We're looking for signals which are widely broadcast throughout the body, and received by many endpoints. Why look for that type of thing? Because the wide usage puts pressure on the signal to "represent one consistent thing". It's not an accident that there are individual hormonal signals which are approximately-but-accurately described by the human-intuitive phrases "overall metabolic rate" or "stress". It's not an accident that those hormones' signals are not hopelessly polysemantic. If we look for widely-broadcast signals, then we have positive reason to expect that they'll be straightforwardly interpretable, and therefore the sort of thing we can look at and (sometimes) intuitively say "I want to turn that up/down".

This sounds logical but I don't think is backed empirically, at least to the degree you're claiming. Source: I have a biology BA and can't speak directly to the question because I never took those classes because they had reputations for being full of exceptions and memorization.

How do stimulants affect your ability to update or change your mind? @johnswentworth and I are debating stimulant usage in an unpublished dialogue, and one crux is how stimulants affect one's ability to update. 

People who have used stimulants, please percent-emoji with how they affect your ability to update- <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement".  Comments with additional details are welcome. 

Just pushes the trust problem down a level. Lots of recruiting firms advertise positions that don't exist so that they have resumes "just in case"

David Maciver over on Twitter likes a zinc mouthwash, which presumably has a similar mechanism

I didn't read it but trust your assessment that Is Being Sexy For Your Homies was very male-POV. I also agree that LW is male-skewed in general. But I don't think (the way you describe) Being Sexy is representative of the way LW is male-skewed. I think it's more accurate to say most posts (but not Being Sexy) are aiming for some aspect X, and X tends to appeal to men more than women. 

Some things in the cluster of X: systematizing, high-decoupling, math-ey.

are you correcting for the year the test was taken? The SAT grading has shifted dramatically over time. 

short answer: no. Possibly because of hepcidin. 

I'm having trouble parsing but I think the first point is about the mutation rate in humans? I don't expect that to be informative about flu virus except as a floor.