Poster salesman
Lucent
Karma: 75
Very interested in any unique approaches and I don’t want to constrain your creativity, but I am happy to jump on a 5-minute call to rapidly exchange ideas or discuss limitations or strengths of the data, if you think that might help. Also curious which newsletter so I can thank them for the signal boost.
You are drawing out many thoughts I had not explicitly stated in the post, so thank you. The contest is offered as such because I believe I’ve already stumbled into an answer and it is buried within the data. A couple weeks here and there when I ate certain macros or walked enough steps and prematurely quit, not realizing careful retrospective analysis reveals statistically significant loss above RMR for those periods that persisted for months, before being reversed by whatever combination of factors “unlocks” raising my set point.
Added a sentence to the opener expressing the essential issue. Whether pure potatoes or meal replacement shakes, my body isn’t fooled by them. I have plenty of hunger to eat 2500 calories of potatoes or drink half a dozen shakes, so there’s no advantage over eating regular, interesting food.
If I can’t solve the mystery subtractively, a ’tide drug is the last resort. I don’t yet have a rationale I can articulate for wanting to succeed on my “factory settings” but the desire is there.
Quantopian contest, but for food intake and weight
Previously, Tourette’s occupied the same category in my mind as stuttering, a lifelong organic brain disease or wiring fault not amenable to coaching or psychiatry. However, I’m questioning this after watching The Vow, an NXIVM documentary illustrating, with video, a childhood Tourette’s sufferer be “cured” by some sort of negative reinforcement training. Upon looking up the Wikipedia, I’m surprised to find a prognosis of “80% will experience improvement to disappearance of tics beginning in late teens.” Further, there’s been an extreme uptick in Tourette’s experienced by children simply from watching TikTok videos of others’ tics, including taking on the tics they’re exposed to.
Together, these three data points have shifted my belief that Tourette’s, and perhaps stuttering, is not some physical wiring defect, but a named conversion disorder. Perhaps psychiatry already knew this and was being polite, but I did not. I understand the need to group similar behavior disorders into diseases, regardless of somatic or organic origin. However, I also see the danger in naming (or renaming) somatoform disorders like delusional parasitosis as Morgellons, giving legitimacy and cause célèbre to what are otherwise social contagions with no underlying organic etiology.
I can’t speak for others, but if one day I woke up with tics, I suspect my recovery path would be quite different depending on whether I was told, “this is a habit you can unlearn or will likely soon outgrow” or, “this is a serious, unique brain disease, and you deserve sympathy and accommodation.”
I believe consciousness mostly exists to translate complex life situations into a language that can be matched to our instincts. One of the instincts underlying testosterone regulation is probably something like: “If you are victorious in a difficult battle for status you did not expect to win, upregulate.” I doubt it’s easily fooled since your own consciousness is using your full intelligence to map the terms “difficult,” “status”, and “victorious” from the instinct script to the actual situation you’ve placed yourself in.
Televised sports exist to gamble with testosterone levels using prediction skill
Testosterone levels go up and down based on success and failure in conflicts. It indicates the likelihood you’ll win the next conflict and determines your propensity to engage in further conflict. Win a lot, your levels go up, and you’re more likely to stand your ground or even initiate a conflict. Lose a lot, and that indicator will downregulate your behavior to prevent you from risking conflicts that have, historically, not gone well for you. It’s like a built-in, unconscious hint that regulates your desire to roll a die based on how well you’ve rolled in the past.
I feel this most viscerally when battling with phone support and getting a victory or concession a strict reading of the policy would not have afforded me. The high of the win motivates me to make other calls I’ve been putting off, and I’m sure that extra motivation comes from this chemical being upregulated after success, indicating further success is possible.
What if there were a way to gamble testosterone without engaging in any conflict at all—if you could place some on the line in the hopes of getting a higher level through prediction rather than conflict? Watching sports allows such bets to be placed. First, because evolution is not stupid, you must associate yourself with one of the battling factions. You can’t make their victories yours without accepting their defeats. If you are to receive higher testosterone when your side wins, you must equally risk lower testosterone when they lose.
Sports affecting testosterone level is a well-known fact. I’m proposing that this is not an effect of recreational sports viewing, but the cause for it—to deliberately wager testosterone on one’s predictive abilities in substitution for actual combat. Further, wagers can be both safe or risky, with corresponding greater bets, like rooting for an underdog.
Sometimes, in trading, one accepts a fixed value and in exchange offers something in return of near infinite value to all of society until the end of time that others build upon.
Where can I learn more of the frontier thought on schizophrenia? The most compelling theory I’ve heard is a failure to realize one’s internal monologue is one’s own, manifested as “hearing voices.” However, if I lost that feedback loop and began hearing my thoughts as externally produced, I’d immediately think, “uh oh, schizophrenia” yet this absolutely isn’t the case for schizophrenics. What model offers an explanation as to why I’d begin to hear voices yet still maintain I’m not schizophrenic despite that being, to me, an obvious, known symptom?
Could rationalists be the worst people to be put in charge of keeping an AI in the box? We can assume:
Smarter people can convince perfectly rational dumber people of anything, even against their best interests.
Evolution figured out it can’t be guaranteed to produce the smartest brain and needs to give everyone built-in safeguards.
I’ve seen AI box transcripts in which the consensus was: the AI stayed in the box because the AI player was too “dumb” to be swayed by the nuanced, rational arguments. Instead of attributing stubbornness to lack of intelligence, is it a deliberate installation by evolution to defend against clever wordplay and manipulation? Is rationalism the ultimate “cult” as its defining feature is a volitional removal of a safeguard in place to prevent domination of values and goals by those with superior wordplay?
Are there loopholes in this mechanism specifically for one’s parents? Is that why the values given to you by your parents, whether about religion or automobile brands, are so difficult to displace? If religion’s propagation is primarily through a parental trust loophole closed to others, would that be easy to test by seeing if a preference for Ford or Chevy is just as generationally robust?
Lucent’s Shortform
I’m sure this phenomenon has a name by now, but I’m struggling to find it. What is it called when requirements are applied to an excess of applicants solely for the purpose of whittling them down to a manageable number, but doing so either filters no better than chance or actively eliminates the ideal candidate?
For example, a job may require a college degree, but its best workers would be those without one. Or an apartment complex is rude to applicants knowing there are an excess, scaring off good tenants in favor of those desperate. Or someone finds exceptional luck securing online dating “matches” and begins to fill their profile with requirements that put off worthwhile mates.
Is it possible we already have a lot of information about the impact of viral load and just don’t realize it? Ever since we switched to agriculture and civilization, the human population has had a large fraction wiped out dozens of times. I don’t think we’re descendants of merely lucky or biologically “sturdy” people, but of people whose behaviors optimized viral load or had personality traits that helped them avoid it entirely.
Could we be looking at two distinct, competing behaviors which help survival that have evolved out of the ashes of the plagues that devastated humanity? One may be mysophobia/OCD, a behavior pattern about things we cannot see. If this trait has a large hereditary component, that would be strong evidence of why it came about.
The competing strategy may be deliberately attempting to introduce a small viral load frequently to avoid a large load from something like a sneeze to the face. Based on the quantity of recent memes lamenting difficulty in not touching one’s face, perhaps there’s a genetic component to it. It seems like a stretch to suggest a face-touching gene, but with how many droplet contagious diseases have killed so many of us, one would think it would be selected against by now if it didn’t have some redemptive factor.
I’d be most convinced if population modeling showed mysophobia and frequent face-touching were rarely traits that occurred in the same person, suggesting they were opposing strategies, an attempt to avoid exposure entirely and an attempt to deliberately take on a small exposure. Would a combination of both traits compromise survival? Do people at different ages have differing severity of mysophobia or face-touching corresponding to their immune system strength? Does the quantity of each trait in comparison to its population density or type of historical plague correlate strongly enough to these traits to draw any conclusions?
Are we saying “don’t touch your face” to people who’ve specifically evolved to do just that because it got their ancestors through dozens of plagues?
As a child who repeatedly got tonsillitis several times a year, sometimes when totally isolated and sometimes later hearing everyone else around me also got a sore throat, I grew up confused as to why contagious disease tracking was a problem we’d given up on and accepted. No doctor was ever curious of the specific virus or bacteria which caused it. While no one case greatly affected my life, as a whole they very much did. Then again, I was also struck by the possibly false realization that many STDs which have followed us for thousands of years could be permanently wiped out by a couple weeks of global abstinence.
Might we begin to have an intersection of low cost, widely-available tests for every strain of most every contagious agent along with a belief that contagions running amok in civilization is not an unchangeable reality after all this? These at-home DNA tests will soon hit a critical mass of data to link together a global family tree of every human—a previously unthinkable reality that’ll suddenly become possible. I’m ready for such a critical mass in contagion tracking that makes a light bulb go off in our collective heads that contagion no longer be an essential part of civilization. Feel slightly sick or have been around someone coughing? We mailed you an envelope of 6 paper swabs for the back of your tongue that’ll change color when exposed to the viruses we’re aware are circulating in your area.
Learning that a specific RSV strain overwhelmed a daycare and infected 6 babies because my cough I got on a trip to a hotel upstate was cleaned by a chambermaid who got it from… would strongly alter my belief about the inevitability of even minor contagions in the same way the person to person tracking and quarantining of Coronavirus cases is radically altering our social and hygiene landscape right now. Even if widespread testing only shook the “people just get sick for a couple weeks once or twice a year; it happens” attitude of inevitability, it’d be worth it for that alone once it was economically feasible.
Is there general agreement that anchoring experiments are a subversion of an evolutionary trait that is generally beneficial? It’s rare to be in a group, be presented with a “random” number, and then be asked a question whose answer will be an unrelated number. Unless you have a lot of group status, it’s much less harmful to your standing to be wrong with many others frequently than it is beneficial to be right alone infrequently. It’s only recent in our evolutionary history that the balance has tipped in the other direction.
Sticky trap outrage is covert factory farm apologetics. Pretending the suffering time integral of a single mouse held still exeeds the suffering of billions of chicken and cow “instant” deaths is a way to culturally launder factory farming as humane.