jseliger

I have no way of assessing who is (more) correct.

Audience capture: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture or perhaps more accurately criticism capture: https://www.houseofstrauss.com/p/criticism-capture-is-more-d... is a problem for many people who become media people.

In "Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive?: A Bayesian Decision Analysis of Clinical Trial Design," the authors find that:

Implicit in the drug-approval process is a host of decisions---target patient population, control group, primary endpoint, sample size, follow-up period, etc.---all of which determine the trade-off between Type I and Type II error. We explore the application of Bayesian decision analysis (BDA) to minimize the expected cost of drug approval, where the relative costs of the two types of errors are calibrated using U.S. Burden of Disease Study 2010 data. The results for conventional fixed-sample randomized clinical-trial designs suggest that for terminal illnesses with no existing therapies such as pancreatic cancer, the standard threshold of 2.5% is substantially more conservative than the BDA-optimal threshold of 23.9% to 27.8%. For relatively less deadly conditions such as prostate cancer, 2.5% is more risk-tolerant or aggressive than the BDA-optimal threshold of 1.2% to 1.5%. We compute BDA-optimal sizes for 25 of the most lethal diseases and show how a BDA-informed approval process can incorporate all stakeholders' views in a systematic, transparent, internally consistent, and repeatable manner.

PTSD is not generally fatal, apart from suicide risk, but denying treatment due to arbitrary hypothetical dreamed up by the committee members is a travesty.

Moderna's mRNA-4157 is a current example of this: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/04/12/moderna-mrna-4157-v90-new..., although it may be held up by lack of manufacturing capacity as well.

I'm facing just this problem and my life is not worth "infinite money:" http://jakeseliger.com/2024/05/16/the-financial-costs-of-hea...

Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...

Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.

The simple answer is likely the quality of TVs: 65" OLED TVs with good sound aren't that expensive any more. The quality delta of going to a theater versus watching something on TV used to be massive.

In books about writing, I like:

How Fiction Works

Reading Like a Writer

Writing With Style

There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/

I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people deciding to go their own, off those sites.

Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...

Some people also go into denial about what's happening, and denial can be fatal. This is not quite 100% on point, but my wife wrote a story about meeting a patient whose large mass on the side of her neck had not been there for just a couple days: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/just-because-you-wont-se...: "Per triage, my patient’s symptoms started yesterday and she’s worried that the swelling might be an infection or maybe a pulled muscle, but the moment I walk into the room I know that I’m going to ruin her life."

Some attempt to take the hedonic path that would not, I think, be very satisfying, and yet they pursue it (heedlessly spending down cash on trinkets, the non-prescribed drugs you might imagine, Vegas, etc.). This is distinct from someone who decides: "I've always wanted to visit Tokyo and now I'm finally going to do it."

I think it's good to try and lead and positive, generative life, even when what is left of that life is limited, and when what "positive, generative" means will vary widely by person.

Oh man, I hope he or she was okay. This is terrible. In most people in whom squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue gets caught early, it's curable. I'm in the group in whom it's caught relatively early, but the initial surgery and radiotherapy isn't enough.

Regarding attitude, I figure that there is much I can't control, but attitude is one I can. WWMAD? (Would would Marcus Aurelius Do?): https://jakeseliger.com/2023/09/18/stoic-philosophy-finding-...:

You’ll see stoic ideas threaded through the essays my wife and I have been writing about my fatal cancer diagnosis: “Every day I’m trying to make a good and generative day, and I remind myself that there are many things I can’t control, but, as both Frankl and the Stoics emphasize, I can control my attitude.”

One way to see the virtues of this attitude is by process of elimination: What’s the alternative? Wallowing in bad days in which I accomplish and achieve nothing important? Getting angry about things I can’t control, and things that will remain the same whether I’m angry about them or not? Lamenting that which cannot be, and will not be no matter how much I wish it so? Nothing will bring my tongue back. Bemoaning my fate will not avert it (though I’m also not passively accepting fate: as described below, I appear to be in a clinical trial for a novel, promising drug that targets squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue). The likelihood of another decade of life is not literally 0.0, but it’s under one percent and would require a series of near-miracles via clinical trials.