eszaq
I'm old enough to remember the naive optimism around the internet in the 2000s. "The long tail", "cognitive surplus", "one laptop per child", Creative Commons, the Arab "Spring", breathless Youtube videos about how social media is gonna revolutionize society for the better, etc. Hardly anyone forecasted clickbait, Trump tweets, revenge porn, crypto scams, or social media shaming. If we had a few professional critics who were incentivized to pour cold water on the whole deal, or at least scan the horizon for potential problems, maybe things would've turned out better.
Perfect Privacy accepts a gift card (more convenient than mailed cash IMO) and has a nifty "neurorouting" feature which aims to be better than standard multihop (claims of speed, at least, I can attest to). They do ask for an email address, sadly, unlike iVPN/Mullvad. Also I just saw this and it looks a bit worrisome https://www.security.org/privacy-guide/perfect-privacy/
Both iVPN and PP let you block various trackers / MANGA corps at the network level.
I like Mullvad but it seems good to support a diversity of providers. Curious if anyone has any dirt on either of those two, or if they can make more recommendations.
Years ago, the center of the action in "Silicon Valley" was actually in the geographical valley, in the south bay. The south bay is way different from SF - safe and sterile. Some people would move up to SF and commute all the way down to the south bay just because they wanted to live somewhere interesting. Those sort of people also tended to be the sort to start startups, and the center of the action gradually moved to SF.
I think SF can try following the same path a second time, focus on catering to the gritty hipster demographic and hope something valuable grows out of it. Added housing to push rents lower seems like a good start.
With N different control variables to either include or ignore, that's 2^N possible sets of control variables. Odds are decent at least one of those regressions has a large effect size for coffee.
I would trust this sort of research more if instead of publishing a particular set of control variables obtained by an unspecified method, the researchers chose 100 of those 2^N possible sets of control variables at random, then published the average effect size from the 100 resulting regressions. Ideally they would make the code to reproduce this average effect size publicly available, so anyone could easily replicate using another 100 randomly generated regressions.
As Bayesians, shouldn't this effect size cause us to update in the direction that coffee is good for health, even if we think confounding contributed to the large effect size?
Seems to me that a likely reason for a large effect size is both a causal effect of drinking coffee and confounding, added together.
As an analogy, suppose you and I are talking about a Hollywood star who has made a lot of money. I say: "The star is probably a good actor." You say: "I would just encourage people to think about this wealth level and ask whether it's plausible. The star is probably just physically attractive." Of course, the wealthiest Hollywood stars tend to be both good actors and physically attractive.
Why is a large effect size more plausible for some unspecified confounder than it is for coffee? I think some research suggests coffee induces benefits akin to caloric restriction (autophagy) among other good things: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4111762/ Should we really have a prior that an unspecified confounder can have such a large effect size? How common is that?
BTW, this appears to be the money quote from the paper https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/epdf/10.7326/M21-2977
>Compared with nonconsumers, consumers of various amounts of unsweetened coffee (>0 to 1.5, >1.5 to 2.5, >2.5 to 3.5, >3.5 to 4.5, and >4.5 drinks/d) had lower risks for all-cause mortality after adjustment for lifestyle, sociodemographic, and clinical factors, with respective hazard ratios of 0.79 (95% CI, 0.70 to 0.90), 0.84 (CI, 0.74 to 0.95), 0.71 (CI, 0.62 to 0.82), 0.71 (CI, 0.60 to 0.84), and 0.77 (CI, 0.65 to 0.91); the respective estimates for consumption of sugar-sweetened coffee were 0.91 (CI, 0.78 to 1.07), 0.69 (CI, 0.57 to 0.84), 0.72 (CI, 0.57 to 0.91), 0.79 (CI, 0.60 to 1.06), and 1.05 (CI, 0.82 to 1.36). The association between artificially sweetened coffee and mortality was less consistent. The association of coffee drinking with mortality from cancer and CVD was largely consistent with that with all-cause mortality. U-shaped associations were also observed for instant, ground, and decaffeinated coffee.
Positive health effects from drinking sugar-sweetened coffee make me think it's not just confounding, since I wouldn't expect health-conscious people to drink sugar-sweetened coffee. But I'm suspicious regarding the "less consistent" association for artificially sweetened coffee. That makes me think that there is just too much noise in the data to know for sure, or perhaps artificial sweeteners are actually bad for you?
Edit: I wrote some more skeptical thoughts here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31602472
>...if we want to understand the economic geography and political paths and political stability of a country, we need to understand what commodities they started out with. What this led me to do, and how I got started on the path of studying war, actually, is by realizing that some commodities are just hugely volatile in price for various circumstances, and some are not.
>So, if we wanted to understand long-term paths of development and why some places weren’t prosperous, it’s because they lost the commodity lottery, and they got a volatile commodity rather than a stable one.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/chris-blattman-w...
When I heard this, I immediately thought: "Why don't countries selling volatile commodities just hedge?" I wonder if "commodity hedging for the masses" could be one of those things like mobile money which has a transformative effect on the global poor.
(Of course, you could also imagine the government of a country that exports something volatile hedge that commodity and buy the production of its people in lean times in order to keep things stable)