Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Colonoscopies are the first-line method for preventing colorectal cancer in America -- and almost nowhere else. But do they work? We finally have a comprehensive trial, but it's left gastroenterologists with more questions than answers.
The 18% reduction in colorectal cancer incidence was statistically
significant, while the 10% reduction in colorectal cancer mortality
and 1% reduction in overall mortality were not.
...
One thing is clear: Screening works. If you're of the appropriate
age, please get screened. If your tubes are acting funny, please
get screened without delay. The best method and the level of
benefit are debatable, but we know it helps. Use a stool test
if you want (multitarget DNA test if you can), or a colonoscopy,
or a sigmoidoscopy, or a "virtual" CT colonoscopy, or a crazy
edible camera. Do one of them. Statistics show colorectal cancer
is highly curable when caught early, and now that we have feisty
checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies,it's probably even better now.
Just do it. Your tubes will thank you.
Peter Beinart, once a staunch defender of Israel, is arguing for the Palestinians' right to return.
A must read about foreign politics and the Mideast is his substack: The Beinart Notebook:A conversation about American foreign policy, Palestinian freedom and the Jewish people.
If it is the case that political disinformation is at least
about voter preferences as it is about politicians and social
media platforms, solutions to the problem are much more complex.
Modern democracies are not very good about figuring out what to
do when voters get exactly what they want and what voters want
is actually bad for democracy. Tweaking the law and relying upon
private ordering is less than optimal, if the goal is a resolution
of the problem. Rather, the focus will need to be on structural
political and economic reforms.
...
Social science evidence
indicates that bias in evaluation of political information is roughly
equal across the political spectrum. Each side is relatively more
susceptible to misinformation that confirms their priors.
Examples that appeal disproportionately to the left include 9/11
"trutherism", and claims that GMO foods should be banned or tightly
restricted because they are supposedly more dangerous than "natural" ones.
Regular Americans are getting richer.
Basically, the 2022 numbers — which you can see summarized in the Fed’s report — tell a really encouraging story. In a nutshell:
Scott Alexander of "Astral Codex Ten" fame recounts his decision and experience donating a kidney.
The FTC stated, "At several points in the signup process, BetterHelp promised consumers that it would not use or disclose their personal health data except for limited purposes, such as to provide counseling services. Despite these promises, BetterHelp used and revealed consumers' email addresses, IP addresses, and health questionnaire information to Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising purposes, according to the FTC's complaint." The results of this enforcement action are a $7.8 million settlement paid to consumers and a ban on Betterhelp "sharing consumers' health data, including sensitive information about mental health challenges, for advertising."
If we want to understand complex constructions, such as ourselves, assembly theory says we must account for the entire history of how such entities came to be.
In 2021, a team led by Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow in Scotland and Sara Walker of Arizona State University proposed a very general way to identify molecules made by living systems - even those using unfamiliar chemistries. Their method, they said, simply assumes that alien life forms will produce molecules with a chemical complexity similar to that of life on Earth.
Called assembly theory, the idea underpinning the pair's strategy has even grander aims. As laid out in a recent series of publications, it attempts to explain why apparently unlikely things, such as you and me, even exist at all. And it seeks that explanation not, in the usual manner of physics, in timeless physical laws, but in a process that imbues objects with histories and memories of what came before them. It even seeks to answer a question that has perplexed scientists and philosophers for millennia: What is life, anyway?
State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.
Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they've both been accused of fabricating data.