To go one step further, potentially any and every major decision they have played a part in needs to be reevaluated by objective third parties.
I like a lot of this post, but the sentence above seems very out of touch to me. Who are these third parties who are completely objective? Why is objective the adjective here, instead of “good judgement” or “predicted this problem at the time”?
I haven’t looked into it; seems plausible it helps, but since it’s a signalling molecule I’m wary of amplifying it too much.
The best known amplifier of NO in the bloodstream is viagra. My understanding is they haven’t found general health effects from it, despite looking really hard and first investigating it as a treatment for heart disease.
Yeah when I was writing this part of me kept saying “but humming is so cheap, why shouldn’t everyone do it all the time?”, and I had to remind myself that attention is a cost. This is despite the fact that it’s not cheap for me (due to trigeminal neuralgia; I’ll probably stick with enovid myslf) and attention is a limiting reagent for me. The too-cheap-to-meter argument is really seductive.
I think some poly scenarios save money (although most are accessible without poly), but poly also gives you new and exciting ways to lose it (these can be replicated without poly too, but it’s harder).
If you can’t afford your home without everyone’s income, then your housing stability is dependent on every relationship in the house. Hope everyone is chore compatible. And is in agreement on if the house allows kid. And everyone’s work is near each other. And...
I’ve seen poly housing (and found family shared housing) go well and save money, but mostly when at least one person had a lot of financial slack (to paper over housemate losses) and no one was so badly off they can’t afford to leave. If someone needs the house sharing to work, issues will fester until they become toxic.
citric acid and a polymer
https://www.modestneeds.org/ will give one time cash infusions to people with capital intensive problems (like moving costs, or keeping a vehicle). I haven’t looked into them in a while; a few years ago there was a requirement that the cash infusion would get recipients on a stable track, I think that might be looser now.
All of the problems you list seem harder with repeated within-person trials.
I found the gotcha: envoid has two other mechanisms of action. Someone pointed this out to me on my previous nitric oxide post, but it didn’t quite sink in till I did more reading.
Is there a lesswrong canon post for the quantified impact of different masks? I want to compare a different intervention to masks and it would be nice to use a reference that’s gone through battle testing.
Yep that’s my main contender for the better formulations referred to in the intro. .
I don’t think the original comment was a troll, but I also don’t think it was a helpful contribution on this post. OP specifically framed the post as their own experience, not a universal cure. Comments explaining why it won’t work for a specific person aren’t relevant.
I think that’s their guess but they don’t directly check here.
I also suspect that it doesn’t matter very much.
The sinuses have so much NO compared to the nose that this probably doesn’t materially lower sinus concentrations.
the power of humming goes down with each breath but is fully restored in 3 minutes, suggesting that whatever change happens in the sinsues is restored quickly
From my limited understanding of virology and immunology, alternating intensity of NO between sinuses and nose every three minutes is probably better than keeping sinus concentrations high[1]. The first second of NO does the most damage to microbes[2], so alternation isn’t that bad.
I’d love to test this. The device you linked works via the mouth, and we’d need something that works via the nose. From a quick google it does look like it’s the same test, so we’d just need a nasal adaptor.
Other options:
Nnoxx. Consumer skin device, meant for muscle measurements
There are lots of devices for measuring concentration in the air, maybe they could be repurporsed. Just breathing on it might be enough for useful relative metrics, even if they’re low-precision.
I’m also going to try to talk my asthma specialist into letting me use their oral machine to test my nose under multiple circumstances, but it seems unlikely she’ll go for it.
obvious question: so why didn’t evolution do that? Ancestral environment didn’t have nearly this disease (or pollution) load. This doesn’t mean I’m right but it means I’m discounting that specific evolutionary argument.
although NO is also an immune system signal molecule, so the average does matter.
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.
I curated this post because
this is a rare productivity system post that made me consider actually implementing it. Right now I can’t because my energy levels are too variable, but if that weren’t true I would definitely be trying it.
lots of details, on lots of levels. Things like “I fail 5% of the time” and then translating that too “therefore i price things such that if I could pay 5% of the failure fee to just have it done, I would do so.”
Practical advice like “yes verification sometimes takes a stupid amount of time, the habit is nonetheless worth it” or “arrange things to verify the day after”
Brandon Sanderson is a bestselling fantasy author. Despite mostly working with traditional publishers, there is a 50-60 person company formed around his writing[1]. This podcast talks about how the company was formed.
Things I liked about this podcast:
he and his wife both refer to it as “our” company and describe critical contributions she made.
the number of times he was dissatisfied with the way his publisher did something and so hired someone in his own company to do it (e.g. PR and organizing book tours), despite that being part of the publisher’s job.
He believed in his back catalog enough to buy remainder copies of his books (at $1/piece) and sell them via his own website at sticker price (with autographs). This was a major source of income for a while.
Long term grand strategic vision that appears to be well aimed and competently executed.
The only non-Sanderson content I found was a picture book from his staff artist.
long shot: did you find anything evaluating the dose of nitric oxide delivered by enovid? I want to compare it to humming but can’t find any quantification of the spray.
EDIT: followed the trial link you gave and found at 0.11 ppm*hour. I’m guessing that is the actual dose divided by 8 (since they administer 3x/day), but I’d love to be sure.
A very rough draft of a plan to test prophylactics for airborne illnesses.
Start with a potential superspreader event. My ideal is a large conference, many of whom travelled to get there, in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation and air purification, in winter. Ideally >=4 days, so that people infected on day one are infectious while the conference is still running.
Call for sign-ups for testing ahead of time (disclosing all possible substances and side effects). Split volunteers into control and test group. I think you need ~500 sign ups in the winter to make this work.
Splitting controls is probably the hardest part. You’d like the control and treatment group to be identical, but there are a lot of things that affect susceptibility. Age, local vs. air travel, small children vs. not, sleep habits… it’s hard to draw the line
Make it logistically trivial to use the treatment. If it’s lozenges or liquids, put individually packed dosages in every bathroom, with a sign reminding people to use them (color code to direct people to the right basket). If it’s a nasal spray you will need to give everyone their own bottle, but make it trivial to get more if someone loses theirs.
Follow-up a week later, asking if people have gotten sick and when.
If the natural disease load is high enough this should give better data than any paper I’ve found.
Top contenders for this plan:
zinc lozenge
salt water gargle
enovid
betadine gargle
zinc gargle
I’d really like to do humming but haven’t yet figured out the logisitics of reminding the treatment group to hum without ruining the control group.
Can you clarify this part? The liquid is a reactive solution (and contains other ingredients) so I don’t understand how you calculated it.
I agree the integral is a reasonable interpretation and appreciate you pointing it out. My guess is low frequent applications are better than infrequent high doses, but I don’t know what the conversion rate is and this definitely undermines the hundred-dollar-bill case.