Adaptation and Delusion
I want to know what I am doing and why
I used to write about fitness, rather a lot and perhaps too much. Some of my points back then remain true in the specific context of their writing. Other criticisms have either become moot due to attention paid to fixing them or to technological advances and/or behavioral change. However, much of what I wrote about fitness and training focused on human nature, which, apparently, hasn’t changed so those theses are timeless. I’ve also realized that other ideas, originally written about fitness, apply universally.
For example, in the following essay (extensively edited here over ten years after I wrote it), I write about, “how easy it is to conclude that what we are doing produces the result we seek because we like doing that particular thing and it gets us high,” i.e. it provides us immediate and obvious positive feedback. I wrote that about various physical training modalities but it could just as easily be applied to alcohol consumption, for which the underlying motivation is often deep-seated personal discontent that drinking may mask without moving one any closer to resolving the actual issue.
We also tend to cherry-pick anecdotal or scientific observations that support our chosen actions, using them to bolster what we were going to do anyway. I get it; it’s hard and tedious work to sort the signal from the noise, and to read decades of work done on a particular topic. One could, of course, read a meta-analysis wherein someone else has done the sorting and developed conclusions from it, e.g. Stepto’s assessment of interval training, or Laursen and Jenkins’ work a few years later. But it’s a TLDR issue and we easily leap to the conclusion our prejudice has already prepared us to find, rarely reaching the paper’s conclusion, which is often, “more research is needed ...” It sure is hard to recognize our nature, and harder still to resist its influence.
/
I have three questions today:
Does anyone know what they are doing?
If so, do they know why?
In the end, does it matter?
