[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.]
Van Geijlswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.
Melatonin is a neurohormone produced by the pineal gland. In a normal circadian cycle, it’s lowest (undetectable, less than 1 pg/ml of blood) around the time you wake up, and stays low throughout the day. Around fifteen hours after waking, your melatonin suddenly shoots up to 10 pg/ml – a process called “dim...
(Cross-posted from Facebook.)
Now and then people have asked me if I think that other people should also avoid high school or college if they want to develop new ideas. This always felt to me like a wrong way to look at the question, but I didn't know a right one.
Recently I thought of a scary new viewpoint on that subject.
This started with a conversation with Arthur where he mentioned an idea by Yoshua Bengio about the software for having been developed memetically. I remarked that I didn't think duplicating this culturally transmitted software would be a significant part of the problem for AGI development. (Roughly: low-fidelity software tends to be algorithmically shallow. Further discussion moved to comment below.)
But this conversation did get me thinking about...
I wonder how many cases of Goodhart's law could be mitigated by injecting some randomness in the decision system. This has already been proposed in the context of allocating research grants (e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33970719/), and could certainly also work for the Harvard admissions problem.
"So suppose I want to go to bed at 11, and take 0.3 mg melatonin. Now my body has a melatonin peak (usually associated with the very middle of the night, like 3 AM) at 11. If it assumes that means it’s really 3 AM, then it might decide to wake up 5 hours later, at what it thinks is 8 AM, but which is actually 4."
That does make sense. But my conclusion according to this logic is different from the article's recommendation:
Say I want to shift my 8hrs. sleep phase from 2-10 o'clock to 1-9 o'clock, ie. by one hour backwards. Then --according to what I understo... (read more)