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.
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.
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.
Help me out, everyone. Where do you go looking for employees in this day and age? I've recently started a small biotech firm, and I'm thinking of hiring a tech. I have the money, and don't have the time to do all the work on my own. But I can't use LinkedIn, because my firm is still kept secret from my "real" job. I was thinking of calling the local universities and just asking some profs I know if they have any recent grads with biology research experience looking for an entry level position? Reasonable? No bad ideas here.
Had a fun experience with a go-around on a flight today. Kind of unsettling when the wheels touch down the the pilot hits the gas instead of the brake.
I'm sorta pissed off about this whole lab leak thing bubbling to the surface again. To me it was a mathematical certainty at almost the dawn of the pandemic that it was clearly a leak. People who I'm close with told me I sounded like a racist conspiracy theorist when all I was doing was making a statistical argument about how many coincidences would have to align to make it not true. I guess that's the nature of the pile-on mentality...people believe what their in group believes without respect to consideration of a fact set that differs from their assumptions in any way. You and I and everyone else are guilty of it in certain contexts, but you'd hope that scientists could rise above it in the name of science. But that's naive too. What was it that Planck said? Something like no one ever changes their beliefs in response to new data; the old people just eventually die. Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's annoying that we have to wait for Trump to be out of office for two entire years before we're allowed to use logic. Someone can be right for the wrong reasons, but agreeing with that person doesn't mean you agree with them about everything. There shouldn't be guilt by association.
Did anyone else besides me notice that am_Unition's account is active again?
Thoughts on the debt cancellation, anyone? I'm super confused as to how they arrived at the $125,000 number, and why it isn't scaled to a cutoff. If I make $125,001, do I not qualify? What if I get married real quick to qualify for the $250,000? What if I'm a physician in residency and I make $60k, but I'm going to make $300,000 next year? What if I'm enrolling in college this year at a $50k/yr university? All-in-all I think this is moronic at best. Just change the law to make student loan dischargeable in bankruptcy court and get on with it.
Just hurl the counter weight into the side of the structure. It's armored. I was already pretty sure they had thought of everything, so it's nice to see my suspicion confirmed.
There’s a general and a specific response I have to you. The specific: W got re-elected largely by pushing a wave of anti gay marriage state constitution amendments in 2004 that brought the creeps out to vote. DOMA had passed Congress with veto-proof majorities a mere 8 years previous and was signed into law by Clinton. Not even Obama thought gay marriage was a good idea until Sleepy Joe forced him to say so. The backlash was swift and punishing against the bigots. People like me who has never really even thought about the issue before were suddenly steadfastly opposers to any and all politicians who were anti-gay bigots, and a mere two election cycles after W’s reelection, Obergefel (sp?) was the law of the land. My point is that they can awaken beasts they want no part of awakening. It has happened before and will happen again. We’ve never seen the Court strip away a previously granted right. We’re in uncharted waters and it may get ugly, but the side of humanism will win. The general: “This time is different” has been the refrain since the day Jesus emerged from behind the rock and promised to return. Malthusian thinking is not new and is also perpetual. Eventually there will come a day when this time will, in fact, be different. But every generation thinks that time is now and has so since the beginning of time. I am, admittedly, a betting man, and I like betting on solid favorites. Takes a lot for me to take an underdog. The reason is that everyone wants an underdog to win and everyone thinks he’s smarter than the market, so the value is usually on the favorite. Same here. We have a cognitive bias toward the here and now, but past is prologue, and there’s no actual reason to suspect this time is different. We’ve come a long way in a short period of time with respect to individual rights and respect for each other. In the 90s when I went to high school “fag” was the #1 insult and “nigger” wasn’t exactly rare. As a result there were like 2 openly gay people in my 2500 person high school. That was <25 years ago. Try to see the forest for the trees. This is a backlash. And it hurts and it sucks. No doubt. And it’s going to affect a lot of innocent people. But the arc of history is bending toward Justice at an incredible pace.
It's a tragedy that your parents haven't ever and apparently cannot give you any credit for developing, with little help, into the person you are. I know this is of probably immeasurably small consolation, but I'm a really fucking smart and creative scientist, and I stand in slack-jawed awe of some of the the shit you come up with. Fuck your parents if they can't recognize that.
Your governor's brilliant speech in which he reminded everyone that "things could have been worse" I'm sure was a big comfort to all, especially the family who lost two kids instead of one.
NYT had a 30% chance of Don winning the 2016 election. 30% is far from outlandish. It's actually pretty likely. One thing I've found interesting in this saga is the extent to which the administration has kept the public informed on the latest intelligence, then seeing the predictions come to pass in real time. I don't remember the last time that happened.
Buddy of mine died of covid the other day. Not a close friend, but an old friend, and a guy I liked and respected. Early fifties, no known underlying health conditions, but of course unvaccinated. He wasn't particularly republican or anything, just a macho dude who I guess thought it wasn't a big deal or something...really don't know. Besides sadness you sort of feel anger, because it's just so avoidable. My wife was a lot closer with him than I was, so she's going to the funeral tomorrow. The invite asked that everyone please wear a mask at all times independent of vaccination status. Really tough way to learn a lesson.
One party rule always devolves into a race to see who is the most pious. Show Trials were a great example of how that works practically. Those who haven't read up on them may not be aware that only the truest, most prominent communists who fell from grace got a Show Trial. At the trial the person always read a script denouncing themselves as reactionary, or some variation thereof. Part of America's problem is that we lack true two party rule. Due to geographic sorting, gerrymandering, etc, we have a de facto dual one party system. So it leads to everyone in Oklahoma out-Trumping each other, and everyone in Seattle confessing their eternal sin of whiteness. In places like where I live (Michigan), it's scarcely better, it's just more local, since we don't have a state-wide consensus. Ideological purity is not a virtue and never will be. I've literally been called a bigot on this very site for expressing the opinion that compromise isn't bad per se. That's the state of play these days. If you can't outflank the guys on your own side, then you're the enemy.
One aspect here that I've yet to think through is that it's a weird company insofar as it's small and entirely populated by seasoned veterans of the field who are mostly in their 50s and 60s, and then there's me, the young(ish--compared to them), inexperienced newcomer. I know she likes me, and I know she thinks I'm decent at what I do, so I want to think she think she's trying to mentor me in a way. But I think she's just not good at it. Anyway, I appreciate the advice. No one does it better than you.
I think it's ridiculous. It appears as if all the cases are limited to child-bearing age females on birth control who also suffer from thrombocytopenia. That is a really specific set. I would have much preferred to see them temporarily contraindicate the vaccine for women on birth control while they investigate. My fear is that people already thought this was a "second class" vaccine, and now there's going to be a needless safety stigma. Not handled well, in my opinion.
My close friend also got J&J and had a 102 fever and all the nastiness that accompanies that for almost an entire 24 hours. Pretty bad, but also pretty typical. So far the worst side effect I've seen was a colleague got facial paralysis for a couple days after the Pfizer vaccine. I had Pfizer and had nothing but minor arm soreness.
Yesterday I finally changed my mind. I thought we should let Trump be gone and forgotten after he leaves office. I now think he and any enablers of this action, including police who let it happen, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This can't be tolerated. I also think any senator who kept up the charade after Congress reconvened in the evening should be expelled.
To me, this is what it looks like, and this is why I'm very hard to convince otherwise: Someone calls the police to report shots fired. They show up to the scene, and I'm holding a smoking gun, my hands flecked with burnt powder. You lay on the ground, a bullet matching the caliber and rifling of my gun having felled you. [My occupation happens to be gunsmith who specializes in making guns extra powerful.] The police say to me, did you shoot this man? I reply, no, it was some dude from Atlanta; I bought my gun in Atlanta, and some guy must have gone to the exact same gun manufacturer to come here and kill him, but then he ran away before anyone saw who it was. But, they reply, the gun that was used to shoot him may have come from Atlanta, but yours is moded to shoot with an extreme muzzle velocity and this guy was clearly shot with a similar ballistic trajectory. Hmmm, I reply, I guess the guy in Atlanta must have taken the gun to be moded by someone who does the same type of work as me, and then that person gave it to someone else, who must be the real killer. That checks, the police say, but what about the powder on your hand and the smoke billowing from the muzzle? Well, easy: I was target practicing right next to him. But I couldn't be the real killer, because I target practice a lot, and I've never killed anyone before, so, you see, I couldn't have done it. Open and shut, they say: You're free to go, sir, sorry to have wasted your time. No problem, I say. Actually, I was worried it might have been me, but then I counted my bullets and they're all accounted for. Trust me, I was losing sleep. I can't imagine, they say, just before leaving.
This is a fantastically written piece. I think, importantly, it finally shed some light as they why the NIH (and Fauci in particular) seem so dead set against entertaining the possibility that the virus is lab made: because they would feel the weight of responsibility too closely. One of the things the article doesn't touch too much on is China's absolute obstructionism of investigations (though that has been written about extensively elsewhere). To me, this is some of the best circumstantial evidence of the virus's origins, because there's no shame in a naturally occurring virus. It's not as if they obstructed SARS investigations in 03. In fact, they signed a compact with other SE Asian countries to facilitate expedience in handling and investigating similar outbreaks. Personally, I have very little doubt about the lab hypothesis. There may be no direct evidence for either scenario, but there's two steps in one case, each of which are easy to describe and perform (i.e. creation and release). And there are a dozen hypothetical and vaguely described steps to the other case. Occam's razor couldn't be sharper here.
So far, they are the only two to release preliminary results, as far as I'm aware. I think it's just a matter of coincidence that they both have mRNA-based vaccines.
If it's true that the effectiveness rate is indeed 90% then probably they should stop the trial early and apply for authorization (this happens from time-to-time in medicine, although it's pretty rare, on the theory that it's unethical to continue to withhold a lifesaving treatment from the public)). However, what I mean by hype is that we have no idea about the details as far as strength of antibodies over time, potential side effects, subgroup analyses of different age and comorbid conditions (which I'm sure they powered for). These things are really important to understanding the full picture, and I don't think it's possible to get those details until the trial is complete. I'm very optimistic, as the stock market clearly is too, but we can't stop looking with a skeptical eye by the same token.
Obvious, but it works so well for this format.
Mike Lee is a constitutional scholar, believe it or not. There's a grain of truth in what he's saying, but he's being very disingenuous. Among the Framers were represented advocates of direct democracy, notably James WIlson, but direct democracy was rejected for fear of mob rule (or you know, just poor people getting power of any sort). I think he's right insofar as in the Declaration of Independence the stated reason for leaving the crown was that it had put undue burdens on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So, yes, I think he's correct in that those are the sacred cows of America. However, where he goes off the rails is that the Framers decided that the only way to protect those objectives was through popular sovereignty. So they all agreed that (A) popular sovereignty means that majority rule is the default, and (B) majority rules needs to be checked by hard limits on what laws could be passed. So they said, a simple majority can do X, a super majority is needed for Y, and a few things can't be changed under any circumstance (I suppose short of a whole new constitution). I think where Lee really loses me is when he goes on to say that these limits were put in place to hedge against power being put in the hands of a powerful few. WTF? The GOP is literally a minority party. They get fewer votes for the House, Senate, and President in almost every election. Who are the "few" to whom he is referring? It sure as shit isn't liberals.
This is literally the smartest observation I've ever read.
I think a lot of hard science is pretty bad, too. Maybe it isn't social science bad, but I'd say the majority of papers I review in biology are pure shit. Faked or fraudulent data notwithstanding, I think this has mainly to do with one very serious problem: pre-registration. If you want to do a clinical study, for example, you have to write down a priori the literal one thing you are going to measure. If you don't find a "significant" effect in that one single outcome measure, then your study "failed" (in the eyes of FDA). Full stop. For anyone who wants to do work in the US, clinicaltrials.gov is the registry that must be used (and a lot of studies in other countries use it, too). Unfortunately, there is no such registry for animal or in vitro work. What I do is manufacture experimental drug for brain injuries. I work with a number of other scientists who do work on animal disease models. Every time I initiate one of these studies with them, I say, "We should write a protocol and try to publish it, so that we have a de facto preregistration." I have never had anyone say yes. For the ones who've even heard of doing that, it's seen as a waste of time at best. The trouble is, of course, that a p-value means, essentially, the odds of your result occurring due to random chance. If you consider 5% odds to be acceptable, as is custom, then if you measure a bunch of stuff, you're almost guaranteed to have one fall into the "random chance" bin. If however, you've pre-specified what is is you're going to measure, then you have a conditional probability that says that the p-value reflects the "true" odds (i.e. what are the chances I observed X given that I was only looking for X?). I've never been involved with any type of social science research, so I don't know what their tradition of specifying outcome measures is, but I get the sense it's pretty dismal, given that this dude can read an abstract and tell you with better than even odds whether the study is going to be replicable.
Lil, I wish you and your family all the best. Things may not work out how you want them to, but they will work out. I am thinking of you. -Ben
Nice review--thanks, as always! Just to flesh out a couple points (since he was the single politician I paid any attention to, so I heard a number of long interviews he gave): His policy proposal was actually limited to US citizens 18 and over. When asked about it, he gave one of his worst answers I heard him give to any question, which was basically "mumble, mumble, fairness." It was obvious that he thought that every legal permanent resident in America should be eligible, but that his political staff convinced him to say "citizens" for the same reason you cite that changed to "freedom dividend". Personally, "freedom" aside, I think calling it a dividend is not just smart but semantically correct, if you believe we're all shareholders in America (a la popular sovereignty) and therefore should have some reward when America experiences a profit glut as we have for decades now. Second: He was the only candidate I've ever heard say "yes" when asked if he would accept a VP or a cabinet position were he not elected the nominee. The standard line is always supposed to be, "I'm focused on this race." He was very willing to all but admit that he was campaigning for secretary of something (treasury? labor? some new cabinet department?). I really respected that answer, because it was so honest. I also really appreciated the fact he almost always answered the question that was asked of him and did so as completely as he could, which is another non-politician move--no pivoting to the message you want to get out. I think the moment I became a Yang convert was when he cited the stat that more people are currently on disability than are actively looking for jobs (obviously not true anymore! but it will be again soon), then went on to try to say something smart about how to address that. He also wants to vastly reorganize the way we collect taxes, which to me is a game changer. I hope he's around a while. I very much regret not getting a chance to vote for him.So what Yang proposes, basically, is an economic safety net that is automatically and immediately available to every single human being in the United States. At least, I presume so as he never talks about immigration at all.
I still don't think he wanted to be president in 2020. I think he's got a much better grasp of the kabuki than I was giving him credit for. I think he ran for president in order to increase his access to other policy people. I think he's building a coalition for 2028.
First, thank you for this. It really is insightful! Second, Wait, what the fuck? Is he using his "originalism" to say that oversight isn't in the constitution and therefore the whole oversight game is wack? Or that no one really needs to be compelled to testify before committees for the specific purpose of drafting legislation? I'm really confused by this. It seems really far outside the mainstream even for him.Justice Thomas dissents, saying he doesn't think that Congress has the power to issue legislative subpoenas to a private individual, president or otherwise.