Author of Eat Shit & Prosper. Founder of Constellation Bio. Giving people back the parts of themselves they've lost. https://xitter.cf/t.co/eMsPVMDkjn
Berkeley, CA
Joined June 2021
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ɪ ᴄᴏᴍᴘʀɪsᴇ.
I've always said that I'll get a tattoo when I hear, or see, or think of something that I am compelled to have etched into my skin forever. I don't know if this quite does it, but I think it's the closest thing so far.
Stephen Skolnick retweeted
terry tao: imagine, if you will, a petrifying situation. you have produced a very effective drug, but you do not know how it works. do you trust the drug? now, this is just a hypothetical, but—
drug developers:
If Tolkeinian elves kept humans as pets, we'd probably end up giving them a disease.
I say this because Fusobacterium, a core component of the healthy canine gut microbiome, is very reliably associated with colorectal cancer.
I saw a post years ago positing that to dogs humans are like elves, immortal and unchanging. It reckoned that greatest honor a dog could achieve was to be there to ease a human’s passing, not just because it was an event so rare that generations of dogs lived and died never even seeing them age, but in recognition of the many ancestors that the human had cared for during their long life.
"Let he who is without sin..."
But seriously, this guy's been on his beat—that the pyramids and similar ancient-megalithic structures were poured rather than carved—for YEARS. He is obviously correct. But he makes everyone who did a PhD in Speculative Egyptology look the fool.
🧵 Cast stones? Come on!
"Where are the molds? And why is every single stone a different shape and size?"
I've been asked these two questions about twenty-eight thousand times, and I've answered them at least as often. It happens every time someone looks at a polygonal megalithic wall in Peru, Japan, Greece, or anywhere else megalithic walls stand. Apparently my patience is infinite, because here I am, summing it all up for the twenty-eight-thousand-and-first time.
The observation itself is fine: there really are no two identical stones in these walls, and "you can't slip a razor blade into the joints", as people who DON'T know the subject keep repeating.
The conclusion they draw, though, is a work of art: according to the critics, the stones can't be artificial because they're not identical. 😊
Hats off, you rarely see a logical backflip like that live :-)
1/7
Come to Lighthaven Oct 30 - Nov 1 for @AvalonInst's Avalon Exposition; I'll be giving a lecture series on the origins of a variety of chronic illnesses, along with some musings on the philosophical implications of the new science of the microbiome.
People need new grounds for sharing art and thought. The Avalon Exposition is ours: three days of exuberance for anything touching the human condition, from military history to music to the microbiome.
Some amazing work will be there. Bring yours!
avalon.institute/exposition/…
Another great example of how "consensus" science is just whatever major corporations decide. Try to update the Wikipedia article on any drug or herbal remedy and—even if you're citing legitimate studies—you'll have your edits reverted lickety-split as "not MEDRS"
This is certainly the most consequential paper published in child and adolescent psychiatry for the last few years. It shows that the meta-analyses that current child psychiatry guidelines rely on to recommend fluoxetine for depression were skewed by an unbelievable trial (n=40) in Iran which found an effect 15 times larger than the average.
When this trial is removed all meta-analyses find the same as a recent Cochrane analysis which found 'small and unimportant differences.'
The flawed meta-analyses by Zhou and @cipriani in the @TheLancet and Lancet Psychiatry need to be corrected.
And guideline committees need to update their guidance in the context of the harms of these drugs including withdrawal effects, sexual effects and agitation/akathisia and suicidality in a minority of youths exposed to them.
Link below
Other fun facts: I have it on good authority that @EliLillyandCo reran their pivotal prozac trial—the one it got approved on—in Japan a few years later and found no significant improvement in depression. Whoops!
Stephen Skolnick retweeted
The great thing about science is that, if you do the right experiment, you only have to do one.
This is the thing that the wet-lab hyperscaler fanboys are missing. The kind of science that truly advances the frontier cannot be approximated by an aggregate of incremental advances.
I did not nab this bug in the several years that I worked at a company doing high-throughput cultivation and strain-banking. I did it in a small lab of my own, when I had some time while the lawyers were dickering about the wording of the poop donor consent forms.
But if you are willing to do those things, your reward is sometimes to be the first person in history to lay eyes on a beautiful creature like this one. You can, as I did, make history—in a small but very real way—on your first try.
