All of riceissa's Comments + Replies

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... (read more)

(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.

I have, but my writings are pretty disorganized at the moment and probably hard for people to interpret without some sort of dialogue with me, which is probably why I invited Nicholas/Heather to message me (I no longer remember my exact thought process from a year ago when I wrote the grandparent comment). But regardless, here are some links that you can check out of learning-related content I have written (feel free to message me or reply to this comment if you want to talk more about this stuff):

• https://issarice.com/things-i-wish-i-knew-earlier#learning-

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 ... (read more)

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 ... (read more)

I agree they are hard to fix, but a lot of nerdy interests tend to also be hard (and that seems to be part of the attraction). So this doesn't seem like a differentiating factor.

Perhaps an intestinal parasite like a tapeworm?

I did get the GI Effects stool test done (in December 2022, well after I'd already been ill), which showed no presence of parasites. Any reason to think a stool test like this wouldn't detect the parasites?

How do you know your infection from years ago was viral?

My symptoms during the acute infection were a sore throat, fever, large quantities of mucus and clogged nose (requiring constantly blowing my nose), and a cough (both dry and wet cough; mostly in the evenings). It felt like a cold or flu, just stronger ... (read more)

I've always been underweight. The heaviest I got was about 115 pounds during freshman year of college. A bunch of the men in my family were quite skinny (though not as much as me) when they were younger, so I suspect it's at least partly genetic.

I guess one of the first things to do to create/market/... an interest from labs/researchers/nerds/... would be to find other people suffering from the same illness and create/coin a name for that illness and create some association/website/gatherings/... to communicate about it like it is done for most other illnesses?

Funny that you mention this, because I was just musing about this the other day over on my personal website. Unfortunately I wasn't able to come up with a very good name...

It must be really dreadful as it seems to be the case for you, to hav

I've heard of this, and may want to try it eventually. I'm starting out with things like LDN first though.

I've heard a lot of good things about fasting, but unfortunately I am pretty underweight (104 pounds, 5 feet 6.5 inches) and unable to gain any weight (despite trying quite hard). And when I am awake if I don't eat for 1-2 hours I start to feel extremely weak. So those two things have kept me from thinking seriously about trying fasting. Do you have any resources or thoughts on fasting for underweight/wasting people?

I have not. I've been supplementing vitamin D my whole adult life, and the initial blood test showed a level of 86.6ng/mL which one of my doctors said was higher than optimal, so I lowered the frequency of supplementation and my follow-up blood test showed a level of 54.5ng/mL. Any reason I should try megadosing it even if I have adequate levels in my blood?

I've heard of zinc carnosine but haven't tried it yet. I tried supplementing with zinc gluconate at one point but it seemed to be aggravating my hunger attack symptom so I stopped.

Can you elaborate? It seems to me that a lot of nerdy interests also "don't generalize" in the sense that different problems are quite different from one another (a puzzle game would be boring if all the puzzles had similar solutions, and part of the game designer's job is to make puzzles feel impossible in different ways; a mathematical theorem that was unnecessarily particular would be eaten up by a more general theorem, so major theorems in math necessarily require unique insights, so you can't prove most theorems by using the same old tricks; etc.). So this does not seem to be a distinguishing property to me.

Here's one example. Jeff Wood had been suffering from ME/CFS for a while, and found that his head started sinking one day, and a lot of his symptoms would get worse depending on the position of his head/neck. This led to his diagnosis of CCI/AAI and he was able to get the right surgeries and is now in remission. Of course, most of us are not as lucky as he is in having something that so dramatically and immediately changes symptoms. But I think it's one way to solve such medical mysteries, and is basically what you say about tracking backwards from symptom... (read more)

Sure, all of those things. I think they are all related parts of what I've been wondering about, and are not as distinct as maybe you think. If I were to try to compress my main confusion, it's something like: I see nerdy people spontaneously doing certain activities for fun, like doing math, programming, making and solving puzzle games, writing long blog posts about COVID origins, or whatever; why is it that almost no one spontaneously decides to try to solve mysterious chronic illnesses? Does thinking about mysterious chronic illnesses have some kind of barrier that repels people, and if so, are there ways to remove that barrier?

I wonder if "brains" of the sort that are useful for math and programming are neccessarily all that helpful here.

I think I used to implicitly believe this too. I gravitate much more to math/programming than biology, and had a really hard time getting myself interested in biology/health stuff. But having been forced to learn more biology/health stuff, I seem to be able to ask questions that I don't see other people asking, and thinking thoughts that not many others are thinking, so now I think the kinds of thinking used in math/programming generalize and wo... (read more)

I've been trying. You can see my write-ups about breathing, swallowing, weird thirst/electrolyte(?) thing, and paradoxical temporary improvements following certain events. I also have a draft of a post detailing all of my history, labs, symptoms, and everything I've ever tried, but it's a huge amount work and I don't have much hope of people even reading it (hence this question, to see what I can do to make it more interesting), so I've only been able to make progress on it very slowly.

Update: The flashcards have finally been released: https://riceissa.github.io/immune-book/ 

Other commenters have already hinted at this, but I suspect that terms like "saturated fat", "seed oils", and "omega-6 PUFA" are not specific enough, and I further suspect that this makes basically all studies mostly useless (because they work with these flawed coarse terms). "Saturated fat" can be tallow from factory-farmed cows or cultured butter from grass-fed grass-finished cows (and even that isn't specific enough; was the grass sprayed with XYZ pesticide? etc.). "Omega-6 PUFA" can be highly heated seed oils chemically treated to deodorize them (maski... (read more)

Hi, I wanted to give an update. Capnometry biofeedback worked better than I expected. My baseline ET CO2 went from around 27mmHg to around 40mmHg in the first 1.5 weeks of using the device, and stayed there for the whole month I had access to the device. (I've now returned the device.) The key thing I discovered was that even though I was already nasal breathing 99.9% of the time, my nasal breaths were still quite audible and so I was overbreathing because of that. The biofeedback+coaching allowed me to switch my breathing to a silent nasal one in stages. ... (read more)

Interesting, I don't know anything about the quality of different SLIT manufacturers, but $2600 sounds a lot more affordable than $7000. I'll try to remember to ask my allergist about this if I ever see them again.

My understanding (based on watching some YouTube lectures and talking to my allergists) is that SCIT (aka allergy shots) and SLIT are equally effective but (at least in the US) SLIT is not covered by insurance so SCIT ends up being a lot cheaper for most people. The main problem with SCIT is that it requires going to the allergy clinic every week for a while, then every month for a while over a period of about 3 years (but it is possible to speed things up quite a bit by doing cluster shots or double shots). I tried doing SCIT last year but my chronic illn... (read more)

I had a couple more questions about the CONTEC device:

1. What's the lag time from when you breathe to when the waveform is displayed on the screen, and when the number updates?
2. How does it prevent water (from exhaled air) from getting into the device? The CapnoTrainer uses water traps inserted between the cannula and the device itself, and these water traps need to be replaced every once in a while. But I haven't seen anything similar for the CONTEC device.

I haven't verified the correctness of what this person is saying, but this Reddit comment seems relevant:

Most yoga breathing techniques have been completely misinterpreted from the ancient texts, and incorrectly teach people to breath larger amounts of air, when true deep breathing (deep as in from the diaphragm) is very still and almost imperceptible at rest. Buteyko teaches how to reset the part of the brain that controls autonomic breathing back to this very gentle still breath. Lau Tzu said 'the perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing' . The thi

One data point: https://youtu.be/XliOGg8Tl98?t=230 

Thank you, this is helpful!

I found someone in my local area who has a CapnoTrainer and was willing to rent it out to me and coach me, so it was a lot cheaper than the official route. But yeah, in general rentals are quite expensive unfortunately. If I couldn't find anyone who would rent one out to me for a reasonable price, I would probably have just gone with the CONTEC device as you did.

When I originally wrote this LW post, I had never used a capnometer of any kind (it just seemed quite promising and I was confused why basically no one was talking about ... (read more)

The contec does show the waveform, it's just on a tiny screen so not the most detailed. 

Huh, okay, that is good to know. I was looking at images like this one where the wave form is clearly the SpO2, rather than CO2:

But scrolling through more of the images, I do see this, which looks like a CO2 curve:

I am guessing there must be some way to switch which graph you see?

Talking is really bad too for me. If I talk for a sentence or less, let myself breathe a few breaths while not moving, then resume talking and keep pausing for a while after talking only a

I self-studied a bunch of math in 2017-2019 in order to do AI alignment research (specifically, agent foundations type stuff), and have a lot of thoughts about how to do it. Feel free to message me if you want to discuss.

Thank you, this is really fascinating! After writing this post, I talked to someone who does biofeedback using a capnometer, and they also mentioned that same CONTEC device as a cheap but still accurate capnometer. Their main gripe with it was that it responds more slowly compared to the CapnoTrainer and doesn't show the wave form, so it is not as good for doing biofeedback with (e.g. apparently the CapnoTrainer can show things like aborted breaths or weird exhalation patterns, whereas the CONTEC device can't show that), but it is still good enough for det... (read more)

Does this mean that a cheap "pseudo-capnometer" can be created which measures VOCs collected via a nasal cannula? Or would measuring VOCs instead of CO2 change the results at that level (but why?)?

Thank you!

Does "COTS" stand for "commercial off-the-shelf" or is this some more technical acronym related to CO2 measurements?

Ultimately the reason it's not popular is probably because it doesn't seem that useful. Breathing is automatic and regulated by blood CO2 concentration; I find it hard to believe that the majority of the population, with otherwise normal respiratory function, would be so off the mark. Is there strong evidence to suggest this is the case?

I agree that this wouldn't be useful for the majority of the population. (Some breathing gurus cl... (read more)

I was not familiar with that term, but I am aware of sleep apnea and how that can lead to too-high levels of carbon dioxide. Like I said in a different comment, my current understanding is that both too-high and too-low are problems. In my case (and in other cases where people have anxiety-like shortness of breath) I think what's going on is too-low carbon dioxide. But having a capnometer seems useful for correcting both too-low and too-high carbon dioxide.

My understanding is that like many things, both low and high are bad (high carbon dioxide is called hypercapnia), so you want to be in the "good" range (I typically see 35-45 mmHg of partial pressure carbon dioxide being cited as the good range). In rationalist circles I have seen discussion of too-high atmospheric carbon dioxide being bad, but I am myself confused on how that connects to carbon dioxide levels in the blood (and separately, I'm not convinced that higher carbon dioxide levels in the air are bad either).

Was the update ever posted? I am interested in getting a capnometer for an unrelated reason and was curious where people decided to get theirs.

I feel like doing correctness right requires originality after a certain point, so the two don't feel too distinct to me. Early in one's intellectual development it might make sense to just "shop around" for different worldviews by reading widely, but after a while you are going to be routinely bumping into things that aren't on the collective map.

The casus belli example Habryka gives in the "Correctness as defence against the dark arts" strikes me as an example of ... how originality helps defend against the dark arts! (I am guessing here that Habryka did... (read more)

I don't actually know how to design things, but here's a simple prototype you can play around with: https://issarice.com/adaptive-typography (as is the case with all prototypes, I ask the user to please overlook any jankiness of the current implementation, and instead imagine you are interacting with a much more polished/idealized version of the same idea).

Two years later: an abstract algebra server was created (covering three books: Artin, Aluffi, and "Abel's Theorem in Problems and Solutions"), but never really took off. I also discovered a topology server (covering Munkres) but it is also now inactive. Meanwhile the Tao Discord is still alive, but I fear it is mostly only alive because I am still there answering people's questions...

There's a tricky trade-off where on one hand, I want to answer questions quickly enough that people don't feel blocked on not knowing the answer to their question, but on the ... (read more)

What would you recommend in cases where there isn't a single moment in time when one has given up? Most of my projects are inactive in the sense that I haven't done much with them in a while (months or years), but also, they aren't completely dead. I gradually lost interest in the project or prioritized doing other things, but there isn't a sharp cutoff when that happened, and I might pick it up again. To give a concrete example, one of my blogs has a posting history that looks like this (numbers in parentheses indicate number of blog posts in that month):... (read more)

I really like the idea of this page and gave this post a strong-upvote. Felt like this was worth mentioning, since in recent years I've felt increasingly alienated by LessWrong culture. My only major request here is that, if there are future iterations of this page, I'd like poll options to be solicited/submitted before any voting happens (this is so that early submissions don't get an unfair advantage just by having more eyeballs on them). A second more minor request is to hide the votes while I'm still voting (I'm trying very hard not to be influenced by vote counts and the names of specific people agreeing/disagreeing with things, but it's difficult).

I have about 500 Anki cards on basic immunology that I and a collaborator created while reading Philipp Dettmer's book Immune (Philipp Dettmer is the founder of the popular YouTube channel Kurzgesagt, which has been featured on LW before, and the book itself has also been reviewed on LW before). (ETA: When I first wrote this comment, I stupidly forgot to mention that my intention is to publish these cards on the internet for people to freely use, once they are polished.) However, neither of us is that knowledgeable about immunology (yet) so I'm worried abo... (read more)

I think another disadvantage that the post doesn't mention is that being an Organization confers a sense of legitimacy, in part because it acts as a costly signal that one can manage all the legal complexities, pay for paperwork, etc.; so being a sponsored project is a way to call yourself an Organization without paying the cost of the signal. In the limit of widespread knowledge about the legal subtleties of fiscal sponsorship, and due diligence on the part of the community to always keep the distinction in mind, this is not a problem. But people are lazy, and so this sort of confusion does I think benefit sponsored projects.

I've written up a few things on Reddit recently:

• Things I've tried with my breathing difficulty, including some things that helped quite a bit
• Things I've tried with my swallowing difficulty. This one I have not figured out how to improve reliably at all, so it's mostly asking people for help.

Based on this Wayback snapshot it seems to be a paper called "A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic" by Ethan Ludwin-Peery and Sarah Ludwin-Peery. I was able to download the PDF of the paper at this link (the main body of the PDF is 63 pages as claimed in this LW post, and the PDF is dated July 3, 2021, which is just before this LW post was published, so it is likely the version of the paper being discussed here).

I have not gotten prayer to really work for me yet, but I've experimented with it a bit (I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but yeah I've gotten desperate enough and have thought I was possibly going to die on multiple occasions now and have entered mental states where I think praying might be the only thing I can do).

"Prayer" in the sense of "ask for a thing in your head and then the thing happens in real life" is obviously not going to work. But I think this may be the wrong way to think about prayers/praying (disclaimer: I am not religious at al... (read more)

People often claim that consumer products have been declining in quality over the decades. Some people even claim that such a decline is inevitable under market forces. I've seen this discussed a lot especially for laptops, where supposedly desirable qualities like durability and repairability have declined. I'll focus on these two qualities in particular below.^[1]

In contrast to the observation above, I learned the following argument from one of David Friedman's books: if people are willing to buy a crappy product for $x, then they should be willing to pay... (read more)

Home water testing: these are periodic tests rather than continuous monitors, and aren't cheap either. My doctor recommended this one but it's more expensive than the water filter I use, so maybe find a cheaper one or skip straight to filtering (the test did verify my filter worked, and this was pretty late in the filter's lifecycle). You can also use EWG to check your city's water data, although it will miss problems in your own pipes.

Did you have a reason to suspect that your tap water in particular was bad (e.g. after seeing EWG's measurements), or was ... (read more)