Book review: The End of Alzheimer’s Program, by Dale Bredesen.
This sequel to The End of Alzheimer’s is an attempt at a complete guide to a healthy lifestyle.
Alas, science is still too primitive to enable an impressive version of that. So what we end up with is this guide that would overwhelm anyone who tries to follow it thoroughly, while still lacking the kind of evidence that would convince a skeptic.
Continue ReadingLast month, I conceded defeat in my bet (with Robin Hanson) that US COVID-19 deaths would be less than 250,000.
My biggest mistake was thinking voters would care about results, and unite against a common enemy as they did in WWII. I should have been more aware of the tendency to treat natural deaths as more acceptable than deaths due to a hostile agent. Robin clearly did better at evaluating this.
Continue ReadingI said in my review of WEIRDest People that the Flynn effect seems like a natural consequence of thinking styles that became more analytical, abstract, reductionist, and numerical.
I’ll expand here on some questions which I swept under the rug, so that I could keep that review focused on the book’s most important aspects.
After reading WEIRDest People, I find that the goal of a culture-neutral IQ test looks strange (and, of course, WEIRD). At least as strange as trying to fix basketball to stop favoring tall people.
Continue ReadingBook review: The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich.
Wow!
Henrich previously wrote one of the best books of the last decade. Normally, I expect such an author’s future books to, at best, exhibit regression toward the mean. But Henrich’s grand overview of humanity’s first few million years was merely a modest portion of the ideas that he originally tried to fit into this magnum opus. Henrich couldn’t quite explain in one volume how humanity got all the way to industrial empires, so he split the explanation into two books.
The cartoon version of the industrial revolution: Protestant culture made the West more autistic.
However, explaining the most important event in history makes up only about 25% of this book’s focus and value.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Precipice, by Toby Ord.
No, this isn’t about elections. This is about risks of much bigger disasters. It includes the risks of pandemics, but not the kind that are as survivable as COVID-19.
The ideas in this book have mostly been covered before, e.g. in Global Catastrophic Risks (Bostrom and Cirkovic, editors). Ord packages the ideas in a more organized and readable form than prior discussions.
See the Slate Star Codex review of The Precipice for an eloquent summary of the book’s main ideas.
Continue ReadingFrom The problem with rapid Covid testing, Mayank Gupta writes:
The absolute number of false positives would rise dramatically under slightly inaccurate, broad surveillance testing. At least initially, the number of people going to the doctor to ask what to do would also rise. One can imagine if doctors truly flubbed and didn’t know how to advise patients accurately, a lot of individual patients would lose trust in the medical system (testing, doctors, or both). The consequence of this would be more resistance to health public policy measures in the future.
For a reminder of why rapid testing is valuable, see Alex Tabarrok. Note also the evidence from the NBA that people who need useful tests can be more innovative than the medical system.
This seems like the tip of an important iceberg.
Continue ReadingBooks by serious researchers on how to defeat aging are now coming out almost as fast as I have time to read them.
This one mostly aims to enable us live in good health to 115, preferably via a few simple pills.
Continue ReadingLots of people want to frame the 2020 US election as a fight between the left and the right, with the wrong side being near an extreme on that spectrum. They are deceiving you.
The U.S. is facing some extremism, but it has little connection to the extremes of the left-right spectrum [1]. The latest dangers are extreme mainly on a very different spectrum. A spectrum on which Trump and the woke are very similar.
How to describe this spectrum? I’m unsure what the best description is, so I’ll list some that capture important components of it:
In this post, I’ll try to summarize my guesses as to what are the most controversial parts of Scott Sumner’s monetary policy ideas.
In the process, I’ll try to dress them up to look more like the kind of wisdom that requires years of study to master. After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to get the impression that the Fed’s highly educated experts could be replaced by, say, ordinary bloggers.
In particular, I will attempt to correct the serious shortage of equations and graphs that plagues market monetarist writings.
I’ve attempted to make this fancy enough to belong in a prestigious publication, but I’m little more than an ordinary blogger, and I doubt that I’ve been thorough enough, or have enough experience at creating a prestigious style. Please feel free to write a more sophisticated-looking version of this post, and borrow as much as you like, without any need to credit me.
A new study has provided evidence that a healthy lifestyle can reverse aging, as measured by epigenetic age: Reversal of Epigenetic Age with Diet and Lifestyle in a Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial. This is the second study to show that epigenetic age can be reversed in humans (here’s a reminder to read the first).
They used the Horvath DNAmAge clock.
After a mere 8 weeks of a healthy lifestyle, the subjects’ DNAmAge was 3.23 years younger than the controls (and 1.96 years younger than the pre-trial DNAmAge of the treatment group).
The lifestyle interventions weren’t labeled as paleo, but they closely resemble the lifestyles that are recommended by Chris Kresser, Steven R. Gundry, and Dale Bredesen. The diet comes about as close as the diet of a typical paleo enthusiast to avoiding foods that have been available for less than 10,000 years. The recommended foods that I consider the least paleo are “coconut, olive, flaxseed and pumpkin seed oil”. The diet is more plant-based than the stereotypical paleo diet, but it’s well within the normal range of hunter-gatherer diets.
The study has a bunch of the usual limitations, such as a small sample size (18 people in the treatment group). There are also reasons for mild concerns about conflicts of interest, as some of the researchers work as functional medicine physicians, so their careers are mildly dependent on the popularity of the lifestyle approach being studied. As far as I can tell, that is likely to cause a level of bias that is rather ordinary for nutrition-related research. Oh, and the instructions are listed as “Patent pending”, but it’s unclear why they would meet the novelty requirements for a patent.
My main doubt comes from the difficulty of figuring out whether DNAmAge measures causes of age-related health problems, or whether it’s just measuring symptoms. I’m slightly more than 50% confident that epigenetic changes have some causal influence on aging.
This kind of trial raises questions about how well patients follow the instructions – most would find it difficult to “Avoid added sugar/candy, dairy, grains, legumes/beans”. The paper describes how they checked on patient compliance, but I didn’t see any data indicating what they found about compliance. So there’s some risk that they were especially lucky about getting patients to follow their instructions, and maybe future studies of this nature will show much weaker results due to poor compliance.
Lastly, it’s a bit odd that the control group appeared to age 1.27 years in 8 weeks. Maybe they were depressed about not getting any treatment? (This isn’t the kind of study where blinding is feasible). More likely it was just noise, but that’s a reminder that the small sample size provides lots of opportunity for luck to dominate the results. Even if we assume perfect measurement, there’s plenty of room for variation in lifestyles. Uncontrolled lifestyle changes, such as someone getting fired, could mess with the results enough to matter.