Open thread, Jan. 30 - Feb. 05, 2017

I'm a cyclist and a PhD student, and I've noticed some patterns in the way that my exercise habits affect my productivity. I get a lot of data from every ride. While I'm riding, I measure heart rate and power, and if I'm outside, I also measure distance and speed. I've found that the total amount of energy that I produce, as measured by the power meter on my bike, is a useful metric for how I should expect to feel the rest of the day and the next day. In particular, if I generate between 800 kJ and 1000 kJ, I usually feel alert, but not worn out. If I do less, I feel like I've not had enough exercise, and I either feel restless or like my body is in lazy recovery mode. If I do more, I feel physically worn out enough that it's hard to work for an extended period of time, especially on the days that I am working in the lab.

What I think is most curious about this is that it is relatively independent of my fitness or the intensity of the ride. If I go balls-out the whole time, it takes slightly fewer kJ to make it hard to focus, and if I go super easy, it takes a bit more. It's the same with fitness. The difference between the power I can sustain for an hour when I'm in form for racing vs when I've barely been riding at all is about 25-30%, but the difference in the amount of mechanical work to make me unproductive is about 10%. (You might notice this gives me an incentive to stay in shape; I can do the same amount of work for the same productivity boost in less time when I'm more fit.)

So, what's definitely true is that the amount of work I put in on the bike is a useful metric for maximizing my productivity. What's unclear is if the amount of work is in some way fundamental to the mental state that it puts me in. The most obvious possibility is that it mainly has to do with the number of calories I burn; this is consistent with the finding that I need to do more work to feel tired when I'm more fit, since training will make you more efficient. But it's not obvious to me why this would be the case. When I'm in poor shape, an 800 kJ ride will have a much more drastic effect on my blood sugar than it will when I'm fit enough to race. It would be useful to venture outside the 800-1000 kJ range on days when I need to get work done.

I don't really know enough physiology to get any further than this. Does anybody else have experience with this sort of thing? Does anyone have empirically testable hypotheses? (Non-testable or not-testable-for-me hypotheses may be interesting as well.)

If you buy a Humble Bundle these days, it's possible to use their neat sliders to allocate all of the money you're spending towards charities of your choice via the PayPal giving fund, including Lesswrong favourites like MIRI, SENS and the Against Malaria Foundation. This appears to me to be a relatively interesting avenue for charitable giving, considering that it is (at least apparently) as effective per dollar spent as a direct donation would be to these charities.

Contrast this with buying games from the Humble Store, which merely allocates 5% of money spent to a chosen charity, or using Amazon Smile which allocates a miniscule 0.5% of the purchase price of anything you buy. While these services are obviously a lot more versatile in terms of the products on offer, they to me are clearly more something you set up if you're going to be buying stuff anyway rather than what this appears to be to me, a particular opportunity.

Here are a couple of examples of the kinds of people for whom I think this might be worthwhile:

1. People who are interested in video games or comics or whatever including any that are available in Humble Bundles to purchase them entirely guilt-free, with the knowledge that the money is going to organisations they like.

2. People who are averse to more direct giving and donations for whatever reason to be able to support organisations they approve of in a more comfortable, transactional way, in a manner similar to buying merchandise.

3. People who may be expected to give gifts as part of social obligation, and for whom giving gifts of the kinds of products offered in these bundles is appropriate, to do so while all of the money spent goes to support their pet cause.

Huge apologies if this is an inappropriate place to post this, but I'm having a situation where I really want a quantitative answer so I can do a cost-benefit analysis, and can only seem to get qualitative ones from e.g. my doctor and the internet. And also, there seem to be enough of us transgirls on here that someone might actually know about this.

Anyways, being on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) sometimes makes you infertile, and the chance someone will be infertile after being on hormones a while is definitely a function of how long one has been on HRT. But, it's entirely unclear-to-me what this function looks like; I'd wanted to ask my doctor, but I've always had trouble getting doctors to give me their best quantitative guesses and just put numbers on things related to my health, so, here I am.

(For context, I've been on HRT for 3.5 months).

Possibly relevant: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy-female-hormones/

Anyways, more personal info: I don't currently think I'll want bio kids, but sperm banking is cheap enough (a quick Google search says that at best, it'd be $1,000 initially and then $200/year) that it's still an obvious win if I place a 10-20% chance on me changing my mind about wanting kids in the future. I'd have banked before starting hormones, but 1) I was actually too poor at the time and 2) hormones help me not self-harm, so I didn't want to wait to start HRT until after I had money to bank a sperm sample.

I recall that being off of HRT for relatively longer before banking a sperm sample increases the odds somewhat, too. So, when I have more info, I'll do some more internal cost-benefit analyses on how (being more likely to self-harm) trades off against (being more likely to successfully preserve a sample) at various values of (how long I'm off HRT before banking).

Also, this question is obviously super difficult, and I plan to upvote helpful but non-thorough quantitative-ish responses to this comment with my main account. I think that only upvoting super-well-researched responses to this wouldn't incentivize the right sort of discussion here.

Thanks!

If there is no anti-gravity force, then how can an galactic scale empty section be "pushing" us toward the Great Attractors....

"Discovery of the “Dipole Repeller” confirms that both attraction and repulsion are at play in our extragalactic neighborhood"

http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/33403

Some decent visualizations linked, and an original one on Utube from a French team is one of the coolest large scale animations i've ever seen...

Edit: and there it is, linked at bottom of viz page! http://irfu.cea.fr/cosmography

A math problem which a child can understand. But who can solve it?

https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/a-topological-problem/

European Community Weekend announcement moved to Main and promoted.

For almost a week the Less Wrong page has consistently been taking 1-2 minutes to load when I load it the first time, although it is faster to navigate to other pages once I am there.

This has not been happening with any other website, which makes me suspect that there might be some issue that has at least some aspect on the side of the site.

Do we have a current/new book list? or recent book recommendations?

Do people feel like the Newcomb paradox (one-boxing yields the better result, it is clearly preferable; two-boxing only means taking an additional 1000$ through a decision that can't possibly have an effect on the 1 million, it is clearly preferable) been resolved through Anna's post in the Sequences (or others)? I strongly feel that I have a solution with no contradictions, but don't want to post it if it's obvious.

While the article linked is interesting, I find the comments section interesting as well.

Talk of Monsanto shills, source dumping, accusations flying left and right.

Just out of curiosity, I want to see the reaction of this community.