Ways of Looking #6 (February '25)
In this issue: two useful hack projects, cholesterol reduction, the mathematics of electromagnetism, placebos, and the Enneagram.
Welcome to Ways of Looking. Roughly every month, I send my friends links and summaries for anything I’ve written recently, plus a few things I’m enjoying.
Check out my more regular writing and reply to this email anytime. Thanks for reading.
What I wrote last month
Deus Deceptor: Descartes as a Chrome extension — a Chrome extension that changes the internet in front of your very eyes (without telling you). It was fun to build, and led to some philosophical explorations.
Mentat Mail: Email as an interface for AI — I made a tool that lets you to correspond with AI models from your email inbox. I’ve been loving it — far preferable to the standalone sites for most of my AI use cases.
Here it is in action — I just email [preferred model]@agent.andybromberg.com and it replies to me (right now it won’t work for you unless you deploy it yourself):
Building intuition for electromagnetism's symmetric origins — a long, self-indulgent piece walking through the math that gives rise to the symbolic representation of electromagnetism. Plus some thoughts on maps vs. territories, existence, and symmetry.
A design pattern I hope Yelp copies — a quick writeup of a useful feature on Clean Travel Club: treating chains of restaurants as a singular unit.
What I’m enjoying
Experiment: Nattokinase for cholesterol reduction. This is not medical advice, but I saw some research suggesting natto / nattokinase supplementation could reduce cholesterol levels (along with other positive effects including potential neuroprotective ones). It seemed low-downside, so I tried five months at 8000 FU daily of this well-tested brand. Lo and behold, my LDL cholesterol is down >15% (!) over that stretch, with few other interventions that seem likely to be related. Of course, this is n=1 and poorly-controlled, but I’m happy with the results and would be interested to see more experimentation with this compound.
Book: The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert. I had assumed the Enneagram was “just another modern personality assessment,” but it turns out to have hundreds or thousands of years of background in Christian thought and Sufism. This skimmable book gave me a much deeper appreciation for it.
Worth noting: the canonical advice in the Enneagram community is that “Enneagram tests” don’t really work, and instead what you want to do is get a book like this one. At some point in the book, you’ll be reading about one of the types and it will feel painfully resonant — and that’s what you are. This was my experience. (Any guesses what I am?)
Product: Urban AIP is by far the best meal delivery service we’ve found. Tasty and healthy.
Article: A Case Against the Placebo Effect by “a literal banana” (this seems to be how the author identifies themselves…). A very long and very thorough argument against the existence of the placebo effect, at least as popularly understood. I wish there were more articles like this on the internet. Also enlightened me to the historical distinction between “dummy” and “placebo.”
About me: I’m a three-time founder (Eco, CoinList, Sidewire) based in Austin, TX. I’m currently spending time on: Eco, exploring the home health & environmental toxins space, supporting FreeWorld, hacking on a few products, and investing in and advising great companies and founders.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.
— Andy