Skye's Curator Corner - BlogFlock

Hollywood Reporter: TikTok Suspends Toronto Film Fest, Junos Sponsorships Ahead of Canadian Operations Closure - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T15:31:39.000Z

Hollywood Reporter: TikTok Suspends Toronto Film Fest, Junos Sponsorships Ahead of Canadian Operations Closure. “Canadians will still be able to access the social media giant via the TikTok app. The federal government is instead targeting the local operations of TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, over national security concerns. It’s understood TikTok Canada, faced with a shutdown of its local offices and workforce, has begun notifying Canadian cultural events it has sponsored that that support is being withdrawn.”

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Gizmodo: The Hidden Cost of OpenAI’s Genius - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T15:22:12.000Z

Gizmodo: The Hidden Cost of OpenAI’s Genius. “According to a recent report from The Information, OpenAI revealed to investors that its stock-based compensation for employees surged more than fivefold last year to an astonishing $4.4 billion. That figure isn’t just large; it’s more than the company’s entire revenue for the year, accounting for a staggering 119% of its $3.7 billion in total revenue.”

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Engadget: Grok sure seems antisemitic after its recent update - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T15:17:44.000Z

Engadget: Grok sure seems antisemitic after its recent update. “Last Friday, Elon Musk said that X’s built-in chatbot had been ‘significantly’ improved. ‘You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,’ Musk said on X. As it turns out, X users are noticing a difference. Over the last couple days, Grok seems to have taken a hard turn toward antisemitism.”

The post Engadget: Grok sure seems antisemitic after its recent update first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Associated Press: Musk’s latest Grok chatbot searches for billionaire mogul’s views before answering questions - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T15:11:44.000Z

Associated Press: Musk’s latest Grok chatbot searches for billionaire mogul’s views before answering questions. “The latest version of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok is echoing the views of its billionaire creator, so much so that it will sometimes search online for Musk’s stance on an issue before offering up an opinion.”

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Donegal Daily: Letterkenny councillor seeks correction to ‘annoying and dangerous’ map error - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T13:05:53.000Z

Donegal Daily: Letterkenny councillor seeks correction to ‘annoying and dangerous’ map error. “Donegal County Council has been asked to contact Google Maps again to try and fix the incorrect naming of the Old Glencar Road in Letterkenny. The road, which has been named ‘The Grange Road’ on Google Maps for up to a decade, is causing confusion for motorists and a potential danger in the event of an emergency.”

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Domus: Dirt Shoe is a shoe that plants flowers as you walk - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T13:00:22.000Z

Domus: Dirt Shoe is a shoe that plants flowers as you walk. “As previously mentioned, the shoe challenges the idea that for a product to be sustainable it must be long-lasting. On the contrary, the dirt shoe is designed to wear out within minutes of use. It’s not meant to end up in a landfill, but to return to its origins, nature. Each pair of shoes contains wildflower seeds embedded inside. As the shoes break down through wear, they gradually disintegrate, releasing their seeds back into the soil.”

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Le Monde: The ICC petitions to end Russia’s plundering of Ukrainian museums - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T12:53:00.000Z

Le Monde: The ICC petitions to end Russia’s plundering of Ukrainian museums . “[For Ukraine, for Their Freedom and Ours!] called on the court to issue arrest warrants as soon as possible for Russian President Vladimir Putin and eight other top Russian officials, to put a stop to the plundering of Ukrainian museums – acts that international conventions recognize as war crimes.”

The post Le Monde: The ICC petitions to end Russia’s plundering of Ukrainian museums first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Reuters: Turkey’s competition board imposes $8.9 million fine to Google - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T12:49:47.000Z

Reuters: Turkey’s competition board imposes $8.9 million fine to Google. “The Turkish Competition Authority said on Thursday it had decided to impose an administrative fine of around 355 million lira ($8.87 million) on Google for failing to comply with regulatory obligations.”

The post Reuters: Turkey’s competition board imposes $8.9 million fine to Google first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

World Health Organization: WHO, ITU, WIPO showcase a new report on AI use in traditional medicine - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T12:49:08.000Z

World Health Organization: WHO, ITU, WIPO showcase a new report on AI use in traditional medicine. “At the AI for Good Global Summit, the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) released a new technical brief, Mapping the application of artificial intelligence in traditional medicine.”

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The Conversation: Africa’s plants: a database project has recorded 65,000 species – and is still growing - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T12:39:18.000Z

New-to-me, from The Conversation: Africa’s plants: a database project has recorded 65,000 species – and is still growing . “The database was developed by the Geneva Botanical Garden in Switzerland – involved for more than 60 years in research and conservation projects in Africa – in collaboration with the South African National Biodiversity Institute. It’s an online list of all known African plant species from almost 1.9 million places on the continent.”

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PsyPost: Positive attitudes toward AI linked to problematic social media use - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T12:33:45.000Z

PsyPost: Positive attitudes toward AI linked to problematic social media use. “People who have a more favorable view of artificial intelligence tend to spend more time on social media and may be more likely to show signs of problematic use, according to new research published in Addictive Behaviors Reports.”

The post PsyPost: Positive attitudes toward AI linked to problematic social media use first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

The Conversation: What happens to your brain when you watch videos online at faster speeds than normal - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T11:45:50.000Z

The Conversation: What happens to your brain when you watch videos online at faster speeds than normal. “Watching quickly is also potentially a good way of making sure you sustain your attention and engagement for the entire duration to avoid the mind wandering. But what about the disadvantages? It turns out that there are one or two of those as well.”

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Calishat: Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader Updated and Now Available - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-07-12T11:42:27.000Z

Calishat: Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader Updated and Now Available. “The Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader is a Google Sheets-based tool that lets you schedule your RSS feeds and give them expiration dates. I have used TOFR for monitoring breaking news topics over the short-term, scheduling feeds in advance for a known business-/stock- related deadline, and to ‘audition’ keywords I might be interested in monitoring. TOFR is now updated and publicly available.”

The post Calishat: Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader Updated and Now Available first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-07-12T11:05:18.000Z

"Well beyond the rarefied world of polo, the match is hailed as historic. This is the first time anyone has played a polo final on six identical horses, let alone won with them." —Matt Reynolds for Wired

https://www.wired.com/story/cloning-came-to-polo-things-got-uncivilized-cambiaso/?src=longreads

#longreads #polo #horses #ponies #cloning #writing #nonfiction

Mele ma‘i - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

2025-07-11T21:21:32.000Z

Traditional Hawaiian songs, humorous descriptions of genitals

Melatonin: More Than You Want To Know - Cecily

2025-07-11T19:00:28.000Z

Scott Alexander | Slate Star Codex | 10th July 2018 | U

[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.]

Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.

Melatonin is a neurohormone produced by the pineal gland. In a normal circadian cycle, it’s lowest (undetectable, less than 1 pg/ml of blood) around the time you wake up, and stays low throughout the day. Around fifteen hours after waking, your melatonin suddenly shoots up to 10 pg/ml – a process called “dim light melatonin onset”. For the next few hours, melatonin continues to increase, maybe as high as 60 or 70 pg/ml, making you sleepier and sleepier, and presumably at some point you go to bed. Melatonin peaks around 3 AM, then declines until it’s undetectably low again around early morning.

Is this what makes you sleepy? Yes and no. Sleepiness is a combination of the circadian cycle and the so-called “Process S”. This is an unnecessarily sinister-sounding name for the fact that the longer you’ve been awake, the sleepier you’ll be. It seems to be partly regulated by a molecule called adenosine. While you’re awake, the body produces adenosine, which makes you tired; as you sleep, the body clears adenosine away, making you feel well-rested again.

In healthy people these processes work together. Circadian rhythm tells you to feel sleepy at night and awake during the day. Process S tells you to feel awake when you’ve just risen from sleep (naturally the morning), and tired when you haven’t slept in a long time (naturally the night). Both processes agree that you should feel awake during the day and tired at night, so you do.

When these processes disagree for some reason – night shifts, jet lag, drugs, genetics, playing Civilization until 5 AM – the system fails. One process tells you to go to sleep, the other to wake up. You’re never quite awake enough to feel energized, or quite tired enough to get restful sleep. You find yourself lying in bed tossing and turning, or waking up while it’s still dark and not being able to get back to sleep.

Melatonin works on both systems. It has a weak “hypnotic” effect on Process S, making you immediately sleepier when you take it. It also has a stronger “chronobiotic” effect on the circadian rhythm, shifting what time of day your body considers sleep to be a good idea. Effective use of melatonin comes from understanding both these effects and using each where appropriate.

1. Is melatonin an effective hypnotic?

Yes.

That is, taking melatonin just before you want to get to sleep, does help you get to sleep. The evidence on this is pretty unanimous. For primary insomnia, two meta-analyses – one by Brzezinski in 2005 and another by Ferracioli-Oda in 2013 – both find it safe and effective. For jet lag, a meta-analysis by the usually-skeptical Cochrane Collaboration pronounces melatonin “remarkably effective”. For a wide range of primary and secondary sleep disorders, Buscemi et al say in their abstract that it doesn’t work, but a quick glance at the study shows it absolutely does and they are incorrectly under-reporting their own results. The Psychiatric Times agrees with me on this: “Results from another study reported as negative actually demonstrated a statistically significant positive result of a decrease in sleep latency by an average of 7.2 minutes for melatonin”.

Expert consensus generally follows the meta-analyses: melatonin works. I find cautious endorsements by the Mayo Clinic and John Hopkins less impressive than its less-than-completely-negative review on Science-Based Medicine, a blog I can usually count on for a hit job on any dietary supplement.

The consensus stresses that melatonin is a very weak hypnotic. The Buscemi meta-analysis cites this as their reason for declaring negative results despite a statistically significant effect – the supplement only made people get to sleep about ten minutes faster. “Ten minutes” sounds pretty pathetic, but we need to think of this in context. Even the strongest sleep medications, like Ambien, only show up in studies as getting you to sleep ten or twenty minutes faster; this New York Times article says that “viewed as a group, [newer sleeping pills like Ambien, Lunesta, and Sonata] reduced the average time to go to sleep 12.8 minutes compared with fake pills, and increased total sleep time 11.4 minutes.” I don’t know of any statistically-principled comparison between melatonin and Ambien, but the difference is hardly (pun not intended) day and night.

Rather than say “melatonin is crap”, I would argue that all sleeping pills have measurable effects that vastly underperform their subjective effects. The linked article speculates on one reason this might be: people have low awareness around the time they get to sleep, and a lot of people’s perception of whether they’re insomniac or not is more anxiety (or sometimes literally dream) than reality. This is possible, but I also think of this in terms of antidepressant studies, which find similarly weak objective effects despite patients (and doctors) who swear by them and say they changed their lives. If I had to guess, I would say that the studies include an awkward combination of sick and less-sick people and confuse responders and non-responders. Maybe this is special pleading. I don’t know. But if you think any sleeping pill works well, melatonin doesn’t necessarily work much worse than that.

Sleep latency statistics are hard to compare to one another because they’re so dependent on the study population. If your subjects take an hour to fall asleep, perhaps melatonin could shave off thirty-four minutes. But if your subjects take twenty minutes to fall asleep, then no sleeping pill will ever take off thirty-four minutes, and even an amazing sleeping pill might struggle to make fifteen. I cannot directly compare the people who say melatonin gives back ten minutes to the people who say melatonin gives back thirty-four minutes to the people who say Ambien gives back twelve, but my totally unprincipled guess is that melatonin is about a third as strong as Ambien. It also has about a hundred times fewer side effects, so there’s definitely a place for it in sleep medicine.

2. What is the right dose of melatonin?

0.3 mg.

“But my local drugstore sells 10 mg pills! When I asked if they had anything lower, they looked through their stockroom and were eventually able to find 3 mg pills! And you’re saying the correct dose is a third of a milligram?!”

Yes. Most existing melatonin tablets are around ten to thirty times the correct dose.

Many early studies were done on elderly people, who produce less endogenous melatonin than young people and so are considered especially responsive to the drug. Several lines of evidence determined that 0.3 mg was the best dose for this population. Elderly people given doses around 0.3 mg slept better than those given 3 mg or more and had fewer side effects (Zhdanova et al 2001). A meta-analysis of dose-response relationships concurred, finding a plateau effect around 0.3 mg, with doses after that having no more efficacy, but worse side effects (Brzezinski et al, 2005). And doses around 0.3 mg cause blood melatonin spikes most similar in magnitude and duration to the spikes seen in healthy young people with normal sleep (Vural et al, 2014).

Other studies were done on blind people, who are especially sensitive to melatonin since they lack light cues to entrain their circadian rhythms. This is a little bit of a different indication, since it’s being used more as a chronobiotic than a sleeping pill, but the results were very similar: lower doses worked better than higher doses. For example, in Lewy et al 2002, nightly doses of 0.5 mg worked to get a blind subject sleeping normally at night; doses of 20 mg didn’t. They reasonably conclude that the 20 mg is such a high dose that it stays in their body all day, defeating the point of a hormone whose job is to signal nighttime. Other studies on the blind have generally confirmed that doses of around 0.3 to 0.5 mg are optimal.

There have been disappointingly few studies on sighted young people. One such, Attenburrow et al 1996 finds that 1 mg works but 0.3 mg doesn’t, suggesting these people may need slightly higher doses, but this study is a bit of an outlier. Another Zhdanova study on 25 year olds found both to work equally. And Pires et al studying 22-24 year olds found that 0.3 mg worked better than 1.0. I am less interested in judging the 0.3 mg vs. 1.0 mg debate than in pointing out that both numbers are much lower than the 3 – 10 mg doses found in the melatonin tablets sold in drugstores.

UpToDate, the gold standard research database used by doctors, agrees with these low doses. “We suggest the use of low, physiologic doses (0.1 to 0.5 mg) for insomnia or jet lag (Grade 2B). High-dose preparations raise plasma melatonin concentrations to a supraphysiologic level and alter normal day/night melatonin rhythms.” Mayo Clinic makes a similar recommendation: they recommend 0.5 mg. John Hopkins’ experts almost agree: they say “less is more” but end up chickening out and recommending 1 to 3 mg, which is well above what the studies would suggest.

Based on a bunch of studies that either favor the lower dose or show no difference between doses, plus clear evidence that 0.3 mg produces an effect closest to natural melatonin spikes in healthy people, plus UpToDate usually having the best recommendations, I’m in favor of the 0.3 mg number. I think you could make an argument for anything up to 1 mg. Anything beyond that and you’re definitely too high. Excess melatonin isn’t grossly dangerous, but tends to produce tolerance and might mess up your chronobiology in other ways. Based on anecdotal reports and the implausibility of becoming tolerant to a natural hormone at the dose you naturally have it, I would guess sufficiently low doses are safe and effective long term, but this is just a guess, and most guidelines are cautious in saying anything after three months or so.

3. What are circadian rhythm disorders? How do I use melatonin for them?

Circadian rhythm disorders are when your circadian rhythm doesn’t match the normal cycle where you want to sleep at night and wake up in the morning.

The most popular circadian rhythm disorder is “being a teenager”. Teenagers’ melatonin cycle is naturally shifted later, so that they don’t want to go to bed until midnight or later, and don’t want to wake up until eight or later. This is an obvious mismatch with school starting times, leading to teenagers either not getting enough sleep, or getting their sleep at times their body doesn’t want to be asleep and isn’t able to use it properly. This is why every reputable sleep scientist and relevant scientific body keeps telling the public school system to start later.

When a this kind of late sleep schedule persists into adulthood or becomes too distressing, we call it Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. People with DSPD don’t get tired until very late, and will naturally sleep late if given the chance. The weak version of this is “being a night owl” or “not being a morning person”. The strong version just looks like insomnia: you go to bed at 11 PM, toss and turn until 2 AM, wake up when your alarm goes off at 7, and complain you “can’t sleep”. But if you can sleep at 2 AM, consistently, regardless of when you wake up, and you would fall asleep as soon as your head hit the pillow if you first got into bed at 2, then this isn’t insomnia – it’s DSPD.

The opposite of this pattern is Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder. This is most common in the elderly, and I remember my grandfather having this. He would get tired around 6 PM, go to bed by 7, wake around 1 or 2 AM, and start his day feeling fresh and alert. But the weak version of this is the person who wakes up at 5 each morning even though their alarm doesn’t go off until 8 and they could really use the extra two hours’ sleep. These people would probably do fine if they just went to bed at 8 or 9, but the demands of work and a social life make them feel like they “ought” to stay up as late as everyone else. So they go to bed at 11, wake up at 5, and complain of “terminal insomnia”.

Finally, there’s Non-24-Hour-Sleep Disorder, where somehow your biological clock ended up deeply and unshakeably convinced that days on Earth are twenty-five (or whatever) hours long, and decides this is the hill it wants to die on. So if you naturally sleep 11 – 7 one night, you’ll naturally sleep 12 – 8 the next night, 1 to 9 the night after that, and so on until either you make a complete 24-hour cycle or (more likely) you get so tired and confused that you stay up 24+ hours and break the cycle. This is most common in blind people, who don’t have the visual cues they need to remind themselves of the 24 hour day, but it happens in a few sighted people also; Eliezer Yudkowsky has written about his struggles with this condition.

Melatonin effectively treats these conditions, but you’ve got to use it right.

The general heuristic is that melatonin drags your sleep time towards the direction of when you take the melatonin.

So if you want to go to sleep (and wake up) earlier, you want to take melatonin early in the day. How early? Van Geijlswijk et al sums up the research as saying it is most effective “5 hours prior to both the traditionally determined [dim light melatonin onset] (circadian time 9)”. If you don’t know your own melatonin cycle, your best bet is to take it 9 hours after you wake up (which is presumably about seven hours before you go to sleep).

What if you want to go to sleep (and wake up) later? Our understanding of the melatonin cycle strongly suggests melatonin taken first thing upon waking up would work for this, but as far as I know this has never been formally investigated. The best I can find is researchers saying that they think it would happen and being confused why no other researcher has investigated this.

And what about non-24-hour sleep disorders? I think the goal in treatment here is to advance your phase each day by taking melatonin at the same time, so that your sleep schedule is more dependent on your own supplemental melatonin than your (screwed up) natural melatonin. I see conflicting advice about how to do this, with some people saying to use melatonin as a hypnotic (ie just before you go to bed) and others saying to use it on a typical phase advance schedule (ie nine hours after waking and seven before sleeping, plausibly about 5 PM). I think this one might be complicated, and a qualified sleep doctor who understands your personal rhythm might be able to tell you which schedule is best for you. Eliezer says the latter regimen had very impressive effects for him (search “Last but not least” here). I’m interested in hearing from the MetaMed researcher who gave him that recommendation on how they knew he needed a phase advance schedule.

Does melatonin used this way cause drowsiness (eg at 5 PM)? I think it might, but probably such a minimal amount compared to the non-sleep-conduciveness of the hour that it doesn’t register.

Melatonin isn’t the only way to advance or delay sleep phase. Here is a handy cheat sheet of research findings and theoretical predictions:

TO TREAT DELAYED PHASE SLEEP DISORDER (ie you go to bed too late and wake up too late, and you want it to be earlier)
– Take melatonin 9 hours after wake and 7 before sleep, eg 5 PM
– Block blue light (eg with blue-blocker sunglasses or f.lux) after sunset
– Expose yourself to bright blue light (sunlight if possible, dawn simulator or light boxes if not) early in the morning
– Get early morning exercise
– Beta-blockers early in the morning (not generally recommended, but if you’re taking beta-blockers, take them in the morning)

TO TREAT ADVANCED PHASE SLEEP DISORDER (ie you go to bed too early and wake up too early, and you want it to be later)
– Take melatonin immediately after waking
– Block blue light (eg with blue-blocker sunglasses or f.lux) early in the morning
– Expose yourself to bright blue light (sunlight if possible, light boxes if not) in the evening.
– Get late evening exercise
– Beta-blockers in the evening (not generally recommended, but if you’re taking beta-blockers, take them in the evening)

These don’t “cure” the condition permanently; you have to keep doing them every day, or your circadian rhythm will snap back to its natural pattern.

What is the correct dose for these indications? Here there is a lot more controversy than the hypnotic dose. Of the nine studies van Geijlswijk describes, seven have doses of 5 mg, which suggests this is something of a standard for this purpose. But the only study to compare different doses directly (Mundey et al 2005) found no difference between a 0.3 and 3.0 mg dose. The Cochrane Review on jet lag, which we’ll see is the same process, similarly finds no difference between 0.5 and 5.0.

Van Geijlswijk makes the important point that if you take 0.3 mg seven hours before bedtime, none of it is going to be remaining in your system at bedtime, so it’s unclear how this even works. But – well, it is pretty unclear how this works. In particular, I don’t think there’s a great well-understood physiological explanation for how taking melatonin early in the day shifts your circadian rhythm seven hours later.

So I think the evidence points to 0.3 mg being a pretty good dose here too, but I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to try taking more.

4. How do I use melatonin for jet lag?

Most studies say to take a dose of 0.3 mg just before (your new time zone’s) bedtime.

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It seems like you should be able to model jet lag as a circadian rhythm disorder. That is, if you move to a time zone that’s five hours earlier, you’re in the exact same position as a teenager whose circadian rhythm is set five hours later than the rest of the world’s. This suggests you should use DSPD protocol of taking melatonin nine hours after waking / five hours before DLMO / seven hours before sleep.

My guess is for most people, their new time zone bedtime is a couple of hours before their old bedtime, so you’re getting most of the effect, plus the hypnotic effect. But I’m not sure. Maybe taking it earlier would work better. But given that the new light schedule is already working in your favor, I think most people find that taking it at bedtime is more than good enough for them.

5. I try to use melatonin for sleep, but it just gives me weird dreams and makes me wake up very early

This is my experience too. When I use melatonin, I find I wake the next morning with a jolt of energy. Although I usually have to grudgingly pull myself out of bed, melatonin makes me wake up bright-eyed, smiling, and ready to face the day ahead of me…

…at 4 AM, invariably. This is why despite my interest in this substance I never take melatonin myself anymore.

There are many people like me. What’s going on with us, and can we find a way to make melatonin work for us?

This bro-science site has an uncited theory. Melatonin is known to suppress cortisol production. And cortisol is inversely correlated with adrenaline. So if you’re naturally very low cortisol, melatonin spikes your adrenaline too high, producing the “wake with a jolt” phenomenon that I and some other people experience. I like the way these people think. They understand individual variability, their model is biologically plausible, and it makes sense. It’s also probably wrong; it has too many steps, and nothing in biology is ever this elegant or sensible.

I think a more parsimonious theory would have to involve circadian rhythm in some way. Even an 0.3 mg dose of melatonin gives your body the absolute maximum amount of melatonin it would ever have during a natural circadian cycle. So suppose I want to go to bed at 11, and take 0.3 mg melatonin. Now my body has a melatonin peak (usually associated with the very middle of the night, like 3 AM) at 11. If it assumes that means it’s really 3 AM, then it might decide to wake up 5 hours later, at what it thinks is 8 AM, but which is actually 4.

I think I have a much weaker circadian rhythm than most people – at least, I take a lot of naps during the day, and fall asleep about equally well whenever. If that’s true, maybe melatonin acts as a superstimulus for me. The normal tendency to wake up feeling refreshed and alert gets exaggerated into a sudden irresistable jolt of awakeness.

I don’t know if this is any closer to the truth than the adrenaline theory, but it at least fits what we know about circadian rhythms. I’m going to try to put some questions about melatonin response on the SSC survey this year, so start trying melatonin now so you can provide useful data.

What about the weird dreams?

From a HuffPo article:

Dr. Rafael Pelayo, a Stanford University professor of sleep medicine, said he doesn’t think melatonin causes vivid dreams on its own. “Who takes melatonin? Someone who’s having trouble sleeping. And once you take anything for your sleep, once you start sleeping more or better, you have what’s called ‘REM rebound,’” he said.

This means your body “catches up” on the sleep phase known as rapid eye movement, which is characterized by high levels of brain-wave activity.

Normal subjects who take melatonin supplements in the controlled setting of a sleep lab do not spend more time dreaming or in REM sleep, Pelayo added. This suggests that there is no inherent property of melatonin that leads to more or weirder dreams.

Okay, but I usually have normal sleep. I take melatonin sometimes because I like experimenting with psychotropic substances. And I still get some really weird dreams. A Slate journalist says he’s been taking melatonin for nine years and still gets crazy dreams.

We know that REM sleep is most common towards the end of sleep in the early morning. And we know that some parts of sleep structure are responsive to melatonin directly. There’s a lot of debate over exactly what melatonin does to REM sleep, but given all the reports of altered dreaming, I think you could pull together a case that it has some role in sleep architecture that promotes or intensifies REM.

6. Does this relate to any other psychiatric conditions?

Probably, but this is all still speculative.

Seasonal affective disorder is the clearest suspect. We know that the seasonal mood changes don’t have anything to do with temperature; they seem to be based entirely on winter having shorter (vs. summer having longer) days.

There’s some evidence that there are two separate kinds of winter depression. In one, the late sunrises train people to a late circadian rhythm and they end up phase-delayed. In the other, the early sunsets train people to an early circadian rhythm and they end up phase-advanced. Plausibly SAD also involves some combination of the two where the circadian rhythm doesn’t know what it’s doing. In either case, this can make sleep non-circadian-rhythm-congruent and so less effective at doing whatever it is sleep does, which causes mood problems.

How does sunrise time affect the average person, who is rarely awake for the sunrise anyway and usually sleeps in a dark room? I think your brain subconsciously “notices” the time of the dawn even if you are asleep. There are some weird pathways leading from the eyes to the nucleus governing circadian rhythm that seem independent of any other kind of vision; these might be keeping tabs on the sunrise if even a little outside light is able to leak into your room. I’m basing this also on the claim that dawn simulators work even if you sleep through them. I don’t know if people get seasonal affective disorder if they sleep in a completely enclosed spot (eg underground) where there’s no conceivable way for them to monitor sunrise times.

Bright light is the standard treatment for SAD for the same reason it’s the standard treatment for any other circadian phase delay, but shouldn’t melatonin work also? Yes, and there are some preliminary studies (paper, article) showing it does. You have to be a bit careful, because some people are phase-delayed and others phase-advanced, and if you use melatonin the wrong way it will make things worse. But for the standard phase-delay type of SAD, normal phase advancing melatonin protocol seems to go well with bright light as an additional treatment.

This model also explains the otherwise confusing tendency of some SAD sufferers to get depressed in the summer. The problem isn’t amount of light, it’s circadian rhythm disruption – which summer can do just as well as winter can.

I’m also very suspicious there’s a strong circadian component to depression, based on a few lines of evidence.

First, one of the most classic symptoms of depression is awakening in the very early morning and not being able to get back to sleep. This is confusing for depressed people, who usually think of themselves as very tired and needing to sleep more, but it definitely happens. This fits the profile for a circadian rhythm issue.

Second, agomelatine, a melatonin analogue, is an effective (ish) antidepressant.

Third, for some reason staying awake for 24+ hours is a very effective depression treatment (albeit temporary; you’ll go back to normal after sleeping). This seems to sort of be a way of telling your circadian rhythm “You can’t fire me, I quit”, and there are some complicated sleep deprivation / circadian shift protocols that try to leverage it into a longer-lasting cure. I don’t know anything about this, but it seems pretty interesting.

Fourth, we checked and depressed people definitely have weird circadian rhythms.

Last of all, bipolar has a very strong circadian component. There aren’t a whole lot of lifestyle changes that really work for preventing bipolar mood episodes, but one of the big ones is keeping a steady bed and wake time. Social rhythms therapy, a rare effective psychotherapy for bipolar disorder, revolves around training bipolar people to control their circadian rhythms.

Theories of why circadian rhythms matter so much revolve either around the idea of pro-circadian sleep – that sleep is more restorative and effective when it matches the circadian cycle – or the idea of multiple circadian rhythms, with the body functioning better when all of them are in sync.

7. How can I know what the best melatonin supplement is?

Labdoor has done purity tests on various brands and has ranked them for you. All the ones they highlight are still ten to thirty times the appropriate dose (also, stop calling them things like “Triple Strength!” You don’t want your medications to be too strong!). As usual, I trust NootropicsDepot for things like this – and sure enough their melatonin (available on Amazon) is exactly 0.3 mg. God bless them.

The Quiet Nights That Count - Cecily

2025-07-11T19:00:28.000Z

Dan O'Regan | Notes On A Napkin | 27th June 2025 | U

What a slow service taught me about success, connection, and why we stand there smiling.

Yesterday afternoon, I was driving to BANK, psyching myself up for a solo service. For the uninitiated, that means I was the only person on the floor, with one chef holding down the kitchen. No bookings. Literally zero covers on the books. Quiet, residential neighbourhood. Not the kind of place that surprises you with a flood of hopeful walk-ins.

BANK, before service

Truthfully, it felt futile. One of those evenings where you show up more out of duty than belief.

On the drive in, I had the Go To Food podcast on. It was the legends’ round table — Ruthie Rogers of The River Café, Jeremy King of just about everywhere worth knowing — The Park, Arlington, with his revival of Simpson’s on the Strand on the horizon — and Francois O’Neill from Maison François. Bona fide royalty of the restaurant world. People who don’t just lay food on tables — they engineer emotion, curate experience, sow the seeds of nostalgia. The ones who’ve cracked it, or so it seems.

Then they started talking about zero-cover services.

Francois O’Neill:
"You know, I went through many services of seeing one table in the restaurant… It was a case of being patient, keeping at it, doing it well."
Jeremy King:
"I’ve done a zero. Have you ever done a zero?"
Francois:
"I’ve done a zero. Pretty low… hard few hours."
Jeremy:
"If you’ve got nobody in the theatre, you go home. But in a restaurant, you stand there for three hours with the potential smile on you."

Couldn’t have put it better myself. That draining feeling. The weird limbo where there’s admin calling your name — invoices, payroll, supplier orders piling up — but you’ve got to stand there. Waiting. Hoping. Smile ready.

So I got in, said hello to Ollie — my lone partner in crime for the evening — and opened up. Expectation management firmly in place.

But the car crash didn’t come. It was slow, sure. We didn’t break even. But then… trickle. A gentle hum. Less than half a dozen tables over the next hour or so. A “table for two, please.” Enough to quiet the internal monologue.

Every guest that walked in was new to us. Bristol locals, but not locals to our side of town. First-timers, testing the waters. Working solo is tricky — you’re one round of cocktails away from being fully in the weeds. And Ollie? He’s manning the fire, pan work, hot section, desserts, plating, washing up. Everything.

But we found rhythm. The service points were the baseline — prompt, accurate, solid. But beyond that? We connected. One table asked how long we’d been open, genuinely curious, not just passing time. Another wanted my name, said it was nice to put a face to the place. Another told me they’d been meaning to visit for ages, ever since a friend had raved about us over drinks. You could feel it building — this quiet little moment of connection, of people wanting to belong to something they’d only just discovered.

And in that quiet trickle, I had time — not just to serve, but to chat, to engage, to show who we are. They all had a great time. Which made standing there — with the potential smile on — worth every second.

It’s funny, really. Listening to Ruthie Rogers, Jeremy King, Francois O’Neill — three people I’d call true successes of this industry — talk so openly about their own “zero cover” nights. It grounds the myth. Reminds me of what I wrote recently about what makes a successful restaurant. Success isn’t some unbroken streak of packed rooms and glowing reviews.

They’ve built legacies by creating spaces that stay with people — places woven into memory and meaning — not by chasing numbers for numbers’ sake.

Jeremy put it perfectly:
"People boast — ‘Oh, we did 200 covers last night.’ But did you do them well?"

Numbers aren’t everything. Two hundred covers, badly done, isn’t success. But twenty, done with care, with atmosphere, with heart — that’s where the magic lives. Those nights when the restaurant breathes a little.

And sometimes, it’s the quiet, unlikely nights — the ones you nearly didn’t bother with — that remind you why you do this at all.

If you enjoyed this, you might also like my piece on what makes a successful restaurant.

A Pro-Human Manifesto - Cecily

2025-07-11T19:00:28.000Z

Marie Le Conte | Young Vulgarian | 11th July 2025 | U

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! I’ve done the thing again. I’ve written a really long essay by mistake. I swear I didn’t meant to do it. We’ve definitely gone back to basics though, in case you were wondering if you were now stuck with random pieces about Europe or what have you. This is just a Chunky Column About Thoughts And Feelings. We’re back, baby!

I’m not going to add anything else because, again, it’s super long, but before I go - would you fancy a sale? A funky little sale? I’ve not run one in ages. You can have a sale. Become a paying subscriber in the next 48 hours and pay 25% less than you usually would. Woohoo.

A column

I first found out about needless cruelty at the age of 4, maybe 5. I was in maternelle and some girls invited me to play a game with them, which involved standing in a circle in the playground and saying all the bad words we could think of, and had heard grown-ups say in front of us. I discovered intimacy that day, and can still remember being arms in arms with my schoolmates, giggling and whispering things we shouldn't have.

I still can't really make sense of what happened next. I said some words, following everyone's lead, and the girls decided to pretend they'd not been playing that game at all, and were shocked to hear me say such bad things, and they went to report me to the teacher, who duly told me off. Had they lured me in for the specific purpose of eventually betraying my trust, and getting me grounded? I'll never find out. I can't think of another reason why they did what they did. I can't think of a reason why such small children would behave in such a vicious way.

Well, I can't and I can. This was the first incident but there were many others. I was bullied pretty relentlessly from kindergarten all the way to the beginning of high school. For a decade, I was mocked, pushed, beaten, and generally treated as a repulsive oddity, who could never for one moment be left to think that she would ever belong. It was pretty tiring! I wouldn't say I enjoyed it.

If I had to choose, I would say that the physical bullying was the most bearable of the lot, as getting shoved around gets your adrenaline up and your blood pumping, if nothing else. It makes you feel pretty alive. Having every aspect of your personality, fashion sense, behaviour and appearance mocked just makes you want to cry. It's also harder to predict.

I remember having this t-shirt my mum bought me, when I was 8 or 9. It was white and tight and said "I Miss You" in bright, glittery pink and swirly letters. Everyone else in my class was 10 or 11 then - I started school early then skipped a year at 7 - but their English still wasn't that great. They parsed the slogan as "You Miss Me", because the relevant French verb works the other way round, and somehow that was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. Who could possibly ever miss Marie? I don't think I wore the t-shirt to school again.

I was alright, though, on the whole. I never self-harmed, never fell into depression, never really lashed out in any of the predictable ways. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't, but think I can hazard a guess. You see, I was a genius. I learnt to read when I was very young, and my grandmother would often rave about the quality and tenor of our conversations, even though I was only a little child.

My family had several IQ tests done, and the number that came back was all big and sexy and impressive. As a tween, I was sent to see an adult psychotherapist, as it was decided that sending me to a kiddy shrink would be an insult to my intellect. Some time around then, one of the various adults who'd been tasked with assessing me told my relatives that I was intellectually way ahead of my peers; socially slightly behind my peers; emotionally the equivalent of a pet rock. I may have paraphrased that last part, though only slightly.

Naturally, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell a child that they're very good at one thing and very bad at another, they will pretty obviously end up throwing themselves at the former, and trying to ignore the latter as much as possible.

I was bullied as a child and a young teenager and in some ways it was miserable but in other ways it was fine, because I was also being told that I was better than everyone else anyway, and they were probably just jealous or, at best, just couldn't possibly understand where I was coming from. I, on the other hand, had this great big brain but no real capacity for human emotion, and so I acted like it. It was a weird life but I couldn't really tell that it was, because I'd never known anything else.

Things started changing when I, precocious class warrior that I was, begged my parents to let me leave the hellish Catholic private school I'd entered at the age of 3, and instead head to the local state high school. They agreed and, at 13 and three quarters, I joined something which felt a bit closer to the real world. I still got bullied a bit there, because clearly I'm just always going to be one of those people, but for the most part people ignored me, or befriended me with vague enthusiasm.

Still, I refused to let go of my comfort blanket. I don't actually remember mentioning my IQ all that much in those years but somehow it became one of my nicknames, used semi-affectionately and semi-mockingly even by looser acquaintances, so clearly it was an active part of my personality.

I'd spent my childhood quietly assuming I was an alien and would eventually come and be picked up by my real, alien family and brought home to my true planet. My teenage years were spent getting slowly but surely used to life on earth, but I still felt like a benevolent alien a lot of the time. Humans were, perhaps, no longer worth fearing, but it wasn't clear to me that I was fully one of them.

It took me a really long time to get out of that mindset. If I'm honest, I occasionally still feel like I'm there; not quite waiting for the spaceship to turn up and take me home, but not quite comfortable down here either. What helps, when I feel like this, is to think of the scenes in Doctor Who when the Doctor talks about humans, and gets all soft and misty-eyed and full of awe. People! They're so messy and weird and wet and petty but look at them! Underestimate them at your peril! They may just be the best this universe has to offer!

These monologues always make me tear up. I think I can blame that reaction on the three weeks I spent doing nothing but smoke weed, garden and watch Doctor Who back when I was 19. How and why I came to do that is a different story, perhaps for another time, but the point is: I got so stoned and watched so much Doctor Who that I ended up genuinely hearing the Tardis noise outside my window. I'm pretty sure those weeks rewired my brain in a pretty fundamental way.

That's also what I wanted to talk about today, though I guess I got carried away. I meant to give you a bit of context so I could say that "liking people" isn't something that came to me naturally at all. I felt you'd need at least a slice of background to get the extent to which that statement is true. There are, I think, an absurdly high number of timelines in which I remained a recluse, a cynic, a misanthrope, or a plain old prat. Well, jury's still out on the latter, but I like to think that I am, just about, getting away with it.

I love people a lot now, at the age of 33, and it never was a foregone conclusion. That's probably why I feel so strongly about it as a topic of discussion. A lot of what I've written, both for this newsletter and in general, has tried to argue, in a variety of ways, that people are good and you should want to spend more time in touch with your fellow man. A lot of it was about the pandemic and its aftermath, but it actually started before that. As it happens, I wrote about the dangers of glamourising bailing on plans in January 2020, as we were just beginning to feel the ripples of the pangolin fucking that bat. I've been on this beat for a long time.

I do just feel the need to keep saying it, though. There were lockdowns and afterwards many people felt that actually, staying at home and only interacting with people they were close to already was the way to go. We're now in the process of getting AI shoved into all our orifices at once and, somehow, many people seem to think it feels like a good way to go through life. Please, no human frailty or unpredictability; all we want is isolation and the cold certainty of the machines. Do we really, though?

I guess that's my question. Well, more precisely - my question is about whether we've even stopped to ask ourselves that question. We're creatures of habit, as a species, and it doesn't take much for us to tweak our routines, and not really think about what we've done. I reckon that relatively few people have stopped at some point between 2022 and now to truly take stock and have a big think about what they wanted to bring back from their pre-pandemic life, what they were happy to have junked, and what they still aren't sure about.

Similarly, I worry that only a small minority of people using, say, ChatGPT, have really taken a beat to think through what they want to use the AI chatbot for, what their limits ought to be, and what the upsides and downsides seem to be. Our lives just keep changing in pretty massive ways, and without us really stopping and wondering if we're enjoying our direction of travel.

It's something I feel strongly about because, at some point, I had to decide to like people. My life didn't make me do it by default. It was something I had to think about, and choose to do. I'm not being clumsy in my choice of words here, by the way: I think that liking someone, or a group of people, or the concept of humanity, is someone you do. It's an active choice.

Long-term romantic love requires you to wake up next to the same person every morning and choose to keep wanting to wake up next to them. Being pro-people means leaving the house every day and choosing to tell that old lady that her dog looks sweet, and sticking your tongue out at the kid who's bored out of their mind while waiting for mum to finish paying, and getting involved if you overhear a conversation and think you have something to add which will be of help.

It means moving through the world and being conscious of the strangers around you, and of the many small ways in which you could make their lives better, or they could make your life better, or you could just enhance each other's day without even having to try all that hard. It's a choice you make again, and again, and again, and that you keep making because faith is something you practice, not merely a dormant part of your brain. It's a choice you make because the only other option is to believe you're entirely alone or, at best, surrounded by only a handful of people. I've been there before and can tell you it's no way to live.

There are some who will argue that this is a manifesto for extroverts but that would be missing the point, both because this manichean way to see the world is a misguided one, and because no-one is asking anyone to talk to everyone all the time. That being said, I do believe that making an effort does mean…doing just that. I bristle at the people who shrug and say they're introverts, as if that explains everything, when really they sound like people who've simply chosen to give up.

As discussed at length earlier, people and I didn't exactly get off to a good start. I'm not one of those smug people who was somehow always great at getting then keeping attention. Being social is something I had to purposely learn, like swimming or enjoying vegetables. Maybe that's why I'm so attached to it; it feels good to have become proficient at something that once felt so entirely alien.

It also means I'm wholly conscious of all the ways in which it changes me for the better. Even the most minor of pleasant interactions with a stranger can lift my mood and turn my day around, because I choose to let it do that to me. I choose to feel the warmth of human interaction, be conscious of it, and let it make my heart swell, even for just a moment. I choose to see it as a sign that most people are, if not wholly good, then certainly capable of fleeting moments of true goodness.

That really is the point, I think - no-one has to be pleasant to anyone else, or vaguely helpful, or to make a little joke out of nowhere to lighten the mood. We're under no obligation to cheer up our fellow man, or make it known that we think their baby looks sweet. No one's making us do it, and yet here we are! It's entirely possible that I'm spending too much time thinking about all this right now because I'm watching The Good Place again, but I think my point stands.

There's something so deeply life-affirming about these daily reminders, coming from either you or the people around you, that there isn't actually much we owe to each other, as strangers, but sometimes we can simply decide to act like there is. That is, in my view, the spiritual opposite of letting yourself be mindlessly carried towards misanthropy by post-lockdown habits and the increasing influence of AI.

Of course, it requires more work, but that's the entire point. It's easy and tempting to opt for solitude because nothing is more straightforward than lying to yourself, sometimes even without realising that you're doing it. For a long time I hid in my bedroom and in the corners of the playground and I convinced myself that I was too clever to be understood, and that intellect was the only thing that truly mattered in the world.

Eventually I left the house and I joined the other students at the café and, over time, I realised that no-one really gives a shit about your IQ, or your ability to solve maths problems in your head, or whatever else may have impressed nearby grown-ups when you were a seven-year old. There isn't even one way of being clever, and there's little point in trying to measure intelligence anyway. It's all redundant, and only matters to those who have nothing else to hold onto.

We also started getting drunk around then, and that really turned out to be a great leveller. Suddenly we were all getting blitzed and acting like morons, and somehow that was the most fun I’d ever had in my whole life. It only came around a few times a week, for a few hours at a time, but it offered me a series of brief windows into what felt like a better and freer way to be.

After I finished school I moved abroad and that gave me an opportunity to try on a new life, like it was an outfit, and it built a barrier between my childhood and adulthood which was more definite than most people's. I changed countries and languages and it made sense to change personalities as well. It made sense for me to take the Eurostar and emerge as a new person, ready to embrace the entire world.

I learnt how to live in English and how to get around London and, at the same time, I taught myself the ways of people. I threw myself in the arms of whoever would have me, time and time again, and sometimes I was betrayed and lived to regret it but, mostly, I built myself a solid web of friendship and goodwill.

It took me years and years to get to where I am today, and I wouldn't exchange that journey for the world. I love my friends but I love my acquaintances as well; I know so many of my neighbours, and the people who run my local businesses, and it can be hard for me to leave the house without exchanging at least a few words with someone, somewhere. I've no idea who I would be without all of them. I can't imagine what navigating the many lows of the past few years would have been if I'd remained alone.

My only worry is that I climbed that mountain while, at the same time, countless others were letting themselves slide all the way back down. I wake up every day and I choose to keep loving people, with every fibre of my being, and I watch as our recent past and encroaching future work overtime to pull us apart.

I also have no idea if any of what I've just written has been in any way persuasive, as I find it so hard to argue in favour of things I think of as so self-evidently good. How would you make the case for eating ice cream in the sun, or kissing your loved one on the lips? I know I'd struggle to put any of it into words.

I tried to make the case for people today, because I'd been meaning to do it for weeks and weeks, and hopefully I got at least some of the way there. As I was writing it, I took a brief break to chat with the woman next to me in the park, who was playing with a spaniel. The dog, it turns out, was adopted after being found in Ireland, and now belongs to the woman's daughter. "That's probably the only grandchild she's going to give me", she told me, "...and that works great for me!". She laughed and I giggled and I scratched the spaniel's ears and when she left we said bye to each other like we were friends.

I'm spending my day by myself but, for a little while, I got to stop by a window and peer into the inside of someone's life, and my own life got a little bit richer as a result. I hope something similar will happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. I love people and maybe, deep down, I always did, but them loving me? I don't think I'll ever get used to it. I hope I never do.

Homo Crustaceous - Cecily

2025-07-11T19:00:28.000Z

Michael Garfield | Aeon | 4th July 2025 | U

Michael Garfield

is a writer and artist focused on transdisciplinary research into the evolutionary history and future of intelligence. He is the author of How to Live in the Future (forthcoming) and the award-winning host of Humans on the Loop, and has worked at the Santa Fe Institute, the Long Now Foundation, and Mozilla. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Why Are We All Cowards? - Cecily

2025-07-11T19:00:28.000Z

Linch | 10th July 2025 | U

The Rising Premium of Life, Or: How We Learned to Start Worrying and Fear Everything

How much is your life worth? Not just in the abstract: I mean literally, what dollar value would you assign?

If you're American, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says $11.4 million1. That's the ratio they use when deciding whether it’s worth enacting regulations that would in aggregate save one life. In 1980, you were worth $3.3 million (inflation-adjusted). Your great-grandfather in 1940? Maybe $500,000.

But here's the strange part: we're not getting 20x more life than our great-grandparents. We get maybe 10-20 extra years. So why has the price tag on those years exploded? And why is this happening everywhere? From Thailand to Switzerland, the value we place on staying alive is skyrocketing far faster than wealth alone can explain.

Nobody talks about it, but over the course of the last century, something has dramatically changed in how our species thinks about life and death.

In this article, I’ll argue that “our premium for life” – that is, our willingness to keep living, and our willingness to pay to avoid incremental chances of dying – has gone up over time. I trace three main factors that might result in this change: wealth effects, safety-risk feedback loops, and secularization, and argue that this shift has had profound implications for how we organize society.

Intro

“YOLO, you only live once (Ooh)

The battle cry of a generation

This life is a precious gift

So don't get too crazy, it's not worth the risk” YOLO by the Lonely Island

We live in the safest era in human history, yet we're more terrified of death than ever before.

The numbers tell a stark story. Americans now value a statistical life at $11.4 million, likely over an order of magnitude higher than a century ago in real terms. We shut down the global economy to prevent COVID deaths, sacrificing tens of trillions in wealth, as well as substantial social costs. Parents who once roamed miles as children now won't let their kids leave the front yard. Young people take fewer risks than any generation in history. Less sex, less drinking, less driving, less... everything.

This isn't just about having more money to spend on safety, though that's part of it. Something deeper has shifted in how our species relates to mortality. Each generation raised in greater safety than the last develops a lower tolerance for risk. Secular worldviews make this life feel like all we have. Smaller families concentrate our emotional investments. Safety culture in organizations creates competitive arms races toward zero risk.

The result? A civilization increasingly organized around the principle that death is the ultimate evil, to be avoided at any cost. But there's a problem: risk and reward are coupled. The same impulses that make us safer might also make us stagnant.

This essay traces how we got here, why it's accelerating, and what it means for humanity's future. Because if we're going to spend the next century eliminating every last source of mortality risk, we'd better understand what we're trading away in the process.

Pro-life evidence

Value of a (Statistical) Life

(Source)

Suppose that you’re a government official, trying to figure out whether to enact regulations that can potentially save lives, but have a cost in economic activity. How would you balance the two? Slogans like “we must be willing to save lives at any cost” or “the government should just step out of the way” or “how could you possibly balance incommensurate moral goods?” don’t cut it; in the real world, difficult decisions must be made. Inaction, too, has a cost.

While different governments around the world make these choices differently, the US government makes this decision in a surprisingly egalitarian and decentralized way: economists study how individuals value and prioritize safety measures, and aggregate them, and then many government agencies takes those inferred numbers as a given to guide collective decisions.

In particular, the Value of Statistical Life (VSL) measures how much people are willing to pay for small reductions in mortality risk. Economists calculate it by observing real-world trade-offs, like how much extra salary workers demand for riskier jobs, or how much extra people pay for safer cars. For example, if people will pay $100 for a safety feature that reduces death risk by 1 in 100,000, that implies they value a statistical life at $10 million ($100 × 100,000). Importantly, this isn't the value of saving a specific person's life: it's what we collectively reveal about mortality risk through thousands of small decisions. Government agencies use these estimates to decide whether safety regulations are worth their cost: if a regulation costs $50 million but saves 10 statistical lives valued at $11.4 million each, it passes the cost-benefit test.

Let’s look a graph of VSL2 over time:

As you can see, the inferred VSL (accounting for inflation) has gone up dramatically over time. Further, the difference can’t just be accounted for by increasing wealth, as you see the same pattern after adjusting for real income:

Note that VSL is evidence for an increased premium of life in two different ways: evidentially: as this is how (some agencies in) our government believes individuals value risk reduction, and causally: as this is how our government makes life-and-death decisions on how to set regulations.

I don’t want to overstate the case: The evidence from VSL, while suggestive and strong, is frustratingly limited and by itself insufficient. Most of these government figures are made based on a relatively small number of studies, different methodologies would result in different figures, and they have not conducted recent studies. That said, I speculate more recent studies would have shown an acceleration in VSL over time for private decisions, and the current official figures are slightly too low.

Fortunately, we don’t need to speculate much further, as we have other lines of evidence for the increased premium of life thesis:

Healthcare Spending

Source: https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/snapshots-health-care-spending-in-the-united-states-selected-oecd-countries/

In this survey of OECD (developed) countries, we see a continuous, large, and monotonic increase of healthcare spending over time across all countries. As with VSL, this growth is clearly larger than just changes in GDP or average income.

People often decry increases in healthcare spending. Common reasons cited for increases in healthcare spending include healthcare-specific reasons like an aging population, technological advancements and expensive R&D for new drugs, and administrative complexity and regulatory bloat. They also include reasons that are specific to a specific country’s healthcare: for example, the US’s American Medical Association artificially limits the supply of doctors and thus increases wage premiums for doctors.

However, I suspect healthcare-specific and country-specific explanations are only part of the explanation, and miss the forest for the trees. Instead, much of the increase in healthcare costs across countries can be readily explained by a broad, cross-cultural, secular change in people’s increased premium of life.

Evidence from developing countries: Mixed but indicative

Is this just a rich-world problem for very wealthy and perhaps WEIRD countries? After consulting the literature, my tentative answer: Probably not.

There are some tentative stylized facts I gained while researching for this article:

Income elasticity for life is broadly above 1. That is, people on average are willing to spend proportionally greater fractions of their income on buying life-years as their incomes go up.
Income elasticity for life is probably higher for poorer countries than rich countries
- In other words, going from $2500/year to $5000/year will see proportionally greater changes in willingness-to-pay for health than going from $25000/year to $50000/year
- For example, in this study of willingness to pay to increase road safety, the authors model elasticity as ~2.5 for low-middle and middle-income countries (though after reading the study, I find their methodology quite weak)
Western academics are often surprised by the value people in developing countries place on reducing risks, relative to income.
- For example, in a Thailand study, an estimate of VSL of poor villagers was about $470,000 ($250K in 2000 dollars), low by Western standards but high compared to what past foregone earnings models would suggest (at the time Thai GDP per capita was $2000 in today’s dollars).
- This is weakly indicative that VSL has gone up over time, relative to Western countries at the same development level

That said, however, the evidence is sufficiently limited and mixed that it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions. For example, below3 is a plot of all the different developing-world studies on VSL, normalized against average incomes:

Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uTSxcDzPLiifryqH6/technical-updates-to-our-global-health-and-wellbeing-cause#Aggregating_these_considerations

As you can see, the results are all over the place. One can read the tea leaves however they want, and honestly the data is broadly consistent with your story regardless.

Covid Lockdowns

March 2020 gave us an especially dramatic worldwide natural experiment in life valuation. Faced with a disease that threatened primarily the elderly and infirm, the world chose economic shutdown over mortality. Schools, businesses, social events, and much of civil society chose to shut down, voluntarily and otherwise. The revealed preference was staggering:

Estimates of economic costs range from ~20 trillion on the low end, to ~80 trillion on the high end
While separating out causality is hard, in my estimation more than half the economic costs (excluding deaths) likely comes from our responses to the pandemic (including individual behavior and government actions), rather than the disease itself.
Lives potentially saved: ~10-50 million (estimates vary wildly)
Implied economic cost per life saved: ~$400,000 to ~$8 million

While much of the debate for the “covid lockdowns” comes from arguments for individual freedom, autonomy and voluntary economic activity on one end, and collective benefits of health, lives saved and collective action on the other, I think the framing of individual behavior vs government mandates is largely misguided.

At least in developed countries, traffic camera data and smartphone location data broadly shows most of the social distancing and isolation measures came 0.5-2 weeks before official lockdowns were announced or came into effect. The interplay between civil society and government mandates were mostly about the tail wagging the dog, rather than the other way around.

Further, public support for lockdowns remained high even as costs mounted. Polls showed 70%+ approval for restrictions in most developed countries through 2020, with the stricter countries broadly more positive about their governments’ responses. We knew the economic costs and chose life preservation anyway.

Compare this to historical pandemics. During the 1918 flu (which had an unvaccinated infection-fatality rate ~5-8 times that of COVID, and was unusually lethal among adolescents and young men), quarantines and business closures were narrowly targeted and limited in scope, often restricted to schools4 and heavily crowded businesses like movie theaters and dance halls. The longest among them lasted about 15 weeks. St. Louis's aggressive closures, which included smaller businesses and churches, were considered radical overreach. A century later, Sweden's relatively light touch was the outlier.

Our response to the COVID-19 pandemic was also instructive as it was not just a tradeoff between economic values and years of life. Instead, it pitted our values of life against other sacred values – our children’s education, our maintenance and growth of social relationships, our freedom of movement, and our desires for individual rights, privacy, and autonomy. With a few exceptions, life won.

Individual Behaviors

On X, I recently saw this map go viral:

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/01/162079442/do-you-know-where-your-children-are-is-that-always-a-good-thing

In it, we see the ranges of 4 generations of 8-year olds (from Ed to his great-grandfather George in 1919). As NPR puts it:

The Thomas family has been living in Sheffield, a town toward the north of England, for at least four generations. When great-grandpa George Thomas turned 8 in 1919, he was allowed to walk six miles — by himself — to go fishing. But each generation after has been given less and less room to roam.
In 1950, when Jack, the grandfather, turned 8, he was allowed to go just a mile on his own to visit the woods.
In 1979, when Vicky, the mom, turned 8, she was allowed to ride her bike around the immediate neighborhood, walk by herself to school, and could visit a swimming pool on her own. Her zone of play was a half-mile wide.
And then we have the current generation, Ed.
[...]In 2007, Vicky said her son, then 8, was "driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home." Basically, he stays on the block.
In fact, she says, he prefers the family yard to the street outside. "He doesn't tend to go out because the other children don't," she said.

That was 2007. Now, 18 years later, post-pandemic and with ubiquitous smartphones and indoor entertainment, I’m not sure how many 8-year olds are even allowed to venture outside their own yards.

This is hardly specific to parenting. Across nearly every domain, individual risk-taking is converging toward "minimal acceptable."

Transportation: Motorcycle ridership in the US peaked in the 1970s and has declined 50% since. Teen driving licenses have plummeted: in 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds had licenses; today it's 25%. Not because cars are less available, but because both teens and parents see teen driving as unnecessarily risky.

Recreation: Extreme sports participation has plateaued despite better safety equipment and practices. Meanwhile, safer activities like yoga have exploded (up 500% since 2000).

Social risks: Young people have less sex, drink less, fight less, and commit fewer crimes than any generation in recorded history. The "wild youth" stereotype has been completely inverted: today's young are radically risk-averse compared to their parents.

Across the board, we see a wholesale shift in what constitutes acceptable risk. Activities that were considered normal parts of growing up: unsupervised play, teenage employment in manual labor, high-school boxing, and hitchhiking have now been reclassified as almost unconscionably dangerous.

The Overarching Pattern

There are multiple disparate strands of evidence that the premium of life has clearly gone up. While any given line of evidence can be disputed or explained away through some other mechanism, the overarching pattern is clear: we care more about living longer than we ever have in the past, and take heroic efforts to avoid death.

Why caused this change? And what does it mean for the future? We turn to our next section:

Why might people value life more?

Money

An obvious explanation here is money: We’re richer, so we can afford to care more about living. Hall and Jones (2007)5 presents a simple formal model of this. In essence, more money means more capacity to buy life. Further, once basic needs are met, your other options for spending (compared to healthcare) are more limited. Thus, if your other options for spending money on material goods do not “spark joy”, healthcare is a better option in contrast. In economics jargon, healthcare is a “superior good.”

For more, see Hall and Jones (2007).

On Money and Happiness

Finally, being richer might mean your life is better, and thus more worth protecting. Up until now, I have elided the question of whether richer people are actually happier. My thesis does not necessarily rely upon this assumption (People might fight harder to preserve life for reasons other than greater subjective well-being). However, I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming:

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/mczgk9/does_a_rich_country_mean_a_happy_country/

When self-reported happiness from World Happiness Surveys is plotted against log (income), we see a clear and positive trend. A fairly parsimonious explanation is that richer people are in fact happier, and this gives them prima facie greater reason to want to live longer.

That said, I believe money alone is not a sufficient explanation for our greater value of life. In particular, it does not explain why people are increasingly willing to not just pay more money to extend their lives, but also trade non-monetary goods to live longer, as well as take less risks with their lives across the board.

Safety-Risk Aversion Feedback Loops

“A bat is just a rat with wings” – The Riddler, apocryphally

Greater risk aversion isn’t just a cause of having a safer environment, but also partially a result. To understand why, we naturally turn to a closely-related question: Why do bats live longer than mice?

Source :https://apomorphic.com/2019/09/09/why-we-age-1-intro

Bats and mice are evolutionarily and morphologically quite similar. The main difference, of course, is that bats could fly. And that, arguably, made all the difference.

See, one of the more interesting stylized facts in animal surveys on aging is that an animal’s intrinsic mortality rate – how likely it is to die without external pressures like starvation and predation – is closely linked to its extrinsic mortality rate. An animal’s lifespan in captivity is closely linked with its prevalence of predation in the wild.

Source: https://apomorphic.com/2020/01/12/why-we-age-2-nonadaptive

In addition to bats, birds on average also live much longer than most mammals. Fliers in general live longer than landlocked animals, since they can escape more easily, controlling for body weight (Being bigger of course also makes it harder to eat you).

In addition to flight and bodyweight, you are also more likely to have a longer maximum lifespan if you’re tree-borne, burrowing, armored, spiky, poisonous, or social – all factors that reduce your extrinsic mortality rate.

Why? There are many theories for this, but according to Bradshaw’s blogpost above (and I agree), the most plausible comes from natural selection pressures: mutations that decrease fitness later in life are more punishing if you have a longer natural lifespan (lower extrinsic mortality rate). In contrast, if predators have a 99% chance of eating you before the ripe old age of 2, any mutation that reduces fitness by the age of 10 is ~ irrelevant.

For more, see Will Bradshaw’s sequence on the theoretical biology of aging: Why We Age, Part 1; Evolution is Sampling Error; Why We Age, Part 2: Non-adaptive theories.

Why is this relevant to the human value of life? There are two different angles:

The Rational Actor Model

As baseline mortality drops, the expected value of safety investments increases. If your baseline rate of death is 10%/year, then your expected lifespan is 10 years, so getting rid of something that has a 10% chance of killing you buys you one year of life (on average). In contrast, if your baseline rate of death is 5%/year, then getting rid of something that has a 10% chance of killing you buys you two years of life.

The longer your baseline mortality, the more valuable each additional improvement in safety might be.

The Psychological Angle

Rational calculations aside, it just seems really intuitive to me that safer environments mean you care more about safety. If your children have a 30% chance of dying from smallpox before the age of five you probably aren’t going to be spending that much effort reducing their chances of drowning from 0.05% to 0.02% in the local pool – you just have much bigger problems to worry about. But when you have a child mortality rate like Norway’s (0.19%), drownings might suddenly become the biggest problem in your child’s life, and fretting parents might naturally worry more about these small (in absolute terms, on a historical scale) risks.

There are also conditioning considerations. When organisms evolve in high-mortality environments, they develop psychological patterns suited to that reality: risk-taking, fast reproduction, lower long-term investment. But what happens when the environment suddenly becomes safe?

One hypothesis: each generation raised in greater safety than the last becomes psychologically calibrated to that new baseline. They don't just expect safety; they need it at a deep emotional level. What was paranoid overprotection to one generation becomes baseline common sense to the next.

To be clear, this is just one hypothesis among several, and I’m still confused about the details. Because this happened on such a quick timescale that there can’t be a clear selection mechanism like in animal evolution, I do find these psychological hypotheses to be somewhat tentative and confused. Still, intuitively it really feels like there’s something there.

(One piece of potential evidence for this hypothesis would be longitudinal data on developing countries6)

The Secularization Hypothesis

While discussing these models with the language model Claude Opus IV, they suggested another intriguing possibility: Secularization. In Claude’s own words,

This might be the most profound driver. For most of human history, death wasn't the end—it was a transition. Whether you believed in heaven, reincarnation, or joining your ancestors, mortality had an escape clause.
But as traditional religious belief declines, this life becomes all there is. The stakes of mortality go from high to infinite. Losing 30 years of life when you expect eternal paradise afterward is tragic. Losing 30 years when those years are all you'll ever have? That's existentially catastrophic.
The timing fits suspiciously well. The acceleration in VSL starts in the 1960s-70s, exactly when secularization took off in the developed world. Countries with the most dramatic religious decline (Scandinavia, UK) often show the most extreme safety cultures. The US, with higher religiosity, has been a relative holdout—though we're catching up fast.
This also explains the super-elasticity in developing countries. Modernization doesn't just bring wealth; it brings secular worldviews. A Thai farmer who starts earning more money and stops believing in reincarnation will value life preservation far more than income alone would predict.

I find this argument intriguing but somewhat shaky. In particular, I’m unsure how well it aligns with data from China and other broadly always-secular countries.

Smaller Families and Greater Per-Child Investment

As family sizes have gotten smaller and the world becomes increasingly specialized, each individual child represents greater familial and state investment in their education, health, and well-being. This in turn means that it becomes costlier for them to die, and their life matters more.

That said, this theory is incomplete: one thing I’m confused about is how does this explain the potential delta in selfish preferences? It’s intuitive to me when families and states care more about preserving their children, but how does this affect the view from the inside? How does this explain why children (and adults) want to live more than they ever did before, rather than rebel (as they always did) against parents and the government in less-than-safe ways?

More research and thinking needed. Comment if you have thoughts!

Alternative Theories, Countervailing Evidence, and Implications

I’ve presented a potentially very important trend, many lines of (what I think is) good evidence for that trend, and (what I think is) some good reasons for why that trend might be occurring. But is the trend real? What are some countervailing strands of evidence that might contradict this story? And what, if true, are the most important implications of this trend?

In the next post, we’ll discuss those questions, as well as topics for future research. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, I’ll encourage readers to consider these questions for themselves, and/or discuss these questions with your friends and/or comment with your objections here. You only have one life to live, so why not spend it on manufacturing internet beefs on Substack?

EPA currently uses $7.4 million in 2006 dollars, which this handy inflation calculator tells me is about $11.4 million in 2025 dollars.

Graph made with Claude. Sources include Thaler & Rosen(1976), Viscusi and Aldi (2003), and various studies by Viscusi. I spot-checked the sources and calculations but cannot guarantee a complete lack of hallucinations

H/T Isabel Juniewicz for the article

Note that school were a more natural target for closures in 1918 than 2020-2021, since Spanish flu affected adolescents much more than COVID did

H/T Isabel Juniewicz for the article

Developing countries lifespans have increased a lot in the last 50-100 years. In general, catch-up adoption of public-health related technologies like vaccines, sanitation, and antibiotics have been relatively quick, whereas economic development have been relatively slow. This means that (e.g.) countries with GDP/capita closer to the US in 1930 have had lifespans closer to US in 1970. If my safety-feedback loop story is broadly correct, you’d expect developing countries’ willingness to pay for life to be higher than the US and other developed countries’ past willingness-to-pay at the same income income level.