Curing sinusitis

7. Read every hippie-dippy, holistic, all-natural website and public forum Google could find.

8. Added Apple Cider Vinegar to my sinus rinse. Low point in treatment, maybe in entire life. Felt like death but really cleared my mucus out, at least for a while.

9. Eucalyptus oil in a steam bath. Opened sinuses, providing temporary relief, but didn't clear out the mucus.

10. Chopped up garlic cloves and put them in a steam bath. Similar experience to No. 9.

11. Started reading up on biofilms, the hard-to-kill little bacteria that encase the infection and make it resistant to antibiotics.

12. Convinced myself that, hey, I have that!

13. Looked into various methods of breaking down biofilm. The two most prominent solutions I found during my research (thanks, Internet!): Xylitol, which is a natural sugar substitute, and baby shampoo.

14. Bought some Xylitol spray at Whole Foods. It kind of worked. As soon as I used it, snot started draining down the back of my throat. I heard some snap and crackle up in my frontal sinuses, the ones above the eyes. Some of the pathways were peeling themselves open, and, joy!, air was flowing again.

15. But the snot demon ball in my face had not been fulling exorcised. In a late-night moment of desperation, I overcame my reservations (there's research!, I told myself). I put a teaspoon of Johnson & Johnson's Baby Shampoo into my sinus rinse, which also contained salt, baking soda, Xylitol and distilled water.

16. And it didn't hurt or feel uncomfortable in the slightest. In one nostril and out the other. Disconcerting and maybe a little hilarious: A bubbly brew started streaming out my nose after the rinse, and everything smelled like my early childhood.

17. I didn't notice anything at first, but, gradually, my sinuses started popping, and mucus flowed down the back of my throat in big gushes. The baby shampoo broke through. I baby shampoo-ed my sinuses for a few more days, and now I feel better than I've felt in several years.

How one person used self-experimentation to cure his sinusitis. Ingenuity borne of frustration.

In 2003 I had terrible sinusitis and went through a similar quest as he did, but mine ended differently. I went to an ENT doctor who gave me a CAT scan. Then, to my horror, he sat me down and then stuck a huge needle through the roof of my mouth and drained some fluid out of my sinus for analysis. It felt like someone was sucking my brains out from inside my skull.

It turned out I had a cyst in my sinus cavity, and after surgery (they cut through the roof of my mouth to remove it) and a week of drinking soup I was cured.

So before you go rinsing your sinus with a formula including baby shampoo, maybe see an ENT.

Liberals versus conservatives? Nope

Types A and B map reasonably well onto today’s culture wars, with A the modern/liberal and B the traditional/conservative. It maps well to the rich-poor axis from the World Value Survey.  But in fact, type A vs. B are actually foragers vs. farmers. [The above summarizes many books and articles I've read over the last year.]  Which is my point: I think a lot of today’s political disputes come down to a conflict between farmer and forager ways, with forager ways slowly and steadily winning out since the industrial revolution. It seems we acted like farmers when farming required that, but when richer we feel we can afford to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways. The main exceptions, like school and workplace domination and ranking, are required to generate industry-level wealth. We live a farmer lifestyle when poor, but prefer to buy a forager lifestyle when rich.

From a 2010 post by Robin Hanson. Click through to read the descriptions of Type A and Type B people.

From a later post by Hanson on the same topic:

Farming required huge behavior changes, mostly unnatural to foragers. A key enabler seems to have been increased self-control to follow social norms. But what allowed this increased self-control?

One source was moving from vague spirituality to religions with powerful and morally-outraged gods who punish norm violators. In addition (as I’ll explain tomorrow), high densities and larger social networks made stronger credible threats to ostracize folks for specific deviant acts.  Yes both these mechanisms require the fear that norm violations could lead to great harm, even death. But for poor farmers living on edge, such threats were easy to come by.

Interestingly, this death-threat pressure could work even without farmers being conscious of the relevant threats or fears. In fact, farming society probably worked better with homo hypocritus farmers, consciously denying that strong social pressures pushed them to do what would otherwise feel unnatural.

A large robust literature makes it clear that inducing people to unconsciously think about death pushes them to more strongly obey and defend cultural norms, especially norms framed as disgust at animal-like behavior.  Today, fear of death encourages folks to obey authorities, and be more loyal to their communities and spouses, all strong farmer norms.

Count me among the foragers, though until reading these posts I'd never call it that. Thanks Mom and Dad for giving me the chance to live like a forager, I am blessed.

The farmer-forager dichotomy is like some variant of the Myers Briggs personality test.

The role of government in innovation

When it comes to productivity, there is one set of rules, which economists have worked on since Adam Smith. Innovation has a different set of rules. Most economists seem barely aware that the two sets of rules often clash — what is good for productivity is bad for innovation. Let me sketch a few of the innovation rules. Innovation needs freedom, of course, and the ability to profit from your invention, which I’ll call benefit. It is also called self-interest. The importance of benefit/self-interest for innovation is the main point of Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson. Innovation is also increased by resources, such as skills, knowledge, space, and equipment. After discussing this with Bryan Caplan, I believe many economists are well aware these three factors (freedom, benefit, resources) affect innovation. All three also increase productivity — for example, more resources, more productivity. Far fewer economists realize that two other things, which act against productivity, are also very helpful for innovation:

1. Pain. Not a lot — not debilitating or all-consuming pain — but enough to make you think hard. Necessity is the mother of invention is the aphorism, which isn’t quite right. Pain, not necessity. Government is useful here, as I said. So is war. Many innovations came from wars. A famous example is the greenback, which came from the Civil War.

2. Stability. To innovate, you need free time, which is different from freedom (ask any prisoner). Free time allows painless failure, very helpful for innovation. To have free time, you need a secure job. Government is useful here, too. So is tenure. Pain plus stability = peacetime military spending. The internet came from peacetime military spending. Professors were the first users. Stability also promotes innovation because it makes it easier to detect small improvements. The quieter it is, the better you can detect soft sounds.

More here from Seth Roberts. It's commonly accepted that constraints can spur creativity, but the idea of government as a useful irritant is not something I'd heard before. 

The tradeoff of freedom and pain with government plays out on a smaller scale with employees and companies. Early in your career, you run into more obstacles in a company given your generally lower position in the organization. Some of them are instructive, others are just friction or the usual coordination costs of an organization.

At some point, for some people, those costs become unbearable and they leave for a position higher up, where there are fewer obstacles, or they start their own company and trade one type of challenge for a different type.

Instagram Direct and the crowded messaging space

Instagram found a place in our hearts as an app for broadcasting moments. Take a photo (or later a video) and share it publicly, and specifically, to people who follow you. Now Instagram wants us to use it for private sharing. Take a photo or video and send it to one person or a small group. Those are entirely distinct species of communication.

Convincing a userbase to break their ingrained behavior pattern and use an app for something completely different is a tough sell. And it’s a lot tougher if that “something different” is actually “something you can do elsewhere”.

If I want to share a photo with a few friends, I can text it, email it, or Facebook message it. These each let me get friends’ reactions and have a conversation around the photo. In fact, they’re all more flexible than Instagram Direct in that I can reply with another photo — the absence of that feature is my biggest gripe about IDG. It also suffers from a creation interface that’s too slow for sharing to such a limited audience. Filtering and adding a witty caption bog down the flow, making Instagram Direct too time intensive to be a rapid-fire visual communication tool.

And of course, if I want to private message someone a photo or video, I can Snapchat them. Snapchat has carved out a purpose and following with ephemerality — something that’s actually different. I can’t send a photo that disappears with any other major messaging service, so I go to Snapchat when I have something silly or racy to share.

So really, the problem is that Instagram Direct is too different from Instagram, and not different enough from everything else.
 

Good piece from Josh Constine on a key problem facing Instagram Direct.

Allowing video to be uploaded was a natural extension for Instagram. Instead of broadcasting photos, you were broadcasting video. It felt comfortable right away. 

Instagram Direct felt immediately strange. I'd never used Instagram as a one-to-one photo sharing tool, and the people I'd chosen to follow on the service were not ones I'd chosen with one-to-one sharing in mind. My Instagram graph is much smaller than my graph on other social graph services because I'd chosen who to follow based on who I wanted to see photo broadcasts from, and I think most people who follow me there were looking for my photo broadcasts as well. It will always be easier for me to share photos one-to-one through another app because my graphs are larger there and because, as Josh notes, the interaction flow is much faster.

I now use the following multitude of apps to message other people on an almost daily basis: email, Twitter, Twitter DM, Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, Snapchat, iMessage, SMS. One would think using so many different messaging apps would be annoying, that the shape of social graphs would see one of these services winning out through network effects.

But now that all of these messaging apps can easily piggyback off of my mobile contact book to easily find the people I already know on those services, the switching costs are very low. The interfaces are all easy to learn and largely equivalent (the other person's message in a chat bubble on one side of the screen, mine on the other side) so the learning curve is also negligible. Finally, since my phone sends me a notification anytime I receive a message through any of these services, I can launch any of the apps with one click and tap out a reply just as easily as I would on the next app.

For those reasons, It's not clear this has to be a winner-take-all space. That makes it challenging for investors in this area. If some other messaging app came along that was somewhat better and some of my friends flocked to it, I could switch in no time, and if for some reason one of these apps became unfashionable, I could delete it without too much regret.

Hierarchy of innovation

Nicholas Carr hypothesizes that we're seeing a stagnation in transformative innovation because we've shifted towards the top of a sort of Maslow's hierarchy of innovation.

As with Maslow’s hierarchy, you shouldn’t look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the highest level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We’re already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn’t seem particularly pressing. We’ve become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal state or projecting that state outward. An entrepreneur has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he creates, say, a popular social-networking tool than if he creates a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. The arc of innovation, to put a dark spin on it, is toward decadence.

One of the consequences is that, as we move to the top level of the innovation hierarchy, the inventions have less visible, less transformative effects. We’re no longer changing the shape of the physical world or even of society, as it manifests itself in the physical world. We’re altering internal states, transforming the invisible self. Not surprisingly, when you step back and take a broad view, it looks like stagnation – it looks like nothing is changing very much. That’s particularly true when you compare what’s happening today with what happened a hundred years ago, when our focus on Technologies of Prosperity was peaking and our focus on Technologies of Leisure was also rapidly increasing, bringing a highly visible transformation of our physical circumstances.

If the current state of progress disappoints you, don’t blame innovation. Blame yourself.