Natalia Mendonca
Article
Natalia Mendonca is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 14, 2022 and October 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Natalia Mendonca disagrees and says the evidence for more sleep is pretty good”; “Natalia Mendonca has been working hard trying to investigate theories of obesity”; “Natalia Mendonca continues her series pushing back against Slime Mold Time Mold’s case”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, COVID, Supreme Court.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: April 14, 2022
- Last seen: October 30, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Twitter (4 shared issues)
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- COVID (3 shared issues)
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- Supreme Court (3 shared issues)
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- US (3 shared issues)
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- Argentina (2 shared issues)
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- Dylan Matthews (2 shared issues)
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Italy (2 shared issues)
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- Less Wrong (2 shared issues)
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- Marginal Revolution (2 shared issues)
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- NYT (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
23: Alexey Guzey argues for getting less sleep as a productivity and mental health intervention (sort of), or at the very least that all the scientists saying getting 7-8+ hours of sleep is important don’t know what they’re talking about. Natalia Mendonca disagrees and says the evidence for more sleep is pretty good. You can find some further discussion between the two of them in the comments of Natalia’s post.
47: Natalia Mendonca has been working hard trying to investigate theories of obesity (especially SMTM’s lithium contamination theory). Her main writeup is here: It’s Probably Not Lithium. But I’ve been even more impressed with some of the periperhal things she’s found that apply to almost all “alternative” theories of obesity, like that lab mice don’t actually seem to be getting fatter and the evidence that truly wild animals are inexplicably getting fatter is slim. I hope she puts it in one place someday.
38: Natalia Mendonca continues her series pushing back against Slime Mold Time Mold’s case for the chemical contaminant theory of obesity. Even though I was already doubtful of SMTM’s case, I found this really helpful because of the argument that obesity hadn’t suddenly increased at a specific point (usually claimed to be the 1960s) but had been increasing gradually since at least 1900 - I think this matches what you would expect from increasing affluence and food-making technology, and not what you would expect from some specific dietary nutrient/toxin being the villain. Also, Natalia finds no real evidence for the oft-quoted idea that wild animals are gaining weight, which again rules out some of the more exotic theories and removes a challenge to the boring old caloric intake explanation.
Inline links: continues her series pushing back against
33: For the past several years, the Slime Mold Time Mold blog has been arguing that rising obesity rates cannot be a simple matter of changing diets, and must be due to some chemical contaminant, plausible lithium. In 2022, Natalia Mendonca wrote a long and exhaustively-researched takedown of the hypothesis. Since then, I have been hoping the Slime Mold Time Mold team would respond to Natalia; after pestering them on Twitter, they have kindly written a response to at least my summary of Natalia’s argument. And Natalia responds to their response here, including an extra point challenging whether lithium levels have really risen over the timeframe being discussed.