Here be dragons

Edit: Knowing you as I do, I'm 99% sure that if it were ever proven beyond doubt that Hubski actively harmed children in unfathomable numbers, your reaction wouldn't be "Oh shit, we have to cover this up ASAP!"

I know we're months away still, but one thing I find frustrating is that you just don't see political ads from the democrats that simply show clips of these conferences and interviews. The GOP has been running this ad in Michigan where they show Harris saying "The border is secure" super imposed over images of migrants coming in by the dozens. It's highly effective. The same should be cakewalk for the dems where you can literally just show Trump yelling about "ending voting" or "being a dictator on day 1" or Vance saying that women belong at home (never mind the fact that his very own wife is a successful lawyer--yet more evidence that he actually believes in nothing).

Democrats have a strong history of running the nice campaign under the assumption that people will see through the moron they're running against. But that strategy collapsed in 2000, 2004, and 2016. I don't know why they're so bad at elections, but they need to wake the fuck up and fast.

As an aside I think it's fairly interesting that pro-family policies have been gaining traction among the GOP. If they would wake up and realize there's no going back to 1950, there might be some room for progress and compromise there. Not at all hopeful about that, but it seems like there's some convergence on both side of the aisle that the status quo sucks. Though my personal belief is that the only pro family policy that could ever do anything to actually encourage families is to fix the housing crisis. To me that is the single biggest domestic policy issue out there and it gets virtually no play.

Ha! Got your ass motherfucker. I knew the laser pin story was written just for you. That was a strategic reply.

I'm always unconvinced by Malthusians, especially when those predictions involve the exhausting of arable land. That prediction has come and gone since before Malthus became famous for making it. The actual carrying capacity of the Earth is unknown, though obviously (1) it certainly isn't infinite, and (2) every time we expand we make less room for other species.

I certainly wouldn't be surprised if by mid century almost all species of large mammals were endangered or extinct, but that's a far stretch from societal collapse. Of course, the more we talk about this stuff, the less people are excited to breed, and the shrinking of the populations of the Western world have to be considered when trying to make bets on the future. What if the birth rates in poor countries start to approach those in rich countries? This isn't a remote possibility, and surely that would forestall a lot of the most dire predictions.

I think it's a valuable exercise to think about worst-case scenarios, but I think the risk is in putting too high of odds on worst-case as an inevitable outcome.

I think that Berliner actually was way off in his timeline. NPR almost fully lost me back when Obama did the DACA executive order. Every story NPR did about it was some version of "listen to this sob story about a kid who isn't going to go to Harvard if DACA is struck down by the courts." Certainly those stories were real and heartbreaking in a way, but you never heard them run a story about the wife beaters and tax evaders who came here illegally with their parents as children (and of course I'm not saying those types of people are representative of the population either...just that they never even tried to be balanced). I thought their coverage was a great disservice to the country by not focusing on the legal merits but rather on the human interest. It was so blatantly biased that I see that as the point in my life where the liberal media bubble was popped for me. It (DACA) is probably one of the major starting points for Trump's political career, so it's ironic that Berliner sees their Trump coverage as the beginning of the end. NPR-level liberal bullshit is why he exists as a political player, IMO.

Nothing brings people out of the woodwork like self-reflection. At this point, I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference. The traffic has slowed to a crawl, so I'm not sure whatever choice you make is going to get a lot of support or pushback. It's basically a half dozen of us reverberating ideas into a large echo-y cave at this point.

The mistake everyone is making is the assumption that the Roberts court is attempting to set precedent.

I'm not as sure as you are about that for two reasons. Firstly, they could have decided the case narrowly to simply say that Trump is immune. They didn't. They said The President is immune for any official act, then went on to define "official" so broadly as to make almost anything official in some conceivable way. And secondly, this dumb fucking "unitary executive" hypothesis has been kicking around for decades. Nixon himself wasn't the one who first opined that when the president does it, it's not illegal.

Largely, however, I agree with you that Roberts has gone out of his way to try to twist himself in knots to sound intellectual while basically holding the party line to the greatest extent possible. I think he'll go down as a great villain of 21 c. America. You expect that out of the other lackeys, but he tries to position himself as above the fray, and he's not fooling many people.

He doesn't have dementia. He has age related cognitive decline, which isn't great either. I think he's going to last in the race until the first set of high quality, post-debate opinion polls come out. I think this actually might be a best case scenario for America. The behind-the-scenes fight right now should be Witmer v. Josh Shapiro, with no other serious contenders. Both upper midwest pragmatist governors who are very popular in relatively evenly dem-gop split states. Either would be formidable, assuming it's not too late to mount a serious campaign. I think Trump is more like America's Maduro--stupid and incompetent but with an authoritarian's disposition. But I don't like gambling America's future on a guy who probably isn't fit to be president now, let alone 4 years from now, when the vanquishment of America's Maduro is there for the taking with the right candidate.

As in , do I think Whitmer would be a better candidate than Biden? I mean, I think marshmallows taste better than an old shoe. But I also think that an old shoe is what's for dinner, and that beats the shit out of cyanide. Whitmer will be a candidate in 2028, but I think it's engaging in wishful thinking to think there isn't a 98% chance Biden is the candidate, with a 2% chance that Harris is should Biden suffer some sort of medical emergency. I don't have the slightest clue how you'd dump her. Whitmer is great, and has done a very good job as the chief executive of my fair state, but we don't live at the end of the rainbow.

I'm talking about much smaller things than that. For example, overestimating the chances of harm from an MMR vaccine vs. underestimating the harm from texting while driving. Or never letting your kids go to the park by themselves vs. virtually unfettered access to digital devices. There's a whole mixed up world perceived vs. real harms. Maybe KB is correct that we've always been bad at risk assessment, but my sense is that the way in which were bad at his has morphed into something that looks like the tragedy of the commons on steroids.

Certainly in that environment it's a lot easier for bad actors to exploit people's fears for whatever gain they get out of it. But also a lot of leadership in this country has scored some nasty own goals since the pandemic that are inexcusable. There's a good line in a thing I posted this morning about suicides in the army where a soldier says how fucked up it is that the army preaches sacrificing the individual for the collective but then still fails the collective. I'm not into making predictions, but one I'm fairly certain of is that we're going to continue to experience a leadership gap for at least another 4 years and change.

On a more serious note, I think what covid exposed is that many decades of a fat and happy society have made it virtually impossible for the average person to assess risk. In a way, that's a good problem, because it points to the fact that things are safer now than they ever have been in the history of the world. But it has the giant downside of every tiny risk being perceived as existential.

Good luck, man. You have the will power to do whatever you want to do.

I didn’t say admirable. I said it’s “nice” to read an articulate human trying to mount a defense of policies I fundamentally disagree with. Frankly, the tariff thing, when articulated in this way, makes him sound like a left wing unionist, which is surprising. I truly believe that it’s in all of our best interests to try to understand positions we disagree with, and to me, there just aren’t ideas that are too dangerous to talk about. Trump articulates literally nothing, and neither do the Bannons and Millers of the world, so I thought it was very insightful to finally find an individual trying to make a case.

Would be awesome to see him try to order ice cream from the moderator though.

Looking forward to an adventurous 2024. I have a day job, but what I'm really interested in is a drug discovery company that I started on the side. In 2023 I hired a postdoc, and we've been working tirelessly to optimize a drug screening assay. On the downside, I was recently told by NSF that they're not going to fund a grant I applied for. It was disappointing news but not devastating. On the upside, our assay is running really well, and we're generating data every day at this point, which is wild. Wasn't 100% sure we'd get there with all the trouble it put us through. But that's science. Solve problem 1. Solve problem 2. Keep going until problem 300 is solved and you're in business. Big shoutout to kleinbl00 for recommending just trawling Indeed for resumes, as that's where I found my postdoc and I would be exactly nowhere without her. Money will quickly become an issue later this year, but I'm hopeful I can convince some investors that what we're doing is worthwhile. Wish me luck. It's quixotic, but the payoff in terms of how many people I think I can help keeps me excited to do the work every day.

Had an inflection point in my side business this week, as we started phase 2 of our drug discovery program (and actually started getting some hits!). I'm itching to get away from my day job, but that wholly depends on some additional funding coming through. Have some irons in that fire, but nothing solid yet. The biotech funding situation is shaky right now anyway, so there's no harm in biding my time while I can. Either way it's exciting, and I'm getting closer and closer of realizing what seemed like a pipe dream until very recently.

I've flipped out on multiple family members, including my own wife, for posting pictures of my kids on whatever site (not for money or "influence", whateverthefuck that is, but just for sharing). I know it's de rigeuer in today's world, but I feel like we don't let kids get tattoos, because tattoos are forever. Well the internet is forever, too, right? It's really shitty to let a kid do that to themselves, let alone to make that choice for them.

It's above my head, but at least they propose a practical (if not currently practicable) experiment, which is better than any string theorist has ever done.

Listening to Sly and the Family Stone today it kind of dawned on me that while we live today in the most politically tumultuous time since the 60s, we just don't have the cultural transformation now that they had then. The turmoil then was accompanied by an explosion of transformative art. Today it's almost the opposite. Everything smacks of such sameness. Not sure that's if that's meaningful or not, but it's something to think about more.

That definitely means your chances of sticking with it are a lot higher. Or if you don't it will also be on your own terms after you've cleared your head. I'm a tinge hungover myself today and will be tomorrow, too (hockey). It's rough at my age to be sure.

Real milestone yesterday, as my company had its first employee start. It's a big investment for me, but one I think will pay off. I feel good about it. She was already giving suggestions on improving the assays I'm running. New experience for me navigating all of the legal and administrative side of things...which agencies to register with, how to do payroll, where the hell to buy health insurance. If I can raise more money, I'm definitely making an administrative assistant my next hire!

Spent last weekend at Sphere. Definitely lives up to the hype.

Or he is. Which is also scary.

Seems to be so many instances where these tech guys watch/read sci-fi and identify completely with the bad guys. Fury Road in this case, I guess.

I'm in total agreement with Marcus on this one. The authors' misapplied statistics notwithstanding, I am a qualified expert on designing biologic assays, and I have used GPT-4 very successfully to help design a couple assays. My experience has been that it is a really good crutch for that sort of work, insofar as it can point you in the right direction. It can't point you to papers, but it can help you refine search terms which can then be brought to PubMed or another database as a refiner. All that said, the things that GPT has helped me with are things I could have done without it, but it sped the process up dramatically. It stands to reason that similar would be true for any arbitrary assay design.

As for the abused stats in the paper, my guess is that it was intentional, and that Marcus is giving them too much benefit of the doubt by saying it was probably someone who doesn't know what they're doing. If it were biologists I'd buy it. But these are math nerds who likely know very well what a Bonferroni correction is and how it's meant to be used. Bonferroni is one of the strictest post hoc correction methods. It's meant to weed out all but the most robust results. There are other less severe methods that are just as common, so the choice to use a strict methods has the air of deceitfulness. As in, it would make a lot of sense to use the strictest statistical methods if what you were doing was trying to prove a point and not just following the data.

Not really worth a post of its own, but Bolton out here railing against a second Trump term is the best broken-clock-right-twice argument I've seen in a long time.

My wedding took place under a massive banyan tree in Lahaina, Maui. It was sort of a symbol of permanence and might, given that it was 140 years old and like an entire city block wide. Guess it's a joke to think of anything as permanent. I visit Maui most years, so I guess this year instead of going I'll be looking for a good relief group to give my would-be tourist bucks to.

Polling has really wide margins of error at this early stage. I think people are likelier to say challenger over incumbent the farther from the vote you actually are. And in this case, it's probably more pronounced, because you know Uncle Joe is going to hammer J6 footage on TV ads until our eyes bleed. Mitt Romney had a lead in MI in early polls in 2012 and lost by like 9 points. Trump will fade. He may be more senile than Biden, and that will become more clear the more people have to actually watch him. He can't even keep Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi straight anymore. The Big Mac gunk is degrading his synapses by the day, and I don't think 50% of people are that stupid no matter how little they think of Biden. Call me an optimist. I've been wrong a lot.

An incumbent candidate whom the majority of his party views as the victim of a stolen election mustered 51% of primary votes in mutherfucking Iowa.

I think it's worse than that. There were like 110,000 voters out of 700,000 registered republicans in the state. So that 110,000 represents the most die hard republicans. Caucuses do not represent a valid statistical sample. So if anything, I think that his numbers are worse than the early indications. This is a very far cry from 2020 when they literally made their entire platform "MAGA, bitches!" The NH result was probably even worse, given that Haley won over 60% of independents. Biden may be unpopular generally, but there's no way those independents split more than 50% for Trump in the general. I think the pollsters say he needs 90+% of GOP voters and more than half of independents to have a realistic shot of winning. IA and NH seem to be really dim for the Trump campaign, despite all the catastrophizing from NYT today.

Without getting into the technical details of the work I do, I have a certain amount of expertise in sex hormones, at least as they relate to the brain. One curious aspect of SSRIs that is not paid nearly enough attention to is that one of the ways in which they work is to increase a certain hormone called allopregnaolone, whose primary function in the brain is to make receptors for the neurotransmitter GABA much more sensitive. Curiously, Prozac, e.g., causes this change at about 10x lower of a dose than what the typical starting clinical dose is. However, the typical response to drugs not working is to increase dosage. My opinion is that people are generally already far overdosed and that docs should start way lower than they normally do. I, obviously, have no idea what your history is and I wouldn’t in a million years pretend to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. However, what I will say, and what I say to anyone on your shoes, is that if you ever choose to do SSRIs again, start small and give it time. Your doctor will push back. Don’t let them. Happy to share more if you’re interested and also happy to butt out.