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Comment by db1234 | Hacker News Reader

Could this explain trends like increasing food allergies in countries where more and more people are becoming urban dwellers?

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It's not impossible, and it might even be plausible... But it's a really, really difficult question.

People outside of science: don't make the mistake of thinking that scientists haven't thought about this before! haha

What is that supposed to mean?

That it's certainly a valid thought with the information we have, and is being thought about, but requires further investigation to make an affirmative statement.

^ This is the best explanation of what I meant.

Guessing that this means there are a lot of confounding variables other than gut biome (environment, diet, genetics, etc) that are very difficult to isolate to prove causation, as opposed to correlation.

Gut biome being one of the most promising area of research, whose earth-shattering potential is about on par with the sheer complexity of the problem.

If you thought ML was difficult, try modeling a human being's digestive tube from mouth to anus down to the cell: welcome to a category of problems where climate and gravity are the "simple" ones.

On the other side of that space though, potentially the promise to increase by orders of magnitude our mastery of human condition both biologically and experientially.

We are a symbiote.

Bingo, we are just bunch of bacteria walking around. Some organism become symbiotic over time like mitochondria, so it go incorporated into our cells to make energy. The whole concept that we as human-being is one organism needs to be revisited.

This is already understood, it's not like scientists aren't aware.

The simplified concept of humans being one organism will continue to be taught nonetheless, because it's extremely useful, and not even wrong in most contexts in which it's applied.

There's nothing special about this, you can say the same thing about any simple model in biology: that the brain is an organ inside the head is a simplification, any diagram of a homeostatic system or metabolic pathway that fits on a single page is a simplification, the "central dogma" of DNA -> RNA -> protein is a simplification...

All of these things are well-known. They continue to be used as models, because, well... they're useful models. And there's nothing wrong with that!

Even more generally, reductionism works but with known limitations which warrant a more holistic approach, and we can't work our way out of most real-world problems without this multi-layered approach. Welcome to empiricism in complex systems.

I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that the workings of the human brain are still far more complex than that of our digestive system. If the amount of effort that has been put into trying to emulate the former with software had been put instead into trying to emulate the latter, I reckon we'd pretty much have it cracked by now (as in, you could feed some tool info corresponding to all the inputs into our digestive system and it would be able to spit out exactly what outputs would be produced in the average human). But unlike AI/ML, not enough people, ahem, give a shit...

The brain and digestive system are very closely linked.

I think to make an "AI" on par with simulating the brain, you would need to simulate the gut first. And probably vice versa!

Not sure I agree, but accept it's not my area of expertise. We don't necessarily want to simulate the human brain the way it does actually function biologically, rather simulate the its most useful behaviors, which are hard to see as being intrinsically linked to the workings of the gut.

There's an imperfect truth to the comment you're replying to.

You're right that it's unnecessary to emulate the brain down to its finest implementation details, down to the molecule or even down to the cell.

However, I contend that it's essentially impossible to create a "relatable AI" (an AI that behaves and thinks like humans do) without proper consideration of embodiment. A large part of why the brain works the way it does, at a macro level, emerges from the vehicle it's in, and broadly speaking both its afferents/inputs and efferents/outputs.

There's a guy (Jasper Lawrence, who had a horrible allergy problem) had heard of a study where they were testing to see if allergies was related to parasites. He was rejected from the study, so, long story short, he ended up flying to northern Africa and walking around barefoot to get hookworm. He now monitors and manages his hookworm infection with low doses of anti-parasite medication, and he sells soil infected with hookworms so that you, too, can get infected by hookworm and reduce/eliminate your allergies. Oh, and his allergies are gone.

I read about it here: https://www.ksl.com/article/20838871/man-infects-self-with-h...

But there are lots of stories and some studies on the subject as well. The original hypothesis was proposed in 1989 by David P Strachan. According to the theory, many modern diseases have gotten out of hand and are rapidly growing in industrialized western countries because of chlorinated drinking water, vaccines, antibiotics and the sterile environment of early childhood. Moreover, it is theorized that since we have become so good at preventing infections, we have upset the internal balance and ecology in our bodies. One missing element of hyper-clean and sterile environments is that our inflammatory responses do not function as they should. Parasites and bacteria play a symbiotic role in preserving our health.

I know a person who contracted a transient parasite infection, possibly hookworm, while doing research in Africa and walking around barefoot. In the decade+ since, they’ve suffered terribly from debilitating and incurable auto-immune diseases brought on by the initial parasite infection.

So, YMMV.

I agree that caution is in order. The question above just reminded me of the story so I thought I'd pass it along because it was from 2012.

He originally posted his story on kuro5hin[1]. It's an interesting read. He was interested in the worm because, for its survival, it has evolved a mechanism to disable the host's immune system in a particular way that eliminates allergies. At the time he wrote that nobody knows how the worm does it. Now that we can do similar things with monoclonal antibodies, I wonder if the mechanism is similar.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20151205143301/http://www.kuro5hi...

Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, do not give yourself hookworms.

I get they are bad, but you seem to speak from experience, either yours or others. Out of curiosity, why not? What can happen?

The history of hookworms in the US is the history of millions of intellectually and physically stunted children and adults[1].

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...

There is a great Radiolab show about both the South and modern research into hookworms.

If you have 2-10 hookworms and eat a modern diet (higher in iron), you're probably going to be fine.

If you have 30-50, you're going to have abdominal discomfort and some side effects.

If you have insane allergies or autoimmune disease, the risk/reward seems pretty incredible.

Worst case scenario if you're an adult with hookworms is you take some antibiotics and they go away.

This https://twitter.com/jimmybernot/status/1354443837897388033 is one person's story about participating in those studies.

I can only imagine how desperate he must have been. Truly debilitating levels of allergy.

"he sells soil infected with hookworms so that you, too, can get infected by hookworm"

Well, when Fry ate the truck-stop egg-salad sandwich in a Futurama episode the worms he ingested really helped him, so sign me up!

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