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This comes up a lot - Gwern has a decent research overview on arguments why nicotine by itself isn't particularly addictive (spoiler: MAOIs in tobacco) and there also decades of trying and mostly failing to get animals hooked on nicotine alone. As far as I can tell, society has just conflated nicotine and smoking and blamed the former for addiction to the latter.
n=1, but I personally do not feel any pull towards using patches not lozenges and ironically often forget about them.
To stay with the drug theme: I've had moderate success using nicotine lozenges to "jumpstart" an exercise habit. For the uninitiated, nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive and slow-release forms like lozenges or patches are relatively safe. I had no trouble stopping the lozenges after a few weeks and the habit stuck.
Do be careful with this if you have any cardiovascular ailments (particularly hypertension), as nicotine is a vasoconstrictor.
This is purely speculative, but I wonder if slow reaction speed could be in any way conducive to intelligence. I also score subpar on reaction time tests and sometimes react over a second later than I'd consider typical. Afaik IQ does correlate positively with reaction speed, so this naturally isn't the whole story, but my hypothesis would be a kind of "deep" vs "shallow" processing of sensory data. The former being slower, but able to find more subtle patterns in whatever you are perceiving, the latter being quick to respond, but also quick to miss vital information.
Only about 300 bases as well. I remember a study on SARS1 that showed higher immune response to an RBD vaccine than a full S1 subunit vaccine in mice. And while I usually trust studies on mice as far as I can throw them, it served as a good enough excuse to be a cheapskate. (And after all, I can throw mice at least moderately far...)
Thanks!
Hm, I'm not opposed to it, but given that the project is dead and any future biohacking project I'll take on will get a different name anyway, I'm not sure if changing the name retroactively accomplishes anything. I doubt this experiment will have enough of a lasting impact to cause trouble (beyond the people who were confused by this post, for which I apologize).
edit: I've changed the title for now, that seems to accomplish most of what's needed.
Not as far as I know, butThought Emporium on Youtube has a lot of tutorial videos on genetic engineering. (FWIW, Stöcker himself failed to express the protein in bacteria and iirc used CHO instead. I don't see any intrinsic reason why E.Coli shouldn't work, but I'd probably use HEK or CHO myself given the choice)
Purification isn't necessary if you buy already purified protein; in my case it was just cheaper to get it in bulk and filter it myself.
Removing the his-tag reduces the low-ish risk of it interfering with the immune response, but not doing so doesn't strike me as dangerous, it's just a dangling chain of histidine after all (and biology doesn't quite work like Unsong, luckily).
As for using peptide vaccines as a booster, I'm mildly optimistic given the evidence. Boosting vector vaccines with mRNA seems stronger than vice-versa, but it's still better than only having n-1 vaccines. I could see the same being true for peptide vaccines.
FWIW, my first official and fourth overall vaccination pretty much knocked me out for two days, so perhaps my experiment wasn't entirely without effect.
Interesting data! I made a similar calculation at the start of my studies, but in the opposite direction - I thought I had the cognitive capacity to study at a fairly rapid level, but ADHD and other projects often got in the way. So I picked a fairly tough university for my subjects (CS and mathematics in Bonn, though CS is "only" in the bottom half) and I'm happy with the result.
I'm not sure how different my experience would have been at other places - I think Germany has a much more homogeneous standard of education than the US - but my math modules definitely challenged me.
Oo, I wasn't even aware of that, thanks for the link!
That is a DNA vaccine, so it's more similar to the mRNA vaccines we have now in that it contains genetic data of the virus that is then built by the body itself. This one seems to contain the entire S and N proteins, not just a subunit of the S protein.
DNA vaccines are more complicated than recombinant vaccines to get right and can cause serious damage if done wrong. That and the fact that the more complex a project, the more likely I'm going to procrastinate and let it die, made me stick with the simpler recombinant approach.
At least the ELISA approach to antibody testing is one I could have borrowed, though, and in hindsight I'm a bit disappointed I didn't think of it myself.
Hm, most of the people I'm thinking of are rather technical, e.g. Kevin Esvelt's research on distributed secure research.
Coordination and incentive problems are of another nature and I only manage to be prescriptively optimistic. I've been interested in algorithms for decentralized economic planning for a while, plan to specialize in that area and am working with a local left-acc group to organize a think tank that works on these questions. Thanks to mechanism design taking off as a discipline and crypto hype fueling a lot of work on trustless computing, there's actually a surprising amount of relevant research.
Not really, was concerned about biological X-risks before and continue to be.
I don't currently see any plausible defense against them - even if we somehow got a sufficient number of nations to stop/moderate gain-of-function research and think twice about what information to publish, genetic engineering will continue to become easier and cheaper over time. As a result, I can see us temporarily offsetting the decline in minimum IQ*money*tech_level needed to destroy humanity but not stop it, and that's already in a geopolitically optimistic scenario.
Luckily there are some intimidatingly smart people working on the problem and I hope they can leverage the pandemic to get at least some of the funding the subject deserves.
Yes, I originally planned to include a small section about Stöcker, but it seemed only tangentially related to the project itself and fuel for extensive political discussions.
tldr for the unintiated: Stöcker is the founder of Euroimmun, a company that makes lab chemicals and also happens to make Covid antibody tests. Through his contacts, he managed to get his hands on the spike protein DNA early and made his own recombinant vaccine candidate. He also gave this to several dozen volunteers and lab employees, which he argues falls under a loophole that allows doctors to use unlicensed medicine if no proper treatment exists. The PEI, a German medical regulatory body, however argues that this constitutes an unlicensed medical trial. He is AFAIK still facing a lawsuit, but is nonetheless occasionally vaccinating volunteers until the local police make him stop.
He was always somewhat nutty when it came to politics, though, and has gotten significantly worse during the pandemic, even reblogging "fan mail" about Bill Gates Covid Vaccine conspiracies, so I'm not sure how much faith I have in his data. It's another argument in favor of at least testing subunit vaccines, though, since his writing about the economics of protein production (i.e. supplying Germany many times over within months) is perfectly credible.
Another OT but curious side note: His audience appears to be predominantly anti-vax when it comes to the licensed vaccines yet extremely willing to take his vaccine candidate. This surprised me - sure, I had always assumed that a large aspect of conspiracy communities is opposing anything supported by the government, but not that the specifics really don't matter at all. Stöcker's vaccine has all the (faux) pitfalls the anti-vax community raves against - aluminum, untested, GMO, made with embryonic cells - yet none of this matters in the slightest as long as he's fighting The Man. Might make for an interesting post in its own right.
And yes, I took the vaccine IM with no noticeable side effects.
Excellent post! It's interesting how this mirrors what I've been attempting to do over the last month - applying some of the ideas from Mark Manson's Models (i.e. the one good dating book out there) to my general social life with surprising success. I've always been a bit of a reclusive guy (big surprise given that I'm on LW, I know) and the two main people I've tried to be more open and emotionally honest with this month have responded very positively. We cuddle, touch and have intimate conversations even though we met fairly recently, which would usually feel awkward to me, but this time it doesn't. Additionally, it doesn't feel like a strategy or a "move", more like I'm just being more of myself and people like me more for it. I like it a lot.
One takeaway for me is that being too frugal with spending my weirdness points has the downside that I don't filter for the kinds of people who are right for me. It makes it easier to get along with everyone, but harder to both build lasting connections and to feel honest about who I am.
Btw, if anyone is looking for more fun questions, School of Life has some card decks designed for introspection and getting to know each other. I'd recommend "Know Yourself" and the dating one. Some of the cards are a bit forced and Freudian, but I've found a few of them pretty insightful. I do introduce them as a game though, they feel too constructed to work well as random questions. Some of my favorites:
- If you could be sure to achieve one thing, what would you pick? (Around LW people I specify "common accomplishment" to prevent munchkining)
- Which four adjectives would you use to describe yourself and each other?
- What did you enjoy as a child? How do you feel about it now?
- What three works of art/media mean a lot to you and why?
- List five ways in which you are quite difficult to live with.
From what preliminary legal advice I've received, I'm allowed to hand it out as a research chemical but anything beyond that might get me into trouble. That sadly limits me to offering it to other nerds who I can reasonably expect to use it for research purposes, but I also highly doubt that anyone outside that cluster would even be interested.
Thanks for posting this, this looks excellent.
It's my impression that you can indeed just buy the antigen needed - the lowest price for 1mg I found was around 900€. Allowing for 10% waste, this would cover 20 individuals at 45µg each. I looked at the antigen test results first and was worried that the vaccine wouldn't perform as well in live tests, but the neutralization results Stöcker posted are quite promising and a Nature study suggests that using 319–545 of the RBD is effective in providing immunity to live virus in primates. I don't expect the remaining amino acids will affect the results in a major way, so this looks quite promising indeed.
I've asked a few people with more domain knowledge to comment on this and depending on their judgment (and access to sterile lab space) I might fund vaccines for myself and friends, given that Germany's vaccine rollout seems to be taking its time.
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Make sure you don't have undiagnosed ADD and spend ten years of your life going from one self help technique to the next and failing to get your executive brain to use any of them.
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Also, virtuous cycles are incredibly powerful for me. It's much easier to start a big project when I have a few victories fresh in my mind than when I don't. So I try to go for quick wins whenever I have free time. Small home improvement projects work well for me and also make my surroundings nicer.
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Avoid clutter. This can double as a way to procrastinate, but I've found that I can focus much less in a messy place.
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Have agenty friends. If not able to: Watch interviews with agenty people or read fiction about them.
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For longer projects, make meditating on them a habit. I usually contrast where I am with where I want to be and why. This helps avoid shiny new things getting in the way.
The mediawiki suggestion was mine (and the whetstones, but that's more specifically for people who cook and/or relax more easily with something to do) and it's been surprisingly useful.
There's always something small to add, so it can very quickly become a virtuous cycle of finding something that cheers you up and adding something to cheer up future you in turn.
I'm not the organizer, but the Cologne meetup has been happening regularly for a while. The mailing list is here and the date is decided via online poll, but always a Saturday and usually towards the end of the month.
Certain people -- some of whom are in positions of enormous power -- just do not give a damn about other human beings. A certain head of state in Syria comes to mind.
I'd also say that your ability to care about other people, along with overall sanity, will diminish under constant stress. That's why "Preserve own sanity" is #1 on my rules to be followed in case of sudden world domination list and something I need to stay aware of even in my current (and normally not that stressful or important) job.
Happy to share my system. This isn't supposed to be a jab at zero inboxing, I just never felt the need to physically move email. I've been using multiple addresses, filters and tags since long before I actually had things to do and they actually continue to do the job pretty well.
My current set-up looks something like this:
- Bulk inbox for everything unsorted.
- Business inbox for everything sent to me about my job by a person.
- Ad inbox for everything sent to me about my job by a robot.
- Accounts inbox for bills I intend to keep and any financial mail.
- Chat inbox for forum updates and responses to blog posts. >90% university-related discussions.
- Private inbox for close friends and family. When my phone is not on priority mode, I also get a notification for these.
- Subscription inbox for newsletters and advertisements at me personally. I go through these after work and sometimes tag stuff I want to read during dead time (e.g. waiting in line).
Bulk, Ads, Accounts and Subscription get automatically marked as read when I shut down the program.
Filters sort >90% of my mail for me and are mostly based on the address used, as it saves me the time to manually add the sender to my filters (and hope they only use one email). Since my starting screen shows the bulk folder, I can just glance at the other <10% and move on, as it's usually unimportant. Today's bulk mail includes two Japanese book shop coupons, Reddit, two seminar invites, a reminder at myself and a meetup proposal.
I also have an emergency email which has no inbox but forwards mails directly to my phone in all situations. Never been used, of course, because nobody remembers obscure email addresses in emergencies (and my life actually isn't as action-filled as one would expect the life of a business consultant with a dozen email filters to be...). Still, I like the idea of handing them out in the hope that it makes my other addresses "non-emergency" by contrast.
Each inbox currently holds several thousands of emails and after a few tantrums at having deleted that one email, they will likely stay undisturbed for the next couple of years.
FWIW: The idea of upvoting the poll itself kinda eluded my internal option mapper until right now, even though I like them. Guess my decision making process went straight past "If post interesting then upvote" to "If poll interesting then participate".
I enjoyed it, thanks for sharing. (Btw, are there more general, practical utility lectures like this?)
When you talk about being underwhelmed with other students, could you go into detail what criteria you'd specifically assess when making that judgment?
I've noticed that most intellectual doujins tend to think of themselves as particularly special and of other people as not quite as much, even if the empirical evidence isn't all that convincing (Mensa can be notoriously bad about this, so is the "I have goals!" self-help crowd), so I always take some time to look at the actual data before adopting a similar belief.
Even if you, personally, happen to die, you've still got a copy of yourself in backup that some future generation will hopefully be able to reconstruct.
Is there a consensus on the whole brain backup identity issue?
I can't say that trying to come up with intuition pumps about life extension has made me less confused about consciousness, but it does seem fairly obvious to me that if I'm backing up my brain, I'm just creating a second version who shares my values and capacities, not actually extending the life of version A. Being able to have both versions alive at the same time seems a clear indicator that they're not the same, and that when source A dies, copy B just goes on with their life and doesn't suddenly become A.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure the same argument doesn't apply to one brain at different points in time, too. If you atomize my brain now and put it back together later, am I still A or is A dead? What about koma, sleep, or any other interruption of consciousness?
It's all kind of a blur to me.
For me personally, writing email faster. It's really easy for me to get immersed trying to write the perfect email or forum post and burn through 40-60min without noticing. They're not even necessarily long, just excessively pruned and reformatted. Getting comfortable with an email with all the important content and okay phrasing saves me a bunch of time.
On second place, priority filtering, i.e. separating email to respond to from subscriptions, offers and notifications. Category filters are nice, but I don't think they're making me more productive.
Anything beyond that is kind of marginal for me. Shortcuts for inserting phrases are fun, but I don't use them that often. If I had to deal with repetitive inquiries, they'd probably be more important.
That would be a cool feature for phone calls. Depending on situation (or mood), switch between happy hours where everyone gets through, serious caller only mode for business hours, and emergency mode for anything social or serious.
I don't think it matters much. I'm not a fan of instant notifications (avg. importance of my email is too low to justify the amount of distraction), but beyond that, checking frequency would be pretty low on my list of email productivity improvements.
I check mine once or twice a day; most of my email is pre-sorted correctly by using a bunch of filters and around a dozen of addresses with different uses and priorities. I don't think I could work with a global, unsegmented email inbox; I saw a friend use his years ago and it still terrifies me, even with his relatively low inflow (30-50/day).
That's a really good point, especially for those who decide to make their living outside of the common "get safe job" paradigm, which to be fair isn't all that robust (at least in the US), either.
I've noticed myself that the anxiety I feel about losing a key component of my business has decreased immensely over the last few years, even though the risk is either the same or slightly higher. Even as a kid I used to feel strange about that. I was scared of big spiders, so whenever I'd catch one in my bed, I'd be terrified for the next couple of days and then completely dismiss it on an emotional level afterwards.
I'm not sure of how to effectively protect myself against that. It seems obvious to me that the current mapping of motivation/anxiety to risk, i.e. abrupt jumps from baseline activity into overdrive once an arbitrary and often foreseeable threshold is met, is pretty bad. However, beyond developing better habits, willpower and networks and having that bleed into not procrastinating on insurance against boring risks, is there really anything useful to do about it?
For the sake of completeness, the two best counter-arguments I've heard so far (IRL):
1) MBAs are useful as a baseline business sanity tool, so you can get a decent employee to a point where they'll understand the basic vocabulary of a lot of different disciplines. For instance, they'll have a rough picture of what segmenting and targeting a market means, even if they won't know how to use it in practice, let alone compete with a junior marketer. Someone who's already read a bunch of stuff and managed a business isn't going to learn as much and might be disappointed by how close to common sense everything is.
2) MBAs teach you how to maneuver the minefield of the large company, where the decision-making process is complicated by personal alliances, office politics and employee/boss conflicts. To an entrepreneur, this will seem unreasonably complicated ("Why don't you just walk in a straight line?"), but someone having to deal with a fair share of Dilbert-esque behavior, additional ammunition, whether business lingo or complex models, might come in handy.
I should also note that I'm the only one with a largely critical view and that the rest of my tutor group is quite happy with the program.
Elon's and Manoj's statements caught my interest since hiring MBA-types is assumed to be a standard move for entrepreneurs who have completed the exploratory phase of reaching product-market-fit and are trying to scale up quickly.
Even if you're highly skilled in entrepreneurial and/or executive tasks, you'll need somebody who deals with monitoring, dissemination and handling low-key disturbances. To be honest, I always assumed that you should hire MBAs for this, but now I'm a little more wary.
Do you think the Group 1 schools are superior to the rest as far as quality of material goes? I've been talking to a friend who goes to a well-known university in Europe and a fellow entrepreneur who visits an ivy-league US school, and while I don't have the full picture (or syllabus), they didn't seem much more impressed with the experience than I've been.
Ansoff's matrix, the product portfolio and Kotter's 8 step model for change are fairly popular choices.
I'm on a business trip, so I won't be around for this one, but I'm definitely interested in future events.
It would appear so. FtBCon Homepage says this:
After each session is over, it will almost immediately be saved to the YouTube channel of the person hosting it (the person whose Google+ profile the session was on). It takes a little while for the videos to be processed and posted, so it’s not instant. We’ll update a post with final videos as they become available.
Hello, everyone. I stumbled upon LW after listening to Eliezer make some surprisingly lucid and dissonance-free comments on Skepticon's death panel that inspired me to look up more of his work.
I've been browsing this site for a few days now, and I don't think I've ever had so many "Hey, this has always irritated me, too!" moments in such short intervals, from the rant about "applause lights" to the discussions about efficient charity work. I like how this site provides some actual depth to the topics it discusses, rather than hand the reader a bullet list of trivialities and have them figure out the application.
I am working as a direct marketing consultant, in the process of getting my MBA (a decision I've started to regret; my faith in the scientific validity of academic management begins to resemble a Shepard Tone) and with future ambitions in entrepreneurship, investing, scaling and other things that fit in the "things I've never done yet smart people are supposed to be good at" box.
I'm a member of Mensa, casual Poker (winning) and Mahjong (losing) player, enjoy lifting weights, cooking (in an utterly unscientific way that would make Heston Blumenthal weep) and martial arts. I also have an imaginary -5yo son/daughter who keeps me motivated to put in more hours at work so we won't have financial worries once they get born.
There are a bunch of things I'd like to do with my life long-term, with varying amounts of megalomania, but I'm generally content with focusing on increasing my financial and (practical) intellectual power in the short- to mid-term and let the future decide just how far off my predictions and plans turn out to be. Estimates range from very to utterly.
Here's hoping LW will help me with that, and that I'll be helpful to others.