Tom File Briefs #1

Breath Training, Erythritol, Master's Degrees, and more

Often I have ideas that I wish to write about but don’t have time or enough material to develop a full post. This new format will be an occasional digest of small items I’m thinking about.

Breath Training for Stress Relief

In the past couple of years, a young person very close to me was diagnosed with a type of dysautonomia (POTS). It tends to afflict high-achieving girls after a viral infection at around 15 years old and usually goes away by age 21, but in the meantime, those with it are constantly fatigued, dizzy, and out of breath, in a time of life where the demands are brutal, especially those who are academically and athletically competitive. The standard treatments (fludrocortisone, compression, extra sodium) provided some relief, but not enough. I researched alternatives and came across a clinic offering an alternative treatment focused on activating the parasympathetic nervous system through biofeedback and breath training. It was expensive, but worth a try, even though I thought it was probably quackery. I figured even a 30% chance of improvement was worth the risk.

To my amazement, the treatment resulted in about an 80% reduction of symptoms, and the patient went from a debilitating existence to one approaching normal, if energy levels were properly budgeted across the week. The focus was primarily on diaphragm breathing as a means of activating the body’s relaxation response. My best synthesis of how it works is as follows:

Idiopathic POTS manifests in the highest-anxiety-prone population (high-achieving teenage girls) when a threshold event (like a viral infection) pushes the fight-or-flight response so high that it gets stuck and can’t turn off, overriding the body’s ability to regulate blood pressure and heart rate in tandem. This population already operates near the redline of stress, and so what’s barely manageable before then crosses this threshold and requires intervention to reverse. Stomach breathing overrides the stress response and allows the body to eventually get itself back to a better equilibrium.

It occurred to me that these benefits might be achievable with simple resistance training without all the rigamarole of the complicated and expensive therapy. For a few years now, I have used a product called PowerBreathe to train my diaphragm, mostly for sports and music performance, but I only used it occasionally. After observing the dramatic turnaround in this patient despite my bias against it, I began using the device 5 days a week. Overall, my stress levels began to drop, and it was noticed by coworkers after a particularly stressful season at work. I do notice I breathe more through my stomach simply because the muscles are stronger.

The device works by having the user breathe through resistance created by a valve, and the standard treatment is 30 breaths in 5 minutes, and like weight lifting, your goal is to continue to increase the load as you successfully complete 30 breaths at a given level. And no, just being generally fit usually doesn’t mean the breathing muscles are developed. A super fit friend of mine who lifts much heavier weights than I do had to start nearly on the lowest level after buying one.

The company that makes it (an FDA-cleared medical device) has documented benefits for athletes and high blood pressure patients. It’s pretty cheap, about $70 on Amazon. The medium resistance is the model most people need. You definitely do not need the higher resistance unless you’ve already trained with the medium resistance device. Highly recommended.

Erythritol Caution

Out of precaution, I am now avoiding foods with erythritol. A new study seems to imply it can cause blood clots, which given my family history is not smart for me. Of particular concern was that the study showed that the blood levels associated with clotting were well in excess of natural levels (as previous studies showed that higher natural, endogenous levels were perhaps a symptom, not a cause, of health problems) and could only come from dietary consumption. While sugar alcohols like xylitol seem to be very healthy in moderation, some of the keto “junk food” manufacturers have taken to using erythritol as a bulking agent to give the mouth-feel of sugar, since unlike other sugar alcohols it doesn’t cause gastrointestinal symptoms. Halo Top ice cream, for example, can contain 23 grams in one container, and Lily’s Chocolate is full of it too. That’s so far out of the range of natural consumption that given the studies I will avoid it.

Ban Master’s Degrees

I sometimes have thoughts that occur to me as half-jokes. One of these is “We should ban master’s degrees.” Policy-wise, I would support legislation that would ban licensing boards from requiring more than a bachelor’s degree for any state-licensed professional, and remove all advanced degree incentives from state compensation.

Here’s just one example. A friend of mine was licensed as a physical therapist, and this field, which is essentially allied health, now requires almost a doctorate for licensing. Accounting now requires practically a master’s degree for licensure. All these requirements do is restrict the supply of professionals while enriching the colleges and universities.

I’d even apply this to medicine and law, both of which used to be apprenticeship-based professions. If aerospace or nuclear engineering can be taught in four years, these less complex fields can too, and with a ban the colleges and professional associations would figure it out, since so much of a college education is useless filler. A few years ago, the Texas Legislature, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, told the universities that they would not subsidize any bachelor’s degree beyond 120 hours. Before this, they were bloating degrees to 130+ hours of “required” courses and were adamant that they couldn’t possibly educate with such a restriction. But lo and behold, now they all have figured out how to trim every degree to at or close to 120 hours.

Just a few of the benefits of such a policy:

• Overeducation leads to what historian Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction.” Due to the human ego and the sunk cost fallacy, everyone with a superfluous master’s or Ph.D. believes they are entitled to a more elite position in society, and yet the marketplace seems to disagree. When you have smart people who think they are entitled to something they aren’t getting, it leads to discontent. Turchin documents how this leads to political instability, and looking at voting patterns by education level this seems pretty obvious.

• Rob Henderson believes overeducation is making it harder for people to form families. First, the extra years of education waste time during the best child-rearing years, and second, people tend to sort themselves by education, and sex imbalances in advanced degrees make it harder for people to pair up because of status differentials, even though a master plumber has more useful knowledge and practical intelligence than that provided by a soft non-technical postgraduate degree. By “banning” advanced degrees as prerequisites to professional licensing, we detach some of the social status that unjustly accrues to them.

• The years of education required for the most prestigious professions, medicine and law, are extremely unfair to young women. Both fields take until about age 30 to get established. If these smart women don’t have children or fewer children due to credentialing regimes and crippling student loan debt, society gets dumber and given that most women want children it will lead to substantial unhappiness. Yes, I know the real problem is that the culture undervalues mothers and overvalues careerism, but that nut will take longer to crack culturally.

An aside:

I have long had an aversion to owning a second home, and other vanity assets with poor ROI that consume precious time. But, with my first child away at college, I am now the enthusiastic owner of a townhome in a college town, because taking away even a bit of friction to enable seeing her more often is worth it to us. There’s certainly an irreplaceable hedonic value in owned space that surprised me, particularly for something we frequently visit within driving distance. While house shopping, an activity I hadn’t done in over twenty years, the realtor, a conservative guy, was very careful to use the term “primary bedroom” instead of “master bedroom.” I suppose that’s cheap Fair Housing complaint insurance in even a relatively conservative but ideologically mixed college town.

So master bedrooms have been canceled, but why not master’s degrees? I suppose for the same reason Yale (its namesake and benefactor, Elihu Yale, was involved in the slave trade) didn’t get canceled either. Conservatives like to point to the hypocrisy of the Left, but I believe this shows their practical virtue. They don’t cancel their friends over political tactics. They are serious people who understand power and how to wield it.

Movie Recommendation: Maybe I Do

A romantic comedy of sorts, Maybe I Do, is a surprising sleeper of a movie with a very conservative orientation. William Macy’s character, in particular, in one scene makes an artful case for a “True Love Waits” level of monogamy from his own regret at cheating on his high school girlfriend. There are criticisms I could make at the edges, but overall very good. Left-oriented reviewers hate it:

“Maybe I Do,” written and directed by first-time director Michael Jacobs, based on his play, appears to be a farce about two sets of parents hitting their midlife crises just as their kids contemplate marriage, but is one of the most regressive, anti-sex films about infidelity I’ve ever seen.

…

Meanwhile, Michelle seems to have planted her entire existence into whether she and Allen marry or not. We never find out what her job is or whether she has friends (beyond the bride of the aforementioned wedding) or any life outside of Allen. 

Interestingly, to my recollection at no point during the movie is any character’s career or job revealed, and I think that’s the point. It doesn’t really matter that much compared to family.

Writing Begets Thinking

When I help with math homework, I share the wisdom of my favorite engineering professor, Dr. Darby. He taught us to “always draw a picture and start writing down everything you know. Don’t just stare at the problem.” The surprising results of LLMs like ChatGPT seem to come from a similar process, though mechanical. Just start writing and fuzzy possibilities narrow, stimulating thought.

A Test for Original Thinking

Hypothesis: the harder time Siri has transcribing your words and/or Gmail has predicting your sentences, the more original your thinking is compared to NPCs who find AI tools SUPER COOL in helping them fluff out their highly compressible thoughts.

AI Is Probably Just Plagiarism / Derivative Work

Some interesting litigation against Stable Diffusion describes the prompting mechanism as a ruse to hide its true design as a derivative work algorithm:

In 2022, the diffusion tech­nique was further improved by researchers in Munich. These researchers figured out how to shape the denoising process with extra information. This process is called conditioning. (One of these researchers, Robin Rombach, is now employed by Stability AI as a developer of Stable Diffusion.) The most common tool for conditioning is short text descrip­tions, also known as text prompts, that describe elements of the image, e.g. “a dog wearing a baseball cap while eating ice cream”. (Result shown at right.) This gave rise to the dominant interface of Stable Diffusion and other AI image generators: converting a text prompt into an image. The text-prompt interface serves another purpose, however. It creates a layer of magical misdirection that makes it harder for users to coax out obvious copies of the training images (though not impossible). Nevertheless, because all the visual information in the system is derived from the copyrighted training images, the images produced—regardless of outward appearance—are necessarily works derived from those training images.

LLMs are pretty much the same. Great times coming for IP lawyers!

Homeschooling Teenagers

I have homeschooled my children in various formats for nearly twenty years. We currently attend a hybrid model Christian school where classes are attended two days a week and work is completed at home the remaining three days.

It is very difficult to both parent and teach a child to an academically high level into high school. Some homeschool parents seem to baby their adolescents academically instead of challenging them, and it’s hard to do this as a loving parent. I came to the conclusion that as I sought to protect my children from public school, it would be malpractice as a parent if their academics were less challenging than what I experienced at a large suburban public high school with honors classes. As appealing as a hippie approach can be, avoiding difficult abstract thinking gives up a lot of the Flynn effect benefits of competitive academics for kids with high cognitive ability.

The natural process of adolescence involves the child developing an independent identity of their family of origin in preparation for forming their own household. This psychological development makes it more difficult for a parent to subject the adolescent to rigor. The Puritans found it wise to send adolescents to external authorities starting at 13 or 14, where this tension is less present and where the adolescent is more motivated by proving themselves in the outside world than pushing back on the parent. Boys and girls were “sent out” to other families to work and develop skills. Everything seemed to work better when you supervised someone else’s teenager instead of your own. Puberty seems to be the onset of this instinct, which makes sense. Just like kids tend to whine less when Dad is in charge because Dad is less emotionally invested in the whining, teachers, tutors, and coaches external to the family are often able to extract more from teenagers than their parents.

Adolescents also seem to need a degree of peer competition to spur them, which is absent with solo homeschooling. I’m not saying everyone should go to a traditional high school but online academies, hybrid schools, or co-ops with challenging curriculums, grading/ranking of work, competition, and ambitious peers, or even early enrollment in college classes will probably work better than Mom or Dad doing it solo.

Review: The Age of Entitlement

The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell provides a useful high-level summary of the various post-1960s cultural revolutions for those of us too young to have lived through them. He leads the reader through the various racial, sexual, and cultural revolutions followed by failed conservative counter-revolutions that culminate in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. I highly recommend it as a guide to how we arrived at the current cultural moment from Old America.

Conventional conservatives may find the book difficult, for he shatters the mythology of the colorblind civil rights revolution, by showing that equality of outcome, not just equal opportunity, was an objective of the movement from its earliest days, and advocated by both LBJ and MLKJ. While a colorblind, meritocratic interpretation of this era may be necessary as the only way forward for a de-facto multicultural America, it is objectively, historically false other than as incrementalist rhetoric that was useful for activists who always intended more.

He also heavily criticizes Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed the largest mandate in American history to roll back the excesses of the 1960s but largely wasted his political capital domestically. Reagan, in fact, was a key player in the sexual revolution as governor of California in leading with laws allowing both no-fault divorce and abortion.

One notable takeaway was his citing a survey from the early 1990s showing that 40% of academics at that late date identified as conservatives. The revolution of the 1960s was slow, then fast, as this generation died off and the Left blackballed the very conservatives who were snookered into tolerating their ascent into academia beginning in the 1950s under the guise of free speech. What seems so sudden for many in the last 10 years is simply the endgame of a long process of the Left consolidating power. Nothing has really ideologically changed since Alfred Kinsey and Saul Alinsky.

Review: Outlive by Peter Attia

The most recent book to leave my reading stack was Outlive by Peter Attia. I always respect people who change their minds based on evidence, particularly those who have taken strong public positions. Attia came to prominence in the fitness world by advocating both fasting and ketosis as the keystones to health but has now changed those opinions substantially. While the book is meant as a primer on longevity and health, my main takeaways were:

1. Fasting and calorie restriction do indeed raise lifespans in laboratory animals. However, humans do not live in laboratories. They live in a natural environment with significant stressors. Quality of life matters as well. There was a time when I fasted one day a week. I quit because I was miserable on that day. What was the point of trading 1/7 of my time in my 30s to maybe live 2-3 years longer in my 80s?

2. Attia, however, no longer believes either extend the lifespan of humans. By calorie restriction, he means a lifestyle of deliberately reducing calories by 20-30% in a lean, healthy person to trigger certain anti-aging responses the body produces under conditions of near-starvation. There are a few health diehards who have the drive and self-control to voluntarily do this.

3. Attia changed his mind because of observational data showing that the two strongest predictors of longevity are aerobic fitness, as measured by VO2 max, and grip strength, a proxy of muscle development. Fasting and calorie restriction are bad because they can make it difficult to exercise and can accelerate sarcopenia, the natural loss of muscle mass associated with aging. His biggest nutritional advice is to eat as much protein as practical, which usually involves a daily protein shake or two for most people. Weight loss in overweight individuals must be accompanied by resistance exercise and high protein intake to preserve lean mass.

4. Attia’s new model of health focuses less on nutritional strategies and more on fitness. He advocates Zone 2 training, defined as aerobic activity that is strenuous enough such that having a conversation is difficult but doable (more than a walk, less than an all-out run), based on the training patterns associated with elite cyclists with the best VO2 max scores. These athletes spend 90% of their training building a base with moderate intensity and only train to capacity about once per week. His prescription is 40 minutes, four times a week, of moderate aerobic training and one high-intensity session with two-minute long max effort intervals.

5. Along with this, and almost as important according to the data, is strength training. He lifts heavy 2-3 times per week.

6. He directs patients to attempt to get into the top 2% of their age bracket for both aerobic fitness and strength. That’s not as difficult as it sounds given the lifestyle of most Americans. If this is achieved, some degree of weight loss will likely naturally follow. There aren’t many overweight people in the Olympics, and not many of them have to consciously diet for weight management. Fitness has downstream effects on insulin sensitivity and other factors affecting fat metabolism, and adding sufficient protein should naturally lower appetite along with exercise.

7. He recommends viewing both aerobic fitness and strength as savings accounts for retirement. We will all decline and age, but the higher the starting balance, the longer we can live. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 75, still works out daily at Gold’s Gym, and these days he works out with 120 lbs on the bench press due to old shoulder injuries. That’s not much compared to his prime, but he’s still more than strong enough to handle the activities of daily life. Age comes for everyone, but more slowly for those who maintain their strength and fitness.

There’s more to this book worth reading and considering, particularly his emphasis on early cancer screening and advocacy of statins under certain conditions, but my action item is to expand my moderate-intensity aerobics sessions on the incline treadmill. I guess I need to find some television shows worth watching.