Probably not for most people. I've found there's something importantly load bearing about the presence of another person that is hard to articulate

Thank you for writing this!

I'm the one who wrote about my own similar realization, with How predictive processing solved my wrist pain.

If what we claim here is true (and specifically if the 2022 Ashar et al. Pain Reprocessing Therapy  paper does replicate^[1]), the implications feel pretty enormous. It suggests that a large fraction of the 800 million-1 billion who report chronic pain could experience permanent relief from <8 hours with a practitioner.

After my own experience, I pivoted from ML into pain research (building computational models). I went through the Pain Reprocessing Therapy training and have since been iterating on it (have so far successfully brought ~20 people to resolution, I'd say at a roughly similar rate that the 2022 Ashar et al. paper reports).

My experience is that there are different populations who respond quite differently to each intervention. Some people just need Sarno's book and feel immediate relief. Others are too dissociated to even do somatic tracking and need some assistance to work up to that.

Some other resources I might add for those interested:

• This evidence page points to some other papers and success stories
• The TMS wiki database of success stories was quite motivating for me to see how people with much worse conditions recovered
• Here I evaluate Sarno's ischemia theory of chronic pain in light of more contemporary literature

1. ^{^}

   I've been in contact with both Yoni Ashar at CU Anschutz and also Mike Donnino at Harvard; they're both running larger trials which I'm told is going quite well — though they are often bottlenecked in finding participants.

Do you have some good pointers for fascia-based expllanations?

Good point — somatic exercises can change the way I use my wrists. Though, I'll note that the pain often notably changed in the course of the exercise. This could still be fascia-linked, but also strengthens my sense that the feedback loop as I described above captures some core dynamic.

Two incredible posts of yours — thank you also for sharing. I have been using PP here in a more loose ('poetic') sense. From a quick look at your post, it does seem like we mostly agree about the underlying phenomena. I look forward to reading in more detail your PP gripes.

Yeah — the book "The Way Out" is a popsci general introduction that contains the outline of the exercises enough to try it yourself. Happy also to talk more if that'd be helpful.

This is very cool! Thank you for experimenting with grants in this format

You may find inspiration in papers like Modular Politics, which spawned Metagov, an online research community I'm a part of attempting to experiment with and understand digital governance. Although their focus is largely online platforms, there are a number of scholars adjacent to the community who study non-digital governance. (Related is the excellent 80,000 hours interview with Audrey Tang where she talks about Taiwan's governance experiments with Polis.)

The best older/non-digital literature I know of is from Elinor Ostrom — Governing the Commons is particularly good and provides a meta-ethnography of different long-lasting governance structures (ranging from villages in Yamanashi prefecture deciding how to harvest grain to Zanjera irrigation communities in the Phillipines). David Levi-Faur points out in the Oxford Handbook of Governance that 'governance'  (the systematic study of how people can/should make rules for each other) is somewhat recent (~1980s), and as far as I can tell, there isn't a deep governance literature that's comparable to, say, game theory. The work of social/political anthropologists like E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes, who used case studies of the Nuer people in Ethiopia may also be a next good bet. 

I think governance is very important, and have tried to collect the most important questions in the space, which has involved a very brief and broad literature review. I've also been collecting digital constitutions and documenting the processes that spawned them. I consider the topic of governance both very rich and highly underexplored.