All of myconull's Comments + Replies

I replied to J Bostock. To address the "wouldn't it be infectious", that mental model has the assumption of being able to actually detect transmission. That type of thinking seems inherited from acute infectious models rather than chronic disease modelling. In the chronic pathogenic model, progression of disease can be slower and causal attribution can be unassigned. To understand this point, see link below re: latency in cryptococcus neoformans, where the fungi can go dormant in white blood cells for years or decades.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7324190/

For what it's worth I found OP extremely valuable.

The tenet that radiation cannot spread a fungus is incorrect. Fungi radiotrophic effects in the literature is exactly aligned with radiation making cancer worse. See cryptococcus neoformans and ionizing radiation triggering a melanin synthesis virulence loop. See the lichen that grew on the international space station. Other fungi including sacchyromyces are also included here. You can match this phenomenon to reports of mammogram induced cancers of which there are studies available.

You are correct, the fungus theory is testable.

My response, written in about half an hour, from the top of my head:

1. You aren't accounting for the ability of fungi to travel. Fungi like candida albicans can extend hyphae to extend spatially into surrounding tissues. This is why, for example, fungal arthritis is a thing, they can move over time in the body and into different areas post-invasion, so it's not just exposed areas that are expected to be affected. Cryptococcus neoformans can use the "seed cell" morphotype to go smaller to a few microns in size, so they can get into tighter spots over time. Als

Congratulations, you have entered into the legendarium @RatsWrongAboutUAP. I fully agree with you and think you will win big here. I have been trying to create a bet with Eliezer since 2021 on this same issue (I have receipts) but could not word the criteria as elegantly as you did. Now, what I wanted to comment on was expanding on one of the criteria.

The Breakaway Group. This example may not fall under any of the previous explicit examples: they are still human, they are not an ancient civilization, they are not time travellers. The Breakaway Group repres... (read more)