Rational wart removal
What’s the best way to get rid of a wart?
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Donating to SIAI, obviously.
I hereby award you this year’s prize for Widest Safety Margins.
The title of this post sounds like a strawman example of what people think is silly about Less Wrong.
That’s the point I suspect.
We have Open Threads for this kind of thing.
Prefacing a post with the word “rational” does not magically make it on-topic. The space of topics appropriate for discussion is (and should be) quite large, but I believe this lies outside it.
I’m pretty certain that was the joke.
Why do you think this post is a joke?
Because a lot of things get discussed here with a superfluous “rational” or “rationalist” attached. Of course the joke would have been much better if the author had written a longwinded article with lots of citations and math involving Bayes’ Theorem and UDT, and as it is it probably deserves to be in the negative.
On the other hand, maybe they really just did want to remove warts (rationally, of course.) It’s a crazy world out there!
Apparently this has been a problem since the 19th century at least.
And is generally not helpful.
Look up wikipedia. Quickly conclude that salicylic acid treatment is the most effective of the non-invasive treatments. If that doesn’t work (unlikely) then start to consider the interesting options like lasers and immunotherapy. (The immunotherapy option looks kind of fun. You can treat one wart topically and it makes warts elsewhere on your body go away too!)
Radical phalangectomy; it’s the only way to be sure.
Don’t you mean rational phalangectomy?
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The Aliens solution seems a bit harsh, though probably effective. I estimate P(wart comes back|wart nuked from orbit) < .1
That’s a rather timid estimate, don’t you think? Unless you consider “wart nuked from orbit” to include cases where we try to nuke it from orbit but somehow miss the intended target site.
...and miss rather badly, at that.
Well, he did say “from orbit”… And now that I think of it, he didn’t say from what orbit.
It occurs to me that languages with only a couple degrees of comparison (i.e., all those I know of) started to feel a bit “tight” a bit after learning to count above a hundred, but I didn’t become aware of the feeling until very recently (i.e., decades later).
You know how people that speak languages with fewer color names do better on some color-based tests? I wonder if that would also work for a language with seven or so degrees of comparison.
Yes, I know one can use phrases to express finer degrees, but I think the option must be much deeper in the language. One can speak English well enough without using words like “crimson”, but you need rather unusual circumstances to do without “red”. Actually, I think the ginormous number of fake words, the astronomical frequency of hyperbole in casual speech, the not quite absence of scale-related euphemisms, and even the rather frequent use of QUITE a few distinguishable levels of emphasis on comparative modifiers in both speech and text seem to suggest that I’m not the only one feeling this particular language feature restraining.
You may now return to your regular scheduled posting. I apologize for the digression.
I wasn’t aware of the colour results. A hazard of verbal overshadowing?
As far as I know the issue isn’t close to being settled, and from a glance at your link it doesn’t seem to be a related effect.
See http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-03/color-and-language and http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/news070430-2.html for examples of what I was thinking of. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen discussion about this on LessWrong, if you’re interested enough to search.
There were also reports of a few languages that didn’t have words for numbers other than (AFAI can remember), one, two and many, and their adult speakers apparently really couldn’t learn basic arithmetic or even reliably distinguish between four and five objects.
Very few studies, very hard to experiment, very many confounding variables, draw your own conclusions about validity. But it is interesting and fun to speculate :-)
Get it frozen. Feels like being snowed on really hard; wart will go away. Faster and more effective than chemical solutions but might cost more, I’m not sure.
It seems like it should be more effective but the evidence apparently doesn’t support it!
Oh, huh. I was going by what my doctor said last time I asked. It’s still faster, though.
My anecdotal, not necessarily rational evidence:
I used store-bought wart remover, used it once in the morning for a few weeks until it looked like it had gone away. It recurred. I tried the store-bought cryotreatment, but it didn’t seem to have much of an effect. I got more regular wart remover and used it again, this time using it about two weeks longer than it seemed necessary. This worked, with virtually no trace now. But I’m sure every wart is different.
With the normal wart remover, every week or so, you should go ahead and try to peel away the dead layers. Be careful not to peel too far away from the wart itself, but this will happen. When it does and you have raw skin around it, use some sort of ointment on the skin around it to prevent the acid from eating away more of it. I believe I also took some days off and just used antibiotic ointment on it. Covering it with a bandaid is helpful until it’s pretty far down. The remover gel dries and smooths so you don’t really need a bandaid for the last few weeks, if you take care not to get it too wet.
Anecdotal evidence is weak, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t rational.
anecdote: the one time I had one my doctor tried freezing and it worked.