self_made_human
C'est la vie
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
I tried stuffing my friends into this textbox and it really didn't work out.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
C'est la vie
12d ago
Jesus Christ. It's one thing to observe that a lot of QALY and DALY improvements come from "clean water, vaccines and antibiotics" and then entirely another to imply that additional interventions are zero or negative expected value.
Do you think that our (now quite successful) treatments of childhood leukemia are as ineffectual as extending the unhealthy lifespans of the very elderly?
Doctors: Attending to hypochondriacs and prolonging old people’s suffering.
What. For example, what do you think paediatricians do?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
13d ago
Sounds to me like you're describing the Bay Area.
https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/erectile-dysfunction/background-information/prevalence/
Erectile dysfunction is a very common disorder, and the incidence and prevalence increases with age [Hackett, 2018; Muneer, 2014; EAU, 2022]. The Massachusetts Male Aging Study (MMAS) in the USA, a community-based, random sample, prospective observational study of non-institutionalized men in the Boston area, used a self-administered sexual activity questionnaire, and found [Feldman, 1994]: A self-reported overall prevalence of erectile dysfunction in 52% of men aged 40–70 years. The specific prevalence for mild, moderate, and severe cases was 17.2%, 25.2%, and 9.6% respectively. The prevalence increased with increasing age (increasing three-fold between men aged 40 and 70 years).
A large German postal survey (the 'Cologne Male Survey') of men aged 30–80 years (n = 8000) reported [Braun, 2000]: A prevalence of erectile dysfunction of 19.2%. The prevalence of erectile dysfunction increased from 2.3% at 30 years to 53.4% at 80 years of age. Expert opinion in a review article
self_made_human
C'est la vie
13d ago
No, no, you're right. I did say it was a bad pun. As a doctor in a very socialist medical system, SSRIs for everyone!
self_made_human
C'est la vie
13d ago
Whats the "ussri" name about btw?
It's a frankly terrible pun that came to me in a dream. Possibly something to do with fully automated luxury space communism, with the homosexuality optional.
I dont think Bayes theorem requires its numbers to be independent (whatever it would mean for a conditional to be independent of its condition).
Oops. Not sure how that snuck it, the whole point is to find out conditionals and manipulate conditionals.
As far as I know, beard minoxidil doesnt need to be kept up. Androgenic hair is easy to get and usually sticks around.
I believe you're right, but minoxidil takes ages to show good effect. What I mean isn't that he's forced to keep it up while at risk of losing it all when he stops, but rather that he wanted it to get denser and denser, which takes a while.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
Thank you. I try my best to make my existential angst both funny and educational. Sometimes this results in less angst!
At times, I am dismayed by other doctors' ignorance regarding base rates, relative risks, and their attitude towards pontification without additional qualifiers towards their patients. Of course, we're only human, fallible, and working with a patient population that isn't necessarily sophisticated enough to follow such caveats. I'm guilty of this myself, even though I strive to be better.
As far as I'm aware, there's no reason to think that finasteride must cause BPH and man boobs in your case. It increases the risk, but that's a quantifiable increase in probability and far from a certainty.
AFAIK, Rogaine is just a formulation of basic bitch minoxidil. It's inoffensive, doesn't have very strong effects, but when applied topically, doesn't have significant drawbacks either. We don't know for a fact how minoxidil even works, but the prevailing hypothesis is that it improves blood flow to the local tissues near where it's administered. This ?somehow increases hair growth.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
Nope, must have missed me. Got a link handy?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
My understanding is that this is a contested finding, but even assuming the usual relative risk of ED while actively taking finasteride (~1.5x baseline), the absolute risk is not so high that you need to run away screaming. That being said, unless my hair falls out by the fistful overnight, I would personally take my chances with minoxidil first.
I am weakly agnostic on this claim, but my primary motive was to explain that the claim by this pharma professor half a decade back was hyperbole.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
It didn't come up, but I'm passingly familiar with what you're talking about. I believe that Scott has written about this a few months back, and the mechanism attributed was venous stasis/insufficiency causing the local hormonal levels to go too high.
Not related to balding as far as I'm aware, and largely out of my wheelhouse. I'll defer to Scott, and limit my commentary to saying that I don't see anything obviously implausible with the mechanism purported.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
I'm not even going bald yet! Even from a purely internal notion of aesthetics, I think I'd look better with a full head of hair rather than being bald or shaved.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
I agree that finasteride is treated unfairly. Even if you're in the unlucky 1-2% that gets significant side effects, they usually wear off in weeks or months from cessation.
Thanks for reading, and good luck keeping your hair while you still need it!
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
I figured it out, but with the caveat that this only works in ideal circumstances which are very much not true.
Here's the link to the full post. I'm reasonably confident about the maths.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
Hmm? That's definitely not true. I'd know, I just submitted an effortpost on the topic.
Even in the study you linked:
Using common genetic variants with a minor allele frequency of at least 1%, GCTA-GREML analysis found that 47.3% (SE 1.3%) of the variance in baldness can be explained by common autosomal genetic variants, while 4.6% (SE 0.3%) can be explained by common X chromosome variants.
Fathers contribute autosomal chromosomes, even if they don't hand over an X chromosome. The relative risk if you have a bald dad is anywhere between 2.5-6x as much!
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
I can't fully answer that question without major spoilers! In fact, this admission of my inability to do so itself constitutes a spoiler, but what else can I do since you asked?
To keep it as spoiler free as possible, each Venerable, while they were alive, were the only ones of their kind. They didn't overlap, and while dominant, prevented anyone else from having any hope of rising up. This has a proper mechanical explanation too, and not just for want of trying.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
My 6 hour train ride down to England just turned into a 9 hour one. Apparently there's a "heat wave" about, with temperatures at 27° C at my part of Scotland, and that's sufficient to cause the trains to breakdown. There was some forewarning, as a foreboding "potential service disruption" alluded to earlier in the day. I just didn't think this was likely.
I'm beginning to think the Indian railway system , for all its faults, has a thing or two to teach its ancestor. You won't catch them melting at anything below boiling point, unlike their playdoh kin.
They weren't nice enough to send out warning before I boarded the first train either, and if it wasn't for my cousin's girlfriend chasing down customer support on Twitter, I'd be up shit creak with a very small paddle. I'm very sleep deprived as is, and was counting on a nap I'm not going to get, what with additional stops and changes.
(I'm going to tell him to hurry up and put a ring on her, she's a keeper)
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
In the novel, in the past 3 million years, there were ten "invincible" rank 9 Venerables. During their reign, before they died of old age, literally nobody was able to contest their dominance or pose a threat. There's more to the story, which I can't discuss without massive spoilers.
If FY did achieve both becoming the strongest, and true immortality, then there's strong precedent that he could smack down any upstarts.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
I just wanted to say that I appreciate your curated collection of legal anecdotes, and look forward to them every week. I did, in fact, find this one bleakly funny, but my sense of humor is darker than my complexion.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
It's all well and good to begin succumbing to the recessionary pressures up top once you're already married and settled down. To my (mild) astonishment, women are quite unlikely to abandon the partners they cherish and love, while being averse to going for their less lucky counterparts while single.
But hey, hair transplants work if you can afford them.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
You're in luck, because I did in fact decide to begin that effort-post. I've got a 6 hour journey today on abominably slow British trains, so expect something in a few hours or change.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
14d ago
I'm also gauging interest in an effort-post on the topic, so let me know if this something that you'd like to know more about.
I've done a relatively exhaustive analysis on male pattern baldness (I have a vested interest). I'm extremely relieved to find out that despite the reflection of the OR lights off dad's head being dazzling, I likely have lower than average odds of going bald.
Relevant factors:
- 50% of men lose some hair by 50.
- Dad's saving a lot of money on haircuts.
- Maternal grandpa has a respectable head of hair past 95. If I'm slightly thinning when I'm crossing my 80s, I can live with that.
- Only 1/3rd of my paternal uncles are bald, all of them older than my dad.
- I'm teetering dangerously close to 30, without losing anything off the top. That pretty much rules out early onset AO.
I can breathe a little easier, without having to worry so much about turning 30 and finding out that I've lost my hair, alongside my well-founded belief that you immediately develop arthritis and an inability to drink liquor like you used to. The jungles of Norwood seem less daunting, and worst comes to worse, it's time for minoxidil or a trip to Turkey. Going bald might even be good for career progression, just look at Scott!
(I was immensely annoyed by the fact that while stats on the probability of your dad being bald if you're balding are well established at around 80%, the odds of becoming bald with a bald dad are much harder to find. And MBP is annoyingly polygenic to boot.)
Edit:
self_made_human
C'est la vie
15d ago
I only read about 50 chapters
As ludicrous as it sounds, this is nowhere enough to judge the quality of most Xianxia, including the good ones.
I didn't mind the start, but I can promise you the novel gets better. I'm calling it a contender for my favorite novel despite the flaws and teething pains.
Seeing romance as a weakness seems like the surface-assessment of a 14-year-old. You should rather let yourself fall in love with somebody far out of your league - this would help you improve faster. Motivation comes from emotions, so killing all your emotions doesn't make you a perfect rational agent, it merely drains your life of meaning and reasons to go on. I'm quite confident that crazy people generally outperform rational people unless the latter is highly conscientious - "you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star". The "Dao" that these cultivators build is literally a worldview/a personal path. Manga like "The world after the fall" show this concept well. People who are too rational cannot do this, they barely have their own opinions and values, they believe that things are either universally true or universally false, they do not have faith in subjective and personal things.
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
More seriously, Fang Yuan is a maximally motivated character. There is nothing that a romance could do to make him aspire to be better, any faster.
I don't see why they wouldn't work, but you'd be stretching out the transplanted follicles to cover a lot more surface area.
I don't recall running into any studies, but I think it's just an observed fact that's not really in question. It would be good to know the numbers though!
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