You should only put approximately zero weight on anecdotes that got to you through a sensationalism-maximizing curation system with biases you don’t understand, which I hope this wasn’t? Regardless, the anecdotes are mostly just meant to be clarifying examples of the kind of thing effect that I am trying to ask about, I don’t expect people to pass them along or anything.
I decided not to talk about biological plausibility, because I don’t get the impression pharmacology or nutrition follows reductive enough rules that anyone can reason a-priori about it very well. It will surprise us, it will do things that don’t make sense. I actually wrote out a list of evolutionary stories that end up producing this effect, some of them are quite interesting, but I decided not to post them, because it seemed like a distraction. I guess I’ll post some theories now though: - This sort of phantasic creativity was not useful in pre-industrial societies, because there was no way to go far beyond the social consensus reality and prove that you were right and do anything with it (that’s only the case today because of, basically, the investment cycle, and science and technology, which took hundreds of years to start functioning after it was initially proposed). The body needed an excuse to waste creatine, so in sapiens, it only did it when we ate an abnormal amount of meat, but sudden gluts of meat would occur frequently enough for the adaptation to be maintained. - Or maybe eating lots of meat/fish was kind of the norm for millions of years for dominant populations (I can cite this if you’re that interested). And maybe there’s a limit to how fast the body can replenish brain-creatine (investigate this assumption, Gregger seemed implicitly sus about it). In that case, we might have an effect where the brain implements creatine frugality by lowering our motivation to think in phosphocreatine-burning ways, which then may lead to a glorification of that frugality, which then becomes sticky. This could be a recurring class of motivation disorder that might even generalize to early AI, so I’d find it super interesting.
The note about choline in wheat is interesting. I wonder if it’s bioavailable? I think I can remember situations where I’ve craved meat/eggs and thought “but some good bread would also do”. Oh, but, I went and dug a little bit (because I take my immediate close friends’ reports seriously) and it turns out that the “choline” in wheat is a pretty different molecule? betaine? https://veganhealth.org/choline/#rec Looking at it, I don’t think it would be a big stretch to say that the resemblence between betaine and choline is only a little bit closer than the resemblence between phytoestrogen and estrogen… but maybe they mean that they’ve been observed to actually have similar effects?
Regardless, that page also says that you’re probably not naturally going to get the AI from what you’re eating (although you personally eat a lot of bean burritos, right? So maybe you actually are (and btw, I think you’re very high in pragmatic-creativity! (You’re the only person aside from me who ever designed a puzzle for crycog, and you did it immediately verbally after playing it. Your distributed computing stuff also seemed pretty great.))). This is the case for a lot of nutrients, but for choline it might actually matter quite a bit to be below AI.
You should only put approximately zero weight on anecdotes that got to you through a sensationalism-maximizing curation system with biases you don’t understand, which I hope this wasn’t? Regardless, the anecdotes are mostly just meant to be clarifying examples of the kind of thing effect that I am trying to ask about, I don’t expect people to pass them along or anything.
I decided not to talk about biological plausibility, because I don’t get the impression pharmacology or nutrition follows reductive enough rules that anyone can reason a-priori about it very well. It will surprise us, it will do things that don’t make sense. I actually wrote out a list of evolutionary stories that end up producing this effect, some of them are quite interesting, but I decided not to post them, because it seemed like a distraction.
I guess I’ll post some theories now though:
- This sort of phantasic creativity was not useful in pre-industrial societies, because there was no way to go far beyond the social consensus reality and prove that you were right and do anything with it (that’s only the case today because of, basically, the investment cycle, and science and technology, which took hundreds of years to start functioning after it was initially proposed). The body needed an excuse to waste creatine, so in sapiens, it only did it when we ate an abnormal amount of meat, but sudden gluts of meat would occur frequently enough for the adaptation to be maintained.
- Or maybe eating lots of meat/fish was kind of the norm for millions of years for dominant populations (I can cite this if you’re that interested). And maybe there’s a limit to how fast the body can replenish brain-creatine (investigate this assumption, Gregger seemed implicitly sus about it). In that case, we might have an effect where the brain implements creatine frugality by lowering our motivation to think in phosphocreatine-burning ways, which then may lead to a glorification of that frugality, which then becomes sticky. This could be a recurring class of motivation disorder that might even generalize to early AI, so I’d find it super interesting.
The note about choline in wheat is interesting. I wonder if it’s bioavailable? I think I can remember situations where I’ve craved meat/eggs and thought “but some good bread would also do”.
Oh, but, I went and dug a little bit (because I take my immediate close friends’ reports seriously) and it turns out that the “choline” in wheat is a pretty different molecule? betaine? https://veganhealth.org/choline/#rec Looking at it, I don’t think it would be a big stretch to say that the resemblence between betaine and choline is only a little bit closer than the resemblence between phytoestrogen and estrogen… but maybe they mean that they’ve been observed to actually have similar effects?
Regardless, that page also says that you’re probably not naturally going to get the AI from what you’re eating (although you personally eat a lot of bean burritos, right? So maybe you actually are (and btw, I think you’re very high in pragmatic-creativity! (You’re the only person aside from me who ever designed a puzzle for crycog, and you did it immediately verbally after playing it. Your distributed computing stuff also seemed pretty great.))). This is the case for a lot of nutrients, but for choline it might actually matter quite a bit to be below AI.