Coffeedy, Conjectures: Aged Water Coffee Brewing

And now, here's another installment of "Coffeedy, Conjectures" (hat tip to @WhatBrett for naming this Series):

m=1 My-thology: Drinking water contains halogens (chlorine and fluorine). These halogens can displace iodine in our bodies, which could cause thyroid malfunctions, among other things (*see Marc Simonson's Meta-Rule). Making coffee/espresso helps filter water to reduce poison levels to some extent. Letting water sit out and "vent"--that is, aging water--allows some toxins to evaporate, breakdown, or be degraded by micro-organisms. Thus, aging water by filling your coffee/espresso machine container the night before morning intake, or right after making a batch in preparation for the next brewing (hat tip to @ernoj for the keen suggestions), could combine these hypotheses synergistically/constructively to reduce the toxicity of these fluids most effectively. Moreover, you could also go another step further and try to incorporate fermentation into this process as well, since we know that fermentation degrades potentially dangerous molecules to some extent in many cases.

n=1 Self-Experiment: Serendipitously (that's how medical breakthroughs happen), after a few consecutive days of sipping on some glasses of water that had sat out on my counter for several hours, I noticed that aged water tastes less "plasticy" (newly-poured water had a plastic-like flavor once I had an aged-water baseline for comparison). This made me think of spas and hotels that put pitchers of water out with citrus fruits sitting in the containers: this ages the water and allows the citrus fruit compounds to interact with the mixture's components. So, after consulting with my self-experimentation mentor, Seth Roberts, I conducted a simple Patient of One clinical trial: I did a taste test (I trust my taste buds) of newly-poured water versus aged water, making sure to drink them in identical cups and at the same temperature. Net Result: I could taste the difference remarkably well; the plastic-like flavor dissipated noticeably in the aged water batches (aging times were several hours). The results from my experiment suggest that continuing to tinker with aged water might be beneficial to my health. I suspect that, as long as I do not leave the water out for too long--pools of water become health hazards in time--there is little, if any, downside risk to aging fluids a bit and continuing this practice where possible.

So, starting tonight, I will fill my drip coffee maker with water before going to sleep, and then I will rise tomorrow morning and brew my coffee with aged water.

Just to see what happens.

Any cheap health option in toxin/poison avoidance therapy seems worth considering, minimally.

Notably, most toothpastes contain fluorine compounds (and gluten, by the way), and Splenda contains some active bromine atoms too: both are likely culprits in the iodine displacement risk category.

Hedge your bets.

And make some Qualitative (or Quantitative) Self Meta-Rules in the process.

Because "[t]he goal isn’t to figure out something about human beings generally but to discover something about yourself. Their validity may be narrow, but it is beautifully relevant." (hat tips to Navanit Arakeri and Dave Lull)

By respecting the problem of induction and deducing things independently, we, paradoxically, position ourselves to avoid being generally wrong because convergent evolution (homoplasy) of meta-rules bubbles up shared parallel solutions to ecological niche challenges, allowing the validity of those conclusions to generalize more effectively to various domains.

Always translate and transfer domain-specific knowledge cautiously; wisdom is knowing how to accomplish this art in practice safely.

To good health,

Brent

GPA 2010: Rich Callahan of USC

(Above: Highlights from Professor Callahan's presentation; hat tip to Brian Geremia for video editing.)

Rich Callahan of the University of Southern California (USC) spoke to our students at Game Plan Academy (GPA) this past Sunday. He did a great job; he was gracious and supportive as always.

All the mentors at GPA are simply volunteering their collective time and energy to create a fractal program that can inspire and assist low-income students by providing them with free resources that they normally would not have access to (SAT/ACT prep/tutoring, personal statement editing, motivational speakers, college counseling, professional athletic training, etc.).

As a former student-athlete myself, I can attest to the powerfully positive role that sports can play in human development when the right mentors support kids warmly and respectfully.

To good health,

Brent

Game Plan Academy (GPA): Game Time!

(Above: Alex Van Dyke shares his professional wisdom)

Game Plan Academy (GPA) opened camp this past Sunday.

GPA is awesome.

Check out the Sacramento Press article here:

"Game Plan Academy opens second season" by Nick Houser

It's all about localism: we're local animals living in an increasingly global world.

Social innovation locally is what excites me personally.

That's why Brian Geremia and I have been thinkering with Ancestry.

Here are students working in the classroom:

Here is the ancestrally-fit Gio Carmazzi mentoring players:

Feel free to Chip-In:

All support is much appreciated (& tax deductible, of course).

To good health,

Brent

Self-Experimentation with Meta-Rules: Quality of Knowledge & the Justificationist Addiction

Nassim Taleb talks about epistemic humility in terms of quality of knowledge. Jerome Groopman, in parallel, shares a similar theme by asserting that knowledge does not translate directly into wisdom.

And it's wisdom that we're seeking, ultimately.

That's why I wrote about Black Swan Logic for n=1 Health.

Knowledge is just a (necessary, but not sufficient) stepping stone in between.

So, when it comes to assessing quality of knowledge, interdisciplinary inquiries in philosophy of science seem potentially useful for informing how we structure and interact with our daily self-experiments; our daily living. Personally, these inquiries have led me to think that self-experimenting with meta-rule formation is one potential way to accomplish a few goals at once, to "kill two (or more) birds with one stone," as they say:

1) Reflecting on quality of knowledge

2) Structuring our experiences as clinical trials

3) Creating feedback systems to observe and capture results

4) Integrating personal data effectively

5) Acting on lessons learned from living

Because we are all scientists in our own way. Whether or not we frame our lives in that fashion matters less to the universe than it does to us: Personally, I find value in viewing living as self-experimenting, as testing my m=1 story-telling empirically through my experiences, creating vibrant interactions with my constantly-updating and evolving narratives, myths, intuitions, and heuristic habits.

Epistemology, as the study of knowledge, requires conjectures (hypotheses / ideas / theories / stories / mythologies / concepts / et al.) for testing; and, at the margin, anything can serve as a source of suggestions. And anyone can test these suggestions; not just people with the word "scientist" in their formal titles. Titles matter little to reality; reality just reacts accordingly. Luckily, Seth Roberts has advanced this field immensely, and he regularly highlights three keys to self-experimenting successfully:

1) The subject-matter knowledge of insiders

2) The freedom of outsiders

3) The motivation of someone with the problem

Motivations matter. For instance, I fit these three descriptors when it came to my chronic migraines and sinus infections: I cured myself nutritionally ... eventually. But it wasn't easy. I had to falsify a lot of theories painfully before emerging on the other side of this opaque tunnel safely. While trying to escape the darkness of this epistemological tunnel, "experts" both misled (deceived) and helped (nudged) me, but regardless of the knowledge source, I was still left to sort it all out for myself, on my own terms, with my own devices.

Recently, a perceptive reader of my blog, Marc Simonson (who has been self-experimenting with Ancestral Health for over fifty years), emailed me with a thread that I feel captures all these concepts magnificently (and concretely, more importantly).

HISTORY HAS SHOWN THAT, WORLDWIDE, MANY PEOPLE FOR MANY CENTURIES HAVE KNOWN THAT IF THEY FERMENT FOODS, THEY ARE BETTER ABLE TO DIGEST AND ASSIMILATE THEIR NUTRIENTS.

SO, IS IT NOT LOGICAL TO THINK THAT THOSE FOOD FERMENTING ORGANISMS CAN PRODUCE NEUTRALIZING / INHIBITING SUBSTANCES AGAINST FOOD ANTINUTRIENTS ... JUST LIKE ORGANISMS ROUTINELY PRODUCE THEM AGAINST ANTIBIOTICS? I THINK YES.

DO YOU THINK YOU CAN FIND OUT IF ANY RESEARCH STUDIES HAVE BEEN DONE ON THIS SUBJECT, AND IF YES, LET ME KNOW WHAT THE RESULTS ARE? AND, IF THERE ARE NO RESEARCH STUDIES ON THIS SUBJECT, WOULDN'T IT BE A GOOD SUBJECT FOR THE ANCESTRAL HEALTH SYMPOSIUM FOLKS TO PURSUE BEFORE THE ACTUAL EVENT?

Clearly, this cuts right to the core of what self-experimentation with meta-rules for m=1/n=1 Ancestral Health is all about. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Here is my response:

Yes, it is well known that fermentation reduces the toxicity of many compounds. I eat Greek yogurt for this reason; it's like a universal condiment in my nutritional bricolage schema.

I could send you research studies, but do you really need epidemiology to justify to yourself this reality? You have access to the best experiment: your own body experience.

I would trust those results--if you have not falsified your conjecture, keep thinkering with it and observing closely.

That's how I like to operate.

Though it's always fun to read the research literature, and I enjoy that form of inquiry immensely, when it comes to quality of knowledge and avoiding the Justificationist Addiction, I always place more weight in what my body tells me.

With this groundwork in place, I decided to create this post as the permanent list of Meta-Rules that I will use to catalogue and archive all the aphorisms that I utilize and that others share with me, giving credit to the author of each (hat tip to Navanit Arakeri for suggesting this forum format):

Meta-Rules are simply rules for making 'rules to live by':

~Don't consume anything that causes negative physiological responses, such as excessive mucous production. - Brent Pottenger

~You can't eat a bunch of peanut butter and then take a bunch of fish oil to cancel it out. - Melissa McEwen

~Don't forget to stay mentally and physically flexible. - Marc Simonson

~A 'Paleo' cupcake is still a cupcake. - Melissa McEwan

~Don't consume anything that causes allergic reactions. - Brent Pottenger

• How? "Start with the next Meta-Rule by Chris, then also consider other allergy indicators like itchiness, swelling, inflammation, redness, irritability, and skin bumps." - Brent Pottenger

~Don't eat or drink anything that makes you sneeze. - Chris

~Don't consume anything that leads to a bad aftertaste. - Brent Pottenger

~Don't omit daily setting of your circadian rhythm; it is the starting point to optimum health. - Marc Simonson

• How? "On cloudy days, stay indoors in rooms with lights that give off UVA, UVB, and blue light. Also, install these full spectrum lights in your bathrooms and in your kitchen since this is where you most likely will spend the first part of your day. Then, on the way to work, open up the car windows to let in the UVA and UVB light ... and some fresh air!" - Marc Simonson

~More "flow" of body fluids and nerve impulses equals less cellular entropy. Less "flow" of body fluids and nerve impulses equals more cellular entropy. So, get those body juices flowing! Or, better said, DON'T let those body fluids stagnate! - Marc Simonson

~Don't expend energy in ways that make you feel chronically sore. - Brent Pottenger

~Never become dogmatic; we are still learning. - Sarah-Ann

~Don't consume seafood that tastes/smells overly fishy. Wait until you aren't repulsed by the fishiness any longer to commence consumption again (mercury poisoning avoidance). - Brent Pottenger

~Don't become a Thanksgiving Turkey (i.e. Minimize your exposure to negative Black Swan hits). - Aaron Blaisdell

~Don't consume anything that makes your face look puffy (inflammation avoidance). - Brent Pottenger

• How? "Look in the mirror after consuming meals and see what the results say. I suspect excessive beer consumption is one of the worst culprits on this front. I drink very little EtOH." - Brent Pottenger

~Suspect any conclusion that runs against Evolutionary Logic. - Miki

• How? "Black Swan Logic for n=1 Health." - Brent Pottenger

~Don't expend energy in ways that make your lower back ache (injury avoidance). - Brent Pottenger

~Don't ignore your daily circadian rhythm energy cycle requirements: eat like a king in the morning (for work & non-work energy); ... a prince in the afternoon (for work & non-work energy); ... and a pauper in the evening (for non-work energy). - Marc Simonson

~Don't go more than a week without consuming some type of fermented food. - Brent Pottenger

~Don't let negative communications and circumstances become your own, as they might become negative self-fulfilling prophecies. - Marc Simonson

~Don't go more than five days without doing one upside-down exercise. - Brent Pottenger

~Don't push your body too far out of its homeostatic norm; competition-level conditioning cannot be maintained for a lifetime. - Marc Simonson

~Don't consume anything that destabilizes your mood or degrades your energy levels. - Brent Pottenger

~Don't consume any (or minimize consumption of) foods or liquids that contain chlorine, fluorine, or bromine; they can damage your thyroid by replacing its iodine. - Marc Simonson

• How? "Coffeedy, Conjectures: Aged Water Coffee Brewing." - Brent Pottenger

~Never go anywhere unprepared. - Aaron Blaisdell

~Never go anywhere overprepared. - Aaron Blaisdell

~When earthly opportunities come into my life that I might want, I ask God, "Please don't let me have this, if it is not good for me; and, please let it happen, if it is good for me." - Marc Simonson

~Don't expend energy in non-Power-Law ways for too long (linearity avoidance). - Brent Pottenger

~Don't limit your supply of fresh air while awake or sleeping. You need the oxygen for cellular repair and recovery. - Marc Simonson

~Don't move non-fractally (non-musically) repetitively. - Brent Pottenger

~Don't let either your analytical or creative/artistic/aesthetic mental activities dominate the other; take time each day to engage both of these capacities in functional exercise to maintain balance between them. - Marc Simonson

• How? "I try to do some activity in my garden each day and put my hands in the dirt. It does me good. I also try to listen to some good music each day." - Marc Simonson

~Don't practice skeptical empiricism without simultaneously knowing where your faith is. - Brent Pottenger

~Don't overreact to life's situations. - Marc Simonson

• How? "Rate things that come up in life on a scale from 1 to 10 before making a decision or acting: 1 being the least important and 10 being the most important. It is amazing how this helps to sort out priorities."

~Don't experiment with more than one variable [at once]. - Jake A

~Don't sleep with the light on. - Chris

~Don't eat or drink anything your grandmother would not recognize. - Anonymous, adapted by Brent Pottenger

~A computer needs electrons to work properly, and a body needs photons to work properly. - Marc Simonson

• How? See Chris' Meta-Rule directly below ...

~Never spend less than two hours outdoors in nature per week. - Chris

~Don't let a week pass without breaking a sweat at least once. - Brent Pottenger

~Don't ignore the importance of your body's pH (acid - base) balance; it is vital to your survival. - Marc Simonson

~Don't think naively that plants are your friendly food friends; they've evolved as immobile creatures with toxin-laden tissues for protection against herbivory. - Brent Pottenger

~Let food be thy medicine. - Tom Woodard (reiterated via Hippocrates)

~Don't disrespect the spirit of The Ten Commandments. - Brent Pottenger

~You can change the location of your body (genes) all over the planet (i.e. by traveling), but you cannot change the diet that your genes evolved on ancestrally. - Marc Simonson

~Don't forget that some stressors happen once per hour, others once per day, some once per month, with a few occurring just once per year (or less). - Brent Pottenger (adapted from @NNTaleb)

~Don't neglect to help your friendly intestinal bacteria / micro-organisms thrive ... they are your closest allies in health. - Marc Simonson

~Never let a week pass without one intermittent fast. - Brent Pottenger

~Let health, not appearance, be your motive; let wisdom, not knowledge, be your guide. - Rick

~Remember that biological systems almost always involve conflicts, tradeoffs, and compromises between conflicting factors; there is no perfection to reach. - Matthew

~Experiment on yourself conservatively. - VMary

~Don't disrespect your ancestry. - Brent Pottenger

~Once you get the idea of Ancestral living, don't spend too much time on the Internet reading about it. - Pieter D

*Email me or leave a comment to add your rules here! - Author TBA ...

This is a live, evolving list; catalogue and share your meta-rules openly.

I'll keep updating this list of rules as we progress. I've composed these statements--grace nudges like Mark Sisson's excellent Primal Laws or Kurt Harris' wonderful 12 Steps--as 'Negative Advice' because I think this is more empowering and respectful than is positive advice: it clips away what not to do, allowing what to do to be left up to you. It's reflective of the 'Asymmetry of Uncertainty': we know what is bad for us much more certainly than we know what is good for us. Be creative with this leeway.

Also, I am adding "How?" entries under some of the Meta-Rules. These will hopefully help illustrate how individuals are applying Meta-Rules in practice to deduce 'rules to live by' based upon higher-level conceptions and intuitions. Feel free to share your "How?" entries too.

Because sometimes asking "How?" is better than asking "Why?" (hat tip to Patrick Vlaskovits for his excellent essay).

Whenever you are assessing quality of knowledge and sense the Justificationist Addiction rearing its head, maybe you can say: "Let's simply capture that notion as a meta-rule, analyze it for its merits, and then, potentially, test it in our own unique ways."

To me, this underpins something that I've learned from Dave Lull, my deductivist mentor: Never practice skeptical empiricism without conscientious self-awareness of your faith. The limits of knowledge are far too vast to live any other way.

That's at least my take.

Because so many times I've realized that I simply had the wrong map in the first place.

Negative empiricism just may win the day.

Meta-Rule away!

To good health,

Brent

Episode II: Dr. Swan & Dr. DJ meet Dr. Camp(bell)

Episode II: Welcoming Dr. Camp(bell) ...

(Dr. Swan and Dr. DJ leave the coffee shop and start walking down the block to their favorite trailhead. It's here, serendipitously, that they run into another person wearing Vibram Five-Fingers shoes.)

Dr. DJ: "Look; he's wearing Vibrams too. Are those the new Treks? I wonder if he reads Mark's blog daily like we do?"

Dr. Swan: "That's a telltale sign; I bet he does. Let's find out."

(Dr. Swan walks over and introduces himself; he, of course, asks, "Are those the new Treks?" as the icebreaker question.)

Dr. Camp(bell): "Yeah; they're great for trekking, no pun intended. What are you guys up to? By the way, my name is Camp. Some call me Dr. Camp(bell), but you can just call me Camp."

Dr. DJ: "Pleased to meet you, Camp. I am DJ, and this is Swan. Just don't ruffle his feathers. Just kidding. Swan and I were just about to hit the trail for a walk/run 'persistence hunt'. We're hungry, but not for food like our evolutionary ancestors were--we're simply seeking enjoyment. Want to join the fun?"

Dr. Camp(bell): "Interesting; do you always frame your exercise activities with stories about mimicking ancestors of the past?"

Dr. DJ: "Not always, but I have been recently, and I usually find that it helps me avoid repetitive drudgery when it comes to working out. In finance parlance, it's like venture capital startup funding that helps me get over the inertia hump and build some early momentum for operating. It helps get me going and playing."

Dr. Camp(bell): "That's a new conception to me. I've spent a good deal of time immersed in how stories shape people's lives in remarkable ways, but this seems like an angle that I have not considered before. What about diet--do you guys apply a similar reference frame to consider what you should and should not eat?"

Dr. Swan: "Personally, I take a meta-rules approach when it comes to health affairs because who am I to tell you what you should and should not do? That doesn't seem very respectful of individual liberty and biochemical individuality, let alone cultural diversity, to me. I will nudge you gracefully though. Philosophically, I am more interested in avoiding being generally wrong than I am in being specifically right. I think science should empower people to solve problems on their own terms. To this end, I do think that studying what our ancestors did should be the default perspective for inquiry when it comes to these things. That's the most logical principle to me because I know that evolution shaped my physiology over the course of my extensive heritage, so I place a lot of faith in trusting what my body tells me today because there's the wisdom of a lineage embedded inside me that I want to respect and foster effectively."

Dr. Camp(bell): "Meta-rules like what?"

Dr. Swan: "Well, the best I can do is share with you my personal list; it's a work-in-progress, like everything that I do. Since I worry a lot about the problem of induction, I don't know how well my lessons learned from experience will translate to you, but the best I can do is be open about subjectivity and simply tell you what does and does not work for me, what general rules I use to make decisions, and where I am willing to make a stand and test my faith."

Dr. Camp(bell): "I can understand that. I have kindred feelings when it comes to personal mythology. As big-brained animals, we walk around all day talking to ourselves internally. These conversations are the stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of and cope with the world around us. All this mumbo jumbo aggregates and interacts to form some form of complex individual narrative that helps us navigate our local ecological niches, for better or worse."

Dr. DJ: "That sounds pretty academic ... and insightful. What's your background?"

Dr. Camp(bell): "I'm proudly trained in the Jesuit tradition. The Jesuits build introspection and reflection into their pedagogy. I benefited from it immensely; it has helped me create my own mythological foundation for my spirituality."

Dr. Swan: "Awesome. I too have benefitted immensely from a Jesuit education. Funny that you mention reflection and introspection. I happen to think a lot about the statistics of individuals when it comes to medicine and healthcare. In fact, I like to refer to self-experimentation as buying and selling 'cheap health options' approaches to personal healing. I see room for creating and communicating ways--I call them execution frameworks--to help people be more reflective and introspective about their own health experiences to restore, maintain, and enhance their health states on their own terms. Which gets me back to the diet thing. If the goal of health science is to equip patients with tools to set their own physiologies free, then I suspect that we need meta-rules so that we can structure our self-experiments in ways that maximize learning from our trial-and-error failures. It's also a way to support good habit formation since we continually test our beliefs this way, subjecting our theories and hypotheses to empirical scrutiny.

Here's what my current meta-rules draft looks like, take it or leave it:

1) Don't consume anything that causes a negative physiological reaction.

2) Don't expend energy in a way that causes (correlates strongly with) chronic soreness.

3) Don't eat or drink anything that causes excessive mucous production.

4) Don't exercise in ways that cause knee and back soreness for more than three days.

5) Don't consume anything that causes allergic reactions.

6) Don't consume anything that causes bad aftertaste.

7) Don't move in ways that degrade your posture.

8) Don't consume anything that destabilizes your mood and/or energy levels.

9) Don't consume marine food that smells/tastes fishy, in a repulsive way.

That last one is my heuristic for avoiding mercury poisoning. I simply wait until the fishiness recedes and then commence seafood intake again."

Dr. DJ: "I only have two meta-rules presently: 'Don't move in non-musical (non-fractal) ways for too long' and 'Don't eat food that your grandmother wouldn't recognize'. Seems to work pretty well for me. As Swan knows, I like to keep things pretty simple and spend the rest of my time playing my guitar and writing songs for my band, Music Medicine."

Dr. Camp(bell): "Fascinating. I see how this game works. I have a 10th meta-rule to add, if I may: 'Don't disrespect the spirit of the Ten Commandments'. That, in essence, captures many of the key things that have assisted me in my maturation socially over the decades. I like the schema you guys have articulated here, but what about the drawbacks--let's draw out the challenges a bit now. What are the tradeoffs of living an ancestral health meta-rule making lifeway?

Dr. Swan: "I'll start with one of the drawbacks of modern living; there are many benefits to living today, thankfully. But, people talk about the loss of cultural diversity that we've experienced as the result of English displacing native languages throughout the world, creating a mono-language of sorts due to the winner-take-all effects of the Information Age. Well, I contend that we are experiencing a parallel trend in nutrition: the rise of a mono-diet worldwide, displacing real-foods native diets with processed garbage made of soy, wheat, corn, and modified vegetable oils, among other poisonous things. Think of all those tasty cultural dishes that we're discarding shortsightedly. These trends concern me deeply.

Yet, carving out ecological niches for existence within this environment to pursue human health ancestrally can be challenging. There are drawbacks to everything. For starters, people wonder about the increased costs of an ancestral lifestyle. However, foods like eggs, bacon, sausage, butter, raw cheese, yogurt, and sardines are just a few items that I buy regularly to keep things priced reasonably. I do think that there needs to be more formalized approaches to and mechanisms for tracking, categorizing, and sharing these costs openly with everyone so that we can pair nutrition considerations with their financial implications, much like Kaiser Permanente does with healthcare. Also, like all lifestyle decisions, there are social consequences too. Wearing these Vibrams around, for one, takes a bit of courage. Evidently that doesn't bother you, Camp, but integrating tales of the past into your living practices and infusing some ancestral wisdom into your life philosophy can be met with resistance by others, especially within mainstream institutions. Leading by example is not easy.

It strikes me that your personal mythology background could be vital to helping sort out these types of challenges because lifestyles are so reflective of our identities and who we are as individuals trying to create our legacies in this world."

Dr. Camp(bell): "Indeed; physiology and spirituality are entangled, intimately interlinked components of our beings. I'll start bantering about these contentions with a few friends. I bet they will raise some good arguments against this type of lifestyle approach for health, generally and specifically. It's always good to test your beliefs against the strongest arguments that oppose them; that's the only way to grow personally, to grow spiritually. Faith evolves too, if you're conscientious."

Dr. DJ: "Guys, it's nearly 7:30 PM and the sun is about to set. Let's get sprinting before our window of opportunity closes for the day. Like I wrote in a song recently, 'You never realize what you have until it goes bye-bye, so pull the blinders off your eyes before life passes you by.'"

Dr. Swan: "Thanks for once again using art to bring us back to a grounded reality, DJ. Talk about a paradox, eh? Artisan abstraction materializing concretely."

Dr. Camp(bell): "Quite poetic this life is. Now, you guys don't really yell 'Parkour!' out loud as you bounce around these trail runs, do you?"

Dr. Swan: "Of course we do! 'Parkour!' Just kidding. That would surely make us stick out like sore thumbs."

Dr. DJ: "You have to pick your battles wisely."

(After a few minutes, off in the distance, calls of "Parkour!" ring out intermittently throughout the nature reserve as three blurs move about the darkening setting stochastically. The hunt is on, but they aren't hunting for dinner; they're hunting for fulfillment.)

Stay tuned for Episode III ...

Programming Notes:

1) Help! I am searching for antagonistic characters: I'd like to thinker with Plato's approach / the Hegelian Progression of _ 'theses --> anti-theses --> syntheses' _ narrative dialogue model that Aaron Blaisdell and Dave Lull shared with me graciously.

What about Dr. Naws? It reminds us of Jaws, is Swan spelled backwards (the anti-Swan), and Naws just keeps saying, "Naw." Antagonist all the way (hat tip to Brian Geremia)!

2) Share your Meta-Rules! In the right-hand column of my blog, I have added a static list of meta-rules that I hope can operate in an open-source fashion: Send me your n=1 meta-rules, via comment here or by email, and I will add them to this collection so that we can capture these bottom-up rules for making 'rules to live by' in one place.

As always, thanks for reading!

To good health,

Brent

Episode I: Dr. Swan & Dr. DJ stumble upon Ancestry

Setting: A coffee bar owned by Chris Owens (@singleorigin)

... they simply follow Chris wherever he goes; he's a legend like that.

Coffee-house culture is key to their thinkering (at least that's what they tell themselves regularly; that, and "thanks to Dave Lull").

Characters: Dr. Swan & Dr. DJ

Scene: Dr. Swan & Dr. DJ stumble upon Ancestry (an emerging school) early in the day and then stop by their local coffee spot to hang out (lounge, really) and converse about it.

Dr. DJ: "Swan, you've got to temper all this thinking about thinking that you've been doing since November 24th, 2007 openly and voluntarily."

Dr. Swan: "Yes, I am a bit concerned, at times, about tunneling so deeply that I won't be able to resurface in time to avoid suffocating. It's a challenging balancing act, indeed. It's those Levy Flights that eventually free me from the darkness, at least."

Dr. DJ: "Remember when Nassim said that 'painters don't paint about painting'? Maybe that's applicable to thinking about thinking? I don't compose and perform music about music. Music is my thing; writing is your game."

Dr. Swan: "Yes, what you're describing is the central Paradox of Living: searching versus acting. They're one in the same, really. They're what Nassim calls inseparabilities. Concrete, binary thinking compels us to break them into discrete, crisp categories, but thinking and tinkering are really one activity when we search and act perceptively, reflectively. Just look at all those platforms that I've told you about over the years that help us sort through these philosophical uncertainties."

(Dr. DJ interrupts)

Dr. DJ: "Yeah, yeah. I know where this is going: more high-falutin' Talebian prose, as Dr. Kurt Harris would say."

Dr. Swan: "What about your music making? Songwriting is quite an abstraction process; wouldn't you say? You have sounds and poetic rhymes and lines to express yourself. I've only got pen and paper, keys and computer screens. How do I make melodies from silence for folks to read? I don't have the luxury of a (multi-fractal) drummer like you do in your Music Medicine band."

Dr. DJ: "That's true. I can see how an aspiring hunter-gatherer artisan/citizen scientist like yourself may feel restricted at times when it comes to working through new ideas, unclear areas of inquiry, and the rest of the human condition that you seem to enjoy exploring via essays."

Dr. Swan: "Thanks, DJ. But enough of that fluff for now; what about Ancestry? That sure doesn't seem like white noise to me."

(Dr. DJ's eyes light up. He sips on his espresso, then responds.)

Dr. DJ: "I wish that school were open today; I'd send my kids there right away."

Dr. Swan: "I agree; that co-founder we talked to this morning really understands child development; his ideas on education are insightful and refreshing. He said that Ancestry developed from the mentoring company and nonprofit program that he co-founded with his friends."

Dr. DJ: "Yeah; it's so cool. Did you see that they want to teach ancestral health, personal finance, and personal mythology alongside the academic core? That's great. I wish we had that when we were in school. All those grocery store trips and mortgage loan dips, in addition to many other things, probably would've gone more smoothly (and less roughly) ... at least for me."

Dr. Swan: "I agree. Sugar is like debt: ancestral nutrition and personal finance instruction are gaping holes in modern educational systems. Education, like medicine, does not exist/occur in a vacuum. We have to equip both students and patients with practical survival and thrival skills today. Ancestry is attempting to tackle those challenges head on--good for them."

Dr. DJ: "Here's what that well-designed flyer we picked up today says:"

Ancestral Education is a student-centric educational approach that seeks broad human development through meaningful relationships with dynamic mentors.

Ancestral Education is a re-emerging educational approach that capitalizes on human beings’ innate, ancestral capacity to learn and grow via mimicry.

For millions of years, without defined, standardized knowledge, humans learned what (and when) they needed in order to survive. They learned by mimicking successful elders (role-models) who passed down useful tricks of the survival trade. The curriculum was defined by what worked, not what ‘should have been’ taught.

(m=1) + (n=1) = (s=1)

The history of science, the history of knowledge, teaches us that epistemic humility is of ultimate importance: We must recognize that we know far less about the world than we think we know. Thus, at some point, since no one knows everything, each of us must self-experiment to figure out what works and what doesn't work in our own specific cases. It's an n=1 clinical trial, the statistics of individuals, and this local, small-scale tinkering approach is the modus operandi that rises to the surface as the best way to confront and make decisions in the face of opacity. In this spirit, self-experimentation operates under a thinkering model: Generate m=1 my-thologies and then test these conjectures by conducting n=1 tinkering efforts, just to see what happens, falsifying negative results along the way, re-editing your personal narrative in the process.

Dr. Swan: "DJ, that sounds like some of your wonderful music to me; it's music to my ears: s=1 sounds fun."

Dr. DJ: "I saw somewhere on the Web page that they are starting to coalesce everything by organizing an Ancestral Health Symposium and an Ancestral Health Society. That seems like a decent way to lay the groundwork for Ancestry. Ancestry seems like one umbrella idea, like an epistemocracy; Nassim would probably like that--plenty of room for trial-and-error in the far-from-equilibrium tails to unleash Positive Black Swan hits from the envelope of serendipity."

Dr. Swan: "Now you're talking my language, DJ. Come on; let's take these excellent drinks with us and hit the trails in our Vibrams for some fractal, Primal sprints. Soaking in the aesthetics of nature is a nice way to end the day; being fooled by randomness selectively can be pleasing."

Dr. DJ: "Sounds good to me. That's basically what I do with my music making anyways. By the way, I read Keith Norris' blog this morning, so, of course, I'm full of energy--let's put some theory to practice. Parkour!"

Stay tuned for Episode II ...

To good health,

Brent

Tales in n=1 Ancestral Health: Gio's takes

As the awesome Robb Wolf says, the "Universe is anecdotal."

So here's an anecdote to consider.

My friend and colleague, Gio Carmazzi, has been reading Nassim Taleb recently (namely, "Why I Walk" and other essays). We've chatted in the past quite extensively about the ideas of Nassim Taleb, Art DeVany, and Doug McGuff (and many others) given our kindred interest in financial matters and Black Swan applications to health and fitness choice architecture.

So here's Gio's tale of Talebian takes:

Movement Challenges: They stem from our poor form or applications based on lifelong habits/patterns of movement that cannot be unwound in a week or even months. It takes years, putting one foot in front of the other, to correct. It is a constant process of two steps forward and one step back.

Animal Energy Expenditure Patterns: Watch animals and other living creatures that are not entirely domesticated (dogs, cats, horses). They rest most of the time. They have short bursts of energy. They look happy more often than we do.

Also, look at children. Watch them play chase/tag/hide-and-seek. They burst for 30 seconds, then breathe for two minutes. Then they burst again. Most people think that we stop doing that because we get old. I say that we get old because we stop living like that. There is evidence to support this theory (i.e. high-intensity/short-duration workouts).

Self-Experimentation Feedback: Finally, we need to listen to our bodies and inner voices as often as possible. We are conditioned from an early age to ignore ourselves (i.e. soldier on and push through), but I find that my mind and body tells me what I need quite accurately. If you feel spry with energy to burn, then burn it. If you feel lazy or exhausted, then rest. If you are hungry, eat. If you aren't, don’t. I think that it is more simple than we make it out to be.

I shared with Gio the concept of Physiological Headroom. He likes that take too.

Gio is a talented Ancestral Health practitioner.

Parkour!

To good health,

Brent

Child Development: Two things my mom taught me

Child development is important to me.

It's why I work with my friends on Game Plan Academy (GPA).

I had a nice opportunity to discuss child development this morning with my sharp, epistemocratic friend, Jeff Erno.

Child development is so encouraging because human potential is exciting.

Of course, it's also challenging.

We must do our best to foster the human spirit effectively (and warmly).

Here's what I've learned from my mom gracefully:

1) My actions affect other people

How did I learn this principle? One way in particular stands out to me. When I was young, anytime I did not do something that I said I would do, or I acted in a way that hurt someone else's feelings, my mom asked me to write her a short note that stated clearly how my actions affected other people in that particular case and setting. It was a simple reflective exercise, but the act of internalizing and then communicating how my behavior influenced those around me helped me develop socially.

2) I have strengths that I should develop to the best of my ability

My mom also encouraged me consistently to recognize my strengths and use them to the best of my ability. Whether in athletics, in academics, or in other settings, my mom helped me identify my unique talents and abilities and then provided me with constant support while I worked to operationalize them daily.

Writing is one of the things that she fostered in me, thankfully.

It's a medium to simply express and share my thinking.

That's freeing. (At least for me.)

Call it a platform; call it an execution framework; call it anything.

It's just a communication vehicle for thinkering.

To good health,

Brent

Upside-down energy expenditure: a n=1 trial

Another, as Brett might say, 'Coffeedy Conjecture', to muse on today:

Doing exercises at inclines and upside-down could be beneficial for cardiovascular health because we get our body fluids flowing in different directions while also reducing (transiently) the loads placed on various valves throughout our circulatory systems.

It's a hypothesis.

That's it.

I'm testing it.

How? Upside-down pushups--done slowly in Dr. McGuff's Body By Science spirit--and by performing other exercises with my feet above my head.

How's it going? Well (yet-to-be-falsified). It feels good (to me) as a part of my workout routine; I gracefully nudge you to try it yourself and just see what happens.

Discard if proven not useful; continue if deemed beneficial; iterate if in-between.

Either way, your body fluids will flow in a new direction with gravity.

Perhaps this is a therapy approach that could be adapted to help patients with edema and other circulation challenges?

To good health,

Brent

Hunter-gatherer artisans: Bricoleur stability

Stability.

That (oft-)fleeting notion of social (system) cohesion.

Degraded by deceptive, manipulative tensions; supported by intricate, interpersonal connections.

But interpersonal and intrapersonal skills are intimately interlinked; they're inseparabilities, really. Self-awareness becomes social awareness fractally. From me to you to us and the rest of our glocal communities.

And when it comes to thinking about stability within communities, Nassim Taleb suspects that hunter-gatherer and artisanal groupings are the most stable arrangements for human beings (they're also ancestrally fit, infused with wit; see Notebook #'s 124 & 125, thanks to Dave Lull).

"I am afraid to conclude that the only form of stable society, outside of the hunter-gatherer environment, & one that does not blow up, is an artisanal one. Complexification drives institutions --and societies--to maximal fragility." - NNT

But what do hunter-gatherers and artisans have in common? Simple: bricolage. They have crafts. They take whatever happens to be available, and they make masterpieces. It's localized creativity, operationalizing spontaneous-order processes within ecological niches serendipitously, and it's central to the survival process that got us here in the first place: evolutionary thinkering.

Hybridizing these two groups produces a playful (and potentially useful) archetype, a 'Hero of Two Faces' (within Joseph Campbell's mythology framework): the hunter-gatherer artisan.

Archetypes are symbols. Symbols represent many words via a single communication vehicle. They also capture un-words, and unspoken words. So, when I write that a hunter-gatherer artisan is a bricoleur, and thus, by extension, an epistemocrat at heart, that means a lot of things to me to you to us and the rest of the Ancestral Health epistemocracy community. In a sense, it's no more than a poetic play on words; an interdisciplinary bridge between two concepts that could spur new reflections and resulting novel actions just because these ideas were presented in a slightly different way.

That's what Nassim has been doing lately with his my-thological characters: Nero and Fat Tony (follow him on Twitter--@nntaleb--to witness his unfolding story). And since Nassim mentors me through his writing, I created my own characters, two kindred healthcare epistemocrats / mythocrats, awhile back: Dr. Swan and Dr. DJ. They've been hibernating, but now they are ready to come out and play (it must be that whole watching the Masters at Augusta every early Spring thing).

Because we live by fiction anyways.

Especially when it comes to testing potentially dangerous things on our own bodies; it's much safer to live vicariously* on those days.

That's why I outsource my body to my colleague, Aaron Blaisdell, whenever I want to test possible poisons and suspected toxins; he's a better animal model approximation to me than his lab rats are any day--I feel a lot more comfortable extrapolating data that way.

I'm sure he's willing to help you tinker with your hypotheses; his track record as a n=1 Patient of One clinical trial on wheels (Vibrams, really) is quite impressive, by the way--his "porphyria went away."

And, of course, I jest, but it's this type of playful spirit that I suspect underlies some of the arguments in favor of the hunter-gatherer artisan archetype, lifestyle, and existence. They called Richard Feynman a citizen scientist, and he mobilized the entire physics community during his lifetime and beyond in profound, perceptive ways.

Perhaps hunter-gatherer artisans could do the same in modern medical domains?

I bet we could use some bricoleur stability in our health(care) systems today.

Enjoy your Sunday!

To good health,

Brent

*Because, as the always-intriguing-and-witty Mark Sisson might say, he lives vicariously through himself--he's the most interesting man in the world:

A Coffee Conjecture & My Nutritional Bricolage

When you reflect on imperfect wisdom--opacity--for awhile, you realize that we can generate conjectures for testing in infinite ways, from any (Whole Health) Source.

Hypotheses do not discriminate; mythologize, experiment, iterate.

For instance, in his excellent podcast with Jimmy Moore, Richard Nikoley discusses his self-experimentation bouts during his ancestral health journey, and in this discussion, he shares that somewhere he read a memorable story about two groups of people living in neighboring regions on an island. The group that lived inland learned to trade and maintain cordial relations with the group living by the sea because the inland group members knew that they needed marine foods in their diets in order to achieve optimal health. From this thread, Richard reminded himself--via an m=1 my-thologizing process--about the importance of seafood in his diet, and he responded by adding fish back into his regular n=1 nutritional bricolage lineup with positive results.

So, in this spirit, I present a conjecture that appeared to me recently: One benefit of making coffee could be that it filters toxins out of our water. Toxin avoidance is one of the most important health concepts in modern day. It's well-known that our drinking water contains potential poisons. Therefore, consuming coffee may also be a great way to start the day because it is (relatively) safer to drink than most of our available water sources are.

Of course, we will never know if this hypothesis is true--we can never confirm anything fully in science--but we can use it as a proxy to inform our personal self-experiments.

Personally, I've used a lot of awesome epistemocratic maps to generate my Barbell-diversified portfolio of health stories. Perhaps, by simply sharing the results from my recent trips to my local grocery stores (Trader Joe's and Whole Foods), the spirit of these nutritional bricolage stories will rise to the surface:

Drinks

Coffee beans (Major Dickason's Blend at Peet's Coffee & Tea)

Tejava tea

Foods

Raw, sashimi-grade Ahi tuna

Raw crab (canned)

Wild Sockeye salmon

Uncured bacon (nitrate-free, et al.)

Italian sausage (ibid)

Brown, free-range eggs

Raw almonds

FAGE Total Greek yogurt

Celery

Unsalted butter (organic)

Onions

Mushrooms

Raw milk bleu cheese (crumbled)

Raw coconut butter (Artisana)

Raw coconut oil (ibid)

Lemon & lime juice (concentrate)

Avocados

This list is pretty comprehensive/representative of the real foods conjectures that I'm currently testing on my own body.

In listening to my body continually (trying to Free the Animal, really), I'm hoping to connect more deeply with my ancestral physiological roots, in combination with modern technological tools, to optimize my health and make my biology as robust to disease as possible given local conditions and constraints in my Patient of One case.

Regardless of the results of my tinkering, I'm always attempting to be aware of where my faith is; and, right now, when it comes to placing faith in what I elect to put in my mouth, I am thankful for the entire Ancestral Health epistemocracy community for thinkering with diet conjectures openly--I've tapped into this library-like resource extensively.

And, to end with a nice extension of my previous two essays, here's what Frank Wilson has to say about faith (thanks to Dave Lull):

"For to live in faith means to embrace both the uncertainty of being and the non-necessity of oneself. Faith takes courage."

"Faith enables us to live with uncertainty."

How do you cope with uncertainty?

We all have faith in something.

To good health,

Brent

What is Evolution? Faith, Science, & Black Swans Collide in the Thought Experiment Hadron

What is it, exactly?

Evolution, that is.

To me, evolution is simply an execution framework (hat tip to Navanit Arakeri) for storytelling about changes in organisms that occur across time. That's it. On various time-scales and on different levels, there exists a genetic, epigenetic, cultural, social, et al. co-evolutionary milieu that creates the context within which each ancestral lineage descends from the past, contends in the present, and then progresses into the future. The transitional phases, of course, appear fuzzy in practice, like the famous Schrodinger's cat thought experiment (thanks to Dave Lull), so the question of 'What generation of Pottenger's cats are you?' may be dizzying because our evolutionary heritages have changed non-linearly throughout history.

Individually, though, each of us embodies one such n=1 heritage.

And heritage is a power greater than ourselves. It's something to respect and be accountable to because it empowers us to live with more degrees of freedom than we would if we ignored our ancestries completely. But we don't want to drive while only looking in the rearview mirror, focusing too narrowly on past history (reverse processes can get quite murky, anyways), because modern science provides us with another execution framework to explore the human condition today, with extant people (you and me) as our lab rats.

And execution frameworks for self-experimentation Patient of One clinical trials challenge us to analyze our faith more acutely. In testing ideas on our own bodies, we place faith in our own experiences, in the feedback we receive from tinkering, in the unknown forces that seem to compel us each day in unexpected directions spontaneously, and, most notably, in the notion that we can evolve through trial-and-error beneficially. Technology, for instance, represents materialistic trial-and-error evolutionary production. The dynamics of human development can follow suit too.

When it comes to tools for interpersonal growth and evolving spiritually, people, as a result of their heritages, often look to religions and faith traditions for execution frameworks to guide and support their journey. For instance, given my Christian heritage, which I respect, I find practical, useful wisdom in the messages embodied in Jesus' living, storytelling, and teaching. Operating within this execution framework, full of social-scaffolding nodes like the 10 Commandments, I enjoy reflecting on and self-experimenting with the conceptual points that Jesus raised and emphasized in his legacy. From this process, I generate accountability principles that anchor me as I evolve along my own path of personal improvement each day.

But there's a continual examination when it comes to deducing how best to apply these principles in each specific case. It's during these times, which occur more often than not, that I turn to interdisciplinary inquires; I turn to bricolage.

What happens when evolution, science, and faith collide in an epistemocratic conceptual bricolage, the exciting thought experiment version of the Large Hadron Collider (a high-energy particle accelerator) in action? The unseen is made seen (hopefully ... that's the goal, at least, with that Higgs boson experiment). And that's exactly what Mark Vernon writes about in his excellent essay, "Religion and the Science of Virtue: Virtue and religion are, from a historical point of view, intimately bound up. We discard religious insight at our peril" (thanks to Dave Lull; emphasis mine):

So what's religion got to do with it? Link the evolutionary story with the insights of virtue ethics, and it's clear that living a good life requires training – the cultivation of those virtuous habits, the gradual erosion of personal inconsistencies. Moreover, it's a journey powerfully influenced by the stories we tell ourselves about what makes for the good we pursue – the stories that speak to our humanity and inspire us to keep at it. It's why moral heroes and morality tales are so important. They address our reason and feelings; they shape the moral emotions.

It is those heroes and tales that religions provide in abundance; they are otherwise called saints and parables. Is there a secular source of them nearly so copious as religious traditions? They're often complex and ambivalent, mirroring our own struggles to live well. But when we try to separate morality from religion, and assert that faith should have no part to play in the discourse, we should at least be aware of what the new science and virtue ethics tells us: we could be discarding a resource of immense value for our moral lives.

Clearly, Mark Vernon captures several central tenets to bricoleur (opportunistic generalism) living:

1) Gradual erosion of our personal inconsistencies = Falsifying conjectures deductively via n=1 self-experiments.

2) It's a journey powerfully influenced by the stories we tell ourselves = Reflecting deeply via m=1 my-thologizing.

3) Is there a secular source of them nearly so copious as religious traditions? = Evolution. Science. Black Swan thinkering.

And from chaos and complexity emerges clarity: evolution, religious/faith traditions, science, and Black Swan considerations all operate as execution frameworks that spur us to think more broadly (translation: fat tails) about our existence, about our roles in this world, and about the extensive possibilities that make this life so intriguing.

That's a life worth living; one full of Joseph Campbell's hero journeys: from the Bible myths that mentor some to the evolutionary paradigms that provide logical guidelines for others, we all expand our perspectives and world views when faith, science, and Black Swans collide to create execution frameworks that help us evolve each and every day in our own unique, iterative ways.

Because I am a different person today than I was yesterday, and I want these changes across time to turn out favorably for me, my family, my friends, and my local community.

I want to tell a respectable story of evolution by living accountably.

That's what evolution means to me.

But that's just me.

m=1/n=1, always.

To good health,

Brent

Freedom, Responsibility, & Accountability

Easter, fundamentally, is about freedom.

But with freedom comes responsibility. And, responsibility, ultimately, requires accountability.

In practice, accountability relies on feedback loops and structures: we have to be accountable to something greater than ourselves, and we have to reflect openly and honestly about our actions as we thinker our ways through our days. Religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions that thrive and support human development effectively share one central theme: people practicing these faiths (yes, at the margin, we all have faith in something) all "[c]ame to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."

In the face of opacity--defined as incomplete wisdom in the art of living--we have to sort out for ourselves and think strategically about how to engage the gift of freedom responsibly. Without accountability, we tend to fall victims to addictions it seems. When it comes to m=1 my-thologizing and n=1 self-experimenting, we need execution frameworks to help us capture our open laboratory results in manners that nudge and/or prod us to react appropriately. For example, if we engage in nutritional or exercise bricolage without mechanisms for analyzing our feeding and moving experiences--simple rules like 'poor aftertaste signals potential toxins in our meals' or 'chronic pain indicates improper training techniques'--then we miss opportunities for accountability that could help us stumble (semi)-blindly in new, improved directions for energy intake and expenditure decision-making. But these types of important execution frameworks are largely unexplored frontiers for most of the mainstream science community. Luckily, Seth Roberts has lead the way, as one prominent trailblazer, towards thinking more critically about tools and meta-rules that can empower us to conduct research on our own bodies, and then share our results collectively, yet I suspect there exists lots of room for growth in this area.

Starting with the insightful message that Zach's grandmother shared--"I don't know how to get to the freeway, but I can tell you the way that I go to get there"--we can create small-scale accountability communities that offer timely feedback and support. Of course, these self-organizing groups (uno, dos, tres, et al.) are already forming and performing, but integrating these activities with academic health and medical science in a more comprehensive, rigorous fashion seems potentially fruitful, at least to me (and some of my colleagues), so I am sure this thread promises to be a valued presentation topic and discussion item at the Ancestral Health Symposium. For starters, it looks like Skyler Tanner will be respecting accountability using Quantitative Self and Qualitative Self measures like body fat %, caloric needs, body weight, food intake, mood, and body composition (via photos tiled side-by-side for data points, among other things) to test a hypothesis on his own body, just to see what happens, and then will present these clinical findings at the Symposium's proceedings to learn more about the boundaries of freedom that demarcate his own individualized Patient of One case when it comes to eating and moving ancestrally.

This is the Ben Hogan "find your swing in the dirt" health/fitness/medicine tinkering stuff that I view as extremely promising and exciting.

It's engaging the gift of freedom responsibly; it's living life fully.

It's what Easter is all about, fundamentally.

To good health,

Brent