LessWrong 2.0 Reader

The U-Shaped Curve study you linked does not seem to support really any solid conclusion about a T-vs-IQ relationship (in this quote, S men = "successful educational level", NS men = "unsuccessful educational level"):

• In the total sample (S + NS men), the correlation between T to IQ was best described by a polynomial regression (3rd order), exhibiting an inverse U-shaped regression. 
• In S-men, the relationship between T and IQ was best described by a polynomial regression equation of the 3rd order; however, the relationship was not U-shaped, but rather a positive correlation (low T: low IQ and high T high IQ). 
• In NS-men, there was an inverse U-shaped correlation between T and IQ (low and very high T: low IQ and moderate T: high IQ)

So there are three totally different best regressions depending on which population you choose? Sounds fishy / likely to be noise to me.

And in the population that most represents readers of this blog (S men), the correlation was that more T = more IQ. 

I'm only reading the abstract here and can't see the actual plots or how many people were in each group. But idk, this doesn't seem very strong.

The other study you linked does say:

Interestingly, intellectual ability measured as IQ was negatively associated with salivary testosterone in both sexes. Similar results were found in our follow-up study showing significantly lower testosterone in gifted boys than controls (Ostatnikova et al. 2007).

which seems to support the idea. But it still doesn't really prove the causality - lots of things presumably influence intelligence, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them influence T as well.

Intuition primer: Imagine, for a moment, that a particular AI system is as sentient and worthy of consideration as a moral patient as a horse. (A talking horse, of course.) Horses are surely sentient and worthy of consideration as moral patients. Horses are also not exactly all free citizens.

Additional consideration: Does the AI moral patient's interests actually line up with our intuitions? Will naively applying ethical solutions designed for human interests potentially make things worse from the AI's perspective?

There is a 0.001 chance that someone who did not have the disease will get it. But he can repeat the procedure.

No, that doesn't work. It invalidates the implicit assumption you're making that the probability that a person chooses to "forget" is independent of whether they have the disease. Ultimately, you're "mixing" the various people who "forgot", and a "mixing" procedure can't change the proportion of people who have the disease.

When you take this into account, the conclusion becomes rather mundane. Some copies of you can gain the disease, while a proportional number of copies can lose it. (You might think you could get some respite by repeatedly trading off "who" has the disease, but the forgetting procedure ensures that no copy ever feels respite, as that would require remembering having the disease.)

I kind of implicitly assumed we are not talking about missing the obvious stuff (like someone staring at you angrily in a 1 to 1 conversation). That would probably best be explicitly learned by flashcards.

Everything but basic emotions has a lot of hidden states and the tracking becomes much more of a thing. But that state is not all that hidden. You actually know a lot about the people in your life. 
The hard part is coming up with enough hypotheses and not separating true from false. I call it to myself 'generating social conspiracy theories' to get rid of my inhibition to state a bad theory. Whatever you come up with usually will not be too bad. Evaluating the truth of 'my colleague is stressed' is usually easy. But it will make you aware that they are or aren't and how that influences their behavior. That is what you actually learn and what will make you aware of their stress in the future.

I never felt like there is a lack of 'obvious' things to become aware of. Either things are so interconnected that everything is kind of accessible with enough layers of such perceptions, or I am playing on too basic of a level of this game to get to interesting cases. I feel like I am learning some deep art, so I am probably a total beginner to something most are much more capable at just by using their intuition.. 
The disappointing part of course is that reading strangers minds is hard with huge error bars and reading huge parts of the mind of close people is basically expected.

I might be arguing something totally besides Lsusrs original point, but I do not think that facial expressions carry very far and this (cognitive empathy) does the thing he seems to be after. 

I would have guessed high T is associated with lower neuroticism, but studies found weak or no effects afaict.

I find this essay very moving and it helps me notice a certain thing. Life is passing and we can pay attention to one thing or another. What will I pay attention to? What will I worship?

Some quotes:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

The multiverse might be very big. Perhaps you're mad enough having the disease will bring you to a state of mind that a version with no disease has. That's why wizards have to be mad to use magic.

Is your mind causally disconnected from the actual universe?  That's the only way I can understand the merging of minds that share some similarities (but are absolutely not identical across universes that aren't themselves identical).  Your forgetting may make two possible minds superficially the same, but they're simply not identical.

I don't know why you think path-based configuration of brain state would be false.  That may not be "identity" for all purposes - there may be purposes for which it doesn't suffice or is too restrictive, but it's probably good for this case.

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.