The Long Game 92: Managing People, Surrogate Endpoints, Complaining, Heuristics
The Long Game 92: Managing People, Surrogate Endpoints, Complaining, Heuristics📦 Drone Delivery, Good Climate News, Writing, North Pole, TikTok & Teens, AskAnything, and Much More!Hi there, it’s Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder at Vital, and this is The Long Game Newsletter. To receive it in your inbox each week, subscribe here: In this episode, we explore:
Let’s dive in! 🥑 Health🎯 The Problem of Surrogate EndpointsI came across this excellent thread, and it encapsulates something that happens even outside of machine learning research. This is the problem of optimizing for a model rather than for reality. A lot of machine learning research has detached itself from solving real problems, and created their own "benchmark-islands".
How does this happen? And why are researchers not escaping this pattern?
A thread 🧵 In health research, it’s widespread. We learn how a mechanism works, and we get a good idea of which levers can be pulled to improve an endpoint, and we consider that the improvement of the endpoint naturally makes us “healthier.” This phenomenon was described at length in the context of cancer research and therapies by Vinayak K. Prasad in Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer. He shows how big pharma manages to get drugs approved that improve surrogate endpoints (an indicator or sign used in place of another to tell if a treatment works) but, for the most part, aren’t really increasing the quality-adjusted life-year of the patients.
The solutions he provides are numerous, but the general idea is that the hypotheses should be tested in randomized controlled trials that target the actual outcome we’re looking for (more years in good health) rather than the improvement of a surrogate endpoint. This is a fundamental challenge because it determines how scientists and companies work. If the efforts are engaged in a process that’s not reliable, we’re wasting time and money while not improving health outcomes. Pair with: Vinay Prasad, M.D., M.P.H: Hallmarks of successful cancer policy I am reading these Booster docs in disbelief
Are we really going to deploy a national booster campaign on the basis of an uncontrolled study showing that Ab titers (surrogate) are Non-inferior to what they were after dose 2 (historical control)?
Insane
fda.gov/media/152161/d… Other noteworthy news 💊 🌱 Wellness🚫 Complaining Really Does Make Things WorseI must admit that I was delighted to find this research paper explaining that complaining does make things worse. I try to stay away from complaining as much as possible, and now we have new research demonstrating why it’s important:
Bottom line: stop complaining. It will make your life better! My deepest wish is that academics & scientists & clinicians that don’t like what they see in the world related to science & health communication, will stop complaining. If people do not understand something, that’s generally not their fault, it’s ours. Do better & make it free. 🧠 Better Thinking🏴 Heuristics That Are Almost Always RightThere’s no one better than Slate Star Codex to explain why relying on experts who follow heuristics can be so dangerous.
Heuristics that almost always work are dangerous because people stop being sharp and stop paying attention. Most viruses don’t cause global pandemics, most new technologies don’t change the world, most physical pain isn’t serious, most UFO sightings are not legit… These things are true, but the rare times they’re false, they cause a tremendous impact on the world, the person, etc.
⚡️ Startup Stuff👥 Managing PeopleThis piece on managing people by Andreas Klinger is excellent and a must-read for all managers out there. Here’s how it starts: Everything is your fault.
I also liked this part on trust, which echoed Tobi Lutke’s trust battery concept:
Here’s how Tobi puts it:
Unrelated, but I found this tweet excellent and underlining a vital reality: Good early stage founders look unsuccessful for a long time
Bad early stage founders look successful before doing the work 📚 What I Read✍️ Putting Ideas Into WordsYour ideas are not clear until you can write about them.
🌍 People Need to Hear the Good News About Climate ChangeLess guilt and tribalism, more efforts where it really matters:
🏥 Teen Girls’ Sexy TikTok Videos Take a Mental-Health TollTikTok has very detrimental effects on kids. It’s no wonder that China bans it at specific hours of the day and tweaks their algorithm to promote learning and scientific content while doing the exact opposite for the version they export to the West.
TikTok should be banned in the USA because it’s Chinese psyops, Chinese spyware, & because our apps aren’t allowed in China.
Also, it’s horrible for kids and at a minimum should be age gated at 18 — this @WSJ story explains how bad it is. 🎙 Podcast Episodes of the WeekThis week in podcasts:
shout out to my armchair twitter intellectuals tweeting things along the lines of "pentagon just casually admitted UFOs are real and no one cares???"... welcome to the party. that actually happened a year ago, and serious reporting has been breaking on the topic since 2017. 🍭 Brain Food📉 When There Were More Deaths Than Births in the U.S.For the first time (ever?) in the US, deaths surpassed births from 12/2020 - 03/2021.
Pair with: What the decline in population means for South Korea
🎥 What I’m Watching📦 Drone Delivery Was Supposed to be the Future. What Went Wrong?Sometimes, the “future” never materializes. Drone delivery is a perfect example. Pair with: The counterpoint from Bryne Hobart, Drone Delivery: Accelerating to Inevitable 🥶 58 Days Alone in the North PoleIn 1978, Naomi Uemura attempted to reach the North Pole with a sled, 17 dogs, and determination. 🔧 The Tool of the Week❓ Ask Anything — VCBuilding a company is about learning different things as you go. It can quickly get tricky when it comes to legal/VC terms, and the small mistakes you make in the early days can have massive impacts later on. AskAnything.VC is a great place to find resources to answer your questions. I also highly recommend Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor. 🪐 Quote I’m Pondering
— Arthur C. Clarke If you enjoyed this newsletter, make sure to subscribe if you haven’t 👇 👋 EndNoteThanks for reading! If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. Podcast reviews are also gratefully received. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the heart just below this, which helps me get visibility on Substack. Feel free to email me or find me on Twitter if you have any feedback or questions. Until next week, Mehdi Yacoubi PS: Lots of newsletters get stuck in Gmail’s Promotions tab. If you find it in there, please help train the algorithm by dragging it to Primary. It makes a big difference. If you liked this post from The Long Game by Mehdi Yacoubi, why not share it? |
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The Long Game 91: Fitness but Free, Loneliness Epidemic, Optimism, No Filter
Monday, February 7, 2022
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The Long Game 90: Improving HRV, Moving in Sync, Wanting, Early-Stage Lessons
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🧬 Software in Life Sciences, Russia/Ukraine, Carbon Tax, Online Privacy, South Korea, and Much More!
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📱 The First 1000 Users, Evil, Amazon, High Output, Covid, Less, Designing a House to Last for 1000 Years, and Much More!
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