NancyLebovitz

I don't like the way he treated his girlfriend, but that doesn't address whether his health advice is good. It did make me want independent verification of his claims about what he's selling.

Replying toBryan Johnson and a search for healthy longevity

The olive oil is $35 per 750 ml bottle. It's a little hard to find the quantity.

An ordinary olive oil might cost $12/litre or about a quarter as much. So, not outrageous, but still expensive.

Replying toBryan Johnson and a search for healthy longevity

I'm not sure he thinks his methods will achieve immortality. his overt goals are reversing aging and improving quality of life. If he's talked about living long enough for drastically better tech, I haven't heard him say it. I think he does believe it would take too long to get to a general solution for aging for it to do him any good.

Replying toBryan Johnson and a search for healthy longevity

The food he sells is fairly expensive.

Replying toBryan Johnson and a search for healthy longevity

I've added a link to the post.

Unfortunately, "he's too weird" was most of the response I got at ACX.

I've listened to some of his videos, and he strikes me as at least rationalist-adjacent.

https://www.bryanjohnson.com/

I was wondering what people think of him and his ideas, and whether they'd tried out any of his system.

I respect that he offers his research for free, and I don't see a problem with him charging for personal consultation.

I don't expect all of his ideas, even the ones he's been using for a while, to work for everyone, and I haven't seen anything about how much variation there is in what his clients seem to need.

I would like to see independent testing of his food and supplements. Are the heavy metals really that low? How good is the evidence that people are generally getting enough heavy metals from their food and supplements to be a problem?

I would appreciate it if people don't say that he's weird so his ideas must be bad.

Replying toSocial Dark Matter

Social Dark Matter

I suggest thinking about other possible social dark matter.

I think deliberate weight loss makes a lot of people's lives worse-- that being hungry and distracted (possibly chilled and more frequently sick) isn't worth greater social acceptance, and that the current insistence on leanness is about looking right rather than health.

Asexuality could have fit in the article.

Replying toSocial Dark Matter

Social Dark Matter

This might be related to the circular reasoning that gay people shouldn't be trusted with security clearances because they can be blackmailed.

The Speed of Rumor

Questions about the NY Megameetup

So I was talking with someone in the community about Michael Vassar (I should check for permission to put a name to this story), and they said that Michael encouraged people to take high doses of psychedelics.

I said he'd encouraged me to take psychedelics, but at ordinary doses.

And the person said, "Right-- one of the people who had a psychotic break said they'd taken high doses, but not that Michael had encouraged them." (I've seen a quote from one of the people Michael was alleged to have pushed into a psychotic break who said, no, Michael wasn't the problem.)

I'm glad they were meticulous enough to take the correction, but I'm spooked. I'm... (read more)

*How* people shut down thought because of high-status respectable halos

I don't have a confirmation that I have space, and I don't know what the location is. Some other people in Philadelphia don't have the information, either.

I'm handling this publicly because we might not be the only ones who need the information.

"Is Science Broken?" is underspecified

https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/

A detailed look at the belief that high status social structures can be so much better than anything one can think of that there's no point in even trying to think about the details of what to do, and how debilitating this is.

Discussion of the essay

Prediction challenge: Zika and birth rates

10y

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/

This is an interesting article-- it's got an overview of what's currently seen as the problems with replicability and fraud, and some material I haven't seen before about handing the same question to a bunch of scientists, and looking at how they come up with their divergent answers.

However, while I think it's fair to say that science is really hard, the article gets into claiming that scientists aren't especially awful people (probably true), but doesnn't address the hard question of "Given that there's a lot of inaccurate science, how much should we trust specific scientific claims?"