Ice baths and cold showers are so often the situations in which I get strokes of insight. It happened yesterday too...
I could barely make it out the ice bath before I would lose the idea. It wasn't something of the magnitude of revelation, but it meant and it means a great deal to me. And putting it on digital canvas, sort-of organizes and commits it to memory.
I wrote something along similar lines a few days ago...
The idea here is that you can fit in this '1-2-3' into a whole host of scenarios, including: diets, nutrition research, ideologies of different flavors, conspiracy thinking, and so on and so forth.
I pushed this onto a few of my social media channels but I failed to mention how it hit me. It wasn't just like that - out of the sudden.
I was listening to an interview (from a famous radio program) in which the interviewee was saying something like:
'...for years we've been looking at cancer through the lens of genetics, but more recent research has shown than only about 5-10% of cancers are caused by genetics and that cancer is 90% caused by diet and lifestyle...'
Therefore, my inspiration...
And it's a shame, in my view, that such individuals, often researchers, choose to do it this way.
First of all, dismissing convention, even if it has its flaws, it's not the way to do it. You are dismissing the work of numerous good researchers.
Second of all, you are not aware of your own mental flaws. Most of us are not trained in critical thinking even though many of us say we are.
It takes much much much more effort than the mere awareness of your cognitive biases to be a rational thinker. It takes comfort with dismissing your own past ideas (in many cases), which goes against your ego and which also requires violating the consistency bias; additionally, there are a whole host of other barriers that so very few people can cross to become good thinkers. I will not diverge too much from the main idea, because I will probably develop this flow of thought into a more elaborate post.
Until then, don't be that guy, or gal!
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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author