Young people forget important stuff, get depressed, struggle to understand the world. That is the prediction of my model: that a bad gut microbiome would cause more neural pruning than is strictly optimal.

It is well documented that starving young people have lower IQ's, I believe? Certainly the claim does not seem prima facie ridiculous to me.

The older you get, the more chances you have to develop a bad gut microbiome. Perhaps the actual etiology of bad gut microbiomes (which I do not claim to understand) is heavily age-correlated. Or maybe we simply do not label neural pruning induced by fake starvation perceptions as Alzheimer's in the absence of old age. 

Note that the Alzheimer's gut microbiome have induced Alzheimer's-like symptoms in young healthy mice by transferring something (tissue?) from the brain of human Alzheimer's patients to the stomach of young healthy mice; thus, I consider this particular claim (young people can get Alzheimer's) to have heavy empirical validation, if only in animal models.

And if people refuse to take such an attractive bet for the reason that my proposed cure sounds like it couldn't possibly hurt anyone, and might indeed help, then I reiterate the point I made in The Alignment Agenda THEY Don't Want You to Know About: the problem is not that my claims are prima facie ridiculous, it is that I myself am prima facie ridiculous.

I only have moderately high karma but I'd be happy to take this bet.

Oh, come on. If the rationality community disapproved of Einstein predicting the transit of Mercury, that's an L for the rationality community, not for Einstein.

I have offered to say why I believe it to be true, as soon as I can get clearance from my company to publish capabilities relevant theoretical neuroscience work.

This comment continues to annoy me. I composed a whole irrational response in my mind where I would make credible threats to burn significant parts of the capabilities commons every time someone called me delusional on LessWrong.

But that's probably not a reasonable way to live my life, so this response is not that response.

I get that history is written by the victors. I get that what is accepted by consensus reality is dictated by the existing power structures. The fact that you would presume to explain these things to the author of Ethicophysics I and Ethicophysics II simply demonstrates that you have either failed to read these documents, failed to understand what they are saying, or are simply too pigheaded for your own or anyone else's good.

I do not appreciate being called delusional, and I must ask you never to use that word in reference to me again (at least not to my face). You have my permission to use the synonyms "irrational" (for claims that you believe have poor Bayesian hygiene) or "unreasonable" (for claims or suggestions that you think do not lead to Pareto-optimal outcomes consistent with morality as it is commonly understood).

If you do continue to be condescending to me, then my response is always going to be some mostly-polite but quite direct explanation of the current location of your foot relative to the current location of your oral cavity. 

And history will not be kind to both sides of any discussion like that. I offer you a choice: continue to pooh-pooh my proposed treatment for Alzheimer's disease, and accept some wager at my proposed odds on the probable outcome of this trial when I organize it out of my own free time and my own funds, or (and I say this as politely as I know how) find some more reasonable use of the precious gift of your time on Earth than to comment on my work, my character, or the inside of my head.

Well that should be straightforward, and is predicted by my model of serotonin's function in the brain. It would require an understanding of the function of orexin, which I do not currently possess, beyond the standard intuition that it modulates hunger. 

The evolutionary story would be this:

• serotonin functions (in my model) to make an agent satisficing, which has many desirable safety properties, e.g. not getting eaten by predators when you forage unnecessarily
• the most obvious and important desire to satisfy (and neurally mark as satisfied) is the hunger for food modulated by the hormone/neurotransmitter orexin
• the most obvious mechanism (and thus the one I predict) is that serotonergic bacteria in the gut activate some neural population in the gut's "second brain", sending a particular neural signal bundle to the primary brain consistent with malnutrition (there are many details here that I have not worked out and which could be usefully worked on by a qualified theoretical neuroscientist)
• this neural signal bundle would necessarily up(???)modulate the orexin signal(???)
• sustained high levels of orexin lead to autocannibalism of the brain through sustained neural pruning