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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2301 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 13, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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A doctor thinks I have a SLAP Shoulder labrum tear, and I’m not exactly hyped to pay for the surgery he is suggesting I need. The pain isn’t scary, it’s just dull and occasionally annoying in certain positions, some loss of strength, and I can’t sleep on one side, so I’m bargaining in my mind about whether or not I can just find some other doctor who will recommend exercises that fix this.

Regardless I think I’m going to need a couple of MRIs looked at my multiple doctors before I go through with the procedure. The post surgery recovery doesn’t sound great either, and the idea that these injuries will set back my fitness goals, and only continue to occur in the future has me bummed out about aging. What’s the point of trying to be fit if you’re guaranteed to run into injuries which cost a chunk of change, hurt, and ruin your fitness habits in the end? I always loved going to the gym and lifting weights, so this really feels like the door on something I love is closing forever slowly. Have any of you guys deal with a similar injury or situation?

I have data on some USB flash drive than I need to recover; it seems just filesystem is corrupt (e.g. unsafe removal). I had prior experience with MS-DOS filesystems, but I'm completely lost now on modern systems. And it completely bugs me that Windows asks "this USB flash drive should be formatted before use, do it(Y/N)". It wants to destroy more data on which could be very innocent mistake. This is very very despressing. I tried googling and many advices are like to destroy any remaining data on drive, at least it's good that YTer warns if beforehand and says "if you need data, go watch a different video".

I'm somewhat afraid that even a paid professional would be lax with my data, or it will cost much, and I'm very short on cash.

How do I just look at drive at sector level? In DOS, I had this in my file shell, two clicks away. Now I need to install some software which advertises itself and now what it actually does.

it is encrypted?

I guess not.

you'd probably want to try a hex reader to see if you can get the signature of the file . it's possible the header is corrupted

i have no idea which software to use. i'm sorry, what files you're talking about? the filesystem doesn't read, i'm asking what to use to read it without filesystem (sectors) did you want to say maybe MBR is corrupted?

We're entering in to the time of year when I need to diet or exercise and this year I choose exercise.

Right now I'm 220ish; my most fit weight when I was wrestling and competing in martial arts and doing manual labor was 240ish. I'm going to see if I can get at least to 230 in the next couple months without going to the gym at all.

I set up a heavy bag for extra cardio, and I'm going to move a couple tons of sand and gravel by hand over the next while, I'll see if that plus expanding my usual calisthenics will turn enough fat into muscle to get me back up there.

fit at 240? you must be really tall

Nope, short (average) king here. I just got that monke body type; no waist no neck no problem, size 38 waist size 40 shoulders size 34 legs size 42 arms, when I stand next to the gorilla enclosure at the animal park people wonder how I got out and the keepers start rolling up with the dart guns, etc and so forth.

I just put on weight really easy, so the best way for me to stay fit is to keep ahead of it by putting on tons of muscle, which I also do easily. I'm never gonna have a six pack, but I can lift your fridge and run an eight minute mile and do a 10 mile hike (not back to back unfortunately); so whatever.

Why would you choose one between diet/exercise? If you're going to pick just one, it's got to be diet. That's far more important for weight management.

Dieting doesn't work for me because I don't want to diet lol

For real though; diet is thing 1 for weight loss but if you have a healthy body thing 2 is putting on as much muscle as you can easily maintain (at least for me). When I am carrying the full amount of muscle I can get without doing heavy workouts, I would need to try really hard at the buffet to gain much weight at all. Just going around at 220 (where I am now) I barely have to watch my diet excepting around the holidays when it's feasts every 10 days and cookies in between.

The muscle gain attempt is mainly just to see if I can get back into fighting trim without being a teenager.

I thought turning fat into muscle was a meme. Why do you think bodybuilders bulk and cut so meticulously? If they could turn fat into muscle, surely they would just bulk all the time?

Sure, if you want to have a six pack and big guns you gotta do all sorts of silly shit.

The thing to remember though: if a you see somebody and they are cut, shredded, ripped as fuck: they are as weak as they will ever be with that muscle mass (note: certain genetic FREAKS excluded).

You don't have to be fully spheroid like dudes banging out 1000 lb. squats, but if you want to perform fully you gotta gain some weight.

ALSO: the point of bulking is to put on as much weight as possible because you can only gain muscle while gaining weight. Due to build and genetics I have an easier time than most gaining muscle and a harder time losing weight; so I just put on muscle until even a normal amount of exercise puts me into caloric deficit and maintain.

What's your calisthenics routine?

In the afternoon I walk the dog a couple miles, then sprint back in short sections; If I see a convenient horizontal solid I do a pullups till I start to feel it, plank until failure at the end, and If I don't feel exercised after that before I take my shower I do pushups and crunches and squats until I do.

Basically, I just do normal shit until I feel like my body has had enough, but not so much I get that lactic burn or loose feeling.

The only extra thing I do beyond gym class shit is heavy bag sprints when I think I need more cardio; which are the ultimate in full body heart rate raising exercise IMO.

I don't have a routine or record numbers; because that turns it into work instead of play and it becomes boring real quick and I quit doing it.

Having the dog around has been a godsend for fitness actually, it means I don't get to the end of the day having just mindlessly forgotten to move my body outside of work stuff at all.

FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences using Large Language Models

Another day, another AI breakthrough, this time in maths.

Mathematics has been surprisingly difficult for computers to get a hold of, which would seem weird when you consider they're made of maths themselves. For decades, automated theorem solvers were more of a curiosity rather than anything practical, with the bulk of the problem being, as I understand it, representing intuitive-to-humans (and mathematically valid) concepts/axioms in their programming language. Of late, they've gotten better, and are handy for proof-reading and ensuring no nasty little errors creep into theorems that can stretch pages and boggle even the imagination of talented mathematicians to keep straight in their head.

However, short of brute-forcing certain classes of problems through exhaustive search, novel mathematical insight remained out of the reach of both programs that can't really be called intelligent, as well as proper AI (not that this isn't invaluable, good luck solving some of those by hand).

Until now.

Deepmind, a subsidiary of Google/Alphabet (does anyone call them Alphabet? At least Meta took off), announced FunSearch, which stands for function search (I'm sure somebody finds it fun, I'll settle for interesting).

As of today, the technique (rather than a model, per se, the general approach can be slotted into most LLMs, they used PaLM 2 this time), advanced the SOTA in two particular problems, namely the Cap Set problem and Online Bin-packing.

Of particular interest is the fact that this wasn't done by brute-forcing the space of all possible programs, which as Deepmind notes, is computationally intractable because of inevitable combinatorial explosions.

FunSearch uses an evolutionary method powered by LLMs, which promotes and develops the highest scoring ideas. These ideas are expressed as computer programs, so that they can be run and evaluated automatically. First, the user writes a description of the problem in the form of code. This description comprises a procedure to evaluate programs, and a seed program used to initialize a pool of programs.

FunSearch is an iterative procedure; at each >iteration, the system selects some programs from the current pool of programs, which are fed to an LLM. The LLM creatively builds upon these, and generates new programs, which are automatically evaluated. The best ones are added back to the pool of existing programs, creating a self-improving loop. FunSearch uses Google’s PaLM 2, but it is compatible with other LLMs trained on code.

Blah blah blah, I've been awake for 27 hours, my patients are dying, and my patience is dead, I can't be arsed to clean it up further and add additional commentary for the main thread, the "Stochastic Parrot" is better than you are at practical problems, justifying why AI becoming better than us at everything needs a CW angle, fuck me, fuck you, I'm going to take a nap

It would be great to see this post in the Friday Fun thread instead of Wellness Wednesday, but I assume this was your initial purpose and I should put the blame on your sleeplessness.

The wellness part is more of a cry for help as I steadily experience temporary dementia from sleep deprivation. I'm sure "FunSearch" could also work in the fun thread.

Reading the paper, doing the set of experiments for one of the problems cost $800-1.4k. Extremely affordable!

This isn't as impressive as 'LLMs good at abstract math' would be, though. This is basically making a million copies of a smart 14 year old, telling them each to randomly tweak programs in ways that seem interesting, and running an evolutionary process on top of that for programs with high scores on some metric. As opposed to taking a LLM and teaching it 1000 math textbooks and then it spontaneously proving new theorems. Which is a thing that this paper, notably, very much doesn't do. But, you know, another paper totally might in 5 years, the field's moving quickly.

But the discovered functions are less triumphs of machine thought and more like random blobs of if statements and additions with a bunch of simple patterns (eg fig 4b, 5b, 6b). Even that's quite useful.

But the discovered functions are less triumphs of machine thought and more like random blobs of if statements and additions with a bunch of simple patterns (eg fig 4b, 5b, 6b).

DM claims that the code generated is clear enough that human evaluators can notice obvious patterns and symmetries, which would certainly accelerate things.

As far as I'm concerned, this is only the first step, PaLM 2 isn't a particularly good model, and the fact that this works at all makes it a good bet that I'll only continue to get better.

If I had to set a date on when I expect:

As opposed to taking a LLM and teaching it 1000 math textbooks and then it spontaneously proving new theorems. Which is a thing that this paper, notably, very much doesn't do. But, you know, totally might in 5 years.

It would be closer to three years, but since you and I are in agreement that it's going to happen, and soon, there's not much else to do but wait and see.

They say man plans and god laughs.

I think I’ve been pretty in-tune with the techno-capitalist zeitgeist.

Any philosophical framework needs to address death—as much a constant of life as the sun setting each day.

How does the rat-diaspora do this? Rationally of course! With statistics. But the lower parts of our brains don’t understand statistics, so the real message is this: if you’re 64 you’ll get another 16 years according to the actuarial tables. If you’re completely healthy, run daily, have a highlighted and annotated copy of your medical records—if you’re literally doing everything right and within your power to take care of yourself—you can shade that up a couple years.

But that’s not true—you can do everything right and be perfectly healthy and suddenly die anyway, as the statistics tell us.

Have you ever experienced real “denial”? When the facts tell you “1+1=2 and also fuck you” and you just shake your head and think “no, that can’t be right, maybe 1+1=3 and my life is still good.” The power of rational thinking vs the surge of more primal, ancient ways.

So how do I cope with this? Our thinkers seem to prefer to avoid it, or throw Hail Marys on radical life extension tech. The modern way would be therapy. The traditional way, which got my ancestors through innumerable tragedies, is the church.

But I need something—I don’t think it’s healthy to live in a cold, unfeeling world ruled by randomness. (After all, that’s not how the West was won, was it?)

How does the rat-diaspora do this? Rationally of course! With statistics. But the lower parts of our brains don’t understand statistics, so the real message is this: if you’re 64 you’ll get another 16 years according to the actuarial tables. If you’re completely healthy, run daily, have a highlighted and annotated copy of your medical records—if you’re literally doing everything right and within your power to take care of yourself—you can shade that up a couple years.

And if you're a billionaire or have a reputation for war crimes, you can bump that up to 100. Joking aside, your family tree is more predictive of how long you will live than actuarial stats. But even then, it comes down a lot to one-off factors, which can be mitigated or prevented with screening. Avoiding the big ones like heart disease or cancer and you can reasonably expect to live to 95+.

And if you're a billionaire or have a reputation for war crimes, you can bump that up to 100.

This attempt at joke is not funny.

Avoiding the big ones like heart disease or cancer and you can reasonably expect to live to 95+.

Ye, just win a genetic lottery bro. Not as unfunny as previous joke, still not rational. Tips on being rich: be born in 1st world country. It's easy, almost a billion people managed to do that, why can't you?

many people live to 95. hardly like winning a lottery. and with advances in medical technology, the odds increase. Someone who is 40 today has greater odds of living to 90 than someone who was 40 fifty years ago.

Many? Quick GPT question says 11.3% americans live up to 95. I wouldn't call this many.

your family tree is more predictive of how long you will live than actuarial stats

Not looking good for me, then.

Avoiding the big ones like heart disease or cancer and you can reasonably expect to live to 95+.

Or you do everything right and die from a mystery illness. Unlikely I guess, but I don’t see how I’ll personally ever be able to look at life the same way.

The buddhadharma is the only good solution, afaik.

But I need something—I don’t think it’s healthy to live in a cold, unfeeling world ruled by randomness. (After all, that’s not how the West was won, was it?)

Where's Tarski and Gendlin when you need them? Aight fam, spit bars:

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

So even the most healthy of us are actually living in a "cold, unfeeling universe", and while it's usually an unhelpful stance from a doctor or would be shrink, the GMC isn't looking so I'll quietly whisper skill issue, since even the "healthiest" of us live in the same reality and manage just fine. Believe it or not, nowhere in psychiatry textbooks does it state that any kind of delusion, be it intentional or otherwise, is necessary for mental health.

If I die, I die. And that really would suck. Doesn't mean I don't expect radical life extension within my current nominal life expectancy, even if superhuman AGI is a bust. That is the closest I have to an informed opinion on such a pre-paradigmatic matter. Maybe you're already 64 years old, in which case you ought to be a tad less hopeful, but not particularly so, given that we don't seem to be in the timeline where AI doesn't work. 95, like my grandfather?

Then as painful as it is to accept, he's probably going to die before technology and the medical science he pioneered can save him. That is the tragedy of a cold, uncaring universe, but it is a form of pain humans can bear, I am already bearing it, I can't say I've made my peace with it, or that it won't be some of the worst pain I can potentially ever feel when he does pass, but I'll persevere.

In contrast, my own death is at the very minimum at the exact same time, or a long time away. It is not remotely as painful to contemplate as the passage of a man who is both a better doctor and human being than I am. All I can hope for is that he thinks his life was worth it, even if it ends far too soon.

And isn't that a difference between us of degree and not kind? Believe it or not, I don't expect to outlive Heat Death, but the sensible approach to finding yourself in an indifferent and cold universe is to grab it by the Dyson Spheres and then mould it to be full of individual, happy entities that aren't so.

It may be a skill issue, but have you lost a direct family member?

Because I didn’t know I had a skill issue until it happened to me

Also an age issue, and a responsibilities issue. When you're in your 20s you feel invincible and are all "live fast die young leave a beautiful corpse." Death isn't real, it's a thing that happens to other people, not you. When the most you have to care for is a casual gf, who cares if you die? She'll move on. It's very different when you age and see your mortality appear over the horizon, or when there are people who you love deeply would be permanently, fundamentally changed or scarred by your death.

I'm sorry you don't have religion. I am religious, and more than the promise of an afterlife, the idea that life has meaning and that I have a purpose is what comforts me. It's not a perfect solution, of course, and I still feel plenty of doubt and existential dread. But it helps.

Look into Stoicism if you havent already. If I weren't a Christian, I would probably be a stoic. It's a very sensible response to life in a cruel, uncaring world.

Yes. Ones I loved to boot.

The skill issue in question is handling your own knowledge of your mortality, not that of others.

I have some bad news for you, son.

The world is cold and random. But it doesn’t have to be unfeeling. It remains possible to leave a thinking, feeling legacy that propagates your values—and values your memory—into the future.

It’s theoretically possible for an elite to outlive his body via song the history books, but for most people, I wouldn’t count on it. I’d say achieving notoriety in your field is more plausible. But the easiest way, the one that was traditional before any of this dogma of life after death, is children.

Good luck!

In my unfortunate new experience, what you say is good for coming to terms with mortality.

But acute grief is more about the imagined future you’ve lost, and the sense of unfairness and senselessness

I have a child. And am a child of the departed. It’s certainly some consolation.

But I need something—I don’t think it’s healthy to live in a cold, unfeeling world ruled by randomness. (After all, that’s not how the West was won, was it?)

It's jarring and eye-roll-worthy when someone sneaks in a grand claim in an otherwise mundane post.

Anyway, I don't experience this all that much. The times that come to mind are;

  1. The Monty Hall problem. I understand probability theory well enough to Euler myself into the "correct solution", but I still FEEL like it should be 1/2 not 2/3s. And if you completely flipped the script with an alien scenario, I might fall for it again. I'm no stranger to probability puzzles and usually solve most of them or don't fall for the obvious trap, but the lizard in my brain can't accept reality in this specific case.
  2. I have a hard time accepting that things just are (the way they are) in the sociopersonal space. In that if you do X, the signal that you do X might predict that you do Y, but, that intuition is useless. In other words, knowing aggregate trends helps little on a single data point. Predicting aggregate -> aggregate is easy. Making a prediction is hard, this is almost always because (Lewontonins fallacy, minus the fallacy).

How do I cope with it? Just ignore it lol.

The Monty Hall problem. I understand probability theory well enough to Euler myself into the "correct solution", but I still FEEL like it should be 1/2 not 2/3s. And if you completely flipped the script with an alien scenario, I might fall for it again. I'm no stranger to probability puzzles and usually solve most of them or don't fall for the obvious trap, but the lizard in my brain can't accept reality in this specific case.

Code a simulation of it, and step through the logic, it helped me.

After grokking it, my conclusion was that a lot of the explanations are backwards. After they reveal the empty slot, you can only win by changing your decision, if you got it wrong the first time. So what are the chances of getting it wrong on the first go?

I have a hard time accepting that things just are (the way they are) in the sociopersonal space. In that if you do X, the signal that you do X might predict that you do Y, but, that intuition is useless. In other words, knowing aggregate trends helps little on a single data point. Predicting aggregate -> aggregate is easy. Making a prediction is hard, this is almost always because (Lewontonins fallacy, minus the fallacy).

I have a similar - perhaps reversed - experience as this. I chalk it up to my upbringing, being consistently taught and reinforced that stereotyping someone is only one notch above imposing something like literal chattel slavery on them. As such, as Arthur Chu might say, I was trained to periodically "mind-kill" myself to never predict the behavior of someone based on other signals without some specific independent evidence. If I ran into a burly man with face tattoos in a dark alley in an area known for gang activity, it would be evil to treat him any differently than if I ran into an old lady in her 70s who has to take deep breaths every few steps; the burly man could just be a tattoo and fitness enthusiast, and the old lady could be an armed robber with a hidden gun. The relative odds of these scenarios don't matter; in fact, even considering calculating it is, again, evil.

I've been trying to learn to think differently, since I noticed that even the people who push this stuff clearly don't believe it, as shown by their revealed preference and, more recently, just explicit praise of the moral virtuousness of stereotyping in [circumstances]. It's not easy to navigate out of decades of propaganda that started since grade school, though.

The Monty Hall problem. I understand probability theory well enough to Euler myself into the "correct solution", but I still FEEL like it should be 1/2 not 2/3s. And if you completely flipped the script with an alien scenario, I might fall for it again. I'm no stranger to probability puzzles and usually solve most of them or don't fall for the obvious trap, but the lizard in my brain can't accept reality in this specific case

Doesn't the feeling go away when you realise that what you're choosing is the odds of selecting the car the first time around, not the second, since the game show master always removes a goat? The removing of a goat isn't independent of your choice of door.

Or if you expand the number of doors. If there are a million doors, you choose one and the game show master removes 999998 doors and asks if you want to choose again, do you still feel like it doesn't matter what you choose?

I was never convinced by the "expand the number of doors" scenario because it's not obvious why 999998 doors would be removed in the new scenario. It feels like another euler trick.

Yeah me neither because of how hand wavy it is. It's trying to make a point about priors but that totally misses the point! The point of the Monty hall problem is that the door Monty Hall opens is DEPENDENT on you having made the choice before. That's what makes it 2/3. If he already opened a door and you walked up to the stage and chose the door after the fact, it would be 1/2. The lesson in Monty hall is a lesson of dependence not priors.

Another way I like to view it is that Monty Hall opening the door doesn't tell us anything at all about the door we initially chose. It's the illusion of information, my chances were 1/3 when I walked up to the stage, it's still 1/3. Because the dependence flows one way. You are not actually given any information to update on, so I think the bayesian explanation is kinda shoddy on that front.

Anyone who is actually good at probability theory, feel free mansplain it to me If my intuition is wrong.

Yeah, you’re right. When you pick door 1, Monty removes it from his little pre-game winnowing of the doors; he can only open door 2 or 3 now, which collectively have a 2/3 chance of containing the prize. If he opens 3 and it contains the car, you’ve automatically lost. The chance of this is eliminated when he reveals a goat, but the collective grouping of 2 and 3 retains 2/3 odds. Now door 1 is added back to the mix, it’s smart to switch.

What is sometimes confusing is realizing that there are actually two ‘games’, each with only two doors in play, with the second dependent on the first. The odds of a door having the car in a standard two-door scenario are 50/50, but the odds of your door having it are only 1/3, because there’s a 1/3 chance that you’re only still playing because Monty excluded your (goat) door from round one. Your door being ‘safe’ from Monty’s initial opening means your odds don’t improve, while door 2’s do, provided 3 doesn’t have the car.

When you frame it in terms of dependence (on you choosing the door before or after Monty showing a door with a goat) the Monty Hall problem isn't much of a problem at all.

This is a common thing in many many stats puzzles and the overall trend of why normies are so bad at probability/stats. The most important/pivotal part is formulating the correct problem statement. And in terms of inference, that means knowing exactly what the inference tells you and what it doesn't.

The above applies to most branches of math, but probability/stats is fundamentally at a level of abstraction above most other fields of math from the ground up.

But that’s not true—you can do everything right and be perfectly healthy and suddenly die anyway, as the statistics tell us.

Well, the first thing that gets me by is that I actually find the statistics pretty comforting. For my age group, only about 2 people per 1000 die on an annual basis. If I avoid the really dumb stuff, like suicide and getting killed in an interpersonal spat, this gets even better. If I avoid being morbidly obese or severe drug addict, another point in my favor. I'll die someday, of course, but the odds are strongly in favor of it not being something I need to fuss about all that much at the moment. Some of that is denial! But the denial is aided by the statistics rather than the other way around. This is a level of randomness I can tolerate.

I suspect that my toleration of this when I get older will be built on cope about having lived a good life.

Yeah, I could tolerate it too, but can no longer deny now that it’s happened to someone I love

I believe that no matter what is real - heaven awaits us, life is hell or purgatory and we're all going to suffer here for eternity, existence is said unfeeling void and we just briefly blink into and out of life once and never again - it's the same for everyone, and no matter how it goes we at least all go down the same path together. Even the hypothetical techno-immortals who eat stars for breakfast and have consumed a billion AI-powered permutations of their favorite fetishes by lunch will eventually have to come back and reckon with the same reality, the same ending. Whether we go to God, to our Ancestors, or just into the Dirt and that Dirt into nothingness given a few more billion years, whether what we build lasts for another day or outlasts the Earth itself, we're all in this together.

So I don't feel particularly bad about having no answers or even any profound questions or a solid, tangible belief system. I'm just muddling along with everyone who ever existed.

What do you believe about consciousness?

  • If it's an illusion, death is just the illusion ending. I see little reason to believe it is an illusion though.
  • If it's an emergent property, something which atoms arranged in certain ways create, then "you" are unaffected if, for example, you are killed and a perfect copy created. In this case "you" die to the extent no other sufficiently similar human exists or will ever exist, anywhere in reality. This also implies "you" die temporarily if you get a head injury, get high, or even fall asleep. I see little reason to believe this, but if this is what you believe, I see little reason to not believe in alternate dimensions or anything similar. Maybe the Big Bounce is a thing, and after countless repetitions the atoms will align just right for "you" to appear again.
  • If souls exist, your soul is headed somewhere, and there's clearly a lot we don't understand about reality.

I think we are generally pretty overconfident about this stuff. It's much more certain that 1+1=2 than that death is the end. If death is the end, though, is coping even the right thing to do? It's horrible to imagine a conscious being just being snuffed out like that.

A way of thinking about this is that radical life extension already exists, it's called having children and being part of a tribe.

And at that point you might as well pretend you’ll live on through your amoeba cousins.

I prefer to half-seriously believe everyone goes to heaven for no reason at all.

Persistent cough after getting a cold? The fix might be pretty simple.

For the last few years, every time I got a cold, it ended up with a cough that seemed to linger for multiple weeks, or even more than month. It felt like my throat was constantly irritated. Cough drops and cough suppressant did nothing. I thought it was post-nasal drip.

I know believe that it was actually GERD (caused by acid reflux) which was causing the irritation.

I caught another bug last week, and felt the same exact thing happening. This time I treated the cough by drinking high PH water. Several brands of high PH water are available at grocery stores promising all sorts of dubious benefits. But it really did work for me. Within minutes my throat irritation was gone. I've been drinking a little high PH water everyday and the irritation hasn't returned. I haven't coughed a single time.

I've recently got GERD without esophagitis. Probably stress-induced.

I've seen the alkaline water, but I never understood what the difference between that and a teaspoon of baking soda dissolved in water.

I'm intrigued, however. Thanks for the tip.

Probably just the ease of getting the correct pH. Someone also mentioned that baking soda has extra salt.

If I find myself buying a lot of the fancy water, I'll find a way to start making it at home for free.

My keto diet came to an end as scheduled on Thanksgiving. I lost about 12 pounds in 2.5 months, so decent results but nothing world-shaking. I was strict for maybe the first half of that, then less strict.

Pros:

  • Effortless weight loss
  • Delicious food that I looked forward to every meal
  • Zero self denial or hunger
  • No cravings for sweets or carbs
  • Less tendonitis

Cons:

  • Acid reflux
  • Much higher cholesterol

So let's address the cholesterol issue. In 2020, my LDL (bad cholesterol) was slightly high, but overall fine. When I got it checked after my diet, it was 297. This is very high and concerning.

I am making an effort to reduce my cholesterol now and will get another test in a couple days. I predict a much lower LDL. I will also likely get a coronary calcium scan to see if I have any early signs of heart disease.

I was pretty upset about the high cholesterol, but it turns out it might not be all that bad. It turns out I pattern-match (almost, but not quite) into "lean mass hyperresponders". These are people who have low BMIs, high HDL, low triglycerides, and EXTREMELY high LDL.

In this group, having low BMI is actually correlated with "worse" cholesterol numbers.

This Harvard med student is very skinny can run a marathon in 2:40. This puts him easily in the top 1% of cardiovascular fitness. Yet his LDL is an off-the-charts high 400!

So how did he reduce his LDL to normal levels? By adding 12 Oreos a day to his diet. He kept his normal diet the same, consuming copious amounts of saturated fat. He just ADDED 12 Oreos to his existing diet for several weeks. His body responded by LDL dropping 250 points to normal levels.

I believe the data about cholesterol causing heart disease is of very poor quality. My instinct is that for a person with a low BMI, a high cholesterol level doesn't tell the whole story. My extremely high LDL level might be perfectly safe, even good.

But I am not willing to risk my health on this counter-narrative and so will making efforts to reduce my cholesterol by eating oatmeal and supplementing with Berberine intermittently. I predict good results, but epending on my calcification score, I might also consider statins. Unfortunately, my current doctor seems incapable of doing anything except for regurgitating WebMD, so I'm doing a lot of this research myself which is not ideal.

I lost about 12 pounds in 2.5 months

So most of your weight "loss" was glycogene and water associated with glycogene, not fat. Will return quickly.

No, it's not "most". Maybe 5 pounds of water weight if that.

I've been off the diet for 3 weeks. Trust me when I say that my glycogen stores are fully replenished. I've been eating like a pig. I'm still 8 pounds lighter and my waistline is smaller.

I believe the data about cholesterol causing heart disease is of very poor quality. My instinct is that for a person with a low BMI, a high cholesterol level doesn't tell the whole story. My extremely high LDL level might be perfectly safe, even good.

This sums almost all of fitness/nutrition research. Even with the most meticulous of data collection and stats, it's basically a garbage in garbage out problem. In over half a century of this stuff being studied, there is little consensus. A study may show that high cholesterol foods are bad, but 'badness' entails a tiny increased likelihood of a cardiac event over many decades. Something not worth losing sleep over.

Curiously, before I went on Keto, I noticed I would get some pretty nasty acid reflux for a few minutes at a time when I ate unusually high-carb meals. When I went on pretty strict Keto, that vanished entirely. I'm now on what I consider "lazy keto", where all the meals I make at home are pretty strict keto, but I don't sweat eating Keto much when I go out to eat, which is a few times a week, and drink beer when I do. It seems to do the job fairly well as far as keeping my weight from going up much but not being too much of a pain in the ass to stick to. The acid reflux is still gone though.

So how did he reduce his LDL to normal levels? By adding 12 Oreos a day to his diet.

If he didn't deep fry them in pancake batter beforehand, then he missed an opportunity.

Congrats on the weight loss!

I am currently struggling with holding myself accountable for being reliable and reliably productive. I am having trouble achieving goals that I set for myself and am passionate about (e.g. finish a draft of X project by Y date). The part that makes this challenging for me is as best as I can tell my lack of productivity is downstream of two rare sleep disorders I have. (I was much more productive before these disorders worsened.)

I have a “sleep quality disorder”, which greatly reduces the restorative quality of my sleep, and I have a “sleep schedule disorder”[1], which makes it hard to predict my sleep/wake times on a daily basis.

I am currently pursuing medical treatments for both disorders, and I have had a lot of success treating the sleep quality disorder. Now, there’s roughly an 70% chance each “sleep session” that I will have a normal, restful amount of sleep. This seems to be the point of diminishing returns for treating the sleep quality disorder; more improvement will come only with much more effort.[2]

So now I’m in a state where I follow roughly this algorithm:

  • When I wake up, I try to tell if I got high quality sleep in my “sleep session”, where I generally sleep for 8 to 10 hours.
  • If I did, which happens about 70% of the time, I go about my planned activities, staying awake for roughly between 12 to 18 hours before falling asleep again.
  • If not, which happens about 20% of the time, I will generally be so exhausted as to easily fall asleep back asleep within 2 to 3 hours. I’m not really able to think clearly or be productive during this time. I will then wake up and try again.
  • About 10% of the time, I think I’m rested well enough, but after trying to be productive for a bit it becomes clear I am not, and I end up wasting a bunch of time until I fall asleep regularly again in 12 to 18 hours.

This works okay, but I have the following problems:

  1. I find it really hard to tell when I’m being unproductive for normal reasons (e.g. distraction/laziness/procrastination) versus when I’m just having a run of "bad luck" with my sleep.
  2. I find it hard to interface with the wider world on a calendar-day scheduled basis. I basically deliver work on a “it’s done when it’s done, best effort” basis, which people who have to collaborate with me find frustrating.
  3. I struggle with building habits, because a bad run of sleep will inevitably cause me to “miss twice” on my new habitual tasks, which is really fatal to habit formation. I also don’t really have reliable daily cues to hang my habits on, although with much effort I’m starting to build a “wake up” and “bed time” routine.[3]
  4. Because my sleep + wake time is offset from the daily 24 hour cycle, I eventually end up having periods where I’m primarily awake at night, which gets me a bit depressed and saps my productivity a bit.

Currently my plan of attack is basically:

  1. Track good versus bad sleep days and timing. Use this data to better estimate work and coordinate times for things where I interface with the outside world and evaluate treatment success.
  2. Try to stick to all habits at least on good sleep days. Intellectually, this should work, but I’ve found it really lengthens the amount of time it takes for a habit to “stick” in practice. It seems like the habit parts of my brain don’t ignore the bad sleep days.
  3. Use sleep aids to sleep again more quickly on the 10% of days I do not sleep well enough to be productive but not badly enough to fall asleep. (It’s unclear if this makes the schedule problem worse, but it does net back higher productivity by having fewer totally wasted days)
  4. Continue to iterate with light exposure therapy and melatonin to reduce variability/noise from sleep schedule disorder long term and improve mood.

If anyone has any advice or thoughts or brainstorming on how to better manage this, I’d be all ears. I think the lowest hanging fruit right now is working on concrete better ways to improve my habits/routines and make the most of the time I’m productive. So for the short term, I’m trying to find ways to make the most of what I have.

[1] The sleep schedule disorder has been medically diagnosed as non-24 circadian rhythm similar to what Eliezer Yudkowsky has. Mine seems to be more erratic and irregular than his is. The solution that worked for him has not (yet) worked for me, but I'm still tweaking.

[2] I have sought out world-expert level medical advice for the sleep disorders, and we seem to have squeezed all the easy improvement from treatment there.

[3] When the sleep quality disorder was at its worst, I just fell asleep and woke up pretty randomly. Now I'm trying to rebuilt routine around waking up and going to sleep, especially so I can try to find some better objective way of discerning low quality and high quality sleep sessions, so maybe we can debug that further.

(Meta Note: I posted this previously on an earlier Wellness Wednesday thread, but it got eaten by the automatic moderator, so the mods have said it is fine if I repost.)

I know non-24-hour sleep disorder is a real thing, but since it's most obviously a real thing for blind people, maybe among the sighted it's often something like 'idiosyncratically weak response to day/night lighting cues' -- have you really maxed out the intensity of your day/night cues? Is it as bright as possible in the day and as dark as possible in the night?

I fixed my delayed sleep phase problem (which tended toward non-24-hour during the winters) by being unreasonably aggressive about darkness in the evening. I bought a pack of rechargeable LED candles and if I use no other light source for three hours before I intend to sleep, I reliably sleep at my chosen hour, which is about 4 hours earlier than I'd tend to otherwise, and my sleep time no longer creeps later and later every day like it used to in the winter. Previous attempts at fixing this with super bright lights in the morning, or avoiding blue light in the evening, or avoiding screens in the evening, or using a 'reasonable' degree of dimming in the evenings, all failed. If my evening darkness procedure hadn't been enough, I'd have tried blackout curtains to maximize intensity of nighttime darkness.

Maybe you've already exhausted all your possible gains here, and if you lived in a tent in the woods for a week or two with no artificial lights at all you'd still not entrain with the sun -- but if you haven't tried something roughly that extreme, maybe push harder in that direction.

Not OP, but as someone struggling with delayed sleep problems, this is an incredibly helpful and inspiring comment.

How do you deal with the desire to do electronic things during your evening hours?

Somewhat poorly. It helps that screens can be dimmed a lot, with third-party tools (Twilight, etc) if necessary, and a screen can be useable (for non-graphics tasks) when extremely dim if the surroundings are dim too. I also have a red-backlit keyboard -- looks a bit like fireplace embers.

I'm not religious about this stuff, and I trade off my sleep timing against other concerns. Sometimes I do stuff out in public at later hours under bright lights, and in recent weeks my sleep time slipped because I liked keeping my Christmas lights on late. But I can be confident now that when I want to sleep earlier, being more religious about the lighting situation is an effective way to do it.

Probably not the answer you're looking for, but I'm reminded of the great Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton. Payton was notorious for a stubborn, enduring discipline rooted in sky-high self-determination and -esteem, even refusing medical treatment in the face of life-threatening cancer and all the little problems that led up to it (he died at 46); there are definitely continent-sized holes in that methodology. All the same, seeing as you're past the "accepting the legitimacy of modern medicine" phase and into the "mindset and self-discipline" phase, there might be something of use to you in a "fuck it" attitude toward your own capacity for feeling "up for it" or not. Here's how Payton summed up his mantra:

Never die easy. Why run out of bounds and die easy? Make that linebacker pay. It carries into all facets of your life. It’s okay to lose, to die, but don’t die without trying, without giving it your best.

Substitute the football terms for just getting yourself to the office and sitting in your chair, even if that's all that happens. I'm also reminded of a (perhaps more apropos) quote from Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick:

Inspiration is the act of drawing up the chair to the writing desk.

And if all else fails, there's no shame in stocking 24-packs of Monster in the fridge. Do whatever you have to do to "get yourself there," then start critically analyzing what's necessary to maintain that level of focus and what's superfluous or harmful.

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