Should discomfort be a requirement for important experiences ?

A quest to solve aging must start with careful consideration of what it is.

Aging is a constant in nature, from archaea to elephants. Where life finds death as counterpart, aging is unopposed, yet frames our understanding of both.

To solve aging is to prevent death and avoid decay.

Death is a rather sudden process and decay is a fuzzy concept.

Decay is non-linear and hard to characterize at the organism level.

Sudden regime changes can happen over the course of days, see: menopause, post-viral syndromes, acute neuropathy, autoimmune diseases.

To make things harder, we are evolutionarily and culturally adapted to obfuscate signs of decay.

Defining decay at the molecular level is presently an intractable information problem. Theoretically possible... (read 773 more words →)

Replying toLongevity and the Mind

George3d61y

Longevity and the Mind

I think the point is being missed here, I'm saying if you solve aging at the level of a head now body-transplant becomes viable, otherwise you're indeed just stuck with an old mind.

As for parabiosis approaches, the sens take, etc -- My personal take is that it's hogwashy, biology is a faulty paradigm that hasn't yielded relevant results in 80+ years, primary gains in solving diseases come from diagnosis criteria being shifted, gains in mortality reduction are solving at the mean not at the edges (e.g. removing pollution, better ERs, broader vaccine and antibiotic distribution, reduction in youths dying, reduced childhood mortality -- stuff that is a distribution and production problem as of 100 years ago, not a scientific venture)

Longevity and the Mind

My lukewarm take on GLP-1 agonists

A framing I quite like is that of germs vs soma, body vs eggs and cum, consciousness vs replicators.

My first foray into age reversal was a (successful) attempt to increase fluid IQ, the loss of which is among less than a handful of ubiquitous symptoms of aging.

At the time, I found it odd that most people working in biotech, medicine, and longevity were confused about why I did this.

In part, the issue here is one of people finding it hard to break out of existing paradigms, even as hypotheticals. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (I expand more on it in this talk)

In part, I believe the... (read 2707 more words →)

Motivation for posting:

I read Scott's recent article: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-does-ozempic-cure-all-diseases

And it seems to me that scott isn't considering two points:

GLP-1s might fix a lot of things because people are metabolically compromised (e.g. literally to the point of having mitochondria that are unable to properly use all respiratory complexes due to an odd selection effect in always-high glucose environments) - Or they might be magic, but as of yet there's no conclusive evidence and a lot of incentives to say "magic"
You can always come up with alternative mechanisms for why GLP-1s might work, but we should wait for more studies to be done in basically healthy people before we recommend basically healthy people take them
If you are a basically healthy person, especially one that is looks-obsessed or hypochondriac, the risks might outweigh the benefits of GLP-1s... and while nobody is saying the reverse outright, there's a lot of hinting at benefits with no mention of side effects.

Replying toIncreasing IQ is trivial

I'm getting longer term results on all 17 people and will publish everything soon~ish (1-2 months tops)

Replying toIncreasing IQ is trivial

Had 20 people that were interested in replicating (well, more, but 20 got to a signal group) -- I gave them the protocol and nobody did it (because taking 1/4 to 1/3rd of your day to do something is hard)

I have data in n=17 people (but like, only 6 did the protocol, 1 dropout) - That looks pretty good and I want to have everyone retake the tests at some point to see if the effect holds over time.

However I took on a lot of projects in the meanwhile so I kinda lost track of this one.

Replying toIncreasing IQ is trivial

Yes, that sounds about correct to me.

Replying toIncreasing IQ is trivial

That is more like, a monitoring device based on NIR (which has little to no relation to the stimulation effect of NIR)

Replying toIncreasing IQ is trivial

All of these issues are resolved by having controls and by the variance within control.

Using different tests, given that the results don't correlate very well, would be a mistake.

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Replying toSome Things That Increase Blood Flow to the Brain

Some Things That Increase Blood Flow to the Brain

Increasing blood flow to the large masseter muscles seems to have a broadly stimulating effect on blood flow to the head in general. You can buy unflavored gum for cheap, or xylitol gum which has a positive side effect on decreasing cavity formation.

Never thought about this one, quite interesting 🙃

Replying toIncreasing IQ by 10 Points is Possible

So, if we are trying to prove something like:

Plane A flies faster than plane B

We do indeed need to make sure plane A and plane B are the same in all instances, I'd say that engineering not science, but in the last 50 years little science has happened so people seem to confuse the two.

If we are trying to prove something like:

Planes can fly

Then the specific plane design is less important.

My point here is something like "I did a thing, and people seem to have higher IQs upon retesting than control, and I'm controlling for things like motivation, memorization, exercise and diet" therefore, given that we don't expect anything (maybe sans stimulants?)... (read more)

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Replying toIncreasing IQ by 10 Points is Possible

pinged you in DMs :) Happy to share, I don't need a liability waver just making sure people understand this is not medical advice, I am not a doctor+ not being assholes

Replying toIncreasing IQ by 10 Points is Possible

That all sounds to me like increasing IQ ?

Like, if shape rotation is an underlying component of many valuable cognitive processes (e.g. math) and you get better at it in a generic way (not learning for the test)... that's getting smarter

Benefits of adding poison to your DMT

A while ago I wrote how I managed to add 13 points to my IQ (as measured by the mean between 4 different tests).

I had 3 “self-experimenters” follow my instructions in San Francisco. One of them dropped off, since, surprise surprise, the intervention is hard.

The other two had an increase of 11 and 10 points in IQ respectively (using the “fluid” components of each test) and an increase of 9 and 7 respectively if we include verbal IQ.

A total of 7 people acted as a control and were given advantages on the test compared to the intervention group to exacerbate the effects of memory and motivation, only 1 scored on par with... (read 1471 more words →)

DMT might be one of the best psychedelics out there, its effects are short-lived, it can be quite intense, and it allows for careful modulation of the dosage through trial and error.

With most psychedelics, working towards a dosage that won’t induce a difficult experience (read: hellish and psychotic) is tiresome. Their effects last for a long time, and the vast majority come with some amount of side effects if taken often or in large quantities.

Its more infamous cousin, 5-MeO-DMT, has a similar profile regarding safety and ease of titrating the dosage. As far as I’ve been told, its phenomenal character is such that it would be more unpleasant than DMT, but I... (read 1206 more words →)

Hard Questions Are Language Bugs

TL;DR - It took me about 14 days to increase my IQ by 13 points, in a controlled experiment that involved no learning, it was a relatively pleasant process, more people should be doing this.

A common cliche in many circles is that you can’t increase IQ.

This is obviously false, the largest well-documented increase in IQ using nothing but training is one of 23 points.

A Standard Deviation of IQ

Alas it is a myth that persists, and when pushed on it people will say something like:

You can’t easily increase IQ in a smart and perfectly healthy adult permanently.

FINE — I’m a smart and perfectly healthy adult, I tested my IQ with 4 different tests:... (read 1527 more words →)

Thanks to Jessica Taylor for the discussion that was the stem of this article. The opinions here are all mine and I’m sure she’d disagree with some or all of them.

The Hai’Zu

Imagine the Hai’zu people of Stone Age Langong, using a very simple language that might contain only 6 words:

There (combined with pointing towards a direction)

Do (indicating that the person must do the appropriate action)

Gather (indicating that everyone should come and listen)

Them (indicating another person, combined with pointing)

No (negation)

Sun (indicating the concept of sun, which stands in for both time and weather)

The Hai’zu can coordinate very well using this simple language, Scout comes back to camp and says:

Gather There Do

This obviously means... (read 2037 more words →)

Open Brains

Bringing Agency Into AGI Extinction Is Superfluous

The year is 2026. Turns out that, in spite of much evidence to the contrary in 2023, early Wittgenstein was wrong, and language is neither used nor particularly useful as a substrate for communicating direction information about reality.

Language models and multimedia generation models have really come to form, TikTok has now removed all human content creators, and most moderately intelligent people suspect somewhere between all and most “social media” “creators” to be bots.

Still, while having made the online and “knowledge work” space significantly weirder, in some ways it’s all the same. A lot of spam, most people are employed to think, speak and type question whether or not their job has any... (read 1657 more words →)