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Ever since the halcyon days of early 2020, where some yahoo dared us rationalist corona panickers to buy puts on cruise companies, I’ve been trying to recreate this missed opportunity (turns out, it wasn’t priced in).
Ozempic’s been getting a lot of good press in rat circles. Leaps calls on novo nordisk/eli lily?
I think eventually that these kinds of drugs will be shown to have extremely negative consequences for anyone who’s not extremely morbidly obese (or at least in bad enough shape that the side effects are less serious than the obesity). Of particular concern is the number of people who are using this product for aesthetic reasons rather than as medically necessary treatment. Women have used this stuff to fit in their wedding dresses as an example.
Long term, given that this substance acts like a hormone, I think that homeostasis will eventually strike leading to the body becoming less sensitive to semiglutide and therefore the person cannot feel full. And there have been some reports of things like stomach and intestinal issues, so I’m not sure about that either.
There have been lots of these pills in the past starting with fenfen in the 1990s. Most of them overhyped or have serious side effects (fenfen worked, but since it was basically an amphetamine, it caused a lot of heart problems and was withdrawn). The thing I keep coming back to is that people are so desperate for something like a skinny pill to be true that the public and doctors pounce on it without thinking about the long term effects. So that’s why I’m shorting it. I’m expecting wrongful death or serious injury lawsuits to kill it in all but the most serious cases and thus limit the profit from it.
Man, I genuinely do not understand the intuition that drives people to think that there must be a catch to Ozempic. You are doing better by couching your claim in terms of likelihood, but even then, I think this is misguided.
The universe is cold and uncaring, but it isn't actively malevolent. There is no law of physics that demands some kind of equivalent exchange here. Sometimes we just get lucky.
Biology has homeostasis, but homeostasis can break, and it can also be reset.
What drives such a belief? Do you think that drugs care about the moral pulchritude of those taking them? We discovered semaglutide in the saliva of Gila Monsters, which aren't known to be particularly discerning moral actors.
If someone with high blood pressure takes antihypertensives, their blood pressure falls. If someone with a normal BP takes them, theirs falls too. I would obviously prescribe them to the first case, and not the other two (at least for the control of blood pressure), but the mechanism remains the same.
This is a reasonable concern, but I think it might misinterpret what homeostasis is trying to do in obesity. The obese state isn't a healthy, well-regulated system that semaglutide is mischievously disrupting. For many people with obesity, the homeostatic system is already broken. Their bodies are defending a pathologically high set point for weight, ignoring satiety signals that should be firing, and managing insulin poorly.
Think of it less like a functioning thermostat that you're tricking, and more like a thermostat that's already broken and stuck at 90 degrees (Fahrenheit, I hope, if that's Celsius then turn off the oven) . The house is sweltering, the air conditioner is running itself ragged, and the occupants are miserable. Semaglutide comes along, and it isn't just put a bag of ice placed on the temperature sensor to fool it. It seems to actually repair the sensor.
If I hadn't been awake for 48 hours, I might have linked to a recent paper that semaglutide reduces the risk of Alzheimer's by 50% even in people without diabetes. You can look that up. You might even simply read Scott's deep dive on the topic.
Semaglutide is a miracle. Such mundane miracles are rare, but they do happen. Penicillin was quasi-miraculous, but even in this age of people sweating bullets about super-bugs, antibiotics save far more lives directly than they take.
I don't know about the advisability of taking the long on your short, but I'd probably benefit from taking the opposite end of a normal bet instead of trying to convince you. I strongly expect to make money on that 1:1 exchange if that were somehow feasible.
There's a common religious belief that suffering is holy and morally required. You see this a lot with Catholics in particular. They will lecture people with claims like "quitting smoking using nicotine lozenges isn't really quitting smoking". Somehow results don't count, it's the suffering that's important.
Also in modern society the left expresses purity through diet.
Additionally believing that fat people are gross because they are sick and unhealthy doesn't jive with a lot of modern views. You aren't supposed to be weirded out by people's medical conditions.
So the view that obesity is a moral failing is popular. This has the added effect of letting healthy weight people feel morally superior.
The idea that a medication can safely reduce appetite is jarring. That implies that their feelings of moral superiority were unjustified and kind of immoral.
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