Discussion

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michaelcampbell: This feels like a Gwern blog, or something he'd be interested in.

OuterVale: Gwern is active on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/gwern

meitham: I haven’t come across lesswrong before! Great site and this caffeine article is great presentation of data.

OuterVale: I feel it my due diligence to advise you that LessWrong is closely associated with the rationalists and all that comes with them. It is worth doing a tad of research into the rationalist community and Eliezer Yudkowsky before going too deep down the LessWrong rabbit hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community

bensyverson: This article makes the case for paraxanthine supplements; 80% of caffeine is metabolized into paraxanthine anyway, and it turns out paraxanthine behaves a bit more like we (apparently wrongly) assume caffeine works.But the real question is: does it taste as good as espresso?

Zababa: >the rationalists and all that comes with them.What does that mean?

WBrentWilliams: Quick Wikipedia search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZiziansLike any group of humans, there are power structures and edge cases that can lead to horrific outcomes. Giving the person that posted the warning the benefit of the doubt, I think what they are saying is that "Rationalist does not necessarily mean positive for humanity, nor even no harm for humanity". This holds for all religions and religion-like movements, of which Rationalism, in this sense, is one.

ortusdux: I'd imagine it would not be hard to breed/engineer a coffee plant that produces more paraxanthine than caffeine. The plants take 5 years to mature so getting a crop to market would take a while though.

NoiseBert69: For me a coffee is more kind of a ritual addiction.

drakonka: I think it is already pretty widely recognized that caffeine can disrupt sleep taken even as early as 6 or 7 hours before bed. I usually don't drink coffee or caffeinated tea after 12 for this reason. Caffeine also has many other known benefits, possible beneficial effects on all-cause mortality, etc, and I'm not sure if we have any research showing the same benefits coming from paraxanthine. Seems like potentially a bit of a waste just to be able to get the stimulant effect a couple of hours closer to sleep time.

mapt: This is a distinct claim. Caffeine can disrupt sleep even 48 hours later, a little bit; It is traditionally modelled with an elimination half-life of 5 hours, meaning 1/2 effect at 5 hours, 1/4 effect at 10 hours, 1/8 effect at 15 hours, an exponential decay curve.The claim being made is that due to cascading decay of a secondary metabolite that does a lot of the work producing the clinical effect, caffeine elimination is a much more linear, slow process that only reaches half effect at around 10 hours and 1/4 effect at 17 hours, 1/8 effect at 23 hours.

nlitened: > does it taste as good as espresso?Coffee is an acquired taste, I think. People conditions themselves to like the bitter taste of coffee over time. I remember hating the taste of coffee (or beer, for example) in childhood.

Xcelerate: I’ve heard that bitterness affects children more intensely. So I wonder how much of it is an acquired taste vs bitterness just becoming “milder” over time.

bensyverson: It's definitely an acquired taste. But an espresso doesn't have to be overwhelmingly bitter! It can be almost sweet if it's extracted well.

siliconc0w: Nicotine is also a nice alternative to coffee. I still drink coffee but past late morning I'll usually reach for nicotine because the effect is much shorter.It also has neuro-protective effects if you're an older gentleman.

yonaguska: My three year old loves the taste of matcha. Even when I don't prepare it quite right and it turns out very bitter. He's pretty picky about near everything else. I think it's acquisition through mimicry.

altairprime: [delayed]

lamasery: Regular coffee, too, can be very delicate, minimally bitter, giving herbal or strong tea-like notes, among other things.I've not gotten that kind of profile out of anything but fairly-expensive beans roasted within the last couple of weeks, though. I've never seen it out of even mid-priced beans, nor anything nationally distributed. It's practically a totally different drink from what you get if you ask for a coffee in most contexts.Iced coffee and cold brew are also fairly different. I find middling beans can make a much milder and more pleasant cold brew coffee than hot. Tiny (like, a teaspoon) splash of cream or milk and it takes the bitter edge all but completely off, to my taste anyway.

bensyverson: > I've not gotten that kind of profile out of anything but fairly-expensive beans roasted within the last couple of weeks, though.Good beans will last more than 2 weeks, but yes—just as you wouldn't judge all sushi based on gas station sushi, we shouldn't judge coffee based on months-old pre-ground grocery store roasts.

keepamovin: I take pentoxyfylline (a synthetic substituted xanthine, caffeine is a natural substituted xanthine) occasionally as a nootropic and supplement for vascular health and anecdotally for me it has several nice caffeine like properties without the jitters/ long tail, sleep effects etc.I find the listed side effects don’t happen for me besides occasional flush/blush. Which at my age is more like youthful vigor.Caffeine is is 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, pentoxyfylline is 3,7-dimethyl-1-(5-oxohexyl)xanthine.Good effects are: sustained mental clarity, focus and energy with a smoother more stable baseline than caffeine’s bursty performance; good sleep, but strangely you can also stay up, if you prefer; feeling similar to “after exercise”. Half life is listed as under 1 hour, but beneficial effects can be felt for half a day after 400mg (a standard dose). So maybe there’s something like metabolite dynamic occurring here too.This ends my erowid/hive style “trip/nootropic” report ;)

atlgator: I generally avoid caffeine at all costs. I'm susceptible to SVT, and I want the Adenosine to work if I should need it. Caffeine blocks Adenosine receptors. But on the rare occasion I have a single can of caffeinated Diet Coke, I experience a crash 48 hours later so profound that I cannot get out of bed that day.

bilsbie: I switched to cocoa. Replaces the ritual at least. I still miss the boost though.

embwbam: One can take many good ideas from less wrong, yudkowsky et al without adopting a rationalist identity. Sure, it attracted wackos and they made a cult or two. But that could happen to anyone!

specialist: > without adopting a rationalist identityAha: "identity". You nailed the misgivings I couldn't articulate. Thank you.

m463: I accustomed myself to drinking coffee black. Then decaf. And later I tried camomile tea.I found the need I really needed satisfied was a warm cup of something to curl my hands around in the morning, and they all worked after I let them. ymmv.

yehoshuapw: Regardless of the community,Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is worth a read.https://hpmor.com/chapter/1Or a listen: https://hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=56

fwip: I found it pretty boring, to be honest. Felt like an excuse for the author to show off how smart they thought they were, without really any skill at characterization or meaningful plot.And like, I'm not a writing snob. I read fanfic by amateur authors. But HPMOR just doesn't do much of anything interesting.

em-bee: but why? i have to add so much milk and sugar to mask the bitterness that, combined with the negative effects, i asked myself, why do i even bother? i might as well just drink hot milk with sugar instead. now i only drink coffee if i need the energy and waking effects and nothing else sugary is available, which happens once a year, at most.

integralid: This is not universal. I only drink espresso without sugar or milk, because I love the taste of a strong coffee.

bembem_c: Pharmacokinetics (in this case: half-life in the central(venous) compartment, totally neglecting the distribution to the site of primary activity, the CNS) is only half of the truth.You have to consider pharmacodynamics: where is the site of action located, where are the receptors located. And how well do caffein and paraxanthine distribute to this compartment.Soiler: Most metabolites are more hydrophilic than respective parent compounds (biological sense of metabolism: to increase renal clearance of xenobiotics). Therefore, receptor affinity alone tells you little about the relative contribution of any metabolite for the pharmacological effect observed.And to complicate things even more: Long-half life metabolites are only ONE potential reason for prolonged biological effects.

malfist: Just because the halflife leaves a measurable amount in your system, doesn't mean that that amount is enough for measurable outcomes.In your example, a 200 mg caffeine intake in the morning, least to 100mg at noon, 50mg at 5PM, 25mg at 10PM. Yes that means you still have 25mg of caffeine. But it's unlikely to have an outcome you can measure since it's below a minimum threshold.

kreyenborgi: Probably referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREALor, if you don't buy into the "they're all the same" arguments, at least beware of the arguments against utilitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

Zababa: Yeah but like:>Writing in Asterisk, a magazine related to effective altruism, Ozy Brennan criticized Gebru's and Torres's grouping of different philosophies as if they were a "monolithic" movement. Brennan argues Torres has misunderstood these different philosophies, and has taken philosophical thought experiments out of context.[21] Similarly, Oliver Habryka of LessWrong has criticized the concept, saying: "I've never in my life met a cosmist; apparently I'm great friends with them. Apparently, I'm like in cahoots [with them]."The people that coined TESCREAL seem to not really be related to rationalists, and seem to have coined a term for "those vaguely related ideas from people that do some stuff we consider wrong and we consider bad". "Evil people from San Francisco" could work just as well I think.And wait, shouldn't I beware arguments for utilitarianism rather than against? If that's what you meant yeah I agree, especially pushed to the extreme it leads you in very weird places.

SmirkingRevenge: I'm not sure what the parent meant by "beware arguments against utilitarianism" - there is nothing wrong with arguing for or against utilitarianism. It's a popular moral philosophy.You should beware of bad utilitarian arguments though, which is where you often get the real "gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette" kind of arguments that justify all manners of atrocity in service of some narrow hypothetical future good.Like when Marc Andreessen says we should consider anyone who would do something to slow down or regulate AI advancement murderers of future humans. Bad utilitarianism right there.Proper utilitarians are concerned with the net difference between all positive and negative consequences of actions.

tasty_freeze: People often think they have mic-dropped utilitarianism by saying things like, "Oh, so if two people get a lot of joy by beating up a third person, that is ethical because it is overall net positive?"A few things wrong with that. First is there is no net happiness formula which utilitarians are proposing. Peter Singer has said more than once that he weights suffering far, far higher than happiness.Second is that every ethical system has screw cases which make the system look messed up. "Do unto others..." it terrible if you are talking about masochists.