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That looks like a very strange list which ranges from utopian suggestions ("improve political systems") to something we already tried ("build underground bomb shelters") to something we don't know how to do ("store information about building a stable political system") to just silly things ("legislating for individuals to be held more accountable for large-scale catastrophic errors").
In response to
Improving long-run civilisational robustness
In my defense: 1. Utopian political changes like futarchy, seasteading and world-government are often seriously proposed as GCR reducers. They ought to be listed if only to be ruled out. 2. Well one's library at least ought to include some prescient historical case studies of political collapses and revolutions, and studies of primitive tribes. 3. Requiring people to insure dual use synbio labs against widespread loss of life is also a serious policy proposal.
I grant that it's an eclectic and unprioritised list, but that's an assessment of the field (which is only in its earliest stages) moreso than an indictment of my characterisation of it, right?
In response to
Improving long-run civilisational robustness
- Improve focused surveillance of people who might commit large-scale terrorism (this is controversial because excessive surveillance itself poses some risk)
Who do you mean with "people who might commit large-scale terrorism"? Militaries of nation states?
The prototypical case would be a rogue individual but military and other security institutions also pose danger that we ought to think about targeting.
In response to
Improving long-run civilisational robustness
- Grow (or replicating) the international space station
Why?
To improve the likelihood that people can come back to Earth from space after a disaster. Presumably there would be some targeted ways to do this.
Doesn't that go the wrong direction? I.e., if you have more CO2, don't you end breathing more and so having more oxygen?
I don't see how it can be about oxygen. In the paper I linked, I think they directly add relatively pure carbon dioxide. And the total concentration is 0.1%. So the concentration of oxygen in the air is not really changing.
The texas natural experiment seems like an especially convincing complement to the more artificial setting, thanks for pointing it out.
If you look into this I will leave open the offer to buy certificates after the prize. So far not many takers on the prize, this comment is currently in the lead based on the literature review, not sure if there will be takers closer to the cutoff.
(aside from the sample size)
The sample size is small, but given the effect size I don't think it even matters that much. The error seems like less than a factor of 2.
taken at face value, with reasonable estimates of how much rooms differ from day to day or week to week, CO2 levels would explain a lot or maybe most of variability in IQ tests or cognitive performance!
This looks right to me (well "a lot," I don't think "most"), I assume that something is wrong. An obvious possible culprit is their cognitive test.
It's also unlikely to be about oxygen because oxygen levels that reach the brain in a healthy person depend almost entirely on the amount of saturated haemoglobin, which is 95-100% of Hb in someone without serious lung heart or haemoglobin defects. This means that variability in O2 availability is more dependent on one's iron level (~10% SD) than breathing/air effects (<2%sd). (I disclaim that I haven't yet looked into literature about O2 chemistry and supply to the brain so may be wrong)
The CO2 hypothesis at least makes some sense because bloodstream CO2 levels vary a bit.
Gwern's evolutionary argument seems weak because we did not develop in ancestral environments where we could properly trap CO2 (our CO2 sensors mightn't need to be very sensitive), and for our ancestord it was at least somewhat more important to conserve energy from breathing and somewhat less important to be be so intelligent.
Ryan, thank you again. Your concerns are my concerns, I am grateful to you for them.
And I apologise. You have been talking to a raving lunatic, by the ICD10 diagnostic criteria as applied by my attorney and myself. See the exchange with buybuydandavis for details. I am apparently recovered now, in the opinion of one who should know.
I am painfully aware that I have reasoned myself into a place where I prove too much.
I am in the position of a philosopher who started out with a little detail, and is now claiming 'It is at least marginally possible that here is the light and the sacred cup'. Knowing that he is wrong.
I was carefully and expensively trained to speak with certainty when and only when I was certain. The Lord knows I was never very good at it.
I have used plausible reasoning where I only trust classical logic.
I am forced to seek the Grail.
But I cannot shake the suspicion that I might be right. And I know that my hopeless hardware will not let me find the reason why I am wrong.
1 - It has never been the case previously that almost all unexplained human ailments have shared a single simple explanation
It has. The germ theory.
I am claiming that the great killers of the past may have left their shadows in our genes, and those shadows still plague us today.
I am claiming that the great changes we have made in our environment may have hurt us worse than we know.
Here I stand, naked to the world. Afraid. I can do no other in good conscience. I do not believe my own conclusion.
I hope that when I am shown to be wrong, I can retreat with no more than huge embarrassment, resolving to fail better next time.
And it all depends on the TSH test. If I am wrong about that, I am just wrong.
If the TSH test is flawed, then all our statistics are confounded, and we have some thinking to do.
Still Crocker's Rules though! Let this cup pass from me!
Forget about being proved wrong and facing huge embarassment.
Short-circuit that by getting some background domain knowledge then making claims that in light of that knowledge are reasonable.
In response to
Thyroid Hormones, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia: A Hypothesis and a Proposed Experiment
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.
Or you have a psychiatric, inflammatory, genetic or other cause of fatigue, pain or bowel disturbance. Yes, undiagnosed thyroid issues could cause this but why is this more likely than other possibilities?
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.
This is weak evidence, where strong or at least more numerous arguments are needed.
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.
Why? Why not an alternative cause, such as a combination of thousands of genes, mostly unrelated to the thyroid?
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.
Not true. Plenty of people have and diagnose somatoform disorders.
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.
But plenty is already known about the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder, depression and so on. e.g. depression seems likely to be caused by many thousands of genes (either that or some unidentified environmental stimulus, though we tend to have looked quote closely for those) (1)
Why not learn about the conditions and the evidence about their causes and then argue forward to some hypothesis rather than priveleging your thyroid-based hypothesis and trying to apply it to all available diseases?
At least an experiment is proposed here, but if you wanted to actually implement it, you would need a placebo control design, and you would approach disease interest groups or elsewhere for participants.
Ryan, thank you, I really appreciate your time, and that is exactly the sort of thing that someone needs to say to me. I have come to the conclusion that I must be trolling.
My idea, which I have arrived at quite independently by a long chain of dodgy inferences from a minor puzzle to do with my own illness, it now seems to me can be summed up as:
Almost all the remaining unexplained human ailments can be explained as disorders of the endocrine system.
This idea seems to have been first thought of in the 1940s, and independently deduced, observed, or inferred many times since. If true, it would have a great number of disturbing implications. If untrue but widely believed, it would cause a catastrophe.
Now I look for them, there are published books suggesting this, and an entire tradition of alternative medicine based on it. Which reports success. But then, they would say that, wouldn't they?
And yet no one except a few quacks believes it.
And so my mystery is now:
Where is the obvious refutation that means that it is false?
I apologise for wasting everyone's time. I am not being sarcastic.
I realise that my argument is 'You cannot prove me wrong, and therefore I must be right'
I realise just how bad that argument is.
I realise that I have blundered into a complicated subject that I am not in the least qualified to discuss.
I have already had to discard one simple obvious explanation for a complicated problem (they are almost always wrong). I do not like to believe in chocolate teapots.
I am asking for help in discarding another one.
What on earth is Less Wrong for, if it is not for this?
I do not imply that you must waste your time helping me. But I am damned sure that someone needs to say it plainly. It has fooled me. It is causing havoc. Why is it not true?
Excellent - thanks for responding to this so positively. I wouldn't say you're necessarily trolling, rather than just arguing a little more forcefully than someone else might.
Almost all the remaining unexplained human ailments can be explained as disorders of the endocrine system.
I basically think that this is the absurd conclusion that demonstrates your chain of reasoning to be false. This is far wronger than the idea that Fibromyalgia could have an endocrine cause. And I think you've identified this problem with your argument even more acutely that I had.
I think there are a lot of useful ways you can reason from here, such as: 1 - It has never been the case previously that almost all unexplained human ailments have shared a single simple explanation 2 - Many conditions that we discovered a long time ago had simpler 'single pathogen' explanations, whereas many newer ones are quite complex. 3 - Although many of these conditions will eventually be explained, the explanations are not likely to be visible to a non-expert. 4 - If they all shared an explanation, there's no major reason why it should lie in the endocrine system. An alternative 'catch-all' explanation for these would be 'psycho-neuro-immunology', another somewhat overambitious school of mostly scientific thinking that could potentially claim these conditions more credibly.
My alternative explanation that collects this thinking is that most 'unexplained human ailments' are likely to be multifactorial. This is also the common wisdom. As to where to read and learn about this, by far the best place is www.uptodate.com. This is very popular but also potentially expensive. So if you really must, you could instead look through medical textbooks like Harrison's or Kumar and Clarke, focussing specifically on unexplained conditions. I would warn that reading about conditions unexplained by medical science via textbooks of medical science might be a bit like pulling teeth, but truly it should be one way to abstract away the knowledge of these conditions.
Another approach might be to learn more about the scores of "medically unexplained physical symptoms", "diagnoses of exclusion" and "functional disorders". Likewise some "functional symptoms" and some "ideopathic" or "cryptogenic" conditions. "functional", "ideopathic" and "cryptogenic" can be used interchangeably here, as in the sentence "we can't explain your problem, but as a concession, let's meet halfway and conceal our ignorance with this Latinate (or Greek) name. On my hypothesis, most such conditions will be about halfway heritable (as are most traits in behavioural genetics). They'll be correlated with each other, and with mental health conditions. They'll often be helped by SSRIs and by psychotherapy.
I guess you just have to learn a lot about these conditions with an open mind and see where you end up. If you gain a detailed knowledge and still think that some have an endocrine explanation, then write up your findings in a google doc, send it around to some other smart people who share that knowledge, and see what they say.
Ryan, this is great, I came here for an argument! Thanks. ("I wish to believe 'snow is blue' if and only if snow is blue")
(a) OK, can we agree on "In most cases with 'normal' 0.3<TSH<5.5, TSH is the sole test performed"?
(b1) I don't know, but given that FMS includes 'brain fog' and 'tiredness' I'd be surprised if many people with it haven't had a TSH test. I would be surprised by the existence of people who only have the tender points and no other hypometabolic symptoms. Do we know what proportion that is?
(b2) "Also there are studies where they stimulate release of thyroid humans. There are literally hundreds of highly relevant studies here." I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Can you link to a couple? Google scholar "fibromyalgia and thyroid" gives top hit: http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/1512769, Neeck G , Riedel W "Thyroid function in patients with fibromyalgia syndrome.", in which they find abnormalities in a thyroid hormone releasing test in fibromyalgia patients. Doesn't that support me?
(c) There are forms of hypothyroidism that don't show up on the TSH test certainly, 'central hypothyroidism' and 'peripheral resistance to thyroid hormone', which have the same presentation but normal TSH. 'Central' should give you normal TSH but low T4 and T3. 'Peripheral' should be normal in all respects. But they're thought to be vanishingly rare, and as far as I know, CFS/FMS people aren't tested for them. In fact presumably the only way to test for them would be a trial of thyroid hormones! That's kind of my point.
(d) Not just tiredness and slowness. It's more of a general metabolic collapse. And which systems fail first seems to be random, which is why it's so difficult to diagnose clinically.
(e) I'd expect anyone with widespread pain to recoil if you tried to touch them.
"What is needed here are similarities that are specific to these conditions and that are shared, whereas here it is the aspects that are the most general that are shared but the main facets of each condition are quite different and overall the two conditions don't blur together in an interesting way."
John Lowe appears to have known the rheumatology and endocrinology literature backwards, and claimed that every symptom of fibromyalgia was a symptom of hypothyroidism and vice versa.
He gives references for a vast number of them in:
Inadequate Thyroid Hormone Regulation as the Main Mechanism of Fibromyalgia: A Review of the Evidence
You can find it here: http://tpauk.com/main/dr-john-lowe-overview-of-important-articles/
There were a couple of hypo symptoms (low basal temperature and low basal metabolic rate), which are arguably the characteristic symptoms of the disease, that hadn't been documented in fibromyalgia. So he got a bunch of FMS patients and checked. And found them.
I really think that at this point, someone should be running a PCRT on 'giving desiccated thyroid to FMS patients'! I would actually be surprised if T4 alone didn't have some effect, but since Lowe thought (from extensive experience, but based on a sample that must have been skewed by people going to him after doctors failed to help) it was the least useful of all the thryoid hormone therapies, we should take him at his word and try desiccated thyroid. My own bet would be that T4/T3 in the same combination as secreted by the thyroid gland would be the best thing, but that's just a detail.
Again, many thanks! I don't want to have these beliefs if they're false. Take me down.
Sorry this discussion is not interesting to me.
It's only mildly surprising that fibromyalgia patients have lower temperature in one study, or that improvement was seen in one study with thyroid hormone. Fibromyalgia patient's having lower metabolic activity is a plausible component but does not necessarily implicate the thyroid. Taking anything with a stimulant effect would do similarly to thyroid hormone here.
People with fibromyalgia present similarly to patients with other chronic pain syndromes, and other presumed multifactorial syndromes like irritable bowel syndrome. It is associated with childhood trauma, sexual abuse, etc (just as is IBS) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9407574
It's likely a massive combination of metabolic, psychiatric/psychosonatic, social and physical factors at play here. That's because the gestalt of the condition is that someone is complaining of pain that you can't explain, which is apparent if you spend time seeing these people. Of course this is not going to be always caused by a problem in one hormonal controller of metabolism. Many (combinations of) problems can cause body pains!
I apologise that this note is less carefully proofed than previous ones but spending more time on this investigation does not seem likely to bear fruit.
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Terrorists are a rounding error. Sure, some day they'll take out a city with a nuke but in history cities have been wiped out many many times without taking their parent civilization with them.
Historically speaking, I agree, yet it's conceivable that a malicious actor might militarise some powerful technology, and classing its use as an extreme act of terrorism sounds about right.