The Science says drinking is for squares
First alcohol was good for you in moderation. Now it's not so good in any dose. Maybe the science has changed. Maybe the problem is that The Science is a bizarre cult of fanatics.
My twenties and a decent portion of my thirties revolved around alcohol.
Drinking was a huge part of my identity. This wasn’t for the best. As I got older, my interests moved from power-drinking three or five nights a week to emphasis on quality whiskeys, locally-made New Zealand wines, and micro-brews (before that market turned into wall to wall Hazy IPAs)
But even that frou-frou boutique experience leaves a mark. The impact of even a few drinks on sleep and on the quality of the next day is obvious and severe enough to put me off it. It makes me wonder if I’ve changed with age, or if the booze was always doing this to me and I didn’t put it together thanks to the energy of youth. Based on Marc’s comments plus my own suspicions, I believe it’s the latter.
I haven’t officially Stopped Drinking, nor is that likely, but my consumption is way down. I have maybe 3-4 beers once or twice a month. I no longer understand myself as a “drinker”.
The kicker though is this line:
TLDR is it is no longer crazy or even particularly controversial to say that most of what we know as science is simply fake.
The crisis of the sciences has been a long time coming.
I’ve been paying attention as far back as 2005 when John Ioannidis published his provocative yet prescient “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”.
We’ve invested a lot of prestige in that word “science” up here in the 21st century. That almost pious reverence toward The Science and its labcoated priesthood, a default view held at least by the elite class in the West, has roots in 20th-century technological innovations, to which is added a cultural mythology linking technology to the history of the European “enlightenment” circa 1600-1900.
As I remind anyone who will listen, I’m no critic of science. I am a critic of science done badly, science without context, and that chimeric monstrosity called The Science™ that looks a great deal more like a cult than anything Copernicus, Galileo, or Newton had in mind.
If you were really interested in science, you’d welcome questions and criticisms.
A useful barometer is a comments section where those who publicly declare “OMG I <3 SCIENCE!” congregate. Question “the consensus”, ask deeper questions about method and approach, and take note of how much openness to criticism you find among the science-lovers.
You will be set upon by a hive of angry midwit nerds reciting the D&D stats they committed to memory during their time as unpaid lab techs in grad school.
What you won’t find is much genuine curiosity.
The Science™ is a cult that worships expertise, which substitutes for real innovation, insight, and ingenuity, and consensus, where everyone agrees that we’re the smartest people in the room (clearly, because we all agree).
The dysfunction of science is but a microcosm of the weirdness happening everywhere else in society. Institutions at large, from food to transportation, seem increasingly unable to deliver on their basic functions. Organizations are as broken and ineffective as the individual personalities staffing them.
I have a lot of material on this so maybe I’ll drip some of that out between the AI and mind posts. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
The takeaway here is to stop acting like science can or should dictate how you conduct your life. Science never did have that much to say about the on-the-ground realities of getting through your day. In broad strokes we learn interesting things about our bodies, sure. But by the nature of that knowledge it has hard limits on practical significance.
The sooner we move past blind worship of managers in labcoats, the better we’ll all be. I still like drinking, but I don’t want to do it often since it isn’t compatible with how I want to live my life now. That’s enough.