You know, someone once asked me (at vibecamp) are you concerned with the purity of the drugs you’re taking? (this made me go into a fugue [later in life] where I later obsessed over purity/air pollution/microplastics)
At the time, this tangent made me then obsess over Putin’s obsession with purity (both COVID purity and having people taste things for him before he eats them) AND his seemingly slow aging rate AND racial purity too…
He was not thinking about rapamycin at the time, but rapamycin… really… was the most important of them all (that, and dapagliflozin…) and anything from kachhela or indian pharmacies. I really ought to be better than this…
At some point in time (AGI timelines and infinite amounts of change from one small change in inputs/outputs will literally cause some people to do the same thing [wrt extreme levels of microplastic/chemical testing for ALL food they eat, and it’s probably SUPER-WORTH it for people who already have wealth, especially given the nanoplastics crisis [we cannot afford to take risks on stupid things] ]. At the very least, universal semaglutide reduces all total compute loss from microplastics)
[a small amount of impurity in some drugs can cause DRASTIC changes to people’s cognition]
Most people don’t appreciate this thesis enough, and are dismissive. We were dismissive of air pollution for many decades, and only now do we really see how terrible it is for us. We cannot afford the same risk for nanoplastics/microplastics. Sure, don’t raise your cortisol levels stressing over it, but like, at the very least, take semaglutide and do things on the margin to reduce plastic consumption
I know one person in longevity who ONLY drinks soylent (and avoids all impurities). He’s pretty strange, but he also is creative in strange ways.
I actually did get a small grant b/c I convinced some people that the microplastics thing is really important (on top of some other things), though the recent nanoplastics paper now shows that I’m not sure if testing microplastics is useful/helpful unless we can find nanoplastics (given that ALL historical estimates of microplastics were now gross uncertainties)…
And this is ALL important for global alignment because we cannot take stupid chances on human compute loss from lack of alignment, and yes, microplastics pollute our chances at alignment. Even davidad views microplastics/nanoplastics as significant enough to be of concern.
Sam Altman said that AIs will become capable of super-human persuasion before superhuman anything else. Perhaps AIs will be what finally convince humanity to really finally cut down on “dumb microplastics” (if AGI generates A LOT of near-wealth, the plastic alternatives/degraders will be even more fundable).
[pollution is also mimetic, can come from back pain, can come from wasted time, can come from trauma]…
Someone actually told me “think clean thoughts”, which was SOUND ADVICE. Too bad this is not ALL in my control yet, because I still historically had a lot of distracting thoughts that were irrelevant (tFUS, tFUS…)
