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'
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.
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'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
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?"