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Were you gardening or anything when you first got sick?
I was not. I've stayed indoors most of my adult life, so I think I'm at lower risk for worms. Hard to say where I could have gotten worms from (assuming it is worms).
I'd be curious to hear about how you decided which on dewormers I should take. Maybe the answer is just "a bunch of reading on random internet posts and papers".
I wasted the first couple years of my illness thinking my condition was psychosomatic or DP/DR, doing things like therapy, anxiety techniques, introspection/journaling, gradual exposure, and so forth. I still sometimes try some psychosomatic treatments anyway (most recently, I was trying out John Sarno/Howard Schubiner-style mind body syndrome stuff, after reading Steve Byrnes's post and having it recommended to me). None of it really helped. I now think a lot of what people think of as psychosomatic conditions are instead somatopsychic conditions (i.e. a physical condition that results in mental symptoms). In my case, it helps that some of my symptoms clearly cannot be produced by anxiety/a psychosomatic condition (e.g. peeling and burning lips and rapid heart rate that returns to normal by lying down).
Thank you, this is good to know. I reached out to one of my doctors to see what they think of this idea. My own feeling is that 40% on a worm is too high. My eosinophils count is normal (and I know sometimes that can be normal even with a parasite), the viral illness seems like a sufficient explanation of kick-starting my chronic symptoms, I tested negative on the stool test, and I already know I have gut problems (and those gut problems seem to be explained by SIBO/leaky gut). Basically, everything I see seems to be explained well by stuff that I already know is going on, and I don't see any clear evidence of parasites. I would still put maybe 3% on it though.
My current distribution of root cause now looks something like: 35% on autoimmune/pre-autoimmune (e.g. Sjogren's syndrome), 25% on MCAS, 10% on dysautonomia/POTS, 5% on latent virus/viral reactivation, 5% on SIBO/impaired MMC, 3% on some kind of parasite, 17% other causes.
Only explanation for this (and the salt sensitivity etc) IMO is a hole/thinning in gut lining.
Why not dysautonomia? I am newly sensitive to a lot of things, including heat, light, and sound that don't directly involve the gut.
I agree they are hard to fix, but a lot of nerdy interests tend to also be hard (and that seems to be part of the attraction). So this doesn't seem like a differentiating factor.
Perhaps an intestinal parasite like a tapeworm?
I did get the GI Effects stool test done (in December 2022, well after I'd already been ill), which showed no presence of parasites. Any reason to think a stool test like this wouldn't detect the parasites?
How do you know your infection from years ago was viral?
My symptoms during the acute infection were a sore throat, fever, large quantities of mucus and clogged nose (requiring constantly blowing my nose), and a cough (both dry and wet cough; mostly in the evenings). It felt like a cold or flu, just stronger and longer lasting (10 days for most symptoms to clear, then 5 more days after that until I felt basically normal, and then a few weeks later weird stuff started happening to me like extreme sensitivity to caffeine, and it has just kept going on for 5 years now).
GI tract pathogen
I do know I have SIBO and gut dysbiosis (from breath/stool test), but the usual treatments for these seem to have made me worse off, so my current guess is that it's not the root problem.
I've always been underweight. The heaviest I got was about 115 pounds during freshman year of college. A bunch of the men in my family were quite skinny (though not as much as me) when they were younger, so I suspect it's at least partly genetic.
I guess one of the first things to do to create/market/... an interest from labs/researchers/nerds/... would be to find other people suffering from the same illness and create/coin a name for that illness and create some association/website/gatherings/... to communicate about it like it is done for most other illnesses?
Funny that you mention this, because I was just musing about this the other day over on my personal website. Unfortunately I wasn't able to come up with a very good name...
It must be really dreadful as it seems to be the case for you, to have a mysterious chronic illness without even a specific name attached to it (from what I understand), only a set of symptoms which (similarly to ME/CFS) can have many different possible root causes/factors.
I really appreciate you saying this!
I've looked at some of Sarah Myhill's work before, and yeah, I think it's a good example of someone seriously thinking about how to solve an illness. I wish I knew how to get more people like her to study different kinds of illnesses too.
I've heard of this, and may want to try it eventually. I'm starting out with things like LDN first though.
I've heard a lot of good things about fasting, but unfortunately I am pretty underweight (104 pounds, 5 feet 6.5 inches) and unable to gain any weight (despite trying quite hard). And when I am awake if I don't eat for 1-2 hours I start to feel extremely weak. So those two things have kept me from thinking seriously about trying fasting. Do you have any resources or thoughts on fasting for underweight/wasting people?
I have not. I've been supplementing vitamin D my whole adult life, and the initial blood test showed a level of 86.6ng/mL which one of my doctors said was higher than optimal, so I lowered the frequency of supplementation and my follow-up blood test showed a level of 54.5ng/mL. Any reason I should try megadosing it even if I have adequate levels in my blood?
I've heard of zinc carnosine but haven't tried it yet. I tried supplementing with zinc gluconate at one point but it seemed to be aggravating my hunger attack symptom so I stopped.
Can you elaborate? It seems to me that a lot of nerdy interests also "don't generalize" in the sense that different problems are quite different from one another (a puzzle game would be boring if all the puzzles had similar solutions, and part of the game designer's job is to make puzzles feel impossible in different ways; a mathematical theorem that was unnecessarily particular would be eaten up by a more general theorem, so major theorems in math necessarily require unique insights, so you can't prove most theorems by using the same old tricks; etc.). So this does not seem to be a distinguishing property to me.
Here's one example. Jeff Wood had been suffering from ME/CFS for a while, and found that his head started sinking one day, and a lot of his symptoms would get worse depending on the position of his head/neck. This led to his diagnosis of CCI/AAI and he was able to get the right surgeries and is now in remission. Of course, most of us are not as lucky as he is in having something that so dramatically and immediately changes symptoms. But I think it's one way to solve such medical mysteries, and is basically what you say about tracking backwards from symptoms to causes.
Here's another example, although this one hasn't led to any actual cures yet. Robert Phair used his knowledge of biochemistry pathways to come up with a hypothesis of how the citric acid cycle gets shunted, which has the immediate effect of lowering ATP production but also some other crazy downstream effects like neurotransmitters being stolen to fuel an alternative cyclic reactions (which possibly is what one type of brainfog is caused by). So this approach is more top-down: start with a bunch of "textbook" knowledge and theory, try to come up with a hypothesis of how that could lead to problems, and how those problems might explain symptoms.
I'm sure there are many other approaches.
Sure, all of those things. I think they are all related parts of what I've been wondering about, and are not as distinct as maybe you think. If I were to try to compress my main confusion, it's something like: I see nerdy people spontaneously doing certain activities for fun, like doing math, programming, making and solving puzzle games, writing long blog posts about COVID origins, or whatever; why is it that almost no one spontaneously decides to try to solve mysterious chronic illnesses? Does thinking about mysterious chronic illnesses have some kind of barrier that repels people, and if so, are there ways to remove that barrier?
I wonder if "brains" of the sort that are useful for math and programming are neccessarily all that helpful here.
I think I used to implicitly believe this too. I gravitate much more to math/programming than biology, and had a really hard time getting myself interested in biology/health stuff. But having been forced to learn more biology/health stuff, I seem to be able to ask questions that I don't see other people asking, and thinking thoughts that not many others are thinking, so now I think the kinds of thinking used in math/programming generalize and would be quite helpful in solving mysterious chronic illnesses.
Separately, I used to mostly agree with the Elizabeth post you linked, but the biggest "win" I've had so far with my own chronic illness has had the opposite lesson, where careful thinking and learning allowed me to improve my breathing problem. Of course, I still try a bunch of random things based on intuition. But I have a sense that having a good mechanistic model of the underlying physiology will lead to the biggest cures.
I've been trying. You can see my write-ups about breathing, swallowing, weird thirst/electrolyte(?) thing, and paradoxical temporary improvements following certain events. I also have a draft of a post detailing all of my history, labs, symptoms, and everything I've ever tried, but it's a huge amount work and I don't have much hope of people even reading it (hence this question, to see what I can do to make it more interesting), so I've only been able to make progress on it very slowly.
Update: The flashcards have finally been released: https://riceissa.github.io/immune-book/
Other commenters have already hinted at this, but I suspect that terms like "saturated fat", "seed oils", and "omega-6 PUFA" are not specific enough, and I further suspect that this makes basically all studies mostly useless (because they work with these flawed coarse terms). "Saturated fat" can be tallow from factory-farmed cows or cultured butter from grass-fed grass-finished cows (and even that isn't specific enough; was the grass sprayed with XYZ pesticide? etc.). "Omega-6 PUFA" can be highly heated seed oils chemically treated to deodorize them (masking their rancidity), or some of the oils in e.g. whole nuts. Even something specific-sounding like "extra virgin olive oil" can unfortunately mean pretty much anything because there's a bunch of fraud going on, so the actual bottle in front of you probably isn't the real thing.
My bottom line is pretty similar to yours though. Clearly something went wrong in the last few hundred years, and probably diet is a good chunk of it. So treat any kind of modern processing or ingredient with suspicion and as much as possible try to eat as humans ate before the last few hundred years.
Hi, I wanted to give an update. Capnometry biofeedback worked better than I expected. My baseline ET CO2 went from around 27mmHg to around 40mmHg in the first 1.5 weeks of using the device, and stayed there for the whole month I had access to the device. (I've now returned the device.) The key thing I discovered was that even though I was already nasal breathing 99.9% of the time, my nasal breaths were still quite audible and so I was overbreathing because of that. The biofeedback+coaching allowed me to switch my breathing to a silent nasal one in stages. I still experience air hunger, but it is a lot more subtle than before. I still have trouble talking, some of the time (I think talking makes me overbreathe, so if I start out with no air hunger then I can talk for quite a while, but if I start talking when I already have some air hunger, then I quickly reach my limits). I still on occasion mysteriously have a lot more air hunger than normal and feel like I "forgot how to breathe", and I wonder if that means I have some sort of autonomic problem... I've been writing up a lot of my thoughts here. I might retry capnometers in a few months or a year or something, but for now my plan is to go back to (original Russian-lineage) Buteyko method and really logging the time (rather than half-assing it, which is what I was doing previously with Buteyko). Feel free to ask any questions.
Interesting, I don't know anything about the quality of different SLIT manufacturers, but $2600 sounds a lot more affordable than $7000. I'll try to remember to ask my allergist about this if I ever see them again.
My understanding (based on watching some YouTube lectures and talking to my allergists) is that SCIT (aka allergy shots) and SLIT are equally effective but (at least in the US) SLIT is not covered by insurance so SCIT ends up being a lot cheaper for most people. The main problem with SCIT is that it requires going to the allergy clinic every week for a while, then every month for a while over a period of about 3 years (but it is possible to speed things up quite a bit by doing cluster shots or double shots). I tried doing SCIT last year but my chronic illness made it too difficult to go to the clinic each week so I eventually had to stop (I imagine this won't be a problem for most other people). My allergy clinic gave me an estimate that SLIT would cost roughly $7000 total over 3 years, whereas SCIT for me was free with my insurance.
How were you getting SLIT for $25/week, how much did SLIT cost in total for you, and were the doses tailored to your particular allergies based on tests?
I had a couple more questions about the CONTEC device:
- What's the lag time from when you breathe to when the waveform is displayed on the screen, and when the number updates?
- How does it prevent water (from exhaled air) from getting into the device? The CapnoTrainer uses water traps inserted between the cannula and the device itself, and these water traps need to be replaced every once in a while. But I haven't seen anything similar for the CONTEC device.
I haven't verified the correctness of what this person is saying, but this Reddit comment seems relevant:
Most yoga breathing techniques have been completely misinterpreted from the ancient texts, and incorrectly teach people to breath larger amounts of air, when true deep breathing (deep as in from the diaphragm) is very still and almost imperceptible at rest. Buteyko teaches how to reset the part of the brain that controls autonomic breathing back to this very gentle still breath. Lau Tzu said 'the perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing' . The things that throw out the breathing pattern/volume (and in turn the whole body's biochemistry) are stress and diet, and environmental toxins mostly, but once this happens its hard to reset the breath back to normal without a correct breath practice. And most yogic breathing as taught in the west is the sadly exact opposite of what is needed.
One data point: https://youtu.be/XliOGg8Tl98?t=230
Thank you, this is helpful!
I found someone in my local area who has a CapnoTrainer and was willing to rent it out to me and coach me, so it was a lot cheaper than the official route. But yeah, in general rentals are quite expensive unfortunately. If I couldn't find anyone who would rent one out to me for a reasonable price, I would probably have just gone with the CONTEC device as you did.
When I originally wrote this LW post, I had never used a capnometer of any kind (it just seemed quite promising and I was confused why basically no one was talking about it). After writing the post, I found someone who would rent a CapnoTrainer to me, and have been using the device now for about a week. The CapnoTrainer is still the only capnometer I have used. It's still too early for me to say whether the device "worked" or not, but so far it's been a quite promising experience (I'm planning to write more in maybe a month when the rental period ends).
The contec does show the waveform, it's just on a tiny screen so not the most detailed.
Huh, okay, that is good to know. I was looking at images like this one where the wave form is clearly the SpO2, rather than CO2:
But scrolling through more of the images, I do see this, which looks like a CO2 curve:
I am guessing there must be some way to switch which graph you see?
Talking is really bad too for me. If I talk for a sentence or less, let myself breathe a few breaths while not moving, then resume talking and keep pausing for a while after talking only a bit that helps a lot.
This sounds so much like me... (Luckily I don't seem to have the problem with movement, but eating (specifically swallowing) makes me nervous too.) I don't know if you've looked into Peter Litchfield's work (he has a bunch of videos on YouTube too), but he talks a lot about altering your subconscious/unconscious breathing habits instead of consciously using techniques as crutches to save you from an episode. I recently got access to a CapnoTrainer so that will be my plan for hopefully fixing my breathing (I already did this once when going from ~80% nose-breathing to ~99.9% nose-breathing -- it took about a month of anxiously paying too much attention to my breath, but after a month or so it became totally natural).
I self-studied a bunch of math in 2017-2019 in order to do AI alignment research (specifically, agent foundations type stuff), and have a lot of thoughts about how to do it. Feel free to message me if you want to discuss.
Thank you, this is really fascinating! After writing this post, I talked to someone who does biofeedback using a capnometer, and they also mentioned that same CONTEC device as a cheap but still accurate capnometer. Their main gripe with it was that it responds more slowly compared to the CapnoTrainer and doesn't show the wave form, so it is not as good for doing biofeedback with (e.g. apparently the CapnoTrainer can show things like aborted breaths or weird exhalation patterns, whereas the CONTEC device can't show that), but it is still good enough for detecting CO2 levels.
I would love to read more about your experiences with your breathing issue and what you've tried. Your description of your problem seems similar to my own -- for example, I notice that talking out loud seems to dysregulate my breathing pretty quickly.
Does this mean that a cheap "pseudo-capnometer" can be created which measures VOCs collected via a nasal cannula? Or would measuring VOCs instead of CO2 change the results at that level (but why?)?
Thank you!
Does "COTS" stand for "commercial off-the-shelf" or is this some more technical acronym related to CO2 measurements?
Ultimately the reason it's not popular is probably because it doesn't seem that useful. Breathing is automatic and regulated by blood CO2 concentration; I find it hard to believe that the majority of the population, with otherwise normal respiratory function, would be so off the mark. Is there strong evidence to suggest this is the case?
I agree that this wouldn't be useful for the majority of the population. (Some breathing gurus claim that poor breathing is responsible for pretty much every health problem ever including anxiety, depression, sleep problems, heart problems, brain fog, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, chronic pain, etc. I don't buy these strong claims.) As I tried to make clear in the original question, my own interest in this is personal: I've been having chronic shortness of breath for over a decade and the doctors just shrug and say "maybe it's anxiety" and give me inhalers which don't work. But I suspect others like me are not all that rare. This video (that explains air hunger in terms of carbon dioxide levels and overbreathing) has 53k views and 2.2k likes; Reddit is full of people complaining about air hunger; something like 8% of all EMS responses in the US are from a combination of "respiratory distress" and "shortness of breath" (most of which I assume are not life-threatening; see this Quora question for some evidence, and my one and only time so far on an ambulance to the ER was due to feeling like I couldn't breathe which in retrospect was probably due to overbreathing). So again, I don't think the majority of the population would need to do anything about their breathing, but that seems like quite a high bar that basically no health problem could clear. I'm instead suggesting that it's quite a common problem (but I don't know exactly how common), and asking why this device which seems like it would be helpful for this common problem is virtually unknown.
I was not familiar with that term, but I am aware of sleep apnea and how that can lead to too-high levels of carbon dioxide. Like I said in a different comment, my current understanding is that both too-high and too-low are problems. In my case (and in other cases where people have anxiety-like shortness of breath) I think what's going on is too-low carbon dioxide. But having a capnometer seems useful for correcting both too-low and too-high carbon dioxide.
My understanding is that like many things, both low and high are bad (high carbon dioxide is called hypercapnia), so you want to be in the "good" range (I typically see 35-45 mmHg of partial pressure carbon dioxide being cited as the good range). In rationalist circles I have seen discussion of too-high atmospheric carbon dioxide being bad, but I am myself confused on how that connects to carbon dioxide levels in the blood (and separately, I'm not convinced that higher carbon dioxide levels in the air are bad either).
Was the update ever posted? I am interested in getting a capnometer for an unrelated reason and was curious where people decided to get theirs.
I feel like doing correctness right requires originality after a certain point, so the two don't feel too distinct to me. Early in one's intellectual development it might make sense to just "shop around" for different worldviews by reading widely, but after a while you are going to be routinely bumping into things that aren't on the collective map.
The casus belli example Habryka gives in the "Correctness as defence against the dark arts" strikes me as an example of ... how originality helps defend against the dark arts! (I am guessing here that Habryka did not just read some old rationalist blog post called "Casus belli, how people use it to manipulate each other, and how to avoid getting got", but that he formed this connection himself.) More generally but also personally, I feel like several times in my life (including now) I have been in bad situations where the world just does not seem to have a solution to my problem, where no amount of google-fu, reading books, seeking societally-established forms of help (therapists, doctors, etc.) has helped. The only way out seems to be to do original thinking.
I also want to highlight that the mental motions of Correctness reasoning seems to be susceptible to the dark arts (to be clear, I think Habryka himself is smart enough to avoid this kind of thing, but I want to highlight this for others). I feel this most whenever I go on Twitter. Like, I go on there thinking "ok, for whatever reason many people (even Wei Dai now, apparently) are discoursing on here now, so I better read it to not fall behind, I better enlarge my hypothesis space by taking in new ideas and increase the range of thoughts I can think!" (this is the kind of thing I mean by "mental motions of Correctness reasoning" -- I am mainly motivated by making my map bigger, not making it more detailed). But then after a while I feel like the social environment is tugging me to feel a certain way, value certain things, believe certain things (or else I'm a bad person) (maybe I only had this line of thought because Qiaochu tugged me in a certain direction!). I started out wanting to just explore and try to make my map Correct, but turns out the territory contained adversarial computations... This sort of thing, it seems to me, is even worse for the non-LessWrong population. Again it seems to me most healthy to mostly just be thinking for myself and then periodically check in on Twitter discourse to see what's up (this is aspirational).
I don't actually know how to design things, but here's a simple prototype you can play around with: https://issarice.com/adaptive-typography (as is the case with all prototypes, I ask the user to please overlook any jankiness of the current implementation, and instead imagine you are interacting with a much more polished/idealized version of the same idea).
Two years later: an abstract algebra server was created (covering three books: Artin, Aluffi, and "Abel's Theorem in Problems and Solutions"), but never really took off. I also discovered a topology server (covering Munkres) but it is also now inactive. Meanwhile the Tao Discord is still alive, but I fear it is mostly only alive because I am still there answering people's questions...
There's a tricky trade-off where on one hand, I want to answer questions quickly enough that people don't feel blocked on not knowing the answer to their question, but on the other hand, if I don't answer a question, then that may actually cause someone else to step in and answer (which sort of "trains" the server to become more resilient, so it doesn't only depend on me for survival). (Reminds me of the quote about how the worst thing you can do is to completely solve a problem, and Bill Thurston's anecdote about how he killed a field by making too much progress on it alone.)
I wish I knew how to make more of these servers go well.
What would you recommend in cases where there isn't a single moment in time when one has given up? Most of my projects are inactive in the sense that I haven't done much with them in a while (months or years), but also, they aren't completely dead. I gradually lost interest in the project or prioritized doing other things, but there isn't a sharp cutoff when that happened, and I might pick it up again. To give a concrete example, one of my blogs has a posting history that looks like this (numbers in parentheses indicate number of blog posts in that month):
October 2023 (4)
May 2023 (2)
April 2023 (2)
August 2022 (1)
November 2021 (1)
September 2021 (2)
July 2021 (1)
April 2021 (1)
March 2021 (1)
February 2021 (1)
November 2020 (2)
October 2020 (1)
September 2020 (3)
August 2020 (3)
July 2020 (3)
June 2020 (12)
May 2020 (25)
April 2020 (28)
March 2020 (23)
I really like the idea of this page and gave this post a strong-upvote. Felt like this was worth mentioning, since in recent years I've felt increasingly alienated by LessWrong culture. My only major request here is that, if there are future iterations of this page, I'd like poll options to be solicited/submitted before any voting happens (this is so that early submissions don't get an unfair advantage just by having more eyeballs on them). A second more minor request is to hide the votes while I'm still voting (I'm trying very hard not to be influenced by vote counts and the names of specific people agreeing/disagreeing with things, but it's difficult).
I have about 500 Anki cards on basic immunology that I and a collaborator created while reading Philipp Dettmer's book Immune (Philipp Dettmer is the founder of the popular YouTube channel Kurzgesagt, which has been featured on LW before, and the book itself has also been reviewed on LW before). (ETA: When I first wrote this comment, I stupidly forgot to mention that my intention is to publish these cards on the internet for people to freely use, once they are polished.) However, neither of us is that knowledgeable about immunology (yet) so I'm worried about inaccuracies or misleading info in the cards. I'd like at least one person who knows a good amount of immunology (who has learned it from a source other than this book) to look over the cards and give feedback. I probably unfortunately can't pay any money for this.
I have about 5 years of serious Anki prompt-writing experience, and the cards follow current best practices for prompts as explained in e.g. Andy Matuschak's prompt-writing guide. In other words, these are not low-effort cloze deletions or ChatGPT-generated or anything like that.
I'm also open to arguments that the right thing to do is to just release the cards as they are, let people maybe point out flaws in public, etc.
I think another disadvantage that the post doesn't mention is that being an Organization confers a sense of legitimacy, in part because it acts as a costly signal that one can manage all the legal complexities, pay for paperwork, etc.; so being a sponsored project is a way to call yourself an Organization without paying the cost of the signal. In the limit of widespread knowledge about the legal subtleties of fiscal sponsorship, and due diligence on the part of the community to always keep the distinction in mind, this is not a problem. But people are lazy, and so this sort of confusion does I think benefit sponsored projects.
I've written up a few things on Reddit recently:
- Things I've tried with my breathing difficulty, including some things that helped quite a bit
- Things I've tried with my swallowing difficulty. This one I have not figured out how to improve reliably at all, so it's mostly asking people for help.
Based on this Wayback snapshot it seems to be a paper called "A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic" by Ethan Ludwin-Peery and Sarah Ludwin-Peery. I was able to download the PDF of the paper at this link (the main body of the PDF is 63 pages as claimed in this LW post, and the PDF is dated July 3, 2021, which is just before this LW post was published, so it is likely the version of the paper being discussed here).
The main blocker for me is social rather than technical. Back when the new wiki first started, I created a page but the LW devs (or at least one of them) didn't like the page. There was some back and forth, but I came away from the discussion feeling pretty unwelcome and worried that if I were to make more contributions they would also involve lengthy debates or my work would be removed. I haven't really kept up on the wiki since that time, but I haven't seen anything that has changed my mind about this.
A few technical things that would make it nicer to edit:
- Wikilinks (perhaps things have changed now, but it was not possible to surround words in double square brackets like on many wiki software)
- Automatic backlinks
I have not gotten prayer to really work for me yet, but I've experimented with it a bit (I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but yeah I've gotten desperate enough and have thought I was possibly going to die on multiple occasions now and have entered mental states where I think praying might be the only thing I can do).
"Prayer" in the sense of "ask for a thing in your head and then the thing happens in real life" is obviously not going to work. But I think this may be the wrong way to think about prayers/praying (disclaimer: I am not religious at all and never was, so I have no idea what I'm talking about). Anna Salamon has an old post where she talks about "useful attempted telekinesis", and I think this may be one valid way to make sense of praying. Repeatedly and vividly visualizing the things you value/the things you want may magically make it easier to get that thing, at least some of the time. Another way to think about it might be as a dual to gratitude journaling: in gratitude journaling you examine what you value/don't value in terms of what you already have, whereas in prayer you examine the same things in terms of what you don't currently have. (Why should the latter work? Shouldn't it just lead to envy/sour grapes/bitterness about your life? Yeah, I don't know. Anna's post talks about useful vs harmful telekinesis and I think there's possibly a lot to explore here.)
Praying combined with chanting + rocking may be even more effective, because the latter two have some shot at directly affecting your physiological state. I've not really gotten chanting to work for me, but rocking sometimes calms me down a little bit.
Homeopathy: yeah, agreed, not sure what's going on here and hope that I don't have to get to the point of trying it out.
People often claim that consumer products have been declining in quality over the decades. Some people even claim that such a decline is inevitable under market forces. I've seen this discussed a lot especially for laptops, where supposedly desirable qualities like durability and repairability have declined. I'll focus on these two qualities in particular below.[1]
In contrast to the observation above, I learned the following argument from one of David Friedman's books: if people are willing to buy a crappy product for $x, then they should be willing to pay $10x on the same product that lasts 10 times longer (because in both cases, the amortized cost is the same). So as long as the more durable product does not cost 10 times more to manufacture, the company's revenue is higher if they sell the more durable product.
From this, I conclude that one potential thing that could be going on is that the reason products are crappy is that consumers prefer the crappy product; they aren't willing to pay 10 times more for a 10 times more durable product. This might happen because of information asymmetry reasons (it's easier to tell which of two products are immediately better, than to tell which of two products will last much longer) or maybe because consumers prefer the small advancements they get if they keep buying new products, instead of staying with one product for a long time. Or maybe due to high temporal discounting and inability to save money, consumers prefer cheaper things.
I am still pretty confused about all of this, because I personally do prefer more durable/repairable products and would be willing to pay more for them. But perhaps my preferences are pretty unusual.
- ^
I'm focusing on durability and repairability because these seem more straightforward as they don't require answering questions about how much more one would pay in a given instant for a higher quality. For example, maybe kitchen shears are declining in how well they cut things but maybe that's okay because people just like cheaper shears that cut less well. Whereas if kitchen shears decline in durability, it doesn't matter how much money people would pay for shears to cut better; for any given preference, I can check whether someone is willing to pay 10 times more for something that lasts 10 times longer.
Home water testing: these are periodic tests rather than continuous monitors, and aren't cheap either. My doctor recommended this one but it's more expensive than the water filter I use, so maybe find a cheaper one or skip straight to filtering (the test did verify my filter worked, and this was pretty late in the filter's lifecycle). You can also use EWG to check your city's water data, although it will miss problems in your own pipes.
Did you have a reason to suspect that your tap water in particular was bad (e.g. after seeing EWG's measurements), or was the filtration more of an attempt to reduce all the possible environmental contaminants in general? I have heard a lot about air quality impacting health, but not as much about water quality. I would be grateful to hear about any resources you have in mind for why one should pay more attention to water quality.
A functioning liver.
What tests do you do or have done or consider to check for a functioning liver?
I found that if my tongue doesn’t block my mouth I can only breathe through my mouth and if it does I can only breathe through my nose.
Huh, this isn't what happens when I try it. If I keep my tongue out or at the base of my mouth, I can still definitely choose whether to make the air go through my nose or mouth. If I try to block my mouth with my tongue, that does obstruct the airflow through my mouth but I can still breathe mostly okay (even if I plug my nose).
I used to have a model of breathing that went something like this: when breathing in, the lungs somehow get bigger, creating lower air pressure inside the lungs causing air to flow in. Then when breathing out the lungs get smaller, creating higher air pressure inside the lungs and causing air to flow out. How do the lungs get bigger and smaller? Eventually I learned that there's a muscle called the diaphragm that is attached to the bottom of the lungs (??) that pulls or pushes the lungs. If I keep my nose plugged but my mouth open, the air will travel through my mouth. If I keep my mouth closed but my nose open, the air will travel through my nostrils. So far, so good.
Then a few days ago, I noticed that if I keep both my nose and mouth open, I could choose to breathe in solely through one or the other. This... doesn't make sense, according to the model. The model would predict that the air just flows through both pathways, maybe preferentially going through the mouth since that seems like the larger pathway.
So something is clearly wrong with how I think about breathing. Is there some sort of further switch inside that blocks one of the pathways? Does the nose or the mouth contain variable-size cavities that can control air pressure to direct the flow? I still have no idea. I'm eventually going to look it up, but I might think about this for a little bit longer (or maybe someone here will tell me).
I thought this was a pretty interesting example of how the explanations you hear about seemingly-basic things are easy to accept but don't make sense on further reflection. But it's hard to notice the flaw too. In my case, after a recent ENT visit where I was told my nasal passages are inflamed, I've been putting more effort into consciously breathing through my nose. Then one day I woke up and as soon as I woke up I did something like consciously breathe through my nose with mouth closed, and then somehow I opened my mouth but then still tried to breathe through my nose (or maybe it was that I noticed I was breathing through my mouth, and since I was still waking up I didn't bother to close my mouth and just tried to breathe through my nose with my mouth open), and was surprised this was even possible.
I don't think "throw every explanation possible" is the right takeaway from your experience. To me, it seems like the teacher was failing to model what you were getting stuck on, and so the takeaway would be something more like "try to model the learner better, so as to produce better (not more!) explanations".
"Throw every explanation possible" might still be learning-complete in some sense, so might be worth exploring.