Decompiling obsessions.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across well-intentioned groups of people in the biohacker space who think they are going to save the world. They are very bright and enthusiastic and good people (at least the ones that aren’t backed by crypto fascists and grifters), but they have no training and they can’t think through a problem and parse it down to something that is practically testable. It’s all about revolution—get the shit out there. They have no training in physiology, no medical training, no training on drug interactions, no idea about the empirical methods that underpin the medical field, and as far as I can tell, no real experience with the scientific method. They throw the jargon around though, man. To someone who isn’t trained, some of them can sound really convincing, but when you sit down and actually listen and ask them for substance, they can’t produce it. As far as I can tell, it all seems like people who have been acquired by the “market,” a market who tells them they are “scientists” and “researchers” because they sit down on PubMed and Google Scholar and read papers, and they say, “Oh, we are doing research” or “We are doing science.” And look, I think this is all good—taking an interest in things and educating yourself—but what is missed is that the training you receive over years is not to turn you into an authoritarian worker bot who wants to crush hopes and dreams and progress. It’s to expose you to enough things so that you learn there is always “more to the story.” It is always more complex, it is always more nuanced, and being an expert in something isn’t about the degree—it is the ability to detect and parse nuance that can have very disastrous consequences if not recognized, but also lead to amazing breakthroughs when things previously overlooked are recognized.

One thing that frustrates me and I find exceedingly difficult to communicate with people is the concept of “honing.” This is the process of taking an idea and looking for evidence against it. It’s a process of refinement, a process of actually developing novel ideas. Sometimes half the battle of making a breakthrough is about guiding yourself through the twists and turns of what already has been done and letting it lead you somewhere. It’s a really hard thing to get across to enthusiastic people—and shit, if I wasn’t the biggest daydreamer of them all when I was coming up—but the breakthroughs I made were the result of that “honing” process. It wasn’t like, “Here is a bucket of darts, throw them all at the board at the same time and see what works.” It’s like, outside of being a waste of human resources, projects that do such things usually require material resources, and I can’t think of a better way to squander and mismanage resources than the old throw-the-bucket-of-darts trick. We live in a world of such abundance that no one thinks about the consequences of such waste anymore and the impact it has.

I would love for the biohackers to “win” because I think there are some structural aspects to how they organize that could improve efficiency in testing new things. But I think there is so much distrust because of n=1 experiences that they want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It’s like they can’t acknowledge that those of us who worked in “the system” also understand that as a system there are always inefficiencies, that everything that can be is always being tried, but that it has to be balanced with risk and outcomes, and that we recognize that, yes, some people will slip through the cracks. But at the end of the day, there is a ton of good that is done, and they are choosing not to see it—because if you don’t have the tear-the-shit-down philosophy, how can it possibly be exciting enough to get funding? And it’s like, that’s the problem. We need to be doing things for progress, not for excitement. We need to become visionary again. There are tons of fundamental questions in biology that still need answers. There are tons of things we still don’t know about basic things, and to be quite frank, a lot of those unanswered questions would do wonders for progress in the future. It’s the old “slow is fast, fast is slow” thing again.

If you can’t build something and only extract you will become irrelevant on multiple levels of existence.

Was looking into PFAS and microplastics again after a friend mentioned the exposures that firefighters see.

Context is everything.

Executive summery based off the data that is available today:

The panic narrative on PFAS/microplastic in humans is probably bullshit. The motto is eat shit and prosper.

For PFAS healthcare workers and firefighters have 1 – 1.3 to 2 – 10 times elevated PFAS than the general population. Healthcare workers live longer than the average population. The data is a little more complex for firefighters because it is confounded by other hazards. This excludes flat out getting burnt to death; think things like smoke inhalation. Yet, even with those factors, they don’t live statistically significant shorter lifespans than the general population. Some data sets show they live slightly longer, just like healthcare workers.

The data on microplastics is less mature than PFAS but it’s the same deal – elevated levels in healthcare workers and extreme levels of exposure to firefighters and yet lifespan is either the same or slightly more.

Nevertheless, healthcare workers and firefighters are also generally healthier populations to start with much like military personnel “healthy worker effect” – so would healthcare workers and firefighters with baseline better health live even longer than the general population if they weren’t exposed – that’s up for debate – I think probably not.

I had OpenAI Codex probe the Ziglings source tree and prompted it to create a similar set of learning exercises for C. I haven’t worked through all of these but so far it’s looking good. I think this methodology of learning is a fun way to get your feet wet and get you thinking in manageable bite sized chunks.

Here is the repo for Clings, make sure to read the README: https://codeberg.org/deths74r/clings

My white noise is the twenty-something year olds I still have screaming in my memories of triage at 2 am in the morning in the pouring rain and then starting their autopsies 4 hours later.

I’ll never forget the one who was screaming with all his limbs blown fresh off while the chaplain with his clerical collar—flickering like a broken neon sign every time lightning flashed—provided comfort with mementos of God’s plan.

That white noise became a foundational hum and the resonating frequency that, instead of fading into the background as time passed—became a jack hammer in my brain.

It was a full ontological recalibration of my childhood naivety—not only did the passage of time fail to rationalize those experiences; those experiences became the new origin point from which everything was measured—silence and peace was no longer the absence of noise, but the brief, interstitial moments between the frequencies of that hum and the flickering of that collar on God’s dog.