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Doctor Hammer's avatar

Thanks again for writing these up. Between you and Naked Emperor one can save an absolute fuck-ton of crap to sift through, and I really appreciate it.

Honest question: Do we have any reason to read "COVID deaths" as "Deaths caused by COVID" instead of "Deaths with COVID?" if it is not explicitly written out in the report in question? I ask because I haven't seen any reason to do so from the beginning of the pandemic, and things like the "Total COVID-19 patients in acute care or intensive care" graph immediately jump out at me as saying "This isn't necessarily because they have COVID, but they just happen to have COVID and be there for whatever reason, including having COVID." Maybe I have just been an academic too long and cynically assume that if they could say "They are there because of COVID" without lying they absolutely would, but instead word it so you could be mislead to make it seem like a more important result than it is. (That's about 90% of conference paper presentations, right there.) Is there some reason to believe it is not just misleading with statistics and language?

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George H.'s avatar

Re aging: Do you know of the idea that aging, (more specifically the Hayflick limit, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit ) is an organisms response to not dying of cancer.

So in brief, with ~a billion cells how do you stop one from going cancerous and killing the organism. Well you give it a maximum cell divide counter. (The Hayflick limit.) Once a cell reaches the limit, it stops dividing and perhaps you have a little tumor but the cell doesn't take over the entire body. The long term effect of having a limit is aging. So cancer and aging are two sides of the same coin. (The 'coin' being how do a billion cells form an organism.) I think I heard this idea first on a podcast by Eric Weinstein with his brother Bret. "All our mice are broken" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s It's a bit of a torturous conversation... And as far as I know all our mice are still broken. (broken in that they were accidently breed to have very long telomeres.) Edit, The idea is called the 'reserve-capacity hypothesis', and Gwern has a copy of the original paper. https://www.gwern.net/docs/longevity/2002-weinstein.pdf

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