Friday, September 20, 2024

Harris, Trump, and Plato



The US has high prices for branded drugs but it has some of the lowest prices for generic drugs in the world and generic drugs are 90% of prescriptions.

***

Donald Trump said during his rally in New York on Wednesday that if elected president he would put a “temporary cap on credit-card interest rates” of “around 10 percent.” He said, “We can’t let them make 25 or 30 percent.”

Sounds like Harris

***


Harris, Trump, and Plato

The disregard for the truth has become a characteristic of this election. It is so casual as to be a style, like slipping into an accent. Where did such a profound change in human thinking become routine?

The Open Science Collaboration tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Of the studies that had originally reported positive results, an astonishing 65 percent failed to show statistical significance on replication, and many of the remainder showed greatly reduced effect sizes.

In 2011 a group of researchers at Bayer decided to review significant drug papers. Looking at sixty-seven recent drug discovery projects based on preclinical cancer biology research, they found that in more than 75 percent of cases the published data did not match up with their in-house attempts to replicate.
 
So how do we "follow the science?" Have we just conceded the impossibility of truth? Are Trump and Harris just the personifications of Platonic unreproducible ideals?

Or are they simply ragged competitors seeking success having found the lowest common denominator?

No comments: