Back on the longevity thread, I proposed (without really knowing if or how it was possible) how we could just replace organs with young cells piecemeal.
Does anyone know what happens to the barrels of tanks (armored vehicles, not containers) after they wear out? Can old barrels be restored and reused, or do they have to go to the junkyard?
Let's say I get a positive covid test today. (I don't, but I want to pre-plan.)
What's the current best practice of what to take? Paxlovid is still illegal, but what could I ask my doctor to prescribe off-label, or what could I take OTC, to give me the best outcomes?
The author's Twitter handle is @plain_fiction, which is telling, but do we have any physicists here that want to explain what a "warp bubble" is supposed to be, and why this thing featured on Slashdot is surely nonsense? Anyway, in addition to the usual prior against such trings, Harold White and his team previously failed to notice that the physics-defying EM drive they tested didn't actually work, suggesting, I suppose, a lack of rigor on their part (or worse).
DataSecretsLox user WeDoTheodicyInThisHovse has started a December 2021 Welcome thread for new users who wish to introduce themselves. Having met her, I think she's a nice person and a great entry point for those who are interested.
I'm curious how people interpret the behavior of a business that's sending me daily emails, usually with one limited-time offer after another, including reminders of the amount of time left on the latest special.
Note that IIRC, this was not their practice until perhaps last year, and I've been a happy customer of theirs for at least a decade, and subscribed to their mailing list. Again IIRC, emails were often announcements of new products, and specials weren't continuous.
I'm especially interested in any insights from people working retail, particularly a smallish online business which also has a few storefronts. Products are physical, and consumable - but slowly, in case that matters.
Way back at the beginning of the pandemic, people were publishing lots of articles and videos explaining simple models of how disease spreads, showing for example what happens in the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model in which a population is uniformly mixed and randomly spreading a virus around, producing a neat little exponential curve that turns into sort of a bell shape.
I always assumed that these toy models were only just for explanatory purposes, not for any serious epidemiological research. The following article is interesting because it explores a non-simple model of disease spread, but it also makes a shocking claim that models "like" SIR are "the most commonly used".
Surely the average epidemiological researcher is not that stupid? So, is this article is being misleading/disingenuous, or are trivial models like SIR/SEIR *actually* widely and directly used by epidemiologists to make predictions, make recommendations and evaluate policy effects?
Aside from that one stunning allegation, the model presented in the article is interesting (but as the author notes, not necessarily accurate) because it produces vaguely similar hard-to-explain patterns like those we see in the real pandemic. Basically the conclusion this type of model suggests is that the course of the pandemic in a region *cannot* be predicted in detail without a lot of good data we don't have about how specific people are physically interconnected with other people in the real world. A corollary: attempting to evaluate the effects of public policy based on things like "cases before and after policy was put in place" can give more noise than signal.
Arguably the most interesting result from this model is that a variant can come to dominate in a population *without* being more infectious/contagious, which has caused me to wonder if delta/omicron are less infectious/contagious than they appear to be. But remember, there are *thousands* of catalogued variants and it's very rare that one of them "takes over the world", as delta did, which suggests that delta really is more infectious.
Blegging for a recommendation for a Silicon Valley GP that's rationalist-adjacent(-ish?). I don't expect a full-send, but anyone even marginally closer to the community or that others get along with would be super appreciated.
My therapist recommended that I try to meet women at Asperger's/HFA support groups. Has anyone here done this? No offense, but I feel like this would be a good place to ask.
In my RSS reader, whenever I scroll past an item, it's faded out to mark it as read. Does anyone know of a similar Chrome extension for Twitter (ideally the read tweets would be synced between computers)?
Fun fact. The Spanish flu - which was a novel virus at the time - never went away. Modern seasonal flus are direct descendants of that. What happened is that more transmittable strains were less fatal. Could be good news for Omicron.
That shakoist substack post linked was especially good. I am not sure he explicitly pointed it out but it seems like the central limit theorem strongly argues against the methodology used by ivmmeta.com people. If all of the studies (they include) were equally valid then they should nicely form a normal distribution about the actual value of ivermectin's effectiveness. That they do not, ought to invalidate the methodology of...pretending that they do.
Question for the resident psychiatrist: How does fluvoxamine look side effectwise?
(Background: triple vaccinated but zero antibodies due to immunesuppression, contemplating it as preventive measure, prior experience with SSRI and SNRI almost a decade ago)
I just learned that large passenger planes have their own radars that can be switched between weather mode and terrain mapping mode (this explains where the pilots get their information from when they announce over the intercom that turbulence is expected in X minutes). I assume the pilot flips a switch to toggle between modes.
I found videos showing what the radar screen looks like in weather mode, but nothing for terrain mode. Can anyone find one for me?
Also, how often do commercial pilots use radar terrain mode, and under what circumstances do they generally do it (e.g. - when lost, when approaching for landing)?
Do the radar computers come pre-loaded with detailed topographical maps of the whole planet, allowing them to automatically deduce where the plane is based on what the radar sees in terrain mode, or are pilots left to look at the screen and figure it out by comparing the image to paper maps in the cockpit?
High school senior here, planning to attend college. A few wonderings I'd love to have some perspective on:
1) Is a Computer Science degree as could as people say it is? I've tentatively decided on CS, but I've heard alternatively that there's either a crippling shortage of CS professionals in the US, or you can spend months on the jobsearch and the interview process could be a new circle of hell. I'm also specifically interested in cybersecurity; how does that compare with CS?
(To be quite honest, I'm also worried that if I go into CS I'll never get a girlfriend. Sue me, I'm a teen.)
2) What should I direct my effort toward in college? I've heard that college isn't useful for the education, but for the signalling power a degree holds. So rather than academics, what should I funnel my effort toward? "Enjoying my youth"? Building ties with competent like-minded peers in preparation for the future? Building work experience with internships? Working on personal projects?
3) How can I up my conscientiousness/build self discipline? My test scores are always excellent, but my gpa is abysmal in comparison. Part of that is being hit by depression and later a behavioural addiction to reading, but I'm also just lazy and weak-willed. 'Executive Dysfunction' was suggested back when I had a therapist.
4) General college/job/life advice? I can't see myself sticking with one career for the rest of my life; I'd rather switch it up every few years. I'd also like to travel, and am thinking of attending a year of college abroad, perhaps in Germany. These may just be juvenile sentiments that will pass, however, and in the case that I'm romanticizing something that sucks in actuality I'd like to know.
Happy and sad fact on corona: by the end of this year, 12.5 billion vaccination doses for corona will have been produced. Monthly production is 1.5 billion.
Given that there are 5.8 billion people of age 15+ on earth, that's easily enough to give every adult two shots, with almost a billion doses left for children, booster shots, etc. (Currently about 250 million booster shots have been given world-wide, so there is still margin.) By end of March, we could give three shots to all adults on earth.
It would even be enough if every single adult would take the shots. We know that some people decline the offer to get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, Africa has given out only 18 doses of vaccine per 100 people. This is not a malfunction of vaccine production, it's a malfunction of distribution.
I am moderately optimistic that this will change soonish, and that the excess doses are finally reaching Africa. I wish I would be sure about it.
you sit in a chair across from morpheus, he holds forward two clenched fists. He speaks your name, and opens them. "In my right hand, I hold the red pill." He says, your face perfectly framed in his smoked glasses. "In my left hand I hold the blue pill. Choose carefully."
You attempt to stand up. You have no idea who this morpheus person is, or what these pills do. You are manifestly not in the matrix movie. This is something else, but you have no idea what.
Meaty hands push you down into your chair. Morpheus' gun toting henchmen hold guns to your temple.
"you misunderstand me." Morpheus says. "you must choose, take the red pill, or the blue pill."
Knowing absolutely nothing about either pill except their color, which do you take and why?
Am I the only person who's noticed hydroxyzine is an atypical antipsychotic?
Hydroxyzine is generally described as an antihistamine that, for reasons nobody can explain, just happens to be remarkably effective for treating anxiety, even though other antihistamines aren't.
If you look into it though, hydroxyzine is a ligand of the D2 receptor [1] and the 5-HT2 receptor family (paper didn't report subtype but presumably this includes the 5-HT2A receptor) [1] [2] with potency not much lower than for the H1 receptor. This strongly suggests it's an atypical antipsychotic (especially since doses used in anxiety are higher than used for allergy). It can also cause tardive dyskinesia [3], just like other atypical antipsychotics (other than possibly clozapine). More to the point, though, it being an atypical antipsychotic entirely explains why it treats anxiety, but other antihistamines like diphenhydramine don't.
This isn't the first time an atypical antipsychotic has been misidentified: trimipramine, originally discovered as an antidepressant, also has affinity for the D2 and 5-HT2A receptors, and one trial actually found it effective for the treatment of schizophrenia, even going as far as discharging patients on a maintenence dose of trimipramine [4].
To my knowledge, nobody has tried this with hydroxyzine; I can't find any literature mentioning an antipsychotic effect of hydroxyzine at all. Even the article above on hydroxyzine-induced tardive dyskinesia [3] doesn't mention an antidopaminergic effect of hydroxyzine, instead speculating that the mechanism by which it causes tardive dyskinesia is somehow related to its antihistamine effects.
This really seems to call into question the common use of hydroxyzine monotherapy for anxiety. Antipsychotics generally aren't used as monotherapy for anxiety (outside of bipolar disorder, though then you're not just treating anxiety), not because they aren't effective, but because you can generally use a lower dose of antipsychotic when you combine with an SSRI or another anxiolytic. I think the assumption is that hydroxyzine doesn't have the same risks as commonly prescribed atypical antipsychotics, so it's safer to use as monotherapy. But this seems to question whether it is, in fact, safer.
I also wonder whether I'm missing something. It seems really unlikely that everyone in psychiatry just totally missed hydroxyzine being an atypical antipsychotic, despite it having been used for many years and the signals being relatively obvious. People noticed for trimipramine, so they should notice for hydroxyzine, too, if it is in fact an antipsychotic, right? I have a hard time believing I'm the only one to notice this, and somehow everyone else is blind to it. So I wonder if I'm wrong. I wonder if there actually is something that makes hydroxyzine different from atypical antipsychotics.
(I also wonder if other antihistamines, like promethazine, might also have weak antipsychotic effects. It would make sense - perhaps others have noted it - though I haven't really looked into it.)
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472076/ Cornett, E. M., Novitch, M., Kaye, A. D., Kata, V., & Kaye, A. M. (2017). Medication-induced tardive dyskinesia: a review and update. Ochsner Journal, 17(2), 162-174.
Is there any good empirical evidence that people who go on examine.com and pick out 20 supplements will have worse health than in the counterfactual where the same people didn't take anything?
It seems to me that observational studies will suffer from the sick-user-effect and inevitably fail at fully controlling for that.
So...
Would anyone volunteer to flip a coin, and if in lands tails, go buy 20 supplements of your choice and take them for a year? And either way the flip goes, report your results on an online survey?
Here's a list of supplements I'd consider reasonable to take for that challenge. I expect the expected utility is nonnegative for each of these: Spirulina, Chlorella, broccoli, magnesium, zinc, vitamin d, glucosamine, chondroitin, cod liver oil, microdose lithium, green tea, caffeine, B12, K2, Kefir, garlic, carnitine, cocoa, blueberry, krill oil. That's 20 things that one could take all at once and probably on average not be any worse off except in the wallet.
Maybe we could even avoid the need for a large sample size by just having a betting market on whether the average outcome in the experimental group will be better than the average outcome in the control group. (although this will bias us against considering rare-but-very-bad outcomes) Maybe we could even avoid running the experiment most of the time by rolling a D20 to decide (1: do the experiment and settle bets accordingly. 2-19: all bets are void) and use this 95% savings to fund a much longer and higher quality study. I think Lloyd's of London would write an insurance policy that pays fair odds minus 1% if that D20 comes up 1. Then you have ~20x more money to run a much better study when you actually need to run it. This is sort of like Robin Hanson's idea of double or nothing lawsuits: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/double-or-nothi.html
Note that "homeopathic" does not necessarily mean what you think it means. Homeopathic means diluted, and you may think this means diluted to the point of containing no active ingredient - but this is not the case.
For example, Cold-Eeze is a brand of homeopathic cold lozenge, which, among other things, has diluted zinc in it:
Now, this site is talking about how the amount of zinc is unreliable, and the lozenges don't always contain an effective amount of zinc - but if you think homeopathic means that it doesn't contain any effective ingredient, the fact that it ever contains an effective amount of zinc should come as a surprise.
re: Pascalian Medicine, I was thinking about it a little more.
I think the general idea of "take everything that probably doesn't hurt you all the time" probably sucks as an approach.
But as a diagnostic tool.... maybe not.
I recently saw an interesting case report about a (very rare) genetic condition that broke an amino metabolism pathway. Turned out that a supplement that would normally be a waste of money for 99.999..something percent of the human population halted painful nerve damage. Not naming the amino because this is the sort of forum where someone will latch on to it and drop a pile of money on pills that are not going to help them.
There's a long tail of people with rare conditions, or common but hard to diagnose conditions. Often it can be incredibly hard to zero in on the cause of their condition or what might help.
If you could monitor someone's general health and wellbeing over a long-ish period and they actually took their pills reliably, you might be able to perform something like a binary search.
start with a large Pascalian pile of various supplements and generally harmless things, get them to record how they're feeling each day in something like an app. Watch out for them getting suddenly worse... because that's also a possibility with the Pascalian approach, lots of small risks add up. but if they do experience a significant improvement you might be able to narrow it down to a particular thing over a few iterations.
Scott's post now like a month old but about 'families' I thought it was funny that the first black chess grandmaster has a sister who is a world champion boxing and a brother who is a world champion in kickboxing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Ashley
Thanks for linking David's analysis. I think he is very good at figuring out whether a problem hasn't been solved yet. I have to ask, what does the community think of meta-rationality. It seems like the obvious next step to me. Don't just use a system, use all of them! Create them! Rate them! Don't win systematically, win consistently!
Why are companies in knowledge industries that worked mostly in-person before the pandemic so keen for people to return to the office in person now things are mostly re-opening?
My model of large companies is that they are generally fairly inefficient but rarely self-destructively stupid, but (in my industry at least) the requirement to return to the office 3 or 4 days a week (compared to pre-pandemic 4 days a week) does appear to be an example of a self-destructively stupid decision - myself and my entire team are searching for new jobs which - if we all leave in the next couple of months - will mean the company is unable to operate until they replace us. It also isn't like this will come as a surprise to the company - a staff satisfaction survey sent round a few months ago indicated that about 97% of the company were 'not at all excited' about returning to the office and a significant minority would be 'extremely' unlikely to recommend working for the company to a friend if we returned to the office (which I take as a proxy of flight risk)
I've asked this question on reddit and not really received very satisfactory answers - there seems to be a sense in which 'middle management want to control workers so their uselessness is not revealed' or which 'companies don't want to waste the expensive investment in their offices' but neither of these seem very coherent explanations to me; they seem to rely on a level of coordination between middle / senior management and renters / landlords respectively which does not really seem credible, and treats senior management of Fortune 500 companies as blundering idiots being run rings around by middle management, which is not my experience of them.
Does anyone on ACX have any more plausible explanations of why companies seem to be following this self-destructive path?
"The Outside View argument here is completely right, and is a great illustration of the limitations of Bayesian reasoning" - It's a shame that Bayesian reasoning can't take outside views into account.
In re homeopathy: Are they making their own homeopathic remedies, or using commercial products? There have been some scandals where homeopathic remedies turned out to contain real drugs.
If they're using commercial products, the products should be lab tested.
Matt Yglesias brought up that the US is actually a pretty rich country in GDP per capita. I thought maybe that because we have some of the richest people, the biggest companies, and a very large financial sector - but even looking at the poorest states in the US, we're still pretty rich in comparison. Sweden is about the same as Georgia (#28 in the US ranking), Germany similar to Arizona (#39), Canada comparable to Utah (#42), the UK down with Idaho (#47), France with Arkansas (#49), and Italy is poorer than any of the 50 US states.
It was interesting looking at the regional differences within those countries, though.
1. UK basically has a rich region around London, Oxford, and Edinburgh that is comparable to the middle ranking US states, and a few other areas that are comparable to the lower ranking US states (mostly urban) - with much poorer everywhere else.
2. France is similar in that regard. The Ile de France (centered on Paris) has a per capita GDP comparable to the richer US states, and everywhere else except the Rhone (barely) has a lower GDP per capita than even the poorest US state.
3. Germany really shows the East-West divide, although there's also a really prominent north-south divide. The southern German states - Bavaria, Hesse, Baden-Wurttemberg - are also noticeably higher in GDP per capita than the north-western states, and comparable to the mid-to-mid-low states such as Nevada (#29). Whereas the north-western states are similar in GDP per capita to the bottom ten states in the US, and eastern Germany is (unsurprisingly) noticeably poorer still and poorer than the poorest US state in GDP per capita.
I am happy to announce that, after 6 years of insanity, Stanley Kubrick has finally gotten his infobox back on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick). I commented on the topic in previous open threads, so I figured I'd share the good news here.
I have convinced my mother-in-law that she needs a stupendous amount of illumination in her home, to help with seasonal depression. I'm not having much luck finding what I've got in mind, and would appreciate any suggestions.
Regarding the Pascalian Medicine problem, I think an approach that better includes uncertainty in the calculation could solve this in a formal way. Something similar to this paper that dismisses the Fermi Paradox: https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/1465818521351323652
The founders of Toronto media platform 6ixBuzz were recently covered in Toronto Life and reacted very negatively to having their real names published. See paragraph ~23 in the grafs above the second capital W heading for context: https://torontolife.com/city/the-secret-life-of-6ixbuzz/ ("Over the years, some traditional...")
The platform and the founders are associated with many things I don't like, and appear to be in a different class than me. Other than that, are there important differences between this and the NYT-SSC beef? If I think Scott's anonymity should be maintained in the Times, should I be equally against this decision from Toronto Life?
The homeopathy study also acts as an excellent probe of Scott's reputation among his readers - are you willing to take random pills mailed to you by a complete stranger, based solely off of the fact that Scott trusts that person enough to put the study on his blog?
Re homeopathy: Most health care professionals using homeopathic medicine often believe that greater dilutions are more potent than less dilute doses. Whether or not this is true, I think there is reason to suspect that the most concentrated homeopathic medicines actually may be having a physiological effects do to the presence of the original substance in the medicine.
What led me to this belief was my exposure to some work being done in low-dose immunology. Low Dose Immunotherapy (LDI) is a treatment for increasing immune “tolerance” of an overactive immune system. Allergy and autoimmunity represent an alteration or overactivation of appropriate immune tolerance. LDI retrains the immune system for specific antigens, thereby decreasing overactive immune response and decreasing symptoms.
This type of immunotherapy was discovered in Great Britain in the 1970s and called “Enzyme Potentiated Desensitization” (EPD). The technique utilized very small concentrations of antigens along with an enzyme, beta glucuronidase, which helps educate the T cells involved in the immune response. This treatment was brought to the US, but in the early 1990s the FDA stopped the importation of EPD. At this point, Dr. Shrader reproduced the mixtures of EPD and called them LDA. LDA originally used antigens causing certain allergies and the technique was later expanded by Dr. Ty Vincent to treat various autoimmune conditions using a variety of different antigens, called LDI. The claim for for the effectiveness of these extremely diluted antigen doses seems to be that they stimulate the so-called T regulatory lymphocytes, which are known to suppress unwanted “hyperactive” immune reactions. More information is available elsewhere on the Web.
LDI is by no means a main stream approach. However, it is having some demonstrated positive effects, and I think it’s worth looking into.
The reason I mention it here is because I believe that the most dilute doses used in LDI overlap with the least diluted doses used in homeopathy. So I wonder if the effects of high concentration doses of homeopathic medicines are being mediated by the immune system.
A few weeks ago, I piggy-backed on comments here forecasting the future of Covid19-related mask-wearing to raise a different issue: Why hadn't mask-wearing previously been common in indoors public spaces in areas with high TB rates? (Recent TB transmission research, summarized here, was on my mind: https://theconversation.com/new-study-shows-that-normal-breathing-is-a-major-spreader-of-tb-170656).
Now I'm wondering: In comparison with the reasoning behind mask-wearing for Covid19 in indoors public spaces, are there *any* other diseases where (at a high rate of prevalence) the case for mask-wearing is, or at least temporarily has been, similarly strong?
As far as I know, widespread mask-wearing before Covid19 was in response to exceptionally deadly flu epidemics (e.g. 1918-1920), flu season in general (a few countries such as Japan), or air pollution.
I have probably failed to use proper terminology to phrase this, so I hope my question is comprehensible. Let me know if it isn't.
4: Tangential, but if you are making a google form you do not have to set an autofill for a linear scale (here, 'how serious are you about participating?'. This form defaults to 10, maximally serious, making the question result useless as both the most serious participants and those so unserious that they didn't read or adjust the question both end up as a 10. I entered a 9 incase there is an attempt to salvage, as I am fairly serious about being willing to participate
Thinking about the Pascalian Medicine idea, my first thought was that if we're assuming all supplements have some tiny inexplicable chance of curing our covid, then we should also assume all supplements have about the same inexplicable chance of making our covid worse. Or making us age faster. Or making us age slower.
If your answer to that is "well there are at least some unreliable studies showing an effect," well, I am sure I could run ten studies proving vitamin D makes covid _worse_. So it mostly feels like you're rolling a ten-thousand sided dice for each random med you take, and each die has one "makes your covid slightly better!" side and one "makes your covid slightly worse!" And maybe a few other sides like "Makes you really sleepy" or "slightly increases bone density". And each of these dice costs like twenty bucks to roll.
And this does match my intuition where if you're in a situation where you think it's pretty likely you'll die of Covid _anyway_, yeah cram whatever into your mouth. If all your dice point to nothing, or more covid, or some other weird negative outcome, well, whatever, you'll be dead anyway. And if you do live, it's very unlikely it was because of all the vitamin D you took, but hey, maybe you can make some money selling everyone your miracle combo.
The homeopathy study says that the thing you're supposed to take is chemically equivalent to "milk sugar". Are the pills involved in the study vegan? If so, I will sign up for the study; if not, I hereby mildly complain about not being able to participate.
The Philadelphia ACX Meetup is holding a Solstice Celebration on Tuesday, December 21 from 6pm-10pm. Request to join our Google Group for complete details: https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/ACXPhiladelphia
Back on the longevity thread, I proposed (without really knowing if or how it was possible) how we could just replace organs with young cells piecemeal.
Looks like it's working well for skin:
https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/08/last-gasp-gene-therapy-saved-syrian-refugee-clinical-trial-starting/
Scott: Do you have a citation for the claim about Ritalin neurotoxicity that appears in this post? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
You write: “Never mind, recent studies suggest Ritalin is just as likely to cause this problem.”
However, a study out this year seems to indicate no evidence of neurotoxicity from long-term Ritalin use at above-therapeutic doses in primates: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0892036221000714?via%3Dihub
I’d like to compare this recent study to whatever sources you had in mind as evidence of Ritalin neurotoxicity.
(Bonus question: do the conclusions of this recent article look credible to you?)
Does anyone know what happens to the barrels of tanks (armored vehicles, not containers) after they wear out? Can old barrels be restored and reused, or do they have to go to the junkyard?
Let's say I get a positive covid test today. (I don't, but I want to pre-plan.)
What's the current best practice of what to take? Paxlovid is still illegal, but what could I ask my doctor to prescribe off-label, or what could I take OTC, to give me the best outcomes?
The author's Twitter handle is @plain_fiction, which is telling, but do we have any physicists here that want to explain what a "warp bubble" is supposed to be, and why this thing featured on Slashdot is surely nonsense? Anyway, in addition to the usual prior against such trings, Harold White and his team previously failed to notice that the physics-defying EM drive they tested didn't actually work, suggesting, I suppose, a lack of rigor on their part (or worse).
https://thedebrief.org/darpa-funded-researchers-accidentally-create-the-worlds-first-warp-bubble/
DataSecretsLox user WeDoTheodicyInThisHovse has started a December 2021 Welcome thread for new users who wish to introduce themselves. Having met her, I think she's a nice person and a great entry point for those who are interested.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5274.msg190011.html
I'm curious how people interpret the behavior of a business that's sending me daily emails, usually with one limited-time offer after another, including reminders of the amount of time left on the latest special.
Note that IIRC, this was not their practice until perhaps last year, and I've been a happy customer of theirs for at least a decade, and subscribed to their mailing list. Again IIRC, emails were often announcements of new products, and specials weren't continuous.
I'm especially interested in any insights from people working retail, particularly a smallish online business which also has a few storefronts. Products are physical, and consumable - but slowly, in case that matters.
What newsletters do you have a paid subscription for, and why?
Way back at the beginning of the pandemic, people were publishing lots of articles and videos explaining simple models of how disease spreads, showing for example what happens in the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model in which a population is uniformly mixed and randomly spreading a virus around, producing a neat little exponential curve that turns into sort of a bell shape.
I always assumed that these toy models were only just for explanatory purposes, not for any serious epidemiological research. The following article is interesting because it explores a non-simple model of disease spread, but it also makes a shocking claim that models "like" SIR are "the most commonly used".
https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/have-we-been-thinking-about-the-pandemic-wrong-the-effect-of-population-structure-on-transmission/
Surely the average epidemiological researcher is not that stupid? So, is this article is being misleading/disingenuous, or are trivial models like SIR/SEIR *actually* widely and directly used by epidemiologists to make predictions, make recommendations and evaluate policy effects?
Aside from that one stunning allegation, the model presented in the article is interesting (but as the author notes, not necessarily accurate) because it produces vaguely similar hard-to-explain patterns like those we see in the real pandemic. Basically the conclusion this type of model suggests is that the course of the pandemic in a region *cannot* be predicted in detail without a lot of good data we don't have about how specific people are physically interconnected with other people in the real world. A corollary: attempting to evaluate the effects of public policy based on things like "cases before and after policy was put in place" can give more noise than signal.
Arguably the most interesting result from this model is that a variant can come to dominate in a population *without* being more infectious/contagious, which has caused me to wonder if delta/omicron are less infectious/contagious than they appear to be. But remember, there are *thousands* of catalogued variants and it's very rare that one of them "takes over the world", as delta did, which suggests that delta really is more infectious.
Blegging for a recommendation for a Silicon Valley GP that's rationalist-adjacent(-ish?). I don't expect a full-send, but anyone even marginally closer to the community or that others get along with would be super appreciated.
My therapist recommended that I try to meet women at Asperger's/HFA support groups. Has anyone here done this? No offense, but I feel like this would be a good place to ask.
In my RSS reader, whenever I scroll past an item, it's faded out to mark it as read. Does anyone know of a similar Chrome extension for Twitter (ideally the read tweets would be synced between computers)?
Fun fact. The Spanish flu - which was a novel virus at the time - never went away. Modern seasonal flus are direct descendants of that. What happened is that more transmittable strains were less fatal. Could be good news for Omicron.
That shakoist substack post linked was especially good. I am not sure he explicitly pointed it out but it seems like the central limit theorem strongly argues against the methodology used by ivmmeta.com people. If all of the studies (they include) were equally valid then they should nicely form a normal distribution about the actual value of ivermectin's effectiveness. That they do not, ought to invalidate the methodology of...pretending that they do.
Question for the resident psychiatrist: How does fluvoxamine look side effectwise?
(Background: triple vaccinated but zero antibodies due to immunesuppression, contemplating it as preventive measure, prior experience with SSRI and SNRI almost a decade ago)
I just learned that large passenger planes have their own radars that can be switched between weather mode and terrain mapping mode (this explains where the pilots get their information from when they announce over the intercom that turbulence is expected in X minutes). I assume the pilot flips a switch to toggle between modes.
I found videos showing what the radar screen looks like in weather mode, but nothing for terrain mode. Can anyone find one for me?
Also, how often do commercial pilots use radar terrain mode, and under what circumstances do they generally do it (e.g. - when lost, when approaching for landing)?
Do the radar computers come pre-loaded with detailed topographical maps of the whole planet, allowing them to automatically deduce where the plane is based on what the radar sees in terrain mode, or are pilots left to look at the screen and figure it out by comparing the image to paper maps in the cockpit?
High school senior here, planning to attend college. A few wonderings I'd love to have some perspective on:
1) Is a Computer Science degree as could as people say it is? I've tentatively decided on CS, but I've heard alternatively that there's either a crippling shortage of CS professionals in the US, or you can spend months on the jobsearch and the interview process could be a new circle of hell. I'm also specifically interested in cybersecurity; how does that compare with CS?
(To be quite honest, I'm also worried that if I go into CS I'll never get a girlfriend. Sue me, I'm a teen.)
2) What should I direct my effort toward in college? I've heard that college isn't useful for the education, but for the signalling power a degree holds. So rather than academics, what should I funnel my effort toward? "Enjoying my youth"? Building ties with competent like-minded peers in preparation for the future? Building work experience with internships? Working on personal projects?
3) How can I up my conscientiousness/build self discipline? My test scores are always excellent, but my gpa is abysmal in comparison. Part of that is being hit by depression and later a behavioural addiction to reading, but I'm also just lazy and weak-willed. 'Executive Dysfunction' was suggested back when I had a therapist.
4) General college/job/life advice? I can't see myself sticking with one career for the rest of my life; I'd rather switch it up every few years. I'd also like to travel, and am thinking of attending a year of college abroad, perhaps in Germany. These may just be juvenile sentiments that will pass, however, and in the case that I'm romanticizing something that sucks in actuality I'd like to know.
Happy and sad fact on corona: by the end of this year, 12.5 billion vaccination doses for corona will have been produced. Monthly production is 1.5 billion.
Given that there are 5.8 billion people of age 15+ on earth, that's easily enough to give every adult two shots, with almost a billion doses left for children, booster shots, etc. (Currently about 250 million booster shots have been given world-wide, so there is still margin.) By end of March, we could give three shots to all adults on earth.
It would even be enough if every single adult would take the shots. We know that some people decline the offer to get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, Africa has given out only 18 doses of vaccine per 100 people. This is not a malfunction of vaccine production, it's a malfunction of distribution.
I am moderately optimistic that this will change soonish, and that the excess doses are finally reaching Africa. I wish I would be sure about it.
Source: https://www.ifpma.org/resource-centre/as-covid-19-vaccine-output-estimated-to-reach-over-12-billion-by-year-end-and-24-billion-by-mid-2022-innovative-vaccine-manufacturers-renew-commitment-to-support-g20-efforts-to-address-remaining-barr/
you sit in a chair across from morpheus, he holds forward two clenched fists. He speaks your name, and opens them. "In my right hand, I hold the red pill." He says, your face perfectly framed in his smoked glasses. "In my left hand I hold the blue pill. Choose carefully."
You attempt to stand up. You have no idea who this morpheus person is, or what these pills do. You are manifestly not in the matrix movie. This is something else, but you have no idea what.
Meaty hands push you down into your chair. Morpheus' gun toting henchmen hold guns to your temple.
"you misunderstand me." Morpheus says. "you must choose, take the red pill, or the blue pill."
Knowing absolutely nothing about either pill except their color, which do you take and why?
Am I the only person who's noticed hydroxyzine is an atypical antipsychotic?
Hydroxyzine is generally described as an antihistamine that, for reasons nobody can explain, just happens to be remarkably effective for treating anxiety, even though other antihistamines aren't.
If you look into it though, hydroxyzine is a ligand of the D2 receptor [1] and the 5-HT2 receptor family (paper didn't report subtype but presumably this includes the 5-HT2A receptor) [1] [2] with potency not much lower than for the H1 receptor. This strongly suggests it's an atypical antipsychotic (especially since doses used in anxiety are higher than used for allergy). It can also cause tardive dyskinesia [3], just like other atypical antipsychotics (other than possibly clozapine). More to the point, though, it being an atypical antipsychotic entirely explains why it treats anxiety, but other antihistamines like diphenhydramine don't.
This isn't the first time an atypical antipsychotic has been misidentified: trimipramine, originally discovered as an antidepressant, also has affinity for the D2 and 5-HT2A receptors, and one trial actually found it effective for the treatment of schizophrenia, even going as far as discharging patients on a maintenence dose of trimipramine [4].
To my knowledge, nobody has tried this with hydroxyzine; I can't find any literature mentioning an antipsychotic effect of hydroxyzine at all. Even the article above on hydroxyzine-induced tardive dyskinesia [3] doesn't mention an antidopaminergic effect of hydroxyzine, instead speculating that the mechanism by which it causes tardive dyskinesia is somehow related to its antihistamine effects.
This really seems to call into question the common use of hydroxyzine monotherapy for anxiety. Antipsychotics generally aren't used as monotherapy for anxiety (outside of bipolar disorder, though then you're not just treating anxiety), not because they aren't effective, but because you can generally use a lower dose of antipsychotic when you combine with an SSRI or another anxiolytic. I think the assumption is that hydroxyzine doesn't have the same risks as commonly prescribed atypical antipsychotics, so it's safer to use as monotherapy. But this seems to question whether it is, in fact, safer.
I also wonder whether I'm missing something. It seems really unlikely that everyone in psychiatry just totally missed hydroxyzine being an atypical antipsychotic, despite it having been used for many years and the signals being relatively obvious. People noticed for trimipramine, so they should notice for hydroxyzine, too, if it is in fact an antipsychotic, right? I have a hard time believing I'm the only one to notice this, and somehow everyone else is blind to it. So I wonder if I'm wrong. I wonder if there actually is something that makes hydroxyzine different from atypical antipsychotics.
(I also wonder if other antihistamines, like promethazine, might also have weak antipsychotic effects. It would make sense - perhaps others have noted it - though I haven't really looked into it.)
[1] https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(05)80248-9/pdf Snowman, A. M., & Snyder, S. H. (1990). Cetirizine: actions on neurotransmitter receptors. Journal of allergy and clinical immunology, 86(6), 1025-1028.
[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.873.3218&rep=rep1&type=pdf Haraguchi, K., Ito, K., Kotaki, H., Sawada, Y., & Iga, T. (1997). Prediction of drug-induced catalepsy based on dopamine D1, D2, and muscarinic acetylcholine receptor occupancies. Drug metabolism and disposition, 25(6), 675-684.
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472076/ Cornett, E. M., Novitch, M., Kaye, A. D., Kata, V., & Kaye, A. M. (2017). Medication-induced tardive dyskinesia: a review and update. Ochsner Journal, 17(2), 162-174.
[4] https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/abstract/10.1055/s-2007-1014510 Eikmeier, G., Muszynski, K., Berger, M., & Gastpar, M. (1990). High-dose trimipramine in acute schizophrenia. Pharmacopsychiatry, 23(05), 212-214.
Is there any good empirical evidence that people who go on examine.com and pick out 20 supplements will have worse health than in the counterfactual where the same people didn't take anything?
It seems to me that observational studies will suffer from the sick-user-effect and inevitably fail at fully controlling for that.
So...
Would anyone volunteer to flip a coin, and if in lands tails, go buy 20 supplements of your choice and take them for a year? And either way the flip goes, report your results on an online survey?
Here's a list of supplements I'd consider reasonable to take for that challenge. I expect the expected utility is nonnegative for each of these: Spirulina, Chlorella, broccoli, magnesium, zinc, vitamin d, glucosamine, chondroitin, cod liver oil, microdose lithium, green tea, caffeine, B12, K2, Kefir, garlic, carnitine, cocoa, blueberry, krill oil. That's 20 things that one could take all at once and probably on average not be any worse off except in the wallet.
Maybe we could even avoid the need for a large sample size by just having a betting market on whether the average outcome in the experimental group will be better than the average outcome in the control group. (although this will bias us against considering rare-but-very-bad outcomes) Maybe we could even avoid running the experiment most of the time by rolling a D20 to decide (1: do the experiment and settle bets accordingly. 2-19: all bets are void) and use this 95% savings to fund a much longer and higher quality study. I think Lloyd's of London would write an insurance policy that pays fair odds minus 1% if that D20 comes up 1. Then you have ~20x more money to run a much better study when you actually need to run it. This is sort of like Robin Hanson's idea of double or nothing lawsuits: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/double-or-nothi.html
Note that "homeopathic" does not necessarily mean what you think it means. Homeopathic means diluted, and you may think this means diluted to the point of containing no active ingredient - but this is not the case.
For example, Cold-Eeze is a brand of homeopathic cold lozenge, which, among other things, has diluted zinc in it:
https://askinglot.com/how-much-zinc-is-in-cold-eeze-lozenges
Now, this site is talking about how the amount of zinc is unreliable, and the lozenges don't always contain an effective amount of zinc - but if you think homeopathic means that it doesn't contain any effective ingredient, the fact that it ever contains an effective amount of zinc should come as a surprise.
https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/fda/fdaDrugXsl.cfm?setid=a25b6a72-93b3-487a-9fb9-d33453a448ee has some information about the content of this "homeopathic" remedy. 1x means it has been diluted once, in a 1/10 ratio; this is described as "low potency" in homeopathic communities, but is still considered a homeopathic remedy. But clearly it still contains zinc.
So, well, of course there will be studies showing that homeopathic remedies work; any remedy with 90% inactive ingredients could be described as homeopathic. And even the use of milk sugar as a diluting agent is pretty common: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2007/010187s069,018029s040,021284s011lbl.pdf
re: Pascalian Medicine, I was thinking about it a little more.
I think the general idea of "take everything that probably doesn't hurt you all the time" probably sucks as an approach.
But as a diagnostic tool.... maybe not.
I recently saw an interesting case report about a (very rare) genetic condition that broke an amino metabolism pathway. Turned out that a supplement that would normally be a waste of money for 99.999..something percent of the human population halted painful nerve damage. Not naming the amino because this is the sort of forum where someone will latch on to it and drop a pile of money on pills that are not going to help them.
There's a long tail of people with rare conditions, or common but hard to diagnose conditions. Often it can be incredibly hard to zero in on the cause of their condition or what might help.
If you could monitor someone's general health and wellbeing over a long-ish period and they actually took their pills reliably, you might be able to perform something like a binary search.
start with a large Pascalian pile of various supplements and generally harmless things, get them to record how they're feeling each day in something like an app. Watch out for them getting suddenly worse... because that's also a possibility with the Pascalian approach, lots of small risks add up. but if they do experience a significant improvement you might be able to narrow it down to a particular thing over a few iterations.
What's that about curcumin only being safe if sourced correctly? Is the spice I buy in the supermarket likely to be safe?
Scott's post now like a month old but about 'families' I thought it was funny that the first black chess grandmaster has a sister who is a world champion boxing and a brother who is a world champion in kickboxing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Ashley
Thanks for linking David's analysis. I think he is very good at figuring out whether a problem hasn't been solved yet. I have to ask, what does the community think of meta-rationality. It seems like the obvious next step to me. Don't just use a system, use all of them! Create them! Rate them! Don't win systematically, win consistently!
Why are companies in knowledge industries that worked mostly in-person before the pandemic so keen for people to return to the office in person now things are mostly re-opening?
My model of large companies is that they are generally fairly inefficient but rarely self-destructively stupid, but (in my industry at least) the requirement to return to the office 3 or 4 days a week (compared to pre-pandemic 4 days a week) does appear to be an example of a self-destructively stupid decision - myself and my entire team are searching for new jobs which - if we all leave in the next couple of months - will mean the company is unable to operate until they replace us. It also isn't like this will come as a surprise to the company - a staff satisfaction survey sent round a few months ago indicated that about 97% of the company were 'not at all excited' about returning to the office and a significant minority would be 'extremely' unlikely to recommend working for the company to a friend if we returned to the office (which I take as a proxy of flight risk)
I've asked this question on reddit and not really received very satisfactory answers - there seems to be a sense in which 'middle management want to control workers so their uselessness is not revealed' or which 'companies don't want to waste the expensive investment in their offices' but neither of these seem very coherent explanations to me; they seem to rely on a level of coordination between middle / senior management and renters / landlords respectively which does not really seem credible, and treats senior management of Fortune 500 companies as blundering idiots being run rings around by middle management, which is not my experience of them.
Does anyone on ACX have any more plausible explanations of why companies seem to be following this self-destructive path?
Great news that there is going to be another book review contest. The quality of the last one was awesome!
"The Outside View argument here is completely right, and is a great illustration of the limitations of Bayesian reasoning" - It's a shame that Bayesian reasoning can't take outside views into account.
In re homeopathy: Are they making their own homeopathic remedies, or using commercial products? There have been some scandals where homeopathic remedies turned out to contain real drugs.
If they're using commercial products, the products should be lab tested.
Matt Yglesias brought up that the US is actually a pretty rich country in GDP per capita. I thought maybe that because we have some of the richest people, the biggest companies, and a very large financial sector - but even looking at the poorest states in the US, we're still pretty rich in comparison. Sweden is about the same as Georgia (#28 in the US ranking), Germany similar to Arizona (#39), Canada comparable to Utah (#42), the UK down with Idaho (#47), France with Arkansas (#49), and Italy is poorer than any of the 50 US states.
It was interesting looking at the regional differences within those countries, though.
1. UK basically has a rich region around London, Oxford, and Edinburgh that is comparable to the middle ranking US states, and a few other areas that are comparable to the lower ranking US states (mostly urban) - with much poorer everywhere else.
2. France is similar in that regard. The Ile de France (centered on Paris) has a per capita GDP comparable to the richer US states, and everywhere else except the Rhone (barely) has a lower GDP per capita than even the poorest US state.
3. Germany really shows the East-West divide, although there's also a really prominent north-south divide. The southern German states - Bavaria, Hesse, Baden-Wurttemberg - are also noticeably higher in GDP per capita than the north-western states, and comparable to the mid-to-mid-low states such as Nevada (#29). Whereas the north-western states are similar in GDP per capita to the bottom ten states in the US, and eastern Germany is (unsurprisingly) noticeably poorer still and poorer than the poorest US state in GDP per capita.
I am happy to announce that, after 6 years of insanity, Stanley Kubrick has finally gotten his infobox back on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick). I commented on the topic in previous open threads, so I figured I'd share the good news here.
I have convinced my mother-in-law that she needs a stupendous amount of illumination in her home, to help with seasonal depression. I'm not having much luck finding what I've got in mind, and would appreciate any suggestions.
A couple of these on the ceiling https://www.stagelightingstore.com/sundog/844519-ovad-stages-sundog would be reasonable, but she doesn't need the various stage-related features. Just the illumination.
She'd also like some short lamps she could put in corners that would produce some spotlight-esque beams aimed at the ceiling.
Here's an accordion link: https://youtu.be/_E-yOI-BbLs
Regarding the Pascalian Medicine problem, I think an approach that better includes uncertainty in the calculation could solve this in a formal way. Something similar to this paper that dismisses the Fermi Paradox: https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/1465818521351323652
The founders of Toronto media platform 6ixBuzz were recently covered in Toronto Life and reacted very negatively to having their real names published. See paragraph ~23 in the grafs above the second capital W heading for context: https://torontolife.com/city/the-secret-life-of-6ixbuzz/ ("Over the years, some traditional...")
The platform and the founders are associated with many things I don't like, and appear to be in a different class than me. Other than that, are there important differences between this and the NYT-SSC beef? If I think Scott's anonymity should be maintained in the Times, should I be equally against this decision from Toronto Life?
The homeopathy study also acts as an excellent probe of Scott's reputation among his readers - are you willing to take random pills mailed to you by a complete stranger, based solely off of the fact that Scott trusts that person enough to put the study on his blog?
The homeopathic proving study isn't an adversarial study, is it? Has it received any input from a homeopath?
Re homeopathy: Most health care professionals using homeopathic medicine often believe that greater dilutions are more potent than less dilute doses. Whether or not this is true, I think there is reason to suspect that the most concentrated homeopathic medicines actually may be having a physiological effects do to the presence of the original substance in the medicine.
What led me to this belief was my exposure to some work being done in low-dose immunology. Low Dose Immunotherapy (LDI) is a treatment for increasing immune “tolerance” of an overactive immune system. Allergy and autoimmunity represent an alteration or overactivation of appropriate immune tolerance. LDI retrains the immune system for specific antigens, thereby decreasing overactive immune response and decreasing symptoms.
This type of immunotherapy was discovered in Great Britain in the 1970s and called “Enzyme Potentiated Desensitization” (EPD). The technique utilized very small concentrations of antigens along with an enzyme, beta glucuronidase, which helps educate the T cells involved in the immune response. This treatment was brought to the US, but in the early 1990s the FDA stopped the importation of EPD. At this point, Dr. Shrader reproduced the mixtures of EPD and called them LDA. LDA originally used antigens causing certain allergies and the technique was later expanded by Dr. Ty Vincent to treat various autoimmune conditions using a variety of different antigens, called LDI. The claim for for the effectiveness of these extremely diluted antigen doses seems to be that they stimulate the so-called T regulatory lymphocytes, which are known to suppress unwanted “hyperactive” immune reactions. More information is available elsewhere on the Web.
LDI is by no means a main stream approach. However, it is having some demonstrated positive effects, and I think it’s worth looking into.
The reason I mention it here is because I believe that the most dilute doses used in LDI overlap with the least diluted doses used in homeopathy. So I wonder if the effects of high concentration doses of homeopathic medicines are being mediated by the immune system.
A few weeks ago, I piggy-backed on comments here forecasting the future of Covid19-related mask-wearing to raise a different issue: Why hadn't mask-wearing previously been common in indoors public spaces in areas with high TB rates? (Recent TB transmission research, summarized here, was on my mind: https://theconversation.com/new-study-shows-that-normal-breathing-is-a-major-spreader-of-tb-170656).
Now I'm wondering: In comparison with the reasoning behind mask-wearing for Covid19 in indoors public spaces, are there *any* other diseases where (at a high rate of prevalence) the case for mask-wearing is, or at least temporarily has been, similarly strong?
As far as I know, widespread mask-wearing before Covid19 was in response to exceptionally deadly flu epidemics (e.g. 1918-1920), flu season in general (a few countries such as Japan), or air pollution.
I have probably failed to use proper terminology to phrase this, so I hope my question is comprehensible. Let me know if it isn't.
How freaked out is the rationalist community by the new self-replicating xenobots? Can somebody who understands the tech better than I assuage my fears about this being weaponized, or worse? https://www.npr.org/2021/12/01/1060027395/robots-xenobots-living-self-replicating-copy
4: Tangential, but if you are making a google form you do not have to set an autofill for a linear scale (here, 'how serious are you about participating?'. This form defaults to 10, maximally serious, making the question result useless as both the most serious participants and those so unserious that they didn't read or adjust the question both end up as a 10. I entered a 9 incase there is an attempt to salvage, as I am fairly serious about being willing to participate
Thinking about the Pascalian Medicine idea, my first thought was that if we're assuming all supplements have some tiny inexplicable chance of curing our covid, then we should also assume all supplements have about the same inexplicable chance of making our covid worse. Or making us age faster. Or making us age slower.
If your answer to that is "well there are at least some unreliable studies showing an effect," well, I am sure I could run ten studies proving vitamin D makes covid _worse_. So it mostly feels like you're rolling a ten-thousand sided dice for each random med you take, and each die has one "makes your covid slightly better!" side and one "makes your covid slightly worse!" And maybe a few other sides like "Makes you really sleepy" or "slightly increases bone density". And each of these dice costs like twenty bucks to roll.
And this does match my intuition where if you're in a situation where you think it's pretty likely you'll die of Covid _anyway_, yeah cram whatever into your mouth. If all your dice point to nothing, or more covid, or some other weird negative outcome, well, whatever, you'll be dead anyway. And if you do live, it's very unlikely it was because of all the vitamin D you took, but hey, maybe you can make some money selling everyone your miracle combo.
The homeopathy study says that the thing you're supposed to take is chemically equivalent to "milk sugar". Are the pills involved in the study vegan? If so, I will sign up for the study; if not, I hereby mildly complain about not being able to participate.
Hello,
I am still a lowly medical student, I am working on a medical education program.
actually coding it myself and a few others (from sweden and Latvia).
I am looking for someone to help me publish articles/research on my software.
effectively documenting how it works and what it's for.
p.s. if you work in medical education and you'd like to take a look, let's talk by email
abk93@cornell.edu
The Philadelphia ACX Meetup is holding a Solstice Celebration on Tuesday, December 21 from 6pm-10pm. Request to join our Google Group for complete details: https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/ACXPhiladelphia