You can turn to actual experts, e.g. YouTube or books. But yes, I have recently had the misfortune of working with a personal trainer who was using ChatGPT to come up with training programs, and it felt confusing and like I was wasting time and money.
But he explicitly mentions books. That contrast makes it interesting. I assume that he is explicitly fine with text content.
And then he does not mention the web in general (or even Reddit - it wouldn't be worth more than an eyeroll to me), but YouTube.
On the one hand, yeah, well, the web was probably in a better shape in the past. (And YT even is a major aspect of that, imho, but anyways...) On the other hand, you really must be a die hard YT fanatic to only mention that single website (which by the way is mostly video clips, and has all the issues of the entire web), instead of just the web.
It's really well outside of the sphere of my imagination. The root cause of my reply wasn't even disagreement at first, but surprise and confusion.
Do you know why you got that video. Because people liked and subscribed to them and the 'experts' with the best information in the universe are hidden 5000 videos below with 10 views.
And this is 100% Googles fault for the algorithms they created that force these behaviors on anyone that wants to use their platform and have visibility.
Lastly, if you can't find anything interesting or important on YT, this points at a failure of your own. While there is an ocean of crap, there is more than enough amazing content out there.
Yeah, well, I never said that there aren't any experts in any topic who at some point decided to publish something there. The fact that entire generations of human beings basically look there and at TikTok and Instagram for any topic, probably also helps with this decision. It's still wildly bizarre to me anyways when people don't mention the web in general in such a context, but one particular commercial website, which is a lot about video based attention economy (and rather classic economy via so-called influencers). Nothing of that sounds ideal to me when it comes to learning about actually useful topics from actual experts. Not even the media type. It's hard for them to hyperlink between content, it's hard for me to search, to skip stuff, reread a passage or two, choose my own speed for each section, etc, etc. Sure, you can find it somewhere there. In the same spirit, McD is a salad bar, though... ;)
> And this is 100% Googles fault for the algorithms they created that force these behaviors on anyone that wants to use their platform and have visibility.
Wrong assumptions. It's not their fault, and a lot of it is probably by intent. It's just that they and you are not in the same boat. You are the product at big tech sites. It's 100% (impersonally) your fault to be sooo resistant understanding that. ;)
For anyone who hasn't been to the grocery store recently, a rotisserie chicken can be had for about $8. That was wild to me when I stopped to think about it for a second: a chicken born and raised to adulthood, slaughtered, and brought to my local market all for under $8.
The rotisserie chicken is a loss leader. Costco has publicly said they are happy to “lose” $30-40M a year on them because it drives people to the store and they make the rest up in higher margin products.
As someone arguing against vegetarians in the past, I get the point, but I actually made the switch recently, not because of ethics, but simply because of cost and laziness.
It's a silly story: I recently wrote a program to create my diet from the week based on local grocery store nutrition labels and prices for a couple hundred items, subject to constraints for calories, macronutrients (supporting my goals in the gym) and micronutrients (hit all RDIs for vitamins and minerals plus some speculative stuff). Meat is never included in the generated output because it's too expensive relative to what it offers from a nutrient perspective. All of my daily needs can be met for cheap and with minimal prep on a diet consisting basically of rice, beans, eggs, soy milk, oat milk, pea protein, Brussel sprouts, carrots, and apple juice, which works out to <$15/day for ~3000 calories; <$10/day if I remove some personalized constraints which adds lentils and substitutes cow milk in place of plant milks. Prior to my program, I was spending $20+/day buying groceries mindlessly or on takeout.
I've basically become a vegetarian out of sheer frugality and laziness (I don't like cooking and I don't like solving a puzzle to hit my macros each day). I imagine many people could be convinced to be weekday vegetarians from this angle, but it did take me several months to work through nutrition science books/videos to arrive at this point. (Shout out RP Strength.)
The other issue with my diet is that it is not optimized for taste or variety. I don't mind this (condiments go a long way and I'm pretty focused on my fitness goals), but I think I'm an outlier in this respect.
Anyway, all this to say I see an economic angle for hope, except that all messaging to the public on nutrition science is awful and confusing which leads to consumption decisions not based in any logical framework, and I doubt that behavior will change anytime soon unless we go through another economic shock.
I remember reading somewhere that over 80% of the grains grown in the U.S is for animal consumption, not human. Those animals are then slaughtered for human consumption. I don't know how true that number is, but even if it is half that, it is still highly inefficient and wasteful. That article also calculated the amount of resources (water especially) to produce one pound of meat vs a pound of fruits/vegetables.
None of this is rocket science, it is fairly straightforward to understand. Reducing meat consumption makes sense economically, ethically, environmentally etc. But, people like their hamburgers and their sea food and their KFC...
Right, makes sense. I guess going into fitness I expected meat would be important for getting protein and might be worth a premium, but it's both expensive and requires time to cook where most vegetarian products can be eaten without any prep. The only appliance I need is a rice cooker, which has had an extremely high ROI. The only animal product I can't seem to remove is eggs because of choline.
It's not just a reaction to the fashion of the older generation. They occupy different mental spaces. Facebook is broadcast, to everyone you know, permanently. Snapchat is 1:1, and transient. Sending the same text message on different platforms can have significantly different connotations.
