So if you find yourself saying the “aches and pains” are just a natural part of getting old, time to stop and realize that it is NOT natural. There is nothing natural about increased inflammation and joint pain. There is nothing natural about someone’s memory going as they get old. There is nothing natural about sexual impotence in your 40s. These are all signs that the body isn’t working correctly and steps need to be taken. But first we need to stop thinking that getting older means we have to experience these problems. There are many people who are still sharp as a tack, energetic and have no need for pain killers in their later years. As an old saying goes “It’s ok to get older….just don’t age in the process”.

Now, obviously a lot of health problems are elective, and come back to diet. If you’re an idiot, you will go on to say that they are all elective. If you’re not an idiot, and you know anything about memory research (for instance) or brain physiology you’ll know that actually, there is something eminently natural about memory getting bad as you get old. Even the older “sharp as a tack” people you know have very obvious and measurable signs of cognitive decline. Does this mean we’re all destined to become doddering fools? Obviously not. Does it mean that a great deal of improvement is possible? Obviously so. But of course that doesn’t make such good copy.

For an even stupider and more obviously ridiculous example, see his point #3.

Different person, different topic, same stupidity.

But the problem of saying “I don’t have time to read that” applies to anything – it could be blogs but it could be those really long articles in the Atlantic that scream: “I know no one is reading this article! I only wrote it to get a book deal!”The reality is that you have time to read everything.

Here’s what to do if you feel like you can’t get a grip on your reading pile:

Stop talking about information overload. That term is for weaklings. Guess what? Generation Y never talks about information overload. That’s because they know how to process information better than anyone else. That’s actually what they were doing when their parents told them to turn off the TV and the music and log off of IM and do their homework.

If you think you have time to read everything worth reading, you’re not a savvy information consumer, you’re a fucking retard. A hundred years ago nobody could read everything worth reading, and now you can’t even read everything worth reading in your own field, whatever that might be. Pretending that you can use some badass “Generation Y” strategy to get around this means only that one of the defining traits of Gen Y must be brain damage. And don’t even get me started on this “multi-tasking” bollocks. Unless you define multi-tasking as “doing a variety of things at the same time except slower and worse than if I had done each of them individually one right after the other” then common sense, and all the research, points the other way.

I don’t mind so much people saying stupid shit; what gets to me, for some reason, is the legion of commenters who always pop up saying: “thanks for another great post!1!! this is exzactly what ive always known and im frowarding it to a thousand of my frendz!! u r an inspiration to everyone!” These people should be rounded up and sent to work camps, where their reality-denying could be put to better use.

Now, how the fuck not wanting to teach children useless and antiquated things is an exclusively liberal attitude I have no idea. But there you have it.

For the our Task Force Report, I helped create a Research Advisory Board Literature Review where, along with the tremendous help of Andrew Schrock, we aggregated research to highlight the known issues around online safety. The patterns are brutally clear. The same issues continue to emerge with each new technology. The kids who are in trouble offline are more likely to be in trouble online and offline psychosocial factors contribute to online risks. Many more youth experience bullying than sexual contact and the realities of “predation” look very different than most people imagine and, thus, require vastly different solutions than most people propose.

The report was released while I was away and I came home to a storm. I’m used to folks dismissing qualitative work because they don’t understand it, but I’ve never before witnessed so many people reject solid quantitative studies done by reputable organizations that are replicated with different sampling techniques across different studies. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect someone to say to me, “Go find other data.” More frequently, as if in a refrain, folks are trying to reject the studies in this report as “old” and “outdated” even though the report makes it clear that the findings paint a consistent portrait and unreleased data show similar patterns. It’s as if nothing would satiate critics who can’t imagine that the real dangers are different than have been portrayed over the years.

I bring it up because this aspect of human character is so funnysad – give people data, hard data, peer-reviewed data, that does not say what they want it to say, and they ignore it. And the people who ignore it the most ferociously are the choadsmokers whose job is to make decisions, ostensibly using the best evidence possible to make those decisions.

Really, though, we’re all idiots, not just the policy makers. Unless you make a particular effort to be rational – and it _does_ take an effort, even for smart people – you’re just not going to hear what you don’t want to hear. Which is why I am so _highly_ amused, and disgusted, by the global warming people, who always demand “more research” when what thet really want is for people to “keep doing research until somebody gets results that we find palatable.”

Ah, the human condition. Doesn’t it just make you want to puke.