless children.
I totally agree with this. You should question if the world is actually a sphere (most people don't), but once your gyroscope says its not you should move on.
And we used to think Newton knew everything there was to know about gravity until Einstein proposed a new theory.
In the marketplace of ideas, some are going to be really, really bad, just like products. But over time they go out of business, just like the idea of witch trials or human sacrifice to appease the gods. It's just that for those of us that don't agree it seems to take forever because we already know it's a bad idea -- what's taking them so long?
The real problem is not the bad ideas themselves, but that when people think they know how to pick the good ideas from the bad ones and are OK silencing the bad ideas with force instead of debate. See: Galileo.
Society needs skeptics, this is true. But they need to be skeptics who value rational thinking, the scientific method, and peer-reviewed research.
It adds no value to society for someone to say "I don't trust the experts who have spent their lives studying this subject, and also I refuse to take the time to become an expert myself so that my opinion is an informed one."
Challenge science and popular consensus all you want, but do it with evidence and research, not with scare tactics and appeals to bias.
I'm a bit confused by the linked article. The only link to a study I found was to [1] published Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. The other study quoted is for some specific effects the article mentions. Any idea where the link between CYP1A2 and caffein comes from?
I wonder if the frequency of going to the Sauna was tied to the frequency of going to gym to workout? Here in Seattle that is basically the only place you can go to find a sauna.
The study was in Finland, where the sauna to population ratio is around 1:2. Also, the study claims to have adjusted for resting heart rate, which is a reasonable proxy for cardiovascular fitness:
In analysis adjusted for age, alcohol consumption, body mass index, systolic blood pressure, smoking status, Type 2 diabetes, previous myocardial infarction, resting heart rate and serum low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, compared with men with only 1 sauna bathing session per week, the HR for dementia was 0.78 (95% CI: 0.57–1.06) for 2–3 sauna bathing sessions per week and 0.34 (95% CI: 0.16–0.71) for 4–7 sauna bathing sessions per week. The corresponding HRs for Alzheimer's disease were 0.80 (95% CI: 0.53–1.20) and 0.35 (95% CI: 0.14–0.90).
Even in apartment buildings in Finland, each apartment is assigned sauna hours in the building's sauna. Sauna is truly a standard part of basic hygiene in Finland for most people. Living in a house/apartment without a sauna would truly be like living in a house/apartment with only a bathtub and no shower in the US. Sauna for many people is part of the evening bath/shower routine, not connected with workouts or other activities.
There is a sauna in nearly every house in Finland, and if not, then municipal swimming halls offer an affordable alternative which everyone can afford. No need to join it with heavy exercise. Also, going to a sauna does not signal a socioeconomic status.
It's amazing if Finland has solved poverty to the level that every household can afford to set aside the space for a sauna and costs of running it.
In the UK heat poverty is a widespread problem due to the costs of heating fuels. Presumably saunas are being run from geothermal sources to make it cheap enough??
I'm assuming saunas are cupboard sized, is that accurate or are all these homes dedicating a full room of space?
The prevalence of saunas in Finland is mainly because it has been a part of the Finnish way of life for thousands of years, not an exotic luxury in the way it might be perceived in some other countries.
Municipal facilities (swimming halls with saunas etc) are charged, probably about 4 euros per visit, with discounts for students and elderly.
The saunas people have in their homes these days are typically electric. Electricity prices are roughly the same, perhaps a bit less than UK - an hour of sauna with 4kw stove would probably cost around 0.5 euros in electricity. Some apartment blocks have shared saunas you can book for free, some have small saunas in each apartment. In detached houses you typically get a bit larger saunas.
In general access to saunas is widely available for everyone regardless of socioeconomic status, and there is less economic inequality in general compared to the UK.
Heating is a separate topic but I'll reply briefly - majority of housing in Finland is heated with district heating, rather than individual gas boilers in each house, like in the UK.
As a result, heating tends to be cheaper for consumers compared to the UK. Also, Finnish housing tends to be much better insulated than housing in the UK (because of colder winters).
Outside cities, where population is sparse, people heat their houses with electricity/wood/oil/geothermal - with many new builds now opting for geothermal.
Just a note about district heating: it's not majority of all housing (market share somewhere around 45 %), but it is majority of new housing (around 60 %).
And saunas are heated with electricity in towns, although a few old public facilities still run on wood stoves, as well as private saunas of those who like the "pure" feeling (such as myself).
> In the UK heat poverty is a widespread problem due to the costs of heating fuels.
I would imagine that he cost of the heating fuels is pretty much the same all over Europe. I think the difference is that in the Nordic countries people seem to insulate their houses better, like using double or even triple glasses in windows to reduce heat waste.
Yes, triple glass has been the norm for decades. You of course don't open the windows during the winter, and ventilation is almost always mechanical so that it can include heat recovery from the outbound air flow, allowing further savings in heating cost and emissions.
I would imagine that he cost of the heating fuels is pretty much the same all over Europe.
UK has 3.16 million hectares of woodland[1], Finland has 23 million hectares[2] of forest. UK population is 65 million, Finland has 5 million. [Wikipedia]
With 7 times more trees potentially providing fuel for 1/13th as many people, shouldn't it work out noticably cheaper?
I do not know, but if wood (or biomass) was noticeably cheaper than fossil fuels, I would think there was no need for climate agreements and there would be a large industry shipping wood from Canada and Siberia to use as a fuel.
Wikipedia says "The wood stove sauna is the most common type of sauna [in Finland] outside of the city areas".
In the context of "It's amazing if Finland has solved poverty to the level that every household can afford to set aside the space for a sauna and costs of running it.", and rural areas tend to be poorer than city areas, discussing wood as fuel for said saunas seems relevant.
The UK and Finland have very similar GDP per capita, but the UK is far more right wing than the Nordic countries have traditionally been, and as a result have a far less well developed benefits system and far larger salary differences. It's not that the Nordic countries have no poverty, but certainly the proportion of people who are absolutely destitute is much, lower.
Couple that with the higher housing costs associated with far higher population density (16 per km^2 in Finland vs. 255 per km^2 in the UK) and it seems less weird.
> It's amazing if Finland has solved poverty to the level that every household can afford to set aside the space for a sauna and costs of running it.
If you live in an apartment building, not every unit has a sauna--there is one shared across several units. If you live in a detached house, having a small sauna doesn't take up much space, and since it's so small and only used for an hour a day (if that), it's cheap to heat.
> In the UK heat poverty is a widespread problem due to the costs of heating fuels.
Based on my experiences in the UK, it's not heating fuel costs that's the problem, it's the sheer ubiquity of poorly insulated and air-sealed brick (and in Scotland, stone) houses with leaky single-pane sash windows.
> Here in Seattle that is basically the only place you can go to find a sauna.
Since this crappy cold weather hit I've found myself going to the gym nonstop just to dip in the jacuzzi... I don't know why most apartments in the PNW seem to not have one, maybe people up here don't like to swim as much as people in warmer climates?
Let's say there is a God, or a higher being running a simulation, it would then be completely rational at that point to then think that they could do highly improbable things (it's their simulation after all). Furthermore, with the story of Jesus turning water into wine as an example: Jesus claimed to be God, so its completely rational for us to believe that he could do something so trivial. If he couldn't do something like that, well then it would be obvious he was just a man.
Call me old fashioned, but I would rather be ignorant of my chances of cancer (even if showing me allows me to live longer). I know getting a high percentage would just cause me lots of anxiety throughout the rest of my life. I'm rather happy not knowing, living in peace, and dying sooner.
If I knew I was at "higher risk" for certain kinds of cancer (which BTW typically means, say, a 10-30% increase on some very small baseline risk, say 1 in 1,000 -- and for only a few cancer types), my reaction would be to make peace with it --
-- and to make a note to myself to get screened more often. So then (in the small chance) that it hits, I know I will have done everything possible to shield my loved ones from the shock of facing my imminent departure, when we could in fact be using the foreknowledge to stretch my relatively pain- and incapacitation-free interval out to its utter maximum.
Being as, whenever you've stared down that window in a loved one (and nearly everyone will at some point in their lives) -- the difference between 6 months versus 6 weeks (or something much smaller, depending on how the final phases play out) can make a huge -- sometimes life changing difference for those around you.
I suffer from severe hypochondria. If I did this test and found out I have a higher change of developing some kind of cancer, I don't think I would be able to sleep well again for the rest of my life.
