That they're not saying it after years is really suspicious. Give us all the numbers.

Overturning Roe has been the GOP goal for a long time. Their plan involved capturing SCOTUS and they pulled it off. You could blame the GOP and also the system at it is being set up for abuse, but Roe and Chevron specifically were GOP end goals. GOP judges and private citizens or corporations bringing cases (sometimes hypothetical cases now!) to SCOTUS.

One this is for certain, saying "under Biden" and assigning him blame is disingenuous.

I am not aware of the White House claiming credit for SCOTUS decisions, but they do praise them if they agree with it. Media and others may erroneously assign credit but that's a different problem. At any rate, what other people do has no bearing on the truth of the matter and does not justify assigning blame.

I mean, yes. That was the point of Mitch McConnell withholding Obama's SCOTUS seat nomination because it was too close to the end of his term, only to ram through Trump's pick in record time when RBG died. This was the plan, to get the court.

"Under Biden" is completely disingenuous, the cases were not brought by the Biden administration, and were ruled on largely by Trump and Bush appointees.

BTW, here's ChatGPT on Hitler vs Musk.

> Who had a more negative impact, Elon Musk or Adolf Hitler?

Comparing Elon Musk and Adolf Hitler in terms of their impact is challenging due to the vast differences in their actions, intentions, and historical contexts...

The text interface, also not a search engine. And it is definitely not a *truth engine*, which is what people like Musk expect Grok to be. It's not capable of that level of reason or understanding.

Other commenters have brought up that asking it any type of question like is X worse than Hitler, whether that X is Biden or Trump or anybody else, it's going to respond "it's hard to say." It's being tuned to not pass value judgements at all, because that is not what LLMs are for. It's never going to be your truth engine.

If you think these things are thinking, or that they have values, you've been duped.

As a side note, I think all the big companies are making the same mistake of trying to get a generalized model for all queries, or with the layer that directs them to a specific tuned model. I want sharp detail and lack of hallucinations when it generates code. I want it loose when I'm generating creative text. But in no case to do I want it to talk to me about values.

https://puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/seven.htm

The key complication is "once you've opened the door, you may no longer touch a switch." It gets this. There are many examples of it written out on the web. When I give it a variation and say "you can open the door to look at the bulbs and use the switches all you want" and it is absolutely unable to understand this. To a human it's simple: look at the bulbs and flick the switches. It kept giving me answers about using a special lens to examine the bulbs, using something to detect heat. I explained it in many ways and tried several times. I was paying for GPT-4 at the time as well.

I would not consider this thinking. It's unable to make this simple abstraction from its training data. I think 4 looks better than 3 simply because it's got more data, but we're reaching diminishing returns on that, as has been stated.

Here's a scientist who said we couldn't dismiss the lab leak, and asked for more research, which he did.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/07/19/1016005...

The early cases are clustered around the market. I know the market and the lab are "close" on a global scale, but the details matter. They are 30km apart, about a 45 minute drive in traffic. Looks about as clear as John Snow's map of cholera outbreaks in London.

That article is from 2021, but he stands by it in 2023:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-08/covid-lab-l...

"What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion."

Edit:

2 things.

It's important to rule out that the idea that this could only be engineered, which would imply a definite lab origin. That is why engineered viruses come up. A non-lab leak is certainly plausible, and a lab leak is not ruled out.

There are labs all over China, there are markets all over China. The overlap of cities having both is significant. Viruses appear in larger, denser population centers. The "next thing" was very likely to appear in a city with a lab. The thing is, it's not very close to the lab. There's a large cluster around the market.

Lab theory doesn't have much going for it. It's not actually that close to the epicenter. There are labs everywhere. SARS is widely studies.

Sure some viruses have long incubation periods, but that would show as far less of a tight cluster around the market. Your hypothesis seems to be that it spread from lab distantly because of incubation time, then stopped spreading distantly once it reached the market? That does not make sense.

More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."

Pretty standard scientific writing. I think the lesson is don't trust journalists and the general public to not blow what you're saying out of proportion and assign it more certainty than you intended.

Lab leak is possible, sure. But keep in mind every horrible disease humanity has faced up until the early part of the 20th century came about before microbiology labs even existed. Historically, a zoonitic origin is extremely likely.

Imagine if polio or smallpox or leprosy popped up today, you'd have every Joe internet theorizing how it came from a lab in whatever country it appeared in first. I guess back in the day they used to say it was punishment from God. The Spanish flu, God out there smiting the Spaniards.

I don't think this is true anymore. See what Lina Khan was appointed to do and is doing with the FTC. It's the first step in a long road of undoing decades of Reaganism.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-...

Similarly what would you do if a friend was dying? Sorry I just don't see the ROI here, don't think I can get much out of your last few months?

Taq polymerase is about my favorite thing discovered through basic research. Just some scientists looking at interesting stuff in a Yellowstone geyser, who happened to discover the molecule that enabled DNA replication in a lab and essentially exploded the field.

No corporation these days is going to pay somebody to do that. I think it's worth the risks to get something like that.

There are plenty of criticisms of studies like CONCORD. Survival rates lacking context are not the end-all of comparison studies. A significant portion of this is around diagnosed and undiagnosed, which is a really critical distinction when you're talking about survival rates.

If you have no coverage or you are worried about cost, you are less likely to present and ever be diagnosed with cancer. Silent deaths are a real thing. People will die rather than burden their families. There is no cost to being diagnosed in Canada and other countries with some kind of socialized medicine, so people tend to just get diagnosed. So already your starting sample is different.

Who does get diagnosed, and at what stage, also skews the results. If you have gold-tier coverage and you live in a place where billing for tests is incentivized through profit, you get a sample of very early stage cancers with a very high cure rate, or more importantly for your stats, you get a better 5-year survival rate, which is the what the survival studies measure. This is due to "starting the timer" when you find microscopic evidence of cancer, so you are in effect pumping your stats, because of course people are more likely to survive for more than 5 years if you find the cancer earlier. What happens after 5 years is called mortality and is a statistic of its own that diverges from survival. This is well known:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10865276/

The last line says it all.

But catching cancer earlier is surely a good idea, isn't it? The problem is that morbidity is also part of this picture. Cervical cancer screening (the pap smear) is a great test that catches a lot of precancerous and early stage cancer cells. So many, in fact, that it's actually too good. Because we ended up doing LEEP on a bunch of cancers or precancerous cervixes that in fact would have just gone away on their own, and we left a bunch of women with "incompetent cervix" who are more prone to pregnancy loss for the first year. Big deal, the first year? The thing about being a doctor is that your patients are humans, and it really fucking sucks to have one of your patients go through losing a pregnancy, and sometimes, especially with patients in the 30-40 age range who are more likely to have abnormal cells, every year counts in terms of their remaining fertility. So you can't just shrug this off as unimportant. We changed recommendations around screening in part due to the efficacy of the HPV vaccine, and in large part because we overtreated. Much of those cancers simply go away on their own, with far less morbidity than if we treat every single one. Are we going to make the same mistake with HrHPV? Oh, probably. It takes time to find the sweet spot between effective diagnosis and overtreating.

Colorectal cancer is in a similar boat. Great cure rates and prevention with precancerous polyp removal for your healthiest and wealthiest. Every stage 1 that you get counts towards your 5-year survival rate. Unfortunately all this screening also result in a lot of surgery to remove non-malignant polyps, and that surgery has a mortality rate near 1% with significant morbidity. These people did not have cancer, but might have at some point in the future. Or they might not have! Because only about 5% of adenomas progress, and even if they do progress, you might be dead before you really feel like you have cancer. So again it's pumping stats without necessarily improving outcomes.

Beyond that, we do have different populations, partly because of latitude, which is what I meant by "frozen half the year":

https://i.imgur.com/DNwkkAj.png

Vitamin D via sun exposure seems pretty strongly correlated with lower rates of colorectal cancer. We simply do not get the same amount of UV rays at this latitude. We are also an MS hotspot, possibly for the same reason. Both conditions can be more frequent and potentially worse because of this.

Our populations are different, our testing is different, our access is different due to our geography. In spite of all this, our survival rates are comparable to the extent that you can compare them, and a difference of 2-3% is really not that great, especially given the different in testing.

As for half a million not having access, you will have to give some details on that. Yes, that geography problem exists, and it can be bad especially for first nations and other remote communities, but this is different than not being able to go do a doctor because you have not paid, which is not a thing that happens here.

This is all just with cancer. Consider also as I said in the original post, our infant mortality is lower. Consider also that our life expectancy is about 4 years longer. All this, for not just slightly less money than the US, but less than half what the US spends per capita on healthcare. We are currently expanding it to dental, and medications are on the list as well.

Personally having practiced in the system in Canada, there are things I love about it, and things I would change. We do not fight with insurers here, that is not a thing. Never. We don't have to preauth with any company before we order a test, nor do we get paid extra for additional tests. We order them when they are needed, if they are needed. Nobody's going bankrupt up here from hospital bills. More private imaging would be great, for CTs and MRIs, still paid by the public system with private capital paying the startup cost.

But if you prefer a system that gets 2-3% on a gamed stat, be my guest.

It's not cherry picking, I just didn't add a whole chart. It's on par, considering our different populations, climate (most of the country is frozen for half the year), and the extent of our coverage. I'm not saying it's worse, it's as on par as you can get given the variation in such a thing.

The uninsured don't count towards cancer rates if they don't receive a diagnosis. If you're uninsured and losing weight, anemic, night sweats, and your doctor says it could be serious so you walk away because you won't be able to afford it, you don't count as a cancer diagnosis. Assuming you went to the doctor at all. That does no count against my point.

In Canada we have fee for service, with incentives to care for specific populations (remote or chronic conditions etc.) Doctors (or their clerk) do their own billing direct to provincial health services. It works. We rely on individual morality and they generally do the right thing. Our outcomes are good.