Categories Society, Politics and History

Ways to Stop Police Violence

Police violence is wide-spread problem – not only in the US but in other places as well. While I’ve read some pieces about body cameras, there was generally not a lot of discussions about measures we could take to curb it. I therefore found this Twitter thread about how to reduce police violence highly interesting. Some things they suggest:

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Categories Society, Politics and History

Should You Take Collegra?

I stumbled across this interesting article called Most Academic Advertising Is Immoral Bullshit. It makes the interesting point that most of what university advertises has very little actual evidence for it. The authors invite you to compare this with a medical treatment and ask you to imagine a drug called “Collegra”:

Collegra is a drug unlike any other. If you take Collegra 256 times a year for four years, Collegra will improve your critical reasoning, moral reasoning, analytic, and

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Categories Health

Maybe Mass Testing is not a Good Idea

For the last weeks I was very convinced that mass testing would be one of the best ways to make reopening societies safer. This piece from Michael Hochman on statnews.com had me think about that. The idea is that frequent testing allows us to identify asymptomatic spreaders. But simply mass testing everyone regularly won’t solve the problem alone.

Even with testing every two weeks and a 24-hour lag in results, universal testing would catch less than half of asymptomatic carriers

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Categories Science

On Negative Probabilities

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/42/Richard_Feynman_Nobel.jpg
Everybody likes pictures. So here is a picture of Richard Feynmann

In 1987 Richard Feynman wrote an article arguing in favor for negative probabilities. The question should not be: “do they exist?” but rather: “are they useful?”. People have for centuries denied the existence of negative numbers – but thinking about negative money as debts is undeniably useful. How would you do that with negative probabilities? The idea is to loosen the requirement that probabilities must be strictly positive in … more

Categories Society, Politics and History

Is Divorce Contagious?

Getting babies is contagious. If people around you start having babies, you are yourself more likely to get one. Getting obese can be contagious. Can getting a divorce be contagious as well? From an article from the Pew Research Center:

A research team headed by Rose McDermott of Brown University analyzed three decades of data on marriage, divorce and remarriage collected from thousands of residents of Framingham, Massachusetts.

McDermott and her colleagues found that study participants were

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Categories Health

Coronavirus and Human Experiments

Bryan Caplan makes a couple of very interesting points supporting human experiments to learn more about Covid-19. I personally don’t like his framing on demagogues, but his piece is well worth a read. While there have already been people voluntarily signing up for vaccine trials, Caplan’s argument goes much further when he suggests investigating basic properties of the pandemic that can only be known through human experiments. From his piece:

To find the true IFR [infection-fatality-rate], you recruit

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Categories Science

On Reversing Aging

David Sinclair on a new paper about age reversal (Twitter Link)

Sinclair reviews an exciting new paper. From the Twitter thread:

18 rats were divided into three groups. 6 young rats (30 weeks old), 6 old rats (109 weeks old) & 6 old rats (also 109 weeks old) treated with plasma fractions from the young rats.

Blood was drawn at regular intervals for analyses to monitor the impact and cognitive functions were assessed 4 times. DNA methylation profiles

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Categories Economics, Health

Iran Has A Legal Market Where You Can Sell Your Kidney

Link of the day: Iran has a legal market for organs

Wow. It was only today that I learned that you could actually officially legally sell your organs on a kidney market in Iran. To anyone. You register with the government, they pay for the procedure and you get $4,600 for it after everything is done. Consequently, Iran neither has a waiting list nor a shortage of organs. From the LA Times article:

Since 1993, doctors in Iran have performed

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