Friday Feels – Ketones and The Danger of Preconceived Beliefs

“Speaking respectfully to a person’s worldview is the price of entry to get their attention…People don’t want to change their worldview. They like it, they embrace it and they want it to be reinforced.”

Seth Godin – All Marketers Are Liars

This world view could be gluten-free, functional medicine, or the importance of the 2nd amendment. Like it or not you filter everything based on your preconceived beliefs and this further potentiates your bias.

The perfect example is my preconceived world view of Ketogenic Diets. To me, the word itself is like nails on a chalk board. I have literally watched college professors laugh at the idea as they grabbed another muffin. I knowingly have a lot of bias in this realm. I also train in a manner where I need to be able to blow through carbohydrates and do it well. Furthermore, I like carbohydrates, I am weight stable and healthy AF. Also, not eating them would severely impact many aspects of my life, for instance, my wife would lose her shit. Thus, I have little motivation to change my world view, yet I still have two…maybe three options.

1. Read everything by really smart and educated humans who frame the carbohydrate decision as the best decision. There are plenty of knowledgeable and relatively unbiased writers and researchers in this realm. They really just want people to stop being so dogmatic about ketogenic diets and understand that insulin is not an obese pedophile lurking behind everything that ails mankind.
2. Read everything by really smart and educated humans who frame the ketogenic decision as the best decision. There are some knowledgeable and relatively unbiased figures in this field. They really just want people to acknowledge that there may be another way and that the ketogenic diet does have a ton of practical uses and that what we know is very limited because of decades of research only looking at carbohydrate heavy or mixed dietary protocols.
3. Read nothing and wait for your bagel to pop happily out of the toaster.

Unfortunately, most people live in 1 or 3. Yet, the cool stuff happens when you get 1 and 2 together. You get understanding. You break down barriers and you start to respect and live in the gray.

Black and white is comfortable. It’s ignorant and it is being fed back to you by Facebook algorithms every second of the day. And an entire industry is built around giving you what you want to hear in way that feels familiar and safe.

But, you provide the final Filter. Can you wake up to your biases? Can you laugh at them and not take them so seriously? Are you willing to read information and converse with humans who disagree with you? If you can’t, no matter what you believe you are dangerous.

“Left to their own devices, personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”
-Eli Pariser

Here is a link to an example of this principle in action. Two phenomenal researchers who live in the trenches (Mike T Nelson and Dominic D’Agostino) having an educated conversation on a polarizing topic that focuses on applicability and context, while also acknowledging what we don’t know we don’t know.