"Right now the entire US regulatory state is taking essentially no heat for the slow progress on the next generation of vaccines, and an enormous amount of heat for the perfectly safe vaccines that it already approved."
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Chris Said
@Chris_Said
Data Scientist at Stitch Fix. Formerly: Opendoor, Twitter, Facebook, neuroscience.
Chris Said’s Tweets
On the absurd GOP rush to abandon the successful legacy of Operation Warp Speed, a project that validated early conservative arguments about drug development.
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The debate over vaccines may be purely political for Trump and DeSantis, says @mattyglesias, but it has long-term implications for US science policy trib.al/5MyLnek
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"Mink farms must be shut down. It’s hard to imagine a better way to incubate and spread a deadly virus than letting it evolve among tens of thousands of animals with an upper respiratory tract similar to ours crowded together"
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Love to see it:
Republicans and Democrats agreeing that we need to reform environmental procedure laws (NEPA) to build transmission lines faster and mine more critical minerals like lithium.
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Similar to hospitals, churches have moved hard towards multi-site operations, with 8,000 multi-site churches in the US.
70% of megachurches are now multi-site.
foresthill.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-sit
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Seattle has the nicest looking homes and Dallas has the ugliest.
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Kelsey is completely right about this.
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I think a lot of people look into the case that AI will definitely kill us, find it's not airtight, and end up believing something like"AI is 10% likely to kill us" but not treating that like it's itself an enormously big deal that would if true need to be society's top priority.
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Not making people log in to a government website increases health insurance enrollment by 11%. nber.org/papers/w30885
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Both biology and self-driving car technology are moving away from models with hand-engineered features towards end-to-end models. Fascinating essay. nintil.com/biology-llms
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List of silent musical compositions, many predating John Cage.
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Has there ever been a food product more overrated than these “waffles”?
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Clippy was based on a “tragic misunderstanding” of 1990s cognitive neuroscience.
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“If you think the recipe internet is bad now, wait till the entire internet is inundated with spammy sites that generate content for all combinations of words you can ever use.”
How ChatGPT threatens Google on the supply side, not the demand side.
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Like why is Texas adding clean energy faster than any other state despite an ideologically skeptical governing coalition?
Well, they also have an overall much more permissive land use regime and that's the dominant factor right now.
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No, yeah, they're rich. They're just confused because so much of their income is spent on convenience or positional goods.
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“If you think of a middle-aged professional couple .. each making ~$200K a year, filing a joint tax return, .. paying through the nose for rent or maintenance or a mortgage, you’re probably not going to describe their lifestyle as ‘rich.’”
Uh yes I am. nytimes.com/2023/01/16/opi
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Congress is unwilling to fund pandemic preparedness directly so it’s kind of nice that the Defense Department just decided to take this up on its own.
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Can we take future pandemic threats off the table?
@josh_wingrove and I join The Big Take @podcasts to discuss how the US is preparing (or not) for the next pandemic.
Listen up!
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how
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Trying not to get in culture war stuff, but this is creepy and bad.
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"UC Berkeley’s rubric for evaluating DEI contributions, which is used by universities around the country, dictates a low score for a candidate who professes a desire to 'treat everyone the same.'"
thefp.com/p/how-dei-is-s
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"UC Berkeley’s rubric for evaluating DEI contributions, which is used by universities around the country, dictates a low score for a candidate who professes a desire to 'treat everyone the same.'"
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TIL that while white noise draws its name from white light, brown noise gets its name from Robert Brown, the guy who discovered Brownian motion.
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Just bought a trilobite on Amazon Prime.
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Regardless of whether rapid tests led to a moderate drop in infections vs a moderate increase in freedom, they were obviously useful and it was unconscionable that the FDA resisted them for so long.
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My guess is that in America, most of the benefit of rapid testing wasn't a reduction in infections, but rather the freedom to do more stuff.
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In technical terms, rapid tests expand the Pareto frontier of freedom and safety. Hopefully they'll give us more freedom and more safety. But if they only give us more freedom, that's good too!
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My guess is that the true reduction in infections in Liverpool was lower than 43%. In America, which didn't have such well-organized testing programs, the benefits were probably even smaller.
But any drop >5% is an enormous win.
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We really don’t know the answer to this question, but perhaps the best evidence is a synthetic control study from Liverpool, which estimated a 43% reduction in hospital admissions.
medrxiv.org/content/10.110
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But while it’s clear that rapid testing wouldn’t eliminate transmission, the more interesting question is whether it had a moderate effect (e.g. 30% reduction) or no effect (0% reduction).
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On the website, we briefly made some claims that rapid testing could “end the pandemic”. I felt those were obviously aspirational at the time, as they relied on implausible assumptions of daily testing. I assumed this was common knowledge.
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A retrospective look at rapid Covid testing from .
Argues that while rapid testing clearly passed the cost benefit test and FDA's foot dragging was inexcusable, the strong case for rapid tests didn’t pan out.
This is basically a correct take.
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu
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NASA spent more on their Moon and Mars programs in 2022 than the entire budget of the National Science Foundation.
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First Belgium, now France. Mandated CO2 monitoring in indoor spaces.
What gets measured gets fixed.
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And its done. New legislation passed in 
that foresees mandatory CO2 monitoring of indoor spaces. Starting with schools, daycare, restaurants. Bravo 
twitter.com/scientistandre
that foresees mandatory CO2 monitoring of indoor spaces. Starting with schools, daycare, restaurants. Bravo
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Extraordinary that there is now a thing called Protein Language Models.
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You can use a language model to achieve state-of-the art drug-target interaction predictions.
1. Represent the drug molecule as a sequence of characters
2. Represent the protein as a sequence of amino acids
3. Embed in shared space
4. Dot product
biorxiv.org/content/10.110
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You can use a language model to achieve state-of-the art drug-target interaction predictions.
1. Represent the drug molecule as a sequence of characters
2. Represent the protein as a sequence of amino acids
3. Embed in shared space
4. Dot product
biorxiv.org/content/10.110
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A rapid test that combines Covid, Flu, and RSV seems useful. Unfortunately it is illegal to sell in the US, so you'll have to fly to Germany.
standaard.be/cnt/dmf2022122
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Re-upping this. And obviously I’m especially interested in input from medical professionals!
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Question for an upcoming blog post:
What is an example of a very basic and impactful medical question that could be easily answered with an RCT, but no such RCT has been done?
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You can also include examples where the only RCT performed was very underpowered or fatally flawed in some other way.
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Question for an upcoming blog post:
What is an example of a very basic and impactful medical question that could be easily answered with an RCT, but no such RCT has been done?
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Martin Shkreli on SBF. This interview is a good as everyone is saying it is.
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An exogenous 22% increase in sugar intake in early life drives a 52% increase in adult diabetes and an 18% drop in post-secondary education.
From a regression discontinuity design exploiting sugar rationing in the post-WWII United Kingdom.
nber.org/system/files/w
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Zany idea this inspired: bounties for groups that run trials that answer these questions that would be enormously important to payers (whether private insurance or gov).
Need to incentivize private production of public goods!
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Should you go to the doctor for that problem? We really don't know, and we as a profession do little to find out. New Years resolution?? open.substack.com/pub/sensibleme
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Not great that people rank these risks exactly backwards.
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In the next century, which of these risks do you think is most likely to cause human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity's potential?
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