[HN Gopher] Too much serendipity
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Too much serendipity
Author : HR01
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-01-22 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Look at sucrose and aspartame side by side:
|
| > Molecular structures of sucrose and aspartame, looking very
| different I can't imagine someone looking at these two molecules
| and thinking "surely they taste the same".
|
| They don't taste the same. Aspartame has a very nasty aftertaste
| as compared to sucrose.
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes, to my taste, all the sweeteners have an aftertaste and an
| odor including stevia.
| cgh wrote:
| Re stevia, apparently how you taste it is determined by how
| sensitive your bitter taste receptors happen to be. It's
| somehow also related to why some people can't stand cilantro,
| for example.
|
| For me, stevia is simply sweet with no aftertaste so I guess
| I'm lucky in this regard.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Stevia? My wife has much stronger bitter receptors than
| most people (including me, and I thought mine were strong)
| but Stevia is fine for her.
|
| Aspartame, though, she absolutely despises.
|
| I think they're both fine, but I can pick up a hint of what
| she dislikes from Aspartame.
|
| Sucralose is also fine for both of us.
| bityard wrote:
| You are! As one who identifies as keto, I have experience
| with a wide range of artificial sweeteners. Stevia is one
| of my favorites but I can definitely taste the bitterness.
| Which is why I only use it either in combination with other
| sweeteners (e.g. Erythritol), or in places where only a
| slight amount of sweetness is desired.
|
| Edit: I just had a thought: are we talking about putting it
| in coffee here? Because the bitterness of coffee and the
| bitterness of Stevia are pretty close and I can see the
| former masking the latter easily.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Monk Fruit/Stevia liquid sweeteners (sans erythritol) are
| my go to for coffee and any slightly bitter food for this
| very reason.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I wonder if people have different genetic predispositions that
| influences how sugar taste to them. Like I have with cilantro
| (a bit, a tiny tiny bit is okayish but more than that and
| it's.. ugh... it's not even soap it's.. bleh..).
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| I loved the writing but I don't get the point or the title. Am I
| supposed to infer some sort of conspiracy theory? or is it just
| supposed to be funny?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I don't think it's meant to imply a conspiracy, rather that lab
| safety around novel compounds is probably not as tight as
| people assume it is.
|
| I will put forth another (possible) explanation: fake sugar has
| to be widely marketed, and "we were doing Important Science
| when we accidentally discovered this fake sugar" is a more
| marketable, easy-to-understand story than "we added/removed
| groups on a range of compounds determined likely to be sweet
| based on a literature review, in order of how amenable the
| reactions are to mass production, then tested each of them in
| rats".
| cmyr wrote:
| I don't think there's some huge point beyond exploring an
| interesting question, and raising it in a forum where it's
| possible some people with more specific domain knowledge might
| offer some insight.
| cubefox wrote:
| I think the author suggests that chemical-psychological
| research is quite inefficient, given that so many discoveries
| were random discoveries rather than products of systematic
| search and invention.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| The point is that chemists are tasting a lot of the novel stuff
| they synthesize, if it doesn't look like it's going to cause
| instant cancer, even they they aren't supposed to.
|
| Watching NileRed regularly, it does not at all surprise me.
| WhatsTheBigIdea wrote:
| What a fabulous analysis! The serendipity is remarkably high!
|
| I suppose penicillin might be a good addition to the list of
| powerful compounds discovered by happenstance?
|
| Does this mean that innovation is basically a brute force
| calculation? Humans simply trying permutations until something
| hits?
| vacuity wrote:
| Considering how we all seem to be the product of millions of
| years of hit-or-miss natural selection, it feels almost natural
| that our advancements have also had a great deal of
| luck/improbability.
| hinkley wrote:
| Some homebrewers will wax nostalgic about how the human sense
| of smell/taste can detect almost all of the ways that
| fermentation can go wrong and make it toxic.
|
| But we also keep pushing back earliest dates for precursors
| to civilization, I start to wonder if maybe there aren't
| graveyards of people who couldn't distinguish thymol from
| ethanol and selected themselves out of human history via
| acute liver failure.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Animals do eat fermented food, through fallen/rotting
| fruits, so perhaps the thymol sensitivity predates
| hominids.
| thfuran wrote:
| Yeah, the ability to detect toxins likely to appear in
| the food supply seems evolutionarily important.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yeah exactly this is not just random, it's "guided search"
| as commented by a sibling
| ninjaK4t wrote:
| I mean history suggests that's the case. Took centuries for
| Copernicus to exist.
|
| AI has been an idea for decades. It wasn't until transformers
| in the last few years we had big gains.
|
| Google and giant institutions focus on fiat revenue stability
| over the long term, in line with political ideology. Few big
| ideas come out of that. I think what Adam Smith is said to have
| written applies; division of labor taken to the extreme will
| result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.
|
| We iterated on our current political system over the Boomers
| lives. Next generations are tired of the threat of brute force
| from the elders who the kids now see as in no position to back
| up those threats given their age. They're abandoning norms of
| the last 30-40 years, which IMO, is enabled by abandonment of
| thousands of years of obligation to preserve religion.
|
| There are shorter iterative periods too; 15 years ago comic
| movies went crazy with Iron Man, iPhone blew up; now we're
| iterating on AI generated content and spatial headsets. 15
| years prior (with some wiggle room for margin of error)
| "information super highway" was coming.
|
| On the shorter scales there seems to a pattern of 3-5 year
| warmup and 7-10 year plateau, with a cooldown of 2-3 years as
| the masses lose interest. This aligns with neuroscience
| experiments that show our brains devalue old patterns after
| roughly 15 years.
|
| Generational churn and lack of generalized sense of obligation
| to the past (via abandonment of religious buy in by westerners)
| could free the future to live in cycles that align with
| scientific measurement versus obligation to be parrots that
| recite past memes.
| aeneasmackenzie wrote:
| Copernicus is a bad example. He proposed a heliocentric
| system based on vibes. Actual progress required decades of
| cutting-edge precision measurements by Brahe and then
| analysis by Kepler. Objections to heliocentrism were on
| scientific grounds which were resolved by the discovery of
| inertia, Airy disks, and stellar aberration.
| hinkley wrote:
| How did we ever figure out that aspens and willows have aspirin
| analogs in their bark? Boredom? Starvation food?
|
| Psychedelic mushrooms make sense. You see it, you eat it.
| Willow bark tea is a whole process.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Makes you wonder about tobacco.
|
| Hey, all the bugs that are eating that plant are dying. Let's
| see what happens if we smoke it.
| neuromanser wrote:
| More like: This plant has no insect parasites, it must be
| special somehow, let's try and use it in different,
| increasingly "close approach" ways. I mean, humans must
| have figured quite early that on average, inhaling smoke of
| a poisonous plant has a fraction of the effect of chewing
| the same. Someone gets really sick after chewing some
| leaves, their family burns the rest of the "crop" and they
| get high.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Back in the day people made tea out of anything they could
| get their hands on that wasn't outright poisonous.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbal_tea#Varieties
|
| Also, if you're in constant pain you'll try all kinds of
| random stuff to make the pain go away. If necessity is the
| mother of invention then desperation is its father.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| It's much smarter than random, more like a guided search.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| I think it feels serendipitous only if you think of "sweet" taste
| (or for that matter any taste) as occurring in this giant
| continuum of tastes where hitting a specific spot on that
| continuum is probabilistically impossible.
|
| Ultimately, we experience tastes thanks to chemical receptors on
| the tongue, and as long as a substance triggers those receptors
| we experience a certain taste.
|
| Now of course if triggering needs a very very specific
| combination of atoms, then it is not very probable, but we know
| especially from drug research that you can use similarities in
| molecular structure or sometimes in say the electron cloud of the
| molecule to perform this triggering. Caffeine for eg is a
| selective adenosine antagonist that fools the body and binds to
| adenosine receptors. Now of course int the case of caffeine the
| structures are somewhat similar, but you could imagine similar
| stuff happening with other molecules too
|
| If you think of it as that sort of problem, it's not that
| surprising that many different types of molecules might achieve
| the same effect.
| hinkley wrote:
| That artificial sweetener they mention halfway through, the one
| that gorillas are evolving not to taste, man that amused me
| when I first heard about it a few years ago. Chalk one up for
| hominidae.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > * it's not that surprising that many different types of
| molecules might achieve the same effect*
|
| But the point of the post is that only five molecules found by
| dumb luck have had a useful sweetening effect.
| amelius wrote:
| Unfortunately, the chemists merely tasted, not ingested.
| Otherwise they would have known that their newly found artificial
| sweeteners cause nasty bowel issues.
| ysofunny wrote:
| or you know, consider how many people have gotten into chemistry
| because they wanna learn how to cook, or simply to cook better.
|
| but please don't ask about what exactly they're cooking too much,
| keep the discussion on the how they are cooking it hahahha
| perfectritone wrote:
| I'm left curious as to why our taste receptors are so attuned to
| sweetness if high sugar foods weren't historically correlated
| with being high in energy.
| lemax wrote:
| Perhaps because the high sugar foods that occur in nature
| contain nutrients we don't get elsewhere and help us fight
| disease. These sugars are also naturally packaged in a way that
| makes them behave quite unlike added sugars, they don't lead to
| the same insulin spikes or high blood pressure, and consuming
| fruits like berries alongside more processed, artificially
| sweetened foods can even reduce the insulin spikes of those
| foods.
|
| https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/what-about-all-the-sugar-in-...
| gpsx wrote:
| I have thoughts about that, but IANAN (nutritionalist). Not all
| energy is the same, as in fructose (in sucrose, which we sense
| as sweeter) versus glucose (what composes carbs, and also in
| sucrose), two simple sugars. Glucose goes more directly into
| the bloodsteam during digestion. Fructose does not go straight
| to the bloodstream but is processed by the liver. Although it
| gets into the bloodstream slower, it gets stored by the liver
| faster, and we use this as an energey resevoir when we are not
| getting energy directly thorugh digestion. So maybe we crave
| this somtimes when we need to rebuild our energy stores. Or at
| least it seems that way for me. I crave sugar/fruit sometimes,
| particularly after exercising. I don't generally even eat
| sweets/desserts, so my body apparently isn't fooled into always
| wanting sugar. I would guess from my experience sugar plays a
| specific role and I want it at a certain time and not others.
|
| Incidently, I get a headache when I eat processed sugar, but
| not fruit. (However, fruit will also give me a headache if I
| carmelize it, cooking it at a high temperature for a long
| time.) Anyway that is one reason I avoid sweetened foods and
| maybe why I don't get sucked into eating sugar all the time.
| And people think I am trying to be super healthy...
| paulpauper wrote:
| They are high in energy. carbs used by muscles for energy first
| over protein and fat
| Sesse__ wrote:
| If nothing else: It's certainly useful that mother's milk
| tastes good to babies. Imagine what an evolutionary
| disadvantage it would be if it tasted bitter.
| koromak wrote:
| 1) Its still very, very high in energy. We're built to use it.
| 2) Fruits contain all sorts of good vitamins and minerals along
| with sugar. Two birds with one stone. 3) I don't know if we are
| any less "attuned" to it than fat or protein. Most people would
| eat a good steak over a bag of candy.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Are compounds that might be seen in a clinical trial drawn from
| the same distribution as compounds that a lab chemist might
| accidentally taste? Is it weird that there's no overlap of a
| compound that is both very sweet and medically active?
| cubefox wrote:
| This poses the opposite question: What might we have missed?
| Maybe there are some reverse-accidents, some significant random
| discoveries that, due to their randomness, didn't happen.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| There was an SF story I read years ago where the core concept
| was that humanity had somehow "missed" an obvious power-
| source/FTL drive, which meant that the "solution" to the Drake
| Equation is that the galaxy is full of intelligent, star-
| spanning empires that are effectively stuck at a late-1800s
| tech level (with starships), because getting to there was easy,
| and doing all the complex 20th century stuff humanity has done
| is _really hard_. Hijinks and hilarity ensues when they reach
| earth.
| wheybags wrote:
| Do you remember what it was called?
| caffeinated_me wrote:
| I believe they're referring to the short story of The Road
| Not Taken, by Turtledove.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_sto
| r...
|
| PDF of story: https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_R
| oadNotTaken.pdf
| ptx wrote:
| Is it "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove? The Wikipedia
| description seems to match. (If so, ChatGPT got it on the
| second attempt.)
| johngossman wrote:
| I recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no
| anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not
| only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a
| wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an
| active area of research. There are even speculations that there
| may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are
| insanely complex.
| thfuran wrote:
| How do you determine whether a plant or bacterium is
| anesthetized?
| boston_clone wrote:
| I'm really just reposting one of the first few DDG links
| after inputting your question, but this article covers a few
| different plants:
|
| https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/12/11/general-anesthesia-
| work...
| reaperman wrote:
| I don't think they measure if plants/bacterium are
| anesthetized, but in exposing them to things that cause
| anesthesia in humans, other potentially unrelated effects are
| noticed.
|
| Many compounds/mechanisms, especially hormones and
| neurotransmitters, are widely "re-used" across different
| biologies for completely different things. They're
| essentially generic semaphores, and the action caused by
| raising the semaphore can be basically anything. There's a
| lot of variance in effect even among different instances of
| human species, often quite unpredictable, contradictory, and
| profound.
|
| It's sort of like "hey we already have this testosterone
| thing, it's currently used to call [function A] but we could
| refactor that to use it to initiate [function B] instead"
| (testosterone causes growth in many mammals but inhibits
| growth in lizards, so female lizards are larger than male
| lizards)
|
| or "hey we already have the genes to make serotonin for
| gastrointestinal regulation, but it's not used for anything
| in the brain. The blood-brain-barrier already prevents
| somatic serotonin from reaching the brain so we could have a
| completely different function for it in the brain and
| regulate gut and brain serotonin in isolation of eachother"
|
| or "hey we have this cholesterol thing that we've been using
| as a signaling hormone ever since we were on version Plant,
| maybe we could write a factory that modifies the cholesterol
| we eat and use it to produce new semaphores like estrogen and
| testosterone to support a more complex messaging system and
| handle all the new effects rather than overloading the
| existing semaphore".
|
| Edit: Probably slightly better to think of them as the
| coefficients for activation functions, but nothing here is
| meant to be anywhere remotely close to a direct analogy.
| Taking any of this literally would be a misreading.
| jdewerd wrote:
| > there may be quantum effects involved
|
| Quantum Mechanics is why atoms and molecules exist and form
| bonds. QM is the physics of chemistry. Without QM, chemistry
| does not happen. The universe would just be a big churning mess
| of particles and you would never get little lego pieces that
| snap together according to repeatable rules that, when
| repeated, form macroscopic substances of innumerable
| description up to and including life itself.
|
| So QM is no doubt involved, but on this scale it is either a
| trivial fact or an indication that someone tried to lean on a
| classical approximation, it broke, and they had to revise it
| (which arguably says more about the approximation than it says
| about the underlying behavior).
|
| Apologies for the nitpick. It's a pet peeve of mine that
| discussions of QM tend to focus so hard on the strange behavior
| that they forget to mention where QM fits into the bigger
| picture and leave people with the impression that it only
| matters under special circumstances when in fact it matters so
| much that you can hardly have "matter" without it.
|
| ------------
|
| Re: anesthetic, a large fraction of simple halocarbon compounds
| have intense neural effects, so anyone doing halocarbon
| chemistry would quickly be put on the "scent" even if they
| weren't tasting everything in the Sigma Aldrich catalog.
| bordercases wrote:
| Do you know for sure they meant only those quantum effects
| which operate near or at the classical limit?
| PakG1 wrote:
| As a non-physicist and non-chemist who keeps running into
| quantum mechanics only through headlines, extra thanks for
| pointing this out. It's quite obvious in retrospect to
| acknowledge that quantum mechanics is the physics of
| chemistry, and I don't know why I didn't see that before. It
| certainly helps to view a lot of things in a new light.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I would say everyone understands that "quantum effects"
| refers to situations in which classical approximations break
| down.
|
| Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that
| we're talking about situations in which the usual
| approximation of real numbers by floating point
| representations breaks down. "Disk corruption" doesn't
| necessarily mean anything is physically wrong with the disk,
| only that its contents have become inconsistent with the
| filesystem abstraction it normally supports, etc.
| ddellacosta wrote:
| (In support of your point about QM:)
|
| To contrast with an example of where quantum mechanics is
| relevant at the level of biology--this is one I'm familiar
| with:
|
| https://www.sciencenews.org/article/quantum-fragility-may-
| he...
|
| Unfortunately I'm not finding anything related to anesthesia
| except for hand-wavy pieces about "quantum consciousness"
| (anyone, please do correct me with a link or two if I'm
| wrong). I blame Sir Roger Penrose, if only because him
| talking speculatively about it (even in a sophisticated,
| informed way) seems to give so many others leeway to speak
| far more casually about the same topic, with far less
| coherence. This is why we can't have our cake and eat it too
| I guess
| johngossman wrote:
| More discussion in "Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of
| Quantum Biology." I can't recommend the book unreservedly,
| but it's worth checking out reviews.
| ddellacosta wrote:
| Will take a look--thanks. Also, re: anesthesia,
| appreciate that you linked to the "Electron spin
| changes..." paper in the other comment, will check it
| out!
| johngossman wrote:
| I understand your frustration, sorry for the poor wording.
|
| "Electron spin changes during general anesthesia in
| Drosophila" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25114249/
|
| I learned about this from Nick Lane's book "Transformer: The
| Deep Chemistry of Life and Death"
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| There's a fascinating Radiolab episode about anesthesia that is
| worth a listen: https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia
| stcredzero wrote:
| _I can't imagine someone looking at these two molecules and
| thinking "surely they taste the same"._
|
| I think that's more of a shortcoming of our method of diagramming
| molecules. It might be more apparent if we had 3D visualizations
| of the molecules and the receptors.
| imzadi wrote:
| What I learned from this is never eat at a pot luck full of
| chemists.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Sucralose and aspartame are both reliable migraine triggers for
| me, and have been at least since my early 20s. Stevia and
| monkfruit are fine. The only other even semi-consistent migraine
| trigger for me is alcohol.
|
| I've successfully avoided migraines for years by carefully
| avoiding sucralose and aspartame (and drinking little to no
| alcohol), but even a small serving of something "sugar-free" and
| within a few hours I'll get a crippling migraine. In college, I
| spent a while testing, and the link between both sucralose and
| aspartame and my migraines was perfectly reliable.
|
| Alcohol in general has been harder to nail down. A single beer
| won't normally trigger a migraine, while sometimes a single glass
| of wine or small cocktail will. If I drank to excess it was hard
| to tell the difference between a hangover and a migraine; I
| wasn't that invested in social alcohol consumption, so I've
| mostly just been a teetotaler since college. Absinthe uniquely
| reliably gives me an acephalgic migraine with aura around 12
| hours after drinking.
|
| Edited to add: I've just stayed away from ace-K and sugar-
| alcohols as a precaution. I'm past the point in my life where I
| have any real interest in risking crippling migraines for the
| sake of personal curiosity.
| kirse wrote:
| I think this is because all newly-discovered knowledge inherently
| reflects the miracle of new life. The point at which an "unknown-
| unknown" piece of information is birthed into our awareness and
| becomes a known fact is always going to be a fascinating and
| surprising story. The excitement of informational peek-a-boo, the
| pulling back of the universal curtains on a discovery we never
| expected - we might be a little older, but the reaction never
| changes. Entrepreneurs call it their business pivot, chemists
| call it serendipity.
| joneholland wrote:
| This "I did my own research" pseudoscience has no reason to be on
| hackernews.
| mcherm wrote:
| Really? Because I think Hacker News often features posts by
| hackers and amateurs trying to tackle something normally
| handled by professionals.
|
| The comments would be a great place to reply with references to
| the ACTUAL research on how often chemists taste the chemicals
| they are working with.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Loctite Blue may or may not taste sweet. I'm not reproducing the
| experiment.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Didn't lead taste sweet as well?
| FreeFull wrote:
| Lead(II) acetate specifically is sweet.
| phkahler wrote:
| The amino acid Glycine is sweet and it's good for you. Not really
| patentable though.
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