KempyKolibri (u/KempyKolibri)

KempyKolibri commented on Why immigration research is probably biased laurenzguenther.substack.... · Posted by u/paulpauper

mike_hearn · 3 days ago

It's damning for academia that on HN of all places, a forum filled with academics, this stuff has to be spelled out by outsiders. Once more unto the breach?

The rejection reason: "it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk."

What should scientific institutions do? Answer questions about the natural world honestly.

What should politicians do? Make policy tradeoffs informed by those answers and the preferences of the public.

What were the institutions actually doing? Hiding correct answers due to an ideological and pathologically strong preference for risk avoidance without any regard for cost.

> they’d happily publish papers suggesting lower levels of herd immunity, but the papers would require more rigour than that which was provided.

A "very high evidence bar" that isn't described anywhere is one that doesn't actually exist. They never showed anything wrong with the science, they rejected it out of hand because they didn't like that it would support a libertarian conclusion. Even if they had invented such a bar, requiring weak evidence for policies you like and strong evidence for policies you dislike is exactly the kind of pseudo-scientific intellectual fraud being criticized in the article.

COVID was full of this stuff. That event wasn't surprising, it was typical behavior of most "scientists".

You have to realize, that when the universities get disestablished, it'll be because of decades of discussions like this one. The correct response to that Twitter thread is to demand the journal be immediately shut down and that heads roll at the publisher. The wrong response is to say "of course we should block research that supports policies we dislike, why would anyone be against that?"

KempyKolibri · 2 days ago

> A "very high evidence bar" that isn't described anywhere is one that doesn't actually exist

If your claim is: “if a standard isn’t explicitly written down somewhere such that one can utilise it to ascertain whether something meets it without ambiguity then it doesn’t exist” then the entailments are absurd. The world is full of standards that do not meet such a bar (“reasonable doubt”, for example) yet obviously this is a real standard.

> COVID was full of this stuff

Yet when I asked you for to give examples of “this stuff” you failed to do so. How come?

> when the universities get disestablished

Lmao. Not going to happen, I see we’re off in cloud cuckoo land now.

KempyKolibri commented on Why immigration research is probably biased laurenzguenther.substack.... · Posted by u/paulpauper

mike_hearn · 4 days ago

Good article except for this bit:

> In general, hard sciences are much more reliable than social sciences because standards are higher and topics are less emotional.

Having read lots of both, I'm not sure that's true. There's no way to prove it because nobody has clear definitions for what the words hard, social, science, standards or reliable mean. But the extreme political bias doesn't go away, researcher degrees of freedom are just as large, the topics are sometimes much more emotional, and a lot of fields you'd expect to be hard are methodologically no different to any social science.

For example, a guy in Wales recently claimed a big payout from a fraud suit he won against the Dana Farber cancer center at Harvard. It'd been publishing fraudulent papers for years, yet either nobody noticed or nobody cared. Climatology tells people that the end is nigh, a message sufficiently distressing to make some psychologically vulnerable people commit suicide. Do any social sciences have an emotional effect that extreme? A lot of the COVID pseudo-science was specifically designed to manipulate people's emotions (e.g. journals rejecting correct papers because fewer people might take vaccines as a result [1]). And epidemiology isn't based on any empirical understanding of viruses or disease. It's just modelling no different to the type described in the article.

Unfortunately, ideology and bad incentives are the same no matter what field you look at. There is a hard/soft distinction to be made, but it's more about how close the field is to engineering. Engineering fields have a lot of movement between public and private sector, which keeps the universities a bit more honest. Maybe other fields like law and finance are the same, I don't know, I never read papers in those.

[1] https://x.com/mgmgomes1/status/1291162360657453056

KempyKolibri · 4 days ago

> A lot of the COVID pseudo-science was specifically designed to manipulate people's emotions (e.g. journals rejecting correct papers because fewer people might take vaccines as a result [1]).

1. What Covid pseudo science are you referring to?

2. How does the x thread you referenced show “journals rejecting correct papers because fewer people might take vaccines as a result”? As I read it, the rejection was because the journal had a higher bar for evidence on claims around herd immunity than the researchers were able to meet. That is, they’d happily publish papers suggesting lower levels of herd immunity, but the papers would require more rigour than that which was provided.

It’s not clear to me that this bar existed just to increase vaccine uptake, but to generally avoid moves towards relaxing interventions based on insufficiently strong evidence (social distancing, mask wearing, etc).

It’s not clear to me what objection one would have to having a high threshold for evidence when publishing research with such high potential to impact public health. That seems like a good thing to me.

KempyKolibri commented on Show HN: I created a cross-platform GUI for the JJ VCS (Git compatible) · Posted by u/_pvzn

onatm · 2 months ago

This looks great though I like TUIs more. I’ve been using https://github.com/idursun/jjui for the last few months, I highly recommend it if you are a TUI person like me.

KempyKolibri · 2 months ago

jjui is amazing, sometimes I feel like I shouldn't rely on it so much so I learn the CLI, but it's just so useful!

KempyKolibri commented on California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches gov.ca.gov/2025/10/08/gov... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy

lithocarpus · 2 months ago

What's wrong with eggs btw?

The only thing I can easily find is that they have saturated fat - but it takes 4.5 eggs to have as much saturated fat as 1tbsp of butter.

Aside from 1 year of strict vegan diet, I've eaten an average of 4 eggs with 1tbsp butter mostly daily for my entire adult life (I'm 34), and also ate eggs regularly in childhood, and I seem to be in excellent health with no known issues. But I'm curious what I should be watching for.

KempyKolibri · 2 months ago

The evidence base on eggs is a funny one because of: 1. Genetic traits influencing response to dietary cholesterol. 2. The effect of baseline dietary cholesterol on the impact of additional dietary cholesterol (if you're already consuming ~300mg/d cholesterol, adding more on top is unlikely to increase risk by much). 3. The effect of baseline CVD risk on the impact of egg consumption.

Generally when we take this into consideration, we see a linear increase in risk from increased egg consumption. For example this paper suggests that the higher your genetic risk for CVD, the higher the increase in risk from egg consumption, but even those with lower CVD risk see a ~6% increase in CVD events per 3 eggs/week increase: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652....

Additionally replacing the 1tbsp butter with plant oils would likely reduce ACM risk by ~17% (http://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0205), but I'll be the first to admit that there's nothing that really replaces butter on a taste basis :D. Got to find the happy balance between health and hedonism IMO!

KempyKolibri commented on California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches gov.ca.gov/2025/10/08/gov... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy

lithocarpus · 2 months ago

Regarding the reduction in mm Hg due to sodium - my argument is that the kind of impact on blood pressure can be qualitatively different.

In the same way that increased salt intake causes increased water retention, and thus increased weight, but this increased level of water weight goes away after a few days if you start consuming less salt, and there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.

I could see where if one already had severe CVD, maybe eating more salt could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and thus until they heal the CVD it could be wise to limit salt. But this would be no indication that the salt is the cause of the CVD or causes any long term chronic problem. And it is the long term chronic CVD that is by far the most important to address IMHO. If salt is not causing that, this whole discussion is largely misdirected energy.

---

> IMO Replacing butter with refined oils and whole grain flours/carbs - sure, solid move.

We disagree here but that's a separate issue from salt so I'll leave it. :)

> I’m very wary of trying to find “the culprit” for public health problems [etc]

I agree entirely with this. It's very complex, many factors, no single culprit or silver bullet, and that this is extremely important. It's all the things. So it's important to try to tease out which things are having which kind and degree of effect. And this is where I think salt has been scapegoated in a way that probably just distracts from the root problem as I describe above.

KempyKolibri · 2 months ago

> In the same way that increased salt intake causes increased water retention, and thus increased weight, but this increased level of water weight goes away after a few days if you start consuming less salt, and there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.

We've already gone over data showing that when we summate data from RCTs and salt consumption we see reduced salt consumption leads to reduced cardiovascular disease events, so it's demonstrably not the case that there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.

Additionally we have strong evidence of a dose-response curve regarding blood pressure and atherosclerosis, so that additional 5mmHg is contributing to additional plaque burden. Even after you reduce your salt intake, that plaque is still going to be there, increasing your risk of a CVD event.

Additionally when we look at the results of INTERSALT, age-related increases in blood pressure only seemed to occur in populations consuming more than 2-3g salt per day, which suggests that in addition to acute rises in BP, higher salt consumption than this may also be responsible for much larger rises in the long term that are not reversed when salt consumption is dropped.

Taking that whole body of evidence in totality, I think it's hard to argue that the effects of salt on the risk of adverse health outcomes is akin to water weight.

> I could see where if one already had severe CVD, maybe eating more salt could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and thus until they heal the CVD it could be wise to limit salt. But this would be no indication that the salt is the cause of the CVD or causes any long term chronic problem. And it is the long term chronic CVD that is by far the most important to address IMHO. If salt is not causing that, this whole discussion is largely misdirected energy.

Again, even small increases in BP over normal range (and even slightly below - we tend to see increases in risk once systolic BP rises about 110) is associated with increases in CVD, so the raised blood pressure is one of the forces driving that long term chronic CVD.

> We disagree here but that's a separate issue from salt so I'll leave it. :)

Well if you're open-minded about the topic but think refined oils are a health risk, you're the same as I was a few years ago. I ended up changing my view on the topic. If you think there's a health concern not addressed by https://uprootnutrition.com/blog/seedoils I'd be genuinely interested to know.

> And this is where I think salt has been scapegoated in a way that probably just distracts from the root problem as I describe above.

I think the evidence very strongly suggests that sodium consumption is one of the root problems driving chronic health issues in the West.

KempyKolibri commented on EU lawmakers push to ban term 'veggie-burger' reuters.com/business/eu-l... · Posted by u/r9295

someNameIG · 3 months ago

So are they going to change the name of peanut butter? Coconut milk? Neither are secretions of mammary glands

KempyKolibri · 3 months ago

Monkey nut paste and big hairy ball juice, obviously.

KempyKolibri commented on California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches gov.ca.gov/2025/10/08/gov... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy

chithanh · 3 months ago

> Me and anyone else reading this.

In that case, no "we" don't, because I am reading this and I do not agree with this "standard" nor your characterization of what I wrote.

> Mechanisms are inferred from empirical evidence, I don't see how you can treat them as two separate categories. For example, in your crash test dummy analogy, verification through crash tests (with dummies) is empirical evidence.

This is not how it works. Crash tests are used for validation, but the data from crash tests is generally not used to infer mechanism. Physicists don't come up with a new theory of mechanics every time a crash test has an unexpected outcome.

> If you name proxy experiments that support your views (crash tests) as mechanisms and ones that don't (SSB replacement with NNS RCTs) as "empirical evidence is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained" then sure, everything you want to believe is supported by sound science and everything you don't isn't.

I don't think you understand. If you want to support a public health intervention you either have the empirical data with a relevant endpoint,

or you can point to mechanism which bridges the part between the data that you have and the outcome which you want to achieve.

When it comes to pharmaceutics and food additives, our mechanistic understanding is insufficient so we often have to resort to empirical studies on humans, including RCTs (Pfizer's Covid vaccine trial had tens of thousands of participants) and also observational studies at population level. And it is the last part where artificial sweeteners fail to show benefit so far.

When it comes to seat belts, our mechanistic understanding is sufficient so we don't need to resort to empirism. Yes we perform validation but only to check if there are no design oversights in the vehicle nor shortcomings with the simulation software, typically in a low triple-digit number of crash tests. But no humans involved and especially no control arm with humans.

(Well if you ignore the one study on the efficacy of parachutes which was done as RCT https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094 )

> So it doesn't meet your own goalpost

It does, because again, mechanism is provided. You could say that the study has weak evidence for the mechanism and it works like that perhaps only for sugar. Because that some mechanism is found in mice does not mean it is also found in humans, and it would be a fair point. This is why many species are tested and so far the results held up (testing humans takes too long for obvious reasons).

KempyKolibri · 3 months ago

Sorry, I summarised what I thought was your goalpost earlier in the exact same words and you didn’t correct me, so I made the assumption in subsequent replies. I’m not interested in straw manning your argument, just trying to understand.

I’m going to pass on the crash test dummies bit. You’ve misunderstood the point I was making, but it could be poor communication by me and I think the point is becoming increasingly tangential.

> When it comes to pharmaceutics and food additives, our mechanistic understanding is insufficient so we often have to resort to empirical studies on humans, including RCTs

> It does, because again, mechanism is provided. You could say that the study has weak evidence for the mechanism and it works like that perhaps only for sugar. Because that some mechanism is found in mice does not mean it is also found in humans, and it would be a fair point. This is why many species are tested and so far the results held up (testing humans takes too long for obvious reasons).

So you don’t feel you’re being straw manned again, can I get a clear answer to this: is your argument that if we stack together sufficient numbers of mechanistic animal studies we can be sufficiently confident enough in the translation rate of such studies to humans that we can roll out public health interventions without any evidence of efficacy in human populations?

KempyKolibri commented on California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches gov.ca.gov/2025/10/08/gov... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy

lithocarpus · 3 months ago

> What’s the evidence for this? Exactly what I paraphrased from the study - they chose three biomarkers that correlate with CVD - A increased 19%, B decreased 9%, C stayed the same. If they had chosen some other biomarker D instead of A, that increased say 5% or less, it would give an equally strong but opposite result as the result from the study.

Meta analysis is only as strong as the studies it's based on. I looked at quite a few studies before that purport to show sodium causing CVD, and none of them strongly support their conclusion - they all had significant flaws, not that they're not useful research just that they don't show what they are used to say they show.

For example, there were studies showing that increased salt increased blood pressure by ~5 mm Hg over long term. I understand that blood pressure can be affected very slightly by salt intake, I would guess because the body is holding more water or some other normal mechanism like that, but this does not suggest it's the long term cause of blood pressures going up from a normal 120 to a chronic 160 or 200 as we're seeing in tons of people. There could be any number of adjustments that would increase blood pressure slightly WHILE the change is in effect and then go back to baseline afterward. The chronic high blood pressure is a disease that doesn't just go back to normal immediately after a change.

Anyway, I don't have time at the moment to look through the 11 studies cited in that meta analysis, but if you pick the one or two that give the strongest evidence for salt causing CVD I'd look at them.

I'm genuinely trying to figure this out myself as best I can, because I know way too many people close to me dealing with early stage CVD and diabetes. And a lot of them say they're working on it by avoiding meat and dairy and eggs and salt, and instead of that they end up eating more refined oils and refined flour and sugar. It doesn't seem to be helping them any after years of this, and I think this is backwards advice. I'm not saying we need to eat tons of salt, maybe it does have a minor effect, just that it's not the real culprit.

KempyKolibri · 3 months ago

You said:

> if you'd picked a slightly different set of CVD-correlated biomarkers you would have got exactly the opposite result.

So the evidence I’m looking for is empirics showing CVD correlated biomarkers that suggest a beneficial effect from consuming levels of sodium above recommended levels. Without that evidence then I don’t see why we should believe they would have got the opposite result if they picked other CVD biomarkers.

> but this does not suggest it's the long term cause of blood pressures going up from a normal 120 to a chronic 160 or 200 as we're seeing in tons of people

I’m not claiming that salt is the single cause of hypertension, but that doesn’t mean that the kind of reductions you see from salt reduction aren’t meaningful or contribute to those very high figures. It’s easy to dismiss 5mmHg as insignificant, but we generally see a 5mmHg reduction in sysBP translate to a ~10% reduction in CVD events. Considering how prevalent CVD is, that’s a pretty large effect size.

Chronic diseases are often overdetermined and stack - people have a poor diet which means they consume too much salt, they’re overweight and obesity, have T2DM or prediabetes, sedentary lifestyle, etc etc. The fact that we can’t point to a single one of these and say “this is the thing causing your 160/100 BP doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fix the individual factors. So sure, salt reduction seems to offer 5-6mmHg reduction, exercise 4-8, hypertensive drugs 10. But put them all together and that’s a massive change.

> Anyway, I don't have time at the moment to look through the 11 studies cited in that meta analysis, but if you pick the one or two that give the strongest evidence for salt causing CVD I'd look at them.

It’s just three trials (or four depending on how you count TOHP I & II). I think I’ve met my burden in terms of showing there’s evidence of high salt intake having adverse effects, I have no interest in forcing you to read them. Just trying to provide evidence if that’s something you’re seeking.

> I'm genuinely trying to figure this out myself as best I can, because I know way too many people close to me dealing with early stage CVD and diabetes.

I’m sorry to hear that. We certainly seem to be struggling with chronic lifestyle-related disease these days, though with GLP-1 RAs I’m a lot more optimistic than I was a few years ago.

> And a lot of them say they're working on it by avoiding meat and dairy and eggs and salt, and instead of that they end up eating more refined oils and refined flour and sugar.

Yeah depending on the composition of what they’re eating that doesn’t sound great. IMO Replacing butter with refined oils and whole grain flours/carbs - sure, solid move. Replacing meat with plant proteins is also a worthwhile step, and eggs don’t seem to be great for health in many respects. But fermented dairy seems to be a positive as far as CVD risk goes, so ethics aside, seems like a backwards step if they replacing yoghurt and cheese with sugar and white flour!

> I'm not saying we need to eat tons of salt, maybe it does have a minor effect, just that it's not the real culprit.

I’m very wary of trying to find “the culprit” for public health problems. It’s so rarely the case that a disease has a single aetiology, and in my experience the people who’ll tell you “it was the sugar all along”, “it was the seed oils all along”, “it was the glyphosate all along” have a book to sell. The reality is probably closer to it being a combination of several things. Not as sexy though, no publisher or influencer is interested in that view!

KempyKolibri commented on EU lawmakers push to ban term 'veggie-burger' reuters.com/business/eu-l... · Posted by u/r9295

KempyKolibri · 3 months ago

> The EU has already defined dairy items milk, butter, cream, yoghurt and cheese as "products secreted by mammary glands"

I think they should just label things more explicitly like this - accelerate veganism 100x when people in the supermarkets have to choose between “pressed soybeans” and “mammary gland secretions”.

KempyKolibri commented on EU lawmakers push to ban term 'veggie-burger' reuters.com/business/eu-l... · Posted by u/r9295

tyleo · 3 months ago

It’s more about it being fake when they are delicious by themselves. Vegetables don’t need improvement, they are already respectable.

I think the idea just bothers me, “vegetables aren’t good enough, what you really want is fake meat.”

KempyKolibri · 3 months ago

Two different things. If you don’t want to eat animal products for ethical reasons but you want something high protein and/or similar in taste/texture to a beef burger, eating a vegetable stir fry isn’t going to cut it. That’s what these products are for.