All of Lukas Trötzmüller's Comments + Replies

I found that when using voice dictation, I can do journalling and diary-writing much better (versus when I type). My thoughts tend to go deeper, I get better access to my emotions and I tend to have more awareness. Especially when I sit in a comfortable place with my phone (or walk), being able to look around and lift my eyes off the screen.

Piggybacking with another nitpick:

Apollo 8, where it took 134 days between “what if we go to the moon?” to the actual landing.

Should be "flight" instead of "landing". Apollo 8 was the first manned flight to the moon. The first landing was Apollo 11 in July 1969. Also, they just changed the Apollo 8 mission profile from earth orbit to lunar orbit with the same spacecraft - so the hardware was already existing.

I participated in this study, with full-room illumination of 60.000 lumens and 6 hours per day of treatment. The effect was remarkable. Throughout Winter 2019/2020, I did not feel depressed or lethargic on even one single day on which I used the setup correctly. I did feel depressed 2-3 times per week in the weeks prior to starting treatment. And I felt depressed on some of the days where I did not use the system.

Here's what surprised me: Throughout the winter I went hiking in direct sunlight for 3 hours each day. And my office had really big windows with ... (read more)

All my tools are just Windows desktop applications built on old technology, C# and Windows Forms, using a simple file for data storage. The Facebook API is extremely limited due to privacy considerations, IIRC it does not allow fetching a list of your friends. Therefore I just implemented everything using web automation.

Thanks for bringing up the issue. I think air purification is neglected, both in terms of research aswell as in implementation.

For a general overview of the cost-effectiveness of air purifiers, have a look at my EA forum post [1]. The conclusion of that post was: Placing air purifiers in peoples homes is plausibly good enough to qualify as an “effective” or even “highly effective” health intervention according to WHO criteria.

[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/umzu3RGBBhA3fefhw/cost-effectiveness-of-air-purifiers-against-pollution

2braces
Really useful post, thanks for sharing. In case you're interested, this paper seems to do a good job of tacking the "mortality vs years of life lost" issue you mention.

I have had very good experiences writing my own productivity software. Many of them were so useful, they paid back the time invested in developing them after less than a year.

Some examples of tools I wrote and still use regularly:

  • An application called "event radar", helping me build my calendar of social events for each week.

  • Personal contact management software. Key feature: import contacts from my phone and Facebook, organize my friends into groups and auto-invite to events based on their interests

  • A very simple recipe management software, helping

... (read more)
1MartinB
Hi Lukas! Just stumbled upon this, sounds awesome! Any tips or pointers on the event radar? Screenshots or similar would be incredible!  Thanks!
1DanB
Cool concepts! What tech stack did you use? Was it painful to get the Facebook API working? 

Thank you, great post! I especially liked your insight on the color rendering index.

There are some reports that LED lighting can damage your eyes. From a quick glance at Wikipedia, the evidence does not seem very convincing, but I'm not an expert. What do you think about those claims? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-energy_visible_light#On_eye_health

And if there is no particular danger from LEDs: Is there an inherent danger in looking at high-lumen lights (regardless what type of light it is)? At which point do we have so much brig... (read more)

4jimrandomh
The first Reddit link bottoms out at this study. The key detail not mentioned in the abstract is that this is in rats whose pupils have been dilated with atropine, and the rats are in conditions where a human with pharmaceutically-dilated eyes would not be able to function without sunglasses. This makes the paper's comparison between different types of light sources and wavelengths pretty uninformative. The rest are all about what level of brightness is acceptable. But we have a pretty good point of comparison: we know sunlight is safe (as long as you don't look at the sun directly); and the indoor lighting solutions under consideration are all significantly dimmer than sunlight.

When to cancel events due to Coronavirus? Calculations by Linch Zhang [1], I've put them into a Guesstimate with some slight changes and adaptions for Austria [2]

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A0jcxj4n0BvNt_jMunHT5WSsAKFzuVJJyaaqcK9Z1HU/edit#

[2] https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/15367

Dating during Coronavirus: What's the risk of going on a date with a random new person at the height of an outbreak? https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/15381

Under my assumptions, if 1 in 7700 people gets newly infected every day, it translates to an infection risk of 0.2% per encounter (range of 0.45% - 0.053%). Feedback welcome.

Answer by Lukas Trötzmüller130

This question (“will I get infected if people in my household are sick?”) was asked in the recent Reddit AMA with experts. Keep in mind I didn't verify the original sources.

“It is possible to stay uninfected! Yesterday in a press briefing, Dr. Nancy Messonnier at the CDC said that the secondary attack rate among family members of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is 10.5% so far. So that means that about 1 in 10 family members who have been exposed by a relative have gotten sick.”

Here’s the posting and some more c... (read more)

What is your source for this? The CDC recommends hand sanitizer in cases where washing is not easily possible. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/prevention-treatment.html

Studies confirm the efficacy of hand sanitizer against enveloped viruses [1][2]. Although there is some evidence that handwashing is preferable against viruses [3].

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/215/6/902/2965582

[2] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/44102/9789241597906_eng.pdf;jsessionid=D50A762FABCFB1569406859669F8FAD4?sequence=1

[3] https://msphe... (read more)