Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Big Tech's stealth push to influence the Biden administration

  The Biden transition team has already stacked its agency review teams with more tech executives than tech critics. It has also added to its staff several officials from Big Tech companies, which emerged as top donors to the campaign.
  ...
  For example, Google's former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, a billionaire who is a Silicon Valley titan, has been making personnel recommendations for appointments to the Department of Defense - as the company tries to pursue military contracts and defense work, according to three sources.

• "A Loaded Weapon": Francis Fukuyama on the Political Power of Digital Platforms

  While many reports have proposed antitrust remedies to some of these harms, the Stanford report advocates for a "middleware" solution, in which platforms open their APIs to third-party companies that would offer users ways to choose how information on the platforms is filtered for them. It also advocates for the creation of a digital agency with the power to oversee these markets.
  ...
  These platforms control a great deal of the political speech that happens in the United States. They can amplify certain messages; they can suppress others; they can subtly guide people to certain views.

• Swiss Crypto AG spying scandal shakes reputation for neutrality

  For decades, US and German intelligence used this Swiss company's encoding devices to spy on other countries, and the revelations this week have provoked outrage. From the Cold War into the 2000s, Crypto AG sold the devices to more than 120 governments worldwide. The machines were encrypted but it emerged this week that the CIA and Germany's BND had rigged the devices so they could crack the codes and intercept thousands of messages.

  It is also a country that sold flawed encryption machines, bearing that Made in Switzerland label, to Iran, so that Washington could eavesdrop.

• Peter Beinart on (Jewish) Loyalty

  Answering that question requires understanding the perverse way in which charges of anti-Semitism often function in the contemporary American debate over Israel. Frequently, they serve not to combat bigotry but to excuse it. In the West Bank, which Israel controls, millions of Palestinians live alongside hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Jews enjoy citizenship, free movement, due process and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. The Palestinians enjoy none of these rights. (Defenders of the Israeli government sometimes claim that West Bank Palestinians actually live under the control of the Palestinian Authority. But the PA is not a government; it is Israel's subcontractor. When PA officials do things Israel doesn't like, Israel arrests them).

• How Bad Is It? Elite Influence and the Perceived Seriousness of the Coronavirus Pandemic

  In spite of its immense global impact, Republicans and Democrats disagree on how serious a problem the coronavirus pandemic is. One likely reason is the political elites to whom partisans listen. As a means of shoring up support, President Trump has largely downplayed and but sometimes hyped the severity of the virus's toll on American lives. Do these messages influence the perceived seriousness of the virus, how the president is evaluated as well as support for and compliance with social distancing guidelines? Results suggest that Republican identifiers had already crystallized their views on the virus's seriousness, the president's performance, and social distancing policies and behaviors. Unexpectedly, information critical of President Trump's policy decisions produced a backlash causing people to show less concern about the virus's death toll and rate the president's performance even more highly.

• Billionaires Build

  Paul Graham, Y Combinator

  What YC looks for, above all, is founders who understand some group of users and can make what they want. This is so important that it's YC's motto: "Make something people want."
  ...
  Which means the conversation during your YC interview will have to be about something new: either a new need, or a new way to satisfy one. And not just new, but uncertain. If it were certain that the need existed and that you could satisfy it, that certainty would be reflected in large and rapidly growing revenues, and you wouldn't be seeking seed funding.

• Why are some scientists turning away from brain scans?

  In 2009, a group of scientists investigated papers that had linked individual differences in brain activity to various personality types. They found many used a type of analysis that reported only the strongest correlations, leading to potentially coincidental conclusions. A "disturbingly large" amount of fMRI research on emotion and personality relied on these "seriously defective research methods," the group wrote.
  ...
  This year, Stanford University researchers described what happened when they gave the same fMRI data to 70 groups of independent neuroscientists. No two teams used the same analysis methods and, overall, the researchers did not always come to the same conclusions about what the data demonstrated about brain activity.

• The secret to longevity? 4-minute bursts of intense exercise may help

  The study, one of the largest and longest-term experimental examinations to date of exercise and mortality, shows that older men and women who exercise in almost any fashion are relatively unlikely to die prematurely. But if some of that exercise is intense, the study also finds, the risk of early mortality declines even more, and the quality of people’s lives climbs.

• Two articles about Alzheimer's:
  • Biomarker of Alzheimer's found to be regulated by sleep cycles

    Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) in St. Louis have spent some years investigating the links between circadian rhythm and Alzheimer's, and have recently been making some real inroads. Following a 2018 study demonstrating how disrupted sleep can accelerate the buildup of toxic plaques associated with the disease, the team has now identified a protein implicated in the progression of the disease that appears highly regulated by the circadian rhythm, helping them join the dots and providing a potential new therapeutic target.

  • Financial Presentation of Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD)

    Findings In this cohort study of 81 364 Medicare beneficiaries living in single-person households, those with ADRD were more likely to miss bill payments up to 6 years prior to diagnosis and started to develop subprime credit scores 2.5 years prior to diagnosis compared with those never diagnosed. These negative financial outcomes persisted after ADRD diagnosis, accounted for 10% to 15% of missed payments in our sample, and were more prevalent in census tracts with less college education.

• On The Exciting Subject Of Earwax And Unsupported Medical Arguments

  Disclaimer: I am not a doctor; even if I'm 100% right in my argument and you are 100% convinced by it, you shouldn't listen to me over actual doctors; it's a bad habit that might actually kill you.

  So after all this we are left nothing; there's no study I can find, anywhere, which comes close to providing anything resembling strong evidence that cleaning your ears with cotton tipped swabs also blocks them.

Some thoughts related to the recent Presidential election.

• Brace yourselves. The next Donald Trump could be much worse

  If Biden governs as an establishment Democrat, it won't be long before the US elects another, far more effective Donald Trump.

  Trump was not just a product of latent racism and sexism. The economic hypocrisy of recent Democratic administrations alienated part of the Democrats' traditional blue-collar voting base, not to mention the millions of unaffiliated voters who simply opted not to vote for either Clinton or Trump in 2016. It's these voters, not the wealthy suburbanites which many in the party's establishment cater to, that still hold the keys to American politics. Biden won simply because of how unpopular Trump is. Democrats will need to offer Americans something different - a type of politics that can activate irregular working-class voters and deliver on bread-and-butter economic issues - if they're to create a stable and responsive government.

• Trump should have lost in a landslide. The fact that he didn't speaks volumes

  Blaming the voters simply will not do. This is a failure of leadership. Those responsible for it need to be held accountable.

  We know how Democrats can win again. Thomas Frank, in his vital book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? that offers something meaningful to working people. We know that voting Republican is no indication that voters actually want the agenda the Republican party will pursue in office. Fox News polling indicates voters want universal healthcare, abortion rights and a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. Florida voters, even as they selected Donald Trump, also opted to increase the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour. The Democrats do not need to propose insipid half-measures when the data indicates that the public are fully on board with a progressive agenda.

• Stacey Abrams: The woman behind Biden's biggest surprise

  Kamala Harris will make history when she becomes vice-president in January - but another black woman played a pivotal role helping the Biden-Harris ticket win the White House.

• The Big Lessons From History

  Morgan Housel

  How do people think about risk? How do they react to surprise? What motivates them, and causes them to be overconfident, or too pessimistic? Those broad lessons are important because we know they'll be relevant in the future. They'll apply to nearly everyone, and in many fields. The same rule of thumb works in the other direction: the broader the lesson, the more useful it is for the future.

  • Lesson #1: Calm plants the seeds of crazy.
  • Lesson #2: Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist.
  • Lesson #3: People believe what they want to believe, see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear.
  • Lesson #4: Important things rarely have one cause.
  • Lesson #5: Risk is what you don't see.