🏀 This was… better than expected! Though still horrible defense.
In Washington DC Subway Memory Game you have to guess the names of as many DC Metro stations as you can. There are no extra points for guessing the location, though I would happily pay for that in-app purchase. After seven years of staring at those ceilings while commuting to Bethesda one would think I would be most familiar with the red line, and one would be correct — I had 23 of 27. My worst was the orange: 7 of 26, and two of those were overlaps with other lines.
If you liked the previously mentioned Secrets of… videos and station layout maps, this one is well worth checking out. (↬r/washingtondc, whose users of course had some rather uncharitable comments about bugginess of a free game made by an enthusiast. Never change, DC!)
The Benefits of Being a Young Mom:
My mom, who had me at 22, worked as a nanny for other people’s children when I was a baby, bringing me to work with her in St. Louis, where we were living so my dad could finish school. She had a few rules for kid-raising: no need to go to the doctor for most things (better to wait and see if a malady resolves on its own); a cardboard box from the garage makes for the most thrilling play; and babies can—and should—be brought practically anywhere.
I’m not a young mom, but I can vouch for the soundness of these rules. We did have our first child at an awfully young age for the East Coast (28–29!?)
🏀 The best pass in NBA history happened so fast that the camera, the commentators, and most of the audience completely missed it.
🏀 This was… better than expected! Though still horrible defense.
🏀 Funny that my two teams — the Nuggets because of Jokić, the Wizards because, well, DC — are respectively this seasons best and worst of the NBA. And when I say the worst, I mean truly horrible. I don’t expect it to be fun, but let’s hope that it will at least be interesting!
☕️ My preferred coffee making method has been freshly ground pour-over for a while now, but whenever we are out of whole beans (like we were this week), Mehmet Effendi is the standby. Taleb called it East Med coffee but of course it’s known as Turkish in most other places. Considering that it probably came from Yemen and spread around by the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman coffee may be the most precise name, but of course everyone will call it however they like (Bosnian coffee? Really?)
I read with great interest Sam Altman’s essay *How to Be Successful. Five years after it came out! Better late than never. It presented many interesting nuggets of wisdom, such as:
You get truly rich by owning things that increase rapidly in value.
…
The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale.
So, can someone please explain to me, like I am a nine-yer-old, how did Sam Altman become successful? It couldn’t possibly have been Loopt, a little-known geo-social service. Well, the very last sentence in the essay, added as a response to Hacker News comments, gave it away:
I am deeply aware of the fact that I personally would not be where I am if I weren’t born incredibly lucky.
He should have started with that! Silicon Valley people apparently like talking about “first principles”, and it seems clear to me that the first principle of being wildly successful (or “truly rich”, which Altman tellingly equates) is to be lucky; everything else is ex post narration. I want to read an essay that starts with luck: how to recognize it, how to expose yourself to it, how to benefit from it. This will inevitably become an essay about probability, so Nassim Taleb would be the perfect person to write it, and indeed he did! Only the topic is much too complex for a short essay so yes, it’s a book, and to fully appreciate it you may as well read the whole of Incerto.
And if I am contrasting Taleb with Altman — which may be an unfair comparisson to Altman as there is a bit of an age differential — here is what Sam says about hard work:
I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.
The parenthetical is doing a lot of work here, and the thing left unsaid is that with this ethos you can end up working really hard your whole life and end up safe from poverty, but not wildly successful… like most Americans! Here is prof. Taleb:
Solid financial success is largely the result of skills, hard work, and wisdom. But wild success (in the far tail) is more likely to be the result of reckless betting, extreme luck, & the opposite of wisdom: folly.
Indeed.
P.S. While the essay reads better than the recent Techno-optimist hocum (a low bar), did he really need 17 people to review his drafts, including… Diane von Fürstenberg? Seriously?
I’ve just spent 45 minutes teaching a dozen and a half first-graders how to use a microscope — with mixed success — and it was the best time I’ve had all week. We looked at frog’s blood, the leg of a housefly, paramecia, and some pollen, all of which sound like something a witch would have on hand. Perfect for Halloween!
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:
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.
“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.
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).
“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!
Gorgeous weather in DC today. Even the sky was smiling.
