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Posted by luu 3 days ago

The continuing "Q collar" scandal(statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
37 points | 13 comments
adaml_623 29 minutes ago|
[dead]
rvba 1 hour ago|
From the article:

> You can think of Q collar as a baby version of health scams promoted by wealthy and powerful medical-adjacent celebrities such as Dr. Oz, Andrew Huberman, and RFK Jr.

Anything promoted by the last one must be great.

There were some articles that said that billionaires wanted to put collars with explosives on necks of their guards, in order to be able to control those guards. Because billionaires are afraid that the guards would not allow them to enter their bunkers.

This unrelated device sounds like a nice way to train peoole to use collars, later you just change from the "helpful" model to the "explosive" model.

_diyar 1 hour ago||
Hijacking this comment to ask about Huberman, can he really be lumped in with the other two in that list?

I listen to his podcast for a while and stopped when I realized most of what he is talking about is marginal stuff or ”new research suggests”, which I found less interesting.

But has he really ever been a grifter selling complete bunk? Not talking about the ad-segments, which are of course payed endorsements.

n4r9 47 minutes ago|||
This article seems like a fairly comprehensive run down of the issues: https://slate.com/technology/2024/03/andrew-huberman-huberma...
cheshire_cat 43 minutes ago||||
You might be interested in these critiques of Huberman:

"So, Should You Trust Andrew Huberman?" by Dr. Andrea Love: https://slate.com/technology/2024/03/andrew-huberman-huberma...

"Is Self-Help Guru PhD a Womanizer and Pseudoscientific Nonsense Broker? | Andrew Huberman Analysis" by Dr. Todd Grande: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANW3daJggoQ

He definitely has content that is helpful to people, but there's probably better sources for the same information.

Arodex 1 hour ago|||
Well, here he is promoting complete bunk, so the question answers itself.
_diyar 49 minutes ago|||
> You can think of Q collar as a baby version of health scams promoted by wealthy and powerful medical-adjacent celebrities such as Dr. Oz, Andrew Huberman, and RFK Jr.

This sentence does not imply that Huberman has endorsed this product.

theF00l 55 minutes ago|||
That is fair, especially on this occasion. On the other hand I have found some of his material very helpful, particularly around sleep and helping me maintain my circadian rhythm.
altmanaltman 1 hour ago|||
Wait if they blow up their guards, who will protect them from all the cave people? Surely there are better ways to buy loyalty than this James Bond villian idea lol
wongarsu 54 minutes ago||
It turns it into a kind of prisoner's dilemma where all guards rebelling means everyone dies, while only some guards rebelling means the guards that rebelled die while everyone else (including the billionaire) get to live

It's incredibly unethical, but in a game theory sense it seems sound. Any one guard is punished for rebelling, and even if everyone coordinates they can't do anything about it. At least if you can eliminate the obvious weak points: the collars would have to be automatically activated

chongli 46 minutes ago||
The other obvious weak point is that you can’t surveil the guards 24/7 to make sure they don’t swap the live explosives collar with a placebo collar.
mrob 35 minutes ago||
The obvious countermeasure is adding tamper detection to make it automatically trigger if they try.
chongli 26 minutes ago||
Right, that’s what they do in sci-fi books and movies. But then those collars magically never need batteries replaced, service, or replacement. They also don’t have any issues with false positive detonations.

If the collar can be deactivated to be removed for servicing/off duty/retirement/replacement/etc then it can be hacked and replaced with a placebo.

diryawish 41 minutes ago||
Incredible quote, such great context. No wonder people trust the science so much.