gwern once ran a rigorous N=1 self-experiment on magnesium with self-blinding and week-long blocks, and concluded that it was probably helpful to him: https://gwern.net/nootropic/magnesium#conclusion
You are welcome to review his methodology and see if it still seems like the placebo effect.
Based on his ranking of MP (mood/productivity), he concluded that it helped for the first three weeks and then got worse because he was overdosing on the magnesium. So not much there is going to apply to the general case.
I have a monthly recurring task in my task manager to open the Dropbox app on my iPhone and leave it in-focus for a couple of minutes while it uploads the previous month’s photos.
If I don’t do that, then it just won’t upload them.
I read the first link and was curious what the outcome of the case was, since the article was released in 2021. It seems that Jeanne was declared alive again in 2023, which is the most recent public reporting on the case:
Trader Joe's is probably closest to what you want. It targets single shoppers with small quantities and low prices, and it rotates products frequently to keep things interesting.
Anecdotally I feel like a lot of TJ's shoppers shift into Costco shoppers as they age up.
The nice thing about Trader Joe's is that you can be in and out in 5-10 minutes if you're just buying weekly food items. The store is modestly sized and the checkout lines are short. I'm in there about once a week.
I go to Costco once every three months or so and buy paper towels, detergent, and other consumables that have long shelf lives. I don't feel drawn to it; it's just the warehouse for boring items to buy in bulk. Their hot dog is OK. But a lifestyle? No.
We only shop regularly at three stores: Costco (every 2 weeks), TJs (random stuff that we don't need as much of or that is cheaper/better at TJs, like organic peanut butter, or sometimes their cheeses and marinated meats, oh, and the kids love TJ takis, also wine), and our local grocer (makes fresh bread daily, and we get meat, milk and eggs there because they source locally).
Maybe it varies by location, but in my experience, Whole Foods is significantly more expensive than Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's is pretty affordable. It may not be Walmart cheap, but it's no worse than Target.
I don't think this is abnormal. I think every family in my (middle class+) neighborhood does both Costco and Trader Joes. We don't have a convenient Whole Foods though.
If you squint at it, you can convert all three to just availability.
Confidentiality = available to us, but nobody else.
Integrity = available to us in a pristine condition.
It's a bit reductive, I'll admit, but it can be a useful exercise in the same way that everything in an economy can be reduce to units of either: "human time", "money" or "energy". Roughly speaking they're interchangeable.
E.g.: What's the benefit to you if your data is so confidential that you can't read it either? This is a real problem with some health information systems, where I can't access my own health records! Ditto with many government bureaucracies that keep my records safe and secure from me.
I once heard "creepiness" defined as "becoming invested in advance in a particular outcome to a social interaction".
In that sense, trying tricks in order to have a "successful conversation" will always fail so long as you are emotionally invested in advance in the conversation being "successful".
It's far better to be genuine and accept that you have only so much control over how things will go.
It's ok to sort of passively want things, everyone does, but the real problem is when you try to try to subtly force an outcome that isn't natural. That's when people get uncomfortable.
If a stranger is light and friendly and asks to hang out, no problem. If they start getting subtly frustrated about your response, your spider sense goes off.
On a related note, “sequential analysis” is the keyword in stats for experimental designs that allow for stopping the experiment early in the face of clear results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_analysis#
I don’t know, but I’ve thought for a while that a browser version of “pledge” to permanently restrict uploads from a webpage after it is called would be a great idea.
You are welcome to review his methodology and see if it still seems like the placebo effect.
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