Rank: #10 out of 4859 in peer accuracy at Metaculus for the time period of 2016-2020.
ChristianKl
Karma: 36,585
Bayesianism has no rules for what someone priors should be. It has rules about how to progress from a state of having priors.
There’s a reason that Einstein did not get his Nobel Prize for the special theory of relativity. At the time the prize was given, the Nobel Prize committee did not believe that the predictions about Mercuries orbit were strong enough evidence for the special theory of relativity to give him the Nobel Prize for it. Besides Mercuries orbit there was also the Michelson-Morley experiment.
To the extend that you were taught in school that the Michelson-Morley and Mercuries orbit provided definite evidence for the special theory of relativity, that’s a retrospective accounting from people who already knew it to be true and not the perspective from the physicists that gave Einstein his Nobel Prize.
Whether or not physicists at the time should have updated more strongly into the direction of seeing special relativity as proven depends a lot about what you believe of the merits of alternative explanations for the observations and how well those fitted the data and how likely you consider the measurement for Mercuries orbit to be correct.[Unsure] The probability of GR being true is independent of whether the Bayesian knows about it or not
In Bayesanism probabilities are not independent of the model of the observer the same way that frequentism has a notion of observer independent probabilities.
The general mechanism with the mail order scam you talked about is called survivorship bias. If you take the question of how high the existential risk of being nuclear war happens to be, this matters. If you just observe that we now have nuclear weapons for a long time, it might be wrong to update with each passing year into a lower chance of nuclear war because you would not be around to observe reality in case everyone got killed by nuclear war. That’s why we need to look at Petrov and Arkhipov to get an understanding about near misses and we treat both of them as heroes on LessWrong.
Bayesian is about having priors and updating them. If your prior is that the efficient market theory is true and that there are some people who run scams via unsolicited email exist, getting 6 letters is no strong reason to update towards the company sending the unsolicited email being legit.
I would not call myself a domain expert, but I do think I have a rough idea about the field.
As far as I understand the mainstream position is roughly: There seem to be evolutionary pressures that result in naked mole-rat longevity and naked mole-rats have made a lot of different adaptations for that reason. We have an understanding of some of those adaptions and there’s a good chance that we don’t yet understand all of them because understanding all of them would mean understanding aging better than we do currently.
If you do study a potential new mechanisms it would make sense to look at how it plays out across species and just just the naked mole-rat.
With johnswentworth’s post about the Core Pathways of Aging, for example you have the thesis that transposons are important for aging. You can find out that naked mole-rat have unusually low transposon activity, which is a point of evidence to validate johnswentworth’s thesis that transposons are important for aging. However, if you would reason from that that naked mole-rat longevity is mainly due to different transposon behavior that would be an overreach because naked mole-rats do plenty of things besides having different transposon behavior.It would be interesting to have a better transposon theory of aging even if that only covers part of what aging is about. That wouldn’t really be a “theory of naked mole-rat longevity”, so I’m a bit skeptical about anything that would bill itself as a new theory of naked mole-rat longevity because that’s not the chunk in which I would think. I would expect that relevant scientist who care about mechanisms of aging and not about the naked mole-rat as a species would react similarly.
Having thought about NAC a bit more, I think I agree with you. The one paper about the signaling seems to be less important than the actual observed effect in exercise. Additionally, even if given NAC to a normal person who has a glycine deficit leads to more glutathione synthesis at the cost of less collagen synthesis which could have a negative effect on hypertrophy that concern is less if you just supply both NAC and glycine.
German is a bit different in that German culture does value sophistication. Zizek mentions that we traditionally build our toilets specifically so that the shit doesn’t directly into the water to be better able to inspect it. Under the post-World War II occupation we did switch to British toilets.
In the US you put fluoride in the drinking water, in German supermarkets you have pure salt, next to salt + iodine, next to salt + iodine + fluoride so that everyone can make a choice about what to consume (of course there also the additional choice of the source of sea salt with salt mine salt) .
Malpractice lawsuits do exist but they are less in number and the payouts are lower.
One likely explanation to me seems to be that there is low confidence in achieving results that prove the suggested “extremely huge” impact, and an inherent risk of being reduced to the efficiency level of chicken soup.
That sounds to me like you haven’t really thought about the case. NAC has a well validated effect for clinical practice and is a routine medication and running the study for what is essentially off-label use of NAC wouldn’t discourage the on-label use of it which is driving most of the sales.
When ill the body needs cysteine both for glutathione production and for mucus production. NAC is given to help with mucus clearance when patients have problems with that. It’s ironically a supplement that the same doctors office gave me in the previous visit when I came with an acute respiratory tract infection. NAC isn’t an esoteric supplement.
I think directionally the policy of the current US administration of moving the NIH to be less of a servant of Big Pharma is the right step, even when they might mess it up in practice.
I’m not sure if this is intended to be a joke, but the primary reason there’s “AI Water usage” is that it seems to be a straightforward way to cool territorial data centers. The data centers that Elon Musk wants to put into orbit don’t use any water. If you have a Dyson sphere that power a giant AI datacenter I would expect it not to have any water usage either.
All support “modest benefits”.
Tamiflu also only provides modest benefits and doctors still give it to patients. The benefits are larger than the benefits of standard of care. If those benefits generalize, Galen with his theory of the four humors, Traditional Chinese Medicine and a lot of other traditional systems of medicine outperform the standard of care.
I do think that’s extremely huge. If you would approach this from a modern medicine perspective you can also simply attempt to increase the dose to get a bigger effect.We do that people with genetic defects that produce glutathione deficiency suffer from recurrent infections. While that does not prove that the average person has a clinical problem where glutathione would reduce infections, it makes it pretty clear that at least some people do and from a mainstream medicine perspective you would want to target them to fix their glutathione deficiency. There seem to be some practical issues where glutathione in different tissues might have different levels and thus testing for glutathione deficiency isn’t straightforward, but this should provide motivation for the research agenda.
Sorry, I don’t subscribe to this. “The medical community” is vastly diverse and merit is not only gained through patentable research.
You need more than the desire to have your merit recognized to raise millions of dollars for a clinical trial.
This is the same dynamic that lead to the medical community getting the simple question of COVID19 being airborne wrong at the beginning of the pandemic that I had no problem getting right. A lot of the research is centered around the needs of big pharma.
If you have another answer why nobody tried to repeat the trial or do another trial to give glycine + NAC vs. NAC vs. Placebo to maybe build glutathione even better, I’m happy to hear that answer. The chatbots that I asked didn’t really come up with another answer.
“My doctor just said, she doesn’t know of any evidence” is a summary of a conversation happening in German.
I think the exact wording was something like “Es gibt dafür keine Evidenz. Ist gibt nur etwas für einen schwachen Effekt für Echinacea”. I’m less certain for the wording for the second sentence.
I don’t think my doctor was bad. I think she was doing her job the way she’s supposed to and that’s kind of the reason why asking her about this issue wasn’t useful and it’s better to discuss these kind of questions with chatbots.
Going in I had a some hope given that NAC, glycine and glutathione are are all textbook substances. Genetic glutathione-synthesis disorders causing recurrent infections is something that mainstream medicine does recognize. Glutathione being important and not some weird body work intervention (of the kind that I think increased my collagen turnover and created the increased glycine usage that left less for glutathione) that interacts with pathways that aren’t in the textbooks.
“I don’t know” is actually a pretty good response when your doctor doesn’t know.
That’s not what they actually said, they did make the wrong claim that there’s no evidence for NAC / glycine helping prevent illnesses.
They can tell you if what your doing is far outside the bounds of Normal Standard of Care
I do like health results that are outside of what you get from Normal Standard of Care, so that’s not really very helpful information.
But modern medical care, as normally practiced, is not actually capable of the level of personalized medicine you’re asking for.
That basically means that asking doctors for personalized medicine questions doesn’t really work. On the other hand, chatbots are able to help with personalized medicine.
Sidenote: your cited study is rather old. Has there been no new research since 1997? This would indicate it is not something the medical community feels is worth following up on.
Yes, that says quite bad things about the medical community that they are only focused on things that can be patented to make money. It’s another reason to be distrustful of doctors.
How to have a slight effect on common infections and influenza is definitely not top of mind.
We are not talking about slight effects. We are talking about an extremely huge effect that unfortunately didn’t get studied more to be well validated because it’s not in the financial interest of the system to do so.
The effect for chicken bone broth on reducing length of acute respiratory tract infections according to the literature review is 1-2.5 days reduction which is more than tamiflu’s 0.5-1.5 days while it’s a more general treatment that doesn’t require you to test for the specific virus than you can give it.
The N-acetylcysteine effect is comparable to influenza vaccines but more general “only 25% of virus-infected subjects under NAC treatment developed a symptomatic form, versus 79% in the placebo group”.
The reason why it’s okay for a primary care doctor to be unaware is that primary care doctors are supposed to practice medicine based by relying on the general treatment guidelines being good and not supposed to practice based on what individual studies that haven’t been replicated say.
On the other hand, NIAID and it’s equivalents all around the world not wanting to study whether those huge effects hold up is not okay.
The Problem with Asking your Doctor
In the new post window there’s an option to link LW docs with Claude. I can’t find the allowlist for domains in the Claude menu. Is that because I only have the free version or did they remove it?
Anthropic negotiated a great deal and gave up the practical limits that are relevant to the military about using their models for cyber attacks, censorship and disinformation campaigns in the process.
There are a lot of claims with which I would agree with if you ask me but I wouldn’t use them in a reasoning chain on my own because they never crossed my mind.
A lot of complex reasoning rests on having reliable basics on which you can reason.
When I’m talking about BPC-157, then being trained I bioinformatics it feels pretty obvious to me that if BPC-157 is a real peptide that’s part of a protein called BPC I should be able to look up the gene for BPC sequencing databases. There’s the dogma of molecular biology, proteins come from genes.
If I would ask anyone at the bio-hacking about whether they agree with the dogma of molecular biology and that this means that there should be a gene to look up the probably would say they agree. Yet, somehow the argument does not convince people who believe in BPC-157 that it’s bogus.
Explaining the dogma of molecular biology and our great success at gene sequencing that actually sinks in isn’t easy.
If you find yourself writing something very obvious, it becomes more important to ask: “How can I make this point in a similar way that really sinks in so that the reader can actually use it and rely on it?” instead of just “Have I made a clear logical argument for it?”.
Glycine is water soluble and slightly sweet tasting. 10g readily solves in a glass of water.
As it’s sweet it does encourage your body to produce some insulin which could be an issue for some people but probably not for just trying it out for a few weeks for most people.
Inhalation of humid air is a standard treatment for dealing with mucus better in medicine and pretty well studied. It does not cut illness duration by 1-2.5 days. If you look for example at the Mayo Clinic page for influenza treatments that does not rise to the level of standard recommendation.
I think it’s pretty stupid that when I was with pneumonia and influenza in the hospital I did not get heated water for my normal drinking water, but the effect sizes involved are smaller.
There are quite many ways to give people humid air, it does not explain why so many different traditions ended up with chicken broth soup in particular. The thing that distinguishes this specific kind of soup is the glycine, hyaluronan and a few other substances that exist in connective tissue and can be helpful supplements for connective tissue issues like wrinkles and joint pain.
I don’t think you can accurately predict what superpowers do when you ignore their internal politics.
If you take the invasion of Ukraine by Russia it’s worth understanding why Putin gained an increase in both domestic approval and power through it.
I feel like LLMs try to make everything clear and explicit. Good writing often has multiple layers of meaning and keeps some of the points implicit. An LLM on it’s own will never make an implicit point that 20% of the readers are supposed to get.
If there seems to be an important point that maybe 20% of the readers will get, the instinct of the LLM is it to make the point implicit.
If you have to do actual work to understand the points that requires engagement.
This might be the dynamic where the LLM does what Benjamin Zander describes beginner piano players do in The transformative power of classical music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LCwI5iErE).