Forgot I had this - the MetaMed High End Client Brochure, from 2013. With quote from anonymous patient "Eliezer Y".
(https://docdro.id/gc9g2tb)
posted on February 11, 2023 02:07 PM by
u/dgerard
40
u/JohnPaulJonesSoda31 pointsat 1676133396.000000
That Eliezer testimonial is hilarious. “They studied my issue
carefully, looked into all the research, then recommended something
where they had no known scientific backing or reasoning for it. What
geniuses!”
Hmm.. I’m leaning naive arrogance after reading a Michael Vassar quote from RationalWiki:
> "Imagine there is a set of skills," he said. "There is a myth that they are possessed by the whole population, and there is a cynical myth that they're possessed by 10 percent of the population. They've actually been wiped out in all but about one person in three thousand." It is important, Vassar said, that his people, "the fragments of the world," lead the way during "the fairly predictable, fairly total cultural transition that will predictably take place between 2020 and 2035 or so."
They didn't really say "no reasoning", though. I have no idea who these people and haven't read any of the brochure besides the endorsement. So they could be scammers or this could be placebo. But if you come to a medical expert with a difficult problem, you would probably expect that they consider trying something new.
My memory was it was a bunch of rationalists selling medical advice with no medical background or credentials that then petered out. Did it get worse / was someone injured?
[These ones](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/MetaMed) - Michael Vassar trying to out-doctor doctors using the skills he learned on LessWrong. Thankfully they went broke before they could rack up a body count.
RationalWiki sums it up: > Medically speaking, MetaMed’s rapid
failure was probably the least worst outcome, and it didn’t have time to
rack up a body count.
Rationalist Medical Startup: at least they aren’t Theranos!
I love how working days actually looked like. Just LessWrong pub
debate meetings, but for money.
“A couple of weeks ago we had our first journal club. It was an
attempt to evaluate the efficacy of antioxidants and
multivitamins against cardiovascular disease and
cancer. We got a bunch of contradictory studies, threw
them all together, and started generating hypotheses about why they
might contradict each other so much. It kind of fizzled out before we
came to any strong conclusions, but in a world where some
hard-to-determine number which is not ninety percent of medical studies
are wrong, it’s exactly the sort of thing that should be done (also, in
the course of the discussion, “buy antioxidant supplements” went on and
off my to do list several times; it’s currently off but I have no idea
how long that will last).
Now there’s a discussion going on about the biochemicals in
ginseng which I have yet to finish doing enough research on to
participate in intelligently.”
Can ginseng with its antioxidants cure cancer? WHO KNOWS
“But I’ve skimmed through what’s been said and what’s most
fascinating to me is that no one has fallen into the standard error
modes of “This is labelled as ‘alternative medicine’, therefore we know
it sucks without investigating it””
Hm... It's almost like mainstream academics can evaluate the strength of their evidence and draw appropriate conclusions, a behavior previously observed only in Rationalists
/s
They believe scientists discard ideas without actually evaluating any evidence because they have to believe that in order to hold other "community norms" (e.g. HBD, AI risk being severely underestimated, the basic tenets of effective altruism which presumes that wealthy people are better situate to allocate their money to worthy causes than governments... pretty much the entire edifice of rationalism in practice rests on the assumption that credentialed experts and educators are bad at their jobs). A moment's reflection on their parts would reveal that (1) the community that benefited tremendously from discoveries like penicillin is not going to dismiss something out of hand just because it's a plant, (2) scientists are interested in finding powerful placebo effects even if there's no mechanism of action, and (3) there's always plenty of funding for studying the efficacy of dietary supplements.
I’m still deeply sad that I learned Zvi Mowshowitz, hero of my
misspent youth playing Magic the Gathering, was part of MetaMed and the
broader RatSphere. If you’d just stuck to making sweet Fires of Yavimaya
decks, man…
It's actually the initial intention of melatonin supplements, before companies started selling sledgehammertastic doses of it as OTC sleeping pills, and the same timing was the use of melatonin "prescribed" by my sleep doctor when I was diagnosed with delayed sleep phase syndrome in 2013.
That Eliezer testimonial is hilarious. “They studied my issue carefully, looked into all the research, then recommended something where they had no known scientific backing or reasoning for it. What geniuses!”
It reads like a parody. Especially the EY ‘endorsement.’ The secret was in the timing of your Melatonin dose all along! It takes a genius…
this is a draft
RationalWiki sums it up: > Medically speaking, MetaMed’s rapid failure was probably the least worst outcome, and it didn’t have time to rack up a body count.
Rationalist Medical Startup: at least they aren’t Theranos!
I love how working days actually looked like. Just LessWrong pub debate meetings, but for money.
“A couple of weeks ago we had our first journal club. It was an attempt to evaluate the efficacy of antioxidants and multivitamins against cardiovascular disease and cancer. We got a bunch of contradictory studies, threw them all together, and started generating hypotheses about why they might contradict each other so much. It kind of fizzled out before we came to any strong conclusions, but in a world where some hard-to-determine number which is not ninety percent of medical studies are wrong, it’s exactly the sort of thing that should be done (also, in the course of the discussion, “buy antioxidant supplements” went on and off my to do list several times; it’s currently off but I have no idea how long that will last).
Now there’s a discussion going on about the biochemicals in ginseng which I have yet to finish doing enough research on to participate in intelligently.”
Can ginseng with its antioxidants cure cancer? WHO KNOWS
“But I’ve skimmed through what’s been said and what’s most fascinating to me is that no one has fallen into the standard error modes of “This is labelled as ‘alternative medicine’, therefore we know it sucks without investigating it””
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/27/metamed-launch-day/
That picture of Big Yud had me in stitches. That is a great find.
Damn daywalkers.
Edit: in reference to the Yud testimonial which ends with: ‘and I walk in the daylight once more.’
I’m still deeply sad that I learned Zvi Mowshowitz, hero of my misspent youth playing Magic the Gathering, was part of MetaMed and the broader RatSphere. If you’d just stuck to making sweet Fires of Yavimaya decks, man…
tbh, I’m kind of curious about the melatonin thing, in terms of whether that timing has had any research done on it since then.