The same week Alexey Guzey proposed abolishing the NIH, two more essays popped up: Distinguishing the real from invented problems with the NIH, from Sasha Gusev, himself an NIH-funded geneticist The NIH Needs Reform: Here are 10 Sensible Suggestions from Joseph Marine, a cardiologist A few things came to mind: You can clearly see the difference in backgrounds. Gusev’s essay is an “insider-y”, show-me-what-we’re-doing-wrong approach. Marine’s is outward-looking-in, dealing more with perception of the NIH.

I recently spoke at an event dedicated to “making clinical trials faster” in the US. Mine was the first talk of the day, so I wanted to set up a framework of thinking about clinical trials that would be useful for further discussion. The attempt was a resounding failure at the level of the talks that followed — more on the specifics of that below — but I still think it’s a good framework so I’ll turn my 5-minute talk into a few paragraphs here in the hopes that more people start looking at the problem from that perspective.

Here is a brief anecdote that may help contextualize some recent developments, in particular why anyone black, or brown, or uneducated, or poor may have preferred Trump over Harris. Two apartments ago, a bit before Covid, we were living in a 2-bedroom apartment in Northwest DC that was absolutely gargantuan by European standards but must have seemed cramped for a family of five-plus-a-house-guest to our neighbors. One neighbor in particular, let’s call her Alice, seemed unusually interested in the goings on of our household: the foreign accents, the visiting grandparents, so many children.

It won’t be close. Most pollsters are hacks who commit even greater statistics crimes than physicians so their 50/50 is most likely to mean a landslide either way. That link above is to Nate Silver’s Substack post, but please remember that he is also a hack who builds prediction models from the polling garbage he describes above while knowing it is garbage. That is even worse than what the pollsters are doing because shouldn’t he know better?

I have been reading Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals”, which builds on many of the concepts first mentioned in “Four Thousand Weeks”. One of them is looking at various aspects of life not as a to-do list that needs completing but as a river you dip in and out of as needed. One big to-do list that has followed me for more than a decade now has been my ever-growing Instapaper queue.

Andrew Gelman recently wrote about Columbia surgery professor’s research missconduct. I haven’t looked into the details but it seems like the retracted papers were all about lab research with no true clinical relevancy. In that context, this part of the post stuck out: Can you imagine, you come to this guy with cancer of the spleen and he might be pushing some unproven treatment supported by faked evidence? Scary.