Elizabeth

Karma: 15,639

Elizabeth 26 Apr 2024 3:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: kave’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
I think that’s their guess but they don’t directly check here.
I also suspect that it doesn’t matter very much.
- The sinuses have so much NO compared to the nose that this probably doesn’t materially lower sinus concentrations.
- the power of humming goes down with each breath but is fully restored in 3 minutes, suggesting that whatever change happens in the sinsues is restored quickly
- From my limited understanding of virology and immunology, alternating intensity of NO between sinuses and nose every three minutes is probably better than keeping sinus concentrations high^[1]. The first second of NO does the most damage to microbes^[2], so alternation isn’t that bad.
I’d love to test this. The device you linked works via the mouth, and we’d need something that works via the nose. From a quick google it does look like it’s the same test, so we’d just need a nasal adaptor.
Other options:
- Nnoxx. Consumer skin device, meant for muscle measurements
- There are lots of devices for measuring concentration in the air, maybe they could be repurporsed. Just breathing on it might be enough for useful relative metrics, even if they’re low-precision.
I’m also going to try to talk my asthma specialist into letting me use their oral machine to test my nose under multiple circumstances, but it seems unlikely she’ll go for it.
1. ^
  obvious question: so why didn’t evolution do that? Ancestral environment didn’t have nearly this disease (or pollution) load. This doesn’t mean I’m right but it means I’m discounting that specific evolutionary argument.
2. ^
  although NO is also an immune system signal molecule, so the average does matter.

Elizabeth 24 Apr 2024 20:55 UTC
18 points
3
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Check my math: how does Enovid compare to to humming?
Nitric Oxide is an antimicrobial and immune booster. Normal nasal nitric oxide is 0.14ppm for women and 0.18ppm for men (sinus levels are 100x higher). journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…
Enovid is a nasal spray that produces NO. I had the damndest time quantifying Enovid, but this trial registration says 0.11ppm NO/hour. They deliver every 8h and I think that dose is amortized, so the true dose is 0.88. But maybe it’s more complicated. I’ve got an email out to the PI but am not hopeful about a response clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05109…
so Enovid increases nasal NO levels somewhere between 75% and 600% compared to baseline- not shabby. Except humming increases nasal NO levels by 1500-2000%. atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.116….
Enovid stings and humming doesn’t, so it seems like Enovid should have the larger dose. But the spray doesn’t contain NO itself, but compounds that react to form NO. Maybe that’s where the sting comes from? Cystic fibrosis and burn patients are sometimes given stratospheric levels of NO for hours or days; if the burn from Envoid came from the NO itself than those patients would be in agony.
I’m not finding any data on humming and respiratory infections. Google scholar gives me information on CF and COPD, @Elicit brought me a bunch of studies about honey.
With better keywords google scholar to bring me a bunch of descriptions of yogic breathing with no empirical backing.
There are some very circumstantial studies on illness in mouth breathers vs. nasal, but that design has too many confounders for me to take seriously.
Where I’m most likely wrong:
- misinterpreted the dosage in the RCT
- dosage in RCT is lower than in Enovid
  - Enovid’s dose per spray is 0.5ml, so pretty close to the new study. But it recommends two sprays per nostril, so real dose is 2x that. Which is still not quite as powerful as a single hum.

Elizabeth 24 Apr 2024 16:55 UTC
3 points
0
on: My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia
I curated this post because
1. this is a rare productivity system post that made me consider actually implementing it. Right now I can’t because my energy levels are too variable, but if that weren’t true I would definitely be trying it.
2. lots of details, on lots of levels. Things like “I fail 5% of the time” and then translating that too “therefore i price things such that if I could pay 5% of the failure fee to just have it done, I would do so.”
3. Practical advice like “yes verification sometimes takes a stupid amount of time, the habit is nonetheless worth it” or “arrange things to verify the day after”

Elizabeth 23 Apr 2024 2:53 UTC
33 points
4
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Brandon Sanderson is a bestselling fantasy author. Despite mostly working with traditional publishers, there is a 50-60 person company formed around his writing^[1]. This podcast talks about how the company was formed.
Things I liked about this podcast:
1. he and his wife both refer to it as “our” company and describe critical contributions she made.
2. the number of times he was dissatisfied with the way his publisher did something and so hired someone in his own company to do it (e.g. PR and organizing book tours), despite that being part of the publisher’s job.
3. He believed in his back catalog enough to buy remainder copies of his books (at $1/piece) and sell them via his own website at sticker price (with autographs). This was a major source of income for a while.
4. Long term grand strategic vision that appears to be well aimed and competently executed.
1. ^
  The only non-Sanderson content I found was a picture book from his staff artist.

Elizabeth 23 Apr 2024 1:28 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: angelinahli’s comment on: Nitric oxide for covid and other viral infections
long shot: did you find anything evaluating the dose of nitric oxide delivered by enovid? I want to compare it to humming but can’t find any quantification of the spray.
EDIT: followed the trial link you gave and found at 0.11 ppm*hour. I’m guessing that is the actual dose divided by 8 (since they administer 3x/day), but I’d love to be sure.

Elizabeth 20 Apr 2024 20:44 UTC
11 points
2
on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
A very rough draft of a plan to test prophylactics for airborne illnesses.

Start with a potential superspreader event. My ideal is a large conference, many of whom travelled to get there, in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation and air purification, in winter. Ideally >=4 days, so that people infected on day one are infectious while the conference is still running.
Call for sign-ups for testing ahead of time (disclosing all possible substances and side effects). Split volunteers into control and test group. I think you need ~500 sign ups in the winter to make this work.
Splitting controls is probably the hardest part. You’d like the control and treatment group to be identical, but there are a lot of things that affect susceptibility. Age, local vs. air travel, small children vs. not, sleep habits… it’s hard to draw the line
Make it logistically trivial to use the treatment. If it’s lozenges or liquids, put individually packed dosages in every bathroom, with a sign reminding people to use them (color code to direct people to the right basket). If it’s a nasal spray you will need to give everyone their own bottle, but make it trivial to get more if someone loses theirs.
Follow-up a week later, asking if people have gotten sick and when.
If the natural disease load is high enough this should give better data than any paper I’ve found.
Top contenders for this plan:
- zinc lozenge
- salt water gargle
- enovid
- betadine gargle
- zinc gargle

Elizabeth 19 Apr 2024 3:19 UTC
16 points
9
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: LessOnline Updates Thread
I’m not a parent, but if I was I expect I would need this locked down before I could commit. And I would need to decide on attendance earlier, because traveling with kids is a lot more work.

Elizabeth 19 Apr 2024 3:18 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: LessOnline Updates Thread
I’m on deck to run something but haven’t decided what yet. Some overlapping possibilities I’m toying with:
1. Practicum for CFAR-style “could you solve this in an hour?” focused on health, environmental health, and, uh, looking for a good term for things like cognition improvement and better fitness. Super health?
2. Emotional titration
3. ?

Elizabeth 14 Apr 2024 18:20 UTC
10 points
1
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
First of all, thank you, this was exactly the type of answer I was hoping for. Also, if you still have the ability to comment freely on your short form, I’m happy to hop over there.
You’ve requested people stop sugarcoating so I’m going to be harsher than normal. I think the major disagreement lies here:
> But the entire point of punishment is teaching
I do not believe the mod team’s goal is to punish individuals. It is to gatekeep in service of keeping lesswrong’s quality high. Anyone who happens to emerge from that process making good contributions is a bonus, but not the goal.
How well is this signposted? The new user message says
Followed by a crippling long New User Guide.
I think that message was put in last summer but am not sure when. You might have joined before it went up (although then you would have been on the site when the equivalent post went up).
Going against the consensus is *probably* enough to get one rate-limited, even if they’re correct
For issues interesting enough to have this problem, there is no ground source of truth that humans can access. There is human judgement, and a long process that will hopefully lead to better understanding eventually. Mods or readers are not contacting an oracle, hearing a post is true, and downvoting it anyway because they dislike it. They’re reading content, deciding whether it is well formed (for regular karma) and if they agree with it (for agreement votes, and probably also regular karma, although IIRC the correlation between those was less than I expected. LessWrong voters love to upvote high quality things they disagree with).
If you have a system that is more truth tracking I would love to hear it and I’m sure the team would too. But any system will have to take into account the fact that there is no magical source of truth for many important questions, so power will ultimately rest on human judgement.
On a practical level:
My comments can be shorter or easier to understand, but not both. Most people will communicate big ideas by linking to them, linking 20 pages is much more acceptable than writing them in a comment. But these are my own ideas, there’s no links.
Easier to understand. LessWrong is more tolerant of length than most of the internet.
When I need to spend many pages on something boring and detailed, I often write a separate post for it, which I link to in the real post. I realize you’re rate limited, but rate limits don’t apply to comments on your own posts (short form is in a weird middle ground, but nothing stops you from creating your own post to write on). Or create your own blog elsewhere and link to it.

Elizabeth 9 Apr 2024 23:49 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
It feels like you want this conversation to be about your personal interactions with LessWrong. That makes sense, it would be my focus if I’d been rate limited. But having that converesation in public seems like a bad idea, and I’m not competent to do in public or private^[1].
So let me ask: how do you think conversations about norms and moderation should go, given that mod decisions will inevitably cause pain to people affected by them, and “everyone walks away happy” is not an achievable goal?
1. ^
  In part because AFAIK I haven’t read your work. I checked your user page for the first 30 commenets and didn’t see any votes in either direction. I will say that if you know your comments are “too long and ranty, and they’re also hard to understand”, those all seem good to work on.

Elizabeth 7 Apr 2024 23:35 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Alex Vermillion’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
I initially downvoted because I thought the complaint missed too many key factors. I’ve since changed to upvote, because I think the post provoked a good discussion.

Elizabeth 7 Apr 2024 22:14 UTC
8 points
11
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
AFAIK there was a wave of rate limits, not bans. I think it’s a huge error to conflate those. Most importantly, you can complain on-site about being rate limited in a way you can’t complain about being banned.
I have complaints about implementation but the theory seems sound. I’d like the team to put more work into implementation or treat false positives as more costly, but that’s easy for me to say since I’m not the one that has to do it.
Complaints:
1. the combination of imperfect filtering and no communication seems bad to me. How are people supposed to know their ban was a mistake and asking will help, instead of annoying mods further.
2. “retroactive to a year ago” sounds pretty bad to me. But I don’t think that’s the right frame. I think the team meant to intervene and not rate limit people who’d had an issue 11 months ago but have been great since. habryka described at least one ban as a mistake in comments on this post, so sounds like this was inconsistent. But conceptually I think it was supposed to be “we have a new tool for detecting people who have been below standards this entire time” not “we raised the bar”.

Elizabeth 6 Apr 2024 22:12 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Jeff Pyles’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”
@Raemon told me to be aggressive with things like new lines and ellipses to alter the pacing.

Elizabeth 6 Apr 2024 21:27 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
But when rereading, I see that you don’t say what to do about these comments. You only point out negative effects. What is your proposal?
Rate limiting. If I was pope I’d make a few tweaks, but I think the concept is fundamentally sound and the implementation good enough.

Elizabeth 6 Apr 2024 1:28 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
It sounds like you don’t think there should be any user-focused mod response between “nothing” and “banned”. Is that correct?

Elizabeth 5 Apr 2024 19:43 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: angelinahli’s comment on: Nitric oxide for covid and other viral infections
Thanks, this is great.
Another option for the gap between in vivo and in vitro- NO is an immune system signal molecule. It’s possible it has no direct effect but stimulates the immune system enough to be useful.

Elizabeth 5 Apr 2024 19:22 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
[disclaimer here]
My comments are too long and ranty, and they’re also hard to understand. But I don’t think they’re wrong or without value.
I don’t think “wrong or without value” is or should be the bar. My personal bar is heavily based on the ratio of effort:value^[1], and how that compares to other ways I could spend my time. Assuming arguendo that your posts are correct, they may still be fall below the necessary return-on-effort.
That said, I think (and I believe the real mod team agrees) that Short Form should have a much lower bar than posts or comments on other people’s posts. That’s a lot of its purpose.
1. ^
  including the fact that rarer or more complicated views are often both more work and more valuable.

Elizabeth 5 Apr 2024 2:05 UTC
26 points
15
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
[note: I am technically a mod but in practice that means I give the team my opinions and occasionally curate something. The following is my opinion. I think it has some overlap with team members’ opinion but I don’t know how much, or how much of that opinion has made it into policy]
A counterintuitive effect is that bad comments are often worse for SNR than bad posts. Bad posts seem like they’d be worse, because posts are more important than comments and are placed higher. But karma works better (on average) on posts: bad or mediocre posts get enough downvotes, or at least not enough upvotes to compete, and gently disappear. But comments’ views scale with the viewership of the original post, so a mediocre comment on a popular post will get lots of attention regardless of its karma. If a post gets enough comments that low karma comments can’t get much attention, they still compete with new high-quality comments, and cut into the attention for the latter.
And even if no one else sees a bad comment, they are still likely to be read by the author and annoy them. If this gets bad enough, authors may stop reading their comment sections or stop posting altogether.

Elizabeth 3 Apr 2024 21:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: LessOnline (May 31—June 2, Berkeley, CA)
I’m on that list (in green) and first heard about this when I was invited, so I knew what the list meant going in. But as a general person with opinions, I felt that having an “invitee” list, especially one that mixed in confirmed attendees, was misleading and mildly manipulative. But since almost everyone finds it intuitive, including @Zack_M_Davis, most of my concerns are allayed.

Elizabeth 31 Mar 2024 22:40 UTC
23 points
5
on: How does it feel to switch from earn-to-give?
After 9 years in software, I switched to still being in software but for a noble purpose (mobile money in Africa), and then to nebulous indirectly-x-risk-related research work. My guess is my experience will not say much about yours.
When I made the change, I didn’t particularly feel like I was trusting myself more. My first reason is “the research on M-PESA in Kenya is too strong to argue with”, although the part where I’d read that research for ~fun and trusted my interpretation maybe counts as trust in myself. But also: I wasn’t happy at my old job and would have been leaving anyway, my new job had a much better set up for me even before mission considerations, everyone I knew supported the change (and my later move to independent work).
The move did improve my sense of how valuable I was and how much I was allowed to invest in myself. I think it’s good that that happened but it would have been better if I hadn’t needed a mission to justify it.
You’ve talked about “becoming an adult” and “trusting yourself (to make world-improving plans)” as almost synonyms, and I think that’s a mistake. If I was going to make a road map to impactful and responsible adulthood it would be as follows (hastily written, undoubtably missing stuff, etc):
1. be stable and functional: take care of your health, your finances, and your housing. Be capable of showing up on time and keeping comittments. Have enough savings to weather emergencies and transitions without worry.
2. Be able to be a decent friend, family member, and possibly neighbor (which includes creating enough slack in your life you have capacity to help people). Don’t be a parasite on any system.
3. Work on other people’s projects
  1. Develop valuable skills, if you haven’t done that for #1
  2. Develop the skill of being useful to a boss, who may make decisions you disagree with and won’t justify them to you.
    This includes knowing when and how to ask questions, push back on bad ideas, shut up and do work you disagree with, and refuse when necessary.
  3. Develop your sense of taste so you can figure out who is worth deferring to and who isn’t
  4. Develop your ability to coordinate with peers, without the boss/teacher managing the process.
  5. Develop your ability to work with people even when they are very annoying.
    Twice in short succession I had a big dispute with someone w/i X-risk community, and we went away thinking very poorly of each other. Not a big deal, there was no reason to think we’d ever have to work together. @Raemon (also the author of Earn-To-Save) told me that my complaints were legitimate but both people had valuable skills, and saving the world necessarily involved dealing with people at least that annoying.
    
    So I did mediation with both. One went great, we are now friendly and have a lot of respect for each other. The other was a less smashing success but was good enough that when it looked like our projects would intersect I felt annoyed but not doomed.
4. Gradually expand your sense of taste and ability to work autonomously. Any good boss wants to give you work off their plate, they will be delighted if you gradually work your way up to being an independent agent they can give vague instructions to do
5. Eventually you have the choice to your found your own thing (with or without co-founders) or work for someone, and the wisdom to know which will best accomplish your goals.