Fast-forward to last year, when rationalist Aaron Silverbook came across Hillman's original work with the genetically modified bacteria. Aaron, based on his previous work as guy at a rationalist nonprofit, videogame producer, and Aella's business manager, decided to recreate Hillman's work3. First, he applied for funding from FTX. He got it, but then FTX collapsed. Then, he applied for funding from alternative rationalist funding source Manifund, got that, and failed to recreate Hillman's work. However, Aaron declared mission success anyways in that he negotiated with Oragenics to acquire a sample of BCS3L-1, one of Hillman's later strains4, in exchange for $50k and promise of royalties, although he didn't get any intellectual property rights .
Aaron then went on an intellectual journey where he tried to figure out what exactly to do with this genetically modified bacteria. After all, he was faced with basically the same daunting FDA journey as Hillman, but without Hillman's scientific background or financial resources. After talking to a bunch of people, including me, he eventually decided on a very rationalist, very Bay Area, very strange approach:
1. Sell the genetically modified bacteria as-is for a one time payment of $20,000 in a libertarian charter city in Honduras
2. Give a bunch of rationalist-adjacent celebrities free samples of the GMO bacteria as-is in exchange for positive press, including Scott Alexander, Aella (the porn star/escort/s*x researcher who he's the business manager for), Richard Hanania, Cremieux, and Bryan Caplan
3. Take preorders for $200 a piece from the general public
It's worth noting that, regardless of what I think of this plan (i.e. it's bad and maybe unethical), I'm pretty sure this plan is also illegal. While Lantern claims to be marketing this probiotic as a cosmetic, it is meant to prevent and cure tooth decay. According to the WHO, tooth decay is a disease. A product meant to cure and prevent a disease is a drug, and legally needs to go through the drug approval process. But, you know, whatever.
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Now, given that information, think about the wisdom of infecting your mouth with a bacteria that is designed to continually produce mutacin-1140. You are continually producing an antibiotic in your mouth that:
1. Can be dangerous
2. Goes everywhere that blood goes
3. Is not inactivated by stomach acid
4. Kills other bacteria very effectively
At the very least, this is a great way to give yourself the digestive equivalent of continually taking antibiotics (i.e. diarrhea and indigestion). This also might be a good way to give yourself a hypersensitivity reaction like that poor rat. It's hard to say, because making a safety equivalence between taking an IV antibiotic one time at a high dose and taking an antibiotic orally at a low dose for potentially decades is really difficult. This is why the FDA requires safety studies.
What I can say for sure is that this would be exceptionally dangerous for infants and immunocompromised people. Infants have died from hospital-grade probiotics before, and immunocompromised people have gotten seriously sick. That's from normal, “healthy” probiotics. How do you think your infant (who does not yet have a fully colonized microbiome) will respond if you infect them with a bacterium that nukes all other bacteria in their system? Better hope you don't kiss your baby or share food or drinks with them!
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If Lumina had the good sense of Hillman (who, to be clear, I don't think is a scientific saint either), they at least would have sold the version of the GMO bacteria that had a self-destruct button, AJ2M, which I think was the last strain Hillman created. That one was designed to [editor's note: removed a possibly incorrect claim] require an exogenous amino acid, d-alanine, to function. If the d-alanine stopped being provided, the bacteria died, assuming it didn't acquire any mutations in the meantime that let it keep surviving.
But Lumina didn't do that, even though I and, I assume others, told them to do that. They sold the earlier version of the probiotic without a kill-switch, which means that the cat is out of the bag and is probably giving overly credulous rationalists diarrhea as we speak.
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I've never gotten deep into the "put unusual stuff in your body to max out performance" science but rationalists seem so misguided on this. From a Bayesian perspective there should be a strong prior favoring not consuming weird chemicals/bacteria/whatever that we didn't evolve consuming. Doing so should require extremely strong evidence to overcome that prior. And yet a huge part of the rationalist movement seems extremely preoccupied with this kind of performance enhancement.
Even mainstream things like Adderall seem to frick people up with long-term use. At the very least everyone I know who microdoses on Adderall or whatever else seems to burn out and age prematurely. And nothing else has really risen above the level of Bay Area woo for midwits trying to perform above their genetic endowment.
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They can't do things like look at historical norms. Everything has to be reinvented by first principles and evolution is clearly not as smart as them
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Yeah I was really interested in this stuff until a poster on /r/nootropics posted (with proof) that they had terminal brain cancer at a very young age and (presumably) is now dead. Everyone on that sub was coping how correlation isnt causation, but still that shit is scary.
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You're really going to just post this and not tell us what he was taking?
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It was a woman, tons of racetams iirc. It was a long time ago and jannied pretty quickly, probably lost to the sands of time.
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I think it might've been ground-up pig brains (cerebrolysin)
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the number of rare mutations out there that can raise your IQ by 20 points while horribly crippling you at the same time is honestly crazy. there's one that makes you blind, one that wrecks your bones, one that wrecks your muscles, etc etc
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Yeah jews suck at sports its hideous
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Oh well I'll smoke enough the throat cancer will get me first
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I hope your cigars don't have veins too
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Yeah it basically just puts you under stress so your body prioritizes maximum performance right now at the expense of everything else.
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It's outweighed by the FOMO of getting mogged by your techie peers that that did do those things and rolled a natural 20. It was literally engineered to take advantage of that dynamic in this case because they offered free samples to high-profile rationalist/TPOT/centrist people.
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The irony is the number 1 thing most of these weirdos could do to succeed in their careers is to be more prosocial and less weird and offputting. They don't want to admit it, but slanging JS for $350k doesn't require rare superhuman genius. But getting made Practice Lead for $600k absolutely does require being able to talk to businesspeople and normies without squicking them out.
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The entire rationalist project is basically a massive cope by people terrified by the notion of learning something that doesn't come easy to them, eg social skills, and retreating into the I AM TOO SMART TO HANDLE NORMIES defense.
I recently went to an ACX meetup out of sheer morbid curiosity and Jesus Christ you could tell that 90% of those people never communicate in person.
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you are an r-slured gay BIPOC. this is called 'algernon's law' and rationalists write about it all the time. one: this is a bacterium that was already naturally in someone's mouth. two: medicine does work sometimes, we have antibiotics and they're fine, this is much more like that than a supplement that makes ur iq go up
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If the bacteria was in some people's mouths already then you should have to make out with them to get infected like god intended.
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