page = slate star codex
url = https://slatestarcodex.com
Last week I talked to a New York Times technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex. He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article.
This week, some students at Michigan State are trying to cancel him. They point an interview he did on an alt-right podcast (he says he didn’t know it was alt-right), to his allowing MSU to conduct research on police shootings (which concluded, like most such research, that they are generally not racially motivated), and to his occasional discussion of the genetics of race (basically just repeating the same “variance between vs. within clusters” distinction everyone else does, see eg here ). You can read the case being made against him here , although keep in mind a lot of it is distorted and taken out of context, and you can read his response here .
Luckily we already knew a chemical that could block these – pindolol. Pindolol is a blood-pressure-lowering medication, but by coincidence it also makes it into the brain and blocks this particular autoreceptor involved in serotonin homeostasis. So a few people started giving pindolol along with antidepressants. What happened? According to some small unconvincing systematic reviews , it did seem to kind of help make antidepressants work faster, but according to some other small unconvincing meta-analyses it probably didn’t make them work any better. It just made antidepressants go from taking about four weeks to work, to taking one or two weeks to work. It also gave patients dizziness, drowsiness, weakness, and all the other things you would expect from giving a blood-pressure-lowering medication to people with normal blood pressure. So people decided it probably wasn’t worth it.
On a clinical level, maybe not. Proponents of vilazodone got excited about a study where vilazodone showed effects as early as week two. But “SSRIs take four weeks to work” is a rule of thumb, not a natural law. You always get a couple of people who get some effect early on, and if your study population is big enough, that’ll show up as a positive result. So you need to compare vilazodone to an SSRI directly. The only group I know who tried this, Matthews et al , found no difference – in fact, vilazodone was nonsignificantly slower ( relevant figure ). There’s no sign of vilazodone working any better either.
This is the biweek-ly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, but please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit – and also check out the SSC Podcast . Also:
1. Comment of the week: superkamiokande from the subreddit explains the structural and computational differences between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas .
2. There’s another SSC virtual meetup next week, guest speaker Robin Hanson. More information here .
6. If you haven’t already taken last week’s nootropics survey, and you are an experienced user of nootropics, you can take it now .
Does “terrifying” sound weirdly alarmist here? I think the argument is something like this. In February, we watched as the number of US coronavirus cases went from 10ish to 50ish to 100ish over the space of a few weeks. We didn’t panic, because 100ish was still a very low number of coronavirus cases. In retrospect, we should have panicked, because the number was constantly increasing, showed no signs of stopping, and simple linear extrapolation suggested it would be somewhere scary very soon. After the number of coronavirus cases crossed 100,000 and 1,000,000 at exactly the time we could have predicted from the original curves, we all told ourselves we definitely wouldn’t be making that exact same mistake again.
Last week I talked to a New York Times technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex. He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article.
This week, some students at Michigan State are trying to cancel him. They point an interview he did on an alt-right podcast (he says he didn’t know it was alt-right), to his allowing MSU to conduct research on police shootings (which concluded, like most such research, that they are generally not racially motivated), and to his occasional discussion of the genetics of race (basically just repeating the same “variance between vs. within clusters” distinction everyone else does, see eg here ). You can read the case being made against him here , although keep in mind a lot of it is distorted and taken out of context, and you can read his response here .
Luckily we already knew a chemical that could block these – pindolol. Pindolol is a blood-pressure-lowering medication, but by coincidence it also makes it into the brain and blocks this particular autoreceptor involved in serotonin homeostasis. So a few people started giving pindolol along with antidepressants. What happened? According to some small unconvincing systematic reviews , it did seem to kind of help make antidepressants work faster, but according to some other small unconvincing meta-analyses it probably didn’t make them work any better. It just made antidepressants go from taking about four weeks to work, to taking one or two weeks to work. It also gave patients dizziness, drowsiness, weakness, and all the other things you would expect from giving a blood-pressure-lowering medication to people with normal blood pressure. So people decided it probably wasn’t worth it.
On a clinical level, maybe not. Proponents of vilazodone got excited about a study where vilazodone showed effects as early as week two. But “SSRIs take four weeks to work” is a rule of thumb, not a natural law. You always get a couple of people who get some effect early on, and if your study population is big enough, that’ll show up as a positive result. So you need to compare vilazodone to an SSRI directly. The only group I know who tried this, Matthews et al , found no difference – in fact, vilazodone was nonsignificantly slower ( relevant figure ). There’s no sign of vilazodone working any better either.
This is the biweek-ly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, but please try to avoid hot-button political and social topics. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit – and also check out the SSC Podcast . Also:
1. Comment of the week: superkamiokande from the subreddit explains the structural and computational differences between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas .
2. There’s another SSC virtual meetup next week, guest speaker Robin Hanson. More information here .
6. If you haven’t already taken last week’s nootropics survey, and you are an experienced user of nootropics, you can take it now .
Does “terrifying” sound weirdly alarmist here? I think the argument is something like this. In February, we watched as the number of US coronavirus cases went from 10ish to 50ish to 100ish over the space of a few weeks. We didn’t panic, because 100ish was still a very low number of coronavirus cases. In retrospect, we should have panicked, because the number was constantly increasing, showed no signs of stopping, and simple linear extrapolation suggested it would be somewhere scary very soon. After the number of coronavirus cases crossed 100,000 and 1,000,000 at exactly the time we could have predicted from the original curves, we all told ourselves we definitely wouldn’t be making that exact same mistake again.