Kamil Pabis

While I agree with the logic of avoiding subjecting highly unsaturated oils to heat we do have to be cautious here with speculation.

When you say things like that: "Nonetheless, if these things are poisonous at high concentrations, they're probably not great at low concentrations."

It does not clearly follow that such a dose-response exists. The word "hormesis" gets thrown around a lot in the lay press, and there is actually some truth there. Plenty of moderate (even genotoxic) stressors have health benefits at lower doses. Of course, I would not gorge on li... (read more)

If the treatment is relatively mild, the dropouts are comparable between groups then I am not sure that per protocol will introduce much bias. What do you think? In that case it can be a decent tool for enhancing power, although the results will always be considered "post hoc" and "hypothesis-generating".

From experience I would say that intention-to-treat analysis is the standard in large studies of drugs and supplements, while per protocol is often performed as a secondary analysis. Especially when ITT is marginal and you have to go fishing for some results to report and to justify follow-up research.

The supplement industry and similarly the cosmetics industry is a jarring example of what can happen with no oversight or the wrong kind of oversight. Although, to be charitable to the libertarian position, one can argue that many supplement and cosmetics companies are forced to provide inferior products since efficacious products, even when rather safe, cannot be sold on the free market for various reasons (e.g. higher doses of potassium or retinoids for photoaging).

Thank you for the write-up! Just as a minor quibble, veganism has not been considered the "healthiest choice" ever, or at least not for a long time, if I were to make a guess about "consensus" in the field. While it has been clear for a while that a diet biased towards plants is healthy, the data for the addition of certain food groups (fatty fish, fermented and low-fat dairy, etc) is pretty strong as is the data for the health benefits of individual carninutrients (creatine or even taurine).

As you correctly point out, the issue of residual confounding is ... (read more)

I think the consensus among nutritionists is that a well-planned vegan diet is among the healthiest possible diets. Almost everyone in the US would benefit from "going a bit more vegan". Nevertheless, it is probably not optimal on certain axes.

It would seem that the best diet to improve long-term health is a flexible pescolacto-vegetarian diet supplementing certain carninutrients, e.g. creatine. So not vegan.

Tradeoffs are real and you have to optimize for one thing over another. For example, a standard (unsupplemented) vegan diet may not be optimal for men... (read more)

We have to be careful not to offset the health benefits of a vegan diet. There is a surprising amount of evidence suggesting that low-normal iron stores are beneficial and may reduce cancer incidence, mortality and perhaps increase longevity. Specifically, as strongest, I would point out the FeAst study and numerous recent Mendelian randomization studies on iron and longevity (e.g. Daghlas and Gill 2021). It is prudent to test ferritin to know whether you are too low or too high.

Vitamin D testing certainly could be useful, even though recent clinical trials testing vitamin D supplements are between somewhat to highly disappointing, but deficiency is presumably not strongly linked to veganism.

I do not think this is entirely accurate. Lung cancer in smokers hits unusually young people because, well, they are smokers. Heart disease is a disease of old age and accelerating it somewhat through an unhealthy diet would have complex effects. However, making matters even more complicated, ultraprocessed foods also promote cancers and obesity -- the latter is definitely a huge healthcare burden which does not kill people immediately.

This is hard to model since there can be a shift from a disease that kills slowly to one that kills quickly and early (dem... (read more)

While the term "healthspan" can be useful for public messaging it is not necessary to use it instead of "lifespan" as study after study shows. When the word "lifespan" is used in the correct context people are very willing to embrace even radical lifespan extension. It seems prudent to combine both concepts.

Asked “If doctors developed a pill that enabled you to live forever at your current age, would you take it?” a surprising number of people turned out to be hardcore life extensionists: "There were no differences by age...Among young adults, 40.0% indica... (read more)

Knowing your risk does not change behavior, at least that seems to be the case with genetic risks. That means dietary and lifestyle approaches towards cardiovascular disease are out. As a good approximation, everyone who wants to have a healthy lifestyle already has one*.

On the other hand, it is possible that more people would benefit from wide-spread use of statins and that they could be convinced to actually take them.

Cardiovascular disease is definitely not a neglected cause area. It is a multi-billion dollar industry and a very popular research field. ... (read more)

I enjoyed a lot of the other content and hence am now much more inclined to read the EA forums rather than lesswrong. These changes could mean that people like me, who are primarily interested in progress studies and applying science and reasoning to better humanity and themselves, may miss out on relevant AI content when they move to another site. Then again perhaps the EA forums are more relevant to me anyway and I should spend more time reading these.

Nutritionists are not dumb
Let's not be too cynical here. While, yes, nutrition science is short on definite conclusions, it still remains a science. If you want to figure out how to eat healthy, you would find this out the same way you would check whether aspirin prevents cardiovascular disease in certain subgroups or whether paracetamol extends the duration of symptomatic respiratory tract infections.

Step 1: Is there a consensus statement from a reputable professional society? Do different organizations and groups agree? If yes, here is your conclusion. M... (read more)

I am not sure why we cannot have a vaccine against both strains. The HPV vaccine protects against 9 HPV subtypes, for example. Either I am missing something or it's just the medical establishment moving slowly, as always.

Given the data we have getting an "illicit" fourth booster shot might be the safer play. The mRNA vaccines continue to work, especially against severe disease, the effect is just much diminished.

Also, is there even any evidence for this assertion? If we stipulate that absolutist monarchies are about as bad as a dictatorship then how did that assertion work out historically? Over the last 10'000 years when lifespans were much shorter dictatorships and related systems flourished. The ascent of democracy has paralleled an increase in lifespans. Correlation does not imply causation, but at least it makes it more likely, whereas the dictator argument is just speculation as far as I can tell.

1. Thank you for making a great point! Large countries do implement limits on internal migration to ensure political stability. The Chinese system is called hukou if anyone wants to read up on it; I am no expert myself. I would, however, disagree that these limitations suggest there is no free movement. In fact, the very existence of these limitations suggests we should open up compared to the baselines, but perhaps not fully.
   The population of Shanghai grew almost 100% from 14M to 27M within the last 20 years - and the city transformed into a wealthy metropol

You are right, the same is true in Germany as well. There is even some evidence for lower crime rates for certain immigrant groups (e.g., first generation immigrants from Turkey, or SE-Asian/Chinese immigrants, if I recall correctly). Still, more crimes means more crimes, even if this is due to demographics, and the voters will punish the pro-immigrant parties accordingly.

How limiting are poor corpus quality and limited size for these models? For example, Megatron-Turing NLG was only trained on PubMed extracts but not on PubMed Central, which is part of the Pile dataset. Was this perhaps intentional or an oversight?

Regarding medical texts, I see many shortcomings of the training data. PubMed Central is much smaller at 5 million entries than the whole PubMed corpus at 30 million entries, which seems to be unavailable due to copyright issues. However, perhaps bigger is not better?

Regarding books, how relevant is the limited s... (read more)

As far as I can tell, if they suspend one of two available mRNA vaccines this is bound to have zero effect on vaccination rates in the young because the other one can fill the gap.

Do you think this is a problem? It appears to me that no development is possible without some tail risk (which we obviously want to minimize wherever possible!). Can we come up with a realistic world in which technologic progress is used for peaceful purposes exclusively and never causes any negative surprises? Or a world that develops with zero tail risk?