If conflict exists, one thing it can be useful for agents to do is misrepresent themselves as being weaker or stronger than they are.
Firstly, S. mutans does not colonize the epithelium. It lives almost exclusively on enamel. The total surface area in the mouth that it could realistically inhabit is exceptionally small, unless Lumina can live in places that S. mutans generally does not.
Big crux! Thanks for the investigative effort. Sounds mostly resolvable via assay of existing Lumina customer saliva.
An interesting twist: drinking ethanol doesn't just cause acute exposure but "The concentration of ethanol in the oral cavity increases immediately after an alcoholic beverage is consumed and then decreases. It was reported after intake of an alcoholic beverage that the concentration of ethanol remaining in the oral cavity decreases gradually, as ethanol flows back into saliva from the blood for a few hours after it is taken into the body [25,26]. Most previous studies of acetaldehyde production by oral bacteria, including our study [24], used ethanol concentrations as low as 11–22 mM (approximately 0.05–0.1%), which corresponds to the ethanol concentrations seen in saliva a few hours after alcohol consumption [20,22,26,27]. " From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8204988/
The relevant SNP is rs671, though 23 and me will already have it in your dashboard.
Thanks! This is much closer to the amount of ethanol you'd get eating 50 bananas a day. That's at least one sanity check it fails then, even under these ideal conditions since, as you noted, there is probably a larger bacteria population than what was measured there.
Now I'm wondering about sanity checks in the other direction though. Is ~.5 ml per hour of ethanol actually a realistic production?
If it's really more like 10^6 and not 10^7 that's five bananas worth and not something I would worry about. Isn't this resolvable via saliva assay?
My understanding is that the amount of ethanol we're taking about here on a daily basis constitutes something like the amount you'd get eating an extra piece of fruit or so. Though I don't know where I originally saw the estimate or if it is good. Does anyone want to do some fermi estimates?
Is there a short summary on the rejecting Knightian uncertainty bit?
Huge numbers of people are forced to resort to illegal methods of suicide creating legal, emotional, financial, and logistics problems for their loved ones, on top of the additional grief to the suicidee personally.
I agree my gloss on it is not a substantive engagement, but rather a reminder of what I consider a crucial consideration. Policies that elide horrific suffering are the norm. Part of the point is that suffering, being not available to external quantification, must be left up to the individual whenever possible. Many objections to utilitarianism involve its frequent attempts to obviate subjective effects when this isn't appropriate.
This is true, but we still wish to cooperate with the largest alliance that will have us/some subset of our values that are capable of attaining reflective equilibrium.