Substack: http://hedonicescalator.substack.com/
Fiction: https://hedonictypewriter.substack.com/
The hedonic treadmill posits that human happiness returns to a stable set point regardless of external perturbations. As a transhumanist, I posit that we can do better.
All of my art and writing is free as in beer, and free as in freedom.
See my response to Shoshannah.
You seem worried that finding out the effect is placebo will make it stop working, but this is at least partially a matter of attitude. Would it not be empowering to know you can improve your life so drastically just by believing in it?
But I do understand your concerns. Here is the methodology I suggest, based on similar experiments I’ve run on myself. I tried to make it as specific and actionable as possible.
Preparation:
Decide what you plan to measure during your experiment, and prepare any equipment, including a spreadsheet to track your data. At minimum, I recommend a smartwatch to monitor sleep, plus self-reported mood and energy at designated points throughout the day.[1][2]
Decide how many days you are willing to run this experiment. Call this number 2n.[3]
Get small ziploc bags, sticky notes, a pencil, powdered sugar,[4] and size 000 gel capsules.
Repeat n times: fill 10[5] gel capsules with 10g of glycine, write “G” on a sticky note, fold the sticky note so you cannot read it, and place it in a ziploc bag with the 10 capsules.
Repeat n times: step 2, but you fill the capsules with sugar and label the sticky notes “P” instead.
Place all ziploc bags in a designated bin.
For the next 2n days you run the experiment:
Each morning, randomly select a ziploc bag from the bin.[6] Remove the sticky note, label it with the date, and set it aside. Take half the capsules.
Gather any scheduled data throughout the day, such as recording your energy level.
During the evening, take the other half of the capsules.
Try to be consistent about when you take measurements. Depending on your schedule, it might make sense to run trial days only on the weekdays.
Some alternative options:
Consider deciding beforehand what statistical tests you will run to adjudicate the final data
If you expect that glycine supplementation will have significant compounding effects over several days, you can instead design the trial to assign yourself to a whole week on placebo or glycine at a time
You can include a 1g or 5g/day arm to test for a dose-response relationship
Figure out exactly what data you plan on gathering beforehand so you don’t have to change anything on the fly. Taking freeform notes is always a reasonable addition, but it can be harder to interpret this data.
There are lots of options. For example, you can include a reaction time and/or a dual n-back test, if you think you’ll stick with doing those every day and you expect to see a signal, but if you’re anything like me you will quickly lose interest. Design an experiment you will actually carry out. The bottom line is that if glycine works as well as you think it does, there is something you can measure that will prove this.
I recommend at least n=10, though I would do n=30 or more. You can (ask Claude to) estimate how many data points you need to gather given your predicted effect size and your threshold for statistical significance.
Or placebo substance of your choice. When testing nootropics, I typically use caffeine as an active placebo, but I don’t have a specific recommendation for glycine.
I find that size 000 capsules can hold about 1g of powder, and you’ve been taking 10g per day, but obviously the number of capsules does not actually matter.
If you find that you can visually distinguish the placebo pills from the glycine ones, you will have to close your eyes while taking or interacting with the pills. This may seem annoying, but I’ve done this before and it’s not that bad. It’s for science.
I disagree that modern medicine has an inadequate concept of “deficiency.” Insofar as we are bad at making recommendations for optimal function v.s. curing disease, it is because it is harder to gather evidence for the former: smaller effect sizes, more variance between people, and so on.
So after reading that I grabbed my new pills, and took them, and …
My body and mind flooded with an overwhelming sense of relaxation and ease. It was so much I could hardly move. It’s like I got hit with a fluffy relaxation and well-being hammer.
Per my recent post, Don’t be the vitamin B guy, I am compelled to ask if you have done a blinded test of glycine. Given how dramatic you claim the effects to be, it should be easy to validate your results. I’d be happy to suggest a more detailed methodology if you are interested.
It is obvious and widely known that injections have physiological effects. This is why I suggested using a saline injection as a placebo, which is what you would typically do in a clinical trial. This comment misses the point and is low quality.
truly are someone who speaks English as a second language, and you wrote the post in your native tongue, only using Claude to translate it.
Would this result in Claudeisms? In my experience, you can simply prompt an LLM to translate only while lifting the original style across languages.
I experience jealousy, though not in a romantic context, and I don’t feel like it is a primitive emotion but rather, always caused by another concern like the ones listed.
I read it back in 2024 and felt the same way. It seems to be addressing a niche within a niche. Nothing wrong with that if it finds the right audience, but certainly a surprising perspective to me.
Several inaccuracies on cluster headaches. Psychedelics are an emerging treatment for cluster headaches, but from current data, they don’t seem to outperform triptans, the legal and readily available standard of care. Both drug classes are effective for 70-80% of patients. Psychedelics might still be worth pursuing if they work for different patients, or if they are better suited to faster-acting ROAs, or if they have a different side effect profile some patients may favor, but the “there is a miracle cure to cluster headaches blocked solely by legal problems” is simply not true. It is also not true, to my knowledge, that people with cluster headaches “often” attempt suicide during attacks.
I also think rationalists blogging on this subject tend to… mythologize the condition.
I was acquainted with someone that suffered from cluster headaches. He had the same hang-ups many men do about seeking medical care (he may object to this characterization), so even though standard treatment options were highly effective at aborting his attacks, he didn’t stock up and occasionally found himself without. He disliked psychedelics and refused to try them, despite having DMT vapes readily available during attacks that would kick in 30 minutes faster than triptans. He was altogether a smart, functional person that clearly could’ve tried harder to treat his cluster headaches if he wanted to. It just wasn’t a priority for him.
He acted like a stubborn guy with a chronic illness he had learned to live with, not some poor tortured soul cursed with the worst disease ever. While I recognize that symptom severity varies between patients, I don’t think this exaggerated portrayal of cluster headaches is accurate or helpful.
Here’s the weird part: Roughly half of those who reported they were happy also indicated they did not want to be resuscitated in the case of cardiac arrest.
How are we explaining that?
Not weird at all. Resuscitation following cardiac arrest is an extremely intense, painful process. For patients medically fragile at baseline already, it carries close to no chance of meaningful recovery. It’s common for elderly retired doctors to preemptively get DNR orders, despite good quality of life, because they know the odds.
“I’m satisfied with my life” and “If my heart stops, I would rather die peacefully than go through torture and traumatize my family before dying anyways” are compatible stances.
I can’t think of a gentler way to put this, so
one time i unclenched something just ’cause i noticed it was clenched. then i spent two years straight processing a bunch of repressed memories, which, of course, i did not KNOW were behind a tiny tension in my belly
This is somewhere between woo and delusion. Do you agree?
Pick a different psychoactive substance for each of your pseudonyms, and write only under the influence of that substance.
You’re falling for the Goomba Fallacy.
insisting that you are a different gender is incompatible with insisting that genders do not exist
I agree it would be inconsistent to endorse “genders exist because I have one” and “genders do not exist.” I have never met a trans person that believes both.[1] The gender-abolition adjacent trans people I’ve met have viewpoints closer to “gender is real and bad” or “being transgender is a form of gender-nonconformity that helps break down gender norms.” For a straightforward instance of the latter, I’ve met several “politically nonbinary” people who go by they/them because they support the project of making all English pronouns gender-neutral, as part of the broader goal of making gender less salient in day-to-day-life, and aim to lead by example.
I could describe these viewpoints in more detail if you’re curious, but I am not transgender and these are not my beliefs, so I am not the right person to ask to defend them.
compare the “female brain in a male body” meme and “there is no such thing as a female and male brain
I agree it would be inconsistent to endorse “I have a female brain in a male body” and “there is no such thing as a female and male brain.” I have never met a trans person that believes both. In fact, the phrase “female brain in a male body” is something I’ve only ever heard repeated by anti-trans activists as a strawman[2] - my impression is that it is decades out of date at minimum.
“Transgender” is just a category of people. It is a mistake to expect them to all agree.
(That’s basically the conflict between the trans-positive feminists and the traditional feminists a.k.a. TERFs.)
No, it isn’t. As a certified passer of the Ideological Turing Test, I don’t think either trans-inclusive or trans-exclusive feminists would agree with your characterization. If nothing else, most TERFs would argue that primary sex characteristics matter more than secondary ones, and that behavioral or personality differences between men and women are determined by biology, not just socialization.
traditional feminists a.k.a. TERFs
This is ahistorical. Both trans-inclusive and trans-exclusive feminists have made up significant factions in the feminist movement since trans issues rose to awareness. As an example, consider the controversy surrounding Sandy Stone, a trans woman who worked for the feminist record label Olivia Records from 1974-1978. Trans-exclusive feminists protested her involvement and the record defended her; she resigned after receiving death threats from a group that showed up to her concert with guns.
Moving back earlier in history, the famous Institute for Sexual Science[3], which pioneered modern transgender healthcare, promoted many feminist causes. Lesbian feminist Helene Stöcker worked with the Institute and its founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, to advocate for women’s equality, lesbian rights, and access to abortion and contraceptives.
Moving back even further, individuals we would recognize as transgender today have fought for women’s rights long before the modern feminist movement existed. In the US, the genderless Quaker preacher Public Universal Friend (1752-1819) advocated for women’s equality and abolitionism. The formerly enslaved trans woman Frances Thompson (1840-1876) testified before Congress about her rape in the Memphis massacre, despite the personal risk this entailed, which helped pass the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871.
These are just a few examples of a long and complex history, of course, but it demonstrates that trans-exclusive feminism don’t have a unique claim to “tradition.” Trans people have fought for women’s rights before TERFs, or radical feminism as a whole, existed.
Since some portion of all people are stupid, we can assume some portion of trans people are also stupid, and hold contradictory beliefs. However, I’ve never met one. In my experience, trans people are no more likely to have contradictory beliefs than anyone else.
I’ve met people that believe some form of “intersex brain theory,” but they would all tell you “(fe)male brain” is a gross oversimplification.
You may know them as the target of Nazi book burnings in this famous photo.
I object to calling AI-generated child pornography “CSAM”—there are no children being abused. See Ozy’s post “Controversial smut as an AI alignment issue,” he makes the argument better than I can.
I’ve also found that a larger number of trans women will express discontent at the desired end-state of pronoun degendering. But I’m unsure whether this represents a real preference difference
I think it’s a real preference difference. Broadly speaking, I think trans people are either people with an understudied neuroendocrinological disorder,[1] or people ideologically aligned with some form of gender-abolition adjacent movement. You can be in both categories, but they’re not particularly related, and while the latter is predictive of “prefers a world where everyone is gender-neutral,” the former has little to do with that. Most people in the former group like being men or women, they just want to be in the right category.[2]
I also think this explains the difference between trans men and women you’ve observed. Trans men, on average, have an easier time passing than trans women. The ones you end up talking to about being trans are overwhelmingly the ones who are aligned with gender abolition; the ones who aren’t simply vanish.
I make no strong claims here whatsoever, only that it seems plausible to me that there is an underlying biological condition.
Epistemic status: vibe check. This is my best hypothesis based on people I’ve observed, not a rigorous stance, and it is obviously an oversimplification of a complex phenomenon.
I’ll be attending DEF CON and NecronomiCon this August.
This is great. I enjoyed reading this and I was glad to see that you also wrote the Klein Blue article, which I remember reading and liking but had lost track of.
Not a big comic guy. Do you recommend?
I’m confused. You said glycine has very noticeable effects, such that you forgetting to take it has obvious impacts on your sleep later that night, so why would variation in schedule make it impossible to detect its effects?
Also, you can just run trials over enough days that it averages out. I had extremely inconsistent schedules through many of my self-experiments and still found statistically significant interventions.