Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5hr ago
Here's to hoping that the next four years do indeed make America great again, again. And we manage to dredge some unity and goodwill out of our desiccated corpse.
For all that we complain, I always ask people: if not the United States, where would you go? And where would you invest? Whatever my family and friends say, they're still investing in American securities. They're mostly still working in the USA. The opportunity here in most fields in unrivaled.
And to paraphrase Curtis Yarvin, I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7d ago
I handle a lot of cases involving mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure and, though this is completely anecdotal, immunotherapy seems to be working wonders on that front. It seems like a few years ago meso was a death sentence, and now there are people who, while not exactly cured, seem to be living with it for years
I don't know mesothelioma because it's relatively rare, and I don't see patients - just lines on a graph. That being said, it seems like a pretty similar story with 2 year survival rates of 41% versus 27%. Don't get me wrong, if I get cancer I'll take the pembro, but we're laughably far from curing cancer or LEV.
If you get diagnosed with a solid tumor (i.e. not a leukemia), basically you're either lucky and we caught it early enough to remove it entirely by surgery or you're going to die from it with vanishingly rare exceptions.
One case involved a 60 year old woman who had a resection and subsequent immunotherapy after being symptomatic for over a year before doctors even figured out the correct diagnosis, and she was judged to be completely cancer free, which is something I thought impossible.
I imagine that's bad for your bottom line. Or she lived long enough for you to collect?
I honestly wonder for a guy his age who wasn't having any problems if the treatment is worse than just living with the disease until he needs palliative care, considering that he was otherwise active but was wiped out by the cancer treatments.
Yeah. That's the choice to be made. Hopefully he was of sound mind and deciding for himself.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8d ago
There's modest consensus around here that Vivek & Elon firing half of the government would be a good thing, and that most of those workers are largely vestigial parasites/culture warriors who don't productively contribute to society.
What would the practical effects be of Trump pulling a Xi and dropping the hammer of god on wall street and hedge funds, HFT outfits, etc.? Say you can keep venture capital and bank loans to businesses and all the other stuff, but the 'quants' who make a living with options, trading commodities and the like? I'll leave it to someone better versed in that world to carve out precisely what should or shouldn't be banned, or try to convince me that this is a mistake.
The friends I have in that space freely admit that they don't believe that they contribute meaningfully to society. They have advanced degrees in physics, math and CS; wouldn't society be better off pushing them towards engineering, manufacturing, company creation? And redistributing capital from the non-STEM people at these places who contribute nothing of value to society?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8d ago
I mean even 15 years ago immunotherapy for cancer was not noteworthy enough to be included in a popular overview book “The Emperor of All Maladies” and now it’s a treatment that’s used all over the place, albeit with varying success rates.
Cancer immunotherapy is great, but it's not going to move the needle on deaths from cancer. You get maybe 30-40% cure rates in advanced melanoma (very difficult to give you exact numbers based on how you slice up your patient population), much lower cure rate in lung cancer and a statistically significant but depressingly small boost in survival for a bunch of other cancers. Typically those with high TMB. Then you have CARs which work wonders for two leukemias, but haven't been made to work in any meaningful way for solid tumors.
if you want to actually move the needle on cancer deaths, you need something with meaningful cure rates for lung cancer (vast majority is NSCLC), pancreatic cancer, prostate/breast cancer and colorectal cancer. Melanoma and ALL/multiple myeloma (leukemias that respond to CARs) don't even make the list.
Combining that with AI improvements it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me that we could conceivably see some wild advances in the next 2-3 decades.
AI has been great for lit review and protein design but otherwise hasn't really impact bio research yet. Even if they build autonomous agents that can run experiments, I fear they'll be trained on the same dogshit qualitative cartoon literature and it will be largely impossible for them to make the kind of progress singularitarians imagine.
What do people think about the idea of longevity escape velocity happening in our lifetimes? (I’m 32)
Very bearish, for reasons I've outlined before and don't really have time to get into now. If you want the redux:
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Look at Calico. Launched in 2013, raised 2.5 billion, and here's their pipeline. If you aren't used to looking at drug pipelines, theirs is pathetic for the age and funding of the company and...nothing is related to aging?
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Aubrey de Grey is a hack. The internal research program at his institute was absolute garbage, and whenever he claimed credit for a significant paper it was because they gave grants to some traditional academic labs.
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The vast majority of the drugs right now are small molecules or biologics (mostly antibodies) inhibiting single genes. Maybe you'll find something that can modestly extend lifespan, but aging is complex and poorly understood so the odds of something significant coming out of this approach is unlikely. But it will nevertheless be where most of the money goes.
Books like this seem more promising to me, but have plenty of problems of their own to overcome.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
13d ago
Indeed - we'll save our culture from the pajeets by subsuming ourselves to the American system. Which, going by the experience of Puerto Rico and DC, won't even give us representation in congress because Canadians would probably vote democrat. Not to mention Quebec would secede about 5 minutes after the plan was floated.
But I guess SF could hoover up talent from McMaster more easily.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
13d ago
No they won't.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
13d ago
I'm aware of the temporary workers. I don't think they return. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt I will.
I have no idea what will happen, but is your position based on anything beyond vibes? Do you live in Canada, or spend a lot of time there? Why do you believe the things that you do?
This article claims that only one in three that have arrived since 2010 have received permanent residency. There seem to be a number of articles claiming that 1.2 million visas are set to expire in 2025; how many will actually leave versus try to claim refugee status or just stay illegally, I don't know.
And, yes, the trendline was there pre-Trudeau. As I mentioned, Conservatives went along for the ride because they too believed the myth that migration was good for the economy. I believed it too! They were wrong. I was wrong.
So...why is it Trudeau's legacy? Are you saying that it will be because people never bothered to put the least amount of effort into researching the topic, and will just say liberals bad? Are you saying he deserves it? But then, according to you, it's your legacy as well as the last 30-40 years of Canadian politicians as well? At that point, it seems nonsensical to pin this on the scapegoat du jour for continuing the status quo.
I don't follow Canadian politics in any meaningful way, and I don't have real contacts with anyone on the ground. From what I can tell, Trudeau wrecked his legacy with scandals, stupidity and bad luck. But come on, your initial take was absurd and poorly researched, no?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
13d ago
Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.
Prior to Trudeau, Stephen Harper was Prime minister for 9 years. There's pretty much an unbroken trendline that started in the 90s between Chretien/Martin/Harper's time in office and Trudeau's in terms of the proportion of the population that are immigrants. Ditto for the fraction of 'visible minorities'. The graphs like this one, which I imagine gets spread in your circles, conflate temporary workers with immigrants. After COVID, the government panicked due to inflation and a labor shortage a brought in a bunch of temporary workers before clamping down on it late last year and announcing reductions in immigration over the next few years.
Am I missing something? Do you have any data showing that Trudeau was significantly different from Harper, Martin or any of his other predecessors in recent history?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
17d ago
And the flip side of this is that as soon as a worker is negative EV or whatever the appropriate metric is, they're liable to be laid off. This is just the equilibrium where neither party can trust the other and there is at will employment. I imagine economists like it and would say that the employee who moves and gets a raise or a company laying off unproductive workers is more efficient, and what do I know, maybe they're right.
I was chatting with a Japanese employee of a large company with offices in both Japan and the US. He says that rather than layoffs, they get put on 'career improvement plans.' In his case, it involved completely retraining his specialty and moving his family to the US, but he kept his job and stayed at the same company. We could probably have this situation if we wanted, but I'm unsure it's actually superior.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Neurological science is the better way to get at the human mind, not woo.
Hoo boy, do I have some bad news for you.
Molecular biology works fine for messing around with neurons in a tissue culture dish, but it provides remarkably little insight into a complex system like the brain. It's good for saying if I knock this gene out we lose action potentials, therefore this gene is at least required for that process (how it fits in with the 1000s of other genes involved in that process? Often much less clear).
Anytime you zoom out to a broader systems-level view, or anytime you disconnect your work from some ground truth we're inevitably left with woo. If it weren't for clinical trials enforcing some measure of 'woo' colliding with reality, probably the entirety of the life sciences wouldn't be that far off from phrenology-level fMRI experiments.
Anyways. Sure, the social sciences are a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. I'd argue they have other uses, but that's a bit beside my point - the majority of research in the life sciences as a whole is largely subjective bullshit. It's always a shock to fresh students coming in how arbitrary and ineffective a lot of what we do is when they're used to textbooks having all the answers and making science out to be some dispassionate, objective endeavor.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Premiums are only one component of healthcare costs. A "straight line" is one thing, the slope of the line is what matters. Family premiums are up 89% since 2008, compared to ~43% cumulative inflation.. Outcomes and features have degraded since ACA, I'd argue.
The initial argument was:
So really, health insurance companies can't just deny claims and keep the money. They only way for them to make more money is to let the cost of everything skyrocket, raise premiums sky high, and then keep 20% of a much larger pot.
I agree, the slope of the line is what matters. If your argument is that Obamacare increased premiums, you would expect to see the slope of the line increase after the ACA was passed, correct? Do you agree that that is not what we see, and that the post I was replying to was incorrect, pending them making some kind of rebuttal?
Do you have any data about outcomes deteriorating? That doesn't seem like a straightforward thing to measure.
However, I don't think "things continued to get way worse at the same rate" counts as a victory.
It doesn't, it counts as Whiningcoil being wrong. You're making a new argument and moving the goalposts.
Obamacare accelerated the inevitable failure of this healthcare system and was only engineered to be a pernicious trojan horse for single-payer.
Maybe. No offense, but I'll believe it when I see data.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Except you haven’t shown me any of these things.
Do you want papers?
I can't and am not trying to tell you that everyone on SickTok is sick. All I'm saying is that EDS is almost certainly a real disease, and not even as ambiguous a diagnosis as some other things that are less controversial.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
We used to have our more clinically-focused research meeting Monday mornings. Everyone would rotate through every few months, and people seemed to think the best way to show off the importance of their research was to present graphic images of their patients suffering. One doctor studied some immunodeficient patients, and insisted on showing this one woman's vagina exploding with genital herpes Every. Goddamn. Time.
The EDS guy always showed his patients bending their thumb down to touch their forearm, which was disquieting in it's own way.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
If you see someone on tiktok who never shows you concrete evidence of any of the symptoms above and claims to have EDS, be skeptical and say social contagion.
If I can show you that loss-of-function mutations in collagen or collagen-related genes lead to a syndrome characterized by defects in collagen (i.e. joint hypermobility, esophageal issues, frequent dislocations, weaker blood vessels and organ tearing) with a very high penetrance and that tracks in families, if I can compare mutant and wild-type forms of those proteins in in vitro functional assays and show a difference, if I can either knock those genes out or induce the same mutations in various animal models and show the same syndrome and you're still skeptical of the existence of EDS I'd say you're an [expletive redacted].
If I can't show you a genetic mutation for a subset of patients that still have many of the symptoms above, well, sure, some people may be lying. But...you understand this is true of many diseases, right? Like, do you not believe in lupus? Clinical depression? Rheumatoid arthritis? Many (possibly the majority, or all) diseases have extreme monogenic forms and milder polygenic (we assume) forms. Similar to Alzheimer's patients with mutations in PSEN, APP, etc. who get an aggressive, familial form of the disease in their 30s versus most Alzheimer's patients who show up ~60-75.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
They only way for them to make more money is to let the cost of everything skyrocket, raise premiums sky high, and then keep 20% of a much larger pot. Which is more or less what has happened the last 15 years since the ACA was passed.
Do you have any data to support that argument? I'm not an expert, but 5 minutes on google makes it look like premiums have been increasing in a straight line since at least the late 90s.
See figure 1.12 and also this reference.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.
Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is absolutely real, and monogenic in many cases which provides a clear, objective diagnosis. Then there is a bucket of patients with hypermobile joints, issues with their digestive tract and random pain/other things. That being said, seeing someone flex their pinky backwards past 90 degrees, or their thumb way down to their wrist is profoundly disconcerting and also somewhat objective.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
What is the evidence of this? People here and elsewhere argued that Floyd was a boon for democrats in 2020, and they won fairly convincingly four months later.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Nobody will choose to harm the outgroup "as much as possible" if that means literally as much as possible regardless of the harm to themselves in the process. What they will do is harm the outgroup as much as they can without too much harm to themselves...You've also thrown a few things in there that don't even harm the outgroup; a January 6 style protest against Trump winning the election wouldn't harm anyone in the outgroup (and the actual January 6 didn't harm anyone either, it was just an excuse for a left-wing crackdown).
Okay; explain to me why left-wing protesters can't simply have George Floyd level riots and burn DC, NYC and every other major US city to the ground in response to Trump's election? You believe that sympathetic AGs in all of those very blue districts will fail to prosecute them, correct? What harm will come to stochastic terrorists, when I've been assured that it's very easy to do this kind of damage to infrastructure and hard to track the perpetrators? As far as I'm aware, no public health official has suffered legal other major professional consequences, so what harms did they personally suffer to make them stop pushing lockdowns and vaccines?
Perhaps I'll add, why didn't democrats rig the 2024 election given that nobody suffered consequences for rigging the election in 2020?
When you say 'without too much harm to themselves,' you've essentially watered your argument down to democracy/populism, given that most of your proposed consequences come from the ballot box. Or at least given yourself enough of a loophole to drive a George Floyd-style riot through. At which point, if my model of the world is that elected officials largely try to do things that are popular with the electorate (at least when those actions are legible to the public), and that a majority of Americans aren't particularly motivated by harming the outgroup, please give me concrete examples where our predictions about the world would differ?
while the conversation about the current state has certainly been productive, it seems to me that rationalization on either side is always a failure mode, and the cure is predictions:
Indeed. I've seen you post half a dozen times here something along the lines of (and feel free to correct my paraphrasing): 'My model of the world is that the ingroup will consistently choose to harm the outgroup as much as possible. In 2020, protesters burned down billions of dollars worth of homes/businesses to harm the outgroup. When Red-tribe Kyle Rittenhouse tried to defend innocents he was attacked and then tried by the Blue-tribe Justice system that refused to prosecute the crimes of the rioters.
When the pandemic happened, Blue tribe health officials instituted draconian lockdowns that minimally impacted the white-collar laptop-class but wrecked Red tribe laborers and Red tribe parents.
My model of the world predicts these events perfectly! Do you have a better model, and if so, does it accurately predict the world?'
To which I would say, would your model predict:
- Trump wouldn't prosecute Hilary in 2016?
- The lack of major civil unrest, stochastic terrorism, or any major backlash to the repeal of Roe v. Wade aside from some Democratic electoral wins in 2022?
- The end of vaccine mandates in public and private spheres and the end of lockdowns?
- The utter lack of any major protests, civil unrest, or loss of faith in the electoral system after Trump beat Harris? (you want comments that aged like milk - look at the people who were claiming election fraud the morning of November 5th and even through that evening)
- The utter defeat of abolish the police and any of the George Floyd era movements?
- The lack of significant stochastic terrorism (remember the breathless doomposting about how easy it would be for disaffected lone wolf Red Tribers to blow power substations and other critical infrastructure?) through a year of electoral campaigning and the actual election?
To be clear, I doubt I could have predicted these events with any accuracy. But my observation is that you couldn't have done that either. If you want to prove me wrong, make some concrete predictions about the next four years. Will Trump incarcerate Biden or some other major democrat? Trump assassinated by an activist? Significant uptick in lone wolf attacks? World War III?
The only thing your model has going for it is that nobody pays attention to things that don't happen, even when that's the critical evidence against your argument. But whenever something controversial happens, you pop up and point towards the big flashing sign saying 'EVERYTHING SUCKS.' It's the same sensationalism that governs journalists, wrapped in a Bayesian/rationalist worldview.
Biden family's alleged corruption has evolved over time, here and in the broader public, and the specific events and disclosures that have shaped that conversation. My perception is that many of the arguments made to defend Biden, his family, and the conduct of the investigations into their activities have aged exceedingly poorly.
I admit to being disappointed in Biden, the pardon is deplorable and shouldn't have happened. I remain unconvinced that Joe Biden is particularly corrupt (...pardon notwithstanding), and I'm skeptical that Hunter is particularly corrupt by the standards of DC.
In particular, it seems to me that this saga has been an excellent example of a common pattern of group behavior wherein the facts, as they emerge, consistently break against the tribal narrative. This pattern seems to me to be a good indicator of entrenched tribalism attempting to deny reality, and likewise a good demonstration of the limits and shortcomings of that tribalism, which should guide us to a better understanding of how the Culture War is likely to play out.
One tribal narrative was that Biden was corrupt and abused his office to get rich. The other tribal narrative is...well, that the Bidens aren't particularly corrupt. Setting aside which direction the facts are consistently breaking, one tribal narrative has to be false in order for the other to be true. In your model, since you clearly believe Red Tribers are correct, are entrenched Red Tribalists denying reality?
edit: well, OP changed substantially after I hit post.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Pretty pathetic. I thought he genuinely cared about the rule of law and his legacy, as you point out, but it seems I've been insufficiently cynical. I suppose politicians will only be honest insofar as voters can punish them for defection.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Last April, you said:
Israel cannot survive unless Iran is destroyed now. There’s basically no scenario where the tit for tat won’t escalate into an unending front of infinite Iranian resources in Lebanon, Gaza, and/or the Golan Heights,as well as constant back and forth air and rocket fire.
And Iran can't be destroyed unless the US implements a draft of millions of Americans which would start a civil war and end the US.
...
So after this move, basically the only thing that can save them from a death spiral is a major US invasion, which the US would lose militarily without a draft...
Such A draft that would cause a violent revolution/civil war in the US... A civil war that would quickly become ww3 as Chinese and Russian Assets egged on the US collapse and the US military tried to reply in kind.
...
This is probably WW3 Friends. stock up now. End of the age.
Do you think this was wrong? If so, how did you learn/update from the last 7 months?
You have also repeatedly predicted WWIII as well as a major civil war with >1,000,000 dead in the United States following the election. While you still have 50 odd days left for some assassination scenario or Biden to nuke Moscow, do you think the lack of violent protests (or serious protests at all, really) or the general acceptance of Trump's victory mean this was also a bad prediction? Is the point to be edgy clickbait or...do you genuinely believe the things you write?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
The daily podcast yesterday laid out what they expected would have happened. Senate democrats would have asked Gaetz if he had ever paid women for sex (illegal in Florida and most of the US), whereupon he could have:
- Deny ever having done it. The leaked documents combined with the alleged testimony of the women already show that the vast majority of people would see that as perjury.
- Admit it, in which case you have a candidate for AG admitting to committing a crime just prior to being sworn in.
- Plead the fifth, which would also be remarkable and apparently a bridge too far even for Trump.
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I'm surprised democrats wouldn't hold onto this until Gaetz had been confirmed so they could use it as a cudgel against the Trump administration. Maybe they genuinely think he'll wreck the DoJ in a way that his substitute may not.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.
So why use it at all? Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging? There seems to be a broad agreement in the rat-diaspora that social media is a plague that wrecks attention spans, leads to skyrocketing teenage mental health issues and erodes any kind of political discourse, yet people still seem to use it.
Just read books and build community in meatspace instead of using Twitter/Bluesky. Whatever benefit you derive probably isn't worth the exposure to memes and toxic ragebait.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
A number of diseases have been functionally eliminated in the USA; polio, measles, diphtheria, rubella. One person foregoing the vaccine gives them some small value with negligible cost, although who knows, maybe the value proposition is still there if you plan on traveling to the third world. Some of these things are really nasty if you get them as an adult.
The entire population foregoing vaccines would lead (eventually) to these diseases becoming endemic again. Polio alone was paralyzing 15,000 kids a year prior to the vaccine and killing a fraction of those. I suppose we could decrease the amount of vaccination to allow a little bit of endemic disease back just to improve the value proposition for individuals and please the economists. Thankfully, our forefathers knew that was Fucking Stupid as they watched kids dying of preventable diseases and made vaccines as mandatory as they could.
So, if you want to translate the above into econ-speak - where is the positive externality? And if you agree that eliminating diseases via vaccination is preferable to the alternative, how would you like to give pharma companies enough of a profit motive to make the things?
While we're on the subject, COVID notwithstanding, vaccines are horrifically underfunded for this exact reason. The USA vaccine market was 29 billion in 2024, and pre-COVID was only 17 billion. As an aside, the entire biotech ecosystem in the USA is only ~800 billion; just over half the market cap of Meta, a single tech company. The MMR vaccine costs 100$ and you get two doses over your entire life. This isn't exactly some massively profitable scheme whereby Big Pharma is fleecing hapless poors, it's just a convenient punching bag that plays well with the base.
The context of the Yarvin quote is that democracies are weak and feckless so we convert to a dictatorship, not that Trump is a particularly ineffectual president. My point was that presidential elections probably won't affect any of us all that much. I would, and have, made the same point about democratic administrations. Is that what you were referring to?
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