Nitimur in vetitum đșđž
Joined August 2017
- Tweets6.4K
- Following3.5K
- Followers2.5K
- Likes204K
For interesting reasons Iâve spent more time in the US this past year than in the past 6 years combined. Some observations on the most salient changes from 2021 to 2026:
-non-core (food, energy) price inflation over these years has been considerable. >100% in most cases.
-the immigrant CDL thing is a real problem; traffic behavior of semis is noticeably more unpredictable and dangerous. Behavior in the commons (rest stops and the like) on highways has also deteriorated.
-widespread political discord has tempered somewhat
-causal sports betting has absolutely exploded among young men
-young women seem more entitled (girl asked my buddy his TC before agreeing to talk to him at a bar)âŠ. American ladies you do not understand how good you have it!
-the neologism âgaslightingâ is hilariously overused in everyday convos
-tipping culture has somehow reached its grippy tendrils into areas that youâd previously think impossible
-domestic airlines have made great improvements in all areas besides pricing
-contactless payment finally just works (somehow Europe beat us to this)
-thereâs always a new seltzer and âprotein xâ junk food du jour
-Americans are still as friendly and prosocial as ever
Contrast these particular, discrete observations to my general, continuous observations re the French:
Whatâs most salient is:
-ambient rudeness / dyspeptic behavior
-a certain selfishness to the detriment of the commons (as in expressed in things as small as side-walking behavior and driving to opaque financial transactions and the self-dealing side economies)
-the above results in necessary but highly inconvenient guardrails for a somewhat low-trust society (and I mean even among the non-immigrant French)
-a type of provincialismâand Iâll acknowledge this isnât entirely the populaceâs faultâby dint of the fact that France is a black box walled garden due to language barriers, both by being siloed on the internet and interpersonally
-politics, generally. LibertĂ©, Ă©galitĂ©, fraternitĂ© â high-minded ideals that genuinely do not exist in modern France. Further, Iâve yet to meet a French person who isnât simultaneously so confident in their views of American politics yet so wrong as to warrant serious consideration of any of their other views. Never mind the fact that most are fully willing to derogate my country on first realization Iâm American.
-tax, runaway credentialism, destructive occupational licensing; the entire premise of top-down dirigisme does not make for a robust economy nor country
-finally â and this is a little more ineffable â but communication doesnât seem to have a teleological purpose with the average French person. Itâs so incredibly hard to extract the operative piece of information in a goals-oriented discussion. Itâs a sense that substance follows style, and basal truth is often a side consideration.
I had an interesting talk this weekend with a German post-doc mathematician whoâs at Waterloo currently.
Her views are essentially mine: except in special cases modern pure math is basically useless but still a worthwhile human pursuit; many of the âsolvedâ open problems are compute-intensive, low-hanging fruit used as a means of alternative benchmark marketing; few of the mathematicians claiming to have been scooped by OpenAI have a real claim; the math capability of frontier transformer models will disproportionately advantage mid- to late career mathematicians for myriad reasons (and to a greater degree than is currently appreciated); mathematicians are cognitive misers and newer cohorts will not be as competitive as older cohorts, both due to negative selection into the field and due to LLMs being a training crutch; LLM math capability will follow a sigmoidal curve with a hard upper bound, comprising sub-sigmoidal curves according to architecture advancements; and, novel human recombination will still be necessary at the bleeding edge.
These are in vitro studies but remain compelling to me. DMSO is surprisingly neurotoxic at low concentrations in certain experimental conditions.
This is concerning because it is used as penetration enhancer and active ingredient at ~50% in Pennsaid and Rimso-50 and in several antifungal formulations to enhance drug solubility, principally through nail keratin. But, the serum concentration achieved by both systemic and topical use of these drugs still falls far below the putative apoptotic threshold.
In my view, the biggest risk is with DMSO cryopreserved stem-cell infusions, especially when administered directly into brain tissue.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2044âŠ
Truly amazing stuff!
Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) produces widespread apoptosis in the developing central nervous system
sciencedirect.com/science/arâŠ
My wife and I left Bordeaux in part because it was markedly unsafe for her to be out alone at night.
This is interesting. Debt isn't the only thing rising fast in France, violent crimes and offenses are increasing rapidly too. 45% in just a few years is a lot.
How did that happen? I thought the French were nice, cultured people who enjoy croissants in the morning and good cheese and wine in the evening with friends.
Jimmy retweeted
Hopefully that is not too infrequently! Iâve received two âred flagsâ for being a bad boy--curiously both after moving to France--and have heard that I am not appearing on my friendsâ feeds currently.
I do have a few updates:
-âpragmatic libertarianismâ is far too capacious a term - ripe for misinterpretation, not something Iâm all that keen to defend at present, and comprises a coalition that I donât want to throw in with. Iâm more rightly just a small government conservative with some (not all) laissez-faire social positions. The normative claims that flow from this are simply more consilient with the natural order.
-Saying that âCICO is trueâ is almost a thermodynamic tautology. It is true in the strict sense but the âcalories outâ portion is an imprecise load-bearer: humans vary widely in basal metabolism, which itself varies widely in its allostatic slack over time and space, and this is usually not what most people construe CICO to mean. The âCIâ portion requires refinement and extensive throat-clearing as well, so much so that I question defending this position even on purely semantic grounds.
-Straussianism is far more than a byword for âfurtive dog whistleâ or âselective delusive speechâ; itâs been co-opted as such and this is both kind of gay and represents a poverty-of-language meaning collapse.
--
Other things I may add:
-At least within mammalian species (and especially in recently âspeciatedâ ones like humans), recapitulation theory is basically true.
-Iâve been accused of being a reductive materialist by others on this thread; while Iâm not reductive, I certainly am a materialist simply by dint of the fact that I think this informs the truest model of reality, is falsifiable, and makes useful predictions (at least non-quantum reality, which is true enough for everyday sense-making purposes).
-With respect to hedonic adaptation, there is evidence that certain types of chronic pain are resistant to hedonic adaptation. I ought to add this.
-I consider myself a strict fallibilist (in the non-Popperian sense), but this does not foreclose on the existence of near dispositive fact patterns nor justified belief that form a logical nexus with those fact patterns; in fact, Iâm a fallibilist as applied to fallibilism.
-Some degree of linguistic prescriptivism is probably a good idea as the last two decades has borne out.
-The monosemanticity/polysemanticity spectrum is deeply important for understanding human meaning (and dis-meaning) systems -- as it applies across human populations, language as emergent properties of the collective mental attributes of those populations, and increasingly LLMs. Layer on Shannon Entropy in a 2x2 axis, and you have a profitable way to think about linguistic tradeoffs and supremacy.
-Slippery slope arguments are autological -- themselves often a slippery slope.
-Humans ought to use more no-no words -- if only because, like dreams, these provide out-of-sample conversational data to avoid world model overfitting
-Nicotine and caffeine are Lindy for a reason
-USA is #1, sorry
If youâre looking for some new music, check out my favorite band The Protomen, the best retro synth rock-opera band based on the Mega Man videogames. And also the only one.
They are the quintessence of earnestness without irony. The central question of their three act narrative libretto: what is the point of individual heroism when the people being saved are fundamentally incapable of taking responsibility for their own freedom? What happens when mass servility is voluntary and even rational? What happens when the masses ultimately want a savior but will accept no personal risk themselves?
The Protomen created an immersive world around these questions within a novel medium, rock ballad. These guys are clear-eyed about the nature of humanity and have found a way to assimilate it into innovative & awesome music.
Thereâs a common argument that a lower legal drinking age would habituate American youths to alcohol in such a way that results in more moderate alcohol use throughout life, as is ex hypothesi the case in Europe.
I think this is wrong for several reasons:
a) People making this case are often thinking of southern euros (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French). In my experience, northern euros display more disordered alcohol use than Americans do. Northern euros are dipsomaniacal, and this behavior is normalized.
b) American kids mostly do begin drinking around the age that euro kids do, albeit with more limited access and typically furtively.
c) The American comparative preference for hard alcohol versus beer/wine is not derived from early-age imprinting (when vodka-filled water bottles are necessary), but rather reflect different general preferences and American time efficiency.
d) Heritage Americans are simply more acquisitive, edacious, strivingâgenerally given to extremesâthan euros, and to the extent that there is a difference in rates of alcohol abuse, it is probably innate and tracks with other American pathologies of excess.
Why southern euros tend to be more moderate in their alcohol use:
Itâs interesting that variations in gene expression for both alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) go a long way to explain differential propensities for alcohol between races. While alcohol is cytotoxic, it is much less so than its immediate metabolite acetaldehyde; alcohol metabolism follows zero-order kinetics, where elimination rate is constant (like 10-15 mL pure alcohol an hour) so that acetaldehyde doesnât build up. Most drugs follow first-order kinetics where elimination and concentration are proportional as enzymes are indued.
Southern Europeans/North Africans have the longest ancestral exposure to fermented ethanol and thus have high expression of both ADH/ALDH (they like to drink but are generally temperate as the pleasant effects of ethanol tend to fleet more quickly and elicit a smaller dopaminergic response, ditto with the ill effects of acetaldehyde). Thereâs more variation among sub-Saharan and east Africans, but they have similarly high ADH/ALDH expression and tend to not be bibulous.
The dipsomaniac Northern Europeans have a long history with ethanol, but less so than Southern Euros. Generally, they have lower ADH expression and high ALDH expression (the pleasant effects of alcohol linger, but the toxic and inflammatory effects are comparatively more muted â a dangerous combo).
And the poor East Asians have lower expression of both enzymes. They enjoy ethanolâs soporific/euphoriant effects but are burdened with terrible hangovers, histamine responses fomented by acetaldehyde, and general intolerance to large quantities of alcohol. Curiously, the anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse is a strong ALDH inhibitor, which essentially induces an Asian alcohol-response phenotype to wring a strong taste aversion from over drinking.
A funny black-pill (not even sure I'm deploying that term correctly) is that the Bruce Effect (a spontaneous pregnancy termination when females come into olfactory contact w/ other males) is probably real in humans and probably accounts for a not insignificant proportion of the ~30% of spontaneous miscarriage rate globally.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_âŠ
/ SHGB is vitally important to male endocrine health. You donât need to supplement boron to artificially augment your serum free T!
SHGB is a complex glycoprotein with its own receptor (SHGB-R) and signaling pathways, primarily in the brain and repro organs, that are not well understood. It also functions as a) an androgen buffer system and b) as androgen clearance protection in the liver/kidney. Further, the megalin system (LRP2 rec) requires a bound SHGB-steroid complex to shuttle these hormones intracellularly for nuclear signaling.
Nuking SHGB with boron is hasty internventionalism, driven by the availability of crude serum biomarkers and a facile understanding that higher free T is always better.
/ Much of the âbirth-order effectâ in intelligence is explained by first born siblings trafficking viruses and bacteria to younger siblings, who are less resilient to infection:
Why some highly intelligent people appear to have slow processing speeds relative to their raw cognitive horsepower:
Itâs the shrinking covariance between cognitive subskills at higher g (Spearmanâs âlaw of diminishing returnsâ).
At the low end of intelligence, constraints are broad and global (processing speed, working memory capacity, & basic cortical efficiency). Speed tests are a strong reflection of the positive manifold.
At the high end, the constraints are on domain-specific circuitry: verbal areas (temporal + IFG), visuospatial networks, prefrontal-executive circuits. What differentiates them is the higher variance and more localized micro-architectural features of the brain: cortical minicolumn density differences, specific myelination trajectories (probably most relevant to Bohr), and broader connectivity patterns.
He probably still had relatively fast processing speed, at least at his fluid peak, but was woefully slow vis-a-vis his total processing power.
Prompted by a new episode of the âStudies Showâ, Iâve found my new favorite publication: Medical Hypotheses, a journal that will publish basically any wild biomedical study that has some degree of mechanistic plausibility. Or, at least it used to. In 2009 backlash to a paper positing that HIV does not cause AIDS ended their editorial-review-only model in favor of peer-review, which fundamentally vitiated the speculative quality of the journal. Its founding ethos was that itâs âbetter to publish ten wrong ideas than suppress one transformative oneâ. Its founder David Horrobin felt that 70s-era biomedical research was âan internally self-consistent universe with little contact with medical realityâ⊠which is now a charitable critique of these fields.
Theyâve published some interesting but probably wrong stuffâpapers on how shoe heels are the causal factor in schizophrenia, on how male facial hair abrogates all risk of skin cancer, on how manganese in shower water drives neurological disease, on how teenage acne in humans is driven by the high density of developed sebaceous glands on the superior portion of an infant (head and upper shoulders) which aid in child birth due to the disproportionate size of the human fetal skull, and how vaccines in the presence of mild vitamin C deficiency are the cause of âshaken baby syndromeââitâs just exacerbated infant scurvy.
And some highly prescient stuff: studies on the macrophage/inflammatory theory of depression, studies on the infectious causes of chronic disease (HPV & cervical cancer, H. pylori & peptic ulcer disease â but seemed to miss EBV & MS), papers on melatonin being much more than a circadian hormone, papers on nitric oxide as a universal and systemic signaling molecule, iron overloadâespecially in menâas a driver of premature aging, and studies on the hygiene/old friends hypothesis in adolescence as drivers of lifelong allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Their newer publications are more orthodox, unfortunately, but still feature studies like âhealth risks of mRNA vaccinesâ, âspeculative glutamatergic/astrocyte dysfunction mechanisms in âlong COVIDâ brain fogâ, and âhormonal influence on autism in womenâ. Overall, it was a highly noble project that has significantly narrowed its conjectural purview.
And btw, donât listen to the âStudies Showâ podcast. Itâs just two tendentious âtrust the scienceâ wordcel Brits simulating their low-resolution idea of informed science communication. At one point in this most recent episode one host even says, âI refuse to give a click to MHâs most cited study âPotential health risks of mRNA-based vaccine therapy: A hypothesisââ.
Here are some (more or less) falsifiable ideas I wouldâve proposed to the pre-2010 journal:
- The Bruce Effect does occur in humans
- Telegony does occur to some degree in humans, mediated by maternal immune priming, microchimerism, seminal fluid inducing long-term immune tolerance, and epigenetic effects on the uterine environment
- That the math for the âgay uncleâ inclusive fitness explanation of homosexuality doesnât work, rather homosexual-like/-lite traits in heterosexual men historically increased reproductive fitness at the expense of sometimes spilling over into homosexuality
- That visual, olfactory, and even chemosignals cues negatively affect fertility rates in high non-kin population density settings
- That widespread use of sunscreen has increased male rates of basal cell carcinoma
- That some proportion of modern Western xenophilia is explained by a misapplication of Hamiltonâs Rule because of ancestral co-evolution with domesticated animals
- That maternal-fetal mismatch occurs in admixtures across all established races
- That SSRIs, to the extent they work at all, function by compensatory downregulation of 5-HTP receptors over months of use and thus attenuation serotonergic signalling
- That the falling age of puberty in the past ~70 years is primarily due to kids being fatter (higher leptin = higher kisspeptin production = puberty onset)
- That variations in ADH/ALDH2 expression among different races largely explains alcohol consumption patterns
- That humans have largely evolved from a crepuscular hominid species and still retain many similar circadian patterns
- That MSG is indeed excitotoxic, just as other free amino salts like magnesium glycinate have mild psychoactive effects
- Most males are mildly homochromatic because it was protective against battle and hunting-related injury risk in our evolutionary past
- Fish oil is just as harmful to human health as other highly oxidizable PUFA seed oils and their ilk
Itâs been a while since Peter Attia put out an important + relatively novel piece of content. Heâs probably struggling to book guests these days.
But, in this podcast he gets LipoScience founder and NMR Spec lipidology pioneer Jim Otvos to lay out the (correct) case for the superiority of ApoB/LDL-P vs LDL-C to inform ASCVD risk, despite now decades-long resistance from nescient clinicians.
Otvos is a serious scientist, and this interview is well worth a listen.
youtu.be/IMbghqZ1iXI?is=rulOâŠ
/ Statins are fake & gay.
You need cholesterol for everything from all bodily steroidogenesis cascades to myelinating your neurons (your brain has considerable cholesterol content).
If youâre worried about ASCVD, remember atherogenic particle count is what matters! (ApoB, LDL-P, vLDL-P, HDL-P; Lp(a) if high familial risk, itâs highly hereditary). LDL-C, total Cholesterol are not a good proxies for managing human health.
Consider Ezetimibe, PCSK9iâs if really needed to reduce ApoB, but be wary of distinct iatrogenic harm potential with these medications.
His comments in the later part of the episode on CTEP mortality inefficacy in general and Obicetrapib inefficacy in particular were a useful corrective for me. I was previously fairly sanguine about this drug (despite the classâ poor track record) but had not considered that most of their LDL-lowering effect is offset by their small HDL-P-lowering effect, which has an inverse relationship to mortality risk.