Immediate_Bit
5mo ago
I don't like people using JVN's stance on pre-emptively striking the Soviets to dunk on him. People who were close to the action in the cold war have said they thought there was a 1/3-1/2 chance of nuclear use during the conflict.
It would be pretty easy to use nuke's in a limited manner as a warning to force a surrender. You could tell them what cities were going to be hit in advance to evacuate them or even do it in an unpopulated area so they can see the damage level and extrapolate from there. Half a dozen such strikes could have done it.
Immediate_Bit
7mo ago
It's more that there aren't buttons you can push in without affecting everything else. The signalling systems aren't anything like a computer where there is one variable for each discrete thing. If a molecule has one major effect you can ride off and only a few other minor effects you are very lucky. Often molecules have different major effects in different parts of the body because their release is isolated. But they usually also just regulate multiple important things simultaneously, so with GLP-1's you see a lot of GI side effects. You're not pushing a button that decreases appetite, you're pushing a button that greatly upsets the entire downstream digestive process.
Immediate_Bit
7mo ago
Agree it's what it would require.
It'd be interesting because I think the result would actually be to bring America to EU style price controls. I imagine the intelligensia is more in favour of the socialist price controlled system than the US one. The big loser would be pharma RnD (and stock prices). It is crazy the extent to which the US subsidises pharma RnD for the rest of the world. I saw a graph showing pharma investment returns slowly projecting down over time, reaching 0% around 2020 then going negative. I think this is based off a low-hanging-fruit theory and the data supports it.
On Ozempic I am rather bearish. There are very few buttons in the body which can be pushed for gain without many side effects. It sort of violates a no-free-lunch theorem (which I do believe in) regarding pharmacology. I think over time many people will decide the side effects aren't worth the benefits for them and the positive effects are actually quite modest when viewed in their totality.
I have actually seen some things which violate this no-free-lunch recently. Follistatin gene therapies appear to boost muscle mass, QoL and maybe longevity (30% boost in mice). This counts for me; even though it's not a drug it's a single protein and it's impressive you can get so many positives boosting one thing. There will likely be others along this line, but I don't imagine too many being available.
Immediate_Bit
7mo ago
I believe this was written by an LLM.
FWIW I will still add my thoughts. The failing of psychiatry/psychology is in the categorisation of extreme personality differences as disorders. These are not actually disorders but phenotypes. The narcicistic personality, the sociopath, the psychopath, the high functioning autistic etc. are adaptive personality niches. The 'disorder' aspect comes in when the phenotype is so strong that the person cannot break the trait even when they are overwhelmingly incentivised to do so. But this applies just as strongly to say cowardice, which can be beneficial in certain circumstances and detrimental in others. The person who is constitutionally this way won't summon up the courage when it is in there interest but we don't call it a Cowardice Disorder. Likewise, the narcissist may destroy their whole family, but their self obsession may be very effective in pursuing goals that on net promote their reproductive fitness.
My personal issue is any portrayal of these people as victims. They exist as an unfortunate phenotype for society and have been classified as "disordered" due to their propensity to victimise others. I think it is correct to view it as a trait of the person they are responsible for suppressing, and if they fail to suppress it it is fully on them.
A new male lion taking over a pride will massacre all of the previous lion's cubs. Lions don't have personality disorders. They have a distinct phenotype which has been rewarded by natural selection. I think of antisocial human behaviours the same way. This leads to a harsher perspective on punishment.
He's not that serious. And he especially doesn't want to do things that will create personal risk for him or his family. He'll happily make friends with neocons that now he has the top status job; so long as they stay loyal to his image. He'll go for the easy wins. The hard wins will be ignored. Constitutionally, I don't think he cares at all about the hard wins. He just sees them as a bad investment.
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