Richard Hollerith. 15 miles north of San Francisco. hruvulum@gmail.com
My probability that AI research will end all human life is .92. It went up drastically when Eliezer started going public with his pessimistic assessment in April 2022. Till then my confidence in MIRI (and knowing that MIRI has enough funding to employ many researchers) was keeping my probability down to about .4. (I am glad I found out about Eliezer’s assessment.)
Currently I am willing to meet with almost anyone on the subject of AI extinction risk.
Last updated 26 Sep 2023.
The most-well-known benefit of cold stress is its ability to raise dopamine and cortisol. In a healthy person, there is diurnal variation in both of these such that for example cortisol is 2 or 3 times higher in concentration at its peak (usually between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM) than 12 hours later. Moreover a temporary trigger such as a single experience of cold stress that makes the early-morning peak higher tends to make the concentration 12 hours later lower than it would have been, so “lower physiological stress 12 hours after cold exposure” but not at the other five time points is not “a bit concerning” (as you write), it is a confirmation of one of the most often repeated explanations about the benefits of cold stress (provided that the cold exposure occurs ideally within the first hour, but definitely during the first 3 hours after getting out of a bed, as is the almost-universal recommendation as to timing).
To use cold stress effectively requires are a little flexibility. For example, ketogenesis tends to cause cortisol to stay high throughout the day and night as does “fasting” (intentionally failing to eat enough calories to survive if one kept on eating calories at that rate indefinitely), so when I’m doing either of those things it is very rare for me to choose cold stress because I have learned that the combination of cold stress (or any other trigger that raises cortisol as sharply as cold stress) and the state of chronic cortisol elevation caused by either of those things seems to prove challenging (purposely avoiding “stressful” here) to my hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (as determined by the totality of my observations of my internal state, not as determined by objective testing) -- and the challenge seems to have deleterious effects that can persist for weeks although I have reasons to believe the my hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis might be more easily affected by such challenges than most people’s.
It takes time for a person to learn how to use cold stress effectively. Not all of this learning need be book learning. It is probably not hard for most people (or rather it was not hard for me) to learn to tell from purely internal non-verbal information how stressed he currently is. If a person makes inquiries throughout the day on his current stress level and how that stress level varies in response to various triggers, then after not too many days of this, he will probably have learned enough to start deriving significant benefits from cold stress. Triggers that tend to cause a spike in cortisol are cold stress, exercise, bright light and salt. Conditions that tend to cause cortisol to remain elevated all day and all night are stress, having an infection, being in ketosis and being on a low-calorie diet.
Health interventions that require flexibility in their application are difficult for researchers (or at least our current crop of researchers) to study, but in my experience most of the value that can be obtained from health interventions has this property of the intervention’s requiring flexibility and requiring the consideration of at least a handful factors that most researchers would consider extraneous or at least too complicated to be worth tracking in their data-gathering and analyses.
When I was 17 I moved from Massachusetts where I grew up to South Florida. After only a few months, my performance (I was a student in Mass and continued to be a student in South Florida) dropped drastically and the main cause of the drop was my not applying myself (to use my father’s words) or in other words an inability for me to find the motivation to do the things my society expected of me. Everything related to school seemed to require great applications of willpower, even a simple interaction with the school’s administrative apparatus whose expected duration was less than half an hour.
I have strong reasons to believe that I could have corrected this drastic drop in my motivation and drive using what I know now about dopamine and cortisol. I now know (or believe) for example that cold stress is the single most potent lever I have for achieving a spike in coritsol and dopamine. (Exercise is another lever, and although I exercised regularly in South Florida, I did so whenever. I did not know I should be doing it in the early morning so that the raise in cortisol always caused by exercise would do the most good for my motivation and drive.)
When I lived in Mass I walked to school (as was common in those days, the 1970s) over a mile, which more days than not provided a quite large dose of cold stress. If when I arrived in South Florida, I had started to fill a bathtub in the morning, then to dump some ice in the water, then to wait for the water temperature to hit some target temperature, then get in the tub for some target number of minutes, then get out and let the rest of the ice melt, then repeat the next day, my college career would probably have been vastly more successful.
Another thing I could’ve done to increase my motivation and drive is to take great care not to expose myself to artificial light during the five-hour period starting 7 hours before my usual waking time and ending 2 hours before my usual waking time, taping foil to windows if necessary, then getting bright light during the first hour of being awake, preferably outdoor light.
I tell this story to illustrate that a little learning (both book learning and the learning that comes from simply observing one’s internal state throughout the day and noticing patterns) about cold stress and related things can be decisive. It can put you many years ahead of where you’d otherwise be.