Nitimur in vetitum 🇺🇸
Joined August 2017
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Not many people know that Scott Galloway is a first-gen Brit. Despite his accent, he exhibits the same mannerisms, speech patterns, career pursuits, depressive envy, and general Orwellian weltanschauung as the modern British functionary class. At core, he’s a poor facsimile of the Rory Sutherland type.
I hope that British friends do not take this the wrong way, but the truth is that I’ve observed that they as a people often have an inborn tendency to confuse belletrism for substantive ideas. The words are the end unto themselves and they fail to draw, or draw very tenuously, a logical nexus to the underlying ideas being gestured at. At worst, they implicitly believe language is constitutive of reality rather than descriptive of it (this view, in part, justifies the current flood of UK social media arrests).
Seemingly, asseverating to plaudits that Musk ought to be executed as a traitor to the West makes it true that he is indeed a traitor in Galloway’s mind (and it’s risible that he would invoke “the West”, as if he a) has a coherent idea of what that means and b) believes it is worth defending in any meaningful way that might threaten his self-image of being a heckin’ good person).
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Current medical and public health interventions that probably cause more iatrogenic harm than total harm prevented:
-widespread water fluoridation
-cholesterol-lowering therapies that scarcely address lipoprotein particle count (esp lipophilic statins)
-paracetamol given to children ages 0-6
-most GABAergic prescription drugs (benzos, barbiturates, z-drugs)
-essentially all psychotherapy
-widespread marijuana legalization and medically indicated use (esp with current high THC conc products)
-most psychiatric drugs (SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics, anti-dopaminergics/cholinergics)
-fluoroquinolone antibiotics
-RICE recommendations
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
Some others:
-advice that pregnancy at elevation is ~harmless
-infant circumcision without a medical need
-prescription of all 5alpha-reductase inhibitors
-all “gender-affirming” intervention (hormonal and surgical)
-all hormonal birth-control, esp as prescribed before terminal female development
-isotretinoin and related oral retinols, esp given before terminal development in both sexes
-entire infant vaccine schedule (esp Vit K and Hep B vaccines at birth) and harmful excipient/adjuvant inclusion
-most mRNA vaccines in modern formulations (LNP problems; buildup and slow dissipation in immune-protected tissues like brain, eyes, and testes; pseudo-uridine inclusion; poor QC with plasmid DNA template fragments still in the vaccine; and systemic distribution, esp in more vascularized men to cardiac tissue).
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Elaboration on problems with vitamin k injections in newborns and paracetamol use in young children, from a deleted thread:
Vit K: there’s an evolutionary reason infants are born Vitamin K “deficient”, that placental transfer does not occur, and why human breast milk is low in Vitamin K. It is a powerful catalyst for cell differentiation (which can become premature with a IM bolus dose of Vik K at birth). This can further engender developmental defects or genetic mutations during critical stages of growth. Fatal VKDB is a very low probability event and evolution made the correct tradeoff to prevent against developmental mutations in the womb and in newborns by limiting newborn vit k exposure. Standard of care Vit K injections cause non-fatal but significant developmental harm to many newborns to save the lives of a vanishingly small fraction of them. Classic PH intervention.
Paracetamol:
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Telling my highly distressed interlocutors that no no no it’s okay I’m just a “high decoupler” I don’t have any normative views whatsoever that flow from these obviously true declarative positions
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OCPD is a relatively unknown cluster c personality disorder that I believe is presently under positive selection in the first world, at least as a spectral collection of traits.
It’s characterized by excessive devotion to work and productivity — to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships and even to the exclusion of task completion, moral/ethical inflexibility, obsession with rules/lists, cognitive rigidity, paralyzing perfectionism, inter alia.
These behaviors do not elicit internal distress (it’s an ego-syntonic “condition”), so diagnoses are rarely given save in extreme cases where the OCPDer faces external pressure to be evaluated.
Much of this is pathognomonic of OCPD, which—although still somewhat a fake diagnosis—differs significantly from OCD: these are ego-syntonic (as opposed to ego-dystonic) manifestations of moral rigidity, over-conscientiousness, inability to discard (objects and fixed beliefs), & perfectionism/pre-occupation with fixed rule systems.
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An interesting discussion on the internal life of an OCPDer:
open.spotify.com/episode/1CO…
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For interesting reasons I’ve spent more time in the US this past year than in the past 6 years combined. Some observations on the most salient changes from 2021 to 2026:
-non-core (food, energy) price inflation over these years has been considerable. >100% in most cases.
-the immigrant CDL thing is a real problem; traffic behavior of semis is noticeably more unpredictable and dangerous. Behavior in the commons (rest stops and the like) on highways has also deteriorated.
-widespread political discord has tempered somewhat
-causal sports betting has absolutely exploded among young men
-young women seem more entitled (girl asked my buddy his TC before agreeing to talk to him at a bar)…. American ladies you do not understand how good you have it!
-the neologism “gaslighting” is hilariously overused in everyday convos
-tipping culture has somehow reached its grippy tendrils into areas that you’d previously think impossible
-domestic airlines have made great improvements in all areas besides pricing
-contactless payment finally just works (somehow Europe beat us to this)
-there’s always a new seltzer and “protein x” junk food du jour
-Americans are still as friendly and prosocial as ever
Contrast these particular, discrete observations to my general, continuous observations re the French:
What’s most salient is:
-ambient rudeness / dyspeptic behavior
-a certain selfishness to the detriment of the commons (as in expressed in things as small as side-walking behavior and driving to opaque financial transactions and the self-dealing side economies)
-the above results in necessary but highly inconvenient guardrails for a somewhat low-trust society (and I mean even among the non-immigrant French)
-a type of provincialism—and I’ll acknowledge this isn’t entirely the populace’s fault—by dint of the fact that France is a black box walled garden due to language barriers, both by being siloed on the internet and interpersonally
-politics, generally. Liberté, égalité, fraternité — high-minded ideals that genuinely do not exist in modern France. Further, I’ve yet to meet a French person who isn’t simultaneously so confident in their views of American politics yet so wrong as to warrant serious consideration of any of their other views. Never mind the fact that most are fully willing to derogate my country on first realization I’m American.
-tax, runaway credentialism, destructive occupational licensing; the entire premise of top-down dirigisme does not make for a robust economy nor country
-finally — and this is a little more ineffable — but communication doesn’t seem to have a teleological purpose with the average French person. It’s so incredibly hard to extract the operative piece of information in a goals-oriented discussion. It’s a sense that substance follows style, and basal truth is often a side consideration.
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I had an interesting talk this weekend with a German post-doc mathematician who’s at Waterloo currently.
Her views are essentially mine: except in special cases modern pure math is basically useless but still a worthwhile human pursuit; many of the “solved” open problems are compute-intensive, low-hanging fruit used as a means of alternative benchmark marketing; few of the mathematicians claiming to have been scooped by OpenAI have a real claim; the math capability of frontier transformer models will disproportionately advantage mid- to late career mathematicians for myriad reasons (and to a greater degree than is currently appreciated); mathematicians are cognitive misers and newer cohorts will not be as competitive as older cohorts, both due to negative selection into the field and due to LLMs being a training crutch; LLM math capability will follow a sigmoidal curve with a hard upper bound, comprising sub-sigmoidal curves according to architecture advancements; and, novel human recombination will still be necessary at the bleeding edge.
These are in vitro studies but remain compelling to me. DMSO is surprisingly neurotoxic at low concentrations in certain experimental conditions.
This is concerning because it is used as penetration enhancer and active ingredient at ~50% in Pennsaid and Rimso-50 and in several antifungal formulations to enhance drug solubility, principally through nail keratin. But, the serum concentration achieved by both systemic and topical use of these drugs still falls far below the putative apoptotic threshold.
In my view, the biggest risk is with DMSO cryopreserved stem-cell infusions, especially when administered directly into brain tissue.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2044…
Truly amazing stuff!
Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) produces widespread apoptosis in the developing central nervous system
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
My wife and I left Bordeaux in part because it was markedly unsafe for her to be out alone at night.
This is interesting. Debt isn't the only thing rising fast in France, violent crimes and offenses are increasing rapidly too. 45% in just a few years is a lot.
How did that happen? I thought the French were nice, cultured people who enjoy croissants in the morning and good cheese and wine in the evening with friends.
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Hopefully that is not too infrequently! I’ve received two “red flags” for being a bad boy--curiously both after moving to France--and have heard that I am not appearing on my friends’ feeds currently.
I do have a few updates:
-“pragmatic libertarianism” is far too capacious a term - ripe for misinterpretation, not something I’m all that keen to defend at present, and comprises a coalition that I don’t want to throw in with. I’m more rightly just a small government conservative with some (not all) laissez-faire social positions. The normative claims that flow from this are simply more consilient with the natural order.
-Saying that ‘CICO is true’ is almost a thermodynamic tautology. It is true in the strict sense but the “calories out” portion is an imprecise load-bearer: humans vary widely in basal metabolism, which itself varies widely in its allostatic slack over time and space, and this is usually not what most people construe CICO to mean. The “CI” portion requires refinement and extensive throat-clearing as well, so much so that I question defending this position even on purely semantic grounds.
-Straussianism is far more than a byword for ‘furtive dog whistle’ or ‘selective delusive speech’; it’s been co-opted as such and this is both kind of gay and represents a poverty-of-language meaning collapse.
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Other things I may add:
-At least within mammalian species (and especially in recently “speciated” ones like humans), recapitulation theory is basically true.
-I’ve been accused of being a reductive materialist by others on this thread; while I’m not reductive, I certainly am a materialist simply by dint of the fact that I think this informs the truest model of reality, is falsifiable, and makes useful predictions (at least non-quantum reality, which is true enough for everyday sense-making purposes).
-With respect to hedonic adaptation, there is evidence that certain types of chronic pain are resistant to hedonic adaptation. I ought to add this.
-I consider myself a strict fallibilist (in the non-Popperian sense), but this does not foreclose on the existence of near dispositive fact patterns nor justified belief that form a logical nexus with those fact patterns; in fact, I’m a fallibilist as applied to fallibilism.
-Some degree of linguistic prescriptivism is probably a good idea as the last two decades has borne out.
-The monosemanticity/polysemanticity spectrum is deeply important for understanding human meaning (and dis-meaning) systems -- as it applies across human populations, language as emergent properties of the collective mental attributes of those populations, and increasingly LLMs. Layer on Shannon Entropy in a 2x2 axis, and you have a profitable way to think about linguistic tradeoffs and supremacy.
-Slippery slope arguments are autological -- themselves often a slippery slope.
-Humans ought to use more no-no words -- if only because, like dreams, these provide out-of-sample conversational data to avoid world model overfitting
-Nicotine and caffeine are Lindy for a reason
-USA is #1, sorry