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Takeaways from Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke

  I read Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke recently and learnt A LOT.   The book itself doesn’t go deep into the neuroscience of addictive behavior but uses anecdotes and basic principles to call out behavioral trends.  These are my top 5 takeaways from the book: 1/ Looking inwards with mindfulness. This book got me to start practicing mindfulness with the added layer of removing judgement. Essentially, when we start to judge our thoughts, we make it difficult to actually  learn from our mental processes and observe.  2/ Conscious self-binding. This is basically creating barriers between an addictive activity and our access to triggers E.g. deleting the Instagram app to avoid doom scrolling. Conscious/ intelligent self-binding lets us replace these activities with better ones. 3/ Concept of balance. The book specifically talks about the pain-pleasure balance. When we keep indulging, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases and our threshold for exp...
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War on Employment

The risk of AI taking away jobs is a real one. However, currently, we don’t trust AI enough to replace a job. ChatGPT and Bard still throw out responses like “I am not built to answer this”. Bard is notoriously bad at doing simple math.   A humorous billboard has gone viral stating “Hey Chat GPT, finish this building”, indicating that construction workers will never be replaced by AI. While humorous and hopefully a source of alleviation for those worried for their jobs, it isn’t necessarily true that AI cannot replace those humans. Realistically, one day with a lower margin of error.    Time and time again we have questioned if a new technology will take a hit to employment rates. The difference with AI and a mark of the beauty of ChatGPT is that it's digestible for everyone. We think we understand AI because we are able to interact and play with it. This is unlike other technologies that have come to light like blockchain, big data and AR.   The simple fact is that ...
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Ozem "don't" pic

In tune with its trend of eye-catching magazine covers, the Economist this week showed a visual of a hot dog with an ominous syringe in place of the sausage.  This week's edition highlights the GLP-1 drug that seems to have taken the world by storm.  GLP-1 is a hormone that increases insulin secretion and decreases glucagon secretion to lower blood sugar levels. This drug, Semaglutide (marketed as Ozempic or Wegovy) is clearly meant for diabetics.  There are multiple issues with what’s going on.  Easy solution. Pretty much anyone can get their hands on the drug for diet and exercise free weight loss. Even I admit, it sounds pretty awesome. But, at the end of the day these are synthetic drugs. In most situations, the average body is equipt to lose excess weight on its own (it is my opinion that drugs should be used when the body is not equipt or not strong enough to battle an illness).   Safety. There are multiple instances of rapid weight-gain after use of...
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