LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Yes right, good point. There are plans that go zick-sag through the graph, which would be longer. I edited that.

Check my math: how does Enovid compare to to humming?

Nitric Oxide is an antimicrobial and immune booster. Normal nasal nitric oxide is 0.14ppm for women and 0.18ppm for men (sinus levels are 100x higher). journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

Enovid is a nasal spray that produces NO. I had the damndest time quantifying Enovid, but this trial registration says 0.11ppm NO/hour. They deliver every 8h and I think that dose is amortized, so the true dose is 0.88. But maybe it's more complicated. I've got an email out to the PI but am not hopeful about a response clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05109…

so Enovid increases nasal NO levels somewhere between 75% and 600% compared to baseline- not shabby. Except humming increases nasal NO levels by 1500-2000%. atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.116….

Enovid stings and humming doesn't, so it seems like Enovid should have the larger dose. But the spray doesn't contain NO itself, but compounds that react to form NO. Maybe that's where the sting comes from? Cystic fibrosis and burn patients are sometimes given stratospheric levels of NO for hours or days; if the burn from Envoid came from the NO itself than those patients would be in agony. 

I'm not finding any data on humming and respiratory infections. Google scholar gives me information on CF and COPD, @Elicit brought me a bunch of studies about honey.

With better keywords google scholar to bring me a bunch of descriptions of yogic breathing with no empirical backing.

There are some very circumstantial studies on illness in mouth breathers vs. nasal, but that design has too many confounders for me to take seriously. 

Where I'm most likely wrong:

• misinterpreted the dosage in the RCT
• dosage in RCT is lower than in Enovid
  • Enovid's dose per spray is 0.5ml, so pretty close to the new study. But it recommends two sprays per nostril, so real dose is 2x that. Which is still not quite as powerful as a single hum. 

Even if you manage to truly forget about the disease, there must exist a mind "somewhere in the universe" that is exactly the same as yours except without knowledge of the disease. This seems quite unlikely to me, because you having the disease has interacted causally with the rest of your mind a lot by when you decide to erase its memory. What you'd really need to do is to undo all the consequences of these interactions, which seems a lot harder to do. You'd really need to transform your mind into another one that you somehow know is present "somewhere in the multiverse" which seems also really hard to know.

However I would continue to emphasize in general that life must go on. It is important for your mental health and happiness to plan for the future in which the transformational changes do not come to pass, in addition to planning for potential bigger changes. And you should not be so confident that the timeline is short and everything will change so quickly.

This is actually one of the major reasons why 80k recommended information security as one of their top career areas; the other top career areas have pretty heavy switching costs and serious drawbacks if you end up not being a good fit e.g. alignment research, biosecurity, and public policy (I was actually one of the first people whose soul was crushed by a mistaken career pivot to the public policy world).

Cybersecurity jobs, on the other hand, are still booming, and depending on how security automation and prompt engineering goes, the net jobs lost by AI is probably way lower than other industries e.g. because more eyeballs might offer perception and processing power that supplement or augment LLMs for a long time, and more warm bodies means more attackers which means more defenders.

I think “packaged bread and other bakery products” this is referring to stuff like Wonder bread, which contains a whole bunch of stuff^[1] beyond the proverbial “flour, water, yeast, salt” that goes into homemade or artisanal-bakery bread.

i don't think the constraint is that energy is too expensive? i think we just literally don't have enough of it concentrated in one place

but i have no idea actually

Thanks!

Yep, this is the exact experiment I was thinking about.

I see no reason to doubt that the article is accurate. Why would Chinese scholars completely miss the theory if it was obvious among merchants? There should in any case exist some records of it, some maps. Yet none exist. And why would it even be obvious that the Earth is a sphere from long distance travel alone?

Nevertheless, I don't think this is all that counterfactual. If you're obsessed with measuring everything, and like to travel (like the Greeks), I think eventually you'll have to discover this fact.

I don't think this makes sense. If the Chinese didn't reinvent the theory in more than two thousand years, this makes it highly "counterfactual". The longer a theory isn't reinvented, the less obvious it must be.

Bread is ultra-processed? O_O

I've heard, in this context, the partial counterargument that he was using traits which are a little fuzzy around the edges (where is the boundary between round and wrinkled?) and that he didn't have to intentionally fudge his data in order to get results that were too good, just be not completely objective in how he was determining them.

Of course, this sort of thing is why we have double-blind tests in modern times.