Jonathan Graehl

Science and fun.

'sending a message' costs

Robin Hanson observes the damage to U.S. society caused by the ease of winning punitive-damages-by-jury. We've all experienced paranoid corporate hyper-protectiveness - being ordered off the field in a drizzle because you might slip on the grass and sue (sorry, our insurance contract requires this officiousness!)

More generally, we should consider whether 'sending a message' is worth all the consequences. I wish policymakers  understood this. But 'raising awareness' usually just makes us feel good. Anyway, supposing you had a sincere-technocrat government (like Clinton's was reputed to be), there's no forum those technocrats could visit to hear sincere and competent analysis - anywhere power takes consultation becomes clogged with what amount to lobbyists, the best of them appearing to offer quality information and reasoning, indistinguishable from the virtuous impartial academics.

multivitamins won't kill you

so perhaps they'll make you stronger - a new vitamin supplementation study demonstrates a "sick-user effect" - those who never took vitamins but suddenly started may have done so because they became seriously ill. This reverses my view based on past studies that multivitamins probably don't help (though I'd continued taking mine, since the evidence was mixed).

The hazard ratio for baseline vitamin users is incredibly good (.58), which makes me assume that they haven't controlled for all the confounds, e.g. conscientiousness.