Paul Graham's essays

It annoys me when blog-like content does not have an RSS feed. Sometimes it even annoys me enough that I go and do something about it. So without further ado (not that there was that much ado to begin with), here's a full-text RSS feed of Y Combinator founder Paul Graham's essays:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=e7e734678a95c1b71652ef7c4f4cfe9c&_render=rss

It only contains the most recent 10 entries, to keep loading time reasonable. I tried to include more, but Google Reader kept choking on Yahoo's Pipe when I tried to import the feed.

the kind of person

I was flipping through one of Michael Pollan's books at the airport bookstore last weekend. It may have been In Defense of Food, but I can't remember. Anyway, I came across this puzzling piece of advice:

Be the kind of person who takes supplements.

That is, you don't really have to take the supplements, as long as you are the kind of person who might. Pollan explains that studies have shown people who take multivitamins are generally healthier, but in controlled studies, multivitamins haven't been shown to actually make anyone healthier. This is reasonable, as it could be that supplement-takers are more health-conscious to begin with, and taking the supplements simply indicates their health-conscious status.

The puzzling part is this: how can someone follow Pollan's advice, other than by taking supplements?

This is related to a few philosophical paradoxes. Here's Kavka's toxin puzzle (from Wikipedia):

An eccentric billionaire places before you a vial of toxin that, if you drink it, will make you painfully ill for a day, but will not threaten your life or have any lasting effects. The billionaire will pay you one million dollars tomorrow morning if, at midnight tonight, you intend to drink the toxin tomorrow afternoon. He emphasizes that you need not drink the toxin to receive the money; in fact, the money will already be in your bank account hours before the time for drinking it arrives, if you succeed. All you have to do is. . . intend at midnight tonight to drink the stuff tomorrow afternoon. You are perfectly free to change your mind after receiving the money and not drink the toxin.

The question being, is it possible to intend to drink the toxin tonight if you know you won't actually have to tomorrow?

starting tomorrow

It's sad that it took me this long to come to this realization, but starting tomorrow does not work, at all, for anything.

The interesting part is that starting now does not work either. The entire mindset associated with making an abrupt transition from a bad state to a good state is the problem. Typically, the good state is unsustainable and you eventually end up back in the bad state again, where you tell yourself that at time t you will make another abrupt transition to the good state, which is unsustainable, so you end up in the bad state again, and so on.

The only solution that I've found is to try to be in a state that is not so bad that you have to make empty promises to yourself to transition out of it, and not so good that you can't keep it up.

Another reason not to make an abrupt transition from the bad state to the good state at some future time t is that this encourages you to get in all the damage you can before time t. And since you keep reverting back to the bad state, you can end up doing a lot of damage this way.