doublekill

What happened during start of pandemic is WHO and big tech meeting up to discuss the threat of an "infodemic". Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, agreed to suppress amateur takes on COVID. Mentioning COVID would vastly decrease your reach if not a verified public health source. It would get you demonitized, to not incentivise low-quality clickbait COVID videos. Of course, these algorithms are way more aggressive and produce more false positives (ads removed for just mentioning COVID without giving false cures, like happened here).

It has nothing to do with white or black and race. Just the nitwits at WHO and big business mismanaging crowd intelligence during a pandemic. WHO said masks do not work. Youtube banned users for mentioning vitamin D defiency and COVID. But they meant it well...

An Israeli had build a tool to detect anti-semitism in videos and comments. Not being able to sell to YouTube, they pivoted to targeting advertisers ("make sure your advertisements do not appear next to racist content"). Part of this was a PR campaign, where they would mail journalists "scoops" with videos with lots of views, anti-semetic content, and no moderation of YouTube.

With every such news article, YouTube stepped up its game. It culminated with PewdiePie making an "anti-semetic" joke, and this resulted in the Adpocalypse.

So I'd say it was more commercial interests than activism interests, but at times these align.

She tried to bypass internal review. She knew that internal review was part of the process. She auhored a paper under the Google banner, not making note of her colleagues' work which combat the bias she was decrying. Then she submitted it for internal review the day of the submission deadline. After internal review was done and suggestions to improve were made (valuable time from your peers!) the paper was already accepted by external reviewers. She was then miffed having to update or retract the paper.

Jeff Dean is an absolute saint and ally for the cause. For sure he has better people skills than Gebru. Jeff was over his head with the Twitter mob, which would mess with anyone, no matter how famous.

Google fired Gebru not for retaliation, or for critical science, or for being Black, or for advocating diversity, or for Dean having bad people skills. She was fired for being insufferable.

Only astroturfing Ive seen is from activists claiming racism or Jeff Dean autism / white privilege.

The journalist won't get to talk to the neurodiverse person. Usually someone lacking a thick skin or easy to take offense, goes to HR to complain (anonymously if need be) about offensive, awkward, sexist, racist, far-right, ... speech. The neurodiverse person will (rightly) get a warning, an internal investigation finds no systemic harm done, and that's that, you won't even hear about it, as it juridically not smart to be transparent about such cases.

Then the offended person changes jobs, complains on Twitter about sexist humor driving her out of her previous job, a journalist searches for leads on their next story, and suddenly you are in the news with "multiple people complained about sexist and racist humor on the work floor, but nothing was done about it, and no complaint or investigation resulted in any action. We asked the company for a response and they replied that these internal investigations turned up nothing and that they don't accept discrimination of any kind".

Nearly every company has incidents of sex between co-workers, or people taking illegal drugs on a company get together. Depending on who you get to talk to that's "it seemed like every other week I saw a used condom in the stair ways" or "management regurarily used cocaine during company parties". You won't talk to anyone relativating it, and company PR is shy to even admit that stuff.

My first European colleague was a male-to-female person. She had worked at a major company for years, got a bad performance report, and attributed it to her transition. It went to court and the company settled, instead of defending not promoting her (with or without regard of her transition). Very good programmer. She worked there for 1 year more, doing only things that the company laywers agreed to.

In America I see similar things. I think it is seductive to be swept up with identity politics, and suddenly that promotion that went to a white person, feels different, feels racist. Or you employ a neurodiverse low-social skill person who makes an edgy unfunny joke, because he is nervous. That's "racist humor on the work floor" when going to a lawyer or journalist. It is a dangerous world out there. Current climate not helping.

What I learned from diversity training is that you need to accept the fact that society is systematically racist, and as a white person you benefit from this. So all whites are profiting from racism already. They have to come to terms with this, acknowledge the role that their ancestors played in furthering or creating racial inequality, and do everything in their privileged power to right this wrong: hire more black people. Promote more black people. Mentor more black people. Pay reparations to black people. Be a vocal supporter to black people. And realize and appreciate that you are different, and will never have to share what black people go through every day. What more can you do?

I just did. The research is divided into two: those that look at clinical outcomes (such as cardiac arrest) do not find that vitamins help. Those that look at quality of life indicators, recovery, infection severity, and muscle strength do find significant improvements of supplementation.

And they find no harm of normal use, but warn against dangerous toxicity effects of overdosing.

90 percent of the restaurant is eating, but just 20 percent of those are still hungry :). They can stop eating and return next week when they are starving.

For me it is proof enough that my wise mother told me take my vitamins, but more scientific: you have a vector of essential vitamins and minerals. There are thresholds for deficiency. There are optimal levels. Aim for optimal levels, and do not overdo it. Supplements can help with that, and easier and cheaper than a diet which includes all necessities. Low levels are suboptimal for you. Makes sense?

Deficiencies disparately impact minorities and poor people. And when I was a student even I could not afford that Bell pepper. 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 are real people.

If you take the prescribed one pill a day, how are you going to form overdose? Talking about excess I hear the medical professional disdain for vitamins in that. Understandably, because they get those people who take extreme doses of over the counter stuff in their visiting hours. But that's no risk to use as an argument against vitamin supplementation for regular use. Multivitamins would be banned if regular use caused overdose.

So what about:

> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 10% of all Americans have a nutritional deficiency.

And what about very low, but non-deficient levels?

It very much depends how the study is designed: in this case they do not measure quality of life or disease progression, but clinical outcome. That is what OP was alluding to: if you are going to only look at clinical outcome and completely tar "effectiveness" with that, then that is a very one-sided view of health and well-being.

Osteoporose patients are at increased risk of vitamin K deficiency. Just because multivitamins are not effective at taking us to Mars, are you really going to recommend patients to spend their vitamin money on fresh fruits?

They only measure clinical outcomes such as cancer or heart attacks. "Multivitamins do not cure cancer" would be a better heading. Or even "30% of Americans taking multivitamins report enhanced quality of life".

Terrible study if that is the conclusion. Yes, multivitamins don't help with cancer or heart attacks. Yes, it is better to eat a healthy diet.

But vitamins do physically help when you are deficient. Your energy levels and immune system improves.

And "all in your head" is nothing to scoff at when the Placebo effect has been measured to help shorten disease by 7%.

Having someone else do your prison time was fairly common. Now with more cooperation between organizations and improved biometrics it has dropped.

Different people would be arrested, show up to court, or enter the prison. Impossible for organizations downstream to detect or assume a switch had happened.

Vitamin C is listed as fake news on WHO. Fact checker sites listed vitamin D as false, then switched to correct after research. Doctors, journalists, and health experts in Brazil and the Netherlands chided social media for not removing "fake" info on vitamin supplements.

I'll check some CDC sources later to contextualize these claims to the US.