I am editing the 176th (!?) episode of Priključenija, a weekly podcast in Serbian that will be finishing up its 4th year in a few months, and I heard myself say in Serbian what I thought I had at some point written in English, but I’m searching the archive now and nope, never did.

What I meant to write, at some point, was this: for the most part, people — myself included — don’t use social networks to be informed; we go there to be entertained. We might tell ourselves that it is also a good way to get information about the world, the same way 30 years ago teens and adolescents would tell clueless surveyors that MTV was the main way they got their news. But let’s not kid ourselves: the reason we keep coming back is not for the authenticity, veracity, or timeliness of the news we get, but because of the entertainment value. ⊕ The link is to Derek Kedziora’s blog, which I found through RSS club, which is mostly about things completely outside of my area of interest, but a few of the feeds there have really hit the spot and I now remember that I should update the blogroll.And we do like our entertainment!

The best way to “be informed” has for centuries now been, and continues to be, reading a book. There are, of course, many books with negative information value, but the medium at least allows for books that inform rather than entertain to be made. The second-best way to get information As opposed to “the news”, which is also mostly entertainment is YouTube, which is, if you squint, an extension of what we did before Gutenberg — oral tradition, learning by watching, etc. It is also another double-edged sword — there is so much more computer and human-generated dreck on YouTube than there are valuable videos — but a sword at least has two edges. Social networks aren’t swords, they are spikes, ⊕ Intuition tells me that this is because of the minimal “package size” allowed in each medium, how interconnected they are, and how 99.5% ice cream mixed with 0.5% feces is still inedible… but I digress.with a single point of concentrated “infotainment” headed straight to your limbic system.

So I must have thought this obvious if I haven’t written about it explicitly, but apparently not. Back in the 2000s and early 2010s there may have been some question of the social network’s value in providing information. More than a decade later, we have our answer: it is zero at best, negative at worst, for any social network of sufficient size, and if you think that you are using one to “be informed” you are either fooling yourself or you are an idiot (and I know idiots don’t read this, so I feel comfortable writing it).

To be clear, there are other worthy goals of being on a social network. Socializing, for one! This is not a call to abandon anything, but a quick reality check and something to which I can point my non-idiot friends when the need arises.

Seeing the news about a woman, two mirrors, and an iPhone photo, the first word that comes to mind — rightly or wrongly — is fabulist. When an attention-seeking person wants to engage a scandal-seeking public, of course that they will target Apple. I am old enough to remember people making a show out of the whole thing. (↬Matt Birchler)

The next 24 hours will test the boundaries of not speaking ill of the dead. So it goes…

Rest in peace, Charlie Munger. If you are… were… are a fan of Charlie’s and haven’t heard of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, may this post correct the error.

Without even knowing it, a doctor played the blankface roulette each time he applied for a passport. This year, he lost:

The Northern Virginia doctor was born in D.C. and given a U.S. birth certificate. At 61, he learned his citizenship was granted by mistake.

I have been dealing with the Lovecraftian horror that goes by the name USCIS for 15 years now, and this is not surprising in the least. Not everyone gets to have their story told by the WaPo, so good for the doctor for making it happen — like a true American! Give the man his citizenship.

This is the perfect number of times a year to have cranberry sauce: one.

As heard on the Omnibus. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate! Again.

Nassim Taleb says it, and now James Fallows does to: predictions are worse than useless. Please pay attention to the worse than part.

Rejoice, our eight-month long nightmare is over. For now.

One of the most level-headed descriptions of the “current situation” comes from the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin in an interview with Appolline de Malherbe. His answer to the question of whose fault it was:

But Ms. Malherbe, I am trained as a diplomat. The question of fault will be addressed by historians and philosophers.

Unsurprisingly, he never held elected office. That kind of nuanced thinking will never get you enough votes.

If you thought the state of American media was bad — and justifiably so — I can assure you that most of the world has it much worse. Every so often I get sent a link to a Serbian news site writing about cancer research, and it is always a disaster. Here is the most recent one, short enough to be quotted fully here (translation courtesy of Google):

A German company presented an anti-cancer drug: The tumor stopped growing in all patients

The German company Biontek (BioNTech) is currently raising hopes with its cancer vaccine CARVac.

The first research results show that tumors can be stopped from growing, and sometimes even reduced. The first successes occurred after two out of four vaccination doses.

Most study participants (59 percent) had their tumors shrink by at least 30 percent. In addition, the tumor stopped growing in almost all patients (95 percent) after vaccination. Like the covid 19 vaccine, the vaccine is based on mRNA technology.

This means that a certain protein is taken into the cell, allowing the body to repair it itself.

The new vaccine was developed by a team led by Biontek founder Ugur Sahin (58) and founder Ozlem Turecci (56).

So far, 44 patients have received it in four doses. Success was particularly high after two doses, after four doses the tumors were reduced by at least 30 percent in just under half (45 percent), and the cancer was stabilized in 74 percent of all patients.

Let me list the ways in which this is a terrible new story:

No source

Where did the data come from? Was it a paper, an abstract, a press release, or a leak? A 2-second journey to DuckDuckGo shows that they were, in fact, presented at the 2023 ESMO Congress, which is the annual gathering of the European Society of Medical Oncology. The Serbian website does mention a Bosnian article as a “source” for there copy/paste job, but that article also doesn’t list where the data came from.

Wrong data

“The first research results…”, the article begins. Being the first is big news. But this aren’t the first results. Some were presented last year at the same congress, and even that was a follow-up of data presented earlier.

Incomplete data

Vaccines make the news, so that’s what they highlight, but the trial is actually of a cell therapy with and without the vaccine. The 44 patients they mention are the ones who got the cell therapy with and without the vaccine, and there is no breakdown of how many of them got the actual vaccine. With cancer vaccine’s abysmal past record ⊕ No, they are not now being “tried in cancer” after the success in Covid-19. They were, in fact, developed for cancer treatment, experienced failure after failure, and pivoted back to infectious diseases because of Covid-19; and what a good thing for all of us that they did! I highly doubt that the effect we saw was wholly due to the cells, not the vaccine (then again, I work at a cell therapy company). The paper which came out concomitantly with the abstract shows that about the same number of participants who got the vaccine progressed and responded (see Figure 2 for that).

No context

“The tumor stopped growing in all patients”, the headline says. Well, loog at Figure 2 again, it’s what we call a waterfall plot, which is an aspirational name: if the bar goes up from baseline it means that the tumor grew, if it goes down it means that it shrank, so you want it to look like a waterfall. But in 8 of the 21 participants presented in the paper it grew! And in 5 more it barely came down — those count as “stable disease” because measuring tumors is not a precise science and a pixel here or there on the digital ruler can make all the difference. In only 8 of the participants did the tumor shrink, and in only one of those did it go away completely.

This is, I’m sad to say, about what you would expect for a Phase 1 trial of a cancer drug. Most patients who make it to such a trial have slow-growing tumors, and having a “stable disease” in that context — where you are allowed to have the tumor grow by 20% before calling it “progression” — is perfectly meaningless. Note that you will find terms like “disease control rate” or “clinical benefit rate” which combine participants whose tumors shrunk with those who had this “stable disease”. Those two metrics are also meaningless without a control group.

This became longer than I intended so I’ll stop here, but yes, it’s a sad state. It reminds me of dostarlimab, only much worse since in that case there was at least clear evidence that the drug was good, the only thing missing was context. Caveat lector!