XFrequentist

Not exclusively, but indeed the two main vectors for both dengue and chikungunya are Aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus. Several other species are at least somewhat capable of transmitting these viruses.

I'd love to see the TPP text annotated on Genius (or a similar site). Is that a thing?

I'm struck that with a tiny bit of research you could figure out yourself if/how they accounted for the possibility of luck (hint: they did).

Are you presuming Tetlock et al didn't think of this? That seems pretty unlikely, given what they're studying.

My understanding is that deer are required for long-distance transport of black legged tick populations, but are not absolutely required to complete the full two-year life cycle.

Yeah, that really should have been discussed in the article...

You're right, this work is an advance along precisely the lines I claimed were needed. Time to update my opinion!

I meant that I hadn't yet read the original scientific publication [1] (I have now), not that I hadn't read the Guardian piece.

I also wouldn't agree that I was refuting the headline, I was just giving background. The scientific paper is very clear that this is an advance along precisely the lines I said were needed (ie defining a group for whom benefits outweigh harms), but the Guardian piece makes it sound like Aspirin's chemopreventive effect had just been discovered whole cloth.

[1] http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/07/30/an...

Sweet! I haven't read the article (or even the abstract) yet, glad to hear that they were able to nail down a recommendation. Thanks for letting me know.

Aspirin's reduction of cancer risk has been on relatively solid epidemiological footing for a long time, it's simply not a big enough protective effect to balance the risk of bleeds etc:

http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/uspsasco...

Now, if you were to consider all cancers plus cardiovascular benefit, and target folks who are more likely to benefit and/or less likely to have adverse events, it might be useful. Trying to sort some of this out with genomic data was the subject of my MSc, but I couldn't make it work.

It was actually "technically correct" - he said "if the number of samples is low".

You're correct about the general case, of course.

Many genera of mosquitoes _can_ spread disease: anopheles, aedes, culex, culiseta. Your risk depends on where you are, how often you're bitten, the prevalence of infection among mosquitoes, etc etc.

I don't understand how you possibly missed the sarcasm (it's literally a line-by-line restatement of the grandparent), especially given that you quoted the final part. What on earth did you interpret that to mean?

I also accidentally submitted a dupe (sorry). You also need a search function.

Looks great though, and nice idea.

It's tricky: there is often monitoring of interim results for exactly this reason, but there are some good theoretical reasons to think that halting a trial on the basis of good interim outcomes in the experimental group could bias the results.

As for the latter statement, there are no "guarantees" before clinical trials have been done (even after it can be iffy: see http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal....

I can't imagine how this argument would look in court.

"Throw us in ice-cold water every day and we’ll sprout subcutaneous fat for insulation"

What? Everything I know about physiology and the effects of cold exposure make me believe that this is the opposite of the truth.

I don't program (aside from SAS/R statistical programming and LaTeX). I'm planning on learning how.

I have the feeling that there is a lot of potential good that an epidemiology-oriented hacker could do.

Problem is, I have no direct external pressure to motivate learning, and no direction on what to learn. Reading Hacker News is a way of gaining both motivation and direction.

First on the list: Learn to spell "San Francisco".

Sebastian Marshall == lionhearted

Recommended: http://www.zapreader.com/

Now that I'm used to it, I find I retain more this way than linear reading.

"Living in a very sanitary environment like the US can (potentially) weaken your immune system."

There are lots of vague hypotheses like this floating about, but IMHO[1] they're pretty flimsy. The fact that you don't have immunity to various foreign bugs doesn't imply (at all) that your immune system is "weak".

There's better evidence that sanitary conditions could increase allergy, which is an overactive immune system, not a weakened one.

Pollution, which you mention later in your comment, has nothing at all to do with immunity.

All that aside: boil it, peel it, cook it, or forget it!

[1] - Also not a doctor, but I am an epidemiologist.

You should spread the logical core of your arguments out over several thousand conversations. That should make the arguments much more potent.

Interesting, I'm in kind of the opposite situation:

I recently asked my very excellent girlfriend of 5 years said question. I procrastinated so long at least partially due to residual trauma from an early parental divorce (plus the subsequent decades of court battles and screaming).

My fiancee's approach was a combination of patience and understanding for 4 years, then basically telling me my time was up. The latter strategy wouldn't have worked without the former.

One thing I'm certainly glad we did is to talk about it honestly and deeply before taking the plunge. I doubt I would have been able to work up the courage to do it otherwise.

If marriage is important to you, tell her so, and give you reasons why.

Related: The Daily Mail Oncology Ontology Project http://thedailymailoncologicalontologyproject.wordpress.com/

Suggest that the following would be better wording, as it expresses the same point without emotionally charged turns of phrase like "spend more on murderers" and "those with mental illness roaming our streets":

2. It is unfortunate that we seem willing to spend more money punishing the criminally insane than we do helping nonviolent folk with mental illness, who make up much of our homeless population.

That sounds like a good goal indeed. Looking forward to reading it!

From the final chapter:

"Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting... You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines."

Don't know about the programming profession, but the secret weapon bit is true to a degree that might shock many of the readers here. I would even go so far as to say that NOT knowing how to program causes ridiculous waste of resources in other disciplines.

Working as an epidemiologist during the H1N1 pandemic, I saw literally dozens of man hours drained on repetitive statistical reporting and database tasks that the average reader here could probably automate in under an hour. There were lots of extremely smart people running around with a ton of important things to do, but since no one (myself included) really knew how to program, what were we to do? I think I was the only one to even have the inkling that we could probably be replaced by a few Excel macros.

I don't know this guy's back-story (or why he seems to inspire such antipathy), but this passage got me very excited! I'd already bought into the idea that learning at least the basics of programming would be a good way to improve my general analytic thinking ability (a noble goal, IMHO), but I was being held back by the thought that it was a bit of a frivolous endeavor. This has really inspired me to get started!

Secret weapon indeed! Wooo!

[EDIT: I see several others have commented on this bit. Sorry to be repetitive!]

The potential upside of this type of research is worth the risk of loss of anonymity. I would post my genome to a public website if it would help advance medical science.

[Disclosure: I participated in public health genomics research in grad school.]

Yes it does: x=4,0