zfell

News of which funds sent emails asking their portcos to withdraw funds from the bank that has supported this industry for 40 years is a reputation hit in my view. Although it may certainly not be a popular opinion.

nice analogy ^_^

Another concerning factor is that many large VC firms sent emails to their portfolio companies (hundreds or more at a time) warning them to withdraw funds, triggering the run.

An alternative could have been for this group of already closely connected individuals to call an emergency meeting and agreeing to send the opposite message to their portfolio companies to avoid the crisis. Given SVBs issue was really about profitability and not solvency without the bank run.

I'm skeptical a real lesson will be learned here, and we lose the opportunity to build scar tissue. Instead, we wake up from a nightmare, brush it off, and move on.

Found a link to the full paper here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2018-morgan.pdf

It explains the difference in prevalence rates: "While median lifetime morbid risk for schizophrenia is estimated to be 0.72% (Saha et al., 2005), many of our young cohort had still not passed through the window for schizophrenia onset."

However, their claim for a relationship is indeed very weak: "In our data, this dropped to 0.2% for congenital or early peripheral blindness and was zero for congenital or early cortical blindness [0 cases out of 66]. Our data further suggest that the protection offered by cortical blindness may extend to a broader range of psychotic disorders and that risk of psychosis may effectively be reduced to zero."

It's ironic that they start the discussion stating "The results from this whole-population cohort, although possibly underpowered, lend confidence to findings from smaller case studies". Yes, it is underpowered, and I'm surprised it was published.

Could there be a much simpler explanation?

The most recent study the article sites (Morgan et. al, 2018) states that out of 468k people in the population "1870 children developed schizophrenia (0.4%) while 9120 developed a psychotic illness (1.9%). None of the 66 children with cortical blindness developed schizophrenia or psychotic illness."

If we don't assume there is a relationship between schizophrenia and cortical blindness, it's not surprising that none of the 66 people who had cortical blindness developed schizophrenia. Simple binomial approximation will yield a 77% (0.996^66) probability. Am I missing something?

Also I find the difference in prevalence rates of schizophrenia of 0.4% in the Morgan et al. paper vs 0.72% in McGrath et al. 2008 odd.

Morgan et al. 2018: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09209...!

This article is a great example of the kind of brain-washing that took place historically to justify inhumane actions. It gives very little attention to historical facts.