1) Some impressive science and some real hope for those with Type I diabetes, “A Cure for Type 1 Diabetes? For One Man, It Seems to Have Worked. A new treatment using stem cells that produce insulin has surprised experts and given them hope for the 1.5 million Americans living with the disease.”
Mr. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes.
“It’s a whole new life,” Mr. Shelton said. “It’s like a miracle.”
Diabetes experts were astonished but urged caution. The study is continuing and will take five years, involving 17 people with severe cases of Type 1 diabetes. It is not intended as a treatment for the more common Type 2 diabetes.
“We’ve been looking for something like this to happen literally for decades,” said Dr. Irl Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. He wants to see the result, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, replicated in many more people. He also wants to know if there will be unanticipated adverse effects and if the cells will last for a lifetime or if the treatment would have to be repeated.
But, he said, “bottom line, it is an amazing result.”
Dr. Peter Butler, a diabetes expert at U.C.L.A. who also was not involved with the research, agreed while offering the same caveats.
“It is a remarkable result,” Dr. Butler said. “To be able to reverse diabetes by giving them back the cells they are missing is comparable to the miracle when insulin was first available 100 years ago.”
2) Interesting story on how a single NC Republican legislator, Danny Britt, has been instrumental in bringing needed criminal justice reform to NC’s laws. It’s also more than a little sad to realize that there’s no way Republicans would have agreed to these changes if not for the efforts of Britt (a prosecutor turned defense attorney). Better CJ policy for the state should not have to depend on the arbitrariness of one good man being a Republican legislator.
Legislators on both sides of the aisle agree that while activists, advocates and some lawmakers have worked for years to reform the state’s criminal justice system, some bills Britt has sponsored would not have passed under the Republican-controlled legislature without him.
3) Focus group report on Virginia elections that may or may not be worth your time. I found it interesting.
4) Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana is just a complete fraud. What’s so sad about his completely affected, cornpone style (the man is Vanderbilt, UVA, and Oxford educated) is that this is what works for the Republican base.
The 70-year-old Kennedy is so committed to this persona that a columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune challenged readers in 2019 to guess the author of a series of eccentric statements: Foghorn Leghorn or Kennedy? It was a difficult quiz.
Whenever Kennedy appears on Fox News or launches an attention-getting stunt, those of us in Louisiana who know him well roll our eyes and reflect on the Kennedy we knew before his Senate election.
We recall the brainy
graduate of Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia Law School and Oxford University’s Magdalen College; the relatively progressive Democrat who
ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004; the man who, despite his 2007 party switch, served capably as
state treasurer from 2000 to 2017; the official who, although in the same Republican Party as then-Gov. Bobby Jindal, was a fierce
critic of Jindal’s reckless fiscal policies…
But what stood out in that 2004 interview was the absence of the homey sayings, abusive zingers and character assassinations that have become Kennedy trademarks. He was nothing like the man you see these days
insulting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — “It must suck to be that dumb” — or
vilifying then-Interior secretary nominee Deb Haaland as “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job.”…
What troubles me about Kennedy’s latest stunt is not just what it revealed about a politician doing what some unprincipled, opportunistic politicians have always done. What bothers me more is what it says about Louisiana politics, and today’s Republican Party, that Kennedy could expose himself as a xenophobic demagogue and pay no price for it.
5) This NYT “where should you live” quiz is really fun. Looks like Irvine, California is the place for me (I like a nice climate and political and racial diversity).
6) From Stat, “Covid antivirals could be pandemic game-changers. But Americans might struggle to access them”
Antiviral drugs for treating Covid-19 have been hailed as a pandemic “game-changer” — a tool that could, perhaps, finally help life return to normal. But basic gaps in the U.S. health system could mean that two new treatments from Pfizer and Merck won’t make much of a difference after all.
The companies’ treatments, which haven’t yet received emergency authorization, could make a Covid diagnosis dramatically less threatening. But in practice, before receiving the pills, patients may need to jump through a series of hoops that often prevent Americans from accessing care: Recognizing their symptoms, taking a test, getting a prescription from a clinician, and filling the prescription at a pharmacy.
“Our routine medical systems are not really set up for this,” said Céline Gounder, a physician and NYU professor who served on President Biden’s Covid advisory board in the months before his inauguration. “These are medications that need to be started within three days of developing symptoms. It can take you longer than three days to get an appointment.”…
But it might be difficult to get the drugs outside a clinical trial setting. Depending on the particular patient, it could involve four individual steps: recognizing symptoms, receiving a positive Covid-19 test result, being prescribed an antiviral by a doctor, and picking up the pills at a nearby pharmacy.
Each step could prove difficult, Gaffney said, beginning with the challenge of recognizing symptoms during winter, when early signs of Covid-19 might be easily written off as a cold, flu, or allergies. Even if patients do quickly suspect they have Covid, diagnostic tests are still sometimes hard to come by. Many of the patients who test positive won’t have primary care physicians. And perhaps worst: The antivirals are ideally taken just three days after symptom onset, meaning the four-step process can’t face any setbacks.
7) “Are scientists less prone to motivated reasoning?” Yes.
A new study lays out a bit of a conundrum in its opening paragraphs. It notes that scientific progress depends on the ability to update what ideas are considered acceptable in light of new evidence. But science itself has produced no shortage of evidence that people are terrible at updating their beliefs and suffer from issues like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Since scientists are, in fact, people, the problems with updating beliefs should severely limit science’s ability to progress.
And there’s some indication that it does. Max Planck, for example, wrote that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up.”
But a new study suggests it may not be much of a problem after all. Taking advantage of a planned replication study, some scientists polled their peers before and after the results of the replication study came out. And most scientists seemed to update their beliefs without much trouble.
8) More roundabouts, please! And good for the climate, too.
But there’s also a climate benefit.
Because modern roundabouts don’t have red lights where cars sit and idle, they don’t burn as much gasoline. While there are few studies, the former city engineer for Carmel, Mike McBride, estimates that each roundabout saves about 20,000 gallons of fuel annually, which means the cars of Carmel emit many fewer tons of planet-heating carbon emissions each year. And U.S. highway officials broadly agree that roundabouts reduce tailpipe emissions.
They also don’t need electricity, and, unlike stoplights, keep functioning after bad storms — a bonus in these meteorologically turbulent times.
“Modern roundabouts are the most sustainable and resilient intersections around,” said Ken Sides, chairman of the roundabout committee at the Institute of Transportation Engineers.
9) If Omicron is bad as some of the worst fears, we’ll really need the new antivirals ASAP. FDA-skeptic Scott Alexander writing before the Omicron news, “When Will The FDA Approve Paxlovid?”
For context: a recent study by Pfizer, the pharma company backing the drug, found Paxlovid decreased hospitalizations and deaths from COVID by a factor of ten, with no detectable side effects. It was so good that Pfizer, “in consultation with” the FDA, stopped the trial early because it would be unethical to continue denying Paxlovid to the control group. And on November 16, Pfizer officially submitted an approval request to the FDA, which the FDA is still considering.
As many people including Zvi, Alex, and Kelsey have noted, it’s pretty weird that the FDA agrees Paxlovid is so great that it’s unethical to study it further because it would be unconscionable to design a study with a no-Paxlovid control group – but also, the FDA has not approved Paxlovid, it remains illegal, and nobody is allowed to use it.
One would hope this is because the FDA plans to approve Paxlovid immediately. But the prediction market expects it to take six weeks – during which time we expect about 50,000 more Americans to die of COVID.
Perhaps there’s not enough evidence for the FDA to be sure Paxlovid works yet? But then why did they agree to stop the trial that was gathering the evidence? Or perhaps there’s enough evidence, but it takes a long time to process it? But then how come the prediction markets are already 90% sure what decision they’ll make?
Perhaps that 10% chance of it not getting approved is very important, because that’s a world in which it’s discovered to have terrible side effects? But discovered how? There was one trial, it found no side effects at all, and Pfizer stopped it early. And it’s hard to imagine what rare side effect could turn up in poring over the trial data again and again that’s serious enough to mean we should reject a drug with a 90% COVID cure rate.
Perhaps it doesn’t have any sufficiently serious side effects, but that 10% chance is important because it might not work? Come on, just legalize the drug! If it doesn’t work, then you can report that it didn’t work in January or March or whenever you figure it out, and un-approve it. Nobody will have been hurt except your pride, and in the 90% of cases where it does work, you’d be saving thousands of lives.
Let’s give the FDA its due: this time they’re probably only going to wait a few weeks or months. Much better than their usual MO, when they can delay drugs for months arguing about the wording of the warning label. I honestly believe they’re operating on Fast Mode, well aware that the entire country is watching them and yelling at them to move faster.
Still, move faster.
10) This is so important and under-appreciated, “Most state lawmakers earn low salaries. It impacts who can afford to be one.”
A report released Monday by New American Leaders on low salaries in statehouses highlights the financial realities for policymakers such as Joiner, and the ways that pay impacts who is able to run and stay in office. But the political backlash in raising salaries for lawmakers also carries pitfalls.
The report analyzed salaries in several legislatures around the country and concluded that most lawmakers are paid wages that do not allow them to focus solely on the job of legislating. Many work in legislatures that are considered hybrid or part-time. They meet for shorter periods of time, often at the beginning of the year and into the spring. But it’s a role that has morphed in recent years into one with increasing year-round demands and expectations from constituents, many of whom may not realize their lawmakers are being paid little to no money to be that accessible…
The low pay effectively creates barriers to more diverse representation and trickles down to what kind of policy is created, said Ghida Dagher, president of New American Leaders, which recruits and trains first- and second-generation Americans to run for office. It estimates that just 3.5 percent of America’s 7,383 state legislative seats are held by new Americans. Women make up just 31 percent of statehouse seats, and 26.6 percent of that figure are women of color.
“State legislators have this enormous power to decide the future of immigrants, BIPOC communities and just constituents at large,” said Dagher. “But due to low legislative salaries, many people who are most impacted by the policies that legislators make are shut out of positions of power.”
In Georgia, where lawmakers this year debated restrictive voting bills, lawmakers are paid a little over $17,000 a year plus a per diem. Republicans in control of the legislature led an effort last year to cut that pay due to a reduced budget tied to the pandemic, arguing that the public had also faced hardship…
Dagher said the potential political blowback to increasing pay does not offset the reality, which is that as long as statehouses are financially out of reach as jobs for everyday people, they will not reflect the needs of a demographically diverse population.
“Any time there is discussion of tax dollars and people’s dollars being used toward a salary, there is some frustration,” Dagher said. “But the reality is, this is a full-time job. Community and constituent needs are year-round, they’re not part-time. So our legislatures should be set up at a full-time basis to really serve the needs of their communities.”
The New American Leaders’ report has several recommendations, including that lawmakers switch their statehouses to full time. While several have fixed end dates during session, lawmakers sometimes go weeks or months over those allotted times. Some rely on special sessions to meet later into the year. The report highlights research that shows statehouses that meet longer and pay higher salaries pass more bills, including per legislative day.
11) Yascha Mounk interviews Michael Powell on free speech:
Yascha Mounk: Every time we get a story about an attack on liberalism, in part from the right but also from the left, it is dismissed by partisans as just some crazy story, an extreme example — “this really isn’t a broad phenomenon going on in the country”, etc. Do you think all of the stories that you’ve been writing about add up to a bigger picture?
Michael Powell: I think the answer is almost certainly yes. About seven months ago, I did a story on a particular racial incident at Smith College, an elite liberal arts school in Massachusetts. I spoke to at least 15 faculty members, all of them tenured. As I recall, three of them went on the record. With perhaps one exception, none disputed that there was an illiberal stream running through liberal higher education these days, and specifically at their school. Almost all had particular tales to tell—not all hair-curling. But it was quite striking that I’m talking to—in almost all cases—senior tenured faculty, and none were willing to go on the record. Untenured people, I very much understood. I thought to myself, “This is a fine liberal institution, an elite liberal institution, and this isn’t good.” After the piece appeared, the president, as I expected might happen, denounced the piece, denounced me, and went to the faculty meeting. One of the faculty members called me a few hours afterwards, and she was chuckling. She named a number of people who stood up and denounced the piece and several of those were people who had given me chapter and verse on the problems that the university was running into on these very issues. I took that as a bad sign on the state of many of these institutions.
Mounk: Being back in Europe for a few months, I haven’t had anybody say to me, “But of course, I would never say this publicly.” And I suddenly realized that this is a phrase that I would hear more or less every day in the United States, often from people who are very much on the left, who are very progressive, who supported Bernie Sanders, who are deeply engaged in the fight against discrimination and so on. Their position is perfectly reasonable, but they would be afraid to speak publicly. When did you first sense that cultural transition?
Powell: I’ve only really started writing on this in the last year and a half. I was writing a sports column, actually, for about four or five years before this. I bounced all over the place. The Times being the Times, it’s sports column in which you can write about all sorts of social issues as well. And I started to come across this when I was looking at Title IX abuses which were, frankly, in some cases quite problematic from a civil liberties point of view. And doing that reporting—this is casting back four or five years—I was running into the same problem: that lawyers handling the cases were perfectly willing to talk to me, but when I would try to talk with professors and others on college campuses, people were wary of it. Feminists were leery of it—with, I should say, some spectacular exceptions. There are people who’ve been very forthright on this question from the liberal feminist community. But it just feels to me this is a stream that runs quite strong through our culture right now. And not simply universities and colleges.
12) A year old, but… interesting! “Serial killings are waning, leading to speculation about the cause”
The number of serial killings surged in the 1980s and has been dropping ever since.
In 1987, there were 198 separate serial killers active in the United States, compared to only 43 in 2015 and two in 2019, according to a database run by the Radford University and the Florida Gulf Coast University. The database defines a serial killing as the “unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.”
When a serial killing is defined as the killing of three or more victims, the number drops to 138 serial killers operating in 1987 and 26 in 2015. The number remains at two for 2019.
Discover magazine noted the downward trend and talked to experts about reasons for the possible decline.
The uptick can partly be explained by improved police work and data collection that made it possible to link murders more effectively, leading to an increased count. But other factors are also likely at play, experts told Discover.
One factor: DNA evidence is making it possible to track and find the offenders.
“Serial murder has become a more dangerous pursuit,” said Thomas Hargrove, founder of the Murder Accountability Project, in an interview with Discover.
James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at the Northeastern University, pointed to another factor: People are less vulnerable than in the past.
“People don’t hitchhike anymore,” he told Discover. “They have means of reaching out in an emergency situation using cellphones. There are cameras everywhere.”
13) This is a good story. Racial desegregation in schools is… complicated. “In Minneapolis Schools, White Families Are Asked to Help Do the Integrating
In a citywide overhaul, a beloved Black high school was rezoned to include white students from a richer neighborhood. It has been hard for everyone.”
14) So, this kind of annoyed me, “Hanukkah isn’t ‘Jewish Christmas.’ Stop treating it that way” because, Christmas (the religious holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus) is not Christmas (the completely secular holiday of gift-giving demarcated by elves, Santa, reindeer, etc.).
15) That famous study you’ve probably heard about where hungry judges hand out harsher sentences is based on unrealistically large effect sizes that this post (from 4 years ago, but, new to me) nicely contextualizes.
16) One thing I really like about Scott Alexander is that after writing a post on the need to more rapidly approve Covid antivirals, he publishes another post with the strongest pushback against his case.
17) Criminal Justice is tough. Yes, we incarcerate too many people for too long. And give too many people too high bail. But the maniac who ran over a bunch of innocent people in a Wisconsin parade should never have been on the streets,
18) I love that Drum refuses to just accept the consensus, digs into data, and pushes back. Plus, I can worry less about my daughter using Instagram.
A while ago I asked if there were any academic types who had written a good summary of all the research about the impact of social media on teenage users. At least, I think I did. Maybe I only thought about doing it, because I can’t find it now. [Ah, here it is.]
In any case, it turns out that Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have been compiling a list of research papers on this subject for the past couple of years. This prompted Haidt to write a piece for the Atlantic titled “The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls.” This article is very specifically about Instagram, not social media in general, and his argument goes approximately like this:
- Gen Z teen girls have been reporting increasingly high rates of anxiety and depression.
- This started happening between 2010-14, exactly the time that Instagram use became nearly universal among teens.
- In a 2017 survey by British researchers, teens rated Instagram as the most harmful of all social media platforms on measures of anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep.
- No other explanation for the rise in teen mental health problems makes sense.
By itself, this is not the most persuasive argument I’ve ever read. However, we can learn more by looking at the Haidt/Twenge list of research papers.
First off, they found 29 studies that showed an association between social media use and teen mental problems. They also found 11 studies showing no association.
This is moderately persuasive, though a 72% hit rate isn’t conclusive. A bigger problem is that the studies almost all found that effects kicked in only among teens who used social media a lot (4-5 hours per day or more). This immediately raises the question of whether (a) social media causes mental health problems or (b) teens with mental health problems seek out social media more obsessively.
This is an obvious question, and in a separate section Haidt and Twenge highlight studies designed to test causality. Most of them are experiments where teens are asked to eliminate (or cut back) social media use for a few weeks. At the end of the experiment their mood was compared with that of a control group that made no changes. Of the 13 “true experiments” they found, eight showed a causal effect and five showed no causal effect. This is suggestive, but even less conclusive than the association studies.
Overall, I’d call this moderately weak evidence…
My other problem was Haidt’s reference to the recently leaked Facebook documents as support for his thesis. But as I’ve pointed out before, there’s no there there:
Among teen girls, Instagram has a net negative effect on one thing (body image) and a net positive effect on everything else. This simply doesn’t support the argument that Instagram is an overall problem for teen girls.
All this said, there’s enough evidence here that it certainly suggests some caution is probably in order. And as it turns out, Haidt makes three proposals that are suitably cautious in turn. First, he wants social media companies to allow academic researchers access to their data. Second, he wants the age of “internet adulthood” to be raised from 13 to 16. Finally, he wants to encourage a norm among parents and schools of delaying use of social media until high school. None of these strike me as objectionable given the suggestive evidence we have.
Obviously research on social media and mental health is difficult to do well. Nevertheless, if we’re going to act responsibly instead of moving straight to our usual panic phase, we need something better than what we have now. In particular, we need a more thorough explanation of what happened in the 24 months between 2011 and 2013. Beyond that, we need higher quality studies of how social media affects teens, ideally using something better than self-reported hours of internet use (which is highly unreliable) and self-reported survey questions of mental health (also not terribly reliable). Let’s get cracking, researchers!
19) A nice take on Rittenhouse and guns from Michael Cohen:
In short, the usual political lines have been drawn. However, what’s missing from the post-trial coverage is what is seemingly always missing from the debates about gun violence in America — the gun…
Chekhov’s Gun
The weapon pictured above is a Smith & Wesson M&P 15. It’s the gun that Rittenhouse strapped on his body and displayed in public as he sought to “protect” local Kenosha businesses from demonstrators. It’s the sole reason why what happened that August night turned deadly.
Without a gun, Rittenhouse likely never travels to Wisconsin.
Without a gun, he doesn’t shoot his first victim, Joseph Rosenbaum.
Without a gun, Rittenhouse might have fled the scene once Rosenbaum, a man with a history of mental illness just released from the hospital following a suicide attempt, threatened his life.
Without a gun, he wouldn’t have needed to escape the scene and then been attacked by Joseph Huber, who hit him with a skateboard before Rittenhouse killed him.
Without a gun, Rittenhouse doesn’t shoot Gaige Grosskreutz, permanently maiming him.
Without a gun in his hand, Gaige Grosskreutz likely doesn’t get shot at all.
Without the proverbial Chekhov’s gun, would Rittenhouse — at the age of 17 — have been emboldened to walk the streets of Kenosha at night amidst a violent and tense situation?
If Rittenhouse hadn’t been carrying a semi-automatic rifle that night, there would be no murder, trial, and national debate. The presence of a gun — introduced, if you will, in the first act — is what led to tragedy.
Even if Rittenhouse still traveled to Kenosha, even if he still participated in the demonstrations that night, and even if Joseph Rosenbaum still threatened him, no one would have been shot — if not for the presence of a gun.
Rittenhouse would still have had the right to defend himself. But when individuals are permitted to carry guns and protect themselves with deadly force, people will die needlessly. And that’s precisely what happened in Kenosha. Even if one believes that the actions of Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz were dangerous and provocative, none of them deserved to die.
Every act of gun violence; every mass shooting; every accidental discharge of a weapon; every suicide attempt that is a cry for help but turns deadly; every racially-tinged murder has its roots in the fact that we, as a society, have made the choice that ordinary Americans should be allowed near-unfettered access to guns.
Even police shootings, like the one of Jacob Blake, which sparked the demonstrations in Kenosha, have their roots in American gun laws. Why do American police officers kill so many Americans? They are trained to believe that every interaction with the public could become deadly, and for good reason: America is one of the most heavily armed countries in the world. Do police need better training and less permissive rules of engagement? Absolutely. But as long as guns are ubiquitous in our society, police will continue to kill innocent civilians they believe might have a gun. [emphasis mine]
20) Just discovered the new Showtime series “Yellowjackets” and really liked the first two episodes.
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