I would guess that chemical effects would be diverse while “physical” effects would not be so diverse. Keep in mind that things like mesothelioma from asbestos are kinda sorta “physical” effects because it’s from jagged roughness of the particles at the nanoscale rather than any specific chemistry.

This may be true but I hate the practice of referring to “plastic” as if it’s a single substance. It’s a bunch of different materials that don’t really have that much in common with each other, especially from a health/toxicity standpoint.

For example, people treat it as common sense that “you shouldn’t burn plastic” because the smoke is “toxic”. For PVC this is totally true, it makes very nasty stuff like dioxin that will poison you. But on the other hand you can burn polyethylene (think milk jug) and it’s no more toxic than burning a candle. Definitely way healthier to breath than wood campfire smoke, for example.

There’s also such a silly pattern where people learn some chemical might have some effect on the body and suddenly everyone is up in arms about it. For example Bisphenol A in many applications was replaced by the very similar Bisphenol S just so things could be labeled “BPA Free”. BPS probably has similar estrogenic effects to BPA.

I’d say the moral of the story is be wary of received wisdom about chemical toxicity from people who aren’t chemists.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” - Hanlon’s Razor

Pro tip: if you call zoning out “meditating” (because that’s what it is) it makes you feel more put-together and successful. Congrats on your practice of hydrotherapy meditation.

I have a pattern which really works for me where I wake up, brush my night guard and brush my teeth with no toothpaste and then eat breakfast. That way I don’t have the horrible mint toothpaste / orange juice clash I’m sure many of you are familiar with.

Then at night I floss and brush with toothpaste, and put in the night guard.

I used to make myself floss only every other day (like if I didn’t floss last night I MUST floss tonight), which I highly recommend rather than sporadic or no flossing. But I recently upped my game to “every night except special occasions”.

lmao

Be the change you want to see in the Fediverse.

Running short distances for no particular reason. Like if I’m a short distance from the car and realize I forgot something in it, I’ll run there and then run back.

Sometimes people are like “what’s wrong?? why are you running??” and I’m just like why not? It’s fun.

I dropped out of physics grad school (got a master’s degree as consolation prize). I needed a job, and knew how to code. So I applied to some big tech company and I was like “you’re going to pay me HOW much??” I had no idea I could get paid so much for just writing code and fixing bugs and stuff.

But now I really want to throw away that money and stability to work on AI alignment research, because it’s the most important thing in the world.