Another thought from hypothesis land: maybe a little depression is a chance to retire and regroup, but in the original environment, there was more that would pull people out of depression-- social contact and work that obviously needs to be done.

This is about mild-to-moderate depression, though. Major depression seems to be different, and not good for anything.

Isn't that line about a foot stomping on a human face forever a quote from O'Brian? If so, it's the kind of thing he'd like to believe, but it wouldn't be the sort of thing that could be known, and is less likely to be accurate considering that atmosphere of lies that Oceania had.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if Orwell meant it to be taken straight.

Second thought: O'Brian might not have believed it himself (what does belief mean to an Inner Party member?), he just might have been saying it to get Winston to despair.

One of the other implausibilities of the book is that people who get hurt in dictatorships are generally just ground up by the system, they aren't targeted by a highly intellectual stalker.

Maybe. Blood tests first. And possibly research second.

These are some fast guesses-- my impression is that it can take years [1] to track down this sort of thing. Also, I don't know how much of this has already been done.

Start with five minutes thought. What does Eliezer know about his symptoms? Can anything be deduced by mulling over them?

I'd start with poking around to find out whether other people have the same pattern of symptoms. Does it have a medical name? What does medical research say about what works? What do people say about what works? Do the symptoms ever become better or worse? Does this correlate with something that could be experimented with?

Hire MetaMed, but also look for anecdotal information.

Exercise might be bad for some people.

I'm going to recommend some caution about experiments-- so far as I know, Eliezer has fairly good health. He's got some energy problems, an inability to lose weight, reacts very badly to missing a meal, and doesn't get any good from exercise. There's a lot of room for making things worse.

I'm in substantial agreement with this, but I do think the bad reaction to missing a meal is enough to be of at least a little concern. On the other hand, the cultural issues around fat are weird and extreme enough that it could explain the lack of thought that's gone into Eliezer's efforts to lose weight.

[1] Something in the neighborhood of 2 years or more for people who report success. Original research takes time.

I'm going to recommend something less specific-- researching what's going on with your metabolism, instead of trying things that seem to work for some fraction of other people.

Even if it's good for him, he hasn't done the testing to find out what proportion of people it's good for.

I've wondered about that sort of thing-- if you look for something and find it somewhere that you'd have sworn you'd checked three times, you'll assume it's a problem with your memory or a sort of ill-defined perversity of things, not a Simulation glitch.

A little dubiousness about Sudbury-- basically a claim that the democracy aspect means that you need to be good at small group politics.

Might my lack of desire to travel mean that I'm more likely to be a PC?

Also, simulating one's ancestors would be something that you'd only need to do once, or (more likely) enough times to accommodate different theories. Simulating one's ancestors in what-if scenarios would probably be more common, unless the simulators just don't care about that sort of fun.