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lindamc's avatar

Please keep this going! We need all the non-negative news we can get.

Yesterday I went to a book (actual hardcover books) event* in DC put on by Stripe Press (as many readers will know, they publish books/newsletters/etc on the broad topic of “progress”). I bought a couple of books but I also skimmed one I didn’t buy (yet), Pieces of the Action by Vannevar Bush, a key 20th century figure in technology development and science funding. The preface was written in 1970 and acknowledged that a lot of things looked quite bad, but at the same time a lot of good things were happening (this is a gross oversimplification but you get the gist). Unlike most of the attendees, I was alive in 1970; I was too young then to know what was going on but growing up later, in the rustbelt, things certainly seemed bad, so much so that the progress and prosperity of the 80s and 90s seemed kind of shocking at first.

This is just a long way of saying that it’s corrosive to obsess about how bad things are such that there’s no point in trying to change anything, and that’s the character of so much public discourse. I subscribe to newsletters looking for something different, so I’m happy to see this feature and I hope it continues.

*also there were a *lot* of people there! To talk about books! ❤️

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Brad Stulberg's avatar

Derek - this is a great concept and I'll look forward to reading on Sundays. A dose of tragic optimism. Love it. RE: GLP-1s, as you continue to explore this topic, I'd be curious to know what percentage of effective medications and interventions are, essentially, accidents. GLP-1s began as diabetes medications. You could argue weight-loss is part and parcel of an effective diabetes therapy. But their potential for things like migraines and addiction (if this stuff holds up) is what I'd call a serendipitous accident. I'm sure there are other examples of these. Similarly, I find it interesting that we still have very little in the way of mechanistic understanding on some of these broader effects. It brings to mind SSRIs, which were initially thought to alleviate depression by increasing the amount of serotonin in the brain (a very specific and bioplausible theory/target). Now, it's pretty well accepted that it's not an increase in serotonin that is working on depression (and anxiety/OCD) but something else. The best guess I've come across is that SSRIs increase overall neuroplasticity, explaining why they tend to work best in conjunction with therapy. (However, after multiple decades, we still know next to nothing about why and how SSRIs work.) But all of this makes me wonder if GLP-1s are having some kind of similar effect on hormonal plasticity or disrupting some other homeostatic groove/rut that gets set in the body and underlies some of these conditions. Who knows. This is all armchair speculation. But I'll be curious to learn more from people who think about and study this all day. As you write, it's fascinating we got here from a giant lizard's saliva.

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