While I think finding ways to make future generations healthier and smarter is a worthy goal, I don't think we understand enough yet to do this without potentially severe unintended consequences, and I wouldn't consider doing it myself with our current technology. It's a good bet that many of the seemingly deleterious mutations we'd like to eliminate also offer some benefit we don't understand- given that we have already discovered many instances of mutations with apparent intelligence/health tradeoffs, and disease resistance/health tradeoffs. If you're se...
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I am also on the west coast, and wear wide brimmed hats (usually cowboy hats), which is somewhat unusual and many of the people comment on it, complement it, or ask me about it.
The truth is, I'm not really trying to make a fashion statement, I'm just bald and don't want to get cancer on my head... and this hat design is uniquely functional in that it blocks the sun, doesn't blow off in the wind, and doesn't look incredibly dorky and non-breathable like the nylon sun hats they sell at REI. Yet people make a big deal about it...
As someone that has been a strength athlete, and part of fitness communities for many years, I have never seen a real world instance of someone becoming generally less attractive to the opposite sex, or having trouble finding partners due to lifting weights.
Building noticeable amounts of muscle is much harder than most people who haven't tried to do so assume. The "grotesquely muscular" men on, e.g. bodybuilding magazines are essentially fake, and not something that really happens to people that lift weights, except for a few minutes in a staged photo that...
Late reply I know, but I wanted to add that I was very surprised by your take on Brett Kavanaugh, and wanted to explain my more negative interpretation of those events, as I see it as very helpful to Trump directly, and not about principles. Some points:
-Backing down from anything almost always involves giving up political power, and encourages people to challenge you in the future. Trump is known for consistently almost never giving up without a fight, even in situations like losing an election. This strongly discourages people from challenging you ...
Growing crops for biofuel cannot produce more carbon than it consumes over long time scales, because the only source of carbon available to the system is the carbon in the atmosphere. If they are saying biofuels aren't carbon neutral over long time scales, where is this extra unlimited supply of carbon coming from?
High intensity deliberate practice that you can only do for short amounts of time per session
How is that different from flow work?
I'm not sure if you've read Mihály Csíkszentmihályi or not, but he argued that flow states are more likely when a task is more complex/challenging, and the person has a high level of appropriate skill that makes it possible (with substantial effort) to complete the task.
For me this often occurs while programming, sailing, or doing math- especially if I need to solve a new problem with those skills that will be especially challenging.
Once I'm in 'flow' it is a distinct mental experience - I am totally into it and lose any sense of time passing, or of needin...
I stopped using pomodoros for flow-work, because it would break my flow state. I've found roughly 2 hour chunks work better for flow, without any particular warning to stop me if I feel like going longer. If I am in flow, I want it to keep going as long as possible, until I am fatigued, or the problem is solved.
But I would have thought that if there was widespread 'central hypothyroidism', someone would have twigged by now, since that form does show up if you do a full panel of hormone tests
Which tests? I am not aware of any simple blood test that measures the endpoint of thyroid activity on metabolic rate (except, arguably, cholesterol levels), rather than just the state of the T4->TRH->TSH->T4 feedback loop.
mostly T4 with a bit of extra T3', but no-one has particularly clear ideas on what works and what doesn't or why
The challenge with T3 is it...
he was basically making his patients hyperthyroid
Why is this a reason not to reject it? He is essentially arguing that the major cause of cardiovascular disease is population-wide high rates of hypothyroidism. It would be a circular argument to dismiss that because his treatment leads to a greater than average metabolic rate. One would also need evidence of a disadvantage that outweighs the advantages. His patients seemed to be doing well, or at least he doesn't report them exhibiting any classic signs of hyperthyroidism. He was primarily adjusting dose...
You wouldn't need to invoke the idea of 'hormone resistance' because TSH and T4 tests normally used to diagnose hypothyroidism don't measure the active hormone - T3. T4 is just a prohormone with very little direct activity on metabolic rate.
In primates, metabolism is regulated primarily in the liver by T4->T3 conversion, so if this is inhibited for any reason it will suppress metabolism without showing up on those tests. Low calorie intake, and poor nutrition are known to cause this (e.g. Euthyroid sick syndrome). In cases of poor liver conversion, supp...
You're right, we do understand the pathophysiology of many diseases, and those are the ones that have been mostly eradicated. The major chronic diseases that remain are very poorly understood such as type II diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and alzheimer's.
I spend a lot of time reading about 'alternative' ideas about these diseases, and many seem promising, but aren't taken seriously by the mainstream. It's definitely possible that they're ignored for a good reason, but I haven't been able to find the reasons yet. This is the biggest problem I've ...
I have been attempting to do this with biology and medicine, seriously for about 5 years now. Not by actually repeating experiments, but in trying to understand the original evidence, and see if I agree that it was interpreted correctly. Of course this is nearly impossible as biology is too broad and complex for one person to understand all of the details.
It's a confusing mess, but I think I am still learning a lot. Even if I come to agree with most of the mainstream ideas, I'd like to think I'd then understand them more deeply, in a way that is more funct...
Much of modern medicine involves covering up symptoms with drugs proven to do this, without understanding the underlying cause of the symptom.
What, really? There certainly is a lot of that approach around, but it's not what I think of when I think of modern medicine, as opposed to more traditional forms. Can you give examples?
Most of the ones I can think of are things that have fallen to the modern turn to evidence-based practice. The poster-child one in my head is the story of H. pylori and how a better understanding of the causes of gastritis and gas...
Excellent post, thanks for putting so much work into a clear explanation. I will re-investigate Ling's work more carefully, and also see if I can find the mistakes in his thermodynamics calculations you mention. I have been biased towards his work and not looking critically enough, because it seems to explain some surprising observations about drug activity I've found in my own research- but that's no excuse.
I am interested in the possibility that Ling could be entirely wrong about membrane physiology, but this gel phase shift phenomena could still be impo...
That's a good point about intelligence, the way I used that word without defining it in this article is sloppy.
I am interested in the ability to solve important problems. Maybe instead I should talk about something more easily definable such as mental endurance, or limiting the stress response from focused work? Personally, I think if I could work longer in one sitting on a hard problem without stress or fatigue, that alone would count as "increased intelligence" for practical purposes.
I think there are links between the stress response and nutr...
I need to learn more about this, I don't have a strong belief. If I understand correctly, this is basically the idea behind the free radical theory of aging (FRTA). One interesting variant of that idea is in the article I linked above, which suggests that the focus should be on "mitochondrial membrane peroxidizability index" rather than antioxidant activity or free radical production.
It seems weird that sugar seems to cause problems in certain populations of people, but not others.
There can be damage or defects in the mitochondria that inhibit it's ability to respond to hormones, for example per-oxidation of cardiolipin. Cells don't always die when they have a mitochondrial defect. An extreme example is cancer, where there is major damage to the mitochondria, but the cells continue to live via anaerobic fermentation (aka the Warburg Effect).
Some review articles that talk about these theories:
Cancer as a metabolic disease: implications for novel therapeutics
Life and Death: Metabolic Rate, Membrane Composition, and Life Span of Animal...
Perhaps sugar and glucose only cause problems in those who can't metabolize it effectively, for other reasons (or when consumed in excess of your capacity to metabolize them). I used to think high glucose intake caused metabolic syndrome but I can't reconcile that with the existence of large groups of people (Kitavans, fruitarianism, etc.) that have very high carb diets and don't develop metabolic syndrome.
In mice, high sugar diets don't cause metabolic problems or liver damage unless also coupled with high polyunsaturated fat intake. Populations of people...
If you have time to provide links, I would like to read the research you mention- especially on the thermodynamics of ATP and calcium-triggered membrane vesicle fusion. Ling's work is all very old and doesn't address any newer research, but Pollack addresses some of the issues you raise in his books. Pollack does love to speculate a lot, but he appears to be careful in distinguishing this speculation from things that have more evidence. Here is also a newer review paper that discusses this and some other ideas related to the role of entropy in biochemistry...
I think this would be difficult to observe, because starvation also increases stress hormones which increase motivation. For the most part, brain metabolism remains high in starvation, but other glucose using systems are reduced, to preserve glucose for the brain. Ketones are also used to reduce glucose demands while keeping brain metabolism high. Ancedotally, I seem to be more motivated when fasting or dieting, but more creative when eating a nutritious diet.
Metabolic syndrome, and hypothyroidism (both diseases of decreased cellular energy production) are...
That's a good point. I think some old hot water heaters might even be so full of small particles that they're hard to drain from the bottom, and you might need to get the water from the top.
However, I think most of the sediment would be insoluble in water, and can be avoided by letting the water settle for a few minutes. Any soluble particles would have long since dissolved, sitting in a bath of hot flowing water for years.
Great post.
For food, I think dehydrated potatoes are a particularly effective emergency food. They're more complete nutritionally than grains and will keep you performing longer in a tough situation.
I also like to store enough fuel to safely get to a friend or family members house in another town, if necessary. My vehicle is diesel, so storing the fuel is somewhat safer than storing gasoline.
Books can be helpful as well- especially easy to read field references for emergency medicine and survival techniques. In my opinion a good book on first aid is more i...
However, I don't really have a strategy to seek out some similar mentors and worry that in engineering it's a lot more likely to find method-oriented persons. I'm wondering if you have any advice on this.
No, I'm not even sure how to easily tell if someone is method or problem oriented without at least meeting them and talking to them. If you find any ideas on this please share them with me.
intractability of the problems that grabbed my attention in the first place (intelligence amplification/cognition)
That is a very hard problem. This is wild specul...
e-mail sent
I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.
I've been planning on writing some articles on here, but I don't feel comfortable throwing out outlandish statements without explaining all of my reasoning and evidence in detail... and I don't have time to do so yet. This is a project at least on the order of the Timeless Physics sequences.
This is just the tip of the iceberg but one thing I have been looking at recently is Gilbert Ling's Association-Induction hypothesis which is centered around the idea that gel-like phase shifts in the cytoplasm are c...
I am interested in understanding the molecular basis of chronic diseases such as metabolic syndrome. I am also interested in understanding the relationship between various homeostasis mechanisms and small molecule drug activity.
Yes, I would still be doing biomedical engineering given what I now know. However, I am driven mostly by curiosity and a desire to answer medical questions- if I worked in another field, I would likely be doing so to support myself while I work on these medical questions in my free time. I am a 'dry lab' bioengineer. If my primary goal was to make a high income, I would instead do software development.
If I could change anything, it would be seeking out problem-oriented instead of method-oriented mentors. Scientists and engineers can often be divided into ...
Value creation depends entirely on you. Like any field, to make major advances you will need to tackle big problems and come up with creative solutions.
In my opinion (as a biomedical engineer) the field is currently stalled in some areas (and advancing rapidly in others) but is ripe for a major paradigm shift which will accelerate progress. Some verifiably false ideas about basic biology remain commonly accepted in the field, and will need to be reinvestigated for progress to continue.
As for the grad student debt issue, most major research universities in...
Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'?
-Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
My interpretation is that this quote is aimed at people who do have the cognitive capacity to reason through specific problems that are important to them, but are failing to do so because they put too much trust in authorities.
He's not literally saying to believe this, but to consider this idea to enable you to then look at the evidence yourself.
The problem is so many people hold a 'prior' that the authorities are always right, it becomes possible for wrong ideas to become entrenched, and never seriously reinvestigated.
His ideas are all based on the Association-Induction hypothesis, which is a little known and iconoclastic theory of cell biology... however it seems to have a strong experimental basis.
His writing seemed crazy to me at first (almost like schizophrenic word salad, despite having graduate level training in biology), but I've spent much of the last year studying the papers he cites... and I cannot find any mistakes in his reasoning yet. It's seeming more and more reasonable, but I think it's better to use his writings to find new ideas about basic biology, ra...
Is this reverse stupidity? It's a demonstrably false statement, but I think it's a useful heuristic to compensate for a bias we are prone to, allowing you to then collect evidence and evaluate the situation rationally. It might help overcome the also demonstrably false 'prior belief' that the authorities are always correct, which prevents people from ever expending energy to confirm or question them.
I retracted this, because I have learned a lot more about this issue in the last year. I am still undecided on aspirin, however I no longer think that the mechanisms mentioned above are the only important roles aspirin plays. I am also no longer convinced that omega-3 offers a health benefit, and that omega-6 restriction alone may be superior to replacing omega-6 with omega-3.
I really like your recipe analogy, I think it would be very useful for teaching molecular biology.
I think our discussion mirrors the tension between traditional biology and bioengineering. As a bioengineer I'm primarily concerned with what is possible to build given the biology we already know.
While I agree that a "blueprint" isn't a good analogy for naturally evolved living organisms, this doesn't prevent us from engineering new molecular systems that are built from a blueprint. As I mentioned, we already have turing complete molecular computers...
To what extent is labeling the behavior of biological systems as "emergent" just an admission that these systems are currently mysterious to us?
I don't think it's clear to what extent biological systems have "emergent" behavior, vs. organization into distinct "modules" each with a specific role, and robust feedback systems.
The book chapter On Modules and Modularity in the book System Modeling in Cellular Biology argues that simple modular design is likely selected for, as it would increase the ability of an organism to evolve ...
I don't seem to have the same disdain for the word 'emergent' as much of the population here. I don't use it as a curiosity stopper or in place of the word 'mysterious' - I wouldn't be much of a biologist if a little emergent behavior stopped me cold. (Also no argument about many modular things in biological systems, I pull out and manipulate pathways and regulatory circuits regularly in my work, but there is a whole lot which is still very context-dependent). In this context I used the word emergent to mean that rather than having some kind of map of t...
Isn't life an example of self-assembling molecular nanotechnology? If life exists, then our physics allows for programmable systems which use similar processes.
We already have turing complete molecular computers... but they're currently too slow and expensive for practical use. I predict self-assembling nanotech programmed with a library of robust modular components will happen long before strong AI.
Life is a wonderful example of self-assembling molecular nanotechnology, and as such gives you a template of the sorts of things that are actually possible (as opposed to Drexlerian ideas). That is to say, everything is built from a few dozen stereotyped monomers assembled into polymers (rather than arranging atoms arbitrarily), there are errors at every step of the way from mutations to misincorporation of amino acids in proteins so everything must be robust to small problems (seriously, like 10% of the large proteins in your body have an amino acid out ...
Consider volunteering in an academic lab that does computational research- such as bioinformatics, or computer science research. This will get you practical programming skills, but also other useful skills and knowledge related to the specific research being done.
Personally, I find it a chore to learn programming languages, but I find it very enjoyable and rewarding to write software which helps solve problems I'm interested in.
Do you have any more information on this?
My personal experience has been that it's almost impossible to consistently put in more than about 2 hours/day of highly focused 'flow' coding. I was previously worried that there was something wrong, but at this pace I'm able to complete big projects on a regular basis. Could this be normal even for productive programmers?
Invest some time looking into modern bodybuilding methods and "paleo 2.0" diets, and you'll quickly see that his knowledge level of practical fitness methods is shockingly shallow (and outdated) for someone who claims such a longstanding interest in them.
I was not arguing for studying theory over practical experience- but to argue that he is far from an expert at either approach.
It's true that most effective fitness techniques lack any solid theoretical basis and were discovered by self experimentation. However, his knowledge level of these practical fitness techniques is shallow.
For example his workouts were copied nearly verbatim from the book "Body by Science" but are missing important advice from that book on how to perform them safely and effectively. He also seems unaware of the methods de...
You have a good point about motivation, but I don't think Timothy Ferriss is a good example person to use for explaining this idea to LWers. Perhaps a very successful and motivated scientist such as Feynman?
Personally, I don't find Timothy Ferris' motivation level that impressive- on the contrary, I think he's dangerously lazy.
For example, he presents himself as an elite and highly experienced biohacker in 4HB, but he's just copying methods from already published books that he doesn't understand well. He's using relatively dangerous and ineffective techniques, because he never invested the time to understand the relevant biology, history, and many key methods surrounding the ideas he talks about.
This is actually a very traditional kind of over-caution. It's being lazy by pretending not to be, and never actually doing anything. You learn more about how effective a diet is for you by trying it for two months than you do by studying nutrition science for 4 years, but one is a scary difficult life change and the other you can leave to the experts and do nothing.
He's put in way more time and effort into figuring out his own body and its reactions to things than you ever will. What's lazy about this? It may be inefficient or incorrect if you believe in the primacy of research, but in what universe does it count as lazy?
The barriers to entry in becoming a supervillan are getting lower and lower- soon just anybody will be able to 3D print an army of flying killer robots with lethal autonomy.
I just got an eBook of "The Motivation Hacker" and it seems AMAZING. I realize it's much of the same ideas present in the article on here how_to_beat_procrastination, but Nick explains them in a way that seems far more convincing and applicable to daily life.
The terminology "cheat meal/day" bothers me, as it implies that it's not a critical part of the diet or even some sort of "planned moral transgression"- and leads many people to think they might get better results if they avoid it, do it less often. In reality it's a critical part of the method.
As I mentioned, I do actually sometimes get negative feedback from people, but overall the effect is positive, because it causes people to interact with me spontaneously when I have trouble initiating social interactions, and I've made quite a few good friends just from that. Being polarizing is way better than being neutral for meeting people and making friends. I also suspect being avoided by a person that would negatively judge someone they don't know just for wearing a hat is probably also a positive thing. It's a functional thing I need because I'm ba... (read more)