Samstack

Have you ever heard of a Perkins Tractor? If you lived in London in the 18th Century, you could buy a pair of Perkins Tractors (shown above) for the steep price of five guineas, and wave them over an aching part of your body for about twenty minutes as a way of relieving your pain. They worked, sort of. People who bought and used Perkins Tractors really did report feeling that their pain had gone away, even though there was no physiological reason they should work.

The UK’s health service has just approved the miracle weight loss drug Semaglutide for NHS use. I know 99.99% of things called a ‘miracle weight loss drug’ are duds, but Semaglutide seems to be the real deal. Here’s one summary of the evidence: This is really, really promising. One person on the EA Forum (citing relevant and reliable data) claims that high BMI contributes to 5.02 million deaths (95% CI 3.22 to 7.11), with obesity being responsible for about 60% of the burden.

Some bad news: I’m travelling at the moment and have had to chuck away my ADHD meds because apparently they’re extremely illegal in Japan (jail time illegal, rather than small fine illegal). People have told me that drugs are not something to mess around with in Japan so I’ve decided not to take the risk of carrying them around.

1) Some research from about a year ago on the personality traits that predict interest in EA. The finding isn’t very surprising, but the whole thing is worth a read: I would love to see research that looks at what other things predict those personality traits, it might make finding proto-EAs a lot easier. I’d also be interested to see research on the link between autism and EA, or the classic big five and interest in EA.

If you do a Google search for ‘meditation’, you might find results like this: ‘Meditation Completely Changed My Life’ ‘How meditation can change your life and mind’ ‘How meditation changes the brain’ Do a bit more digging, and you might find this article (or something similar): ‘I believed the hype and did mindfulness meditation for dumb reasons: now I'm trying to reverse the damage’. You should read this one, it’s pretty interesting.

Most diets fail. I’m not sure if this “fact” is actually true, but it’s repeated often enough to make me think there’s something to it. It also just seems likely to be true. During my second year of university, I gained about 20 - 30 lbs and tried to shed it quickly by adopting a Very Low Calorie Diet, something recommended for morbidly obese people. I wasn’t morbidly obese, I was just on the cusp of being overweight - my BMI was probably around 24 or 24.5 (overweight is 25).

Happy holidays all, and thank you to everyone who donated in response to my matching offer, the full £300 limit was reached (plus quite a bit more)! I had a generally bad and boring Christmas after catching norovirus, so the success of charity drive did cheer me up - thanks again! 1) ChatGPT, of course. And the various ways that people have found to get chatGPT to do stuff it isn’t supposed to do. Thread: 2) Byrne Hobart of on the Lunar Society podcast here and on any podcast app.

Apologies for not posting much recently, here’s a quick post summarising some of the more interesting papers I’ve read recently. Haven’t checked if they’ve replicated or delved much into other studies so take with the appropriate amount of salt! Are charismatic leaders more effective? Here’s a study I read recently (as ever, from JPSP), investigating the relationship between being charismatic and being an effective leader.

I haven’t had a cheesy post for a while, so why not this? Fairly obvious where this idea is from, so no need to give credit. Advice is from a 25-year-old with only very modest achievements, so take from that what you will. 1) If you’re succeeding in most things you do, you’re probably not aiming high enough. Attempt things that you think will almost certainly fail.

1) An oldie but a goodie: guess the correlation. 2) I really, really enjoyed this 80k episode on probability. One thing that stood out (and I’ll probably garble this) was the implication that the expected value of almost decision is infinite once you let infinities into the equation, because there’s always some non-zero probability of an event that produces infinite (or negative infinite) value. What if there is a God and will send you to hell if you eat celery?