gmarx

I have a friend who was course VI at MIT but also a serious (chemical free) bodybuilder. He told me the story of working summers at a gym and he saw this one guy eating a large number of bananas as he trained. I don't know the number, but it was large enough that it was clearly going to be based on some serious bro science.

So my friend asks for the explanation. Guy asks him "what's the strongest animal?"

The answer (which I would dispute) was 'the gorilla'

"And what do gorillas eat?"

I stopped going to dentists for years because two dentists in serial made up cavities. The first guy I let him drill. The second guy, a friend of my dad's (supposedly)I declined. This was in the early 1990s

I told this story to a friend years later and he said the same thing happened to him.

before the US entered WWII the british had an office of propaganda with offices in New York that was dedicated to getting the US to enter the war.

I don't understand? Which way? Making people overestimate or underestimate risk? I think it works both ways in medicine and public health. In public health (as evidenced by the pandemic) people are still vulnerable to acting on small absolute numbers because they don't see how they compare to the population. Likewise they might ignore a factor that seems like a low percentage thing because they don't get how this translates into real absolute numbers.

This is well known in medicine except it often works in the opposite direction, i.e. it tricks people into way overestimating the chance that something rare will happen. So yes, across a population, some children will die of COVID, but your child isn't going to die of COVID.

OTOH it often works against you in the forward direction, e.g. tricking people into thinking we should screen everyone for everything all the time, because they don't appreciate how many incremental adverse events this will result in at scale (vs. the improvements in morbidity/mortality stats at scale)

I refer you to the definitive resource on this issue- the movie "Mean Girls". This movie is the key to understanding the current age.

I'll second what everyone else said and add that the guy was absolutely amazing at capturing drums. Everything I ever read about the guy sounded positive to me even though the authors might not have agreed

The success of these ML models has me wondering if this is what Quantum Mechanics is. QM is notoriously difficult to interpret yet makes amazing predictions. Maybe wave functions are just really good at predicting system behavior but don't reflect the underlying way things work.

OTOH, Newtonian mechanics is great at predicting things under certain circumstances yet, in the same way, doesn't necessarily reflect the underlying mechanism of the system.

So maybe philosophers will eventually tell us the distinction we are trying to draw, although intuitive, isn't real

Based on what is reported in the article (and without reviewing the review studies) we can only say that claiming in a survey to eat less red meat is associated with a small reduction in heart disease risk.

After decades of nonsense high profile nutritional studies being presented then debunked the represented my policy is that I only believe large effects.

They certainly try to give that impression in the article but if you look at the animation showing where all the homeless are being sent it sure looks like the bubble around LA and SF grew a lot during the time frame.

Where these bubbles net flows or totals? Can't tell.

I do strongly suspect and have read some (inconclusive) evidence that a large number of the drugged out long term homeless in LA and SF were shipped here from elsewhere. I don't believe that anyone has a special right to move to a nice city and adopt a street camping meth smoking lifestyle and expect the new city to not only tolerate it but subsidize it.

The only way to arrive at this conclusion is to group the short term and long term homeless together. I concede it might have changed since I last read up on the topic, but the short term homeless are the great majority and these are regular people who have lost their jobs or roommate situation and end up living in cars or shelters short term.

The article is clearly about the minority of homeless who are long term drug abusing street dwellers. Different problem, different solution.

Very high profile efforts to put the latter in free housing have failed.

On the other hand I have a friend (who is incidentally also a drug user but not so far gone that she couldn't stop when forced to wear a drug detecting patch to get her kid back) who became homeless. She immediately got into a shelter and now months later is moving into an apartment with her rent (I think) paid at least partly by the city. So anecdotally (and from some reading) the former group already has working solutions

But it is the drugged out visible long term homeless that this article is about and the problem everyone wants to solve. It is also the problem that hasn't been solved at all. In my city (LA) we have successful programs for the person who lost his job and then his apartment and ended up sleeping in his car.

Grouping the majority of homeless, who are short term, with the people living in tents on the sidewalk, smoking meth freely, is a rhetorical trick

That puppy example is special. In many cases (most?) the fact that a pet needs more than $10k it is likely too much to put the pet through. No way I would give a dog chemotherapy for cancer for example

I disagree. This would be handled by trade secrets. California doesn't stop you from requiring ex-employees to continue to guard trade secrets they learned or created under your employ

I haven't researched it in depth but I gather a much larger issue is the use and abuse of environmental law by the minority who don't want the projects done

abortion legality was determined by unelected judges from 1973 until 2022. Roe v Wade was overturned and now we have the situation you consider not weird. Elected legislators in each state determine to what extent abortion is legal

Hard to blame this on Federalism when states had more relative power in the first half of the 20th century and we were able to complete amazing public works projects on reasonable schedules

People like to discuss who they think deserves to get into Harvard but almost no one ever tries to model what functions Harvard admissions are attempting to maximize. I really don't know and have never read an explanation. Could easily be they are trying to maximize prestige of graduates and future donations. Also not sure why everyone thinks getting certain people admitted to Harvard will solve society wide problems. Don't some studies show the intuitive point that getting into a top tier school matters more than going to a top tier school, i.e. top tier schools are good at identifying high potential high school students.

That's a hypothesis. It is known that (supposedly) that strain can cause cytokine storm more than other flus do. I would not assume that means cytokine storm was the primary cause of death or even the primary cause of death in young adults. Based on my experience my guess is that the pneumonia was a much bigger cause of death than the storm

The Spanish flu really was very bad but would not have killed as many people if it occurred today. Malnutrition might have been a factor (though today's obesity rate might also be a problem) but the bigger thing was lack of antibiotics. Flu almost never kills you directly- it's the bacterial pneumonia you develop on top of it that does. Without antibiotics back then there would have been little they could do

I think it's the opposite. Most of the people actually working as writers cannot write a passable show. Writing something original and compelling enough for people to watch all the way through is extremely difficult. One of the tricks of good movies and TV is the audience takes it so for granted after a while that it looks easy. Acting is similar. Most people think the only thing that keeps them from being an actor is looks. Try saying lines out loud and you will begin to see the problem. Try to write a pilot.

I think the search for tiny effects and the belief that they should drive treatment, is one of the biggest things wrong with medical research. Doctors will put millions of people on a pill that hits a vital metabolic pathway, for life, based on tiny (to my thinking) statistically significant (i.e. only a 5% chance they aren't based on a real effect) results.

These days I only believe large effects- like smoking causes heart disease

No it doesn't historically and in most places even in the US. If you live in an unusual area, e.g coastal California, at an unusual time, e.g. the past 20 years then yes if you bought 20 years ago your cost would be much less than equivalent rent. OTOH if you mean own it outright then sure but with 30 year mortgages almost no one would own a house outright until pretty close to retirement. And sure if you inherit a house you can live rent free but for most people who inherit a house it would be 20-30 years before you yourself die, i.e. pretty close to retirement. So yes some people get a nice surprise late in life (but hardly most people- I won't for example). Difficult to see how it would make much difference in someones life course

This is a new argument in the past few years and it doesn't make sense. You do not need a parent with a paid off house to go to college and be successful. I didn't have that and I don't know many people who did. My friends whose parents have paid off houses now did not have them back when the kids were going to college and how would that have helped anyway? Home equity loan instead of student loan? How often is that choice made? There are some rich families who manage to pass wealth on generation after generation but it's rare in my experience and not needed to succeed

You'd need to know the percentage and scores for ivy league applicants to say such a thing a clear. It's likely true but not from these numbers

You are making some assumptions about what Harvard is attempting to do when filling its classes. If its goal is to have a class full of people who did the most with what they had you have an argument. If their goal is to maximize alumni support (financial and otherwise) then maybe not

Where did you get 30 million? One online source estimates 1 million net worth and has some reasoning to back it up. My guess is that if he has owned a house in the DC area since he has been on the supreme court, he would have a lot of home equity too but probably not up to 30 million

When Sandra Day O'Connor cast the deciding vote in favor of keeping AA back in 2003 even though she was against it, she suggested it might be done away with after another 25 years. We have had affirmative action in college admissions for 50 plus years now. Seems we would have some data to judge its effectiveness by now. More than 20 years ago I recall some top Harvard people lamenting that at Harvard it was mostly helping people who were black but not descended from American slaves. Also, from what I read it is much heavier than a thumb on the scale

There are many situations in economics in which the marginal effects are quite large especially WRT setting prices. I haven't read or done an analysis but I would never assume that 5% of a market has a 5% influence only in determining prices

Share my background? I am an M.D. How about you?