31–36 of 36 posts
Am I misreading this, or is this person actually implying somewhere in the middle of this unreadable mess of an article that they feed their DIY blood test results into an LLM and then order whatever drugs the machine hallucinates in response? If so, I hope sane society doesn't have to pay for the consequences of this willful self-destruction.
Weirdly enough, i know a guy who's worth half a billion bucks and he's doing exactly that.
People reading two abstracts on PubMed and deciding they can manage their own hormonal pathways is terrifying. The regulatory state is slow and bureaucratic, yes, and its got its own problems, but it was built on a graveyard of people who took unverified compounds. When (not if) a bad batch kills a few dozen people in a telegram buying group, the crackdown will be draconian.
An alternate way to view the same situation is that the regulatory state being slow and bureaucratic is the cause of those ills. The more you over-regulate and make the official pathways too expensive by adding a million tiny costs, the less unreasonable it seems to abandon the official channel entirely.
People reading two abstracts on PubMed and deciding they can manage their own hormonal pathways is terrifying. The regulatory state is slow and bureaucratic, yes, and its got its own problems, but it was built on a graveyard of people who took unverified compounds. When (not if) a bad batch kills a few dozen people in a telegram buying group, the crackdown will be draconian.
I'm partial to the idea that we should think of these people as heroic. No way in hell I'd ever do anything like this, but people choosing to do this to their own bodies and essentially absorbing all of the risk is arguably valuable. Certainly more important than other definitely dangerous activities like wingsuits and motorcycles.
Was hen heroic? No, just gullible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weirdly enough, i know a guy who's worth half a billion bucks and he's doing exactly that.
So..? wealth ≠ intelligence
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An alternate way to view the same situation is that the regulatory state being slow and bureaucratic is the cause of those ills. The more you over-regulate and make the official pathways too expensive by adding a million tiny costs, the less unreasonable it seems to abandon the official channel entirely.
PCPs don’t have the capacity to follow all medical research either. They depend on a network of institutions and regulation to do their work. How do you propose to scale that without the bureaucracy?
I think most regulation is a concave quadratic function of regulations vs benefit. At zero regulation it can be very bad, but there also must be a point at which something is so smothered in regulation that doing anything is impossible. So there must be a maxima somewhere between the two points.
All I think is that the current state of drug regulation quite a long way to the right of that maxima, that doesn't mean I think we should remove it all to zero, or that some other things aren't to the left of it and need more regulation!
Probably most disagreements over this sort of thing are just people who disagree about which side of the maxima we're on.