I don't want Biden to subsidize nuclear power by pouring money into it. I want him to remove the barriers which make the construction of new and novel nuclear power plants so ungodly expensive.
Build the damn Yuca mountain nuclear waste site. Give passively safe reactors fast tracked NRC approvals (it's incoherent to let existing designs continue to operate and go over inherently less dangerous new designs with a fine tooth comb). And, most importantly, limit the ability of opponents to use APA and EPA report and notice/comment requirements to hold up projects of all kinds (they aren't substantive requirements).
Besides, I want the nuclear people to get behind carbon taxes as their ticket to profits.
To what extent do wealthy SF "progressives" believe their own rhetoric? I'm personally a great believer in Hanlon's razor, so I'm inclined to think this is caused by self-deception rather than craven self-interest. Humans in general are very good at convincing ourselves that what is good for us is good for everyone.
To be fair, we’ve already been detecting cancers of questionable clinical significance for some time. This is a possibility any time you scan a healthy person (eg for a research study). Tumours picked up this way get called ‘incidentalomas’ and there are usually guidelines for how to deal with them, depending on where they’re found in the body
RIP Daniel Kahneman, and thanks for the nice write-up Noah. I read Thinking Fast and Slow about ten years ago and it was an eye-opener. Understanding biases and the whole System-1/System-2 thing completely changed the way I approached my life. I think it should be required reading.
Cancer screening has had the problem of significance of "early" detection forever. This doesn't just apply to "incidentally" found tumors but to screening programs themselves. it is called overdiagnosis. Perhaps best known in prostate screening, it shows up essentially in all cancer screening programs including breast and lung. There was a famous study from South Korea looking at thyroid cancer screening in which the incidence went through the roof but the change in mortality was zero, since screening detected very low grade tumors that had no effect on mortality. (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1409841) There is no reason this doesn't apply to AI detected breast tumors as well. The usual solution is to do a randomized control study (which Noah loves for economics) to see if finding these small tumors changes outcomes. Outcomes is what you really care about, not finding tiny tumors.
From the Washington Post (also in Thinking Fast and Slow):
"During World War II, he was forced to wear a Star of David after Nazi German forces occupied the city in 1940. One night in 1941 or ’42, he later recalled, he stayed out past the German-imposed curfew for Jews while visiting a friend, and he turned his sweater inside out to hide the star while he walked a few blocks home. He then crossed paths with a soldier in the SS, who called him over, picked him up — and hugged him.
'I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater,' Dr. Kahneman noted …... But the German pulled out his wallet, showed him a photo of a boy, gave him some money and sent him on his way. 'I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.'”
Have "progressives" ever really favored the poor? as with everyone, they actually just work for their self-interest, and their big government policies eventually pave the way for more poverty, state violence and homelessness while the well-connected are more powerful than ever. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in California
I am absolutely positively an outlier here and I don't want to be part of a Kahneman error. But I'm alive only because of an almost random PSA test for prostate cancer. I don't really understand why you're only supposed to take the test if you're old. It seems to me that as you approach the end of your natural life prostate cancer becomes less and less likely to be the cause of your death. So why implant fear of something that almost certainly won't happen. But mine was caught at 50 when there's usually still a lot of life left in you. So if you have cancer with several decades to go you might want to nip it in the bud. I started out in the wait and see camp but it escalated remarkably quickly and if I had waited just a few months it would have been all over for me. But again that's extremely rare so don't pull a kahneman based on my experience.
I was a graduate student in Math Education at Stanford for five years shortly before Dr. Boaler arrived. The professors I knew (though I loved them dearly) consistently opposed anything that smacked of “tracking” or elitism, beginning algebra in middle school being one instance. Yet, the majority of them sent their own children to exclusive private schools. Most of the exceptions went to top-tier public schools in the wealthy areas in which they lived.
It also occurred to me that, considering Stanford’s very low acceptance rate, students there are already tracked.
> One interesting idea is to just come up with a different name for the lowest-risk, slowest-growing forms of prostate cancer, in order to stop people from freaking out about having “cancer”.
We already kinda have that concept, with "pre-cancerous" cells. I was born with a birthmark, a couple inches across, of a type that's known to sometimes turn into a melanoma. When I was in my teens, I was referred by a GP to a dermatologist, who looked at it, and decided that it was technically "pre-cancerous" but it looked like a high risk for turning into an actual cancer. (Something about the edges not being a nice smooth line, looking kind of like a moth-eaten edge on a piece of fabric. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6738388/ ) Because it was right there on the surface, it would be pretty easy and cheap to remove it. So I got that done. (Simple procedure under local anaesthesia, in and out. The guy doing the surgery, when he was cauterizing the blood vessels from the removal site, quipped, "If you smell something burning, don't worry, it's just you.")
It doesn't seem like a stretch to start describing small clumps of cells that pose a _risk_ of turning into something life-threatening, but where the risks of doing surgery or chemo or radiotherapy outweight that risk, as "pre-cancerous".
Female baby boomer here: I struggled with math in school always-learned to hate it. In college, changed my major from art to biology and had to complete the math sequence or else no degree-so now, algebra, geometry, trig and calculus. Figure it out or else. The terrible math experience from middle/high school haunted me, but I learned how to learn it in college. Had to repeat Calculus, but got through the sequence, got the degree. My point is, that to eliminate early educational struggles because the students don't like it, don't see the point, everybody is frustrated, cheats the young person by allowing a future door to be closed before he/she is capable of understanding that there is something worth having behind that door. Ditto Latin classes which turned out to be a super helpful bit of programming in my head. It's a failure of the imagination to assume that because students don't need a skill now, they won't need it in the future or that in not having that tool, opportunity will be denied. That's the opposite of equity.
Fascinating about cancer detection. Right now, many of the tools we have are controversial, because there are so many false positives. It's an exciting time to be alive.
Would love to see a post on rapidly falling battery prices, and what it takes to get to the place where battery+solar can really scale to get rid of all the remaining coal and then gas.
I don't want Biden to subsidize nuclear power by pouring money into it. I want him to remove the barriers which make the construction of new and novel nuclear power plants so ungodly expensive.
Build the damn Yuca mountain nuclear waste site. Give passively safe reactors fast tracked NRC approvals (it's incoherent to let existing designs continue to operate and go over inherently less dangerous new designs with a fine tooth comb). And, most importantly, limit the ability of opponents to use APA and EPA report and notice/comment requirements to hold up projects of all kinds (they aren't substantive requirements).
Besides, I want the nuclear people to get behind carbon taxes as their ticket to profits.
To what extent do wealthy SF "progressives" believe their own rhetoric? I'm personally a great believer in Hanlon's razor, so I'm inclined to think this is caused by self-deception rather than craven self-interest. Humans in general are very good at convincing ourselves that what is good for us is good for everyone.
To be fair, we’ve already been detecting cancers of questionable clinical significance for some time. This is a possibility any time you scan a healthy person (eg for a research study). Tumours picked up this way get called ‘incidentalomas’ and there are usually guidelines for how to deal with them, depending on where they’re found in the body
RIP Daniel Kahneman, and thanks for the nice write-up Noah. I read Thinking Fast and Slow about ten years ago and it was an eye-opener. Understanding biases and the whole System-1/System-2 thing completely changed the way I approached my life. I think it should be required reading.
This post certainly lives up to your title "five interesting things."
Cancer screening has had the problem of significance of "early" detection forever. This doesn't just apply to "incidentally" found tumors but to screening programs themselves. it is called overdiagnosis. Perhaps best known in prostate screening, it shows up essentially in all cancer screening programs including breast and lung. There was a famous study from South Korea looking at thyroid cancer screening in which the incidence went through the roof but the change in mortality was zero, since screening detected very low grade tumors that had no effect on mortality. (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1409841) There is no reason this doesn't apply to AI detected breast tumors as well. The usual solution is to do a randomized control study (which Noah loves for economics) to see if finding these small tumors changes outcomes. Outcomes is what you really care about, not finding tiny tumors.
From the Washington Post (also in Thinking Fast and Slow):
"During World War II, he was forced to wear a Star of David after Nazi German forces occupied the city in 1940. One night in 1941 or ’42, he later recalled, he stayed out past the German-imposed curfew for Jews while visiting a friend, and he turned his sweater inside out to hide the star while he walked a few blocks home. He then crossed paths with a soldier in the SS, who called him over, picked him up — and hugged him.
'I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater,' Dr. Kahneman noted …... But the German pulled out his wallet, showed him a photo of a boy, gave him some money and sent him on his way. 'I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.'”
You say "Meanwhile, on the left, Palestine protests were never that common and have become even rarer." Do you have any numbers on this?
Have "progressives" ever really favored the poor? as with everyone, they actually just work for their self-interest, and their big government policies eventually pave the way for more poverty, state violence and homelessness while the well-connected are more powerful than ever. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in California
I am absolutely positively an outlier here and I don't want to be part of a Kahneman error. But I'm alive only because of an almost random PSA test for prostate cancer. I don't really understand why you're only supposed to take the test if you're old. It seems to me that as you approach the end of your natural life prostate cancer becomes less and less likely to be the cause of your death. So why implant fear of something that almost certainly won't happen. But mine was caught at 50 when there's usually still a lot of life left in you. So if you have cancer with several decades to go you might want to nip it in the bud. I started out in the wait and see camp but it escalated remarkably quickly and if I had waited just a few months it would have been all over for me. But again that's extremely rare so don't pull a kahneman based on my experience.
I was a graduate student in Math Education at Stanford for five years shortly before Dr. Boaler arrived. The professors I knew (though I loved them dearly) consistently opposed anything that smacked of “tracking” or elitism, beginning algebra in middle school being one instance. Yet, the majority of them sent their own children to exclusive private schools. Most of the exceptions went to top-tier public schools in the wealthy areas in which they lived.
It also occurred to me that, considering Stanford’s very low acceptance rate, students there are already tracked.
> One interesting idea is to just come up with a different name for the lowest-risk, slowest-growing forms of prostate cancer, in order to stop people from freaking out about having “cancer”.
We already kinda have that concept, with "pre-cancerous" cells. I was born with a birthmark, a couple inches across, of a type that's known to sometimes turn into a melanoma. When I was in my teens, I was referred by a GP to a dermatologist, who looked at it, and decided that it was technically "pre-cancerous" but it looked like a high risk for turning into an actual cancer. (Something about the edges not being a nice smooth line, looking kind of like a moth-eaten edge on a piece of fabric. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6738388/ ) Because it was right there on the surface, it would be pretty easy and cheap to remove it. So I got that done. (Simple procedure under local anaesthesia, in and out. The guy doing the surgery, when he was cauterizing the blood vessels from the removal site, quipped, "If you smell something burning, don't worry, it's just you.")
It doesn't seem like a stretch to start describing small clumps of cells that pose a _risk_ of turning into something life-threatening, but where the risks of doing surgery or chemo or radiotherapy outweight that risk, as "pre-cancerous".
Female baby boomer here: I struggled with math in school always-learned to hate it. In college, changed my major from art to biology and had to complete the math sequence or else no degree-so now, algebra, geometry, trig and calculus. Figure it out or else. The terrible math experience from middle/high school haunted me, but I learned how to learn it in college. Had to repeat Calculus, but got through the sequence, got the degree. My point is, that to eliminate early educational struggles because the students don't like it, don't see the point, everybody is frustrated, cheats the young person by allowing a future door to be closed before he/she is capable of understanding that there is something worth having behind that door. Ditto Latin classes which turned out to be a super helpful bit of programming in my head. It's a failure of the imagination to assume that because students don't need a skill now, they won't need it in the future or that in not having that tool, opportunity will be denied. That's the opposite of equity.
Fascinating about cancer detection. Right now, many of the tools we have are controversial, because there are so many false positives. It's an exciting time to be alive.
You might want to look into using what3words when guiding people to your hanami party.
Would love to see a post on rapidly falling battery prices, and what it takes to get to the place where battery+solar can really scale to get rid of all the remaining coal and then gas.