Does anyone know if these tradeoffs occur in organic brain variation between people? It almost seems that the g-factor is so strong as to overwhelm these tradeoffs without tDCS...

Now with people posting more of their gaming online, many of their gaming experiences don't necessarily go away once they quit the game. In fact, how one plays video games says a lot about one's personality.

I still stay emotionally involved with some of my old AOE2 games many years later (because I record them all), and I still sometimes reel over certain really irrational decisions I made in them.

Shouldn't this depend on the area? What if I think I might be the best in the world at a particular video game?

Does anyone know if one could convince the Archive Team to archive them? Or does the Archive Team often consist of more difficult personalities?

Here is a theory (fox lens viewpoint) of why many people are under economic duress. The problem is not consumerism but producerism:

In the US there are many ambitious, hardworking people who are very excited about their work and career. Such people view work, achievement, and production as its own reward. They primarily value the intellectual satisfaction and social validation that comes from career success; money is less important.

However, even though they don't necessarily value the money that highly, they still get a lot of it, because they are typically quite successful (other things being equal, people who value achievement highly tend to achieve a lot). Because they have obtained quite a bit of money without directly aiming for it, they don't spend a lot of time thinking about how to conserve it. Such a person's inner monologue might run something like this: "I've got to get a job a Google/Facebook/Amazon/Goldman, they're the best in the business, and I want to work with the best people and change the world!... (person works hard to get a relevant degree from a top school, does a lot of networking and side projects, etc etc and finally lands the dream job) ... Okay sweet, now I'm here! This is awesome, now I've got to hit a homerun on this project... oh right and I've got to buy some clothes and a car... how much will that be? $30K....? Seems pricey, but I'm making $150K, so it's no big deal ..."

The point is, because these people have lots of cash that they don't care too much about conserving, they drive prices up for everyone else. Consumer companies orient themselves towards the people who have a lot of cash and don't care too much about getting the best prices; such people probably are the most valuable customers. Other people, who don't love their work and view it as a necessary evil, find that they need to work much harder than they should because of the crazy overachievers who are running up the prices on everything.

I can play

Why did you have this impression?

Groupthink I guess: other people who I knew didn't think that it's so important (despite being people who are very well educated by conventional standards, top ~1% of elite colleges).

Tell me how exactly you're planning to use PCA day-to-day?

Disclaimer: I know that I'm not giving enough evidence to convince you: I've thought about this for thousands of hours (including working through many quantitative examples) and it's taking me a long time to figure out how to organize what I've learned.

I already have been using dimensionality reduction (qualitatively) in my day to day life, and I've found that it's greatly improved my interpersonal relationships because it's made it much easier to guess where people are coming from (before people's social behavior had seemed like a complicated blur because I saw so many variables without having started to correctly identify the latent ones).

i think the sooner you lose the need for everything to resonate deeply or have a concise insightful summary, the better.

You seem to be making overly strong assumptions with insufficient evidence: how would you know whether this was the case, never having met me? ;-)

It didn't occur to me how significant this was. The number of hours that I had is perhaps as small as the number of hours that most people have by age 10. In hindsight it's obvious: of course I didn't have good social skills relative to other adults, in the same way that a 10 year old doesn't have good social skills for an adult. I just hadn't put nearly enough time in!

Just out of curiosity - do you think that all other people who put massive amounts of time into socializing get benefits that are proportionate to the amount of time put in? From our point of view, most people spend incredibly high amounts of time socializing, but does this make each and every one of them socially savvy to the same extent?

Also, what do you think of https://www.quora.com/How-did-successful-people-spend-their-time-when-they-were-young-between-ages-of-10-and-22/answer/Auren-Hoffman ?

What about something like this? http://nyscf.org/images/pdf/biopsy_flyer_versionweb.pdf?study_id=17&participant_id=51644acd8255dc3ede4fa494b7def28831554d6a . I'm not sure if they'd store the samples at a timescale long enough to be relevant though (aka, 4+ decades).

How important is it, though, that the cells be your own cells? In several decades, we may have even better tools to deal with the transplant rejection that stems from regenerated organs with different genomic material.

==

FWIW here is a relevant article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10295085/Stem-cell-banks-enable-wealthy-to-free-backup-version-of-their-adult-selves.html

Okay, I actually went and looked at the papers and followed a chain of citations back until I found where they are actually getting the protein.

Looks like my assessment was unnecessarily pessimistic. Those that I could find the source of their proteins who studied this protein in isolation seem to have bought a recombinant product from Peprotech, a biotech company that sells huge numbers of proteins. Their website (http://www.peprotech.com/en-US/Pages/Product/Recombinant_Human_GDF-11/120-11) seems to indicate that it is being produced in E. coli. I suspect they have altered the gene a bit to only produce the part cut by the protease that is active and may be doing some post-processing to get it folded right since they indicate that it comes as a dimer held together by disulfide bonds which have a hard time forming in bacterial cytosol. I suspect there's a bunch of industrial techniques and optimization going on in there that we in the research labs don't bother with in favor of doing things faster with more complicated or versatile small scale systems.

EDIT: and now I found this http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0085890 in which just this year someone managed to screw up the redox metabolism of bacteria such that you can more easily express proteins that form disulfide bonds in the cytosol of bacteria without the need for expensive post-processing to get the bonds right. One of a class of recent modded bacterial strains that are more amenable to expressing eukaryotic proteins at the expense of some metabolic upset. Cool stuff.

EDIT 2: Additionally, someone in my lab is in the process of trying to make large amounts of a couple of novel weird fungal proteins in order to study their activity in vitro. She can't express them in a fungus (the context in which they fold normally) since they will alter the cell division cycle of the fungi and probably kill them, so she's expressing them in bacteria. Had a very hard time getting them to both fold correctly and stay stable without degradation. Over the course of more than six months she's had to rebuild the system she is using to express it several times, and the final successful version involves expressing the protein alongside a binding partner that is required to make it not aggregate into mush immediately upon translation, fused to a tag that makes it more soluble, and using slightly nonstandard extraction chemicals to keep it from denaturing. You probably need to apply a similarly tailored approach to many novel proteins when you yank them across contexts, which you can justify more readily if you stand to make money off it.

On the other hand, I also looked at a number of recent papers studying the effects of this growth factor. All the studies used daily intraperitoneal injections (injections through the abdominal wall into the space around the intestines) for about a month, of 0.1 mg per kilogram of body weight. That might just be because it can be difficult to get lots of needles into a mouse blood vessel in a short period of time though, but it still suggests that maintaining levels needs lots of injection. Also, according to Peprotech, their cheapest cost is $3900 per milligram (at their current levels of production, which is limited and for research purposes). Of course, insulin is probably a better model of a protein product that makes it big time, though not a perfect one since that prevents rather severe issues immediately rather than slowing chronic ones.

As for stuff brought up in this post, I think that it is probably should indeed possible to muck around with yeast until you can get it to process secreted proteins how you want - just taking a lot longer.