memetic-invariant information remainsconstant in value if more people learn it
memetic-cooperative information becomes more valuable if more people learn it
memetic-competitive information becomes less valuable if more people learn it
Memetic-invariant
Most simple facts are memetic-invariant. That the sky is blue or that water takes the shape of its container continue to be true and have similar value no matter how many people learn it.
Memetic-cooperative
Sometimes we are lucky enough to discover memetic-cooperative information, which becomes more valuable the more people learn it. Most of our society is built upon the fact that memetic-cooperative information exists, is easily socially transmissible, and can lead to stable equilibria built upon common knowledge.
The rule of law has value because of the social consensus that it will be enforced. When a crime is committed, it is often because someone thinks they will get away with it. If everyone stops believing that the rule of law will be enforced, anarchy may break out, and society may cease to exist.
Similarly, centralized fiat currencies are able to be used at scale and over long periods due to the mutual information between market participants that the currency has value. It is in both of our interests that we believe the dollar has value, as that allows us to easily transact with each other (See also: network effects, common knowledge, social equilibrium, minimum viable superorganism).
The general principles of how to found a company are usually memetic-cooperative: it is good for us if we make it easy to found businesses and create new things, generally speaking.
Memetic-competitive
Much of the most useful information, however, is memetic-competitive: its value decrease the more people that find it. If you have ever thought of an idea that was so good that you were reluctant to share it with anyone, that’s a sign it was memetic-competitive.
An obvious example of a memetic-competitive idea is a market undervaluing an asset. If you have an easy way of making money by finding under-priced assets, this will stop working if you share it with enough people, as eventually the inefficiency will be fully exploited. You have a true idea that may literally cease to be true if you share it with enough people.
Those knowledgeable of the basics of game theory may find that some (but not all) cases of memetic-competitive ideas map onto defection. I could discover that if I cut to the front of the line, no one will stop me, and I can selfishly save myself time. If everyone implements this strategy, the entire queuing system will break. But even if they don’t, I am taking time away from them in order to give it to myself. Systems usually solve defection like this by making games iterated: if everyone in my town knows I’m the type of person to cut in line, the reputational hit may harm me enough to serve as deterrence (See also: iterated prisoner’s dilemma, free-rider problem, the virtue of silence).
Memetic-competitive information is a subset of anti-memetic information (information which ‘does not want’ to be shared). Another example of anti-memetic information is information which has little or negative value to a majority of agents in an ecosystem (if I posted a long random string on social media, it would probably not be picked up by any meme-promulgating algorithms and is thus anti-memetic).
Execution specifics of recently successful go-to-market strategies for consumer startups are often memetic-competitive. While it’s common to share generally good sales and advertising advice, it is uncommon for the specific tactics that startups tediously searched for and executed upon to be fully divulged to potential competitors (See also: things I wish more founders would understand about b2c marketing).
Social Media
Most social media (and the broader information economy) exists to propagate memetic information. As memetic-competitive information is anti-memetic (no one wants to spread it, lest it loses value), it follows that it is not something which will be easy to find on social media (See also: alpha used both in its original financial context, but also in non-financial contexts of finding strategies which give you an edge over competitors).
For an uncommon enough individual, it may be challenging to find the most useful information, because you first have to find a community of other individuals that value the same thing. Furthermore, if the information you are after is memetic-competitive, this can only exist in small communities, so you will have to hunt them out. Unfortunately it follows that it will be hard to hunt them out, because if the community has no barriers to entry and lets anyone join, then all the memetic-competitive information they share will quickly lose its value and the community will cease to exist. Luckily not all information is of the memetic-competitive type, although there’s still many other dynamics of virality to consider (See also: geeks, mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution on the dynamics of community change over time as new actors with different incentives join, the melancholy of subculture society on internet subculture, and border stories: why is it that every unit of life from the cell to the immune system to the country to the planet all seem to have borders).
Further Complexity
Some information can move between different memetic information categories depending on its truth value. For example, take the sentence “AI is going to kill us”. If this sentence is true, then it is memetic-cooperative: we want everyone to know about it so that we can work together to stop it. If this sentence is false, however, it could be (partially) memetic-competitive: perhaps I want you to believe AI is dangerous so that I am able to profit from AI while you are not (I don’t think this is currently the case for most actors).
Things get complicated when we introduce the fact that not only do different agents have different values, but the perceived truth value of statements will also differ between agents (and especially) groups. If we anted to we could also construct a model of memetics which is separate from the delta of informational value that propagation of the meme causes, if we wanted to get closer to fully modeling modern information exchange (See basic reproduction number R0, which is in my opinion the best way to model internet memes).
I’m going to stop the post here before this attempted formalism is over-extended, as my primary motivation is only to publicize the three labels I choose for future reference. My hope is that this post is memetic-cooperative!
I spent $343 for one month of blueprint. this post shares what I got and what my thoughts on it are!
overall I’m a fan of most ingredients and the overall composition. I came up with many of them on my own a few years ago, many of which are listed here. the doses are pretty reasonable and I trust the sourcing to at least be above average
this post is not sponsored or paid for in any way, but I’ve met BJ and think he is reasonably smart and funny. below I include images, nutritional information, and plenty of links and side notes to share what I’ve learned!
Apr 13 2024 edit: Added response comments from Bryan Johnson / Blueprint: ctrl+F “BP” to find them May 7th 2024 edit: Blueprint now allows for the purchase of individual components. I’ve added a new Market Comparisons section near the bottom as a result
Everything I got for one month at a cost of $343
Nutty pudding
The nutty pudding mixAfter being mixed with whole milk
Ingredients for the nutty pudding mix
mostly plant protein, giving you 26g of protein per serving
allulose as a sweetener is great and I’m happy to see it becoming more common (see my post on allulose for why). may want to note to consumers what it does and why they might notice it
no opinion on pomegranate and monk fruit extract. I’m assuming the latter is as a sweetener and flavor enhancer (BP: pomegranite included to improve metabolic panel markers)
the taste is… alright. some people definitely like it more than I do, but I’d probably only rate it a 5/10 myself. I substituted whole milk in instead of nut milk as suggested and added the blueberry mix (below) to it to finish it. it tastes like a rather bland pudding, but a bit more dense and with little sugar or fat (BP: adding EVOO for taste may help)
Blueberry mix
Blueberry mix!
it’s literally just dried blueberries, macadamia nuts, and walnuts
tastes great no matter what do you with it really. I’d suggest adding it to the above pudding or combining it with some milk
blueberries are great for you and a good snack to have around
with that said, this mix is so simple that I’m not sure I gain much from having someone else prepare it for me (BP: mix replaces 2kg of berries and helps not having to acquire them frequently)
Longevity mix
Longevity mix powderLongevity mix powder mixed with water and encased by glass
I’d increase the amount of glycine (1.5g), especially due to this being earlier in the day so it’s unlikely to be too much to disrupt sleep (this dose would be fine before bed and likely benefit sleep but the instructions online suggest to have this mix in the morning). for more information on why I’m in favor of macrodosing glycine check out the glycine section on my supplements page (hint: it extends lifespan in mice!)
sodium hyaluronate is an interesting choice and I wonder why they chose it + this form of it (BP: intended to reduce inflammation and restore HA levels which decline with age)
i’m a big fan of ashwagandha, with the note that it can cause digestive distress for some. great for lipid profile and often improves anxiety too
there could be a bit more creatine (2.5g) for those lifting, especially since calcium alpha-ketoglutarate was added (BP: amount chosen to be tolerable for mass market while covering omnivores average diet intake)
the taste is decent and comparable to most ‘vitamin’ drink mixes that you add to water. I’d probably rate it a 6.5/10, nothing to complain about but not particularly exciting
Pills!
The four bottles that I got along with what the pills from each look like. The daily suggested dosage is 3 pills from each of the larger bottles and 1 from each of the smaller, for a daily total of 8. Certainly not as bad as what was featured on my supplements page!
NAC, ginger, curcumin
Nutrition info for the NAC, ginger, and curcumin capsules
NAC is reasonably popular in the longevity community and pretty interesting
not 100% sure what the reasoning behind ginger was – I wonder if it was due to its ability to ameliorate potential gastrointestinal side effects of other supplements? (BP: intention is to improve metabolic panel, reduce inflammation, improve mood)
circumin is generally a good choice, although I have concerns about lower bioavailability here. does one of the other supplements included notably modify this? (BP: curcumin bioavailability 4x higher in this case due to being bio-enhanced)
Essential capsules
Nutrition info for the essential capsules
not going to list all the vitamins as they’re all reasonable choices
glad to see a higher amount of vitamin D (2,000 IU). could go even higher but the average blueprint consumer probably gets more sunlight than I do
I don’t know what the benefits of including e.g. iodine, calcium, manganese, and selenium are. would these be missed at all if excluded? feel free to enlighten me if you’re a reader! (BP: these deficienties are moderately common so worth including, calcium as excipient of CaAKG)
lithium is interesting at 1mg but I’m not sure that’s high enough to do very much (although perhaps this is the intention to keep it on the safe side)
I didn’t know that the body converts glucoraphanin into sulforaphane via myrosinase. good supplement!
fisetin at100mg daily is an interesting choice. curious how they decided daily was the correct increment and 100mg was the correct dose – I found this one hard to decide on myself (BP: dosage most studied wrt fisetin)
genistein is an interesting choice as it is pretty estrogenic. there are a lot of gender-ambiguous benefits to this, but i’m curious what the specific reasoning was and how the dose of 300mg was decided. it has affinity for α estrogen receptors, but not as much as β. if it was easier to source and include 17α-estradiol, would that have been included instead? was this included for entirely different reasons, of which there could be many? see also: does 17α-estradiol/estrogen extend male human lifespan?(BP: genistein does not increase blood estrogen levels in men, 17α generally requires Rx)
Essential softgel
Nutrition info from the essential softgels
nothing particularly exciting here, nice to see the better forms of vitamin k (k1, k2 mk4, k2 mk7) all included
less excited over lycopene, lutein, and zeaxanthin, but I don’t know anything bad about them. would like to research them more later
Garlic, red yeast rice
Nutrition info for the garlic and red yeast rice pills
unsure why these are in their own pill instead of included within one of the larger mixes (from which you take 3 daily from) (BP: pills were grouped to reduce amount. water soluable actives went into longevity RTM, fat soluble into softgel, bitter tasting into capsules, and small amounts into essentual. RYR and NAC were separate SKUs due to regulatory concerns.
garlic is great if we give them the benefit of the doubt on the 12:1 exact including enough allicin
does the red yeast rice (500mg) actually contain a lot of monacolin k? some countries like the US dislike this due to it being bioidentical to e.g. lovastatin(BP: no, this is why CoAs are shared)
interesting side note: when you research a lot of natural compounds (roots, vegetable extracts, etc), it’s very interesting how many of them are bioidentical to actual pharmaceuticals. when I was young I didn’t understand why ‘vegetables’ or such should be good for me: adults would tell me they had “vitamins and minerals” in them, but I could obviously both a) test myself for vitamin and mineral deficiencies and b) supplement them if I was deficient in them. it wasn’t until many, many years later that I learned how amazingly complex everything we eat is and how many biologically active ingredients are in dishes. think of a dish with many vegetables, spices, roots, meat, etc, as basically having 20 different drugs in it, but with all of them in very small doses. many of them are also very slightly psychoactive too! just as you can get high on nutmeg and sweet potatoes inhibitα-glucosidase and are thus anti-diabetic like the drug acarbose and red yeast rice is literally the same as a statin medication and berberine found in plants like barberry is a mimetic of the anti-diabetic drug metformin, the foods we eat on a daily basis have an astoundingly large amount of downstream effects in the body which have nothing to do with the vitamins or minerals in them. the cases we tend to know about like marajuana or opium are not rare in that they have strong biological effects, but rather are only rare in the dose response curves that are common with consumption. the present epistemic milieu we reside in with respect to nutrition doesn’t talk about this much primarily because we know so little about the topic and actually learning what is going on enough to have high confidence and rigor is extremely tedious and slow
the branding of ‘snake oil‘ is honestly pretty funny given how most supplement marketing is basically fraudulent
Marketing
no cards or instructions were included in the box. this is missing out on a gigantic free lunch!
I’d strongly suggest adding instructions, a thank-you card, and a discount code for future purchases
the discount code should be notable as user retention may be more challenging than other monthly supplements due to the tediousness of consumption (8 pills, one drink mix, one pudding mix, olive oil, and another mix, every single day!)
given the higher price point it would be great if the bags could be redone to have a high-quality zipper on them as sealing them is annoying
the supplement bottles should be shinier. this will increase conversion as this product is offered at a ‘premium’ price point. I’d look into making a bespoke logo for blueprint as well or otherwise refining the font and decor around it. you will be surprised how much of a return you can get by spending $0.10 more on shiny paper and branding!
I would move supplements with the highest probability of causing digestive distress into their own pill so that users can modulate dosage or ablate it themselves for e.g. supplements like ashwaganda and curcumin. this should be included in the instructions as otherwise users who feel unwell may simply never try blueprint again
current marketing paradigm likely favors a cohort of more males than females and more adolescents than the elderly. this is reasonable and likely the correct choice to make early on, but I’d consider long-term strategies on how to improve this. encouraging gifting to the elderly (e.g. one’s parents) is likely a great idea here for obvious reasons
(BP: agreed on much of the above, some are already being implemented)
Research and sourcing
most of what is included is good, but I’m not told why it was included! if there was so much money spent on research and reviewing studies, it would be great if some of it could be shared to me as a lowly and uninformed end-user
why does the blueprint page advertise ‘non-gmo’, and what does ‘no artificial ingredients’ mean? generally the latter means next to nothing, but I don’t actually care if something as simple to synthesize as e.g. glycine is ‘artificial’ or not as long as it is the right chemical and without contaminants or impurities! modify labels for your intended audience accordingly
similarly to sharing research the website states that you “test the ingredients” yourselves. I assume this means more than just eating them and making sure you don’t die, but this seems like a great thing to share more about, especially because this is very tedious to do (BP: manufacturers are asked for CoA and then we test the individual ngredients ourselves)
having users share metrics before and after a few months of blueprint consumption would be great (BJ told me isn’t necessary as the individual ingredients already have sufficient evidence on their own. but if you ask me, there is never enough science being done and there is never enough data, so I’d prefer we continue to learn all that we can even if it only confirms our priors) (BP: a few thousand people are on it and sharing biomarkers, we will share this data)
relatedly I’m concerned that some of the supplements may inhibit various enzymes that then cause unknown and/or undesired changes of bioavailability in other supplements or drugs. both curcumin and ginger inhibit CYP3A4 and this may be suboptimal if combined with other longevity drugs like rapamycin (which, similarly, could block astaxanthin which blueprint includes as well). this is challenging as we have limited knowledge on this topic for most supplements and drugs, but is worth at least being aware of
fortunately i’ve written from-scratch personal tracking software that I can throw all of this data into in order to solve a few of the questions (those which are easily answerable via blood tests at least), but this is costly and tedious and I am tired of getting blood tests. I may try A/B testing all of blueprint RCT-style to see if I can notice any other variables it effects that I wouldn’t have otherwise predicted
Market Comparisons
As of May 7th 2024, Blueprint now allows for the purchase of individual items listed above instead of only all of them as a bundle.
If you only buy the four pill bottles, the cost comes to $146 for a month ($139 if you subscribe)
I did a rough but incomplete analysis of competitors on amazon, building up the ingredients myself from reasonable sources, attempting to find a cheaper alternative to blueprint
I failed at this task. In other words, if I try to get everything in the blueprint pills from reasonable alternatives on Amazon, I ended up spending more money, not less
Because I think most of the ingredients in the blueprint pill bottles are desirable and I trust their sourcing to be at least average (hopefully above-average), I’ve decided to replace some of my supplement stack with blueprint
I am not publishing my full spreadsheet as it could be done with more rigor, but the numbers I got were close to break-even for the essential softgels ($49), notably over for the essential capsules (~$75 to $110 rather than $59), break-even for the nac+ginger+curcumin capsules ($27), and under for the red yeast rice and garlic capsules (which are by far the cheapest at $11 currently)
This is impressive for a consumer product!
Compared to most mass-marketed supplement products (e.g. athletic greens/AG1, blueprint basically murders them in cold blood and is probably ‘better for you’ by a factor of 5-10x. I have unusually high standards compared to the typical consumer here, but this is worth stating explicitly for those that come across this post but aren’t used to this.
Final thoughts
overall this is a decent purchase if you find the price range affordable. It saves you a lot of time, logistics, planning, research, and so on, and a lot of the ingredients are top-notch and actually do things that you won’t otherwise get the effects of from even a good diet. It is certainly better than the rest of what is out there.
with that said, there’s secondary effects to note: a) the substitution effect of having something decent rather than what you’d have had instead (this is why most ‘diets’ are always an improvement: the typical American diet is so bad that basically anything that is not insane is likely to be a net-benefit), and b) the psychological effect of causing you to consciously think more about optimizing for your health. I would strongly bet that there is a ‘healthy user bias’ among blueprint users that results in them having e.g. better lipid and glycemic profiles than non-blueprint users even if they stopped taking blueprint as they probably get more exercise than average
the largest benefits in longevity may still be things that we cannot easily sell in a bag or bottle, whether that is because it is intangible like exercise, or because of excessive regulation (e.g. the revolutionary weight-loss drug semaglutide requires a prescription and often insurance, although notably can also be purchased online regardless from parties which are not fans of the US patent system. even so, clinical trials for it began 15 years ago which likely resulted in the early death of millions of americans due to obesity. other longevity drugs like rapamycin are also challenging to distribute to the average consumer for similar reasons (and that one is FDA-approved too!). the FDA is excessively conservative in what they allow, with drugs requiring a decade and ~$600M to be later slowly distributed to the general public, and this is before we even bring in talk of gene therapies or anything newer
alpha in longevity (both personal and scientific) still remains in copious quantities for those who are willing to search for it!
I have currently decided to continue to purchase the pill section of blueprint, but I’m not subscribed to the other components at this time.
few hit AI apps exist because LLMs are what i’d call very “strangely-shaped” tools.
most tools are built with a specific purpose in mind like a screwdriver or a car.
but LLMs were something we stumbled upon by predicting text and playing with RL – we didn’t design the shape of them beforehand, we just let them naturally evolve into what the loss optimized for.
it’s clear they’re good at many things, but they are so strangely shaped that it’s easy to fall into traps when making products.
AI agents are a good example of a trap (for now), where it’s easy to spend months trying to perfect your scaffolding yet never quite reaching the level of reliability you’d hope for.
long-term memory implemented solely via RAG is another trap. it’s just tempting enough to try, but the results aren’t as good as they should be.
other common inadequacies include poor search, hallucinations, and high inference costs. but there’s a long list of subtle weaknesses which few tinkerers ever notice as well as many weaknesses (and strengths) which remain unfound.
much of the frontier of LLM posttraining is currently concerned with these inadequacies – wondering how we can mold these strangely-shaped LLMs we have grown into a slightly more suitable form for the problems we face.
this is hard, even for the major labs. as we slowly progress on it, i’d expect to continue to see most AI products attempt to solve the same problems via the same methods, further suffering from lack of distinctness both in performance and aesthetic, because they don’t have the right connection between research teams and product teams (or perhaps the right vision to begin with).
it’s telling that among the few recent consumer successes like midjourney or perplexity, competitors are hyper-focused on directly copying winners rather than exploring the vast new frontier of things which could be built instead. this makes sense because the frontier is strangely-shaped, as a result of the underlying catalyst itself being strangely-shaped.
it’s not uncommon for services to launch a feature literally called “AI” which is primarily composed of literal magic wands and glitter emoji simply because the product designer has no idea how to actually convey the intended experience to the user. 2024 is certainly not a year one would be fired for using too much AI.
I expect it to get more interesting later this year and especially in 2025, but it’s still been a surreal experience continually contrasting my day to day life in san francisco with that of the actual real world (note: SF is not real in this example).
the above is also relevant to some of the reasons i have longer agi timelines than i did a few years ago. agi is not a strangely-shaped tool. in fact, it is quite literally the opposite.
This post has a bunch of unordered youtube videos with music I love A few themes: strong piano leads, polyrhythms, Japanese influence, OSTs, beautiful singing Some of them are niche (~1-10K YT views) so hopefully you find something new you like!
Logical Emotion: トライアングルどら息息子
Dimash Qudaibergen: SOS d’un terrien en détresse (Piet Arion Cover)
Polyphia: Playing God
Boa: Duvet [Serial Experiments Lain] (Extended)
Kevin Penkin: Hanezeve Caradhina [Made in Abyss OST] (Takeshi Saitou Cover)
Deemo: Marigold (ふぃくしのん / phyxinon cover)
Nobuo Uematsu [FFXIV OST]: Great Gubal Library (Hard) Theme
Masayoshi Soken [FFXIV Endwalker OST]: Piano Covers by SLSMusic
Tosin Abasi: Thump
Keiichi Okabe [Nier Automata OST]: 壊レタ世界ノ歌 / Weight of the World
Complex systems of life often contain a multitude of shortcuts: sources of alpha which, should you choose to exploit them, give notable advantage. Many classes of these shortcuts are features rather than bugs, and it is no accident of many systems that only a select minority are able to tactfully navigate them.
In many cases there exists zero-sum shortcuts, which, if all of society were to adopt them tomorrow, would have their effectiveness instantly curtailed to zero. Luckily there also exists many which are positive-sum and benefit both parties involved. This post contains a few notes and examples from both classes.
Venture Capital
In venture capital, it is strongly preferred that one receives an introduction to an investor prior to pitching them. This is, in general, a much easier way to meet with many classes of professionals than a cold-email.
At first glance this may appear shallow or nepotistic, but it’s more accurate to view it as one of the first tests to becoming a successful founder. If you’re unable to find any way to get an introduction to a person, it is more likely that you may also have difficulty with other similarly important roles that a founder must perform such as recruiting, sales, management, and further fundraising.
This warm-introduction requirement therefore functions less as “this person happens to know someone”, and more as “this person has the right set of traits in order to acquire this warm introduction, which we consider a modestly bullish investment signal”.
Due to the generality of this phenomenon, this paradigm repeats itself in many categories of society.
Job Hunting
It is much easier to get a job somewhere by messaging someone at that company and asking them to help you out, preferably with some baseline level of evidence that you are at least reasonably competent and aligned with the organization.
This may seem obvious, but at any given moment there are millions of reasonably-intelligent individuals bulk-sending their CVs to hundreds of unsuspecting organizations, when their time may be better spent narrowing their hit list down to only a select few companies, then delegating several hours of their time towards each of them.
You can go much further than this, of course. To give an example: the few times I’ve had an employer other than myself were because I specifically asked to be hired for a role I made up. Rather than seeing an available position on a job posting, I looked at the intersection between the needs of the organization and my own abilities, and proposed that intersection directly to the CEO as my job description. Many find this to be much more agentic than something like “asking the neighbor with overgrown grass if he will pay me $20 to mow it for him”, but the exact same thing is happening in both of these scenarios. Negotiating your salary is in a similar category of actions.
The reason why the above two sections describe intentional shortcuts is because they’re positive-sum. Negative-sum shortcuts are often unintentional (for example, stealing merchandise from a store), and zero-sum shortcuts can be of arbitrary intentionality.
User Support
Many are familiar with the basic techniques of escalating one’s user support channel with a large corporation to an agent which is both more responsive and more capable. Some classes of individuals may formalize this as e.g. “I’d like to speak with your manager”, but there’s often more effective methods depending on your use case. Patrick McKenzie has many good examples among his blog posts, and I’ve included a wonderful excerpt from him on banking and credit reports below.
On occasion, when I’ve had a particularly egregious and frustrating issue with a large company, I’ve emailed an executive in the relevant department with concise and kind language explaining the issue, where its alleviation is in the self-interest of my counterparty. This can sometimes be done all the way up to the CEO, but results vary depending on who both parties are, what the issue is, and how it is communicated (this is, however, a skill you can very much learn and perfect).
I’m fortunate to have a twitter account with a large amount of founders and investors in my following, which affords me the luxury of sometimes having CEOs fix issues I complain about. You don’t need a twitter account for this though; there are many executives and engineers that read forums like e.g. Hacker News and will directly respond to the right classes of issues on occasion.
Every Day Life: Flying
If you spend time thinking about the systems you regularly interact with, you can forecast some potential shortcuts by modelling both the incentive structures of the arbitrators of the system as well as the behavior of the average system participant.
Simple example: I fly pretty frequently. I often do things like:
Changing my seat an hour before takeoff to get two or three seats to myself. Laying down and taking up a full row is a much better experience than first class! This is done by combining 1) last-minute seat selection with 2) picking flight times where the flight is likely to be <80% full (which is unfortunately not a given for an arbitrary itinerary)
If I’m feeling particularly voracious when flight attendants decide to hand out biscuits, I might ask for three of them. I’ve never had a response of ‘no’ as there’s no reason for them to decline. I never ask for additional pretzels, should my choice of airline condemn me to such a fate.
If I want to board earlier than my boarding class, this is generally not scrutinized. I don’t abuse this, but sometimes it is simply more convenient both for myself and others (one reason it can be positive-sum is that I’m particularly quick both with my movement and with handling any luggage). Some airlines are okay with you taking up a first-class seat without paying for it, should one be empty.
Should the airline lose you your flight (or they require a set amount of passengers to switch flights), the compensation offered to is often highly negotiable (as most things in life are!), and can take many forms (flight credits, class upgrades, lodging, etc).
If you fly frequently in the US you should get TSA pre-checked. The advantage is more “reduces the variance and maximum time through security” rather than “reduces the average time through security”, as the former allows you a significantly more generous grace period. It’s also worth looking into credit card optimization if you travel frequently, but I’ll consider this outside of the scope of this post lest it turns into the equivalent of “they don’t want you to know this but you can bring candy inside of the movie theater”.
Exercise for the reader
Think about a system you regularly interact with and take some time writing down the incentives of the actors within the system. Think about actions which could be taken which are not frequently given as examples to follow, but which nonetheless match the ‘desires’ of the system.
It will be easier to find zero-sum examples in systems which are less heavily-optimized by market structures, e.g. searching for a secret to getting rich by trading derivatives better than anyone else will probably result in disappointment, whereas acquiring multiple snacks while on a flight won’t be a problem. I’d suggest picking something fun which is a quotidian yet mostly unscrutinized part of your daily life.
Try to come up with novel ideas, ideally by writing down things that come to your mind with as few stimuli to distract you as possible. I find this to be a really good exercise both in critical thinking and in agency.
If you enjoyed this post you may like other posts or my Twitter account. Thanks!
If you have important video calls (for example, you fundraise as the CEO of a company), you should have a good webcam setup. This post contains everything you need for one, at a cost of $700-$2,000, depending on which options you choose.
I. Camera
Most webcams are not very good, and you’ll want a real mirrorless camera instead, optionally with a better lens:
Buy a capture card for the camera for the best video quality and lowest latency: Elgato Cam Link 4K ($90)
IV. Mounts
You probably want to mount your camera behind and above your primary monitor. I use a large desk mount for this, but if you are often travelling or on a laptop, a smaller one works.
You’ll have to change a few settings on the camera to have a good streaming experience.
It’s a popular camera, so if you don’t know how to do something, just search on Youtube. I found this video which helped me with a few settings such as: set the overheating threshold to high, add ‘USB streaming’ mode to the quick menu if you are not using a capture card, and turn the steady shot option off.
The most important item in this list by far is the camera – the microphone and lighting isn’t nearly as crucial for a good setup. Special thanks to Cory, CEO of Spellbrush, for helping me with all of this myself!
Twitter/𝕏 is one of the best social networks in the world.
It’s among the best places to make friends, find a job, find co-founders or investors, attend events from, date from, learn from, and now even make some cash on the side from. This is still true as of 2024 (last updated: Oct 10 2024).
Despite this, many people haven’t given it a serious try and are missing out, likely because it takes time to learn how to make your Twitter experience great. In order to help remedy this, this post will cover:
X premium (previously Twitter blue) is generally worth it. Although the value it adds in some areas is subtle, if it helps you out even a bit socially, it will easily be worth $8.
An example of this is if it encourages someone to respond to you, check out your profile, or read your DM, when perhaps they otherwise wouldn’t have. Premium is purported to give algorithmic boosts, making you more likely to appear in the For You feed and causing you to appear higher in responses to parent tweets, but I don’t have explicit data to support this.
If your account has a large amount of impressions (5M+/month currently) you will make money from X Premium, so this should be a no-brainer. Based on the numbers I have, you should get a CPM of $0.01, although some accounts get higher rates. If you have 5M impressions per month, this should make you $50/month. Some accounts that I surveyed have a CPM of up to 5 times this as much. This may be due to having a much higher-value audience from an advertising perspective (many founders, investors, etc), or due to other unspecified favoritism.
I looked at the accounts I consider the highest-value, and around 50% have premium, so it’s a good signal that you’re a strongly above-average account.
Strongly consider trying out the lists feature of twitter! Lists are a collection of accounts that you choose which constitute a separate feed that you can browse. Twitter lists can be public so that anyone else can browse and follow them, or private so that only you see them.
The best two ways to use lists are 1) to make lists for specific topics you are interested in so that you can just browse that topic, and 2) to make lists of high-quality accounts which you don’t want to miss any tweets from.
You can add someone to a list by clicking the ‘…’ on their profile and then ‘Add/remove from lists’.
I personally use a ‘high priority’ list with ~140 accounts on it, allowing me to check this list in full daily with only a few minutes of time. This makes sure I don’t miss anything from the accounts that I think are the highest value. A subset of this list of people on my links page.
Bonus #1: lists do not have any advertisements on mobile
Bonus #2: you can pin a list on the mobile app so it appears at the top of the main app view next to the ‘for you’ and ‘following’ feeds. This can be done by visiting the lists page and then tapping the pin to the far right of a list.
Although my lists are not public, some others are! Here are a few examples compiled by Lama:
Twitter has a DM feature. You’re probably under-using it.
You can just talk to people. It’s okay if they are a famous researcher, a CEO, or even a billionaire. Many of them not only have their DMs open, but will check them. The worst that may happen is you don’t get a response, and that’s okay too.
This isn’t to say you should be spamming people – you should definitely focus on starting a conversation when you think it will provide value to both participants. But Twitter is simply a network of humans, and humans love to socialize and make friends and help each other out, and it’s important not to forget this. No matter how much fame or money someone has, there is almost always something they are looking for more of in the world.
A cold DM on twitter from someone who you have ‘seen around’ is significantly less cold than a cold email, where you see nothing but an email address and name. If you are, for example, looking for a job at a company, you may want to look at who is hiring for that company on Twitter and ask them how you can improve your chances.
When I went to San Francisco for the first time I didn’t know anyone there. I had zero friends. But what I did have was an anonymous Twitter account with 400 followers! I sent 6 cold DMs to some people who seemed cool and 4 of them agreed to hang out with me (one non-response, one busy). I had a great time with all 4, and I still chat on and off with two of them to this day.
I know a lot of people who have dated off of twitter and many others who have met their wife or husband from Twitter. I haven’t done this myself so have fewer tips in this area, but it probably beats the state of most dating apps.
Make sure your Twitter DMs are open (not verified-only, explicitly check this setting as for some users it was modified!) unless you have a good reason to close them.
IV. Muting & Blocking
You can mute keywords of things you don’t want to see. This was useful to many users during the NFT bubble, and in general can be a good way to keep politics or outrage-bait out of your feed.
You can also mute or block users. Muting a user ensures that you don’t see what they say, while blocking a user also ensures that they cannot respond to your tweets. Blocks can be considered rude the user will know you blocked them if they try to visit your profile), so muting may be a better idea in some cases (which has plausible deniability, should you desire that).
Some users strongly advocate for the liberal usage of mutes and occasional blocks, although if you aren’t overly political and don’t engage with trolls (which I encourage!), your need for them should be minimal unless you’re otherwise excessively controversial and/or popular.
With that said, your twitter account is yours and your time here is likely limited, so make sure you’re enjoying yourself rather than spending your nights arguing with strangers.
V. Likes
Liking a tweet makes the twitter algorithm more likely to show you tweets similar to it. I don’t use the For You feature frequently, so my personal usage is a little different. I sometimes use likes in a manner almost close to read receipts: the cost of clicking like is very low, it’s nice to notify people that I have read their post, and it also means that my likes are not particularly indicative of what I actually like, so it creates plausible deniability should someone point out that I ‘liked’ a tweet which goes against a given narrative.
If you subscribe to twitter you can hide your likes page from other users if you don’t want anyone to be able to visit your profile and see all of them in one place. As of late 2023 Twitter has also added a bookmark feature within the app which can be useful for saving content.
If you see tweets from someone you don’t like, either unfollow them, mute them, or block them.
I generally unfollow accounts which are excessively political, and my Twitter experience is vastly improved as a result. Whenever something outrageous is happening that is covering the headlines (e.g. every day of ‘US politics’), I often don’t even see a single tweet about it. If it is something that actually matters and affects me, it’s likely someone I follow will bring it up. Twitter has been experimenting with many low-quality For You feeds to increase engagement as of mid-2024, so sometimes this isn’t enough and you’ll have to stick to using alternative feeds.
Experiment with using the Following feed rather than the For You feed. I find my For You feed to be mediocre at best, and an easy way to waste time without getting much value.
VII. Advanced search
Twitter has an advanced search feature which lets you search by account, engagement, date range, included words, excluded words, and more.
It is not the default search or accessible via the app, so many people do not know about it. You can use it by visiting this page: https://twitter.com/search-advanced
VIII: Desktop Keybinds
If you use twitter on a desktop or laptop, you may find the keybinds useful!
Frequent-used keybindings are shown below as well as the full keybind list from twitter.
Frequently-used Twitter keybinds
Twitters’s full list of keybinds, itself accessible via ?
IX: Security Features
Performing an audit on your account security is strongly suggested.
Here is a great guide showing you the features available and how to set proper 2FA (TOTP rather than SMS).
How Twitter Accounts Grow: 0 To 1,000 Followers
I. Foreword
Being popular on Twitter is probably not what you want.
You probably want something that correlates with it, like reputation, influence, friends, or money. You can make great progress on these metrics without having an absurdly high follower count. If you think do in fact desire true fame, my suggested reading for you is Reasons Not to Become Famous by Tim Ferris, or the replies to any tweet Elon makes.
Ask yourself which is more valuable, a twitter account with 100,000 followers randomly sampled from the Earth’s population, or a twitter account with 1,000 followers entirely comprised of CEOs, journalists, billionaires, and heads of state? I’d take the latter any day myself.
This may be an extreme example, but it’s true that higher-quality conversation is harder to find in the replies to larger accounts. Elon Musk may be an interesting person, but the average reply to his tweets is anything but that. I personally find the sweet spot of good conversations to occur with accounts in the 1K-20K range, but your mileage may vary.
Starting from zero followers sucks. Even if you post something good, it may go entirely unnoticed. Here are some tips to help you out.
II. Put an unreasonable amount of effort into your content.
This is the most important tip here, and that is why it’s first. The Internet is filled with content, and if yours is significantly better than average, it’ll help your odds tremendously.
If you’re summarizing a research paper, don’t just paste it into ChatGPT and tweet whatever comes out. Go over sections of it yourself, help explain it as clearly as possible, add or even hand-annotate and crop images yourself, and so on. A good example of an account that quickly grew from 0 -> 70K in a matter of months with this strategy is AI Pub.
If you have years of interesting experience in a field, you may just be able to tweet stream of consciousness thoughts and takes on things successfully, in which case the above doesn’t exactly apply: the unreasonable amount of effort that you put in was applied elsewhere (e.g. in your career), and you’re just translating your knowledge from there to Twitter. In general long posts are not a great idea and should be separated into threads, although Andrej’s tweets are particularly high-quality, so I included him as an example.
III. Make your tweets as easy to consume as possible
Most tweets which go viral are very short and easy to consume. The exception to this tip is ‘essay’-style threads like the example shown above which have a different art to them. You should generally delete as many words as you can from a tweet, space out any sections of a tweet which are long, and then apply this style of thinking to everything else too. Images should be cropped so they’re easy to read and quick to consume, videos should be shortened to not be too long and have an alluring thumbnail, and so on.
IV. Respond frequently, early, and with high-quality content
When someone popular tweets about something you know a lot about, respond to it with something useful (or funny). If you do this shortly after the parent tweet was made, there’s a good chance you will appear near the top of the responses, enabling you to piggyback off of the popularity of the original poster.
One of the best things about this is that people will notice. If you give high-quality responses, even accounts with 6 figures of followers will read them and notice. That’s all it takes to talk with the main characters of the world: your desire to post a response to them on Twitter.
V. Source followers from external locations
If you have other social media accounts (or any friends), you can direct people to your twitter there. I like to include a link to my profile at the end of blog posts in case someone wants to follow me. If you have a friend who has a lot of followers, a single good quote-tweet or endorsement can really speed up starting a new account!
Most growth is based on your current number of followers (e.g., you should expect to gain a given percentage of followers per month), so it can take high-quality accounts months to go from 0 to 1,000 followers. Don’t give up and stick with it, and you’ll make it eventually!
How Twitter Accounts Grow: 1,000 To 100,000 Followers
After you have a few thousand followers, you’re at the point to where your tweets have a large initial seed userbase. This is great, because now if you post something with the propensity for virality it has a much better chance of getting thousands of likes and being ‘picked up’ by the algorithm.
To help demonstrate how social media growth generally works I’ve made a few charts of my Twitter metrics from a period where I was having fun growing my account.
Aggregate followers over time
This first graph is my followers over time. It is going up, and the slope is mostly increasing. That’s good.
To make it more useful, now we’ll adjust for the amount of followers that I had in each month to show the relative growth instead of absolute.
Despite the number of followers increasing more and more over time, the percentage of followers that I gain in a month is surprisingly constant. My month-on-month growth was around 24% on average.
If you are familiar with the power of compounding this should strike you as a very impressive metric and is the exact type of thing venture capitalists look for in the revenue or usage metric of companies. A 24% MoM growth rate would amount to 1,300% per year or 40,300,000% across five years.
But in some months I tweeted more, and in other months I tweeted less. Let’s take that into account to make another chart.
This graph is answering the question “for each tweet that I made, by what percentage did it cause my account to grow, on average, per month?”. Although it’s a bit messy, it is still surprisingly consistent and its data has the lowest standard deviation out of all three graphs.
Thus, numerically speaking, to grow your twitter account:
Tweet frequently
Tweet consistently
Do this for a long time, ideally for years
The best example of someone that has done this well, but for Youtube instead of Twitter, is MrBeast. He consistently made videos for years, getting very few views, but kept at it and kept improving until the subtle 10%/month gains compounded. The first few years sucked, but now 2% of the Earth’s population watches every video he releases.
With that said, none of this will matter if your tweets are low-quality. The above guidelines assume both that there’s some value in your content but also that your goal is to maximize follower count. This isn’t the same as my personal goal, so I usually don’t tweet more than once or twice a day, if that.
Okay, but what do I actually post?
Well, that depends on what kind of followers you want. You can become popular by posting 4chan memes, but if your goal is to network and get a job, this probably won’t help you very much. You could also become popular by posting research summaries of arxiv papers, but if your goal is to hang out with the boys and joke around, this might not hit the spot.
Broadly though, you should decide who you want to surround yourself by (you will become more similar to them, so be careful!), and what type of value you will provide in order to achieve this.
Most social media accounts can be mapped into a category based on the type of value they provide. Broadly those categories are:
Funny
Interesting
Useful
Sexy
Entertaining
These are rough categories, but if you think of some of your favorite twitter accounts, you should be able to map them onto one or more of the above categories.
The next section will go over more explicit advice that might help you to have a good time on Twitter.
Social Tips for Success
I. Be positive and constructive
The most important tip I have is to be positive and constructive. You can get engagement with dunks, but the followers and network you’ll end up with won’t be pretty. I’d avoid the political areas of Twitter at all costs.
II. Err towards saying things rather than being shy
This is hard for some people, but exposure therapy is the best way to fix it. Never be scared to tweet something because you have a lot of followers, or overly important followers, or anything like that, as long as it’s something you actually want to say. This is good advice for life in general. Trying things is good, and not trying things is bad.
III. Optimize your content for twitter
Linking to a 30 minute youtube video will generally get very low engagement, but specifically cropping out the best 30 seconds and adding a quick summary, quote, or thread will do much better. You should keep most posts short and crop images accordingly.
IV. Don’t tweet walls of text
Both spacing out your tweets and tweeting with images are usually good ideas. If the first one or two sentences of your tweet aren’t interesting, few people will finish reading it. It’s possible to succeed with long-form essays and threads if you have good content, but this is usually more difficult and vastly depends on your niche. I strongly advise reading Scott Alexander’s writing advice as well, even if it wasn’t made for Twitter.
V. Make your own images
There’s a lot of value in making custom images. Most of my best performing tweets contained images that myself or someone else made, some which took as long as 5-30 minutes to make.
Having a pseudonymous account can be advantageous. A lot of people are scared to tweet their true thoughts publicly in a permanent form with their face and name directly adjacent to them. This is understandable and there’s nothing wrong with that. Even if you don’t have your name and face on your account you can still make friends, meetup with people, and even network professionally or get a job as long as you’re willing to share more details with individuals. A great example of someone who has managed this well is roon.
You can probablyget away with tweeting more provocative content than you think. Cancellation may have been a formidable force a few years ago, but as of 2024 unless you’re diving straight into hard-politics you shouldn’t let it scare you out of trying to live your life.
If you’re fortunate enough to be skilled in a field like software engineering, you have strong marketplace value and leverage. Consider working for an employer which has courage and will not fire you over a few people on the Internet typing mean words into a text box (thanks @patio11).
VII. Cold DM people more
You should cold DM people more. It’s a great way to get a job, make a friend, find a partner, and much more. If you’re curious why this tip has been repeated twice, it’s because it’s at least twice as important as the other tips.
VIII. Only follow people you want to become more similar to
Only follow someone if you want to become more similar to them in some way (at least with respect to the content that they tweet about). Following someone gives them a limited type of write access to your brain, which for powerusers may be reinforced multiple times a day over the course of many years. This will significantly alter the type of person that you become, so use this super power wisely.
A relevant quote from Moxie Marlinspike on career advice is to look at those senior to you in a field and decide if you’d truly like to become just like them: “They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves” (source)
IX. Optimize for virality only at the cost of your soul
I would advise not purely seeking virality, even if you manage to avoid politics. Our best selves are probably not consistent with the versions of ourselves that maximize engagement online. I’ll leave you with the below quote from Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic:
That’s all I have here for now! If you have feedback to add, please add it to my tweet for this post or send a DM. If you made it this far you may also like some other posts on this site.
FAQ / Addendum
Hasn’t Twitter gotten worse with Elon?
I don’t personally find that the amount of value I get from it has gone up or down by much since the acquisition. but I do find that it takes more effort to get a good experience (for example, the default feed is worse for me). Although some updates have been negative, I’m glad new things are at least being tried. I also exist in an area (AI, startups, tech, San Francisco, etc) which likely uses and enjoys Twitter more than average.
There are of course many alternatives to twitter, and if you prefer their leadership and product choices over the ability to actually have a large and influential audience, that is a choice one could make. As of 2024, Twitter remains largely influential to the world, and that’s why I continue to use it. You don’t have to be a fan of the CEO or ownership of a company to use a product from them, and Twitter is no exception.
I often end up talking about finance a lot, and in doing so often mention investing strategies and asset classes that many regular retail investors aren’t aware of. Although the world of financial derivatives is vast and unknown to most, I wanted to make a brief post about some simple products which I think should have more publicity, primarily that of leveraged ETFs. This post is a brief introduction to some investing strategies that some retail investors choose to use for higher risk tolerance and significantly greater potential performance. This post is not investment advice, in case I need to actually say that. I should also add that suggesting holding leveraged ETFs for longer periods is a relatively controversial view within the wonderful world of dollarmancy; nonetheless I present my own views here honestly should anyone wish to know them.
this could be you!
Cash is not your friend
At the lowest level of risk tolerance, many choose to simply keep their savings in cash. This is bad when done for longer periods. It is often pointed out that you will slowly lose money to inflation over time (whether that is the 2% inflation rate that the FOMC targets per year, the ~7% rate of 2021, or perhaps much more..), which although true, is not nearly as large of a loss as the opportunity cost incurred by investing in nothing. Many will provide APY estimates for investing in common market indexes between 6% and 9%, but examining as much as the last few decades (or even just the last decade) will show significantly greater numbers. $SPY has returned over 10% per year since its inception 29 years ago, and around 16.5% per year for the last decade (the last 3 years are even more impressive at 26% each on average!). I do not attempt to claim these are indicative of future results, or that we should be promising anyone these numbers, but it does seem to be unfair to weigh our expected market growth by including past decades that go so far back that we lacked not only much of our modern monetary policy knowledge, but also inventions as basic as the Internet itself.
If casual returns of 10.5% per year were not enough to motivate oneself, I often like converting these APYs to the period of a decade – in which case 10.5% corresponds to a 171% gain (1.105^10), 16.5% APY to a 360% gain, and 26% APY to a >900% gain. We could, of course, make these numbers even more grandiose by telling someone what returns they may expect by holding an investment for 20 or 50 years, but I find a decade to be a relative sweet spot, perhaps because people have an easier time imagining themselves a decade in the future rather than several.
I have heard many reasons for why people choose not to invest in ETFs (or anything similar such as individual stocks), from the reasonable “I am purchasing a house in a few months and now is not the time to take on any risk”, to the questionable “I am waiting for things to cool down a bit and I am a bit worried about some things in the near future”, to the absurd “I do not trust wall street or bankers, sorry” (and indeed, much can be said about how poorly we educate our citizens in the US about basic personal finance, which unfortunately involves much more than just basic investing). I am not going to spend many words attempting to convince someone that holding cash long-term (a year or more) is sub-optimal, because it seems obvious enough to me that it’s considered outside the scope of this post.
What margin is and isn’t
Most young professionals are now fully aware of what index funds are, and often have some simple strategies for investing in them. While it’s not my job to decide the risk tolerance of others, I do think it’s nice to at least be aware of some options that can generate significantly higher long-term returns than these traditional index ETFs. This is not investment advice, and regardless of if it was, I would not want to be responsible for someone else’s choices should things turn south.
The primary product I’d like to mention is that of leveraged ETFs. Many will initially recoil upon hearing the term ‘leverage’ mentioned in the context of personal finance, because they know that it’s scary and can be involved in situations where someone loses their entire principle (that is, 100% of their portfolio). It’s for this reason that I want to start with mentioning the difference between buying stocks on margin and purchasing a product which itself uses margin.
Buying stocks on margin is generally considered to be risky, because you are buying more than you can afford with your own money, effectively taking a loan from your broker in order to afford additional shares. Generally leverage of up to 4x is attainable with popular large-cap stocks on most US brokers, although there’s many exceptions to this. Although buying stocks on margin is not something I would generally suggest for many reasons, it does have a lot of uses, and it can be much less intimidating and dangerous than many may guess. Tools to analyze, manage, and properly limit one’s risk to a comfortable level are readily available, and rates for margin loans can be as low as 1% or under (IBKR is generally the golden standard for the lowest margin rates for regular retail investors, but some other platforms do offer better interfaces, tools, or additional products, and will also be able to negotiate rates with you should you have sufficient capital).
The obvious downside to margin is that you can lose much more of your investment. Theoretically, if you bought a stock with 4X leverage and it then declines by 25%, you would find yourself broke. In practice, you will get liquidated by your broker before this happens, unless the 25% decline happens instantaneously and they do not have enough time to sell your securities on your behalf (If you have heard the term margin call before, that is what happens when you do not have enough capital to maintain your leverage, generally after whatever you own performs very poorly. You can either deposit more money to get back to your maintenance margin, sell some of the products you own via leverage, or let your counterparty liquidate them for you). I am not going to get into the different types of margin or ideal scenarios for using it (of which there are many – remember, this is a loan with an interest rate of only 1%!) in this post, but rather have included this information to help it contrast with what a leveraged ETF is.
Leveraged ETFs
A leveraged ETF is not the same as buying stocks on margin. It is similar in that it is a higher-risk investment that easily allows one to lose or gain much more than usual, but it is different in that you are not taking out a loan explicitly nor implicitly, are not in debt, and therefore cannot be margin called, liquidated, or otherwise lose your shares via any means except via deciding to sell them yourself (this doesn’t mean they can’t still decrease in value by an arbitrary amount of anything less than 100%, however).
A leveraged ETF functions similarly to a regular ETF – it is a security that you can purchase, in which the work of managing your portfolio is abstracted away from you, and instead done by the issuer of the ETF. Instead of buying shares in 500 companies and managing their proportions yourself, you can simply purchase a share of $SPY and forget about it. In exchange for this convenience, you are charged a fee of 0.094% per year (this is often listed by brokers and compiled by ETF websites, but the original source is in the prospectus for the given security). The goal of an ETF is to track its underlying index – if the S&P 500 index is down by 1% in a given day, $SPY should be down close to that amount as well. A leveraged ETF attempts to perform the same function, however it introduces a linear multiplier which multiplies the intended gains and losses. In the US you will generally only find products that offer 2x or 3x leverage due to SEC regulations (3x products are often grandfathered in, as a 2020 update from the SEC suggests a general cap of 200% leverage via derivatives being allowed), although this introduces much more than enough additional risk and volatility for most investors’ appetites (should one want more leverage, they can create additional artificial leverage through the use of options, but that is also outside the scope of this post. Also, gambling is bad, Just Say Neigh!)
Leveraged ETFs are re-balanced daily, and thus intend only to match the performance of their underlying index (multiplied by 2 or 3) for a given day. If the S&P 500 index goes up 1.5% in a day, then a 2X leveraged ETF for it should return close to 3% that day. Due to their targets being daily, some investors often misinterpret this as being equivalent to matching returns on longer periods, although this is not the case. This has been misunderstood enough that the SEC has an alert attempting to inform investors of this, providing some historical examples of leveraged ETFs declining in value during longer periods, during which the underlying index performed positively. This is generally referred to as ‘volatility drag’, and is one of the largest reasons for which many discourage investors from purchasing these products. Much has been written about it, so I will just offer a very short summary: during periods of volatility, leveraged ETFs will perform worse than one would expect at first glance. To give a simple example as to why, imagine that portfolio A returns 5% on day one and then loses 5% on day two. If you started with $100, you will end up with $99.75 ($100 * 1.05 * 0.95). If portfolio B multiplied these daily fluctuations by 3X and returned 15% on day one and -15% on day two, $100 would turn into $97.75 ($100 * 1.15 * 0.85). As you can imagine, if we iterated over these scenarios many times, portfolio B would start to perform terribly in comparison to the portfolio with less leverage.
Volatility drag, aptly-named, is bad during periods of volatility, but it’s particularly bad when there’s not enough underlying momentum in the upward direction to counteract it during longer periods. During a market that is performing even moderately well, generally the greater returns provided by leveraged products don’t just return more than is lost due to volatility drag, but return so much more that being fearful of the concept can be actively harmful (this is likely a controversial opinion in many areas, for what it’s worth – but many people become scared of an investment that could feasibly return 1,000% over a period because of a potential loss of 10% or 50%, even if it’s clearly a very high expected value. In some cases this may be rational due to the diminishing returns of utility provided by additional capital (money may buy a little happiness, but this caps out pretty quickly, and having no money is definitely much worse than having just a little!), but it is well-known that humans are far too risk-averse as a general principle regardless).
To provide some examples, I will mention some leveraged ETFs alongside the returns that they have provided historically. As usual, past performance is not an indication of future results!
$SPUU, a 2X-daily-leveraged ETF that tracks the S&P 500 index, has returned an average of 32% annually for the last 5 years, and 27% annually since inception. $SPXL, a 3X-daily-leveraged ETF that also tracks the S&P 500, has returned an average of 41% annually for the last ten years. Those of you used to performing basic calculations on compounding annual rates will quickly realize how absolutely insane these numbers are – 41% returns compounding for a decade comes out to a return of +3,000%! This is something that is possible, and that many investors have actually attained, providing they didn’t sell during draw-downs (this is not the same as it being guaranteed, or even probable, however).
If past performance is not a promise of future performance, then why is it being mentioned so saliently here? Because although strong performance is not guaranteed, this helps to illustrate the potential of what happens with leveraged ETFs when things go really well, which we can reasonably say has been the case since 2010 to 2022. Because things are not guaranteed to go well, putting 100% of your net worth into these leveraged products is reckless and is very likely a bad idea. However, just as some people like to have hedges just in case things go south, I think it’s important to have some minor positions in place just in case the opposite occurs: If we get lucky and the next 10 years go as well as the last, it is quite possible to attain a 20x, 30x, or greater return on your investment. If you get unlucky, you may lose some or most of your investment, but no more than 100% of it, so the risk to reward is very strongly in your favor (yes, the math is much more complicated than this, but the result holds in more nuanced conditions regardless). In the next section I will go over a few basic common questions about leveraged ETFs, as well as mentioning more of the negatives.
Leveraged ETFs exist for most popular stock indexes, including sector indexes. For example, $SOXL is a 3X-leveraged ETF based upon the ICE Semiconductor Index, which primarily consists of companies related to semiconductor manufacturing. As it is my personal opinion that we are going to tile the world several times over with semiconductors (or something equivalent) in the coming decades, this is a product that I’m a fan of personally, even if it is very high-risk. For some listings of leveraged ETF products, check out out these pages from Direxion and Proshares
Responses to common concerns about leveraged ETFs
Aren’t leveraged ETFs not intended to be held for longer than a day?
This is mentioned in many locations, but it functions primarily for the purposes of legal liability and investor protection. There is nothing wrong with holding these products for longer periods, as long as one is properly educated about them. This is the type of warning where those that it does not apply to will know they can ignore it. There are other similarly-accessible products that are much worse ideas to hold for longer durations, for example inverse-leveraged ETFs, which return the opposite of what the underlying index returns, and thus trend towards zero over the long-run (for an example, $SPXS has returned -47.22% since inception, which leads to over a 99% loss after a decade. If you’re curious why inverse ETFs exists, they are primarily for short-term speculation and various types of hedging).
Aren’t leveraged ETFs subject to volatility drag, and thus a bad idea to hold long-term?
As mentioned above, volatility drag is an important thing to be educated about and aware of. However, if markets actually perform well, the potential gains from leveraged ETFs significantly outweigh (often by more than an order of magnitude) losses due to volatility drag. Regardless, it is worth noting that as many leveraged ETFs are recent financial products, there is an inherent cherry-picking present in the data used to show how well they perform, as the previous 5-20 years have been favorable financially for most US sectors.
Don’t leveraged ETFs have much higher management fees than most normal ETFs?
This is true, and is also something to note. As with the above two examples, $SPUU’s gross expense ratio is 0.88%, and $SPXL’s is 1.03%. Similarly to volatility drag, while it’s important to be aware of these expenses as they do add up and eat into long-term profits, if the market performs well, you will make so much that you will not even notice it.
I don’t want to get margin called, gamble with money that is not mine, or be in debt
Luckily none of these things occur when purchasing leveraged ETFs. You can still lose almost all of your money, but you cannot go into debt or have your shares taken away from you (unless you are engaged in other things that may cause this).
Leveraged ETFs have draw-downs that are far too high for the risk tolerance of every day people
I would say this is completely true. If we take a fund like $SPXL and look at what happened during the covid crash, it crashed from $76 to $18 in a single month, or a decline of around 77%. Apart from this being bad financially, drawdowns this large often cause significant emotional distress to investors and can easily cause them to make poor choices and panic-sell at market bottoms. While $SPXL may have returned back to $76 in less than a year (and then somehow doubled in the year after that..), this will obviously not always be the case. It’s quite possible for drawdowns in some leveraged ETFs to reach 90% or more, even if very rare.
This is gambling
All investing is gambling, mathematically speaking. The absence of investing is also gambling due to opportunity cost – if you hold USD, you are literallybetting for it and the US to do well! While it’s true that this is more like gambling than other financial products in the views of many, it should not be compared to acts such as buying a lottery ticket or going to a casino, where there is a known large house edge against you, with the objects in question having been specifically constructed in order to gain the upper hand over you.
Markets exists everywhere and will not go away any time soon, so there is no option of ‘not playing’ the game, as unfortunate as that may be for some of us. The only question is what one’s risk tolerance and personal choices are, not whether they exist or not, because they are forced into existence by our environment. While it may be easy to lose a lot of money on leveraged ETFs, it is nowhere near as bad as buying short-term out-of-the-money options, binary options, 100x leveraged cryptocurrency swaps, 250x forex trades, writing uncovered cryptocurrency options, and many other ‘fun’ products that exist and are often traded by young males addicted to gambling.
How much of my money should I invest into leveraged ETFs?
I have no clue; the right answer for you, dear reader, could very well be 0%, 100% or anywhere in between, but I am not the one that can decide for you. I can say that it is worth your time to learn a lot about how personal finance works however, regardless of your risk tolerance or intentions.
Something something trading leveraged-ETFs or other things
Although I am not in the business of telling people what to do financially, I do enjoy telling people things I think that they should not do, and one of those is ‘trading’. The short version of my advice on this matter is that you should be buying and selling things as infrequently as possible, and you should avoid things like ‘day trading’ like the plague. If you find yourself constantly checking prices, you are likely over-leveraged. I have watched too many bad things happen to too many amazing people, many of them very smart, and most of them young males, and I want to do what I can to cause gambling addictions and casual day-trading to happen less. The humor of places like r/wallstreetbets may be quixotically funny at times and comically sardonic at others, but behind all of the fun people are having with memes about cryptocurrencies and options on Reddit and Twitter, lay thousands of people who have lost their life savings, many of which who end up taking their own lives or losing decades of accumulated capital. Markets are not a game, and if they find a way to eat you alive, they will, as they have become exceedingly efficient at it in the recent few decades.
Scott Alexander of SlateStarCodex / AstralCodexTen recently wrote Pascalian Medicine, in which he looks at various substances purported to improve covid outcomes, but which have relatively low amounts of evidence in their favor, likening administration of all of them to patients to a Pascal’s wager-type argument: if there is a small probability of a potential treatment helping with covid, and if it’s also very unlikely that this treatment is harmful, should we just give it to the patient regardless of if the quality of evidence is low and uncertain, as it would clearly have a positive expected outcome regardless?
The naive answer to this could simply be to attempt to calculate an expected value (note: I use the term expected value often here, but in some cases the terms hazard ratio, relative risk, or odds ratio would be more appropriate) for each treatment, and administer it if it’s positive. But there could be some unintended consequences of using this methodology over the entire set of potential treatments: we could end up suggesting treatments of 10 or 100+ pills for conditions, and apart from something just feeling off about this, it could magnify potential drug interactions, some treatments could oppose others directly, the financial cost could start to become prohibitive, and it could decrease patient confidence and have many other undesirable second-order effects.
Pascalian Longevity
There are many counter-arguments presented to the above concept which become less salient when the goal is changed from ‘find drug treatments to prescribe to all covid patients’ to ‘find personal health interventions that increase your own lifespan/longevity’.
I am fortunate enough that I am able to evaluate potential longevity interventions myself, pay for them myself, administer them myself, and review their potential effects on me myself. I might not do a perfect job of this – research is difficult, time-consuming, and lacking in rigor and quantity, and finding appropriate longevity biomarkers to quantitatively asses the effects of interventions is also difficult. But uncertainty is a given here, and that is why we incorporate it into our frameworks when deciding if something is worth doing or not by calculating an expected value. Furthermore, any harm that I may accidentally incur will only be done to myself, reducing the ethical qualms of this framework to near-zero (I would strongly oppose arguments that I should not have the right to take drugs which I think may significantly improve my own health, although some may disagree here).
My modus operandi with respect to longevity may have many uncertainties in its output, but still operates with a very strong (in my opinion) positive expected value: If a substance significantly and consistently increases the lifespan of organisms similar to humans (ideally in humans), and is also very safe in humans, then it is something that I want to take
This is how I operate personally with longevity, and it does result in me taking quite a few things (currently I’m at around 15). I do still try to minimize what I take as a meta-principle (for example, setting a minimum threshold of expected value that a substance must provide to warrant inclusion, rather than simply accepting any positive expected value) for a few reasons: firstly, to reduce potential drug interactions (which we do attempt to asses on a per-substance basis, rather than account for as an unknown, but unknowns are unfortunately a very large component of messing with biology regardless). Secondly, to keep my costs relatively sane, although I am not too worried about this as there are few ways to spend money more effectively than on trying to improve your health. Thirdly, to reduce the occurrence of interventions that may have the same or opposing mechanisms of action (taking two things with the same mechanism of action may be okay, but sometimes dose-response curves are less favorable, and taking >~2x of something will result in diminished or even negative returns). Lastly, to minimize potential secondary side-effects that could be cumulative over large classes of substances (for example, effects on the liver).
I don’t intend to promote any specific substances or interventions here as I don’t give medical advice, nor do I want anything specific to be the focus of this post, but I do want to remind us that just as we can calculate expected values in a utilitarian fashion and get effective altruism as a result, we can do the same for longevity interventions and get a very strong chance at notably increasing our lifespan/healthspan as a result. I do have a list of some of what I take here, but it is definitely not intended to promote anything specific to others.
Why Not?: Potential counter-arguments
Algernon’s Law
Algernon’s Law is sometimes brought up, suggesting that evolution has already put a lot of effort into optimizing our body, and thus we are unlikely to find improvements easily. But, as Gwern notes in the above link, there’s at least three potential ways around this reasoning: interventions may be complex (and/or too far away in the evolutionary plane) and could not have easily been found, they may be minor or only work in some individuals, or they may have a large trade-off involved and cause harm to reproductive fitness.
Although some areas of future longevity treatments may fall under exception one and be complex enough that evolution could not have found them, I would suggest that the majority of today’s potential treatments fall under exception three: evolution optimizes for reproductive fitness, not for longevity, and for this reason there are many interventions which will improve our longevity that it has not given to us already (this is part of why I am more optimistic about longevity interventions than I am about intelligence interventions/nootropics).
For an extreme example of this, it has been noted that castrated males often live longer, and that this is obviously something evolution would not be very interested in exploring. Although this has been found with median lifespan in male mice (maybe in females too?), there is also purported historical data on Korean eunuchs suggesting that they may have lived a full 14-19 years longer (there are definitely potential confounding variables and/or bad data here, but we don’t have RCTs on this in humans for obvious reasons..), and a more recent study in sheep that is also highly relevant: Castration delays epigenetic aging and feminizes DNA methylation at androgen-regulated loci, where epigenetic aging clocks that look at DNA methylation are used in castrated sheep. There are other traits that seem to improve longevity as well, for example decreased height. It seems quite plausible that there are a lot of trade-offs that optimize for strong reproductive fitness early in the lifespan of organisms, which end up costing the organism dearly in terms of longevity. These trade-offs may be involved in many areas such as testosterone, estrogen, growth hormone, IGF-1, caloric restriction, mtor activation, and many others.
Large error in estimating unknown risks
One other counter-argument here is often along the lines of “you are messing with things you don’t understand, and you could be hurting yourself but be unaware of this; the damage may also be difficult to notice, or perhaps only become noticeable at a much later time”
It is true that our understanding of biology is lacking, and therefore also that we are operating in highly uncertain environments. I would be open to evidence that suggests reasoning for why we may be systemically underestimating the unknown risks of longevity interventions, but given how strong the potential upside is, these would have to be some pretty terrible mistakes that are being made. It is often noted how curing cancer may only extend human lifespan by a few years, whereas a longevity improvement of 5% for everyone would provide much more value (and is also much easier to find in my opinion). One could make an argument here that even if I was doing something that notably increased my risk of e.g. cancer, if the expected lifespan increase of this intervention was as much as 1-5%, this could still be a huge net positive for my health! I don’t take approaches that are this extreme regardless, and I try to keep the risk side of my risk/reward ratio low independently of the level of potential reward in attempt to account for this uncertainty. I am also not aware of many interventions that seem to have very high numbers in both the numerator and denominator here, although I am pretty certain that they do exist; I don’t currently take anything that I think has notably detrimental side-effects for the time being.
Is it fair to call this approach Pascallian?
The original nature of Pascal’s wager is that of extreme probabilities resulting in positive expected values, but the numbers that we are operating with are nowhere near as extreme as they could be. It is probably not a good idea to take 10,000 supplements, each of which have a 0.1% chance of extending your lifespan by a year for many reasons (similarly, if 10,000 people that claimed to be God all offered me immortality for a small fee, I would hope to decline all of their offers unless sufficient evidence was provided by one).
As I’m not arguing in favor of taking hundreds or thousands of supplements in the hopes that I strike gold with a few of them, it may be worth noting that ‘Pascallian Longevity’ would be a poor label for my strategy. Regardless, taking just 5-10 longevity interventions with a strong upside potential seems to be significantly more than almost everyone is doing already, so I still stand by my claim that there are many free lunches (free banquets, if you ask me) in this area, and I am very optimistic about the types of longevity interventions we’ll find in the coming decades.
This page lists many of my favorite blog posts, organized by author. Much of my most-cherished knowledge is from blog posts or internet comments, so I hope to share some of that with others here. Last updated: Oct 07, 2024
Scott Alexander (Twitter): As the author behind SlateStarCodex (now AstralCodexTen) and many great LessWrong posts, Scott is among one of the best written content creators of the last decade. He writes about psychiatry, rationality, and meta-science. Here’s some writing of his that I love, with my favorites bolded:
Who By Very Slow Decay (2013): How do doctors choose to die, and how is this related to knowledge of the healthcare system and signaling towards loved ones
Book Review: Seeing Like A State (2017): On the failure of bespoke state-created organizational structures in comparison to naturally-evolved systems, and why this is such a reoccurring phenomenon. Is legibility itself the enemy?
The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay (2019): Interesting photo-filled post on Scott’s attendance at the American Psychiatric Association
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success (2019): Is the secret to humanity’s success culture and shared knowledge rather than first-principles reasoning and individual intelligence?
Gwern Branwen (Twitter – currently private): Well-known for having quality deep dives in diverse areas such as statistics, technology, machine learning, genetics, psychology, and many others. Also often recognized as an amazingly aesthetic, verbose, and highly-usable website. Favorite posts:
About Gwern: About Gwern; who he is, what he has done, and links to other mediums
It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World: An eloquently-written and humorous short story about AI alignment and paperclipping, featuring our good friend Clippy alongside a multitude of entertaining references, both to Internet history and many arxiv machine learning papers
Death Note Anonymity: Using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes inDeath Note (absolutely worth watching, even if you’re not into anime), offering insightful analysis and constructive criticism
The Scaling Hypothesis: Discussion of the scaling hypothesis in machine learning (essentially how much better models get with significantly more data+compute), with obligatory emphasis on GPT-2 and GPT-3
Melatonin: Detailed information on melatonin, a simple endogenous hormone that notably improves sleep in many individuals when supplemented just before bedtime
Nicotine: An analysis on the benefits of nicotine as a nootropic, with attention given to the fact that it is often incorrectly assumed to be a dangerous and addictive drug due to its inclusion in cigarettes and consequently significantly-confounded research claims
Modafinil: Discussion of modafinil, a prescription stimulant drug that appears to have a relatively favorable cost/benefit profile for productivity and alertness
Andrej Karpathy: (Twitter) A bright AI researcher who has spent time both at OpenAI and as the chief AI officer at Tesla. He has a popular Youtube channel with machine learning content as works on Eureka Labs.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks: Back in 2015 Andrej trained a 10M-parameter RNN on some interesting text datasets like the source code for the Linux kernel and Shakespeare. Performance was surprisingly good!
Biohacking Lite: It’s always fun to read content from people from fields like computer science when they later deep dive into biology, often for their own personal health. This post has some high-SNR content on the basics of metabolism and energy in humans as well as some quantified-self demonstrations and simple dietary advice.
Scott Aaronson: A theoretical computer scientist with a focus on quantum computing and complexity theory. Although his posts on quantum computational complexity theory research go over my head, I’ve enjoyed some great content from him in other categories. Favorites:
Matt Levine (Twitter): An ex-Goldman Bloomberg opinion columnist with some wonderfully insightful and hilarious posts (offered as a free newsletter, generally ~4x a week) on the happenings in our modern yet often-insane financial world. Posts are generally centered around current events and are best read as they come out. Some examples:
The SEC Is Baffled By GameStop Too: On the SEC’s Gamestop fiasco report, green company projects, as well as an obligatory section on Elon Musk’s tweets (which appear to be a common theme)
Looking for Tether’s Money: On the potential insolvency of Tether, along with a section on interesting loans and NFT occurrences
Elon Musk Sold Some Stock: Musings on the never-ending fun of Elon Musk’s doings, his tweets, and potential legal implications thereof, as well as notes on GE banking fees and Trump’s SPACPIPE
Nintil (Twitter): A wonderful blog by Jose Luis Ricón with a focus on longevity, economics, and meta-science. Favorite posts:
The Longevity FAQ: An overview of many fundamental topics in aging and longevity
Peer Rejection in Science: Case examples of major scientific discoveries that were initially looked down upon by scientific peers, including mRNA vaccines, airplanes, DNA, and many others
Immunosenescence: A Review: A detailed post reviewing the changes that occur in the immune system with age
No Great Technological Stagnation: Some counter-examples to the common claim that the modern era exhibits a notable decline in the speed of technological improvements, at least in some specific areas
Patrick Collison (Twitter): The CEO and co-founder of Stripe, often with focuses involving meta-science, individual and societal productivity, and economics
Fast: Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together
Sam Altman (Twitter): The CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator, his posts often focus on startups, artificial intelligence, productivity, and science. Favorites:
How to be Successful: Thirteen thoughts on how to achieve long-term successful outcomes: learn a lot, compound yourself, work hard, and be ambitious
Productivity: Various productivity tips, such as ‘Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity and usually almost ignored. So think about it more!’
Advice for Ambitious 19 Year Olds: Advice for young and ambitious individuals, such as ‘The best people always seem to be building stuff and hanging around smart people’
Paul Graham (Twitter): The founder of Y Combinator, with many posts focusing on startups, ideas and frameworks for everyday life, as well as advice and reflections for people that fit the founder/builder/nerd stereotype. Some favorites:
Do Things That Don’t Scale: An amazing tip on gaining initial traction and leverage by doing high-impact activities that won’t scale, but that will work effectively for the time being
Keep Your Identity Small: On why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions due to excessive involvement with personal identity
Having Kids: Personal experiences and thoughts on having kids
It’s Charisma, Stupid: A 2004 essay arguing that charisma is the most important trait for elected politicians, using the US presidency as an example
What I worked on: A personal and emotional memoir on pg’s professional and personal history
Alexey Guzey (Twitter): Currently working on New Science, Alexey has some great blog posts with a focus on properly using the Internet for social leverage (reach out to people more, cold email people more, initiate conversations more, and create content more!), meta-science, productivity, biology, and more. Some favorites:
Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now: Encouragement to start your own blog. I strongly recommend this to people, as well as starting/doing many other things that involve content creation. Also attempts to argue against some common excuses made for why someone shouldn’t start a blog, which I mostly agree with
How to make friends over the Internet: ‘90% of meeting people is reaching out, so, unless you’re already very well-known, most of your network building will consist of actively initiating conversations’
Cold emails and Twitter: Sending cold emails and using Twitter can both be extremely high-impact activities when done well, see also from a separate author: A Guide to Twitter
Why (and How) You Should Join Twitter Right Now: A post encouraging Twitter usage. If you pick your follows wisely, you can have a wonderful time on Twitter, one that is full of smart and amazing people and with minimal political outrage. This is worth reconsidering if it is something you instantly dismissed as ‘not for you’ due to Twitter’s mainstream political reputation. Last time I traveled I met up with many people I had found on Twitter and had a great time with literally everyone single one (and also only had a few hundred followers myself).
Neurons Gone Wild: A beautifully speculative post that suggests a recursively selfish model of biological neurons which enables selfish sub-agents and networks to co-exist in an evolutionary semi-competitive environment within our own minds. Probably my favorite post on this blog for several reasons. Also see Hallucinated Gods
Crony Beliefs: On beliefs that stick around when they shouldn’t
Personality: The Body in Society: What is personality? ‘Nature and nurture work together to create a prototype, which then negotiates with the external world. The result is a strategy for getting along and getting ahead — a strategy we call “personality”, in other words, ‘Personality is a strategy for making the most of one’s particular lot in life.’ See also: part two and part three
Doesn’t Matter, Warm Fuzzies: Discusses many interesting aspects of human ecology and society, with a focus on rituals, culture, confabulation, mimicry, and more
Qualia Computing: With a subtitle of ‘revealing the computational properties of consciousness’, Qualia Computing is a great blog for anyone interested in the neurology, phenomenology, and interesting attempts at quantifications and explanations behind our own conscious experiences (qualia)
Patrick Mckenzie (Twitter): An entrepreneur and writer that lives in Japan and currently works at Stripe with a focus on startups and outreach, Patrick has many invaluable posts about finance, startups, marketing and professional communication, and highly-regarded SaaS and entrepreneurial advice. Favorite posts:
Hacker News Profile: I’ve included this link as patio11 is one of Hacker News’ all-time favorite content contributors, judged both by objective karma and subjective user preferences
Bits About Money: A new ~weekly free newsletter about modern financial infrastructure. See also his Twitter, which has many great finance takes
Fiction and Finance, A Bits About Money post showcasing some of the best finance movies and books. The Big short and Margin call of course both appear here, but dragons and a Japanese salaryman movie are also mentioned.
Overcoming Bias: todo, ‘This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don’t all die’, from Robin Hanson.
Dynomight (Twitter): todo, see Better air is the easiest way not to die by The impact of air pollution on health is often significantly underrepresented, and working on improving the quality of air in your dwelling can result in a very high ROI for your health
