Week 19: “Where is the good knife?”

Best Question I’ve Recently Read

“Where is the good knife?” If I’m looking for the good knife in the kitchen, that means I have other bad knives. I should throw those out.

This applies to anything:

• If I’m looking for the good shoes, it means I haver bad ones.
• If I’m looking for the good book, it means I haver bad ones.
• If I’m looking for the good Y, it means I haver bad Ys.

The Y can be anything: teams building, friends, relationships, supermarkets. Part ways with them, I should.

The limits of our languages..

Side note on an adjacent topic that made me smile: A knife, should, by definition be a good knife. There shouldn’t be a good or bad knife. A good knife is a knife. A bad knife is not a knife. I’ve never thought about this until I’ve read about Ludwig Wittgenstein. Another worthy concept is: Wittgenstein’s ruler.

The ONLY test of intelligence that counts is to see if the person detects Wittgenstein's ruler situations:

1) When you use a ruler to measure the table, you are also using the table to measure the ruler.

2) The more unexpected the measurement, the more you apply W's ruler.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) January 8, 2019

Something I keep doing.

Intermittent Fasting. For me it’s eating 1 meal a day. This doesn’t have to be tied to a Keto or any other diet for me.

Intermittent fasting is something I’ve done for 12+ years now. It’s basically a form of time-restricted eating. I only eat within a time window. The smaller the window, the better. For me:

• The window ranged from 2 to 7 hours over the years.
• I eat my main, and only, meal around 6pm (or later.)
• The meal size used to be big. In the last year I split it into 1 good-size meal followed by another portion 1 hour later. Much better for digestion, much better for sleep.

Something I remembered recently.

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is one of my all-time favorite movies.