I would not underestimate the importance of US dietary guidelines.
For example, dietary guidelines are followed by schools, hospitals and military. They are also taught in medical schools and used by doctors to advise their patients. Additionally, lots of countries semi-blindly follow whatever guidelines US comes up with (see the parallel with covid treatments & measures?)
My gut feeling is that those guidelines directly contributed to a vast number of deaths / lost QALYs.
even though J&J is not mRNA-based
The core point is that even J&J is not a traditional vaccine. It’s also genetic (DNA-based) with a classic non-LNP delivery mechanism using an adenovirus. From what I understand, it penetrates a different subset of cells (using ACE receptors, afaik) that get killed by the immune system in the same way as with mRNA-vaccines.
Strongly upvoted as well, and I agree with Vanilla_cabs—I don’t think it helps classifying everybody concerned about covid vaccines as anti-vaxers. Maybe we need a better term.
Here is an analysis taking into account recovered people with natural immunity in the US:
https://youtu.be/vJy8jdunpFw?t=520
Personally, I’m wondering if antibody dependent enhancement could explain some weird patterns we are starting seeing now in highly-vaccinated places.
The negative meta-study is borderline malicious.
“This article has an embarrassing history whereby treatment arms in the study of Niaee were reversed, attracting protest from Dr Niaee himself. This egregious error has been corrected in the revised version, but with no change to the Conclusions in spite of dramatic change…”—from BIRDGroup twitter.
Pubpeer is also useful in cases like this:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/955418F3D4D39742CFFA8C1B023AA3
Similarly to Hacker Newsletter there is a weekly digest of Lesswrong posts on Rational Newsletter.
Interesting, thanks! My thinking is that:
Methylation increases with age and predicts biological age
Methylation affects protein synthesis in a semi-random way
Those points mean that epigenetics at least partially causes all hallmarks dependent on protein synthesis (loss of proteostasis, intercellular communication, etc). Meaning that epigenetics is at least partially upstream of at least a few hallmarks.
Not sure what being correct about information theory of aging would exactly mean or what other evidence to expect. Intuitively it feels that our efforts should focus upstream and that there are more low hanging fruits in epigenetics than in most of the other hallmarks.
Very curious to hear a bit more about why you are skeptical about epigenetics and information theory of aging as the primary cause. But I completely agree that it’s not the only cause!
“Being sufficient to slow aging” is a pretty low bar, I have virtually no doubt that reprogramming will slow aging (it already has been done experimentally with mice).
Thanks for an amazing post, Jack!
I think it’s worth mentioning that damage accumulation as the root cause is not the consensus view anymore.
To quote Josh Mitteldorf, there are three views:
(from the “programmed” school) Aging is programmed via epigenetics. The body downregulates repair mechanisms as we get older, while upregulating apoptosis and inflammation to such an extent that they are causes of significant damage.
(from the “damage” school) The body accumulates damage as we get older. The body tries to rescue itself from the damage by upregulating repair and renewal pathways in response to the damage.
(also from the “damage” school) Part of the damage the body suffers is dysregulation of methylation. Methylation changes with age are stochastic. Methylation becomes more random with age.
My belief is that (1), (2), and (3) are all occurring, but that (1) predominates over (2). The “damage” school of aging would contend that (1) is excluded, and there are only (2) and (3).
There has been a lot of progress with (1) in the last years which makes me more optimistic in short longevity timelines.
I am using https://scite.ai/ with a plugin for browsers, but I would love a similar service with user-generated flags.
I’m not pretending to even remotely understand the math in question, but, subjectively, his team is doing novel research. The initial results look promising and it looks like they are constantly making progress even though they started pretty recently. The papers are being peer reviewed and they are actively engaging with community.
I know that they are constantly trying to find areas which could generate novel predictions, but maybe it’s a bit too early to demand so much rigor at this point?
Not directly related to your comment, but I don’t understand why there is so much negativity coming from our community and I don’t see why objections could not be respectful.
Thanks for the article!
How could such a brilliant individual let personal dogma and rigid belief (overconfidence, in fact), supersede rational discussion
I would not go as far as to say that his beliefs were not rational or dogmatic. One can also argue that Einstein’s intuition was correct and that he was right to challenge the Copenhagen interpretation.
Have you looked at the claims that whey protein contains NR? I briefly looked at the commonly referred papers but I could not see anything relevant, let alone specific numbers.
I’m not 100% sure this article is in tune with LW
It absolutely is! Thank you for writing this post and I’m looking forward to your follow up articles.
Cheers!
Thank you, the newsletter is alive and well :) I’ve managed to keep the updates weekly and I’m planning on continuing doing that.
There are a couple of hundred people subscribed so far.
Yes! Here it is:
Thank you for such a well-structured and concise summary of the research! I really like this sequence.
Pretty interesting to see where all of that could lead from the evolutionary (working memory / type 2 processes in animals) and from the mental disorder perspective.
Thanks for sharing!
You put quite a lot of effort into being reasonable and not antagonising your brother and it looks like you did a great job! In heated discussions like that, especially with family members, I’d recommend trying out NVC (Nonviolent communication).
Can’t help but give you one example: “I finally told him … [that] … I felt like he was treating me with contempt”. That might get perceived as an accusation or a judgement. I’d rephrase it (oversimplifying) as “I don’t feel understood, could you give my points some more consideration please?” (asking to repeat back your points could also help).
I don’t think there’s any science behind NVC but I find it pretty helpful in situations like that.
Thanks again for the post!
Thank you! RSS feed is definitely coming in the future.
Thank you!
The effect could be different in Vietnam because of cultural differences, strictness of regulation or somethings else. Same as vaccine program compliance.
The central point is about adequacy of governmental decisions, not about compliance to them.
There are plenty of regulations about hospital food or child nutrition in the US that follow the dietary guidance. I have not looked into it but it would not surprise me if they regulate macro calorie intake for military (not that it matters for the central point of discussion).