peytn

Pretty much everyone in life sciences/medicine wants people to be healthy. Public health attracts those who have a problem with informed consent. They need to clean up their act ethics-wise. It’s not working in 2021.

In practice these big trials are run as sloppily as possible to get the desired result. There’s a whole cottage industry of consultants. Think unclear instructions leading to dosing mixups and such. The type of trial you’re proposing is notorious for sloppiness.

Saudi oil: nothing would happen. It’s a commodity. They’d sell their oil at market price minus epsilon. Regime would be fine.

China tariff: they’d devalue the yuan. They already have capital controls that keep money from leaving the country. Regime would be fine.

At the end of the day, might as well trade with them for our own benefit.

I mean, if the app I want is on a single store, do I have a choice? Are users really itching to install the Epic store so they can have more choices? The Epic store will be shoved down their throats.

As a user I’m pretty okay with devs not being able to choose how I’m getting their app.

Intuitively I think as long as your activation function is sufficiently expressive (e.g. not a step function or something), you should be go to go in theory since that’s what you’re feeding back. Might take a while.

Realistically, EITC expansion or similar would be the tool if you wanna go that route as it’s more easily modeled than nationwide collective bargaining and is generally considered more efficient than a jobs program.

I think GP was saying the opposite, i.e. it’s nominally about political power as you said, but in the local context they’re going after white men who have no political power and ignoring politically powerful groups.

We can create combinatorially many drugs. There are labs that can screen hundreds of thousands of molecules a day. So approving drugs that aren’t proven effective for a disease might reasonably lead to few or no drugs that are effective because it’s so easy and relatively cheap to stuff a development pipeline with promising drugs if you don’t need to worry about whether they work at the disease stage due to crowding out effective drugs.

Likely years ago somebody at Biogen used a spreadsheet to calculate NPV under a range of scenarios, and from that decided to license this drug from Neurimmune. So it’s this or nothing, unfortunately.

You’ve hit the three corners of the Fraud Triangle—opportunity, incentive, rationalization.

I think it isn’t necessarily innumeracy to move past napkin math 18 months on. People have had the time to see the results of several cycles of behavior modification and perhaps aren’t interested in participating further.

> Marzari stated that she was not overriding Clark’s “freedom of thought and speech.” “There is no requirement that [Clark] change his views about what is best for [Maxine],” she explained. “It is only how he expresses those views privately to [Maxine] and publically to third parties that is affected.”

Sounds like they’re fine with his transphobia. He just can’t talk about it.

Still, wow. Is this really how we want to do things?

Nujabes kinda popularized the genre as well. It would be weird and unnecessarily racially charged if the author referred to him as a “yellow Japanese man.”

> any adverse effects would have shown

As I understand, the required teratogenicity study in rats with Pfizer is ongoing as of two weeks ago [1]. It’s rather optimistic to claim we’ve seen everything when even animal studies haven’t completed. Vaccine science itself is rapidly developing. Now I don’t think there will be issues with this drug, but surprises may lurk still.

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regulatory-approv...

The history of medical ethics is interesting. We’ve sort of drifted from pure utilitarianism. One problem is that since everyone dies eventually and our statistics aren’t complete, you can usually come up with ways to justify doing pretty much anything from a utilitarian standpoint.

I’ve got a little bit of FDA experience, but of course no COVID-19 EUA experience. Based on what we submitted to the FDA and the comments we received, I would personally think it most likely there were many issues with AZ’s materials, at least as far as their attempts to seek approval from the FDA went.

> “This is a safe and effective vaccine”

> Sir John Bell, the Oxford University professor who helped drive the vaccine’s development

Since academics traffic in reputation, this is an example of a conflict of interest I think.

Parent was talking about missed cancers and drug abuse, not suicides. Alcohol sales were up ~20% [1]—that too is hard data.

[1]: https://wineindustryadvisor.com/2020/11/16/nielsen-covid-bev...

I don’t understand your comment. I’m not advocating for more cautious rules. I’m advocating for due process. The rules should be what we feel is necessary.

The FDA has a process in place as per the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Reauthorization Act of 2013. If you find that legislation inadequate in some way, I think following due process to change it is the way to go. If how we handle pandemics should be more agile, let’s get legislation behind that.

I don’t think jerking our knees over an ethics safeguard that led to a pause in administration of a vaccine that soon won’t be widely available anyway is a great habit to get into.

The rules do not exist to manage risk. They exist to strike a balance between ethics and risk in emergency situations. If you’d like to change them going forward, feel free to advocate. I think it’s best we stick with our current rules this round.

I think the concerns would be around the delivery vehicle, which presumably is some big polycationic lipid thing.

From what I can gather, there’s not terribly much info on what’s known about what’s going into people’s bodies, and what info does exist has arisen from a thick soup of trade secrets and conflicts-of-interest.

Are you in a salaried role with pager duty? Are your responsibilities different from what was advertised? It sounds like you’re okay with pager duty—have you tried asking for an increase in comp? You can probably fix your current plight without invoking a union...

> there are plenty of people just waiting to have their anti-vaccine confirmation biases triggered

You’re probably right, but if we keep trying to front-run people’s reactions to events over and over again, I’m not sure we’re going to get great results in the long run. I get the impression that anticipating how people will respond to news is engendering more extreme responses to future events.

Keeping on the myth of birth control...

> A joint statement from the FDA and CDC clarified that the blood clotting was cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST).

I don’t believe birth control is associated with CVST at a rate of 1/1000. It feels very misleading to use it as a point of comparison.

If you owned all the gold, people would still want to buy gold. If you owned all the Bitcoin, nobody would want to buy Bitcoin. The only value stored is the network of people pumping it, and the only question is how long it’ll take them to move on to the next thing.

I can’t find any engineering job postings on their careers site with the location “Ghana Remote.” Hopefully those roles are coming soon.

It’s not just “going digital”—the creative act isn’t there. It’s just financialization. The act of taking an artwork to an auction house isn’t something that’ll hold value.

At the very least, these arguments might be more credible if their pushers disclosed their own financial interests in said valuable assets.

Dang, I was hoping somebody would’ve come up with something by now before the SEC or whoever does.