Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
I am broaching a large anti-mRNA topic, and throwing down. I have placed plenty claims that I expect to be rebutted.
It'd be a bit easier if you could summarize with some bullet points of the claims you're actually throwing down to be rebutted - it's a fairly long and meandering post.
I am having a lot of trouble with this. The pfizer vaccine is associated with an increase in Pulmonary Embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs. There is severe disinterest in classifying these types of blood clots. I noticed that the scientific establishment went very far to profile "microclots" of the COVID-19 disease
Note that COVID has an RR of 2.2 for pulmonary embolism, the patient population for which is likely heterogeneous (vaccinated, unvaccinated, vaccinated + infection, etc). Does vaccination significantly reduce that number in such a way as to be net beneficial along this single axis? I'm not sure we could power that study, particularly now that everyone is some mess of vaccinated/infected/vaccinated + infected and we can't reliably differentiate them anymore. On the one hand, rates of PE are fairly high in hospitalized patients, who are the ones who would have most benefited from vaccines - on the other hand, the same study doesn't note much of a change in PE risk in hospitalized patients after vaccines became widely available. Moreover, the slow pace of updating the vaccines combined with decreases in COVID virulence make the calculus very difficult in whether the vaccines even provide significant benefit at this point - a point being reported on in the MSM.
Note also that the major caveat of the paper you link is that they're forced to compare to historical data, so we're effectively comparing PE rates in two historical periods - one of which saw the emergence of a major new respiratory virus causing PE! From the paper you linked:
Further, the AMI, DIC, and ITP signals were not robust when additional baseline rates were evaluated, while the PE signal might be explained by differences in rates between the pre-COVID-19 and peri-COVID-19 periods.
Also:
The statistical signals of four serious outcomes are not necessarily causal and may be due to factors potentially unrelated to vaccination. Additional analyses indicated that the potential association was less than twice the historical rates and may be associated with factors not accounted for in the near real-time surveillance methods. For example, the elderly Medicare population that received the BNT162b2 vaccine differed from other elderly COVID-19 vaccinated populations, including a preponderance of nursing home residents and populations with a higher comorbidity burden. These demographic and medical differences were not fully accounted for, since expected rates were only standardized to a subset of characteristics – age, sex, race, and nursing home residency status.
Be careful drawing facile conclusions from large correlational studies like this. And not to be a paternalistic douchebag (feel free to ignore if you know better) but you might find it helpful to skim the discussion of a paper if you aren't familiar with the field to at least get a feel for the limitations or alternative explanations of the study.
That's all I found. Can you help me with information on clotting from the Flu?
There's plenty of papers: Here's a review that will have a summary and a couple dozen primary references if you're interested. Many primary papers investigating the mechanisms as well.
except we saw autopsy results in Germany that prove there can be sudden death after vaccination from the myocarditis related arryhthmia/dysrhythmia.
What study are you referencing? The last time I looked into myocarditis it was vanishingly rare, a tiny number of deaths were attributable to it and those individuals seemed to have many other medical conditions. Usually sudden death after vaccination would be related to anaphylaxis due to an allergy to some vaccine component, whereas the myocarditis takes a few days to develop.
I understand that for your first encounter with the virus, your odds profile is completely different. If you already had Covid-19, you have natural immunity. Any further mRNA vaccination is offering a risk without a benefit, now that your immune naivety is broken.
As well say this for tetanus, flu, rabies or any of the other viruses we need boosters for. Immunity wanes particularly quickly for respiratory viruses. Note also that the Moderna booster is a half dose, so modulo some weird memory effects likely has lower rates of adverse events.
I don't think we know the risk of myocarditis after reinfection; it's almost certainly lower, but I could only find two case reports so it's difficult to draw any conclusions or calculate the relative benefit of vaccination. Moreover, tens of thousands of elderly patients die of flu every year, and I can guarantee you that they aren't immunologically naive. Natural immunity isn't a silver bullet.
We keep getting dragged down by considering every SARS-2 infection as potentially lethal, when this was really never true. I believe this has created a pervasive "magical model" of viruses where the virus touches one of your cells, and suddenly has a key to every organ in your body (please rebut me).
I'm not sure I understand your point here.
Immunity, the virus is being kept very mild, and I am highly suspicious of anyone who presents a sequalae based on unique characteristics of SARS-2, when it infects your upper respiratory tract, like the hundreds and thousands of respiratory virus strains that were ostensibly new, and passed through us dozens of times. The true nature of the human ecology and it's interaction with reparatory viruses, since the group Mammalia existed, suddenly seems like a especially dangerous aberration in our times (edit note - typo and word change for group).
It's true. It does seem like COVID is progressing towards being 'just another virus' that people get repeatedly during flu season and we've watched in real time the emergence of a new 'cold' virus. I'd argue it's the first time we've watched this happen with modern technology (HIV and seasonal flu strains being related, but distinct in my opinion). None of this precludes a hyper-pathological variant cropping up next year, but I suppose I'd bet against it.
That being said, we've been infected by influenza for at least 1,500 years and it's still a major public health concern. A truly protective vaccine would be a major coup, and investing resources in these problems is worthwhile even if lockdowns and mask mandates are not.
Am I outing myself as a desperate Mottian by being so befuddled by the seeming lack of interest in a new type of vaccine that can cause heart damage at comparable rates to a novel coronavirus infection. Imagine updated IFRs if you include the recirculating infections going around now.
The calculus for the vaccines was just much better early in the pandemic. Who cares about PE; it's vanishingly rare. Even in your study of nursing home patients only 10,000 out of 25,000,000 had a PE, an with a fatality rate of 5% (probably needs to be adjusted upwards for the elderly population) that's 500 deaths, with maybe 100-200 of those attributable to vaccination (see caveats above). Now do the math for deaths in that population if they had all been unvaccinated and exposed to COVID.
mRNA seems to be the problem. Check the wikipedia article for "solid lipid nanoparticle." Kind of short. A few years of science (okay, I know the line was "decades," which is not impressive compared to centuries of other vaccines). mRNA spreads throughout your body via your blood stream, and this is a technology flaw in the mRNA platform.
How do you think conventional vaccines make it to your lymph nodes? Both mRNA and conventional vaccines transit from the site of vaccination to your lymphoid organs via blood/lymph.
The centuries of science around conventional vaccines in the ages before we knew what B/T cells were probably don't count for much, and I doubt the live cowpox vaccines that you'd prefer had fantastic safety profiles. The fact that you need tens of millions of doses of vaccine to maybe tease out a signal of a potential side effect is, by and large, a very good safety profile.
J&J, while still newer, did not show any concerning safety signals, and was eventually pulled because it cannot be updated efficiently, and humans become tolerant to the vectors. Or, J&J caused blood clots, killed people, and was pulled/discouraged to direct people to 'safer' mRNA vaccines. I would get more viral vectors, but probably only if I was going somewhere exotic and expected an encounter with a pathogen of special interest to me. J&J platform was also a human virus and will be treated by your immune system as a virus. You, and your mammalian ancestors have naturalistically encountered viruses since the beginning. This is not a fallacy!
It was pulled because both the safety profile and efficacy were worse. And of course it's a fallacy, on par with people have always dumped raw sewage in the Thames and cholera is just a fact of life. There's strong data that the mRNA-vaccines are safer and better than J&J or other non-mRNA vaccines developed abroad, unless you put a huge premium on living 'naturally.'
I'm out of characters, but note that antigens are also 'conjured' at the ribosome with your viral vectors.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Bret Weinstein famously has a theory that since all our drugs are tested on the same cohort of lab mice, and those lab mice have been selected for an outrageous senescent capacity, the testing will broadly miss drugs that are just generally toxic. And this broad toxicity will manifest in the organs that have the most trouble healing, like the heart. So drugs that cause generalized cell damage have that damage manifest as heart failure.
I've never heard of 'senescent capacity' so it's difficult to know what you mean, but I'll assume you're referring to telomere length. It's trivially true that lab mice have longer telomeres than humans, but your broader point is false - if you're really curious, you can read the FDA guidance here. Studies generally march through mice/rats -> dogs -> non-human primates (usually macaques these days). You need data on PK (frequently using dogs as they have similar kinetics to humans) as well as convincing toxicity data in nonrodent species. Then you have small scale dose-escalation studies in healthy humans where toxicity is again evaluated prior to larger trials to test for efficacy & safety with more statistical power.
Fenphen was on the market from 1990 until 1997 before the evidence that it caused heart failure was overwhelming. Vioxx was another, released in 1999 and recalled in 2004.
I'm not as familiar with Fenphen, but for Vioxx Merck just...lied to people, it doesn't have anything to do with laboratory mice.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
We need pathophysiological studies and autopsies - once again extreme lack of interest in autopsy for vaccine recipients.
What study are you proposing? In any given day, some number of vaccinated and unvaccinated people will contract a pulmonary embolism or myocarditis. If you open them up, odds are they'll look pretty similar. You're better off with population-level studies, which have been done and the answer is a few cases of myocarditis per million vaccine doses. Also skewed towards younger men, which again, affects the calculus for whether the vaccine provides any net benefit to certain demographics.
There is a suspicious group of studies that cast extreme doubt on the basic functioning of the mRNA vaccine as an antigen producing unit that remains in the deltoid.
Okay; can you link the studies? I'm not really able to parse your sentence. Antigen-producing unit isn't a standard term, and it's not clear to me how that would support an argument casting extreme doubt on the extreme functioning of an mRNA vaccine.
I have suspicion that mRNA is responsible for allergic generation issues (e.g. anecdotal bilateral hives after vaccination) but I have no evidence.
There have been some reports of adverse events in the skin as well, just less well reported on than the myocarditis.
I just know that mRNA spreads its antigen creating goodness throughout the body, at a frightenly common rate.
Can you provide citations for your claims? I'm not familiar with human data (if it exists), but in animal models the concentration is many orders of magnitude higher at the injection site and proximal lymph nodes. Very little makes it to distal tissues aside from the liver and spleen.
I am surprised you are unfamiliar with https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/, Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination.
I confess, I don't read every new issue of Clinical Research in Cardiology: official journal of the German Cardiac Society. I laud your scholarship, though. From the paper though:
Our study is limited by the relatively small cohort size and inherits the bias of an endpoint analysis. The nature of our autopsy study necessitates that the data are descriptive in quality and does not allow any epidemiological conclusions in terms of incidence or risk estimation.
Essentially, the baseline rate of myocarditis is 1-10/100,000 people per year. Germany administered 180,000,000 vaccines. Some fraction of people are going to die for unrelated reasons shortly after getting the vaccine, and some of them will have myocarditis. I'm also confused why their infectious PCR screening panel didn't include COVID; it's always possible some of the patients were infected prior to their vaccination.
All that said, it could be true. I personally can't think of anything to definitively refute it, but it's also not particularly compelling evidence by itself.
Yes, vaccines are supposed to enter your lymph and lymph node, but your lipid nanoparticle has different pharmacokinetics, and seems to pass the lymph nodes and enter your blood stream, whereas my J&J virus does not. This is a huge win for me, over your choice of vaccine. Let's see - deltoid goes to lymph vessel, lymph vessels carry mRNA to lymph node, some of the trillions of mRNA baubles awash past the lymph nodes and get dumped into venous circulation (right before entering the Right Atrium of the heart).
What data are you referencing?
The mRNA vaccine is found in breast milk: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2796427. mRNA enters the blood stream at a rate higher than other vaccines.
It's present in minute quantities barely above the limit of detection; several pg/ml. And it's not detectable after 48 hours. Or was your point just that some small amount of the mRNA vaccine can make it to the milk?
Spike protein is in blood stream of myocarditis patients. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36597886/
That's interesting.
This is a horrible sign for your data, since I've seen the slides of lymphocyte aggregation in the deltoid of a cadaver, as well as in the heart of a cadaver after vaccination. What do you think of this discrepancy?
See above. When you vaccinate huge numbers of people, some fraction of them will die terribly in the next few days and look bad at autopsy. You need to look at population level analyses.
This is an 11 month old reddit post, the autopsies were not completed then. I think it makes your data look unusable. As a counter to the redditor - maybe this is CIA propaganda to make the vaccine seem safe, to counter Russians propaganda to make you think the vaccine can kill you (which the Germans actually proved was true). This was all in the reddit post you linked to - not an unrelated sneer.
The, uh, redditor is me. The usernames are the same.
Come on. None of those vaccines involve mRNA lipid nanoparticles. Getting boosted with mRNA to seek antibody titers is aboslutely not the same thing as getting a tetanus booster in 10 years.
You argued that boosters were risk without benefit once your 'immune naivete was broken.' This isn't true for COVID as the immunity wanes relatively quickly, and in analogous situations (tetanus, flu etc) where the immunity wanes we give boosters. It's not a comment on the relative safety profiles of the vaccines, or whether an annual mRNA booster is safer than an annual flu booster.
I mean this is a very very polite way - how did you find your way to the Motte?
My school has a big brother program for struggling students. My math tutor linked me to some blogs, but they were boring and I didn't understand a lot of what they were talking about. I like the Motte because the posts are (usually) shorter and easier to understand.
Yes, more evidence that the entry of a novel, circulating respiratory pathogen into the population that targets elderly and vulnerable is entirely normal, see the Russian Flu in the 1800s. What's not normal, is becoming a fanatic for biotechnology.
It killed a million people, and Spanish flu killed tens of millions. If that's our alternative, call me abnormal and sign me up for biotech.
Thinking now of the 2060 version of us looking at the first generation lipid nanoparticle mRNA that people took. Talk about prototype!
Well, of course. The same way we moved from random cowpox pus to live attenuated viruses to subunit vaccines to LNPs. There's problems with LNPs that, amusingly, you don't even reference here that people are working on solving. Absent singularity, 2060 will probably see us having progressed through another 2-3 generations of delivery vehicles.
The efficacy collapsed just like the mRNA vaccines, this is why you're on dose number 5, and defending data from dose number 3. You have introduced an entirely new set of dynamics to your immune system, one that those who receive conventional vaccines will not be exposed to. You have RNA transfective particles leaking into your blood stream, while I do not. Guess the fallacy does much better with actually winnable man made advancements in public health.
You're projecting your own partisanship onto me, my friend. You're acting like we're engaging in some antagonistic dick-measuring contest to see who can win an argument, you're upset, you feel the need to insinuate that I'm stupid or misrepresent my arguments to imply that I'm agreeing with you or just being ridiculous.
I can lay some cards on the table: my position is that the first two doses were warranted, somewhere around dose 3 the calculus definitely shifted for the young and healthy, and at this point I'm unsure of the benefit for anybody and skeptical of anyone claiming otherwise in either direction. The vaccines worked well initially, but the immunity waned rapidly, we didn't update them quickly enough to maintain efficacy and new COVID strains are less virulent all of which shifts the calculus. The safety profiles for mRNA vaccines seem overall quite strong but potentially contraindicated for some demographics - it's not clear to me whether the myocarditis, for example, is related to molecular mimicry with the spike protein or inherent to any LNP vaccine. I'm open to having my mind changed if someone shares reliable data. Based on this conversation, I'm skeptical that you are, though.
Thanks for the conversation, but I'm probably done after this. If you choose to do so, I'll read your reply, but I've got some other things to get back to.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Breast cancer charities don't want to cure breast cancer.
Being sometimes downstream of those charities, I can give some perspective - stop me if you know all this already.
Most people go through a lot of work and hardship to raise like 200$ and feel happy about it. Depending what I'm doing, a single experiment can cost 500 to tens of thousands of dollars and the vast majority of experiments don't work and are never published. So you could safely say the cost to society for a single paper including salaries, infrastructure and reagents is in the 7 figure range.
With that in mind, and given the fact that a lot of (especially high-impact) research doesn't fit nicely into a 'breast cancer' bin, how would you optimally like to see your money spent? In my experience, the money most often goes towards fellowships and whatever the student/post doc ends up publishing goes into their marketing materials.
What's something that a person could do with their time and money to make the world a better place. Something that doesn't involve interacting with any institution at all? Should I just straight up send people cash?
Yes. Fund my startup :)
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
the putative emergencies of climate change, refugee resettlement, natural disasters, famine, and wars.
Is your position that these issues are not important, or that you have superior policies in mind? If not, what problems do you think are important (aside from the well-tread topics of wokeness and the CDC)?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Edgy is just an aesthetic now. It doesn't mean a damn thing. People who self-describe as "punk" will mandate all the exact same speech codes in their spaces as HR departments in multinational megacorps across the world do, if not even more stringent. Rebellion has been successfully co-opted by the monoculture and you can buy it at your local strip mall now.
Or the barber pole turns eternal. Perhaps the true counter-culture in a society awash with twitter narcissists, outrage porn and nihilistic realpolitik is a throwback to something like Victorian era propriety. Subs like /r/Cleanlivingkings and /r/nofap (although the latter included a bizarre strain of muslims struck by self-loathing for being horny and masturbating) always fascinated me for this reason. Maybe if we can make it edgy and high-status to be a decent human being without coding it red or blue, to value honesty, earnestness and a moral code we can rein in the brinksmanship and hatred coursing through our country's veins. A man can dream.
And if Your (the royal you, not picking on you personally) visceral reaction to this is 'But the left/right are the lying fascists/cartoonish villains intent on destroying society, consider that you might be part of the problem.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games
I hope you'll forgive me for ignoring the main thrust of your post to go off on this tangent, but I've had this rolling around in my head for a while. I hope the rest of you will forgive me for poking fun at things that I'm often guilty of myself.
How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition
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Extreme (emotional) Decoupling. Emotion is weakness, rationality is strength. Utilitarianism and consequentialism are our gods; the more gruesome the morally correct action you're willing to undertake, the greater human good you're able to invoke, the better. Examples: Eliezer 'melt all GPUs' Yudkowsky, Abortion/forced sterilization/[policy harming black people] is eugenic and therefore net good, censorship is worthwhile when you're bearing the lofty weight of future quadrillions of the human pan-galactic human-AI-hybrid diaspora on your shoulders. Humility is for normies and low-status chuds, not you, you beautiful prism of rarefied logic, you.
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Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty (see previous points). The longer and harder to follow, the easier it is to obscure and deflect criticism, and the greater your boost in status.
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Literature references. Point score is directly correlated with obscurity; actually having read the the work in question is optional. Bonus points for linking SSC pieces, double bonus points if they're from 2016 or earlier.
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Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus. IQ is life. Everyone knows that vocabulary size is correlated to IQ, which is correlated to g, which determines your worth as a human being and position in the hierarchy. What better way to give your stock a little bump than to sprinkle in a few five syllable words that fell out of common use somewhere in the 19th century?
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Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through? This (1) gives you wriggle room to claim any characterization of your thesis is a strawman and (2) allows you to...
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...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read! Remember, the goal is gaining status, not clear communication of ideas or mutually working towards a model of the world. Obscurantism serves the former, brevity will only hurt you. And potentially get you in hot water with the mods.
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Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.
Shattering the illusion is a bit of a strong word to use when I'd estimate >95% of the population has never heard of rationalists, and I don't think it's the source of my amusement at these habits, but if it makes you feel better: I, ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor, high pope of the Church of the Blue Tribe absolve you of your sins. Go forth and live in virtue, my son.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It's true! That also reminds me, I was expecting exponentially more meta threads with the move here. I've been sorely disappointed so far.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It's true, and it's also awash in other hypocrisies. I could use the John Stewart 'I'm just a comedian, bro defense because I mostly was just trying to entertain, but if you want:
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An expectation of more citations and sources for claims being made, or if the data doesn't exist/can't be collected, acknowledgement of that fact.
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Embracing brevity, concision and clear communication as terminal values rather than long manifestoposts (obviously some leeway for people writing personal stories or stream of consciousness rants).
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Some self-awareness when mocking others for status-signaling.
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Embracing intellectual humility (something akin to the old 'epistemic status: xyz...')
To some extent, this is just me imposing my values on others which is why I tried not to be explicitly prescriptive. The community should be what the community wants to be. Hopefully someone out there laughed.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Oh. Alright, my apologies.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I feel personally called out
No no, of course not. Everyone is guilty of some of the things, but it's not a caricature of one person who is guilty of all of the things. And as Naraburns points out, mostly weakmen.
So long as rats/mottizens, generally speaking, do not commit these sins (perhaps on account of lacking the psychopathic aptitude), whereas their opponents stick to them religiously, I'll say a sperging-out chud is more deserving of attention than a person endowed with such common decency.
For Reasons, I was part of a minority that was a bit rootless in North America and didn't really fit in anywhere. Insofar as I'd identify with any community, it would probably be some flavor of rationalism, and if I found something closer to my heart I'd vote with my feet and leave. But people here articulate a worldview that I was struggling towards explaining to friends and family for years in a much more inchoate manner.
I still can't help but find some habits and norms oscillating between amusing and irritating.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I am disappointed that this post didn't include the word "quokka"
Quincy is too cute, didn't have it in me.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
The WEF post spends 7 paragraphs @ 1k words on non-accusatory exposition about the details of the WEF itself and the history of right-wing beliefs about the WEF, limiting the 'attacking people' part to the title and a short 100-word conclusion that makes a valuable strategic point.
I won't try to defend my post; if people take it as bullying and mean-spirited it's not my place to argue, only knock it off. That being said - I could have written seven paragraphs on each point, but would that have changed the fundamental argument I was trying to make or just obscured it? Was that length beneficial to the WEF post, or could detail have been cut in the interest of clarity and efficiency?
I've read the rationale behind making post length the low-bar to be cleared for many posts, and I even agree with it to an extent. That being said, it's still a kludge and should be treated as such rather than exalted as a terminal value or a virtue. It advantages the verbose and eloquent without improving their arguments, it encourages bad writing habits and degrades the quality of discourse as discussions fragment and people get hung up on minor, non-central points to your argument. The purpose of writing is to entertain or convey information, and while there should be latitude for the former, many trying to do the latter write far too much. In my opinion, for what that's worth.
tl'dr at the bottom.
It was the early 20th century. These were heady times for biology; Thomas Hunt Morgan was doing groundbreaking work in Drosophila which culminated in the concept of the gene. Griffith reported some experiments that launched a series of investigations over the following decades by Hershey & Chase/Avery and McLeod showing that DNA, not protein, is the hereditary material in the cell. And in a lab in the Rockefeller Institute, NYC, a French surgeon was using proto-tissue culture techniques to create an immortal chicken heart.
A full century ago, some smart scientists were already asking how cellular theory intersected with aging and senescence, and whether there where limits on cell division. To great acclaim, Dr. Carrel claimed to have found the answer: he grew embryonic chicken heart cells in a stoppered flask. For 20 years the cells thrived as he fed them a steady diet of embryonic chicken fluid and claimed to the media that:
In 1921, an article in The World by Alessandro Fabbri engaged his audience with an account of how large the volume of the cells cultured could have been, telling readers that it would have been like a “rooster … big enough today to cross the Atlantic in a stride,” and “so monstrous that when perched on this mundane sphere, the World, it would look like a weathercock.” Three years later, the New York Tribune published an article to celebrate the twelfth birthday of the culture.
You might be skeptical at this juncture - maybe you learned about a certain limit in high school named after a famous scientist waiting in the wings. While it was long accepted in the 20th century that cells could divide forever and the answer to aging lay elsewhere, the development of modern tissue culture techniques in the 50s set the stage for Leonard Hayflick (I linked a great radiolab interview above - in his mid 80s, he still stored a ton of cell lines in liquid nitrogen tanks in his garage. There's probably some fascinating cell lines in there that the rest of us have forgotten about). And indeed, Leonard Hayflick showed with much more rigorous technique that differentiated cells isolated from human adults had a definite lifespan, and would naturally senesce and die after a certain number of divisions in vitro, and presumably in vivo as well. A large amount of work went into defining the 'Hayflick limit' for various cell types in different contexts, and more importantly, it was discovered that certain cancerous cells could indeed be adapted to grow in cell culture indefinitely. It turns out Carrel's protocol of adding fresh embryonic fluid to his chicken heart culture was most likely adding fresh stem cells (although we also cannot rule out fraud as the experiment supposedly could not be replicated) on a regular basis.
You may wonder, dear reader, why I bothered to lay this out for you? Well, if you think about it, there's one obvious exception to the Hayflick limit - your germ line. Your gametes represent an unbroken cellular lineage stretching all the way back to the first spark of cellular life in the primordial soup. And this week, a heroic paper described another exception to the Hayflick limit and actually succeeded in creating the immunological equivalent of Carrel's chicken heart.
When T cells recognize their specific antigen, they enable a initiate a genetic program to both rapidly divide and also release effector proteins that unleash a range of defensive mechanisms against the invading pathogen. You've probably heard of the different COVID proteins used in the vaccines; each of those proteins consisting of hundreds of amino acids is chopped up into 8-20 amino acid long 'bytes' that can be recognized by T cells. While your immune response consists of a mishmash of dozens to hundreds of T cell lines specific for different antigens (polyclonal), scientists have developed ways to track a single clone specific for a single antigen. Here, the authors infect mice with a virus (VSV) and track T cells specific for a peptide (VSV-N52-59). Techniques have also been developed to take T cells out of one mouse and transfer it to a new mouse, and the last piece of the technological puzzle missing for Carrel - a method for differentiating transferred T cells from the endogenous T cells already present in the new mouse.
So the basic outline of the study is to infect a mouse with VSV, isolate those T cells, transfer to a new mouse, infect that mouse with VSV, isolate those T cells, transfer to a new mouse...ad infinitum. They kept it up for 10 years, or 5 times the lifetime of a mouse - roughly equivalent to stimulating some T cells around the time Columbus landed in America and having them still be growing today. Curiously, the telomere length is unaffected despite the cells acquiring a number of markers we normally associate with dysfunction (PD-1 of cancer checkpoint blockade fame, TIM3, TOX, KLRG1, etc) and a distinct transcriptional signature. And more importantly, they're still immunologically functional and capable of further division.
How do T cells do it? Hell if I know. But the standard models of ROS, telomeres, mitochondrial dysfunction, etc. just aren't able to explain it. Like the best studies, this hints at a deeper truth we're nowhere close to uncovering, and I despair of meaningfully understanding the system in my lifetime. It's still a beautiful fucking paper though, and I pity the post-doc who's been shuffling T cells around mice for the last 8 years of his life.
tl;dr - Mice live two years, scientists have shown that you can take differentiated T cells (not stem cells!), stimulate them with a virus, transfer them to a new mouse and so on and so forth for more than 10 years (!). They calculate this to be a 10^40 fold expansion of the original group of T cells.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Say what? You wrote the post man, you know better than anyone else how bullying and mean spirited you meant it to be.
I generally believe the onus is on the writer to craft something for their audience to appreciate. If the audience doesn't like it or find it useful, either find a new audience or change your style. Telling them that they're wrong seems to be a bit futile.
I've also just adopted a general heuristic of 'if enough people are telling you you're being an asshole, you're probably being an asshole.' I recognize that can be particularly dangerous and opens you up to manipulation by bad actors, but it also transformed my life in college from unhappy friendless loner to being a relatively popular and successful guy.
But I am impressed that people cared enough to argue with mods on my behalf...
what would you do if it was reported by people who have decided you are a leftist and therefore should be shut up? Would you still knock it off to accommodate them?
Well, yeah, probably. If the community wanted to be an echo chamber, who am I to say otherwise?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Ties into the whole "counterculture became commodity culture" issue, but aren't these two generally at odds?
I suppose I was trying to invoke the high-(social) status low-class activist being invited as a set piece to a high-class gathering. The avant-garde artist, philosopher, psychologist, social scientist etc. rubbing shoulders with wealthy elites. The elites are wealthy and control what is fashionable to some degree, but they don't control what is cool, right?
When our news anchors are dishonest demagogues who rant from our televisions every night, when corporations are legally obligated to fuck their workers and society in the name of shareholder value, when half of the political body is constantly outraged at the party in power, maybe the counter-culture move is a retreat to decorum and a stricter moral code.
Straightedge reached a decent level of popularity at my high school which is amusing considering nobody drank or did drugs. I bet the majority of our class of a few hundred were virgins when they graduated. It's somewhat perplexing in retrospect.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You're correct, but it's also just typical biologist-speak. Carrel also didn't literally culture enough cells to create a rooster that could cross the Atlantic in a single stride.
Typically, when the media is exhausted (every several days) you 'pass' the cells and throw out some fraction (from 50-95%). If you pass the cells 1/10 a dozen times and then do the math, if you hadn't killed any cells you'd have some absurd number. Here, they only transfer 10^5 cells to each new mouse and thus discard the vast majority of their T cells when they kill the old mouse, not to mention the fact that most cells will die during the isolation/sorting/transfer procedure.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
One part to amuse myself and others, one part because I assumed I would have enough in-group credentials for it to be seen as constructive criticism rather than bullying, one part because I thought it might be useful and improve discussion norms, and one part because I thought people would be mature and secure enough to take it as such. When it comes to my ox, I'm expected to take a lot more than that on the nose and any complaints get thrown in the 'thin-skinned liberals can't handle disagreement' bin.
Yes, other members of the community defended you. It seems we made a mistake.
So it goes.
That doesn't make everyone who interpreted it in the spirit you meant it wrong though. Nor does it make those who interpreted it as anger right. What makes them right is you then saying that the way you meant it doesn't matter compared to what they think. You gave them that power, and as a result made yourself irrelevant.
I disagree. I need to assume that at least some people on the other side of a debate are willing to engage in good faith. You're correct that someone could just react with outrage anytime I wrote anything, until the only opinion I could ever voice was essentially agreement with their position in a polite manner. There's probably some people and some topics where this is true and to be honest I try to avoid them.
This case seems fairly split, but I don't think the people who are upset are entirely acting in bad faith. If you want to use this as an example that people should have thicker skin or extend more charity, by all means, go ahead.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Separatism in developed countries (Quebec, Catalonia, Scotland) is like a short, sharp cold. As long as a country makes it over the initial hurdle, independence is unlikely.
I can tell you it was less like a short, sharp cold and more like a hangover that's been going on for 50 years now:
The office is frequently accused of abusing its powers, such as occurred in 2013 during the "pastagate" affair when an Italian restaurant was cited for having pasta, antipasti, calamari, and the like on its menu, instead of using French equivalents. The office also objects to the sale of "grilled cheese sandwiches", insisting that they be called sandwich de fromage fondue, which literally translates to "melted cheese sandwich".[27] Likewise, the Quebec language office objects to "on/off" switches and to the sale of "steaks", insisting that they be called bifteck, "despite the fact that steak is the far more common term among Francophones."[27]
...
Section 73 of the Charter of the French language had recognized the right to English language instruction to Quebec residents alone. Canadian citizens from outside Quebec are forced to send their children to French primary and secondary schools, in direct violation of S26.(3) of the UN Declaration of Human Rights,[2] which states that "Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.[3]
Complete with unconstitutional (but that's okay, because Quebec never signed the Canadian constitution) laws and successfully driving off a few hundred thousand anglo Quebecers in such a way that would probably (and admittedly, hyperbolically) be called genocide in different contexts.
I can sympathize with the Quebecois perspective - in part because, to the chagrin of my parents, I was forced to take French classes taught by Quebecois sympathetic to the cause of what would, in other contexts, be called a terrorist organization - but obviously I'm still bitter about the situation. My spoken French was good, but not good enough to avoid being treated like shit by my Quebecois colleagues as a teenager trying to scrape by with menial service jobs.
I'm pessimistic on the whole situation ever improving until machine learning enables Babel fish level tech (hopefully sooner than I ever thought!) or the world of the Machine Stops becomes reality. But between the western provinces going MAGA and Quebec being Quebec, Canada may implode before we get there.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Is that so bad?
On the one hand, francophones will argue that learning another language is something they'd been forced to do for decades in order to have any chance at landing any of the better jobs, and anglos should stop whining at having to do the same. We're a bilingual country after all. This argument isn't without merit.
On the other hand, mandating the language children must learn in school, the language people must speak in the workplace or use for signage and advertising seems like a pretty gross violation of our freedoms, no? I've seen much more hand-wringing over much more benign infringements of liberty elsewhere.
Indeed, small children can easily become trilingual, one language from each parent and one from their peers. It's hard to overstate how useful that can be for them in adulthood.
I don't necessarily disagree with you. On the other hand, the combination of the laws, hostile political environment and better opportunities elsewhere convinced hundreds of thousands (from a starting population of less than a million) of anglos to leave. There's also an amusing tradition of francophone elites sending their children to english private schools - although they eventually closed that loophole.
Biden seems, on a deeply personal level, to hate the US military and its treatment of its men, due to his son Beau's death-by-burn-pit-carcinogens. In fact, I rather suspect the withdrawal from Afghanistan was so insanely rapid (foolishly, of course, but still) because Biden personally said "get our fucking troops out of there LITERALLY RIGHT NOW BECAUSE YOU FUCKING PIGS KILLED MY SON." So I am heartened by his realization -- unlike so many of my country's insane leaders -- of the true cost of American military mobilization.
I've seen this come up a couple of times over my years here, and always meant to go dig up a quote I remembered from Obama's memoirs. Finally bothered to do it. For what it's worth, Obama's version of events regarding military leaders pushing for a troop surge in Afghanistan:
Among the principals, only Joe Biden voiced his misgivings. He had traveled to Kabul on my behalf during the transition, and what he saw and heard on the trip—particularly during a contentious meeting with Karzai—had convinced him that we needed to rethink our entire approach to Afghanistan. I knew Joe also still felt burned by having supported the Iraq invasion years earlier. Whatever the mix of reasons, he saw Afghanistan as a dangerous quagmire and urged me to delay a deployment, suggesting it would be easier to put troops in once we had a clear strategy as opposed to trying to pull troops out after we’d made a mess with a bad one.
Rather than deciding on the spot, I assigned Tom Donilon to convene the NSC deputies over the course of the following week to determine more precisely how additional troops would be used and whether deploying them by summer was even possible logistically. We’d revisit the issue, I said, once we had the answer. With the meeting adjourned, I headed out the door and was on my way up the stairs to the Oval when Joe caught up to me and gripped my arm. “Listen to me, boss,” he said. “Maybe I’ve been around this town for too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.” He brought his face a few inches from mine and stage-whispered, “Don’t let them jam you.”
...
IN LATER ACCOUNTS of our Afghanistan deliberations, Gates and others would peg Biden as one of the ringleaders who poisoned relations between the White House and the Pentagon. The truth was that I considered Joe to be doing me a service by asking tough questions about the military’s plans. Having at least one contrarian in the room made us all think harder about the issues—and I noticed that everyone was a bit freer with their opinions when that contrarian wasn’t me.
...
In mid-February, Donilon reported that the deputies had scrubbed General McKiernan’s request and concluded that no more than seventeen thousand troops, along with four thousand military trainers, could be deployed in time to have a meaningful impact on the summer fighting season or Afghan election security. Although we were still a month away from completing our formal review, all the principals except Biden recommended that we deploy that number of troops immediately. I gave the order on February 17, the same day I signed the
Recovery Act, having determined that even the most conservative strategy we might come up with would need the additional manpower, and knowing that we still had ten thousand troops in reserve if circumstances required their deployment as well.
It was published mid-November 2020, so while events may have been spun one way or the other to make Biden look good, at least it wasn't done to boost him in the election.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Oops. Dropping a post without bothering to see if the formatting worked is one way to make sure nobody reads it...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
From OP:
In related olds, DisruptJ6 protestors, despite alleging molestation going on for a longer period of time, and interfering with bodily autonomy in much more invasive ways, have yet to be given money.
What it says in the article they linked:
The detainees list several issues. The conditions allegedly include no religious services or visitations, "black mold" and "worms" on the jail's walls and in food, abuse by guards, and vaccine requirements for visits and other services. They also say their clothing sent to laundry is returned covered in "brown stains, pubic hair and or reeking of ripe urine." And they say they've lost eyesight and hair because of "malnourishment.
So...prison? You can't expect me to believe that in a forum where people routinely express a desire to murder carjackers and other petty thieves that someone being outraged about moldy food and dirty clothes without pushback is evidence of anything other than blatant tribalism*. Not to mention the use of the word 'molestation' without providing any evidence that they were sexually assaulted in prison - which, for all I know, exists, but they don't link to it and (lest I be accused of not doing my homework again) some basic google searches of 'january 6th protestors prison rape' or 'january 6th protestors sexual assault' only turns up a few cases of the protestors themselves raping children or assaulting women. Or perhaps you'll claim that they used the word 'molested' per the dated 'Alice and Bob arrived at their destination unmolested,' but now the level of mental gymnastics you're expecting from me to imagine that the OP is being fair or charitable exceeds my modest IQ.
From OP:
Recently the US city of New York, decided that BLM protestors that felt victimized by the police preventing from running amok, deserve 21500 USD (28267877.5 KRW) each.
From the article they linked:
They were restrained with tight plastic handcuffs also known as zip ties by officers who were not masked as the pandemic raged. Officers wielding batons swung at protesters and hit them with pepper spray, according to the lawsuit.
You can also follow a link to videos of the protestors being beaten. Why would you frame them as 'feeling' like they were victimized when they were beaten with batons and pepper sprayed?
From OP:
But now the what the Hot Coffee Incident was in common perception notable for, harm suffered being greatly outweighed by compensation, has come true. Thus making protesting a net-gain, unless one views publicly supporting BLM to be so immoral, as there existing no sum high enough for which one would do it.
Between 15 and 30 million people protested that summer. Three hundred are eligible for a payout. Based on the estimates in the NYT article, 180-230 will collect and some other undefined number have already settled. From the evidence provided, OP's argument is that some minute fraction of BLM protestors being paid out makes protesting liberal causes anywhere in the United States a net positive, which is frankly idiotic and ignores all the jail time that BLM protestors did receive:
The AP found that more than 120 defendants across the United States have pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial of federal crimes including rioting, arson and conspiracy. More than 70 defendants who’ve been sentenced so far have gotten an average of about 27 months behind bars. At least 10 received prison terms of five years or more.
Do you think OP's inflammatory claims brought a reasonable amount of evidence?
We could have an actual conversation about events - the ping-ponging hypocrisy of conservatives swinging from prison inmates FAFO'd to moral outrage at the in-group suffer, and liberals salivating over the possibility of January 6th rioters being prison-raped. From conservatives being hostile or apathetic towards women's sports to suddenly being outraged that the purity of women's sports might be compromised by trans athletes, and liberals who went from supporting cis-women's leagues to dogpiling women who dare to suggest that trans athletes might have an unfair biological advantage. We could have, and have had, more nuanced discussions about both the January 6th and BLM riots - although I admit that I was disheartened by them at the time, at least they were better than this.
This is what the community has come to - low effort, inflammatory posts bashing left wing topics du jour with minimal evidence receiving virtually no pushback or rebuttals. And frankly, most posts along these lines aren't even worth engaging with.
*For the record - prison rape and poor prison conditions are bad, and neither the J6 or BLM rioters should be raped, starved or otherwise abused.
I see. In that case, I'd ask you what your threshold is for saying something isn't heritable. A trait that is 25% heritable is (in our current environment) going to have much stronger environmental effects, and I assume that most people colloquially wouldn't call that trait 'heritable.'
Is your argument that 'demographic decline' is inherently dysgenic, or that "atheists" are genetically superior and their relative decline is dysgenic for society as a whole?
Sorry hoss, I ain't buying it. But I don't think either of us would benefit from hashing it out.
There are inherent limits to both human biology and biology in general that you aren't going to surpass with some assortative mating, not to mention the fact that you invoke some pretty theoretical technologies like iterated embryo selection from adult induced stem cells yourself.
I don't see a path towards AI increasing fertility, but regardless, there's plenty of ways AI (or tech more broadly) can be eugenic on your terms without having an effect on fertility or requiring people to change 'breeding habits or mate selection.'
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