To stay with the drug theme: I’ve had moderate success using nicotine lozenges to “jumpstart” an exercise habit. For the uninitiated, nicotine is habit-building more than it is directly addictive and slow-release forms like lozenges or patches are relatively safe. I had no trouble stopping the lozenges after a few weeks and the habit stuck.
Do be careful with this if you have any cardiovascular ailments (particularly hypertension), as nicotine is a vasoconstrictor.
This is purely speculative, but I wonder if slow reaction speed could be in any way conducive to intelligence. I also score subpar on reaction time tests and sometimes react over a second later than I’d consider typical. Afaik IQ does correlate positively with reaction speed, so this naturally isn’t the whole story, but my hypothesis would be a kind of “deep” vs “shallow” processing of sensory data. The former being slower, but able to find more subtle patterns in whatever you are perceiving, the latter being quick to respond, but also quick to miss vital information.
Only about 300 bases as well. I remember a study on SARS1 that showed higher immune response to an RBD vaccine than a full S1 subunit vaccine in mice. And while I usually trust studies on mice as far as I can throw them, it served as a good enough excuse to be a cheapskate. (And after all, I can throw mice at least moderately far...)
Thanks!
Hm, I’m not opposed to it, but given that the project is dead and any future biohacking project I’ll take on will get a different name anyway, I’m not sure if changing the name retroactively accomplishes anything. I doubt this experiment will have enough of a lasting impact to cause trouble (beyond the people who were confused by this post, for which I apologize).
edit: I’ve changed the title for now, that seems to accomplish most of what’s needed.
Not as far as I know, butThought Emporium on Youtube has a lot of tutorial videos on genetic engineering. (FWIW, Stöcker himself failed to express the protein in bacteria and iirc used CHO instead. I don’t see any intrinsic reason why E.Coli shouldn’t work, but I’d probably use HEK or CHO myself given the choice)
Purification isn’t necessary if you buy already purified protein; in my case it was just cheaper to get it in bulk and filter it myself.
Removing the his-tag reduces the low-ish risk of it interfering with the immune response, but not doing so doesn’t strike me as dangerous, it’s just a dangling chain of histidine after all (and biology doesn’t quite work like Unsong, luckily).
As for using peptide vaccines as a booster, I’m mildly optimistic given the evidence. Boosting vector vaccines with mRNA seems stronger than vice-versa, but it’s still better than only having n-1 vaccines. I could see the same being true for peptide vaccines.
FWIW, my first official and fourth overall vaccination pretty much knocked me out for two days, so perhaps my experiment wasn’t entirely without effect.
Interesting data! I made a similar calculation at the start of my studies, but in the opposite direction—I thought I had the cognitive capacity to study at a fairly rapid level, but ADHD and other projects often got in the way. So I picked a fairly tough university for my subjects (CS and mathematics in Bonn, though CS is “only” in the bottom half) and I’m happy with the result.
I’m not sure how different my experience would have been at other places—I think Germany has a much more homogeneous standard of education than the US—but my math modules definitely challenged me.
Oo, I wasn’t even aware of that, thanks for the link!
That is a DNA vaccine, so it’s more similar to the mRNA vaccines we have now in that it contains genetic data of the virus that is then built by the body itself. This one seems to contain the entire S and N proteins, not just a subunit of the S protein.
DNA vaccines are more complicated than recombinant vaccines to get right and can cause serious damage if done wrong. That and the fact that the more complex a project, the more likely I’m going to procrastinate and let it die, made me stick with the simpler recombinant approach.
At least the ELISA approach to antibody testing is one I could have borrowed, though, and in hindsight I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t think of it myself.
Hm, most of the people I’m thinking of are rather technical, e.g. Kevin Esvelt’s research on distributed secure research.
Coordination and incentive problems are of another nature and I only manage to be prescriptively optimistic. I’ve been interested in algorithms for decentralized economic planning for a while, plan to specialize in that area and am working with a local left-acc group to organize a think tank that works on these questions. Thanks to mechanism design taking off as a discipline and crypto hype fueling a lot of work on trustless computing, there’s actually a surprising amount of relevant research.
Not really, was concerned about biological X-risks before and continue to be.
I don’t currently see any plausible defense against them—even if we somehow got a sufficient number of nations to stop/moderate gain-of-function research and think twice about what information to publish, genetic engineering will continue to become easier and cheaper over time. As a result, I can see us temporarily offsetting the decline in minimum IQ*money*tech_level needed to destroy humanity but not stop it, and that’s already in a geopolitically optimistic scenario.
Luckily there are some intimidatingly smart people working on the problem and I hope they can leverage the pandemic to get at least some of the funding the subject deserves.
Yes, I originally planned to include a small section about Stöcker, but it seemed only tangentially related to the project itself and fuel for extensive political discussions.
tldr for the unintiated: Stöcker is the founder of Euroimmun, a company that makes lab chemicals and also happens to make Covid antibody tests. Through his contacts, he managed to get his hands on the spike protein DNA early and made his own recombinant vaccine candidate. He also gave this to several dozen volunteers and lab employees, which he argues falls under a loophole that allows doctors to use unlicensed medicine if no proper treatment exists. The PEI, a German medical regulatory body, however argues that this constitutes an unlicensed medical trial. He is AFAIK still facing a lawsuit, but is nonetheless occasionally vaccinating volunteers until the local police make him stop.
He was always somewhat nutty when it came to politics, though, and has gotten significantly worse during the pandemic, even reblogging “fan mail” about Bill Gates Covid Vaccine conspiracies, so I’m not sure how much faith I have in his data. It’s another argument in favor of at least testing subunit vaccines, though, since his writing about the economics of protein production (i.e. supplying Germany many times over within months) is perfectly credible.
Another OT but curious side note: His audience appears to be predominantly anti-vax when it comes to the licensed vaccines yet extremely willing to take his vaccine candidate. This surprised me—sure, I had always assumed that a large aspect of conspiracy communities is opposing anything supported by the government, but not that the specifics really don’t matter at all. Stöcker’s vaccine has all the (faux) pitfalls the anti-vax community raves against—aluminum, untested, GMO, made with embryonic cells—yet none of this matters in the slightest as long as he’s fighting The Man. Might make for an interesting post in its own right.
And yes, I took the vaccine IM with no noticeable side effects.
Excellent post! It’s interesting how this mirrors what I’ve been attempting to do over the last month—applying some of the ideas from Mark Manson’s Models (i.e. the one good dating book out there) to my general social life with surprising success. I’ve always been a bit of a reclusive guy (big surprise given that I’m on LW, I know) and the two main people I’ve tried to be more open and emotionally honest with this month have responded very positively. We cuddle, touch and have intimate conversations even though we met fairly recently, which would usually feel awkward to me, but this time it doesn’t. Additionally, it doesn’t feel like a strategy or a “move”, more like I’m just being more of myself and people like me more for it. I like it a lot.
One takeaway for me is that being too frugal with spending my weirdness points has the downside that I don’t filter for the kinds of people who are right for me. It makes it easier to get along with everyone, but harder to both build lasting connections and to feel honest about who I am.
Btw, if anyone is looking for more fun questions, School of Life has some card decks designed for introspection and getting to know each other. I’d recommend “Know Yourself” and the dating one. Some of the cards are a bit forced and Freudian, but I’ve found a few of them pretty insightful. I do introduce them as a game though, they feel too constructed to work well as random questions. Some of my favorites:
If you could be sure to achieve one thing, what would you pick? (Around LW people I specify “common accomplishment” to prevent munchkining)
Which four adjectives would you use to describe yourself and each other?
What did you enjoy as a child? How do you feel about it now?
What three works of art/media mean a lot to you and why?
List five ways in which you are quite difficult to live with.
From what preliminary legal advice I’ve received, I’m allowed to hand it out as a research chemical but anything beyond that might get me into trouble. That sadly limits me to offering it to other nerds who I can reasonably expect to use it for research purposes, but I also highly doubt that anyone outside that cluster would even be interested.
Thanks for posting this, this looks excellent.
It’s my impression that you can indeed just buy the antigen needed—the lowest price for 1mg I found was around 900€. Allowing for 10% waste, this would cover 20 individuals at 45µg each. I looked at the antigen test results first and was worried that the vaccine wouldn’t perform as well in live tests, but the neutralization results Stöcker posted are quite promising and a Nature study suggests that using 319–545 of the RBD is effective in providing immunity to live virus in primates. I don’t expect the remaining amino acids will affect the results in a major way, so this looks quite promising indeed.
I’ve asked a few people with more domain knowledge to comment on this and depending on their judgment (and access to sterile lab space) I might fund vaccines for myself and friends, given that Germany’s vaccine rollout seems to be taking its time.
Make sure you don’t have undiagnosed ADD and spend ten years of your life going from one self help technique to the next and failing to get your executive brain to use any of them.
Also, virtuous cycles are incredibly powerful for me. It’s much easier to start a big project when I have a few victories fresh in my mind than when I don’t. So I try to go for quick wins whenever I have free time. Small home improvement projects work well for me and also make my surroundings nicer.
Avoid clutter. This can double as a way to procrastinate, but I’ve found that I can focus much less in a messy place.
Have agenty friends. If not able to: Watch interviews with agenty people or read fiction about them.
For longer projects, make meditating on them a habit. I usually contrast where I am with where I want to be and why. This helps avoid shiny new things getting in the way.
The mediawiki suggestion was mine (and the whetstones, but that’s more specifically for people who cook and/or relax more easily with something to do) and it’s been surprisingly useful.
There’s always something small to add, so it can very quickly become a virtuous cycle of finding something that cheers you up and adding something to cheer up future you in turn.
Done!
I’m not the organizer, but the Cologne meetup has been happening regularly for a while. The mailing list is here and the date is decided via online poll, but always a Saturday and usually towards the end of the month.
Certain people—some of whom are in positions of enormous power—just do not give a damn about other human beings. A certain head of state in Syria comes to mind.
I’d also say that your ability to care about other people, along with overall sanity, will diminish under constant stress. That’s why “Preserve own sanity” is #1 on my rules to be followed in case of sudden world domination list and something I need to stay aware of even in my current (and normally not that stressful or important) job.
This comes up a lot—Gwern has a decent research overview on arguments why nicotine by itself isn’t particularly addictive (spoiler: MAOIs in tobacco) and there also decades of trying and mostly failing to get animals hooked on nicotine alone. As far as I can tell, society has just conflated nicotine and smoking and blamed the former for addiction to the latter.
n=1, but I personally do not feel any pull towards using patches not lozenges and ironically often forget about them.