Things worth reading - May '24
Randomized deception trials, $60M for improving metascience, the pig-chimp hypothesis, memes as gods, why drug development is difficult & more
What I've been reading:
1. How placement of chairs in clinics can improve patient satisfaction: a randomized deception trial (my favorite new trial design)
2. Why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it: “In the years between the 50s and 90s when he was most active, Janssen and his team developed over 70 new medicines…. if current trends hold, a drug discovery scientist starting their career today is likely to retire without ever having worked on a single drug that makes it to market.”
3. Incredible cultural gaps between Western and Japanese culture: “The Company Is Father. The Company Is Mother”. For instance: “The company is your public life. Have an issue with your landlord? The company will handle it, in those cases where the company is not your landlord.”
4. If you were born 9 months after a world cup don’t read this: World Cup babies are happier but perform worse academically, supporting the Becker & Lewis quality-quantity tradeoff theory (still not convinced though). Here’s a list of all historical world cup dates
5. Samsung Smart Watch app can diagnose sleep apnea and now approved by FDA. Consumer electronics are increasingly competing with medtech. Cheap and accurate collection of physiological data is now poised to change clinical diagnostic processes. However, timing is still difficult to predict
6. On the importance of staring directly into the sun. How science needs unbridled curiosity and contrarian thinkers: “I realized recently that I don’t know how things dry. I know that things dry, of course—I’m not an idiot! But why do they dry? If you leave a wet towel hanging in the bathroom, eventually it won’t be wet anymore. Where does the water go?”
7. Spending $60M to improve metascience from the grant-giver’s perspective. Wordy, but instills hope.1
8. A psychofauna beastiery for memetic perils:
“What if gods were real? Not as supernatural beings whose existence defies explanation, but rather, as perfectly natural phenomena that just happen to be immensely complex and difficult to reason about, such that having a short label like “God” is useful?
For all we know, this could be what the people who invented gods actually meant. Take war: a simple concept in appearance, just two groups of people who enter conflict and fight each other. And yet war has strict rituals, and follows its own patterns; it always seems to come back after a period of peace, almost like a beast who is temporarily put at bay, but never vanquished. War can be easier to think about if you see it as a person — and thus are born the likes of Ares and Mars.”
9. Tell-tale signs of ChatGPT usage in medical research: let’s delve into this realm. Potential explanations related to African consultants
10. An exercise in mental flexibility: “the most interesting interaction you can have with the Chimp-Pig hypothesis is to let yourself believe it, at least briefly, and then observe what it feels like to have your" world overturned”
Time management advice from Tyler Cowen (slightly more concise than my advice on same topic:
All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.
12. AI’s getting convincing. LLMs with personal background can be more effective in changing your opinion than debating a topic with another human. Like most LLM literature it’s a non-peer reviewed preprint involving mechanical turks (dubious external validity ) - but that this isn’t unreasonable shows how much has changed in just a couple of years
13. Higher physician empathy associated with better outcomes for … *spin wheel*… chronic pain. Not a perfect study2, but worth reading.
14. How does a wristwatch actually work? A pedagogical explanation explaining the ingenious mechanics in a way anyone can understand
15. Say you’re an autocracy without saying you’re an autocracy: Chechnya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow. Reminded me of a scene from Parks & Rec, in this case fact beating fiction:
Haven’t verified all content in the links above, so as always, caveat lector. If you have recommendations on other good articles on these topics - please reach out!
Concrete example: I happened to see that Arnold Ventures funded this study finding that most cancer drugs granted accelerated approval did not demonstrate benefit in overall survival or quality of life within 5 years of accelerated approval. That’s exactly the kind of studies that the medical community needs, but few institutions would fund.
Cohort study with no randomization begs the question: could the patients’ reports of physician empathy reflect to what extent the current treatment plan had/was expected to help? I.e. just a segmenting of patient by disease burden? Controlling for variables didn’t reveal that, but several potentially relevant variables were missing from the dataset