All of caffemacchiavelli's Comments + Replies

This comes up a lot - Gwern has a decent research overview on arguments why nicotine by itself isn't particularly addictive (spoiler: MAOIs in tobacco) and there also decades of trying and mostly failing to get animals hooked on nicotine alone. As far as I can tell, society has just conflated nicotine and smoking and blamed the former for addiction to the latter.

n=1, but I personally do not feel any pull towards using patches not lozenges and ironically often forget about them.

To stay with the drug theme: I've had moderate success using nicotine lozenges to "jumpstart" an exercise habit. For the uninitiated, nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive and slow-release forms like lozenges or patches are relatively safe. I had no trouble stopping the lozenges after a few weeks and the habit stuck.

Do be careful with this if you have any cardiovascular ailments (particularly hypertension), as nicotine is a vasoconstrictor.

This is purely speculative, but I wonder if slow reaction speed could be in any way conducive to intelligence. I also score subpar on reaction time tests and sometimes react over a second later than I'd consider typical. Afaik IQ does correlate positively with reaction speed, so this naturally isn't the whole story, but my hypothesis would be a kind of "deep" vs "shallow" processing of sensory data. The former being slower, but able to find more subtle patterns in whatever you are perceiving, the latter being quick to respond, but also quick to miss vital information.

Only about 300 bases as well. I remember a study on SARS1 that showed higher immune response to an RBD vaccine than a full S1 subunit vaccine in mice. And while I usually trust studies on mice as far as I can throw them, it served as a good enough excuse to be a cheapskate. (And after all, I can throw mice at least moderately far...)

Thanks!

Hm, I'm not opposed to it, but given that the project is dead and any future biohacking project I'll take on will get a different name anyway, I'm not sure if changing the name retroactively accomplishes anything. I doubt this experiment will have enough of a lasting impact to cause trouble (beyond the people who were confused by this post, for which I apologize).

edit: I've changed the title for now, that seems to accomplish most of what's needed.

Not as far as I know, butThought Emporium on Youtube has a lot of tutorial videos on genetic engineering. (FWIW, Stöcker himself failed to express the protein in bacteria and iirc used CHO instead. I don't see any intrinsic reason why E.Coli shouldn't work, but I'd probably use HEK or CHO myself given the choice)

Purification isn't necessary if you buy already purified protein; in my case it was just cheaper to get it in bulk and filter it myself.

Removing the his-tag reduces the low-ish risk of it interfering with the immune response, but not doing so doesn't strike me as dangerous, it's just a dangling chain of histidine after all (and biology doesn't quite work like Unsong, luckily).

As for using peptide vaccines as a booster, I'm mildly optimistic given the evidence. Boosting vector vaccines with mRNA seems stronger than vice-versa, but it's still better than onl... (read more)

Interesting data! I made a similar calculation at the start of my studies, but in the opposite direction - I thought I had the cognitive capacity to study at a fairly rapid level, but ADHD and other projects often got in the way. So I picked a fairly tough university for my subjects (CS and mathematics in Bonn, though CS is "only" in the bottom half) and I'm happy with the result.

I'm not sure how different my experience would have been at other places - I think Germany has a much more homogeneous standard of education than the US - but my math modules definitely challenged me.

Oo, I wasn't even aware of that, thanks for the link!

That is a DNA vaccine, so it's more similar to the mRNA vaccines we have now in that it contains genetic data of the virus that is then built by the body itself. This one seems to contain the entire S and N proteins, not just a subunit of the S protein.

DNA vaccines are more complicated than recombinant vaccines to get right and can cause serious damage if done wrong. That and the fact that the more complex a project, the more likely I'm going to procrastinate and let it die, made me stick with the simple... (read more)

Hm, most of the people I'm thinking of are rather technical, e.g. Kevin Esvelt's research on distributed secure research.

Coordination and incentive problems are of another nature and I only manage to be prescriptively optimistic. I've been interested in algorithms for decentralized economic planning for a while, plan to specialize in that area and am working with a local left-acc group to organize a think tank that works on these questions. Thanks to mechanism design taking off as a discipline and crypto hype fueling a lot of work on trustless computing, t... (read more)

Not really, was concerned about biological X-risks before and continue to be.

I don't currently see any plausible defense against them - even if we somehow got a sufficient number of nations to stop/moderate gain-of-function research and think twice about what information to publish, genetic engineering will continue to become easier and cheaper over time. As a result, I can see us temporarily offsetting the decline in minimum IQ*money*tech_level needed to destroy humanity but not stop it, and that's already in a geopolitically optimistic scenario.

Luckily there are some intimidatingly smart people working on the problem and I hope they can leverage the pandemic to get at least some of the funding the subject deserves.

Yes, I originally planned to include a small section about Stöcker, but it seemed only tangentially related to the project itself and fuel for extensive political discussions.

tldr for the unintiated: Stöcker is the founder of Euroimmun, a company that makes lab chemicals and also happens to make Covid antibody tests. Through his contacts, he managed to get his hands on the spike protein DNA early and made his own recombinant vaccine candidate. He also gave this to several dozen volunteers and lab employees, which he argues falls under a loophole that allow... (read more)

Excellent post! It's interesting how this mirrors what I've been attempting to do over the last month - applying some of the ideas from Mark Manson's Models (i.e. the one good dating book out there) to my general social life with surprising success. I've always been a bit of a reclusive guy (big surprise given that I'm on LW, I know) and the two main people I've tried to be more open and emotionally honest with this month have responded very positively. We cuddle, touch and have intimate conversations even though we met fairly recently, which would usually... (read more)

From what preliminary legal advice I've received, I'm allowed to hand it out as a research chemical but anything beyond that might get me into trouble. That sadly limits me to offering it to other nerds who I can reasonably expect to use it for research purposes, but I also highly doubt that anyone outside that cluster would even be interested.

Thanks for posting this, this looks excellent.
It's my impression that you can indeed just buy the antigen needed - the lowest price for 1mg I found was around 900€. Allowing for 10% waste, this would cover 20 individuals at 45µg each. I looked at the antigen test results first and was worried that the vaccine wouldn't perform as well in live tests, but the neutralization results Stöcker posted are quite promising and a Nature study suggests that using 319–545 of the RBD is effective in providing immunity to live virus in primates. I don't expect the remai... (read more)

The mediawiki suggestion was mine (and the whetstones, but that's more specifically for people who cook and/or relax more easily with something to do) and it's been surprisingly useful.

There's always something small to add, so it can very quickly become a virtuous cycle of finding something that cheers you up and adding something to cheer up future you in turn.

Done!

I'm not the organizer, but the Cologne meetup has been happening regularly for a while. The mailing list is here and the date is decided via online poll, but always a Saturday and usually towards the end of the month.

Certain people -- some of whom are in positions of enormous power -- just do not give a damn about other human beings. A certain head of state in Syria comes to mind.

I'd also say that your ability to care about other people, along with overall sanity, will diminish under constant stress. That's why "Preserve own sanity" is #1 on my rules to be followed in case of sudden world domination list and something I need to stay aware of even in my current (and normally not that stressful or important) job.

Happy to share my system. This isn't supposed to be a jab at zero inboxing, I just never felt the need to physically move email. I've been using multiple addresses, filters and tags since long before I actually had things to do and they actually continue to do the job pretty well.

My current set-up looks something like this:

• Bulk inbox for everything unsorted.
• Business inbox for everything sent to me about my job by a person.
• Ad inbox for everything sent to me about my job by a robot.
• Accounts inbox for bills I intend to keep and any financial mail.
• Chat i

FWIW: The idea of upvoting the poll itself kinda eluded my internal option mapper until right now, even though I like them. Guess my decision making process went straight past "If post interesting then upvote" to "If poll interesting then participate".

I enjoyed it, thanks for sharing. (Btw, are there more general, practical utility lectures like this?)

When you talk about being underwhelmed with other students, could you go into detail what criteria you'd specifically assess when making that judgment?

I've noticed that most intellectual doujins tend to think of themselves as particularly special and of other people as not quite as much, even if the empirical evidence isn't all that convincing (Mensa can be notoriously bad about this, so is the "I have goals!" self-help crowd), so I always take some time to look at the actual data before adopting a similar belief.

Even if you, personally, happen to die, you've still got a copy of yourself in backup that some future generation will hopefully be able to reconstruct.

Is there a consensus on the whole brain backup identity issue?

I can't say that trying to come up with intuition pumps about life extension has made me less confused about consciousness, but it does seem fairly obvious to me that if I'm backing up my brain, I'm just creating a second version who shares my values and capacities, not actually extending the life of version A. Being able to have both versions... (read more)

For me personally, writing email faster. It's really easy for me to get immersed trying to write the perfect email or forum post and burn through 40-60min without noticing. They're not even necessarily long, just excessively pruned and reformatted. Getting comfortable with an email with all the important content and okay phrasing saves me a bunch of time.

On second place, priority filtering, i.e. separating email to respond to from subscriptions, offers and notifications. Category filters are nice, but I don't think they're making me more productive.

Anythin... (read more)

That would be a cool feature for phone calls. Depending on situation (or mood), switch between happy hours where everyone gets through, serious caller only mode for business hours, and emergency mode for anything social or serious.

I don't think it matters much. I'm not a fan of instant notifications (avg. importance of my email is too low to justify the amount of distraction), but beyond that, checking frequency would be pretty low on my list of email productivity improvements.

I check mine once or twice a day; most of my email is pre-sorted correctly by using a bunch of filters and around a dozen of addresses with different uses and priorities. I don't think I could work with a global, unsegmented email inbox; I saw a friend use his years ago and it still terrifies me, even with his relatively low inflow (30-50/day).

That's a really good point, especially for those who decide to make their living outside of the common "get safe job" paradigm, which to be fair isn't all that robust (at least in the US), either.

I've noticed myself that the anxiety I feel about losing a key component of my business has decreased immensely over the last few years, even though the risk is either the same or slightly higher. Even as a kid I used to feel strange about that. I was scared of big spiders, so whenever I'd catch one in my bed, I'd be terrified for the next couple of days... (read more)

For the sake of completeness, the two best counter-arguments I've heard so far (IRL):

1) MBAs are useful as a baseline business sanity tool, so you can get a decent employee to a point where they'll understand the basic vocabulary of a lot of different disciplines. For instance, they'll have a rough picture of what segmenting and targeting a market means, even if they won't know how to use it in practice, let alone compete with a junior marketer. Someone who's already read a bunch of stuff and managed a business isn't going to learn as much and might be dis... (read more)

Elon's and Manoj's statements caught my interest since hiring MBA-types is assumed to be a standard move for entrepreneurs who have completed the exploratory phase of reaching product-market-fit and are trying to scale up quickly.

Even if you're highly skilled in entrepreneurial and/or executive tasks, you'll need somebody who deals with monitoring, dissemination and handling low-key disturbances. To be honest, I always assumed that you should hire MBAs for this, but now I'm a little more wary.

Do you think the Group 1 schools are superior to the rest as far as quality of material goes? I've been talking to a friend who goes to a well-known university in Europe and a fellow entrepreneur who visits an ivy-league US school, and while I don't have the full picture (or syllabus), they didn't seem much more impressed with the experience than I've been.

Ansoff's matrix, the product portfolio and Kotter's 8 step model for change are fairly popular choices.

I'm on a business trip, so I won't be around for this one, but I'm definitely interested in future events.

It would appear so. FtBCon Homepage says this:

After each session is over, it will almost immediately be saved to the YouTube channel of the person hosting it (the person whose Google+ profile the session was on). It takes a little while for the videos to be processed and posted, so it’s not instant. We’ll update a post with final videos as they become available.

Hello, everyone. I stumbled upon LW after listening to Eliezer make some surprisingly lucid and dissonance-free comments on Skepticon's death panel that inspired me to look up more of his work.

I've been browsing this site for a few days now, and I don't think I've ever had so many "Hey, this has always irritated me, too!" moments in such short intervals, from the rant about "applause lights" to the discussions about efficient charity work. I like how this site provides some actual depth to the topics it discusses, rather than hand the r... (read more)