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All of David Fendrich's Comments + Replies

Which skincare products are evidence-based?
David Fendrich10

A simplistic model of your metabolism is that you have two states:

  1. The anabolic state which builds muscle and creates new cells.
  2. The catabolic state which tears down dysfunctional structures and recycles your cells.

A common theme in scientific anti-aging is that you need to balance both states and that the modern life leads us to spend too long in the anabolic state (in a state of abundance, well fed, moderate temperature and not physically stressed). Anabolic interventions can lead to good outcomes in the short-term and quick results, but can potentially be... (read more)

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Which skincare products are evidence-based?
David Fendrich40

David Sinclair mentioned in a podcast that he is also a bit worried about the long term anabolic effects of the retinoids. He suggested cycling it, possibly synchronized with other catabolic cycling such as fasting.

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2Vanessa Kosoy
Can you say more? What are "anabolic effects"? What does "cycling" mean in this context?
Should I take glucosamine?
Answer by David Fendrich190

This is not just some random data fishing result. Even before the results of the two glucosamine papers this year, longevity researcher James Clement wrote in "The Switch", that glucosamine is "an autophagy inducer in a pathway separate fron mTOR-inhibiting." That is big, since autophagy seems to be responsible for most of the benefit from fasting and CR, but almost all autophagy that we know is activated via mTOR.

That means that you have a clear prior that it should increase your healthspan (but as with all autophagy inducers, like resveratrol or cold sho... (read more)

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Is AlphaZero any good without the tree search?
David Fendrich00

This is incorrect. It is International Master-level without tree search. Good amateur, but there are >1000 players in the world that are better.

And it is neither MCTS or a "simple tree search", it uses PUCT, often calculating very deeply in a few lines.

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2dxu
International masters are emphatically not amateurs. Indeed, IMs are at the level where they can offer coaching services to amateur players, and reasonably expect to be paid something on the order of $100 per session. To elaborate on this point: The total number of FIDE-rated chess players is over 500,000. The number of IMs, meanwhile, totals less than 3,000. IMs are quite literally in the 99th percentile of chess ability, and that's actually being extremely restrictive with the population--there are many casual players who don't have FIDE ratings at all, since only people who play in at least one FIDE-rated tournament will be assigned a rating.
2gwern
I didn't say anything about chess or shogi because I don't recall any ablation for A0, I just remember the one in the AG0 paper for Go. The AG0 is definitely at or close to professional level and better than 'good amateur'. And I would consider a non-distributed PUCT with no rollouts or other refinements to be a 'simple tree search': it doesn't do any rollouts, and the depth is seriously limited by running on only a single machine w/4 TPUs with a few seconds for search: as the AG0 paper puts it, "Finally, it uses a simpler tree search that relies upon this single neural network to evaluate positions and sample moves, without performing any Monte-Carlo rollouts...we chose to use the simplest possible search algorithm".