Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Stardew Valley: Nitpicks and Wishes for more

To round out my series on Stardew Valley, I’d like to talk about where I *wished* the story had gone. I already spoiled the whole story in a prior post: the spoiler is that there isn’t really a story to spoil. Now I’ll talk more about the story I *wish* I could have spoiled.

I want to start by acknowledging that Stardew Valley was made by just 1 guy. All by himself. I know that he didn’t have the time or the resources to write a national epic. So I only want to talk about story beats which I feel could have been added in easily using the simple dialogue and cutscenes the game already uses.

To start: I wish the Jumino, Jojo Mart (aka Evil Walmart), and Mine plotlines were more interconnected. I wish Jojo Mart was more overtly corrupting the town, and the Juminos were fighting back. And I wish the monsters in the mine were set loose by the Jojo Mart mining operation.

To start, I think that Jojo Mart corrupting the town could have been gotten across in the few few dialogues with the townsfolk. On the first day you get a quest to introduce yourself around town, but while this is a great way to meet the neighbors they all have very generic greeting dialogue. Some might say “oh you’re that new farmer!” to let you know they’re friendly, and I think one says “why are you talking to me” to let you know he’s unfriendly, but more could be done with this.

Pam is the town bus driver, but her bus is broken down. I wish she’d complain about that when you first meet her: “I drive the bus to Pelican town, or I used to”. Shane works at Jojo Mart and seems to hate his job, I wish he said something about that: “do I like my job? Of course not, but what other choices do I have around here?” And a few people could complain about how you’re the first new face they’ve seen in ages, mostly people just move *away*. They could even connect that by saying that when Jojo Mart came they thought it would breathe life into the town, but instead the decline accelerated.

Not every character needs to say something like that, I’d say no more than 5 pieces of dialogue need to be written. But when you’re introducing yourself, this would at least give more of a hint that the town isn’t entirely happy-go-lucky, and that the conflict with the Evil Walmart is something the townsfolk take seriously. As it stands, only Pierre seems to care, and that’s only because he runs the General Store, which is the single solitary store that actually competes with Jojo Mart.

The conflict can still be generic and maybe not even outright stated. I’ve love if Jojo Mart were some secretive evil corp that knew about and was working against the Juminos. But it could be the simple hippy complaint of “ever since Walmart came to town, the jobs and happiness left,” which is a fine premise for conflict even if I disagree with its economics.

So once it’s better established that the Evil Walmart *is* Evil, then I think a lot of the game does a fine job with background storytelling about how the town is decaying and the Juminos want to fix it. The bus is broken, the Juminos fix it. The mine carts are broken, the Juminos fix it. The community center was once the life of the town, the Juminos can bring it back. And it would mean so much more to be able to kick out the Evil Walmart if they were actually established as a degrading influence in the first place.

From there, I wish the game actually did something with the mines. You get a quest early on to reach the bottom of the mines, and I assumed there’d be mystery and revalations down there. Instead all there is is some combat items and a key which unlocks a post-game infinite dungeon where you can fight in the mines forever. It’s fine as a gameplay reward, but really underwhelming overall.

I’d like it if every 30 floors of the mine, instead of just getting a combat item you got a diary page from the Jojo Mart expedition which caved in the mines in the first place (as seen at the start of the game). Chasing diary pages is hardly groundbreaking storytelling, but I would have appreciated it and it would have given a chance to let us Know Our Enemy, if indeed the game’s only plotline is working against Jojo Mart.

The diary could be generically evil, talking about strip mining for minerals and Digging Too Deep/Too Greedily. But it could also give some weight to the Juminos. Does Jojo Know about them? Are they working against them? Do the Juminos specifically hate Jojo Mart as a commercialization entity that’s destroying good old fashioned farming values? Or are they just sad that the town has lost touch with nature?

Finally, the diary could explain that it was Jojo that awakened the monsters in the mine, and that’s why its suddenly so dangerous. Now maybe this isn’t what the creator had in mind, I mean there’s an adventurer’s guild, maybe in his mind the mine has always been dangerous. But personally I thought it was a little weird that there’s these deadly creatures right outside town and no one seems to care. I’d be more willing to accept it if they only started being there recently.

Finally, I like that the Juminos don’t really say much, and mostly just emote happily at you. But I’d like to know just a bit more about *why* they were there, and I think the wizard from the beginning can be a good character for this.

I said earlier how I thought it was strange that in this otherwise modernish farming sim, you have to speak to a wizard who helps you translate the Jumino’s message. He becomes a character you can befriend after this, but otherwise I don’t think he has any story relevance, he’s just some guy. A nice guy, but just a guy.

I wish his friendship arc had him taking on more of a mentor role, telling you about the Juminos, about forest spirits, about how they protect the town and how the town lost its way. Again nothing groundbreaking, but it would at least satisfy my curiosity that there *is* an answer, because in the actual game I spent the whole game hoping to find an answer and getting nothing.

In fact, with regards to the wizard, the adventurers guild, and the Juminos, it feels overall weird that this game is set in present day. The Mayor has a car, you arrive to town on a bus, there’s TVs and electricity all over. And yet there’s a wizard, an adventurer’s guild, friendly forest spirits, and evil monsters in the mine. This could have been an attempt at modern fantasy, or magical realism, but a straight-up robes and wizard hat wizard still felt jarring to me when I first played. I wish the wizard had more to do with the story, because that jarring feeling could have meant something, I could have recalled that feeling as I reflected on how much I’d learned from the wizard over the course of the game. But instead it’s just a moment of “ok, this game is weird” before he starts acting like any other character.

Anyway that’s what I wish the story of the game was like. I wish there was more of a conflict with Jojo Mart, I wish the mines gave you nuggets of story, and I wish someone, preferably the wizard, told you more about the Juminos. The game is still incredibly, I’ve played through it multiple times, but I still wish the story was a little more than nothing at all.

I don’t like what you like

I still want to finish my Stardew Valley miniseries, but I also want to get something off my chest: it’s ok to not like things other people like, and I wish more people felt this way.

I’ve written before about games I like, but I’ve also been honest about how some of them are the kinds of games I wouldn’t recommend to others, just because I know some folks won’t like them. I really enjoyed Pillars of Eternity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t.

What turned you off of it? Was it the 30+ different status ailments to keep track of? The overabundances of resistances and damage types? The stats each doing 5 different things? The rest-heal system? I loved all that shit, but you don’t have to. Or maybe you just don’t like real-time-with-pause, I’ve been open that I’m probably the only one who prefers it to turn-based-tactics in RPGs, so while I’d be disappointed at your criticism I wouldn’t be surprised.

Or maybe you played Cult of the Lamb, but hated how the base building got in the way of your dungeon crawler. Or you tried Ace Attorney, but couldn’t get over how it was a visual novel with pixel hunting for puzzles.

If you told me you didn’t like any of these games, I’d understand. If you said they were *bad* games, I’d disagree but I could probably at least understand your viewpoint. Even if a game is loved by 99/100 people who play it, that still means a game with a million buys is disappointing *at least* 10,000 people.

Our culture has even had a resurgence of memes pointing this out. Standing up and telling the whole world that they are wrong has become a point of pride for some people. So if you don’t like a game I like, I try not to hold it against you.

But I feel some people just can’t accept this. If you don’t like something, you must be *bad* at it, or impatient, or stupid, or you didn’t read the tutorials, or you mashed through the story. The reason you didn’t enjoy it is a *moral failing* on your part because *I* liked it and *I’m* a good person so anyone who thinks differently than me must be a *bad* person.

If this feels like a petty call-out of “gamer” culture, that’s because it is. Too often I’ve seen people disliking things be attacked for being bad, or salty, or unmanly because they can’t handle the “difficulty” of a game that can never just be criticized. I’m tired of this shit, I see it all the time, and it’s why I almost never talk to people about video games.

Because no one is ever allowed to just think something is good or bad, no one can accept that different people have different opinions. You must be too stupid to understand Pillars of Eternity, or too illiterate to appreciate Ace Attorney, or too impatient to enjoy Cult of the Lamb.

And yes this post is a subtweet, because when talking to a friend recently, I had exactly this kind of conversation. I didn’t like part of a game, and this was thrown back at me as a *moral failing* on my part. That because I didn’t play *the right way*, my complaints about not having fun were invalid, and were instead a reflection of my impatience and ignorance for not reading the correct menus or using the correct strategies.

And I hate that shit. Sometimes people just hate your favorite game, or favorite movie, or favorite book. And part of being an adult and not a child should be accepting these opinions, allowing people to complain if they want, and if you feel obligated to defend the honor of your favorite media, to at least couch your defense as how “you” feel, and how “you” played, rather that attacking the other person for their failure to enjoy it.

I just feel like too many people treat and attack on their preferred media as an attack on them. If you thought Ace Attorney was bad, I disagree. And it could be fore any reason, you can think that the murders are too contrived, or the world is unrealistic, you can think the characters like Mia and Pearls are creepy, or that Phoenix is an empty suit, you can think investigations are boring, and trials drone on and on, you can think it’s too simple or too convoluted or anything else. And I’d disagree, but I would hope I’d be willing to see that an attack on my favorite media is just you venting, and not an attack on me.

Nothing you say is an attack on me. “How was I supposed to know to press on that statement!” Fair criticism, I get people can get bored when most presses yield no new information. “I think Mia’s power is creepy,” is something I disagree with, but I can accept others think this way. “The murders are unrealistic and convoluted,” I like it because every case feels engaging and nothing is ever simple or straightforward, but you don’t have to like it yourself. Unless you go out of your way to say “only idiots/perverts/misanthropes enjoy this game,” I’m not going to hold your critiques against me.

So please give me the same treatment. If I dislike a game or movie or book, I’m not attacking you or the people who like it. I’m talking about my dislike because all people like talking about themselves. You just told me about your day, can’t I tell you about mine? So just let me say I don’t like it, say you liked it and that’s fine. But don’t attack me, because I’m not attacking you.

Stardew Valley: Story Spoilers

Last time I was writing about the gameplay of Stardew Valley. I consider it very much like a farming version of Factorio, but the gameplay isn’t the only thing that keeps me interested.

Stardew Valley is a very “cozy” game for lack of a better word. The art style is all cutesy, with animals making little hearts whenever you pet them. The characters are also written to be very sweet (or saccharine, depending on your taste). They each have their own life problems, but most of them will be unwaveringly kind and loyal if you give them even a modicum of respect. So most of your time will be spent walking through this colorful world with cute animals and plants, talking to people who will be your friends almost from the word go, and engaging in a story where you are single-handedly revitalizing a small town with your rustic farmstead.

So yeah, “cozy.”

Minor point, I also like some of the asymmetry in the spritework. Abigail here has her bow on the left side regardless of whether she’s facing towards or away from you. Might be a sprite error? But it feels intentional and cute.

But for all the fact that I like the town, the world, and the story, I feel like the game routinely fails to stick the landing. The game is full of plot points and story elements that seem like they should be important and meaningful, but then don’t go anywhere and no one cares about them. Warning: total spoilers ahead.

The overarching story of Stardew Valley is about rebuilding the town’s community center with the help of some forest spirits named “Juminos.” The community center was once the heart of town life, but has become run down and disused ever since Jojo Mart (aka Evil Walmart) moved in next door. You’d think these stories might be connected: was the moral decay from going to Evil Walmart instead of a general store causing the townsfolk to lose their passion? Was the Evil Walmart the cause of the town’s becoming run down? Did the Evil Walmart’s strip mining operation cause the Juminos to appear and try to fight back?

No not really. The Evil Walmart is just there. The Juminos are just there. The strip mining blocks off the local mines for purely gameplay-based reasons (not overwelming the player in their first week). But none of these plot points have any relation to each other. Don’t expect any sort of final boss fight or plot twist, everyone’s too nice for that.

Before you can even talk to the Juminos, you have to find the magical wizard who teaches you their language. Wait, a magical wizard in this rural farming game, is he going to be a mentor figure? An Obi-Wan who teaches you the ways of inner strength? No he just lives there. Zoning guidelines meant he couldn’t build his magic tower inside city limits so he lives out in the forest, don’t question it.

And the town really is run-down, for example the bus driver is unemployed because her bus is broken. Did the Evil Walmart cause the town’s decay, and are they lobbying the state to prevent repair so they can swoop in and buy land on the cheap? No, things are run down so the Juminos can have stuff to fix for you. And when the state’s Governor comes to visit the town no one talks about the decay and everyone has a good time with him. Even though you can fix things, and people are grateful, it feels so disconnected from everything (and people aren’t all that broken up that the town is broken) that it’s hard to feel proud for what you’ve done.

And again, what about that strip mining operation? The mines you can visit are infested with evil monsters, but are closed off at game start because of a rockslide caused by the Evil Walmart. Did the Walmart cause the mine to become evil? Are the Juminos nice spirits to fight back against these evil spirits? Does the town mind that there’s killer monsters lurking just outside town? No, there’s an adventurer’s guild that takes care of them, no one minds.

And what about clearing the mine itself? You get a quest to reach the bottom of the mind and find what’s down there, do you find anything meaningful that might add to your understanding of the world? Maybe the secret of the Juminos power? Or evidence of the Evil Walmart’s misdeeds? No, you find a key that unlocks a new mine you can explore. This new one’s infinite, so you’ll never reach the end.

These may all sound like disjointed, meaningless complaints, but I truly feel like this game has a “journey/destination” problem. In the moment I love every minute of it, but completion just feels like checking off boxes, I never feel a sense of relief or amazement for what I’ve done, and the story is part of that.

I feel the game could be so much deeper and more meaningful if these stories were connected and expounded upon. The town is pretty run-down with some folks either unemployed or working bad jobs because of it. People should comment on this, and there should be a sense of elation from the townsfolk when you fix things. Instead they mostly just do and say what they always did, and at most they have a new daily schedule based on what got fixed.

I feel like the Evil Walmart and the Juminos should be connected in some way too. Either the Walmart caused the decay of the town or the Juminos are fighting back against the Walmart or something. But aside from a single cutscene in the beginning and one at the end, the Walmart doesn’t even figure into the story at all. It occupies a large chunk of the narrative’s setup, but with almost no intrigue or payoff.

And I feel like the Wizard and the haunted mine are too unusual to not get some story justification. You could have skipped the Wizard and just let the main character learn the Jumino’s language on their own. Of if you must have him, then give him a purpose, even just the visual gag of the local Wizard walking to town to buy groceries would be nice. But instead he spends all day in his tower not doing or saying anything of note. And the mine is just a monster dungeon that people comment on without thinking about the implication of holy shit, man-eating monsters are living not 5 minutes outside our town! Good thing the game doesn’t let them leave the mine!

During my first run of the game, I kept thinking that there would be some mystery, some deeper connection that I’d find as I played the game further. But no, the entire story is basically revealed to you within the first 10 minutes of gameplay, and there’s nothing to say or build upon after that.

So I said there’s spoiler in this post, but really the spoiler is that there are no spoilers. You can get the entire story by just playing for 2 hours before refunding it on steam. And that’s a shame.

Stardew Valley: Farming for Factorio players

I’ve recently been playing (or rather replaying) Stardew Valley. It’s a game about starting a farm in a rural community, and even though it seems like the furthest thing in the world from Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program, for me it scratches that same itch for “systems” based games that I’ve written about before.

The crux of Stardew Valley is that your avatar is working a menial job at “Jojo Mart” (think evil Walmart), until they’re sent a note by their grandfather inviting them to take over the farm at Stardew Valley. The farm itself is pretty run down, but the townsfolk are eager to teach the young newcomer about turning it into a profitable endeavor.

Jojo Mart is muscling into this town as well, competing with the town’s only General Store, but that’s mostly a background element. The real story progression comes when your character happens upon the “Juminos,” little forest spirits who inhabit the abandoned community center. They ask for gifts of “the forest’s bounty” and in exchange they’ll help the town and your farm however they can.

The gifts for the Juminos come from all the products you can farm in the game: seasonal veggies, animal products, fish of the sea. And they give you small rewards for completing a “bundle” of related gifts (like giving them all the Fall Veggies, or all the Summer Fish), and then a big reward when you complete all the “bundles” of a certain theme (like completing all the Veggies bundles, or all the Fish bundles). This system rewards you for learning how to run your farm well to produce all the needed items, and gives you both near and long-term goals to work towards.

Completing these goals also requires improving the farm by constructing barns, coops, and the like using stone/wood/etc. So you have to balance not only farming, but also gathering the materials and money necessary to make long-term investments.

It’s really fun, but also quite hectic. And I didn’t even mention that there’s a cave full of monsters you need to go into to mine stone, copper, and iron, plus every character in the game can be given gifts to become friends with them, and they’ll give you not only special bonuses but also cute cutscenes in return.

In Stardew Valley, a typical day for me starts the night before as I sit in my in-game room planning what I need to do next. I want to complete the “Animal Products” bundle for the Juminos, but that requires getting sheep (for their wool), which requires constructing a barn, which requires getting stone, which requires going to the mine. So I resolve to go to the mine tomorrow to get stone.

When I wake up though, I first have to water/harvest my crops and tend to my chickens, a somewhat tedious bit of micromanagement which becomes easier as you improve your farm. I try to do this as quickly as possible, but although my character wakes at 6am, it’s already 10am before I’ve finished this work. I harvested 8 pumpkins so I resolve to first buy 8 more packets of pumpkin seeds to plant in the furrows, no use leaving those empty when they could be growing things!

Stardew Valley doesn’t believe in crop rotation any more than Amy here

While heading to the General Store I make sure to pick any flowers or wild produce on my way. These help my “foraging” skill and can sell for a pretty penny as well. I take note of the calendar outside the store and notice that it’s a character’s birthday, maybe they’ll like the flowers I picked? I find them in town and give them my gift because gifts give extra friendship points on a character’s birthday. Then I hustle back to the store to sell my pumpkins and buy more seeds.

It’s already afternoon by the time I’ve planted and watered the new seeds, and I’m finally ready to hike to the mines. I can only carry 24 items at a time, and since I want to bring back as much stuff as possible I put away everything in my inventory except a pickaxe and a sword (for protection).

Finally by 2pm I can start battling monsters and mining for stone, copper and iron. But I need to get back home by midnight if I want to have a good night’s sleep and have enough energy for the next day. Energy is an important resource in the game, and just about every action you take will cost some amount of it. So being mindful of the time, I leave the mine at 10pm with stone in tow.

I get back home around 11:30, put my well-gotten gains into storage bins and start planning my next day before bed. I finally have the stone I need for that barn (so I can get sheep, so I can get wool, so I can finish the Juminos bundle) but I still need wood, so tomorrow I’ll have to go into the woods and chop trees. Regardless, I’m that much closer to my in-game goals.

It should be easy to see that this kind of gameplay loop can be *really* addictive. At any one time there’s a dozen things you could be working on (getting resources, expanding your farm, buying and selling, socializing with characters) and a number of goals you’re working towards simultaneously. It can be somewhat hectic and stressful if you don’t know where to look for guidance, and unfortunately I think the online wiki is mandatory to have a good time, because there’s too much information that’s just kinda hidden away.

I only wish there were a better in-game way to find things out. I wish that if the Juminos asked you for a certain type of fish for example, they’d also tell you specifically when and under what conditions that fish can be caught. Because sometimes there’s a fish that can only be caught in Spring/Summer when it’s raining, but you spent your rainy days doing other things. Sure you might have fished really often, but if you weren’t fishing at the right time on the right days, you had no chance to catch this specific fish.

And once Fall rolls around and you finally look up how to catch the fish, you realize that you’ll have to play another half-year in-game before you can even get a chance to try.

I also wish that characters could tell you where other characters are. Sometimes you want to give someone a birthday present, or they send you a quest asking for some item. But I can’t memorize every townie’s schedule, so unless I want to waste a day running all over town (and the woods! lots of folks hang out in their!), I need to go to the wiki again. I think I should be able to ask their parent for some general information, “Oh, we told Sebastian he can’t smoke in the house so he goes to the lake instead.” Some general ideas about their schedule would be nice to have in-game.

Anyway that’s Stardew Valley. I actually have a LOT more to talk about it, maybe 2 or 3 more posts. But for now I’ll say: it’s probably in my top 10 games of all time, so if you were into Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program, give it a chance. I know building a community farm seems like the complete opposite of Factorio’s “coal mines and industry” vibe, but they really are quite similar in my opinion.

“I hate them, their antibodies are bull****”

I want to tell two stories today, they may mean nothing individually but I hope they’ll mean something together. Or they’ll mean nothing together, I don’t know. I’ve gotten really into personal fitness and am writing this in between sets of various exercises I can do in my own house.

The first story is from before the pandemic. I used to be a biochemist (still am, but I used to too). During that time I went to a lot of conferences and heard a lot of talks by the Latest and Greatest. One of the most fascinating talks was by a group out of Sweden who were preparing what they called a “cell atlas,” a complete map that could pinpoint the locations of every protein that would be in healthy human cells.

The science behind the cell atlas was pretty sweet. We know that the physical location of proteins in the body really matters, the proteins that transcribe DNA into RNA are only found in the nucleus because DNA itself is only found in the nucleus. Physical location is very important so that every protein in the body is doing only the job it’s assigned, and not either slacking off or accidentally doing something it isn’t supposed to. The first gives you a wasting disease and the latter may cause cancer.

So knowing the location of these proteins on a subcellular level is actually pretty important. But how can we even determine that? We can’t really zoom into a cells and walk around checking off proteins, can we?

The key was that this group was also really into making their own fluorescent antibodies. They could make antibodies for any human protein and then stick on a fluorescent tag that lights up under the right conditions. Then it was just a task of sticking the antibodies into cells and seeing which part lights up, that tells you where the protein is.

There was a bit more to it of course, I should do a post about how all this relates to Eve Online, but that was the gist of it: put antibodies in cells and see where the cell lights up. Use that to build an atlas of the subcellular locations of the human proteome.

It was some cool science and a nice talk. A few months later I was at another conference and the discussion came up of if conferences ever really have “good” talks or if scientists are incapable of anything above “serviceable.” I proffered the cell atlas talk as one I thought was actually “good,” it was good science explained well. The response I got from one professor stunned me: “oh I hate those people, their antibodies are bullshit.”

I don’t know how or why, but somehow this professor had decided that the in-house antibodies which underpinned the cell atlas project were all poorly made and inaccurate. That then undercut the validity of the entire project. I didn’t press further for this professor’s reasoning or evidence, I could tell he was a bit heated (and drunk) and left it at that. But while I never got any evidence against the cell atlas antibodies, I also never heard much in their favor. They seemed like a big project that just never got much recognition in the circles I ran in.

So was the cell atlas project a triumph of niche science, or a big scam? Well I don’t know, but it reminds me of another story.

As I said above, I’m much more into personal fitness these days. The Almighty Algorithm knows this, and so youtube serves me up a steady stream of fitness influencer content. I still stay away from anything that isn’t Mike Israetel or a few other “evidence based” youtubers, but even this small circle has served up its own helping of scientific slapfights.

In this case the slapfight is about “training to failure.” Most fitness influencers agree that you have to train hard if you want results. What exactly counts as “hard” though, that is where the controversy lies.

First of all, what is “training to failure?” Well unfortunately that too is controversial, because everyone has a different definition of what “failure” actually means. But generally, failure is when you are doing some exercise (a pushup, a pullup, a bench press) and you cannot complete the movement. Say you’ve done 5 pullups and you can’t do another, that’s “failure.”

Mike Israetel shows off example workouts of himself training hard, and he claims he’s training with “0 to 1 reps in reserve,” that’s a fancy way of saying he is training very near failure. If he does 5 pullups and claims he has 0 to 1 RIR (reps in reserve), then he is saying he could do AT MOST 1 more pullup, but he might actually fail if he even tried. He does this for almost every movement: bench presses, leg presses, squats, deadlifts, his claim of 0 to 1 RIR means he is doing the exercise until he can either no longer do it, or do it at most 1 more time before failure.

Failure itself is hard to measure, and sometimes you don’t know you’ll fail a move until you try. I once was doing pushups and just suddenly collapsed on my chest, not even knowing what happened. A quick assessment showed my shoulders gave out, and since pushups are supposed to be a chest exercise this implies I was doing them wrong, but that was a case where I clearly trained to failure since I tried to do the motion and failed.

But other fitness influencers have called Mike out on his 0 to 1 RIR claim, they think he isn’t training anywhere close to failure. The claims and counterclaims go back and forth, and unfortunately the namecalling does as well. I’ve kinda lost respect for the youtubers on all sides of this argument because of it.

But it gets back to the same point as the antibody story up above: a scientist is making a claim that they think is well-founded and backed by evidence, other scientists claim it’s all bullshit.

We think of science as very high minded and such, that science is conducted through solemn papers submitted to austere journals. I don’t think that’s ever been the case, science is conducted as much through catty bickering and backbiting as it is in the peer-reviewed literature. Scientists are still people, I’m sure a lot of us will be happy to take our cues from people we respect without spending the time to go diving into the literature. The literature is long and dense, and you may not even be the right kind of expert to evaluate it. So when someone you respect says a claim is bullshit, I’m sure a lot of people accept that and don’t pay the claim any additional mind.

So is the cell atlas actually good? Is Mike Israetel actually training to failure? I don’t know. I’m not the right kind of scientist to evaluate those claims. The catty backbiting has reduced my opinion of all the scientists involved in these controversies, although I understand that drunk scientists are only human and youtubers need to make a living through drama, so I try not to be too unkind to them.

Still, it’s a reminder that “the science” isn’t a thing that’s set in stone, and “scientists” are not all steely-eyed savants searching dispassionately for Truth. I don’t have any good recommendations from this unfortunately, the only thing I can think of is the bland “don’t believe scientists unquestioningly,” but that’s hardly novel. I guess just realize that scientists can disagree as childishly and churlishly as anyone else.

“I go with the athletes, not the science”

Sorry I haven’t written about finance in a while, I know science+finance (SciFi, if you will) was kinda my niche, but since I got serious about my fitness I’ve been recommended a lot of fitness content by the Almighty Algorithm, and it’s gotten me thinking.

Today’s topic requires just a tiny bit of background. As I wrote about, I’ve been following the advice of Dr Mike Israetel in part because he says all the right science-y shibboleths to make me believe he knows what he’s talking about. But I’ve also gotten recommended content from many other lifters who push back against some of his claims.

To an extent their pushbacks pass the smell test as well, they reference the same concepts that Dr Mike (and others) discuss, but they interpret those concepts differently. So the disagreement between Dr Mike’s “science-based” advice and other people’s advice seems to be a legitimate disagreement over the science, rather than a denial of science and the substitution of personal preference in its stead.

But other parts of this disagreement strike me as more… thoughtless. I watched a video critiquing some of the science-based conclusions, and it stated (paraphrased) “people say this move is terrible, but then you see world record power lifters doing it and you think hmmm, maybe it’s not so terrible after all.”

I think this appeal to authority has no place in a science-based discussion. Now yes, every scientific theory on exercise must be tested and proven *outside* the lab as well as in the lab. If a conclusion only works in a controlled lab environment then it isn’t necessarily best in the “real world.” But saying “well the best power lifters do this so the science must be wrong” is kind of absurd, because maybe they could be *better* if they actually listened to the science.

It reminds me of a story about Pliny the Elder. Pliny was a wealth Roman politician, whose wealth was derived mainly from vast agricultural estates. Not only that, he had extensive sources of the best knowledge available in the Roman world. So in his book Natural History, he draws upon his knowledge and experience to categorically state that *if you do not honor the gods, you will not be successful in agriculture*. And if you asked any of the Roman agriculturalists of his era, they’d probably give you the same answer.

Is the science on agriculture wrong? If all the best farmers honor the Gods, is that the only way to succeed?

No.

So if the best power lifters in the world are doing a certain move that science says is terrible, maybe the science is actually right and the power lifters are succeeding due to their own innate abilities combined with all their other training. I’d hazard a guess that a single move isn’t make or break to their training at all, and defending a move with this appeal to authority doesn’t really seem logical. It seems more like casting about for evidence to support an idea that you’d like to be true.

Science must be refuted with science. You have to be able to use real-world data and say “lab results say this move is bad but here’s all the evidence showing that people who eschew the move generally fail and people who use the move generally succeed.” You can’t point to a single piece of anecdote and say “well some people who use it succeed,” because then you’d be pointing to Pliny the Elder and saying “well I guess honoring the gods does improve your farm, because this guy was a really successful farmer and that’s what he did.”

Anyway, exercise science still seems to be in its infancy. I hope it gets more rigorous and comprehensive in the future, but it still seems to need some time before we can believe its claims as much as we can believe virology or chemistry.

Cope, or good sense?

As I wrote last time, I’ve been following Dr Mike Isratael’s youtube channel in my own quest to lose weight and (maybe) gain muscle. And as I said last time, Dr Mike says all the right words to make me think he knows what he’s talking about, but I’m afraid I only believe him because he knows the shibboleths, not because he’s actually right. What if he’s a charlatan like the rest, but his shibboleths are “basic biochemistry” instead of “pseudo-right wing culture,” and that’s why I believe him? What if what he’s saying isn’t correct, will I have the sense to know?

Well I’ve started… not disbelieving, but rather not following all the advice he gives. On the one hand, this could be proof that I’m a free-thinker, who takes all advice to heart and executes it not based on its source or shibboleths, but on its factual content. On the other hand, maybe that’s all cope and I’m not following it because I don’t want to.

The basic idea comes down to 1 thing: dieting. As I said, my primary goal is to lose weight, but I’m hitting the gym and I’d sure like to gain muscle on the way. Well Dr Mike has a video out about how that entire idea is a myth, and that the most productive way to do things is to eat a calorie surplus to gain weight (and go to the gym to make sure that’s muscle weight), while eating a calorie deficit in order to lose weight (and go to the gym to make sure that’s only fat weight). Trying to gain muscle on a calorie deficit, or lose fat on a surplus, is inefficient and possibly impossible.

Now Mike does caveat this with a few exceptions. If an exceptionally jacked individual was gravely injured and has lost muscle and gained fat while laid up in the hospital, then it’s much easier for them to gain back that fat and lose back that muscle once they get out of the hospital. It’s always easier to get *back* in shape than to get in shape *for the first time*.

Another caveat he talks about is “newbie gains,” where someone who is young and never went to the gym can start gaining muscle/losing fat together. But the caveat to the caveat is that this isn’t sustainable, eventually it will be one or the other.

So I’ve decided to believe that I’m in the “newbie gains” stage, the caveat to my own claim being that I did used to go to the gym a bit and I’m not actually that young. Regardless, I’m choosing to believe that Dr Mike is giving this advice to aspiring bodybuilders, people who are already fairly muscular and with a health amount of bodyfat, and therefore his advice doesn’t apply to me who is very unmuscular and with an unhealthy amount of bodyfat.

To reiterate, my goal is to lose weight and gain muscle. Dr Mike says that’s not usually possible and that I have to pick one and only one goal if I’m going to succeed, and I’ve decided to ignore that advice and believe that his advice is aimed at an audience that I’m not really a part of.

But maybe this is all wrong. Maybe for an obese person to become healthy, they need to lose a lot of weight, and during that time they simply won’t gain much of any muscle no matter how they try. And maybe that obese person is me.

If I were to take Dr Mike’s advice to heart, I would probably restructure my training with the understanding that I need to focus solely on the weight loss, probably by entering a more severe calorie deficit than I’m at now, in order to more quickly lose weight so I can then put on muscle. I’d probably spend a lot less time thinking about my gym technique and a lot more time working on my diet.

Am I ignoring Dr Mike’s advice because I’m a free-thinker making a rational conclusion about whether his advice is right for me? Or am I doing it because this is the first piece of advice I just don’t like?

I don’t know.

Exercise and shibboleths

I’ve been trying to lose weight and gain muscle for years. But despite being in the target Young Male demographic, I never listened to Joe Rogan, or Logan Paul, or any of the exercise/fitness influences. Part of that was that they just didn’t interest me. Part of that was that fitness is filled with a lot of pseudoscience, and as a scientist myself I could see that almost everything said online was tinged with nonsense and falsehood. Everyone is looking for “one weird trick” to get abs of steel and 4% body fat, which leads to a proliferation of voodoo practitioners giving terrible advice and selling you supplements.

I stayed away from online exercise discussions.

But while idly scrolling one day, I found a video by Dr Mike Israetel of Renaissance Periodization. And for the first time in my life, I’m hooked. I’m watching his videos, I’m trying to learn his techniques, I’m putting into practice what he say I should be doing.

I think a large part of this sudden switch is that Dr Mike seems to have legit credentials. A teaching record at Lehman College, a genuine publication history, this guy is clearly doing science, not voodoo. But I think even more than his credentials are his shibboleths.

Put simply, Mike Israetel says all the right words as a scientist to make me (a fellow scientist) believe he knows what he’s saying. There are certain words that started out in science but have reached the mainstream: anyone can talk about carbohydrates and calories. But few people know what a motor unit is, or can accurately talk about the immune system. Dr Mike is saying things that pass the smell test to me (I am a fellow biology but not an exercise scientist specifically), and that helps me believe him when he says things I might otherwise be skeptical of.

And those shibboleths… make me nervous. Because I know I’m not actually doing research, I’m not actually seeking out all sides of the debate and forming my own rational conclusions. There’s hundreds of hucksters selling you on “the best way” to do exercise, so am I trusting Dr Mike for all the wrong reasons? Maybe he knows his biochemistry, but his exercise science is dogshit. I’d never know.

And even if Dr Mike is truly giving me the most accurate, up-to-date information in the scientific literature, that information could be wrong, and I could spend my time following baseless advice and getting less fit than if I’d just trusted the gymbro with a 6-pack and pecs.

I haven’t looked for any advice outside of Dr Mike, because to be honest I don’t have the time or the background necessary to know if he’s *really* got the goods or is a huckster like all the others. I have the background to know he knows his biochemistry, but beyond that I’m lost. But as someone without much time to exercise anyway, I feel like latching on to a charismatic Youtube professor is at least better than latching on to any other charismatic Youtuber, and is hopefully better than flying blind like how I used to exercise.

Time will tell.

Healthcare needs to stop infantilizing its patients

I was once told a family story about one of my great-great aunts, let’s call her Clara. As a young adult, Clara was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, or as it was known in those days “turning to stone.” Before Lou Gehrig made it noteworthy, the disease that bears his name was named after its most noticeable symptoms, a progressive atrophy of motor neurons until a person can’t even move at all. They feel like they’ve “turned to stone,” and death follows when the neurons controlling the heart or lungs also atrophy away.

Clara’s doctor told her sister about the diagnosis, but the sister was *adamant* that Clara not be told. “Turning to stone” was a horrific way to go, and conjured ideas of a person being trapped in their own body unable to move or call for help until at last they slowly, agonizingly, died. Clara was never told her diagnosis, and continued to see her doctor while being told lies that she was “improving” and “getting better.” Until at last she died.

And with the fullness of time, I guess she really will “turn to stone,” as will we all.

I don’t know what Clara thought as she was dying. Maybe she never really knew what was happening to her, or maybe she figured it out. Either way, her family probably thought they were doing her a favor by not telling her, and saving her the pain of knowing her inescapable fate.

But were they really saving her? Or did she pass away sad and frustrated that despite her efforts and all the encouragement, she only ever got worse and worse? Maybe knowing would have given her peace of mind, and made it easier for her to understand her condition.

Stories like Clara were common a century ago. It was not uncommon for doctors to hide a diagnosis from a patient, on the assumption that it was better they simply not know. Fortunately now we’re past that, and doctors are willing to treat patients with a lot more respect. Sometimes.

Recently I switched doctors and have been trying to continue taking the medicine I had been prescribed by my old doctor. My condition isn’t immediately life-threatening, but my live is much improved with the medicine. However I have had an absolutely terrible time of it, and have seen first hand how stupid the medical system can be when doctors get it into their heads that the patient is best kept in the dark.

The first thing that happened was that the doctors, with too little information in hand, misdiagnosed me and tried to brush brush off my condition. The medicine I’m taking has some slight psychoactive properties for some (although not for me) and is occasionally used to treat depression or insomnia. I have neither, and I wasn’t taking it for either.

I listed both my condition and the medicine I had been prescribed, and the doctor agreed to set up an appointment with me. But when I arrived for the appointment, the nurse did nothing more than take my weight before telling me that I was in the wrong place, *that* medicine is proscribed by psychiatric care, and I needed to get an appointment with an entirely different department. I made the appointment, but had no idea why I was even doing so.

The medicine isn’t psychiatric, nor is the condition. But because it has alternative affects, someone got it in their stupid thick skull that this was *only* a psychiatric medicine and that I couldn’t possibly be taking it for the *non-psychiatric* reason that I had put in the mandatory intake form. It’s clear neither doctors nor nurses ever read a damn word of the forms they ask you to fill out, because even glancing at mine would have told them what my condition *really* is. And if they *did* think I needed to visit psychiatric, then *they should have told me so before the damn appointment*. They should have realized “oh, this person is in the wrong place” and told me before they wasted my time!

As I said I scheduled the appointment with psychiatric, but after an angry phone call with the original doctor’s office, someone actually realized their mistake and got me a new appointment with someone who could treat my condition.

*Could* though, not *will*. Because see, my condition can also sometimes be treated with lifestyle changes, but I’ve worked on it for years with no luck before I got the medicine, and the medicine is the *only* thing that helped me. But the doctor I spoke to decided to treat me like someone who had never heard of their own condition, the condition *I had to tell these people about*, and started off with the whole lifestyle spiel before I had to cut them off and list off everything I’ve tried before medicine actually getting some help with medicine.

The doctor also decided that I had so *little* understanding of my condition that she had to list all the signs and symptoms, all the ways it will affect my health, even though *I already know all this, which is why I’m here for some god damned treatment*. These people were too stupid to read a form, and now are too stupid to listen to me and understand that I have had this for a while, I know what it’s all about, and I know I both need and want medicine to contain it.

They treated my like a child, quite frankly. They assumed that I was completely lacking in knowledge, that I didn’t know what I needed or wanted, and that I had zero understanding of my own health. I got a prescription but I’ve decided after filling it that I’m unlikely to ever visit this practice again, because for all the horrors of the healthcare system, infantalization of the patient is one thing that should have stayed in the 19th century.

So just how *do* you get good at teaching?

As a scientist with dreams of becoming a professor, I know teaching is part of the package. Whether it’s a class of undergraduates or a single student in a lab, your knowledge isn’t worth anything if you cannot teach it to others. I always say: no one would have cared about Einstein if he couldn’t accurately explain his theories. It doesn’t matter how right you are, science demands you explain your reasoning, and if you can’t explain in such a way to convince others, you still have a ways to go as a scientist.

Einstein was a teacher. After discovering the Theory of Relativity, he wrote and lectured so as to teach his theory to everyone. Likewise I must be a teacher, whether teaching basic concepts to a class of dozens, or teaching high-level concepts to an individual or a small group, teaching is part of science, and mandatory for a professor.

But how do I get good at it?

The first problem is public speaking. I don’t think I get nervous speaking in public, but I do have a tendency to go too fast, such that my words don’t articulate what I’m actually thinking. It’s hard to realize that the concepts you know in your head will be new and novel to the whole world that lives *outside* your head. When teaching these concepts to someone else, you need to go step by step so that they understand the logical progression, you can’t just make a logical leap because you already know the intervening steps.

So OK, I need to practice speaking more, but beside that, what’s the best method for teaching? And here we get to the heart of why I’m writing this post, *I don’t know and I don’t think anyone does*.

Every decade it seems sociologists find One Weird Trick to make students learn, and every decade it seems that trick is still leaving many students behind. When I went to school, teaching was someone standing at the front of the class, giving a lecture, after which students would go home and do practice problems. This “classic” style of teaching is now seen as passe at best, outright harmful at worst, and while it’s still the norm it’s actively shunned by most newer teachers.

Instead, teachers now have a battery of One Weird Tricks to get students to *really* learn. “ACTIVE learning” is the word of the day, the teacher shouldn’t just lecture but should involve the students in the learning process.

For instance, the students could each hold remote controls (clickers) with the numbers 1 through 4 on them. Then the teacher will put up a multiple-choice question at random points during class, and the students will use their clicker to give the answer they think is correct. There’s no grade for this except participation, and the students’ answers are anonymized, but the teacher will give the correct answer after all the students answer, and a pie chart will show the students how most of their classmates answered. So the theory is that this will massively improve student learning in the following ways:

  • Students will have a low-stakes way to test their knowledge and see if they’re right or wrong, rather than the high-stakes tests and homework that they’re graded on. They may be more willing to approach the problem with an open mind, rather than being stressed about how it will affect their grade.
  • The teacher will know what concepts the students are having trouble on, and can give more time to those prior to the test.
  • Students stay more engaged in class, rather than falling asleep, and likewise teachers feel more validated with an attentive class

The only problem is that the use of clickers has been studied, and has failed to improve student outcomes. Massive studies and meta-analyses with dozens of classes, thousands of students, and clickers don’t improve student’s learning at all over boring old lectures.

Ok, how about this One Weird Trick: “flipped classrooms.” The idea is that normally the teacher lectures in class and the students do practice problems at home. What if instead the students’ homework is to watch the lecture as a video, then in class students work on problems and the teacher goes around giving them immediate and personalized feedback on what they’re doing right or wrong?

In theory this again keeps students far more active, they’re less likely to sleep through class and the immediate feedback they receive while working through the problem sets helps the teachers and students know what they need to work more on. Even better, this One Weird Trick was claimed to narrow the achievement gap in STEM classes.

But another large meta-analysis showed that flipped classrooms *again* don’t improve student learning, and in fact *widen* the achievement gap between minority and white students. Not at all what we wanted!

In theory, science teaches us the way to find the truth. Our methods of storing information have gotten better and better and better as we’ve used science to improve data handling, data acquisition, and data transmission. I read both of those meta-analyses on my phone, whereas even just 30 years ago I would have had to physically go to a University Library and check out one of their (limited) physical journals if I wanted to read the articles and learn if Active Learning is even worth it or not.

But while we’ve gotten so much better at storing information, have we gotten any better at teaching it? We’ve come up with One Weird Trick after One Weird Trick, and yet the most successful (and common) form of teaching is a single person standing in front of 20-30 students, just talking their ears off. A style of teaching not too far removed from Plato and Aristotle, more than 2,000 years ago.

I want to get better at teaching, and I think public speaking is part of that. But beyond just speaking gooder, does anyone even know what good teaching *is*?