I hope this is worth saying: I've been reading up a bit on philosophical pragmatism especially Peirce and I see a lot parallels with the thinking on LW, since it has a lot in common with positivism this is maybe not so surprising.

Though my interpretation of pragmatism seems to give a quite interesting critiquing the metaphor of "Map and territory", they seem to be saying that the territory do exist, just that when we point to territory we are actually pointing to how an ideal observer (that are somewhat like us?) would perceive the territory not the actual territory because that can not be done, since we need some kind of framework. Quite probably I'm just falling for the old trees falling in the forest fallacy. So am I thinking strait? And if I do, does have any consequences?

His position seems to be that Drexler-style nanotechnology is theoretically possible, but that developing it would be very difficult.

I do not think that Drexler’s alternative approach – based on mechanical devices made from rigid materials – fundamentally contradicts any physical laws, but I fear that its proponents underestimate the problems that certain features of the nanoworld will pose for it. The close tolerances that we take for granted in macroscopic engineering will be very difficult to achieve at the nano-scale because the machines will be shaken about so much by Brownian motion. Finding ways for surfaces to slide past each other without sticking together or feeling excessive friction is going to be difficult.

A hypothetical superintelligence might find it easier...

Biology didn't evolve to take advantage of ridiculously concentrated energy sources like fossil petroleum, or to major industrial infrastructure, two things that make jets possible. This is similar to some of the reasons I think that synthetic molecular technology will probably be capable of things that biology isn't, by taking advantage of say electricity as an energy source or one-off batch synthesis of stuff by bringing together systems that are not self-replicating from parts made separately.

In fact the analogy of a bird to a jet might be apt to describe the differences between what a synthetic system could do and what biological systems do now, due to them using different energy sources and non-self replicating components (though it might be a lot harder to brute-force such a change in quantitative performance by ridiculous application of huge amounts of energy at low efficiency).

I still suspect, however, that when you are looking at the sorts of reactions that can be done and patterns that can be made in quantities that matter as more than curiosities or rare expensive fragile demonstrations, you will be dealing with more statistical reactions than precise engineering and dynamic systems rather than static (at least during the building process) just because of the nature of matter at this scale.

edited for formatting

Diabetes in isolation doesn't increase CVD that much for men(2.4X), though the relative CVD risk increase for women are 4.3, (in absolute numbers, CVD risk for diabetic men and women are about the same). Also worth pointing out is that type II correlates to a high degree with other risk factors due to the metabolic disturbance, the cluster is termed metabolic syndrome.

Diabetes and Heart Disease.

Type II diabetes predicts a 7 year shorter life, due to cardiovascular disease. No one knows why. It also destroys small blood vessels, leading to blindness and loss of feeling in the extremities (thence falls or infections). This is called microvascular damage and is fairly well-understood as the direct result of blood sugar. The cardiovascular disease is called macrovascular damage to imply it is similar, but it's really a smokescreen.

Timmons cites two studies of diet and exercise improving blood sugar but failing to improve heart disease. One is a small Finnish study. The other is a big American study, Lookahead, but it hasn't published yet; items 88 and 89 in its bibliography sound relevant. As background, there are two large past studies that have conflicting results on whether improving diabetes (mainly via drugs) improves CVD. 15 years ago, the UKPDS study compared aiming for 7% A1c is better than aiming for 8%. It reduced CVD, though not as much as it reduced microvascular outcomes. So 7% became the new baseline and follow-up studies were started that are only just reporting. A couple of years ago, the ACCORD trial finished comparing aiming for 6% to 7%. It found the more aggressive treatment had worse mortality (and worse CVD, though not statistically significantly). The Accord study had lower A1c targets in both arms than UKPDS, but I think it only achieved the same levels, probably because its patients were older and had more advanced diabetes.

One hypothesis that people throw around is that if you are too aggressive with drugs, you cause hypoglycemic events (too low blood sugar), and these are correlated with CVD. But if you lower blood sugar by diet and exercise, you don't expect to cause hypoglycemic events, so there was some hope that this would improve CVD, despite the Accord study. But the recent studies falsify this loophole. (Also, I think it failed to explain the detailed Accord data.)

Still, the UKDPS suggests that for some people reduced blood sugar improves CVD. Maybe microvascular problems are due to very high levels of blood sugar, at the tail end of diabetes, while CVD is due to long exposure to lower blood sugar. Perhaps for the Accord patients it was too late, but starting earlier with the UKDPS patients worked.

Added: In other words, blood sugar might just be a symptom, not a direct cause of heart disease (but definitely a direct cause of diabetic morbidity). This is not too surprising, since the mechanism isn't understood. Experiments in the past had mixed results. What's new is lifestyle experiments, in contrast to drug experiments. It is surprising that they are worse, but type of patients probably matters.

Well thought through, good work! Though I wonder if you have any insight into what (intuition?) generates the conclusion:

For the most part, the people who have had the biggest positive impact on the world haven’t had their impact by “earning to give."

Thorough out human history it's probably true, though I wonder if that is partly because 1) "earn to give" has never been practiced to any large extent (at least to my knowledge) 2) people (including myself) tend narrate great advances/discoveries in terms discoverers and persons in close proximity to the event - but not so much to the people in the background that nonetheless made it possible. I'd like to hear your thoughts!

Great post!

Just to point out - to people who are not yet familiar with it - there are initiatives that try to tackle the hazards of the current peer-review process, a good example is Plos one that uses a very different setup for publishing, maybe most interestingly is that they publish all articles that are technically sound, and judgment whether the article is interesting or not is reserved to post-publish commentary and it's all open access.

Another big problem - that I guess people here are somewhat familiar with - is pharma funded clinical trial publication bias, e.i. you can do for example 10 smaller studies (same drug), rather than a couple big ones, and weed out the ones with a lesser positive impact (or even negative), and then pool your 6 studies with the best result. Though hopefully this problem will be partly fixed with the new FDA legislation that requires pharmaceutical companies to do a priori registrations of clinical trails.

We are a relatively small group in Stockholm that will be graced with Cat's presences, if you are in the neighborhood and want to join us, feel free to PM me.