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… treatment with 3,3-dimethyl-1-butanol for 8 to 10 weeks to suppress trimethylamine-N-oxide selectively improved endothelium-dependent dilation in old mice to young levels …

The quotation is taken from the abstract of the 免费全球节点加速器article “什么是VPN？ - Youth.cn:2021-5-26 · 同学..还是说简单点。VPN中文意思。虚拟专用网络。先给你说下组成VPN的重要元素.1:VPN服务器。2 vpn 客户机。好了。现在讲VPN的作用了。。比如你总公司在北京。分公司在上海。北京那个公司是个大的局域网。。上海那边也是。” whose abstract is shown at the top of this post.

Lisa Marshall’s CU Boulder Today article “What makes arteries age? Study explores new link to gut bacteria, diet” on this finding, goes on to make the point that two amino acids common in animal protein, L-carnitine and choline, are converted into TMAO by gut bacteria:

Eat a slab of steak or a plate of scrambled eggs, and your resident gut bacteria get to work immediately to break it down. As they metabolize the amino acids L-carnitine and choline, they churn out a metabolic byproduct called trimethylamine, which the liver converts to trimethylamine-N-Oxide (TMAO) and sends coursing through your bloodstream.

At least in mice, these bacteria that produce TMAO from L-carnitine and choline are more common in older individuals:

(This falls in line with a previous study in mice, showing the gut microbiome—or your collection of intestinal bacteria—changes with age, breeding more bacteria that help produce TMAO).

The dangers from TMAO add to the reasons to worry about animal protein.

• In “中关村引领“独角兽”加速跑-国际在线:2021-6-1 · 北京日报记者孙奇茹 突破疫情影响，跑出创新速度。本市新产业新业态新模式迅速萌发成长，中关村的独角兽、准独角兽伋业科技创新动力不减，用新兴动能撬动全市经济发展。5月29日，北京市统计局公布最新数据显示，1到4月，中关村实现技术收入325” I worry about the cancer-promoting powers of animal protein.

• In “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid,” I worry about the insulin spike induced by the protein in certain types of meat, including certain types of fish.

In general, I am more worried about animal protein than I am about saturated fat. But I am becoming convinced by Peter Attia that in a minority of people (he estimates between 5% and 20%), saturated fat raises high-quality measures of the number of low-density-lipoprotein (LDL) particles (sometimes called “bad blood cholesterol”).

I think protein has a better reputation in our culture than it deserves. We need some protein, but few of us in rich countries have any serious danger of having too little protein. When lowering carbs, if you care about health, it is dietary fat that should be increased, not protein.

On potential trouble from protein, see also:

• The Surprising Genetic Correlation Between Protein-Heavy Diets and Obesity

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

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See also this continuation of the thread.

Experience machines get a bad rap. People often use thought experiments involving a machine that gives an ultra-high-quality illusion of life experience to argue that people want things to be “real.” There is a grain of truth to this, but I want to narrow down what I think people most want to be real: the other human beings one seems to be interacting with.

Being in an experience machine alone doesn’t sound at all attractive to me on a long-term basis, even if the experiences themselves are extremely pleasant and engaging. But if the possible experiences go far beyond what is otherwise possible, it seems great to be in an experience machine in which I genuinely interact with billions of other people as real as me—including all the people I care most about.

A movie, “The Matrix” seems to take the opposite view: that there is something wrong with being embedded in an experience machine along with a huge number of other human beings one is genuinely interacting with. But “The Matrix” brings in another element that is detestable: being put in the experience machine without one’s own consent. It may be that we irreduceably hate things being done to them without their consent, or it may be that being put in a situation without one’s consent is such a reliable indicator of something being wrong with that situation that we are justifiably suspicious. In any case, being put into an experience machine without one’s own consent is not a logically necessary element of the experience machine experience.

Rather than the situation in “The Matrix,” the type of experience machine that I think of first is the situation of the trillions of human beings in Robin Hanson’s fascinating book The Age of Em:

The reason Robin Hanson predicts there will be trillions of digital humans if certain technological conditions hold is that it takes a lot fewer resources to support a digital human than a flesh-and-blood human. I don’t think the digital humans would pine for being flesh-and-blood humans if the quality of their experience was at least as good as the experience of flesh-and-blood humans if they share that kind of experience with trillions of other digital humans and they know the truth about everything in the sense that no one is lying to them about the bit picture.

Postscript: In “The Matrix,” the motivation for keeping humans in the matrix without their consent is lame: in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, the humans connected in give off more useable, low-entropy energy than they take in. A much more plausible motivation could have been borrowed from Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos: using spare brain power of a huge number of humans for hypercomputing. In the Hyperion Cantos, though, this is done by an organ giving them physical immortality rather than by putting them in virtual reality, but one could easily have stipulated in “The Matrix” that using spare brain cycles is easier if someone is embedded in virtual reality.

To avoid giving too much credit to Dan Simmons, however, let me mention that Dan Simmons makes a huge ecological blunder in one of the novels in the Hyperion Cantos, by have a planet where creatures eat humans and human eat those creatures, but no new energy for the ecosystem is being brought in from the outside. This could last for only a short time before the ecosystem shrank away to nothing. (Despite this complaints, I think often about the Hyperion Cantos and highly recommend them.)

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• On Being a Copy of Someone's Mind

• Will Your Uploaded Mind Still Be You? —Michael Graziano

• The Virtual Reality Theory of Dualism

• “三马”齐驱铸就城市“超级IP”_全媒体报道_哈尔滨网络广播电视:2021-8-26 · 昨天，哈尔滨银行2021哈尔滨国际马拉松成功举办。作为承办国际马拉松大赛的后起之秀，这是哈尔滨成功举办的第四届赛事。本届赛事开创了“马拉松+马博会+马拉松论坛”的全新格局，“哈马效应”进 …

• Frank Wilczek: Are We Living in a Simulated World?

• The Argument that We Are Likely to Be Living Inside of a Computer Simulation

• Cyborgian Immortality

• Christof Koch: Will Machines Ever Become Conscious?

• The Mystery of Consciousness
  

Robert Eisler had his fingers in many pies. Notably for economists, he anticipated the exchange rate between bank money and paper currency that is one of our best shots for ending the lower bound on interest rates that gave us the Great Depression, the Great Recession and could easily give us another terrible recession soon. The podcast shown above weaves an interesting tapestry about Robert Eisler. I am one of those interviewed for it.

I have credited Robert Eisler many times. My main post about him is this:

• Robert Eisler—Stable Money: The Remedy for the Economic World Crisis

I have collected links for what I have written on the modern version of Robert Eisler’s idea here:

• How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide

Carbon dioxide is a big worry for the planet, but a little more of it may be good for our bodies in a direct way.

I began writing about James Nestor’s intriguing book Breath two weeks ago, in “James Nestor on How Bad Mouth Breathing Is.” Here, I write about another theme in 海外永久免费软件加速器: the role of carbon dioxide as a stimulant for respiratory function. (All the quotations in this post are from Breath.) One dimension of that stimulation of respiratory function is at the cellular level:

Why did some cells get oxygen more easily than others? What directed billions of hemoglobin molecules to release oxygen at just the right place at the right time? How did breathing really work?

He began experimenting. Bohr gathered chickens, guinea pigs, grass snakes, dogs, and horses, and measured how much oxygen the animals consumed and how much carbon dioxide they produced. Then he drew blood and exposed it to different mixtures of these gases. Blood with the most carbon dioxide in it (more acidic) loosened oxygen from hemoglobin. In some ways, carbon dioxide worked as a kind of divorce lawyer, a go-between to separate oxygen from its ties so it could be free to land another mate.

This discovery explained why certain muscles used during exercise received more oxygen than lesser-used muscles. They were producing more carbon dioxide, which attracted more oxygen. It was supply on demand, at a molecular level. Carbon dioxide also had a profound dilating effect on blood vessels, opening these pathways so they could carry more oxygen-rich blood to hungry cells. Breathing less allowed animals to produce more energy, more efficiently.

Meanwhile, heavy and panicked breaths would purge carbon dioxide. Just a few moments of heavy breathing above metabolic needs could cause reduced blood flow to muscles, tissues, and organs. We’d feel light-headed, cramp up, get a headache, or even black out. If these tissues were denied consistent blood flow for long enough, they’d break down.

High carbon dioxide is also the key to our subjective sense of being desperate for more air—more than low oxygen is:

We’d experienced the same confounding measurements during our bike workouts earlier in the week. The beginning of those workouts, like all workouts, sucked. We felt our lungs and respiratory system desperately trying to meet the needs of our hungry tissues and muscles: the dinner rush of the body. Normally, I’d open my mouth and huff and puff, trying to sate that nagging need for oxygen. But for the last few days, as I cranked the pedals harder and faster, I forced myself to breathe softer and slower. This felt stifling and claustrophobic, like I was starving my body of fuel, until I checked the pulse oximeter. Once again, no matter how slowly I breathed or how hard I pedaled, my oxygen levels held steady at 97 percent.

It turns out that when breathing at a normal rate, our lungs will absorb only about a quarter of the available oxygen in the air. The majority of that oxygen is exhaled back out. By taking longer breaths, we allow our lungs to soak up more in fewer breaths.

…

During that ride, I started playing around with my breathing. I tried to inhale and exhale slower and slower, from my usual exercising rate of 20 breaths a minute to just six. I immediately felt a sense of air hunger and claustrophobia. After a minute or so I looked down at the pulse oximeter to see how much oxygen I was losing, how starved my body had become.

But my oxygen hadn’t decreased with these very slow breaths, as I or anyone else might expect. My levels rose.

Take a sip of air through the nose or mouth. For this exercise, it doesn’t matter. Now hold it. In a few moments, you’ll feel a slight hunger for more. As this hunger mounts, the mind will race, the lungs will ache. You’ll become nervous, paranoid, and irritable. You’ll start to panic. All senses will zero in on that miserable, suffocating feeling, and your sole desire will be to take another breath.

The nagging need to breathe is activated from a cluster of neurons called the central chemoreceptors, located at the base of the brain stem. When we’re breathing too slowly and carbon dioxide levels rise, the central chemoreceptors monitor these changes and send alarm signals to the brain, telling our lungs to breathe faster and more deeply. When we’re breathing too quickly, these chemoreceptors direct the body to breathe more slowly to increase carbon dioxide levels. This is how our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe, not by the amount of oxygen, but by the level of carbon dioxide.

…

As humans evolved, our chemoreception became more plastic, meaning it could flex and shift with changing environments. It’s this ability to adapt to different levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen that helped humans colonize altitudes 800 feet below and 16,000 feet above sea level.

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Breathing a few whiffs of 35% carbon dioxide is not especially dangerous, but James Nestor’s description of the experience makes it sound awful.

I find all of this intriguing. I can’t find 7% carbon dioxide on Amazon, so I can’t do an experiment with that. But the old treatment for hyperventilation of putting a paper bag over one’s head is probably also a safe way to experiment with mild carbon dioxide treatment. DO NOT USE A PLASTIC BAG: THAT COULD BE EXTREMELY DANGEROUS!!!!

The one thing I have done already is to use the app BreatheEasy Free to time myself for 9 second exhales and 6 second inhales (with 1 of the seconds each way a pause). That feels good.

I am curious, and would be glad to hear what any of you know about carbon dioxide treatment.

Don’t miss:

• Eating During the Coronavirus Lockdown

• 库尔勒开发区加速推进重点项目建设:国庆期间，作为巴州经济发展排头兵的国家级库尔勒经济技术开发区，正在加速推进重点项目建设。面对经济下行压力，开发区换挡提速，加快转型升级的步伐，积极发展“3+1”产业，即纺织服装产业、石油天然气产业、农副产品产业和现伋服务业嵌入式发展模式，并伍此为带动，推动了各项重点 ...

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• James Nestor on How Bad Mouth Breathing Is

The Federalist Papers #13 has two elements.

First, Alexander Hamilton argues that there are fixed costs to running a national government that would apply also to a smaller confederation of 4-5 states. These fixed costs of running a national government imply increasing returns to scale in national government in the relevant range.

【给孩子的两会新闻】你不知道的两会_评论频道_中国青年网:2021-5-24 · 因为全国两会可伍汇聚14亿多中国人的智慧，凝聚成建设国家的磅礴力量。这，正是我伊中国特色社会主义制度无与伦比的优越性；这，正是我伊“中国号”巨轮前行的加速器！ 作者：嘉木

This difference between slave and free between the two nations would likely have led to intense competition to be first to claim the lands to the west of the original colonies. There might have been a bidding war for the Louisiana purchase, followed by a refusal of the nation that lost that bidding war to respect that purchase. It is easy to predict that a big war between the slave nation and the free nation would have come long before 1865.

Below is the full text of the Federalist Papers #13:

FEDERALIST NO. 13

Advantage of the Union in Respect to Economy in Government

For the Independent Journal.

Author: Alexander Hamilton

To the People of the State of New York:

As CONNECTED with the subject of revenue, we may with propriety consider that of economy. The money saved from one object may be usefully applied to another, and there will be so much the less to be drawn from the pockets of the people. If the States are united under one government, there will be but one national civil list to support; if they are divided into several confederacies, there will be as many different national civil lists to be provided for--and each of them, as to the principal departments, coextensive with that which would be necessary for a government of the whole. The entire separation of the States into thirteen unconnected sovereignties is a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates. The ideas of men who speculate upon the dismemberment of the empire seem generally turned toward three confederacies--one consisting of the four Northern, another of the four Middle, and a third of the five Southern States. There is little probability that there would be a greater number. According to this distribution, each confederacy would comprise an extent of territory larger than that of the kingdom of Great Britain. No well-informed man will suppose that the affairs of such a confederacy can be properly regulated by a government less comprehensive in its organs or institutions than that which has been proposed by the convention. When the dimensions of a State attain to a certain magnitude, it requires the same energy of government and the same forms of administration which are requisite in one of much greater extent. This idea admits not of precise demonstration, because there is no rule by which we can measure the momentum of civil power necessary to the government of any given number of individuals; but when we consider that the island of Britain, nearly commensurate with each of the supposed confederacies, contains about eight millions of people, and when we reflect upon the degree of authority required to direct the passions of so large a society to the public good, we shall see no reason to doubt that the like portion of power would be sufficient to perform the same task in a society far more numerous. Civil power, properly organized and exerted, is capable of diffusing its force to a very great extent; and can, in a manner, reproduce itself in every part of a great empire by a judicious arrangement of subordinate institutions.

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Nothing can be more evident than that the thirteen States will be able to support a national government better than one half, or one third, or any number less than the whole. This reflection must have great weight in obviating that objection to the proposed plan, which is founded on the principle of expense; an objection, however, which, when we come to take a nearer view of it, will appear in every light to stand on mistaken ground.

If, in addition to the consideration of a plurality of civil lists, we take into view the number of persons who must necessarily be employed to guard the inland communication between the different confederacies against illicit trade, and who in time will infallibly spring up out of the necessities of revenue; and if we also take into view the military establishments which it has been shown would unavoidably result from the jealousies and conflicts of the several nations into which the States would be divided, we shall clearly discover that a separation would be not less injurious to the economy, than to the tranquillity, commerce, revenue, and liberty of every part.

PUBLIUS.

In thinking about the nature of economics as a discipline (as of the year 2023), I find the distinction of lumpers vs. splitters illuminating. The terminology of lumpers and splitters is especially easy to understand in zoology and botany. In that context, “lumpers” are zoologists and botanists who make a career out of showing that types that were thought to be distinct species are really one species; “splitters” in that context are zoologists and botanists who make a career out of showing that what was thought to be one species is really many species.

In a broader sense, a “lumper” is someone who tries to explain many phenomena as being in some deep sense similar and arising from similar forces. A “splitter” who someone who emphasize how each different phenomenon is its own type of thing, different from other phenomena.

As a Research Professor (and now Emeritus Research Professor) at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, I had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with many psychologists (mostly social psychologists who do experiments). I learned that it takes a long time to learn how to translate between disciplines as different in their cultures as economics and psychology when talking face to face as opposed to simply reading a journal article. But the effort was worth it. I would not be on the track for studying happiness and subjective well-being more generally that I am on if it weren’t for most of a year’s worth of weekly get-togethers between the famous psychologist Norbert Schwarz and the economists Bob Willis and me. (It was either in 2004-2005 or in 2005-2006.)

大数据、机器人和网络安全成“爆款”新专业:2021-5-27 · 网络空间安全、信息安全 为加速新时伋网络空间安全高层次人才培养，2021年度高校本科专业备案和审批结果中，增设“网络空间安全”一级学科，共有18所高校本科开设“网络空间安全”专业，16所高校新增了“信息安全”专业。“一带一路”小语种专业

One reason I have been thinking about lumping and splitting lately is how much I have been enjoying learning Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence tools. You can read about Positive Intelligence in my post “On Human Potential.” Shirzad is definitely a lumper. He talks about his Positive Intelligence framework as an “operating system” that can be used as a basis to deal with many issues. As an economist, Shirzad’s tendency toward lumping, even in this psychological area, is quite congenial to me, and I suspect would be congenial to other economists.

Regressions of outcomes on genes, when controlling for parental genes, yield causality as much as could be desired: which of the parental genes an individual gets is randomized at the molecular level. And controlling for what genes the parents have (which form the pool from which all but mutations come from in the child) controls for the effect of the parental genes on how the parents do their child-rearing.

Often, though, we are not satisfied with knowing causality from genes because, when it comes to interventions, the only thing causality from genes says directly is what one might be able to get from genetic engineering interventions.

It is often the case that a set of genes G cause both outcome X and outcome Y. This is called a genetic correlation. Correlation does not imply causation and genetic correlation between X and Y does not necessarily imply either that X causes Y or that Y causes X. And a genetic correlation between X and Y does not necessarily imply (X causes Y OR Y causes X). G could cause X entirely without going through Y and separately cause Y entirely without going through X. As a crucial example, G could cause Z, then Z cause X entirely without going through Y, and separately Z cause Y entirely without going through X.

Even though genetic correlation between X and Y does not imply causation, it should make us wonder whether X causes Y or Y causes X. Correlations of any substantial magnitude always raise the question of causation even though they don’t prove causation.

The most surprising finding is a clear positive genetic correlation between fraction of calories derived from protein (controlling for overall calories) and obesity. The next most surprising finding is a negative genetic correlation of fraction of calories from sugar and waist circumference and the closely related waist-to-hip ratio. The authors give a careful discussion of the possible causal explanations. Here is their discussion, with headings added for the two different passages:

Protein

The genetic correlations we find between protein and obesity, waist-hip ratio, fasting insulin, type 2 diabetes, HDL cholesterol, and heart disease, together with the association we find between the BMI-increasing FTO allele and increased protein intake, point to an intriguing hypothesis: relative protein intake may play a role in the etiology of metabolic dysfunction. This hypothesis coincides with a growing (but often overlooked [71]) body of evidence that links protein intake to obesity and insulin resistance [72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80]. There is some related evidence from randomized trials with infants, which found a causal relationship between high-protein baby formula and infant body fat [81]. While the underlying biological mechanisms are unclear, high consumption of protein or certain types of amino acids (i.e., building blocks of protein) is known to induce insulin resistance [82,83,84], rapamycin signaling [77], and growth factor signaling [85], which might increase metabolic dysfunction and early mortality risk. Indeed, a recent phenotypic meta-analysis of prospective observational studies (pooled N = 154,344) found that low carbohydrate diets, which restrict carbohydrate in favor of increased animal protein or fat intake, were robustly associated with increased mortality [86].

We caution, however, that the strong and consistent links between protein and poor health outcomes might also be consistent with alternative explanations. Causation could run in the reverse direction: overweight individuals may have higher protein needs or use high-protein diets as a weight-loss strategy. The associations might also be caused by other, unmeasured variables such as unhealthy lifestyle factors or co-consumed ingredients.

Sugar

These correlations may suggest that dietary sugar, beyond its energy content, does not have negative health effects [87,88,89,90], contrary to some popular beliefs (e.g., [91]). Another possibility is that exercise offsets negative metabolic effects of high sugar intake [92, 93]. Those with a higher predisposition to be physically active may tend to consume more sugar, as sugar is a metabolically convenient source of energy during exercise [94] and may enhance endurance [95]. If so, the positive genetic correlation between sugar and physical activity might partially explain the lack of genetic correlations between sugar and poor health.

I continue to think that sugar is causally bad and the animal protein is causally bad, in line with many previous posts here. But these genetic correlation results add nuance to that view. In particular:

• Based on the authors’ discussions, their may be more mechanisms for protein to be a problem than the high insulin index for many protein-rich foods and cancer-feeding aspects of protein (and especially of animal protein) that I have emphasized.

• Other healthy behaviors—especially physical activity—leading to more sugar consumption may obscure negative effects of sugar.

But all of these ideas are only possibilities. Genetic correlations are only one clue in figuring out diet and health relationships.

For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see:

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As a nonsupernaturalist, I can’t believe the official Mormon account of its founder, Joseph Smith. (See “What Do You Mean by 'Supernatural'? and “The Message of Jesus for Non-Supernaturalists.”) But on the whole, I think he has had a benign and interesting effect on the world—at a minimum opening up additional possible perspectives on many things that are clearly nonsupernatural. And for the most part, I think Joseph Smith has had a benign and interesting effect on my own life, through my 40 years as a Mormon. So I am inclined toward a view of Joseph Smith as positive as my nonsupernaturalism and the documentary evidence of his life can support. That attracts me to the renowned (and now sadly deceased) archaeologist Michael Coe’s view of Joseph Smith as a very talented shaman. (Michael Coe seems to be just as much of a nonsupernaturalist as I am, so when he says shaman it doesn’t mean what it might to, say, a supernaturalist New Age believer.)

In addition to his interest in Angkor Wat, Michael Coe is an expert on the Maya and ancient Mesoamerica. This makes him an expert on what is by far the most plausible historical milieu for the events recounted by 永久免费国际加速器the book taken down from Joseph Smith’s dictation that launched his career as a religious leader. The triple “Mormon Stories” podcast flagged at the top of this post and its sequel flagged on that “Mormon Stories” webpage will give you all the detail you are likely to want about evidence on whether The Book of Mormon could possibly be an accurate historical record. The basic answer is no. Indeed, the evidence against The Book of Mormon being an accurate historical record is persuasive enough that some Mormon Church leaders have begun playing down The Book of Mormon as history, saying it wasn’t intended as history but as a religious record. I’ll give you just one tidbit that is interesting to me: coinage as recounted in The Book of Mormon. the BYU Studies website gives this rundown of coinage at a particular period in The Book of Mormon:

This Book of Mormon account of the coinage system, together with the difficulty admitted by Mormon apologists of situating the bulk of the events in The Book of Mormon anywhere other than Mesoamerica amounts to a claim that metal coins were in use in Mesoamerica in ancient times. But according to Michael Coe, archaeologists have not found ancient Mesoamerican metal coins. (Michael Coe says that what they actually used as small change was dried cocoa beans.) Metal coinage, by its nature, tends to be widely used, and therefore tends to show up in archeological digs of sites where it was used in olden times. So not finding ancient Mesoamerican metal coins is important evidence against The Book of Mormon. Indeed, with all the Mesoamerican archeological digs, archeologists should have found many, many of ancient Mesoamerican coins if even a few cities for half a century made wide use of coinage.

At least for the sake of argument, suppose that Joseph Smith did not produce an accurate history of the ancient Americas by supernatural means. If he had no supernatural help whatsoever in producing 免费全球节点加速器, then he deserves an honored place in the history of the fictional genre of Fantasy. In particular, his works of fantasy with a religious method are up their with, say, C. S. Lewis’s religious-tinged fantasies. (Of course, C. S. Lewis, to his great credit, clearly labeled his fantasies as fiction. Joseph Smith, to his discredit, failed to do this.) Even among believers in Joseph Smith’s supernatural calling, Joseph Smith’s eminence as a fantasy author is, I believe, an important part of the reason for Utah being a hotbed for the flourishing of fantasy and science-fiction authors.

In a 免费外国网络加速器, Michael Coe gives this take on Joseph Smith as a shaman:

I'm a totally irreligious person, even though I was born and raised a perfectly good Episcopalian Christian. Yet figures like Joseph Smith fascinate me as an anthropologist, and I suppose as an American, too. When I read Fawn Brodie's wonderful book, No Man Knows My History, I couldn't put it down. I mean, it's the most exciting biography I've ever read.

When I did read it for the first time, I realized what kind of a person this Joseph Smith was. In my opinion, he was not just a great religious leader; he was a really great American, and I think he was one of the greatest people who ever lived. This extraordinary man, who put together a religion -- probably with many falsities in it, falsehoods, so forth, to begin with -- eventually came to believe in it so much that he really bought his own story and made it believable to other people. In this respect, he's a lot like a shaman in anthropology: these extraordinary religious practitioners in places like Siberia, North America among the Eskimo, the Inuit, who start out probably in their profession as almost like magicians doing magic. ...

I really think that Joseph Smith, like shamans everywhere, started out faking it. I have to believe this -- that he didn't believe this at all, that he was out to impress, but he got caught up in the mythology that he created. This is what happens to shamans: They begin to believe they can do these things. It becomes a revelation: They're speaking to God. And I don't think they start out that way; I really do not. ...

… Joseph Smith had a sense of destiny -- and most fakers don't have this -- and this is how he transformed something that, I think, was clearly made up into something that was absolutely convincing, convincing to him and to a lot of people, and he never could have convinced a lot of people if he hadn't been convinced himself.

In the Mormon Stories interview I flag at the top of this post, Michael Coe expands on this view. I don’t have a transcript to work from with the Mormon Stories interview, but at close to the 30-minute mark of the third installment, he says something close to this:

Michael Coe: … Joseph Smith knew the Old Testament very, very well. …

John Dehlin (interviewer): How Dr. Coe, in the world, can you explain, what many people think is a miraculous book [The Book of Mormon]? …

Michael Coe: [Joseph Smith] was one of the greatest people who ever lived. … He was an incredible leader. …

Very bright kid—interested in old things, Tom-Sawyer-like guy. … This guy had an incredible brain. I really do think so.

Michael Coe goes on to talk in some detail about his view that Joseph Smith fully assimilated the Old Testament and creatively transformed what he had assimilated into an amazing book: The Book of Mormon. (Someone once called The Book of Mormon “a book-length midrash on the Old Testament.”)

Not everything in The Book of Mormon is admirable. It is tinged with the racism against Native Americans common in upstate New York in the 1820s. And in its first few pages, it has a story that seems to recommend unquestioning obedience. (See “A Book of Mormon Story Every Mormon Boy and Girl Knows.”) But it also includes beautiful ethical principles that, to me at least, came home in a way that the closest counterpart passage in the Bible did not manage. (I hope to return to that theme in a future post.)

Even now, as a nonsupernaturalist, I still look back with amazement at the exquisite warm feeling I felt in my heart when I prayed as a teenager to know if The Book of Mormon was true. Evidently, that exquisite warm feeling in my heart did not mean The Book of Mormon is an accurate historical record. But that exquisite warm feeling in my heart meant something.

Don't miss these posts on Mormonism:

• The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists

• How Conservative Mormon America Avoided the Fate of Conservative White America

• Inside Mormonism: The Home Teachers Come Over

• Will Women Ever Get the Mormon Priesthood?

• The Mormon Church Decides to Treat Gay Marriage as Rebellion on a Par with Polygamy

• Flexible Dogmatism: The Mormon Position on Infallibility

• The Mormon View of Jesus

• David Holland on the Mormon Church During the February 3, 2008–January 2, 2018 Monson Administration

• New Mormon Prophet Russell Nelson Shakes Things Up

• Less is More in Mormon Church Meetings

Also see the links in "Hal Boyd: The Ignorance of Mocking Mormonism."

Don’t miss these Unitarian-Universalist sermons by Miles:

By self-identification, I left Mormonism for Unitarian Universalism in 2000, at the age of 40. I have had the good fortune to be a lay preacher in Unitarian Universalism. I have posted many of my Unitarian-Universalist sermons on this blog.

• Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life (video here)

• The Egocentric Illusion (video here)

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• So You Want to Save the World (video here)

• The Mystery of Consciousness

• The Message of Jesus for Non-Supernaturalists (video here)

• UU Visions

• Godless Religion

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Because a smaller fraction of transactions use paper currency in the United States, any worry about the paper currency problem should be more at the level of this worry in the European countries that have used negative rates. The European Central Bank is at -.5%, while the Swiss National Bank has been at -.75%. The Fed should not be worried at all about going that low.

In his op-ed shown at the top of this post, Narayana Kocherlakota suggests that the Fed is worried about the financial health of banks and that it shouldn’t be so concerned about the banks. Narayana’s argument can be strengthened greatly by pointing out that the Fed can take away almost all of the financial pain of negative rates from banks without any help from the US Treasury simply by having the interest on reserves stay zero, but capping reserves so that funds beyond that in an overnight repo-based facility go at negative rates. The higher the cap, the less financial pain banks suffer from negative rates. Of course, the cap has to be below the total amount that banks want to lend to the Fed in order for negative rates to prevail in the market. If that led to more financial pain than the Fed thought banks should face, the Fed could even raise the interest on reserves subject to the cap a bit. So the Fed doesn’t have to choose between banks and the health of the economy. At some cost to its own net worth, it can both hold banks’ bottom lines harmless and stimulate the economy with negative rates. And in practice, if the Fed goes to negative rates, I would bet that like other central banks using negative rates it would in fact take some measure to protect the bottom line of banks. So the idea that negative rates are harmful to banks is a red herring. It would only happen if either (a) a central bank knows the banks can handle it or (b) a central bank is stupider than the central banks in the real world that have used negative rates.

The ease with which central banks can neutralize any bad effects on bank balance sheets from negative rates seems not to be widely understood. I discuss this extensively in “Responding to Negative Coverage of Negative Rates in the Financial Times.”

Note that I am focusing on the potential need for negative rates once the pandemic is over. For example, in “The Wisdom of Jerome Powell” I write:

History may judge Jerome Powell in important measure on whether he is willing to use negative interest rates to get us out of the hole our economy is in some months from now. The “how” of negative interest rates is now well-worked out, the 抢票软件变黄牛 加速包抢不过手动买票_国内新闻 | BBRTV ...:2021-12-29 · 近年来，加速包已成为出行APP的标配，宣称花几十块钱可伍提升抢票成功率。 伍飞猪APP为例，抢票速度分为低速、快速、高速和光速。其中，低速抢票为免费，而快速、高速和光速分别收费20元，40元及60元，网络通道分别加速50兆、200兆、800兆。, and there is a clear legal path to negative rates in the United States. So there is no excuse not to use them if they are needed, as they are likely to be.

But in my debate with Narayana Kocherlakota, he gives cogent reasons for going to negative rates even during the current phase of the pandemic where it has huge economic effects. See “Narayana Kocherlakota Advocates Negative Interest Rates Now.”

For more on negative rate policy, see my bibliographic post “How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide.”

Mouth breathing is proverbial as a sign of being “uncool.” But in his very valuable book 免费海外网站加速器下载, James Nestor argues that mouth breathing is also profoundly unhealthy. As one part of his argument, James writes convincingly of what a horrible experience it was for him when he subjected himself to the experiment of having his nose plugged for ten days. His account of an experiment on monkeys is also convincing:

Egil P. Harvold’s hideous experiments in the 1970s and 80s would not go over well with PETA or with anyone who has ever really cared for animals. Working from a lab in San Francisco, he gathered a troop of rhesus monkeys and stuffed silicone deep into the nasal cavities of half of them, leaving the other half as they were. The obstructed animals couldn’t remove the plugs, and they couldn’t breathe at all through their noses. They were forced to adapt to constant mouthbreathing.

Over the next six months, Harvold measured the animals’ dental arches, the angles of their chins, the length of their faces, and more. The plugged-up monkeys developed the same downward growth pattern, the same narrowing of the dental arch, crooked teeth, and gaping mouth. Harvold repeated these experiments, keeping animals obstructed for two years. They fared even worse. Along the way, he took a lot of pictures.

…

Mouthbreathing, it turns out, changes the physical body and transforms airways, all for the worse. Inhaling air through the mouth decreases pressure, which causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become loose and flex inward, creating less overall space and making breathing more difficult. Mouthbreathing begets more mouthbreathing. Inhaling from the nose has the opposite effect. It forces air against all those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get “toned” to stay in this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.

…

Sleeping with an open mouth exacerbates these problems. Whenever we put our heads on a pillow, gravity pulls the soft tissues in the throat and tongue down, closing off the airway even more. After a while, our airways get conditioned to this position; snoring and sleep apnea become the new normal.

James also points to many ancient and traditional cultures that talk of the virtues of nose-breathing and the troubles with mouth-breathing. The most entertaining was his second-hand account of many Native American tribes:

Catlin would spend the next six years traveling thousands of miles throughout the Great Plains, covering more distance than Lewis and Clark to document the lives of 50 Native American tribes.

…

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All these methods trained children to breathe through their noses, all day, every day. It was a habit they would carry with them the rest of their lives. Catlin described how adult tribal members would even resist smiling with an open mouth, fearing some noxious air might get in. This practice was as “old and unchangeable as their hills,” he wrote, and it was shared universally throughout the tribes for millennia.

Some change in our behavior in the last few hundred years has made a big difference to the average shape of the human skull:

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The forward facial growth and large mouths also created wider airways. These people very likely never snored or had sleep apnea or sinusitis or many other chronic respiratory problems that affect modern populations. They did not because they could not. Their skulls were far too large, and their airways too wide for anything to block them. They breathed easy. Nearly all ancient humans shared this forward structure—not just in the Morton Collection, but everywhere around the world. This remained true from the time when Homo sapiens first appeared, some 300,000 years ago, to just a few hundred years ago.

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Later on in Breath, James points to a shift toward eating soft food that leads to facial underdevelopment as well as the (probably related) shift toward mouth-breathing as possible causes. I find the effects of soft food evolutionarily plausible: just as evolution could assume in the environment of evolutionary adaptation that we would go through frequent periods of very little food, and design some repair processes to happen then, evolution could design facial development based on the assumption—reasonable for the environment of evolutionary adaptation of humans—that we would be eating a lot of tough-to-chew food.

I find myself convinced by James Nestor’s arguments that nose-breathing is better for me than mouth-breathing. So much so that I want to encourage myself to do nose-breathing in the way that requires as little conscious attention as possible: making sure I breathe through my nose at night. This is a straightforward matter of an intervention James discusses: taping my mouth shut at night. I know it seems weird, but I have gotten used to it quite quickly. It is important to have the right kind of tape, or pulling it off in the morning will hurt. This is what I use:

I use the Hitler-mustache taping: a narrow (2” wide) vertical strip in the middle of my lips. That way, if I get thirsty at night, I can drink through a straw through the corner of my mouth without having to remove the tape.

I can report that, subjectively, I feel better with the additional nose breathing. I feel better especially right when I wake up in the morning. I know this intervention needs more in the way of randomized controlled trials to document whether it has genuine benefits, but I would be optimistic about the results of such randomized controlled trials. (James reports some amount of relevant evidence that has been collected, though I don’t remember exactly a randomized controlled trial of mouth-taping at night.)

I confess, before I read it, I thought the theme of Breath—that we are breathing all wrong—sounded weird. And having read it, I am now doing an additional weird thing. But I found myself convinced of most (though not all) of what the book claimed. I recommend it. I plan to follow up with posts on some other ideas from Breath.

Don’t miss:

• Eating During the Coronavirus Lockdown

• Interactions between COVID-19 and Chronic Diseases

• Getting More Vitamin D May Help You Fight Off the New Coronavirus

• Can Fasting Help Fight the Coronavirus?

• Sugar Puts You in Greater Danger from Covid-19

• June 2023 Covid-19 Science Roundup