Sticky trap outrage is covert factory farm apologetics. Pretending the suffering time integral of a single mouse held still exeeds the suffering of billions of chicken and cow "instant" deaths is a way to culturally launder factory farming as humane.

Very interested in any unique approaches and I don't want to constrain your creativity, but I am happy to jump on a 5-minute call to rapidly exchange ideas or discuss limitations or strengths of the data, if you think that might help. Also curious which newsletter so I can thank them for the signal boost.

You are drawing out many thoughts I had not explicitly stated in the post, so thank you. The contest is offered as such because I believe I've already stumbled into an answer and it is buried within the data. A couple weeks here and there when I ate certain macros or walked enough steps and prematurely quit, not realizing careful retrospective analysis reveals statistically significant loss above RMR for those periods that persisted for months, before being reversed by whatever combination of factors "unlocks" raising my set point.

Added a sentence to the opener expressing the essential issue. Whether pure potatoes or meal replacement shakes, my body isn't fooled by them. I have plenty of hunger to eat 2500 calories of potatoes or drink half a dozen shakes, so there's no advantage over eating regular, interesting food.

If I can't solve the mystery subtractively, a 'tide drug is the last resort. I don't yet have a rationale I can articulate for wanting to succeed on my "factory settings" but the desire is there.

Previously, Tourette's occupied the same category in my mind as stuttering, a lifelong organic brain disease or wiring fault not amenable to coaching or psychiatry. However, I'm questioning this after watching The Vow, an NXIVM documentary illustrating, with video, a childhood Tourette's sufferer be "cured" by some sort of negative reinforcement training. Upon looking up the Wikipedia, I'm surprised to find a prognosis of "80% will experience improvement to disappearance of tics beginning in late teens." Further, there's been an extreme uptick in Tourette's experienced by children simply from watching TikTok videos of others' tics, including taking on the tics they're exposed to.

Together, these three data points have shifted my belief that Tourette's, and perhaps stuttering, is not some physical wiring defect, but a named conversion disorder. Perhaps psychiatry already knew this and was being polite, but I did not. I understand the need to group similar behavior disorders into diseases, regardless of somatic or organic origin. However, I also see the danger in naming (or renaming) somatoform disorders like delusional parasitosis as Morgellons, giving legitimacy and cause célèbre to what are otherwise social contagions with no underlying organic etiology.

I can't speak for others, but if one day I woke up with tics, I suspect my recovery path would be quite different depending on whether I was told, "this is a habit you can unlearn or will likely soon outgrow" or, "this is a serious, unique brain disease, and you deserve sympathy and accommodation."

I believe consciousness mostly exists to translate complex life situations into a language that can be matched to our instincts. One of the instincts underlying testosterone regulation is probably something like: "If you are victorious in a difficult battle for status you did not expect to win, upregulate." I doubt it's easily fooled since your own consciousness is using your full intelligence to map the terms "difficult," "status", and "victorious" from the instinct script to the actual situation you've placed yourself in.

Testosterone levels go up and down based on success and failure in conflicts. It indicates the likelihood you’ll win the next conflict and determines your propensity to engage in further conflict. Win a lot, your levels go up, and you’re more likely to stand your ground or even initiate a conflict. Lose a lot, and that indicator will downregulate your behavior to prevent you from risking conflicts that have, historically, not gone well for you. It’s like a built-in, unconscious hint that regulates your desire to roll a die based on how well you’ve rolled in the past.

I feel this most viscerally when battling with phone support and getting a victory or concession a strict reading of the policy would not have afforded me. The high of the win motivates me to make other calls I’ve been putting off, and I’m sure that extra motivation comes from this chemical being upregulated after success, indicating further success is possible.

What if there were a way to gamble testosterone without engaging in any conflict at all—if you could place some on the line in the hopes of getting a higher level through prediction rather than conflict? Watching sports allows such bets to be placed. First, because evolution is not stupid, you must associate yourself with one of the battling factions. You can’t make their victories yours without accepting their defeats. If you are to receive higher testosterone when your side wins, you must equally risk lower testosterone when they lose.

Sports affecting testosterone level is a well-known fact. I’m proposing that this is not an effect of recreational sports viewing, but the cause for it—to deliberately wager testosterone on one’s predictive abilities in substitution for actual combat. Further, wagers can be both safe or risky, with corresponding greater bets, like rooting for an underdog.

Sometimes, in trading, one accepts a fixed value and in exchange offers something in return of near infinite value to all of society until the end of time that others build upon.