Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Who likes to be alone? Not introverts, according to a new paper on personality and the experience of solitude

  In fact, there was no evidence that introverts enjoyed solitude more than extraverts. Rather, the most important trait related to liking one's own company was having strong "dispositional autonomy". This is a concept from self-determination theory and the researchers, led by Thuy-vy T. Nguyen at the University of Rochester, said that people strong in this trait have alignment between their behaviour, values and interests, are "resistant to pressure from others", and "are interested in learning more about their personal experiences and emotions". High scorers in autonomy enjoyed solitude more than others and sought it out for its own sake.
  ...
  Savouring solitude seems to be more associated with being the kind of person who feels free and in control of their life and who finds pleasure in reflecting on their inner experiences - and among both introverts and extraverts there will be those who do and do not fit this description.

• An Interview With Robin Hanson, the Sex Redistribution Professor

  Many people say explicitly that not having sex is a big thing. And that sounds plausible to me of course because I've sometimes had less than at other times. And that was a big thing for me. And of course, sex is a huge part of literature and common conversation. So it's obviously a big thing to people. One question is how big, perhaps. But note, for the structure of my argument, I don't need to claim that sex is as important or more important than income. I just need to say that it's in the ballpark, comparable. That it's the sort of thing you might consider. So you don't actually have to choose between dealing with income inequality and sex inequality. You could be trying to deal with both, even if one is smaller than the other. To me the interesting point is that many people are all over and into income redistribution. And those people seem hostile to the idea of sex redistribution. And on the other side, the people interested in sex redistribution don't seem to be very interested in income redistribution. And that's an interesting phenomenon and puzzle.

• How fascism works

  A Yale philosopher (Jason Stanley) on fascism, truth, and Donald Trump.

  Freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth
  ...
  Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn't the world around them - it's the leader.
  ...
  Again, I wouldn't claim - not yet, at least - that Trump is presiding over a fascist government, but he is very clearly using fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions, and that's very troubling.

• Revolving doors and regulatory capture

  When public sector employees end up working for the private firms which they monitored, regulated, and even disciplined, a clear conflict of interest arises. However, little is known about the the scale and scope of this 'revolving door' problem. This column presents evidence from patent examiners employed by the US Patent and Trademark Office, and shows that examiners grant considerably more patents to the firms that ultimately hire them, and that the most likely explanation is that examiners are 'captured'. This leniency lowers the quality of patents coming out of the agency.

• The rise of YouTube's reactionary right

  How demographic change and YouTube's algorithms are building a new right.

  I think most of this rant about guilt by association is nonsense, but check it out if you want to know Ezra Klein's view of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). For the Rebecca Lewis report mentioned see Alternative Influence.

• Sam Harris vs. Jordan Peterson: The Vancouver Debates Decoded

  Night 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jey_CzIOfYE
  Night 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRJ91lVQyRA&t=1889s
  

  Each debate is over 2 hour long. They discussed topics including meaning, the value and limits of reason, the utility of religion, and the nature of truth. IMO this is a good summary which can save you time and effort.

  • Harris believes that you can derive values from facts. He thinks we can use reason to inform morality. To do this, he argues that we can arrive at notions of good or bad, better or worse, simply with the facts at hand. This is a pragmatic definition, not an ultimate truth or an axiom of the universe. It is a practical truth given what we know now about consciousness and the universe at this moment.
    ...
    
  • Peterson disagrees with Sam, saying that there is no way to connect facts and values. He sees that there are an infinite number of facts to choose from, and therefore an infinite way of interpreting those facts. Ergo, there is an infinite range of values to choose from. He believes that it is therefore impossible to anchor values with facts.
    ...
    

Various web links related to health issues.

• Vitamin D, the Sunshine Supplement, Has Shadowy Money Behind It

  The doctor most responsible for creating a billion-dollar juggernaut has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the vitamin D industry.

  Dr. Holick's role in drafting national vitamin D guidelines, and the embrace of his message by mainstream doctors and wellness gurus alike, have helped push supplement sales to $936 million in 2017. That's a ninefold increase over the previous decade. Lab tests for vitamin D deficiency have spiked, too: Doctors ordered more than 10 million for Medicare patients in 2016, up 547 percent since 2007, at a cost of $365 million. But few of the Americans swept up in the vitamin D craze are likely aware that the industry has sent a lot of money Dr. Holick's way. A Kaiser Health News investigation for The New York Times found that he has used his prominent position in the medical community to promote practices that financially benefit corporations that have given him hundreds of thousands of dollars -- including drug makers, the indoor tanning industry and one of the country's largest commercial labs.
  ...
  In an interview, Dr. Holick acknowledged he has worked as a consultant to Quest Diagnostics, which performs vitamin D tests, since 1979. Dr. Holick, 72, said that industry funding "doesn't influence me in terms of talking about the health benefits of vitamin D." There is no question that the hormone is important. Without enough of it, bones can become thin, brittle and misshapen, causing a condition called rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. The issue is how much vitamin D is healthy, and what level constitutes deficiency.

• Sorry, But So Far War on Cancer Has Been a Bust

  But the overall death rate for cancer-adjusted for the aging of the U.S. population-has fallen by only five percent since 1950, Kolata points out. During this same period, the death rate for heart disease plummeted 64 percent and for flu and pneumonia 58 percent.
  ...
  "The much touted recent drops in some cancer rates," she (Kolata) writes, "were mostly attributable not to cancer breakthroughs but to a decline in smoking that began decades ago--propelled, in part, by federal antismoking campaigns that began in the 1960s."
  ...
  Spector explains: "First, if one discovers a malignant tumor very early and starts therapy immediately, even if the therapy is worthless, it will appear that the patient lives longer than a second patient (with an identical tumor) treated with another worthless drug if the cancer in the second patient was detected later."

• Infectious Theory Of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

  Tanzi believes that in many cases of Alzheimer's, microbes are probably the initial seed that sets off a toxic tumble of molecular dominoes. Early in the disease amyloid protein builds up to fight infection, yet too much of the protein begins to impair function of neurons in the brain. The excess amyloid then causes another protein, called tau, to form tangles, which further harm brain cells.

  But as Tanzi explains, the ultimate neurological insult in Alzheimer's is the body's reaction to this neurotoxic mess. All the excess protein revs up the immune system, causing inflammation - and it's this inflammation that does the most damage to the Alzheimer's-afflicted brain.

• For Some People, Taking Probiotics May Actually Harm Normal Gut Bacteria

  They also found that people who take probiotics after antibiotic therapy-a common practice meant to help restock the gut with healthy bacteria-aren't necessarily better off, either. Rather than speed up the process, people using probiotics actually took longer to have their microbiome return to normal than did people who took nothing at all, sometimes as long as five months after they stopped taking them.
  ...
  "However, our studies do demonstrate in a very direct way that probiotic effects in healthy conditions are personalized and transient at best, and if you take a probiotic that you buy at your local supermarket, you have no way of knowing whether it would pass from one end to the other or colonize your gut, where it may (or may not) induce health effects," he said.

• Is one drink per day really unsafe? That new alcohol study, explained.

  A Lancet study shows everything that's wrong with nutritional epidemiology, and the way we talk about it.

  "But while the paper is so nice and so useful [at estimating alcohol's disease burden]," Stanford meta-researcher John Ioannidis told me, "at the last moment it destroys everything." Instead of focusing on the message about the dangers of excessive drinking, "it focuses on making a claim that no alcohol use is safe."

  Not only did the data in the paper not support a zero drinks recommendation, but the authors were also guilty of doing what too many nutrition researchers do: They used definitive, causal language to talk about studies that are only correlational. That's something Ioannidis, a longtime critic of nutrition science, recently called out as a major source of confusion for the public. In a new paper, he argues that the field of nutritional epidemiology is in need of radical reform.

  Here's a description of the study they are criticizing: No healthy level of alcohol consumption, says major study.
• Low-carb diets could shorten life, study suggests

  But a US study over 25 years indicates that moderate carb consumption - or switching meat for plant-based protein and fats - is healthier. The study relied on people remembering the amount of carbohydrates they ate.
  ...
  However, there are limitations to the study. ... The findings show observational associations rather than cause-and-effect and what people ate was based on self-reported data, which might not be accurate. ... And the authors acknowledge that since diets were measured only at the start of the trial and six years later, dietary patterns could have changed over the subsequent 19 years.

  IMO, this is one of those non-reproducible results that should never have been published.

• What I learned about weight loss from spending a day inside a metabolic chamber

  One of science's best tools for understanding obesity is debunking myths about metabolism.

  The big theme in many of these studies: Our metabolism silently shifts under new conditions and environments in ways we're not usually aware of.

  When it comes to diets, the researchers have also debunked the notion that bodies burn more body fat while on a high-fat and low-carb ketogenic diet, compared to a higher-carb diet, despite all the hype.
  ...
  Research from the chamber won't alleviate these socioeconomic drivers of obesity. But a better understanding of human physiology and metabolism - with the help of the chamber - might level the playing field through the discovery of effective treatments. As Lex Kravitz, an NIH neuroscientist and obesity researcher, told me, "Even if a slow metabolism isn't the reason people become obese, it may still be a place to intervene for weight loss." The same goes for the other common illnesses - diabetes, cardiovascular disease - linked to extra weight.