Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Biotech veterans and critics found new company to undercut drug prices
  • Venture capitalist Alexis Borisy, along with a team of biopharma veterans and critics, announced today they've founded a new company whose goal is to dramatically undercut the price of new medicines.
  • They're calling it EQRx, and it's starting with $200 million in series A financing from investors across biotech and Silicon Valley.
  • Their planned prices are a fraction of those of competitor medicines.

  EQRx will focus on medicines still protected by patents; Borisy and his team aren't planning to develop generic drugs or biosimilars (he calls the company's future drugs "equivalars"). He wouldn't name specific drugs they plan to undercut, but said the company will take aim at products introduced over about the last five years, or which will hit the market in the next five. The goal is to get 10 drugs approved over the next decade.

  And their planned prices? A fraction of those of competitor medicines, Borisy said -- about one-third to one-fifth of price tags now. He said it's possible because the industry's sky-high prices have left a lot of fat in the system. Cutting inefficiencies and focusing on areas where the biology is proven, Borisy said, will lead to a success rate of closer to one in two or three, versus the industry's current one in 10. And bringing lots of these "equivalars" to market, he said, will achieve the needed scale to be profitable.

• Why the foundations of physics have not progressed for 40 years

  Physicists face stagnation if they continue to treat the philosophy of science as a joke. Sabine Hossenfelder

  The consequence has been that experiments in the foundations of physics past the 1970s have only confirmed the already existing theories. None found evidence of anything beyond what we already know.
  ...
  And so, what we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There's math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn't mean this math describes reality.

• Wendt's strong claims about quantum consciousness

  But really -- in the end this just is not a plausible theory in my mind. I'm not ready to accept the ideas of quantum brains, quantum meanings, or quantum societies. The idea of entanglement has a specific meaning when it comes to electrons and photons; but metaphorical extension of the idea to pairs or groups of individuals seems like a stretch. I'm not persuaded that we are "walking wave functions" or that entanglement accounts for the workings of social institutions. The ideas of structures and meanings as entangled wave functions (individuals) strike me as entirely speculative, depending on granting the possibility that the brain itself is a single extended wave function. And this is a lot to grant.

  For an alternative view listen to Julia Galef's Rationally Speaking podcast interview:

  Keith Frankish on "Why consciousness is an illusion".

• How 'Quantum Cognition' Can Explain Humans' Irrational Behaviors

  An emerging theory takes principles from quantum physics and applies them to psychology.

  Enter "quantum cognition," a new theory which suggests that the mathematical principles behind quantum mechanics could be used to better understand another notoriously inexplicable area of study: human behavior.
  ...
  "It's interesting-when we say something is irrational in decision-making, it's because it's against what a classical probability-based decision model should predict," says Zheng Joyce Wang, an associate professor of communication at Ohio State University and a co-author on both papers. "But humans don't behave in that way."

  Also see, You're not irrational, you're just quantum probabilistic: Researchers explain human decision-making with physics theory

  "Whenever something comes up that isn't consistent with classical theories, we often label it as 'irrational.' But from the perspective of quantum cognition, some findings aren't irrational anymore. They're consistent with quantum theory-and with how people really behave."

• CFAR Participant Handbook

  Developing clear thinking for the sake of humanity's future from the
  Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR).
  

• The Economist as Scapegoat

  Russ Roberts castigates New York Times writer Binyamin Applebaum and others for blaming economists such as Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek for our economic problems.

• https://radicalxchange.org/

  RadicalxChange aims to build a clear, coherent, and sustainable alternative to capitalism that embraces markets, egalitarianism, community, and decentralization.

  • Challenging basic inherited institutions by building better ones
  • Increasing public knowledge about the emancipatory potential of new ideas in mechanism design
  • Evolving our vision from the bottom up, coexisting with and working within existing institutions, and building public good providers that benefit people and communities
• The browser wars are back, but it's different this time

  It's about privacy, not marketshare

  The mobile web is broken and unfettered tracking and data sharing have made visiting websites feel toxic, but since the ecosystem of websites and ad companies can't fix it through collective action, it falls on browser makers to use technological innovations to limit that surveillance, however each company that makes a browser is taking a different approach to creating those innovations, and everybody distrusts everybody else to act in the best interest of the web instead of the best interest of their employers' profits.

• S.T.O.P. - Surveillance Technology Oversight Project

  S.T.O.P. fights to end discriminatory surveillance. Our team challenges both individual misconduct and broader systemic failures. We craft policies that balance new technologies and age-old rights. And we educate impacted communities on how they can protect their rights.

• 5G Security

  Schneier on Security

  But keeping untrusted companies like Huawei out of Western infrastructure isn't enough to secure 5G. Neither is banning Chinese microchips, software, or programmers. Security vulnerabilities in the standards-the protocols and software for 5G-ensure that vulnerabilities will remain, regardless of who provides the hardware and software. These insecurities are a result of market forces that prioritize costs over security and of governments, including the United States, that want to preserve the option of surveillance in 5G networks. If the United States is serious about tackling the national security threats related to an insecure 5G network, it needs to rethink the extent to which it values corporate profits and government espionage over security.

• Blockchain Technology: What Is It Good for?

  Ultimately, blockchain technology is not a panacea, but it is a useful tool when the overhead is justified by the system's needs. A good place to start is by posing the following questions:

  • Does the system require shared governance?
  • Does the system require shared operation?
  If both answers to these questions are no, the overhead of blockchain technology is unnecessary. If both answers are yes, there is a good fit. If only one of the answers is yes-if only shared governance or shared operation is needed but not both-then two more questions should be considered:
  • Is it necessary to audit the system's provenance?
  • Is it necessary to prevent malicious data deletion?
  If auditability and data replication are critical, blockchain technology should be considered. This is because meaningful shared governance and operation require miners to audit the operations of others and to be able to recover data that a malicious miner might try to delete.

Some links related to financial and economic matters.

• Jobs, Jobs Everywhere, But Most of Them Kind of Suck

  Contrary to Andrew Yang's grim prophecies, automation is not rendering vast swathes of the public unemployable. What technology and trade have done, however, is displace millions of Americans from their middle-class jobs, and send them hurtling down the income ladder into less remunerative occupations. And while some dimensions of this development have inspired widespread political attention (if not meaningful political action), others have gone all but unmentioned. The plight of the downwardly mobile manufacturing worker is familiar to most Americans. But that of the displaced administrative assistant is less so. And yet, they are two sides of the same story: Since 2000, the U.S. economy has shed 2.9 million jobs in (disproportionately male) production occupations, and 2.1 million in (disproportionately female) administrative and office-support roles.

• Why The Stock Bull Is A Big Meh For Most Americans

  Interesting piece by the FT today that only one-third of Americans feel the benefits of the great bull market. Only 40 percent of the population realizes stocks are up for the year. These are tough numbers for a so-called "populist" president who claims the stock market bull as one of his greatest achievements and much of his base is not participating in the gains.

• The Great Inflation Delusion

  In my opinion, the central bankers are trying to fix problems that can't be fixed with ultra-easy monetary policies. They are trying to fight the four forces of deflation: Détente, Disruption, Debt, and Demographics.

  1. Détente. History shows that prices tend to rise rapidly during wartime and then to fall during peacetime.
  2. Disruption. Competitive markets facing worker shortages will tend to stimulate productivity via technological innovation.
  3. Debt. To avert another Great Depression, the central banks of the major industrial economies scrambled to flood the financial markets with credit. So far, their ultra-easy monetary policies have succeeded in offsetting the natural, peacetime forces of deflation.
  4. Demography. Economies with aging demographic trends are likely to grow more slowly and have less inflation.
  The 4Ds combined tend to weigh on economic growth and are inherently deflationary.

• Costs Are Spiraling Out of Control

  If we had to choose one "big picture" reason why the vast majority of households are losing ground, it would be: the costs of essentials are spiraling out of control. I've often covered the dynamics of stagnating income for the bottom 90%, and real-world inflation, i.e. a decline in purchasing power.

  But neither of these dynamics fully describes the relentless upward spiral of the cost basis of our economy, that is, the cost of big-ticket essentials: housing, education and healthcare.

• Economists are rethinking the numbers on inequality

  An academic disagreement has big real-world implications

  It is fiendishly complicated to calculate how much people earn in a year or the value of the assets under their control, and thus a country's level of income or wealth inequality. Some people fail to complete government surveys; others undercount income on their tax returns. And defining what counts as "income" is surprisingly difficult, as is valuing assets such as unquoted shares or artwork. Legions of academics, not to mention government officials and researchers in think-tanks, are devoted to unpicking these problems.
  ...
  The conventional wisdom to have emerged from these efforts revolves around four main points. First, over a period of four to five decades the incomes of the top 1% have soared. Second, the incomes of middle-earners have stagnated. Third, wages have barely risen even though productivity has done so, meaning that an increasing share of GDP has gone to investors in the form of interest, dividends and capital gains, rather than to labour in the form of wages. Fourth, the rich have reinvested the fruits of their success, such that inequality of wealth (ie, the stock of assets less liabilities such as mortgage debt) has risen, too.
  Each argument has always had its doubters. But they have grown in number as a series of new papers have called the existing estimates of inequality into question.
  ...
  But it is inequality in incomes after taxes and benefits that really conveys differences in living standards, and in which Messrs Auten and Splinter find little change. Some economists argue these figures are distorted by the inclusion of Medicaid. But it is hard to deny that the provision of free health care reduces inequality. The question is whether "non-cash benefits" should properly count as income.

• How Renaissance Technologies' James Simons Transformed Finance

  Gregory Zuckerman discusses his new book, The Man Who Solved the Market, and how James Simons became one of the most successful investors in history.