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All of Michael Harrop's Comments + Replies

How to Make Superbabies
Michael Harrop00

Oh my god, what a disturbingly overconfident & erroneous comment. Especially coming from someone who has been immersed in science for so many years. I recognize your name from Reddit from over 10 years ago.

Due to Brandolini's law, your comment made me look up how to block users on Lesswrong, which apparently isn't possible. I now have to waste a huge amount of time debunking your egregious misinformation. I will only do it this once because in my experience, people who exhibit this kind of behavior will continue it. So in the future I will simply refer... (read more)

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How to Make Superbabies
Michael Harrop3-3

I agree with the majority of this, especially the part where we are in a race to increase our own intelligence before we destroy ourselves with AI or something else.

But I think there's something missing in your analysis.

"Genes are the piano; the microbiome is the pianist."

It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life (Feb 2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00327-x - I see it's closed access now; here are some quotes.

More on the microbiome & genetics: https://humanmicrobiome.info/genetics/

Examples of how important the gut mi... (read more)

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6gwern
The human microbiome is irrelevant to this topic. The microbiome is highly heritable (usual twin studies & SNP heritabilities), and it is caused by genes and the environment, as well as unstable; its direct causal effects in normal humans are minimal. We know that it is supremely irrelevant because environmental changes like antibiotics or new food or global travel which produce large changes in personal (and offspring) microbiomes do not produce large changes in intelligence (of oneself or offspring); and most dramatically, germ-free humans exist and are of normal or even above-average intelligence, eg the fascinating mistakes and delusions of David despite his high intelligence. (Amusingly, germ-free mice apparently even live longer.) Microbiome research is, in general, very low quality and can't be taken seriously - look at your link: Most of this page is meaningless mouse studies (infamous for not replicating and getting whatever result the experimenter wants and the animal model literature having huge systemic biases), and the handful of actual human studies I see here are all garbage - things like cross-sectional studies with large known familial confounding, or heavy reliance on things like breastfeeding where the beneficial effects disappear when controlling for just some confounds. This also goes for much-touted correlations like autism. There's not a single result on this page that provides a shred of evidence for your implied thesis that microbiome interventions could, even in theory, possibly matter to 'how to make superbabies'. It doesn't. He was right. BTW, you remember what happened in 2021, right? EDIT: If anyone cares, I'm not bothering to respond to Harrop's comment in depth because I think his Gish-gallopy response manages to exemplify many of the criticisms I already made, where they are not outright non-responsive (eg. his 'disagreement' about the reasons why germ-free mice live longer is obviously irrelevant to my point that they do), and I'
Being a donor for Fecal Microbiota Transplants (FMT): Do good & earn easy money (up to 180k/y)
Michael Harrop*10

In my last reply, I’ve already listed multiple reasons why we don't advertise the precise criteria. Did you see that?

Elsewhere, in more purely scientific settings, I definitely have discussed the exact criteria and the evidence for them. 

Furthermore, these are arguably proprietary business trade secrets, yet I've made them public in order to try to advance this area of science. 

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Being a donor for Fecal Microbiota Transplants (FMT): Do good & earn easy money (up to 180k/y)
Michael Harrop40

I think your comment ignores the plethora of evidence supporting donor-quality hypotheses. Much of it was presented in the OP, and covered the permanent extinction of our host-native microbiomes, along with the exponential rise in chronic disease. 

Your suggestion seems to be to “try to find a plethora of plant and wildlife species in a forest that has been burned to the ground”. Whether you can piece it back together is unknown, but I don’t think that’s the best approach to take right now. 

Also, one of the major problems is that most people are n... (read more)

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2ChristianKl
If I remember right Bruce Sterling wrote in 1998 in his sci-fi novel Distraction about how when a frozen body was found, there was an immediate commercial interest to sequence the gut microbiome. It's interesting how our world evolves into that future ;)
Being a donor for Fecal Microbiota Transplants (FMT): Do good & earn easy money (up to 180k/y)
Michael Harrop21

HumanMicrobes.org donor criteria are listed on the Donors page. The specifics beyond those basic criteria are not listed for a variety of reasons, including, that they may change over time as we experiment and learn more, and that we need people to be honest with their applications. 

Support for athletes as donors is listed here: http://humanmicrobiome.info/FMT#impact-factors 

You are definitely correct that many athletes may be doing harm by pushing themselves beyond what their body is naturally capable of. 

I've screened hundreds of college a... (read more)

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1tutor vals
I was also surprised on the large emphasis on top athlete, as opposed to simply athletes, and as opposed to generally very healthy people. My main opposition to looking at high athletes only is that I say many high performing people would waste their potential by becoming athletes, and that looking for athletes filters away many very healthy very high performing people.  For example I know someone who's been high performing all his life, in kinda all domains (sports, socialising, technical skills, computer games...). He'd be top of class, also had strong motivation and work ethic which got him highest place in an entrance exam to the best engineering school of the country (main subjects being math, physics, engineering, algorithmics). He so rarely fell ill (less than once per several years) it was a shock for him when he did, for the 2 days it would last (to be precise, I'm using ill in a 'ill enough to notice' way, not just a runny nose in winter). He went on to cofound a still successful company in a technical sector (drones).  I dressed this portrait not to pitch that person to you particularly, but to illustrate that actually there're a whole bunch of people with very similar portraits, all you'll find them all concentrated in certain top engineering schools (there might be similar profiles in other similar top school of other domains but I don't know those). Few of these people become top level athletes (often by preference for something else, though there's also a higher percentage of top level athletes in that population) yet many would have the potential too. As long as we're just basing microbiota transplants on the assumption "very healthy high performing people probably have good microbiota", it makes sense to me to test more of these people for effectiveness in transplants. 
2ChristianKl
Saying "A specific Bristol Stool Type" and not what stool type you are looking for seems to be the opposite of listing the desired criteria.  Generally, in science, it's useful when the process of learning more about what criteria matter, is an open one where arguments about why certain criteria are believed to matter can be openly challenged and discussed. 
Being a donor for Fecal Microbiota Transplants (FMT): Do good & earn easy money (up to 180k/y)
Michael Harrop42

There are companies trying to identify that, and use it to create "synthetic" FMT capsules, but it's largely not yet known, and in my opinion it will be decades before we can replace whole stool with synthetic FMT. 

After all, you have to find a super-donor first. 

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6__nobody
My gut feeling (no pun intended) says the mythical "super-donor" is a very good excuse to keep looking / trying without having to present better results, and may never be found. Doing the search directly in the "microbiome composition space" instead of doing it on people (thereby indirectly sampling the space) feels way more efficient, assuming it is tractable at all. If some people are already looking into synthesis, is there anything happening in the direction of "extrapolating" towards better samples? (I.e. take several good-but-not-great donors that fall short in different ways, look at what's same / different between their microbiome, then experiment with compositions that ought to be better according the current understanding, and repeat.)