Good news everyone: I’m getting into podcasting!  As part of my investigation into how scientific paradigms are created, I hosted a talk by Simon DeDeo, Professor Of Many Topics at Carnegie Mellon and the Santa Fe Institute, recorded at the recent ILIAD conference in Berkeley. He discusses the idea of explore vs exploit in science ..read more

You can temporarily donate to my past covid work tax-deductibley via Manifund’s EA Community Choice. Deadline: 8/31. In my previous fundraising post I mentioned that an intention to post future projects on Manifund, a sort of non-profit GoFundMe. Shortly after that Manifund invited me to apply for retroactive funding as part of their Effective Altrusim ..read more

Perplexity is the first generalized AI chatbot I’ve found useful enough to integrate into any part of my daily workflow, much less across multiple domains. It speeds me up enough that I’m planning an increase in my freelancing rate. Perplexity has three key advantages: The citations are a bigger deal than they sound at first ..read more

Introduction Recently we (Elizabeth Van Nostrand and Alex Altair) started a project investigating chaos theory as an example of field formation.[1] The number one question you get when you tell people you are studying the history of chaos theory is “does that matter in any way?”[2]. Books and articles will list applications, but the same ..read more

Short version It has always felt like a gift that people read things I write, and I enjoyed reciprocating that by sharing my writing for free.  Until recently I had enough income to pull that off and still cover material needs. That is no longer true, and while it is not an urgent problem, I ..read more

Last month I posted about humming as a cheap and convenient way to flood your nose with nitric oxide (NO), a known antiviral. Alas, the economists were right, and the benefits were much smaller than I estimated. The post contained one obvious error and one complication. Both were caught by Thomas Kwa, for which he has my gratitude. When he initially pointed out the error I awarded him a $50 bounty; now that the implications are confirmed I’ve upped that to $250. In two weeks an additional $750 will go to either him or to whoever provides new evidence that causes me to retract my retractio ..read more

Introduction [Reminder: I am an internet weirdo with no medical credentials] A few months ago, I published some crude estimates of the power of nitric oxide nasal spray to hasten recovery from illness, and speculated about what it could do prophylactically. While working on that piece a nice man on Twitter alerted me to the fact that humming produces lots of nasal nitric oxide. This post is my very crude model of what kind of anti-viral gains we could expect from humming. I’ve encoded my model at Guesstimate. The results are pretty favorable (average estimated impact of 66% reduction in severi ..read more

Before we get started, this is your quarterly reminder that I have no medical credentials and my highest academic credential is a BA in a different part of biology (with a double major in computer science). In a world with a functional medical system no one would listen to me.  Tl;dr povidone iodine probably reduces viral load when used in the mouth or nose, with corresponding decreases in symptoms and infectivity. The effect size could be as high as 90% for prophylactic use (and as low as 0% when used in late illness), but is probably much smaller. There is a long tail of side-effects. N ..read more

Epistemic status: I spent about 5 hours looking into this, and the next day developed covid myself.  I did a bit more research plus all of the writing while sick. So in addition to my normal warning that I have no medical credentials, you should keep in mind that this knowledge may be cursed.  Introduction Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray, sold under the brand name Enovid, is a reactive compound that kills viruses (and I suspect taxes your nasal tissue). It has recently been tested and marketed for treatment of covid. The protocol I found in papers was 2 sprays per nostril every 2-3 hours, a ..read more

Three months ago I suggested people consider inositol for treating combined vague mood issues and vague stomach issues. I knew a few people who’d really benefited from it, and when one talked about it on his popular Twitter account several more people popped up thanking him for the suggestion, because it fixed their lives too. But those reports didn’t come with a denominator, which made it hard to estimate the success rate; I was hoping mentioning it on my blog and doing a formal follow-up to capture the non-responders would give a more accurate number. Unfortunately, I didn’t get enough peopl ..read more