Introduction.

[Reminder: I am an internet weirdo with no medical credentials]

A few months ago, I published some crude estimates of the power of nitric oxide nasal spray to hasten recovery from illness, and speculated about what it could do prophylactically. While working on that piece a nice man on Twitter alerted me to the fact that humming produces lots of nasal nitric oxide. This post is my very crude model of what kind of anti-viral gains we could expect from humming.

I’ve encoded my model at Guesstimate. The results are pretty favorable (average estimated impact of 66% reduction in severity of illness), but extremely sensitive to my made-up numbers. Efficacy estimates go from ~0 to ~95%, depending on how you feel about publication bias, what percent of Enovid's impact can be credited to nitric oxide, and humming's relative effect. Given how made up speculative some [...]

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Outline:

(01:20) Math

(01:23) Estimating the impact of Enovid

(02:33) How much nitric oxide does Enovid release?

(03:36) How much nitric oxide does humming move into the nose?

(04:25) Estimating the impact of humming

(06:08) How to hum

(07:52) Are there downsides?

(08:24) The barest scraps of other evidence

(09:24) Reasons to disbelieve

(10:23) Conclusion

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First published:
May 16th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NBZvpcBx4ewqkdCdT/do-you-believe-in-hundred-dollar-bills-lying-on-the-ground-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Do you believe in hundred dollar bills lying on the ground? Consider humming” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma)