Andres

“The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“the slow, contemplative “academic” mechanism of drug testing, Kramer groused, was becoming life-threatening rather than lifesaving. Randomized, placebo-controlled trials were all well and good in the cool ivory towers of medicine, but patients afflicted by a deadly illness needed drugs now. “Drugs into bodies; drugs into bodies,” ACT UP chanted. A new model for accelerated clinical trials was needed. “The FDA is fuckedup, the NIH is fucked-up… the boys and girls who are running this show have been unable to get whatever system they’re operating to work,” Kramer told his audience in New York. “Double-blind studies,” he argued in an editorial, “were not created with terminal illnesses in mind.” He concluded, “AIDS sufferers who have nothing to lose, are more than willing to be guinea pigs.” Even Kramer knew that that statement was extraordinary; Halsted’s ghost had, after all, barely been laid to rest. But as ACT UP members paraded through the streets of New York and Washington, frothing with anger and burning paper effigies of FDA administrators, their argument ricocheted potently through the media and the public imagination. And the argument had a natural spillover to other, equally politicized diseases. If AIDS patients demanded direct access to drugs and treatments, should other patients with terminal illnesses not also make similar demands? Patients with AIDS wanted drugs into bodies, so why should bodies with cancer be left without drugs?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“let’s say that you choose to go on a strict, low-calorie diet for two weeks in the hopes of losing fat and looking more trim and toned as a consequence. That’s precisely what researchers did to a group of overweight men and women who stayed in a medical center for an entire fortnight. However, one group of individuals were given just five and a half hours’ time in bed, while the other group were offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed. Although weight loss occurred under both conditions, the type of weight loss came from very different sources. When given just five and a half hours of sleep opportunity, more than 70 percent of the pounds lost came from lean body mass—muscle, not fat. Switch to the group offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed each night and a far more desirable outcome was observed, with well over 50 percent of weight loss coming from fat while preserving muscle. When you are not getting enough sleep, the body becomes especially stingy about giving up fat. Instead, muscle mass is depleted while fat is retained. Lean and toned is unlikely to be the outcome of dieting when you are cutting sleep short. The latter is counterproductive of the former.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“In 1931, amid that incredible transformation, a brilliant young Russian psychologist named Alexander Luria recognized a fleeting “natural experiment,” unique in the history of the world. He wondered if changing citizens’ work might also change their minds. When Luria arrived, the most remote villages had not yet been touched by the warp-speed restructuring of traditional society. Those villages gave him a control group. He learned the local language and brought fellow psychologists to engage villagers in relaxed social situations—teahouses or pastures—and discuss questions or tasks designed to discern their habits of mind. Some were very simple: present skeins of wool or silk in an array of hues and ask participants to describe them. The collective farmers and farm leaders, as well as the female students, easily picked out blue, red, and yellow, sometimes with variations, like dark blue or light yellow. The most remote villagers, who were still “premodern,” gave more diversified descriptions: cotton in bloom, decayed teeth, a lot of water, sky, pistachio. Then they were asked to sort the skeins into groups. The collective farmers, and young people with even a little formal education, did so easily, naturally forming color groups. Even when they did not know the name of a particular color, they had little trouble putting together darker and lighter shades of the same one. The remote villagers, on the other hand, refused, even those whose work was embroidery. “It can’t be done,” they said, or, “None of them are the same, you can’t put them together.” When prodded vigorously, and only if they were allowed to make many small groups, some relented and created sets that were apparently random. A few others appeared to sort the skeins according to color saturation, without regard to the color. Geometric shapes followed suit. The greater the dose of modernity, the more likely an individual grasped the abstract concept of “shapes” and made groups of triangles, rectangles, and circles, even if they had no formal education and did not know the shapes’ names. The remote villagers, meanwhile, saw nothing alike in a square drawn with solid lines and the same exact square drawn with dotted lines. To Alieva, a twenty-six-year-old remote villager, the solid-line square was obviously a map, and the dotted-line square was a watch. “How can a map and a watch be put together?” she asked, incredulous. Khamid, a twenty-four-year-old remote villager, insisted that filled and unfilled circles could not go together because one was a coin and the other a moon.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World