It has been many years since I thought about this post, so what I say below could be wrong, but here's my current understanding:
I think what I was trying to say in the post is that FDT-policy returns a policy, so "FDT(P, x)" means "the policy I would use if P were my state of knowledge and x were the observation I saw". But that's a policy, i.e. a mapping from observations to actions, so we need to call that policy on the actual observation in order to get an action, hence (FDT(P,x))(x).
Now, it's not clear to me that FDT-policy actually needs the observation x in order to condition on what policy it is using. In other words, in the post I wrote the conditioned event as , but perhaps this should have just been . In that case, the call to FDT should look like FDT(P), which is a policy, and then to get an action we would write FDT(P)(x).
START TRACKING YOUR SYMPTOMS
Have a signal chat to yourself or similar. Make sure its very low friction and you've impressed on yourself the importance of tracking symptoms
What do you do with this data? Do you have any examples of insights you've gained by tracking symptoms this way? I've personally found that tracking symptoms (which I did for about 3 years, increasingly obsessively towards the end, to the point of writing this post) led to obsessing over my symptoms and that this was probably making things worse. I wasn't even gaining much insight through tracking, it was just more like "maybe someone or AI will find patterns in this at some point and be able to explain everything to me so I can get better".
(b12, iodine, niacin)
What does it feel like when you've reached capacity on these? For niacin, do you just mean flushing?
Do not buy supps on Amazon (fraud, reselling, adulteration)
Do you have more info about this? I've had good experiences buying supplements on Amazon (sticking to reputable brands and making sure Amazon is the seller). I've been doing this for years and as far as I know I've only ever gotten maybe on fake product.
Were you gardening or anything when you first got sick?
I was not. I've stayed indoors most of my adult life, so I think I'm at lower risk for worms. Hard to say where I could have gotten worms from (assuming it is worms).
I'd be curious to hear about how you decided which on dewormers I should take. Maybe the answer is just "a bunch of reading on random internet posts and papers".
I wasted the first couple years of my illness thinking my condition was psychosomatic or DP/DR, doing things like therapy, anxiety techniques, introspection/journaling, gradual exposure, and so forth. I still sometimes try some psychosomatic treatments anyway (most recently, I was trying out John Sarno/Howard Schubiner-style mind body syndrome stuff, after reading Steve Byrnes's post and having it recommended to me). None of it really helped. I now think a lot of what people think of as psychosomatic conditions are instead somatopsychic conditions (i.e. a physical condition that results in mental symptoms). In my case, it helps that some of my symptoms clearly cannot be produced by anxiety/a psychosomatic condition (e.g. peeling and burning lips and rapid heart rate that returns to normal by lying down).
Thank you, this is good to know. I reached out to one of my doctors to see what they think of this idea. My own feeling is that 40% on a worm is too high. My eosinophils count is normal (and I know sometimes that can be normal even with a parasite), the viral illness seems like a sufficient explanation of kick-starting my chronic symptoms, I tested negative on the stool test, and I already know I have gut problems (and those gut problems seem to be explained by SIBO/leaky gut). Basically, everything I see seems to be explained well by stuff that I already know is going on, and I don't see any clear evidence of parasites. I would still put maybe 3% on it though.
My current distribution of root cause now looks something like: 35% on autoimmune/pre-autoimmune (e.g. Sjogren's syndrome), 25% on MCAS, 10% on dysautonomia/POTS, 5% on latent virus/viral reactivation, 5% on SIBO/impaired MMC, 3% on some kind of parasite, 17% other causes.
Only explanation for this (and the salt sensitivity etc) IMO is a hole/thinning in gut lining.
Why not dysautonomia? I am newly sensitive to a lot of things, including heat, light, and sound that don't directly involve the gut.
There I was just quoting from the Hintze paper so it's not clear what he meant. One interpretation is that the right hand side is just the definition of what "UDT(s)" means, so in that sense there wouldn't be a type error, UDT(s) would also be a policy. But also, you're right, a decision theory should in the end output an action. The right notation all comes down to what I said in the last paragraph of my previous comment, namely, does UDT1.1/FDT-policy need to know the sense data s (or 'observation x', in the other notation) in order to condition on the agent using a particular policy? If the answer is yes, UDT(s) is a policy, and UDT(s)(s) is the action. If the answer is no, then UDT is the policy (confusing! because UDT is also the 'decision algorithm' that finds the policy in the particular decision problem you are facing) and UDT(s) is the action. My best guess is that the answer to this question is 'no', so UDT is the policy and UDT(s) is the action, so your point about there being a type error is correct. But the notation f:s↦a in the Hintze paper makes it seem like somehow s is being used on the right hand side, which is possibly what confused me when I wrote the post.