Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump

  Over the past few generations, however, the culture and ethos of the American business elite has changed. A once cohesive establishment has broken down, making collective action rarer and much harder to achieve. Competition among companies has become increasingly cutthroat. Chief executives are often more concerned with their share price than their company's long-term health, much less any genteel sense of obligation to a vague greater good. The civic organizations that once bonded corporate leaders to one another have been hollowed out or disappeared altogether.

• An Overdiagnosis Epidemic Is Harming Patients' Mental Health

  Diagnosing patients when there aren't effective treatments to give them can make their symptoms worse, argues neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan.

  In her new book,The Age of Diagnosis, she backs this assertion with some sobering facts. For instance, between 1998 and 2018, autism diagnoses jumped by 787 percent in the UK alone; Lyme disease has an estimated 85 percent overdiagnosis rate, including in countries where it's impossible to contract the disease; and there's still little evidence that many cancer screening programs actually reduce cancer-related death rates.
  ...
  The reason it's not working is because when you get to the very mild end of a spectrum of behavioral or learning problems, you have a balancing act between the benefit of being diagnosed along with the help you can get, and the drawbacks of being diagnosed, which is telling a child that they've got an abnormal brain. What does that do to a child's belief in themselves? How does it stigmatize them? How does it affect their identity formation? We thought it would be helpful to tell children this, but the statistics and the outcome is suggesting it isn't helpful.

  Steven Levitt podcast interview with the author.

• Our Preoccupation With Protein Intake

  Eric Topol: The data on high protein diets, bars, supplements, and powders will surprise you

  Simply put, there are no data to support more than 1.6 g/kg/day of protein intake. Some of these studies were in older adults with mixed data (Nunes study no benefit for older group; ten Haaff no benefit age 50+ over resistance training; Liao benefit in older men on top of resistance training). Likewise, the data are mixed for overweight and obese participants. The findings across all the studies, most of which are quite small in sample size, show marked inter-individual variability. The design and the analysis of the trials are compromised by lack of controlling for calories in the diet, physical activity, and many other confounding factors, along with flaws of interpretation.
  ...
  This leucine discovery is important because leucine is one of the 3 branched chain essential amino acids that is widely used as a supplement by people training and athletes and one with putative anti-aging properties. Which is remarkable since potently activating mTOR is just the opposite of rapamycin (that blocks mTOR), a drug that many longevity influencers take! Remember that leucine is one of the 3 essential branched chain amino acids which are unique since they are primarily metabolized by muscle, not liver. So leucine may be considered pro-inflammatory and a bad actor even though it is also tied to building muscle mass.

• Scientists pioneer 'animal internet' with dog phones and touchscreens for parrots

  Scientists are using digital technology to revolutionise animal communication and move towards an "animal internet", using new products such as phones for dogs and touchscreens for parrots.

  Experiments by Glasgow university have enabled several species, from parrots and monkeys to cats and dogs, to enjoy long-distance video and audio calls. They have also developed technology for monkeys and lemurs in zoos to trigger soothing sounds, smells or video images on demand.

  Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, who heads the university's Animal-Computer Interaction Group, started by developing a DogPhone that enables animals to contact their owners when they are left alone.

• The Last Days Of Social Media

  Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks.

  The difference between human and synthetic content is becoming increasingly indistinguishable, and platforms seem unable, or uninterested, in trying to police it.

• The End of Thinking

  The rise of AI's "thinking" machines is not the problem. The decline of thinking people is. Derek Thompson

• Politically extreme individuals exhibit similar neural processing despite ideological differences.

  Leveraging a combination of neurophysiological methods, we show that regardless of which side of the political aisle an individual is on, those with more extreme views show heightened neural activity to\ politically charged content in brain regions implicated in affective processing-including the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, and posterior superior temporal sulcus.

• The Sex Recession

  The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping

  1. Married adults have markedly more sex than their unmarried peers, but the sex recession is also making inroads among married couples.
  2. When it comes to sexlessness ("`no sex in the last year") among young adults, the biggest change comes post-2010.
  3. Between 2010 and 2019, the average time young adults spent with friends in a given week fell by nearly 50%, from 12.8 hours to just 6.5 hours.
• Poets $150 / hr

  Mercor is partnering witha lead AI Lab to contract seasoned poets for a creative initiative aimed at enhancing AI's understanding of poetic structure, literary nuance, and emotional expression.

  10+ years of experience writing and publishing poetry.
  Strong portfilio with notable literary journal publications, anthologies, or awards.