Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/low-hanging-productivity/

Tl;dr - Simple changes to workspaces like a big screen can make a big difference.

This week I spent a few days away from my usual desk.  I have been house sitting.  I didn't think too much of it; I tend to carry with me a portable lifestyle.  My laptop, some power blocks for my phone, and various supplies that make for easy "office"-ing around the place.  I usually don't carry a charger with me because when I know I will be gone a while I will take it with me.  

I have always liked a portable office.  The ability to stop, and continue later at ease was always important to me.  However recently I moved into a new place and set up a desk.  I figured I would tryX where X is workspaces (a post for the future).  I never set up a workspace for the reason of it not being portable.  The interesting thing that has surprised me this week is that I miss my big screen (which was a gift - I might have never bought myself a big screen).  

For whatever reason, the ability to view more space at once makes me more productive.  Combined with Linux's natural tendencies to have several desktop environments with simple switching.  My laptop screen is about 19in.  Which is plenty.  The new screen is about 1.5x that.  I never thought it would be useful, it took me years to do it.  If it broke today, I would be willing to spend up to $900 to get it back (which is more than six times the price of a new screen).  Right now I wonder how productive I might be with a 3rd screen... Or a 4th.  (or a 3D virtual reality work environment with screenspace limited by my eyeballs not my screen resolution...)

I feel like (along with other habits) I am probably working at 120% of what I was working before.  A fair chunk of which I owe to the extra screenspace.

Questions for today:

1. What part do you remember adding to your workspace to help you be more productive.
2. What's the coolest most awesome or productive workspace that you have seen in action?  How hard would that be to get for yourself?
3. How can you make your current workspace a tiny bit more productive in anticipation for things you have to do tomorrow?

Meta:  This took 45mins to write.

Originally posted here: http://bearlamp.com.au/people-who-lie-about-how-much-they-eat-are-jerks/

Weight loss journey is a long and complicated problem solving adventure.  This is one small factor that adds to the confusion.  You probably have that one friend.  Appears to eat a whole bunch, and yet doesn't put on weight.  If you ever had that conversation it goes something like,

"How are you so thin?"
"raah raah metabolism"
"raah raah I dont know why I don't put on weight"
"Take advantage of the habit"

Well I have had enough.  You're wrong.  You're lying and you probably don't even know it.  It's not possible. (Within a reasonable scope of human variation) Calories and energy are a black box system.  Calories in, work out, leftovers become weight gain, deficit is weight loss.  If a human could eat significantly more calories for the same amount of work and not put on weight we would be prodding them in a lab for breaking the laws of physics on conservation of mass and conservation of energy.

So this is you, you say you gain weight no matter what you eat and that's scientifically impossible.  Now what?  You probably don't mean to break the laws of physics (and you probably don't actually break them).  You genuinely absentmindedly don't notice when you scoff down whole plates of food and when you skip dinner because you didn't feel like it (and absentmindedly balance the calories automatically).  It's all the same to you because you naturally do that.

This very likely is about habits, and natural habits that people have.  If for example John has the habit of getting home and going to the fridge, making dinner because it's usually the evening.  Wendy doesn't have the habit.  She eats when she is hungry.  Not having a set mealtime sometimes means that she gets tired-hungry and has a state of being too exhausted to decide what to eat and too hungry to do anything else that would help solve the problem.  But for Wendy she doesn't get home and automatically cook dinner.  (good things and bad things come from habits.)

Wendy and john go to a big lunch together.  They both eat 150% of the calories they should be eating for that meal, and they don't mind - enjoying food is part of enjoying life.  It was a fancy restaurant with good food.  Later that evening when Wendy gets home she doesn't feel hungry and goes off to read a book or talk to friends on the internet.  Eventually she has a light snack (of 10% of her "dinner" calories) and heads off to totalling 160% of the calories for the two meals.  Effectively under-eating for the day.  John on the other hand, has his habit of heading home and making dinner.  Even after the big lunch, his automatic systems take over and he makes and ordinary dinner of 100% of his calories for that meal.  John's total for that day is 250% for two meals or effectively half a meal extra for that day.

If W and J do this every week (assuming the rest of their diets are perfectly balanced), John will have an upwards trajectory and Wendy will have a downwards one.  John might ask Wendy how she stays so skinny, and Wendy wouldn't know.  After all they eat about the same amount when they are together.

No one understands this.  

What can we do about it?

1. We can hire scientists to follow both J and W around for a week and write down every time they eat something. (this is impractical - maybe if we are in an isolated environment like a weekend retreat it would be easier to do this)
2. We can get them to self report via an app (but people are usually pretty bad at that)
3. We can try ask more specifically, "what do you eat in a day?", or "what have you eaten since this time yesterday?" and gather data points to try to build a picture of what a person eats.
4. We can search for people with similar habits around food to us and ask them how they stay healthy.
5. We can look for people with successful habits around food, ask them for advice and then figure out why that advice works, and how to make that advice work for us.

On the noticing level.  You should notice that every single thing that you eat adds to your caloric intake. Every single piece of work you do adds to your burn.  It's easier to eat another piece of chocolate (for 5 seconds) than run another 15minutes to burn that chocolate off.  If something is not working towards your dieting success it's probably working against it.

Meta: this took one hour to write.

There's a semi-famous paper by Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson: "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right". (Proper reference: Dunn, E.W., Gilbert, D.T., and Wilson, T.D., If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right, Journal of Consumer Psychology, vol 21, issue 2, April 2011, pp. 115–125.) It's been referenced a few times on LW but curiously never written up properly here. The purpose of this post is to remedy that.

There is an earlier LW post called "Be Happier" which among other things references this paper and quotes some things it says, but that post is monstrously long and covers a lot more ground (hence, less details on the material in this paper).

Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson (hereafter "DGW") offer eight principles to follow. Here they are.

1. Buy experiences instead of things.

Many studies have asked people to reflect on past "material" and/or "experiential" purchases and have consistently found that they report greater happiness from (and are made happier by recalling) the latter than the former.

Why? DGW propose 5 reasons. First, deliberately sought-out experiences encourage us to focus on the here and now (something shown to increase happiness substantially); second, when things don't change we adapt to them rapidly, and "material" purchases like cars and tables tend to be pretty stable (whereas ongoing experiences are more varied); third, it turns out that people spend more time anticipating experiences before they happen and recalling them afterwards than they do for material purchases. Fourth, experiences are less directly comparable to alternatives than material things, and therefore less subject to post-purchase regret. Fifth, experiences are often shared, and other people are a great source of happiness.

2. Help others instead of yourself.

Prosocial spending correlates better to happiness than personal spending. If you give random people money and either tell them to spend it on themselves or to spend it on someone else, the latter makes them happier. Reflecting on past spending-on-others makes people happier than reflecting on past spending-on-self. (I am a little skeptical about that one: the right point of comparison would be not the past spending but the past enjoyment of whatever you spent the money on.)

Why? DGW propose two reasons. First, prosocial spending is good for relationships and relationships are good for happiness. Second, when you spend on someone else you get to feel like a good person.

Most people have wrong intuitions about this: they expect spending on themselves to make them happier. Most people are wrong.

3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones.

As we saw above under #1, we quickly adapt to changes. Therefore, a larger number of varied small pleasures may be a better buy than a single big one. There is some evidence for this (though to my mind it seems to bear less directly on DGW's principle than in the other cases we've considered so far). If you correlate people's happiness with their positive experiences, the correlation with how frequent those experiences are is stronger than the correlation with how intense they are. The optimal (for happiness) number of sexual partners to have over a year is one, perhaps because that gets you more sex even if individual instances are less exciting. (I find this less than convincing; individual instances might be better because partners learn what works well for them.)

The other reason DGW suggest why more smaller things should be better is diminishing marginal utility: half a cookie is more than half as good as a whole cookie. (This is, I think, partly because of adaptation, but that isn't the whole story.)

DGW suggest that this is one reason why the relationship between wealth and happiness isn't stronger: "wealth promises access to peak experiences, which in turn undermine the ability to savor small pleasures".

4. Buy less insurance.

We adapt to bad things as well as good, which means that bad things are less bad than we are liable to expect. Our overestimation of the impact of adverse occurrences is one reason why we buy insurance, which notoriously is always negative-expectation in monetary terms.

DGW cite various studies showing that people expect to be made markedly unhappier by losses than they actually are if the losses occur, and that people expect to regret bad outcomes more than they actually do (we overestimate how much we will blame ourselves, because we underestimate how good we are at blaming anything and anyone else for our misfortunes).

5. Pay now and consume later.

The opposite of the bargain proposed by credit cards! Besides the purely financial problems that arise from overspending (which are large and widespread), DGW suggest that "consume now, pay later" is bad for our happiness because it eliminates anticipation. We may derive a lot of pleasure even from anticipating something that we don't enjoy very much when it happens. "People who devote time to anticipating enjoyable experiences report being happier in general."

You might think that moving an experience later would simply mean more anticipation (good) but less reminiscence (bad), but it turns out that anticipation generally brings more happiness. (And, for unpleasant events, more pain.)

DGW suggest two other benefits of delaying consumption. First, we may make better choices (meaning, in this case, ones yielding more happiness overall, even if less in the very short term) when we make them a little way ahead. Second, the delay may increase uncertainty, which may keep attention focused on the thing we're buying, which may reduce adaptation. (This seems a little convoluted to me; DGW cite some research backing it up but I'm not sure it backs up the "by reducing adaptation" part of it.)

6. Think about what you're not thinking about.

That is: when choosing what to spend on, take some time to consider less obvious aspects that you'd otherwise be tempted to neglect. "The bigger home may seem like a better deal, but if the fixer-upper requires trading Saturday afternoons with friends for Saturday afternoons with plumbers, it may not be such a good deal after all." And: "consumers who expect a single purchase to have a lasting impact on their happiness might make more realistic predictions if they simply thought about a typical day in their life." (Rather than considering only the small bits of that day that will be impacted by their purchase.)

7. Beware of comparison shopping.

Comparison shopping, say DGW, focuses attention on the features that most clearly distinguish candidate purchases from one another, whereas other more-common features may actually have much more impact on happiness. It may also focus attention on more-concrete differences; for instance, if you ask people whether they would more enjoy a small heart-shaped chocolate or a large cockroach-shaped one, they generally prefer the former, but if you ask them to choose one of the two they tend to focus on the size and choose the latter.

DGW also point out that the context during comparison-shopping tends to be different from that during actual consumption, which can skew our evaluations.

8. Follow the herd instead of your head.

DGW cite research supporting de la Rochefoucauld's advice: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us first examine how happy those are who already possess it." Others' actual experiences of a thing are likely to be better predictors of our enjoyment than our theoretical estimates: we may know ourselves better, but they know the thing better.

They also suggest (and I don't think this really fits their heading) looking to others for advice on how we would enjoy something we are considering buying. The example they give is of research in which subjects were shown some foods and asked to estimate how much they would enjoy them, after which they ate them and evaluated their actual enjoyment. The wrinkle is that they were also observed, at the moment of being shown the foods, by other observers, who rated their immediate facial reactions -- which turned out to be better predictors of their enjoyment than the subjects' own assessments. So "other people may provide a useful source of information about the products that will bring us joy because they can see the nonverbal reactions that may escape our own notice".

It's a classic story, your average millionaire tells their story of how they had a life of struggling and subsequently overcame such struggles and went on to become a (multi-)millionaire.  "What a great story" everyone says.  But why does it happen, and why does it happen so often?

The easy answer: Survivorship bias.  What happened to the rest of the regiment in the army*?  What happened to the other homeless people on the streets?  They all suffered, struggled and died out, or went on to live mediocre enough lives that they didn't write about their experiences.  Surely there are more millionaires that write about their "story" than people who went through adversity writing about their story...

But is that enough?  Does that explain it?  It certainly would explain a few millionaires.  Also what about your average not-suffering human.  Middle class, ordinary income, is there something about suffering and risk-taking that they should want to do?  Telling someone to give up their job and live on the streets for a month just to know what suffering "feels like", in the hope of going on to become a millionaire...  Sounds like a terrible idea!  And good luck selling a book with that kind of advice.

So what is it about suffering that we should care about?  What can we learn from all these stories if not "survivorship bias is a strong, show-stopping applause light"?

Coping Mechanisms

One thing that hardship gives you, other than a great story is the mental ability to say, "something really bad happened and I survived", and consequently, "I can survive the next really bad event".  The future is likely to have all sorts of ups and downs.  There will always be bad days with car accidents, days where you nearly get fired, or lose the big deal.  There will also be great days!  Days where you make the deal, every plan executes successfully, you get the rewards you were striving for, it seems like you were just lucky...

When you have a coping mechanism you can walk through bad days like water off a duck's back, then you can take the good days and use them to climb and grow as if the bad days weren't even there.

The next question is; How can one develop coping mechanisms without voluntarily undergoing hardship? (with exercises like CoZE, or voluntarily experiencing discomfort just to see what it feels like, but I don't think that's key)

What do you think?

*I disagree with some of the message in that link and hope to publish a rewrite soon.

Meta: this took 30 minutes to write, and I composed it as a private email to someone; I am going to try new writing methods in the hope of giving myself and easier path to writing.  I have been thinking about this the idea for months, and the problem with adversity-to-success stories.  Thanks to Sam and Seph for being two local lw'ers who influenced my thoughts on the idea.

My Table of contents contains my other writing.

Note: Eugine is at the downvotes again.

If there's such a small chance of your vote making a difference in the election, you should be comfortable voting for trump. 

Once upon a time the countries of Alpago and Byzantine had a war. Alpago was mostly undamaged during this war. Byzantine was severely damaged by this war, although they have caught up in some metrics such as education, their economy is still somewhat weaker. Alpago was the clear aggressor, and now, fifty years later, everyone who is reasonable now acknowledges that Alpago was in the wrong. 

There is a major debate within the countries about how to respond to the past. Many Byzantians argue that the views of the Alpagoans are irrelevant. The Alpagoans are "unbombed", this provides them with many systematic advantage over the Byzantians such as career opportunities, indeed most of the top companies in Byzantian still have Alpagoan CEOs since many of the senior management were hired before Byzantian had built anywhere near the number of colleges in Alpago.

Many Byzantians argue that the views of the unbombed deserve very little consideration. Of course the unbombed will want to preserve their advantages. How can the Byzantians ever have their voices heard when unbombed members of parliament are giving their opinions in the Alpago parliament on how much compensation is appropriate? Surely if Alpago was truly sorry, they would accept the demands of the Byzantian government without question.

The Byzantians are undoubtedly correct in their assumption that the Alpagoans have a very strong incentive to underestimate what is owed. They are also correct when they say that the Alpagoans are in a position of power that makes it very easy for them to ignore the issue of compensation, after all, it does not affect them very much if their government decides to pay compensation to the Byzantians, instead of the alternate plan of wasting it on a fleet of nuclear submarines. However, in other areas, the Alpagoans no longer have a power advantage. Many Alpagoan politicians used to say that the war was justified, if a politician said that these days, even the conservative party would demand that they resign because no reasonable person could come to such a conclusion.

In contrast, some of the more extreme Byzantians regularly declare the burning of their capital as a intentional war crime, while the evidence quite clearly shows that the Alpagoans had not targeted their civilian population, only their military base which had inadvertently led to the fire when it was destroyed. During the war, the intentional targetting theory was best supported by the evidence available to the Alpagoans, but advance in forensics have long ago disproven this theory. Many Byzantines consider this forensic technique discredited, because it was originally used to blame the war on the Byzantines. The reason why the Alpagoans did not burn the city was not altruistic. They did not want to burn the city merely because this would make it impossible for them to loot it. It is politically risky for an Alpagoan to point out that the burning was unintentional, since they might be mistaken for a member of the Alpagoan Pillorying Club. These are really legitimately horrible people (even the conservative party consider them to be bigots).

On the other hand, the Alpagoans almost universally insist that they never executed any Byzantine civilians in the brief period that they occupied the country. There are extensive interviews with numerous witnesses who saw this happen with their own eyes, but no hard evidence. The Alpagoans dismiss these accounts as it is impossible for them to conceive that criminals might be telling the truth when their own soldiers (whom they consider honorable - they blame politicians for the war) deny this ever happened. Any Byzantine who mentions this immediately gets dismissed as a "loony conspiracy nut".

If the Byzantians want to consider the incentives of the Alpagoans, they need to also consider their own incentives, as they would be construed by a hardened cynic. They might argue that their incentives are to fight for justice as this would earn them respect, but the cynic would not accept this. The cynic would argue that their incentives are to fight for the maximal amount of compensation, even if a perfectly impartial judge decided that it should be X, their incentive would be to claim that it should be at least X + 1. These incentives exist, even if the Alpagoan government would never offer even half of X.

Some of the Alpagoan are motivated by conscious self-interest to preserve their advantages, while many more who are convinced that they support fair compensation are affect by unconscious self-interest bias. But, the cynic will believe that the Byzantians will have an incentive to position the effect of self-interest on the Alpagoans as greater than it is. The cynic will believe that similarly, some of the Byzantians will be motivated by conscious self-interest, and others by unconscious bias, all while completely convinced that they are being fair.

The Alpagoans are in a position of power when it comes to compensation. The Byzantians lack the ability to force them to pay it, so the resolution will most likely be on the terms of the Alpagoans. The cynic will note that the Byzantians have the incentive to position themselves as being in a position of power for all issues, even when they are the ones in the position of power, such as in relation to the claim that the Alpagoans had intentionally burned their capital. Many Byzantians know that the Alpagoans didn't actually intentionally try to burn their capital, but they see this as a technicality (they started an illegitimate war which resulted in the capital burning) and they do not want to get into an argument with their fellow Byzantians who *really* strongly believe this. Further disagreeing with other Byzantians would undermine their cause which they see as just. The cynic would note that this is a very easy argument for the Byzantians to make. It does not harm them if the actions of the Alpagoans are misrepresented, in fact it helps them. Further, there are social incentives to agree with their fellow Byzantians.

Even though the Alpagoans are correct that they didn't intentionally burn the city, many of them have formed their viewpoint out of self-interest. There is convincing historical evidence, but very few of them have actually seen this, nor do most of them have interest in checking it out as it might disprove their beliefs. Most Alpagoans would be unwilling to acknowledge this, as it would harm their credibility and by used as ammunition by Byzantian activists who believe that they burned it intentionally.

We can see that considering the incentives of all the parties will help both the Byzantians come to a better understanding regarding the situation. The same will be true for the Alpagoans - the Byzantians are right in that the Alpagoans are often unaware of their bias. On the other hand, if either group only considers the incentives of one of the parties, they will most likely come to a more biased conclusion than if they had considered the incentives of neither of the parties. For these purposes, it is very important that the cynic be maximally cynical, without actually being a conspiracy theorist, in order to reduce room for bias.

A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.

I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.

I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'

So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.

Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.

Less Than Ideal Discussion

To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.

1. Aggregation of posts. Our best authors have formed their own fiefdoms and their work is not terribly visible here. We currently have limited support for this via the sidebar, but that's it.
2. Aggregation of comments. You can see diaspora authors in the sidebar, but you can't comment from here.
3. Aggregation of community. This sounds like a social problem but it isn't. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to "hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community." Non-prominent individuals can theoretically post here; yet this is the place we are decrying as moribund.
4. Incomplete and poor curation. We currently do this via Promoted, badly, and via the diaspora sidebar, also badly.
5. Pitiful interface feature set. This is not so much a Less Wrong-specific problem as a 2010s-internet problem; people who inhabit SSC have probably seen me respond to feature complaints with "they had something that did that in the 90s, but nobody uses it." (my own bugbear is searching for comments by author-plus-content).
6. Changes are hamstrung by the existing architecture, which gets you volunteer reactions like this one.

I see these meta-technical problems:

1. Expertise is scarce. Few people are in a position to technically improve the site, and those that are, have other demands on their time.
2. The Trivial Inconvenience Problem limits the scope of proposed changes to those that are not inconvenient to commenters or authors.
3. Getting cooperation from diaspora authors is a coordination problem. Are we better than average at handling those? I don't know.

Slightly Less Horrible Discussion

"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:

1. Centralized from the user perspective. A reader should be able to interact with the entire community in one place, and it should be recognizable as a community.
2. Decentralized from the author perspective. Diaspora authors seem to like having their own fiefdoms, and the social problem of "all the best posters went elsewhere" can't be solved without their cooperation. Therefore any technical solution must allow for it.
3. Proper division of labor. Scott Alexander probably should not have to concern himself with user feature requests; that's not his comparative advantage and I'd rather he spend his time inventing moral cosmologies. I suspect he would prefer the same. The same goes for Eliezer Yudkowski or any of our still-writing-elsewhere folks.
4. Really good moderation tools.
5. Easy entrance. New users should be able to join the discussion without a lot of hassle. Old authors that want to return should be able to do so and, preferably, bring their existing content with them.
6. Easy exit. Authors who don't like the way the community is heading should be able to jump ship -- and, crucially, bring their content with them to their new ship. Conveniently. This is essentially what has happened, except old content is hostage here.
7. Separate policy and mechanism within the site architecture. Let this one pass for now if you don't know what it means; it's the first big inferential hurdle I need to cross and I'll be starting soon enough.

As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.

Getting There From Here

As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.

I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.

And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.

I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?

This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.

Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):

1. Technical Architecture
   1. Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client
   2. Specialized Protocols: or, NNTP and its Bastard Children
   3. Moderation, Personal Gardens, and Public Parks
   4. Content, Presentation, and the Division of Labor
   5. The Proper Placement of User Features
   6. Hard Things that are Suddenly Easy: or, what does client control gain us?
   7. Your Web Browser Is Still Not Your Client (but you don't need to know that)
2. Meta-Technical Conflicts (or, obstacles to adoption)
   1. Never Bet Against Convenience
   2. Conflicting Commenter, Author, and Admin Preferences
   3. Lipstick on the Configuration Pig
   4. Incremental Implementation and the Coordination Problem.
   5. Lowering Barriers to Entry and Exit
3. Technical and Social Interoperability
   1. Benefits and Drawbacks of Standards
   2. Input Formats and Quoting Conventions
   3. Faking Functionality
   4. Why Reddit Makes Me Cry
   5. What NNTP Can't Do
4. Implementation of Nonstandard Features
   1. Some desirable feature #1
   2. Some desirable feature #2
   3. ...etc. This subsequence is only necessary if someone actually wants to try and do what I'm arguing for, which I think unlikely.

(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)

[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]

I've been thinking, and writing, about The Impossible Question of the Thyroid for some while now.

I came up with what I thought was a good stab at an answer to its majestic mystery:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nef/the_thyroid_madness_core_argument_evidence/

This is a very simple and obvious explanation of an awful lot of otherwise confusing data, anecdotes, quackery, expert opinion and medical research.

People seem to hate it because it is so simple, and makes so many predictions, most of which are terrifying.

And it is obviously false! Of course medicine has tried using thyroid supplementation to fix 'tired all the time'. It doesn't work!

EDIT: Apparently I spoke too soon. GRB Skinner tried it in 2000, and it works a treat. See comments.

But there really is an awful lot unexplained about all this T4/T3 business, and why different people think it works differently. I refer you to the internet for all the unexplained things.

In just the endocrinological literature there is a long fight going on about T4/T3 ratios in thyroid supplementation, and about the question of whether or not to treat 'subclinical hypothyroidism'. Some people show symptoms with very low TSH values. Some people have extremely high TSH values and show no symptoms at all.

I've been trying various ways of explaining it all for nearly four months now. And I've found lots of magical thinking in conventional medicine, and lots of waving away of the reports of honest-sounding empiricists, real doctors, who have made no obvious errors of reasoning, most of whom are taking terrible risks with their own careers in order to, as they see it, help their patients.

I've read lots of people saying 'we tried this, and it works', and no people saying 'we tried this, and it makes no difference'. The explanation favoured by conventional medicine strongly predicts 'we tried this, and it makes no difference'. But they've never tried it!

It's really confusing. A lot of people are very confused.

I think that simple explanations are extra-worth looking at because they are simple.

Of course that doesn't mean they're right. Consequences and experiment are the only judge of that.

I do not think I am right! There is no way I can have got the whole picture. I can't explain, for instance: 'euthyroid sick syndrome'. But I don't predict that it doesn't exist either.

But you should look very carefully at the simple beautiful ideas that seem to explain everything, but that look untrue.

Firstly because Solomonoff induction looks like a good way to think about the world. Or call it Occam's Razor if you prefer. It is straightforward Bayesianism, as David Mackay points out in Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

Secondly because all the good ideas have turned out to be simple, and could have been spotted, (and often were) by the Ancient Greeks, and could have been demonstrated by them, if only they'd really thought about it.

Thirdly because experiments not done with the hypothesis in mind have likely neglected important aspects of the problem. (In this case T3 homeostasis, and possible peripheral resistance, and the difference between basal metabolic rate and waking rate, and the difference between core and peripheral temperature, and the possibility of a common DIO2 mutation causing people's systems to react differently to T4 monotherapy, and in general the hideous complexity of the thyroid system and its function in vertebrates in general).

Fourthly because the reason for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' is that the simplest ideas tend to come up everywhere!

And so when a mathematician plays with a toy problem for fun, and reasons carefully about it, two thousand years later it can end up winning a major war in a way no one ever expected. 

So that even if there are things you can't explain (I can't explain hot daytime fibro-turks...), you should keep plugging away, to see if you can explain them, if you think hard enough.

Good ideas should be given extra-benefit of the doubt. Not ignored because they prove (slightly) too much!

Do not believe them. Do not ever ever believe them. You will end up worse than Hitler. You will end up worse than Marx.

But give them the benefit of the doubt. Keep them in mind. Try safe experiments, ready to abort when they go wrong.

And if they're easy to refute (mine is), then if you're going to call yourself a scientist, damned well take the trouble to refute the things. You might learn something!

[For background see: http://lesswrong.com/lw/n8u/a_medical_mystery_thyroid_hormones_chronic/

I thought of a class of solutions, I went looking for possible evidence, someone's already proposed what looks like a perfect answer, and the problem is much bigger than I originally thought.]

[ Epistemic Status 1: Gather Underpants  2: ? 3: Profit! ]

Suppose that:

(1) Some common mechanism(s) can interfere with the reception of the endocrine hormones by the cells on which they should act.

There would be a high genetic load on such a mechanism, so we should look for recent environmental change, immune defence, or incomplete adaptation to less recent environmental change for the causes.[1] [2]

Seek, and you will find: Such a mechanism was proposed in 2003 in:

A metabolic basis for fibromyalgia and its related disorders: the possible role of resistance to thyroid hormone R. L. Garrison, P. C. Breeding

These authors may have seen the whole of the truth for all I know, it looks terribly plausible to me, but I don't understand any of the interesting words in their paper. Hyaluronic. Now there is an interesting word. I wonder what it means. Nevertheless, this is exactly the sort of thing we should be looking for. I would imagine that there might be more than one such mechanism.

Then we would expect to see something like the classical presentations of endocrine disorders without any evident disturbance of the endocrine hormone levels in the blood.

Consider for instance Hypothyroidism / Hypometabolism / Myxoedema, a form of general metabolic collapse disease with famously many symptoms which appear almost at random, famously difficult to diagnose.

Pick a symptom of Hypometabolism and suppose it your primary symptom: For instance T3 deprivation in cells reduces the ability of mitochondria to recycle ATP, resulting in complete, shattering exhaustion from the mildest exercise.

Take this to your doctor. If competent she will test you for hypothyroidism (and all other common causes of fatigue). Your test will show that your blood hormone levels are normal. At this point, you have a mysterious unexplained syndrome in which the primary symptom is chronic fatigue, but which overall shows similarities to hypothyroidism. You have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Suppose that the symptom that bothers you most is widespread pain. Then you will eventually be diagnosed with Fibromyalgia.

Should you complain mostly about alternating constipation and diarrhoea, then you have Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Hypothyroidism, being a general collapse of the metabolism, can present with about forty different symptoms.

We would expect to see a number of overlapping 'syndromes', all with different primary symptoms, but all with great overlap with one another, and with the ancient and no longer understood metabolic collapse syndrome associated with Hypothyroidism, once familiar to doctors but no more.

We should also see various other overlapping clusters of syndromes, associated with random tissue deprivation of different endocrine hormones.

We should see that these syndromes have exploded in prevalence since 1970, when diagnosis of endocrine disorder by clinical symptoms went out of fashion in favour of diagnosis by blood hormone level tests.

We should see low levels of abnormal thyroid blood tests in these populations of sufferers, because some diagnoses of classical hypothyroidism will have been missed. But on the assumption that most doctors are competent, these levels should be above the general population levels, but not nearly high enough to indicate that the symptoms are caused by thyroid disorders.

If one of the obstructing mechanisms is immune in nature, then we should see these various disorders occasionally appearing shortly after infections. Particular types of infections should be more likely to cause them than others.

I believe that that is exactly what we see. They are known as the 'somatoform' disorders, because they are thought to be all in the mind. By those who have never had one.

I have a feeling that the air of crankiness around Lyme Disease, and the belief that its chronic-fatigue-like symptoms get worse long after the known infective agent has gone, might be explained in this sort of way.

But I am tempted also to include other mysterious diseases without known causes and with symptoms plausibly explained by endocrine hormone abnormalities, such as Bipolar Disorder, Depression, and the 'Metabolic Syndrome', which may do exactly what it says on the tin.

In particular, it is known that the principal characteristic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is Mitochondrial Dysfunction [4] . I contend that this is principally caused by lack of the hormone T3 in cells, for reason or reasons currently unclear.

The TSH test in particular is suspect, since it appears to have been justified on the basis of a simplistic model of the thyroid hormone system which had very little explanatory power even at the time, and which is now known to be a hopeless oversimplification. Even allowing for this context, the sensitivity of the TSH test never seems to have been investigated.

It is well known in the alternative medicine community that thyroid hormone treatment can alleviate Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue. Some put this down to the 'stimulant action' of the thyroid hormones, believing that a similar effect would be achieved with amphetamines. But this is known to be untrue. A 2001 trial by some brave Scottish GPs proved conclusively that thyroid hormones have perceived harmful effects on healthy people [5].

The fact that this has been taken as a refutation of the alternative medicine idea of treating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome with Desiccated Thyroid is most unfortunate.

We therefore see that (1) =>

(2) There is a huge, generalized, common disorder with many names, which is caused by inadequate thyroid hormone stimulation of peripheral tissue.

(3) There are further clusters of disorders corresponding to other hormones.

(4) These clusters themselves may overlap. Whatever interfering mechanisms there are may interfere with many hormones at the same time.

Following the suggestion of Garrison and Breeding, by analogy with the situation in diabetes, I call the disorder in (2) type II hypothyroidism. It is not to be confused with central hypothyroidism, which is detectable by blood hormone tests, although not by the TSH test. John Lowe called this disorder 'peripheral resistance to thyroid hormone'.

Since (2) would be such a good explanation of observed patterns of mysterious diseases, it becomes urgent to refute the hypothesis (1)

How to Refute the Central Hypothesis

We seek sufferers of type II hypothyroidism amongst the sufferers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia.

I choose Chronic Fatigue Syndrome because I have had it myself, and thyroid hormones have so far had an excellent effect on me, including raising my basal temperature to normal levels.

I choose Fibromyalgia because John Lowe dedicated his life to establishing that the symptoms of Fibromyalgia and Hypothyroidism were one and the same, and to apparently successfully treating sufferers of Fibromyalgia with thyroid hormones.

We filter out all those with abnormal blood hormone levels. They are classically hypothyroid and should be treated as such, although the possible presence of interfering mechanisms must be remembered, and the treatment should be by symptoms and not by hormone levels.

In our remaining population of CFS/FMS sufferers with normal lab values, I expect to find many people with the classical symptoms of hypothyroidism.

We could score them with the Billewicz test [6], the last word in clinical diagnosis. Although note that by design this test does not take account of the most obvious hypothyroid symptoms!

Or we could score them by what John Lowe considered the principal symptom of hypothyroidism, the ratio of measured basal metabolic rate to the metabolic rate predicted from such factors as weight, age, and sex.

I propose that we do both and I expect that:

(5) In the CFS/FMS population, there is a proportion of sufferers with abnormally low metabolic rate and abnormal hypothyroidism scores.

If (5) is not true, (1) is refuted. My beautiful if somewhat disturbing hypothesis refuted by an ugly fact, I shall shut up about it and start thinking about another way to explain the mystery.

If (5) is true, then we may wish to consider attempting to treat these conditions with desiccated thyroid, since that is what everyone who cares about these diseases has been telling us works since about 1940.

References

[1] Infectious causation of disease: an evolutionary perspective Gregory M. Cochran, Paul W. Ewald, and Kyle D. Cochran

[2] Is rheumatoid arthritis a consequence of natural selection for enhanced tuberculosis resistance? James L. Mobley

[3] A metabolic basis for fibromyalgia and its related disorders: the possible role of resistance to thyroid hormone R. L. Garrison, P. C. Breeding

[4] Chronic fatigue syndrome and mitochondrial dysfunction Sarah Myhill, Norman E. Booth, John McLaren-Howard

[5] Thyroxine treatment in patients with symptoms of hypothyroidism but thyroid function tests within the reference range: randomised double blind placebo controlled crossover trial M Anne Pollock, Alison Sturrock, Karen Marshall, Kate M Davidson, Christopher J G Kelly, Alex D McMahon, E Hamish McLaren

[6] Statistical Methods Applied to the Diagnosis of Hypothyroidism by W. Z. Billewicz, R. S. Chapman, J. Crooks, M. E. Day, J. Gossage, Sir Edward Wayne, and J. A. Young

The Brain Preservation Foundation’s Small Mammalian Brain Prize has been won with fantastic preservation of a whole rabbit brain using a new fixative+slow-vitrification process.

• BPF announcement (21CM’s announcement)
• evaluation

• The process was published as “Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation”, McIntyre & Fahy 2015 (mirror)

  We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution. To demonstrate the feasibility of ASC, we perfuse-fixed rabbit and pig brains with a glutaraldehyde-based fixative, then slowly perfused increasing concentrations of ethylene glycol over several hours in a manner similar to techniques used for whole organ cryopreservation. Once 65% w/v ethylene glycol was reached, we vitrified brains at −135 °C for indefinite long-term storage. Vitrified brains were rewarmed and the cryoprotectant removed either by perfusion or gradual diffusion from brain slices. We evaluated ASC-processed brains by electron microscopy of multiple regions across the whole brain and by Focused Ion Beam Milling and Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) imaging of selected brain volumes. Preservation was uniformly excellent: processes were easily traceable and synapses were crisp in both species. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation has many advantages over other brain-banking techniques: chemicals are delivered via perfusion, which enables easy scaling to brains of any size; vitrification ensures that the ultrastructure of the brain will not degrade even over very long storage times; and the cryoprotectant can be removed, yielding a perfusable aldehyde-preserved brain which is suitable for a wide variety of brain assays…We have shown that both rabbit brains (10 g) and pig brains (80 g) can be preserved equally well. We do not anticipate that there will be significant barriers to preserving even larger brains such as bovine, canine, or primate brains using ASC.

  (They had problems with 2 pigs and got 1 pig brain successfully cryopreserved but it wasn’t part of the entry. I’m not sure why: is that because the Large Mammalian Brain Prize is not yet set up?)
• previous discussion: Mikula’s plastination came close but ultimately didn’t seem to preserve the whole brain when applied.
• commentary: Alcor, Robin Hanson, John Smart, Evidence-Based Cryonics, Vice, Pop Sci
  

• donation link

To summarize it, you might say that this is a hybrid of current plastination and vitrification methods, where instead of allowing slow plastination (with unknown decay & loss) or forcing fast cooling (with unknown damage and loss), a staged approach is taking: a fixative is injected into the brain first to immediately lock down all proteins and stop all decay/change, and then it is leisurely cooled down to be vitrified.

This is exciting progress because the new method may wind up preserving better than either of the parent methods, but also because it gives much greater visibility into the end-results: the aldehyde-vitrified brains can be easily scanned with electron microscopes and the results seen in high detail, showing fantastic preservation of structure, unlike regular vitrification where the scans leave opaque how good the preservation was. This opacity is one reason that as Mike Darwin has pointed out at length on his blog and jkaufman has also noted that we cannot be confident in how well ALCOR or CI’s vitrification works - because if it didn’t, we have little way of knowing.

EDIT: BPF’s founder Ken Hayworth (Reddit account) has posted a piece, arguing that ALCOR & CI cannot be trusted to do procedures well and that future work should be done via rigorous clinical trials and only then rolled out. “Opinion: The prize win is a vindication of the idea of cryonics, not of unaccountable cryonics service organizations”

…“Should cryonics service organizations immediately start offering this new ASC procedure to their ‘patients’?” My personal answer (speaking for myself, not on behalf of the BPF) has been a steadfast NO. It should be remembered that these same cryonics service organizations have been offering a different procedure for years. A procedure that was not able to demonstrate, to even my minimal expectations, preservation of the brain’s neural circuitry. This result, I must say, surprised and disappointed me personally, leading me to give up my membership in one such organization and to become extremely skeptical of all since. Again, I stress, current cryonics procedures were NOT able to meet our challenge EVEN UNDER IDEAL LABORATORY CONDITIONS despite being offered to paying customers for years[1]. Should we really expect that these same organizations can now be trusted to further develop and properly implement such a new, independently-invented technique for use under non-ideal conditions?

Let’s step back for a moment. A single, independently-researched, scientific publication has come out that demonstrates a method of structural brain preservation (ASC) compatible with long-term cryogenic storage in animal models (rabbit and pig) under ideal laboratory conditions (i.e. a healthy living animal immediately being perfused with fixative). Should this one paper instantly open the floodgates to human application? Under untested real-world conditions where the ‘patient’ is either terminally ill or already declared legally dead? Should it be performed by unlicensed persons, in unaccountable organizations, operating outside of the traditional medical establishment with its checks and balances designed to ensure high standards of quality and ethics? To me, the clear answer is NO. If this was a new drug for cancer therapy, or a new type of heart surgery, many additional steps would be expected before even clinical trials could start. Why should our expectations be any lower for this?

The fact that the ASC procedure has won the brain preservation prize should rightly be seen as a vindication of the central idea of cryonics –the brain’s delicate circuitry underlying memory and personality CAN in fact be preserved indefinitely, potentially serving as a lifesaving bridge to future revival technologies. But, this milestone should certainly not be interpreted as a vindication of the very different cryonics procedures that are practiced on human patients today. And it should not be seen as a mandate for more of the same but with an aldehyde stabilization step casually tacked on. …