• 460–370 BCE Hippocrates
• 130–200 Galen
• 160–210 Sextus Empiricus
• 980-1037 Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
• 1514-1564 Andreas Vesalius
• 1749-1797 Edward Jenner
• 1818-1865 Ignaz Philipp Semmelweiss
• 1822-1895 Louis Pasteur
• 1827-1912 Joseph Lister
• Alexander Fleming
• 1918-2011 Robert Ettinger

Healing arts started being written about with Hippocrates, Galen, Empiricus(?). Then came the 15th century in which Copernicus and Vesalius published their works on astronomy and anatomy, respectively, in the same year. Vesalius had stolen dead bodies to analyze how they work. Smashed many preconceptions that ancients like Galen had.

Then came the germ theory. Semmelweiss, Jenner, Lister were early figures advocating hygiene.

Then Fleming found penicillin (apocryphal story?).

Ancient debate continues to this day, between "rationalist" and "empiricist" medicine (these terms have specific meanings in the context of medicine).

See commonplace.doubleloop.net/epistemic-disclosure

As of [2022-09-05 Mon], I prefer to express confidences as odds instead of percentages, may be more intuitive; the difference between 80% and 99.5% seems not as clear to non-numerate readers as the difference between 4:1 and 500:1. Also benefits me the writer, who may struggle with whether to assign 99% or 98% or 97% whereas it's easier to compare 100:1 vs 50:1 vs 32:1.

Also with the right style of writing, you may not need to express an epistemic status. While it's useful to supplement opinions and impressions (like "it's my understanding that…"), when you walk through all the reasoning you use, the reader can follow that and arrive at whatever confidence level is appropriate for them. I use epistemic status as a tool for exploring my own beliefs, which has sometimes humbled me about them, but I don't know how much readers benefit.

I've made surprising observations after eating certain foods.

Examples.

• Keto mudcake
• Burger patties
• Ground meat
• Bolognese
• …

I want to develop a point that you should pay attention to the effects of each meal. Don't be blinded by theory.

I have had periods under a ketogenic diet when I felt absurdly healthy, and periods that felt bad. I'm 90% sure my food selections were largely behind it. But all selections were keto. You can conclude that keto is not the whole answer.

For some reason, when I eat a keto variant of some pastry or cake, I feel similar to as if I had eaten the regular carb-laden variant.

When I broke a fast with burger patties, cheese and bacon, I didn't feel nearly as good as I thought I would. It's much better to break it with whole meat, e.g. slow cooked chuck steak.

I don't understand why I had these effects, but seeking explanations like hidden carbs didn't have much success.

The lesson is maybe obvious, but: even if you don't understand why you feel bad, you can still adapt. Let go of your theories and go back to the bare observations. Refine your personal diet not only from theory but from your experiences.

Computing #emacs #tech

You may be averse to GUIs for Git. Because they don't have feature parity with the command-line version. They cover only a subset of the possible actions, and so at some point you have to "drop into the command line" anyway.

Magit is an exception.

• As of 2020 it's the only porcelain that boasts to be effectively complete, i.e. you never have to "drop into the command line".
• It's discoverable, so it requires you to search the web less for tricks. What you may still search for is the theory behind concepts like "rebase" or "stash", but not the how-to.
• It doesn't have a clunky UI as is typical for GUI apps, where hotkeys only exist for a subset of the things you can click. Instead, it's keyboard-driven, and bashing out a complex git command is usually faster with Magit than the command line.
• It does not overlay its own metaphors like an extra layer of abstraction, it exposes Git's own metaphors.
• For every command you're about to execute, you can reveal what exact Git command-line expression it maps to, in case you're curious.